Dashiell Hammett

Robert Goldsborough is and always has been a gentleman, a rare thing for a newspaperman to be in the still gruff/rough-and-tumble era when Goldsborough worked in all manner of high-level editorial capacities for the Chicago Tribune and later for...

A brief, long-lost essay by "Treasure Island" author Robert Louis Stevenson will be published on Friday, the Associated Press reports. The essay will appear in the Strand magazine, a mystery fiction quarterly out of Birmingham, Mich. The Strand has...

Your choices in San Francisco hotels are overwhelming. The prices can be too. So during our staff visit to the City by the Bay, we looked for reasonably priced hotels that had charm, location or both. We came back with 14 ideas on places to bed down. It's...

As the Baltimore Ravens and Denver Broncos get ready for their big playoff game Saturday, there are plenty of opinions about how the teams and cities compare. But in one competition -- based on books -- Baltimore wins hands down. The East Coast city had...

In light of Philip Roth's recent announcement of his "retirement" from writing, a scene from the 1977 movie "Julia" comes to mind. It's a delicious cinematic moment, involving as it does the deft puncturing of pomposity — always satisfying to...

It's late afternoon on a sweltering day in Hollywood, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and writer-director Rian Johnson have just finished recording ......

For about an hour "Looper" really cooks. Its second half is more of a medium boil, and less fun. But watching it, I realized how few commercial entertainments hold up straight through to the end-point. Even a clever and idiosyncratic filmmaker such as...

The Library of Congress' list of 88 books that shaped America includes poetry, novels, nonfiction, a play, a polemic, books of science and grammar, cookbooks and children's books. What's it missing?...

Mysterious scents of noir fiction sure to liberate your own inner femme fatale...

This and that: •Entries have been pouring in for my local version of San Jose State University's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, created in memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. The goal is to write the worst possible first...

A year in crime fiction, curated by Mysterious Bookshop maestro Otto Penzler...

Surprising stats from the most famous awards show of them all...