Monthly web-only columns by Dean Jobb
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September 2019 - Poison Pens
FROM THE EDITOR
The realms of crime fiction and true crime have many intersections. Fiction writers often draw on real investigative techniques, police procedures, and even notorious crime cases in fashioning their stories, and, conversely, fictional sleuths and their methods have occasionally influenced the practices of actual police forces. In this way, the interests of readers of crime fiction and true crime naturally dovetail, yet the latter field has, until recently, not been represented in EQMM. In January 2018, we launched a new department to remedy that omission. Entitled Stranger Than Fiction, and written by award-winning Canadian author and journalist Dean Jobb, the new column explores true crime through reviews of true-crime books and occasional articles on the true-crime genre and real-world crimes and criminals.
Author and journalist, Dean Jobb |
A true-crime specialist with more than a half-dozen titles in print, Dean is the author of one of 2015’s most notable true-crime works, Empire of Deception. The story of a master swindler in 1920s Chicago, the book won both the Crime Writers of Canada and Chicago Writers Association awards, and earned rave reviews. The New York Times Book Review called it “intoxicating and impressively researched.” In addition to pursuing his literary and journalistic careers, Dean teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
We’ll be providing a preview of Dean’s upcoming monthly columns in each issue of EQMM, with full text available—for free—on our website at www.elleryqueenmysterymagazine.com. Readers of digital editions of the magazine will be able to click straight through from the previews to the full columns.
Stranger Than Fiction was launched, in January, with Dean’s roundup of choices for the best true-crime books of 2017, and that column is still available on our website, where all future columns will be archived.
February’s Stranger Than Fiction, entitled “I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere,” explores, through reviews of new critical works, the creation and enduring popularity—130 years after he first appeared in print—of Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective. A tie-in to EQMM’s annual Holmes tribute (celebrated in our January/February issue), the installment is still current on our website.
Looking further ahead, in March Dean takes a look at the latest books on the history of Chicago crime: a gambling king, a century-old miscarriage of justice, Al Capone’s rivals, and the murderous rampage of the White City “Devil.”
We hope you’ll enjoy this new department, which joins the Jury Box and Blog Bytes in EQMM’s long tradition of cutting-edge reviewing and scholarship.
— Janet Hutchings