How to Watch Shadow of a Doubt as a Crime Fiction Writer
Shadow of a Doubt was Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite of his films. Beloved by noir fans, the 1943 thriller is both a genre-defining classic and a film that quietly subverts the conventions of crime storytelling.
For crime fiction writers, it offers an unusually rich study in antagonist construction, moral proximity, and psychological mirroring. The script—by Thornton Wilder, Alma Reville, and Sally Benson—is sophisticated and literary, and Hitchcock’s direction is foundational to the mood and meaning of the film.
How To Watch Double Indemnity as a Crime Fiction Writer
Every noir, neo-noir, mystery novel, true-crime documentary, and thriller offers lessons in craft. The task is to resist immersion and instead keep the work at arm’s length: to examine it clinically, forensically, like a body on a slab. That may sound hyperbolic, but studying what works makes it easier to replicate those effects in our own writing—not by copying plots, but by absorbing underlying principles.
From the Land of the Lost Classics: Georges Perec and Oulipo
There was a vogue for French writer Georges Perec back in the late 1980s. Well, maybe not a vogue exactly, but you could find most of his books in bookstores.