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Margery Allingham—A Tribute by Agatha Christie Do Detective Story writers read other people’s detective stories? That is a question that is very often asked me. The answer, as far as I am concerned is: “Yes, they do.” First because you obviously like detective stories, or you wouldn’t take the trouble, (and detective stories are a lot of trouble) t

You might wonder how I know that being charmed and being touched were the right feelings for which to aim, unequipped as I am for corporeal experience. As your creator, I am constantly surprised by how little you credit me. I know everything. Knowledge and experience are quite different, but I like to think that I can identify and name the little f

My senses grow sharp in this silence intermittently punctuated by cries or the whistling of bullets. I no longer need to look in order to see: the sea is raging. Raging against the devils, against our resignation, against our cowardice, against us. I listen to it holler, scold, protest, refute. Furious, her waves lift abandoned sailboats and make t

Poetry! The endemic illness of young malcontents, desperately embracing beauty, hog-tied to the tempting rhymes of a loaned-out language, tossed about between Creole and French like those rowboats over there on the sea I can hear but not see crashing from my shack.

But after a certain point in life a person has to dunk her regrets in the morning coffee, just like biscuits.

The nurse was a sick-looking man with grey, translucent teeth. He sucked them, audibly, as we walked. I wondered if he’d begun working here as a healthy person and then slowly absorbed the aura of madness and death surrounding him. I wondered what I was absorbing in my line of work.

Sutty and I were two different kinds of bad cop. Our being partnered together was a sort of punishment for us both, and we each tried to make things as difficult as possible for the other. It was the only thing we had in common.

In Casablanca and in all of Morocco, chaos broke out when that Tunisian guy poured gasoline over his head. It’s been two Sundays since then and downtown still hasn’t emptied. Everyone who’s in want of something, everyone who has nothing to put in their mouths, everyone who’s at war with their wives, everyone who isn’t happy with their circumcision,

When I was born, my mother rubbed a chicken liver in my palms so that I would know how to cook.