Reviewing Cha's The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021

In my first three installments I looked at culture wars in history and literature, how they have popped up in mystery writing resulting in the schism of the year's best mystery stories into two very different volumes, and then went on to review Otto Penzler's The Best Mystery Stories of the...

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Reviewing Otto Penzler's Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021

In my first entry to this series, I presented the broader picture of how a culture war is playing out in America as to who gets to tell history and what history is told. I showed how these battles have extended in the past decade to the science fiction writing community. In the second entry,...

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A Divide in the Mystery Writing Community

In the first installment, I examined the culture wars taking place as the storytellers of history — and science fiction — have been changing from the predominately white male narrators. Compared to the puppy wars in science fiction, the mystery writing community, to its credit, undergone had a milder...

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The Culture War over History and Fiction

In this post I have three parts to present. First, the context of my piece: a battle is being fought over who should tell the narrative of history. Second, I demonstrate that the same fight is taking place in fiction: who gets to be the storytellers is changing. Third, I discuss how these cultural wars...

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