What I’m Working on Next as an Author

One of the best things about building a series is that there is always another door waiting to be opened.
Right now, I’m continuing to work on the larger world behind Bloodlines and the books that follow it. The goal is not just to release individual novels, but to build a…

https://jamiefolsom.net/blog/what-i-m-working-on-next

#JamieFolsom #Bloodlines #PsychologicalThriller #DarkFiction #CrimeFiction

2025 is packed with pulse-pounding thrillers that push fear, mystery, and suspense to the edge. From psychological twists to high-stakes crime plots, these new releases will keep readers hooked until the final page. Discover what’s next in thrillers: https://solihullpublishing.com/blog/f/hottest-new-thriller-releases-of-2025

#ThrillerBooks #MysteryReads #CrimeFiction #BookLovers #Suspense #MustRead

Get some revenge this summer!! #BeyondandWithinBestServedCold #crimefiction #shortstories

https://www.flametreepublishing.com/best-served-cold-isbn-9781835626009.html

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Servea-Cold-Chilling-Stories/dp/1835626009/ref=mp_s_a_1_1

Welcome to JamieFolsom.net

If you’ve found your way here, welcome.
This site is the home for my fiction, my books, and the dark world they belong to. I write psychological thrillers, supernatural suspense, and crime fiction shaped by memory, trauma, fear, and the things people carry long after the…

https://jamiefolsom.net/blog/welcome-to-jamiefolsom-net

#JamieFolsom #Bloodlines #PsychologicalThriller #DarkFiction #CrimeFiction

Welcome to JamieFolsom.net

If you’ve found your way here, welcome.
This site is the home for my fiction, my books, and the dark world they belong to. I write psychological thrillers, supernatural suspense, and crime fiction shaped by memory, trauma, fear, and the things people carry long after the…

https://jamiefolsom.net/blog/welcome-to-jamiefolsom-net

#JamieFolsom #Bloodlines #PsychologicalThriller #DarkFiction #CrimeFiction

Detective or police—what’s the real difference? Discover how frontline officers maintain order while detectives dive deep into investigations, solving complex cases behind the scenes. Learn how both roles work together to bring justice. https://www.davidthomasthegordianknot.com/detective-vs-police-differences/

#Detective #Police #CrimeFiction #LawEnforcement #MysteryReads #TrueCrimeBooks

Wigtown Spring Book Weekend
2–4 May

Covenanters & women crime writers will be two of the themes woven into this year’s Wigtown Spring Book Weekend. With dozens of events from author talks to guided walks, writing, photography & music workshops, the programme is now available online:

https://www.wigtownbookfestival.com/blog/wigtown-spring-book-weekend-2026

#Scottish #literature #books #bookfestivals #historicalfiction #crimefiction #womenwriters #Wigtown

#MurderEveryMonday Crime fiction title with an evaluative adjective

When Kate reminded us of this week’s #MurderEveryMonday theme, my first thought was for H. R. F. Keating because I had noticed a pattern in some of his books:

• The Bad Detective
• The Good Detective
• The Soft Detective
• The Rich Detective

These are standalone’s and I never read anything by Keating, but I’m curious about his writing. He was president of the Detection Club between 1985 and 2000. I do have two related books in my immediate TBR: Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime, essays edited by him, and The Verdict of Us All – edited by Peter Lovesey, a collection of short stories by The Detection Club’s members in honour of Keating’s 80th birthday, which include before each work a memory or contact these writers had of H.R.F. Keating.

Raymond Chandler’s cannibalized stories. On the blog:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/04/20/raymond-chandlers-cannibalized-stories/

#writing #CrimeFiction #RaymondChandler #ShortStories #books #literature #blog

Raymond Chandler’s cannibalized stories

If I were asked to name my all-time favourite crime-fiction writer, I would struggle to place anyone above Raymond Chandler. In contemporary literature the one who comes closest is Peter Temple, who, like Chandler, took up the practice in middle age. There’s a lot to be said for it.

A late entrant to the fiction-writing game, Chandler completed seven novels in his lifetime; another one was finished posthumously. For readers it’s a very manageable total. I read the novels in my twenties and reread a few in my thirties.

I was less systematic with Chandler’s shorter work, with the result that I recently picked up an unread – and unusual – collection, Killer in the Rain, first published in 1964. Philip Durham, who was a professor of American literature at University of California, introduces this Penguin edition:

During his lifetime Raymond Chandler published twenty-three short stories. Yet of this relatively small output only fifteen are generally known to the reading public. For a quarter of a century the remaining eight have lain buried in the crumbling pages of old pulp magazines. And these eight stories are among his finest.

Killer in the Rain collects those eight stories. Curiously, though I had never read them before, I had what I described elsewhere (Mastodon; Bluesky) as a recurring experience of déjà lu: half-familiar lines, characters, and scenarios.

It turns out that Chandler ‘cannibalized’ these eight stories for his novels – he once said in a letter that he ‘won’t discard anything’ – and for that reason excluded them from collections published during his lifetime. This textual cannibalization has its own short paragraph on Wikipedia.

Repurposing one’s writing is a common practice. But it made Chandler uneasy, Durham writes, and he was able to justify it ‘only by leaving such stories buried, virtually unknown in the pages of the rapidly disappearing pulp magazines’. I also feel that it’s trickier in fiction than nonfiction. Durham again:

Turning short stories into cohesive novels tested the extent of Chandler’s skill. It meant combining and enlarging plots, maintaining a thematic consistency, blowing up scenes, and adapting, fusing, and adding characters.

Primary among the characters, of course, was Philip Marlowe, one of the great fictional detectives. For this creation Chandler drew on earlier protagonists, Killer in the Rain making visible the progression from a nameless first-person narrator to Carmady, John Dalmas, and John Evans.

Things were more complicated for secondary figures:

Of the twenty-one characters in The Big Sleep, seven were drawn directly from ‘The Curtain’, six were taken from ‘Killer in the Rain’, four were composites from the two stories, and four were new creations.

Perhaps most interestingly, at least from this editor’s point of view, is the expansion of entire scenes. One passage in ‘The Curtain’, set in a greenhouse, is about 1,100 words; in The Big Sleep it’s about 2,500. Durham presents the change in miniature, from the following forty-two words:

The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the glass house dripped. In the halflight enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.

to these eighty-two:

The air was thick, wet, steamy, and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish colour, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

He finds both passages ‘intense and vivid’ and notes how each achieves its effect: the first through terseness, the second through mood, hyperbole, and ‘striking similes’. Chandler assembled Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake in similar fashion, with variations and twists on the original material.

After Chandler’s death in 1959, frequent calls for the publication of these ‘lost’ stories led eventually to Killer in the Rain, with Durham concluding that ‘there no longer seems any good reason why, provided their origin is clearly explained, they should be denied to the many thousands of Chandler’s readers’.

As well as being thoroughly enjoyable in their own right, the stories can be appreciated as raw material and inspiration for the better-known novels, and they offer a nice insight into an artful form of literary transmutation.

*

An etymological note on cannibalize: The OED dates it to 1655, in the sense ‘To overwhelm, destroy, or eat away at, as if by cannibalism; to crush or manipulate (a person)’. The more literal sense came along two centuries later.

The figurative sense ‘To absorb or destroy (something of a similar kind)’, used especially in business contexts, emerged in 1920; not until World War II do we finally see the word as used in the current post, defined as:

To use (something) as a source of parts or content for another of a similar kind; to take (a part) from one thing to use in another.

The first item the OED records as being thus ‘cannibalized’ is a wrecked French plane (‘parts are stripped from it for use on damaged Allied ships’ —Stars & Stripes, London edition, 26 Nov. 1942, caption). Cannibal itself is borrowed from Latin canibales and Spanish caníbal.