Polly Stewart

Lexington

Author of THE GOOD ONES, forthcoming 06.06.23 from Harper Books and Little, Brown UK. I write the Backlist column at CrimeReads. @pollystewartbooks on IG

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Articles

The Backlist: Reading Alison Gaylin’s ‘What Remains of Me’ with Alafair Burke

3 weeks ago | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

I have high standards for vacation reads. I’ve never been one of those people who saw a trip to the beach as an excuse to read something that only required half my attention. Even if I’m reading on a plane or by the pool, I need a smart, well-written page-turner, and a couple of years ago, I realized that I could never go wrong with a novel by Alafair Burke.
The Backlist: Reading Megan Abbott’s ‘Die a Little’ with Clémence Michallon

1 month ago | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

In the preface to his Collected Stories, the writer John Cheever says that reading the work of a young writer is like watching a child: in their early work, “a writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork.” Even now that I can no longer qualify as a young writer, I come back to this line often, gratified by the vision it offers of an extended training program in craft.
The Backlist: Reading Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassin’, with Ashley Winstead

2 months ago | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin opens with one of the best first sentences I’ve ever read: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” Though the novel isn’t structured as a conventional mystery, there’s mystery inherent in that first sentence, and it only grows as the reader learns more about the narrator, Iris Chase, her sister Laura, and Alex Thomas, the man they both love.
The Backlist: Megan Abbott on Noir, Fatalism, and Denis Johnson’s ‘Angels’

Nov 20, 2024 | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

From the time I began this column, nearly two years ago, I’ve been looking forward to interviewing Megan Abbott. I first became aware of her work in 2016, when I read The Fever over the course of a few days while holding my baby daughter, in the midst of a bleak election cycle which, as we now know, presaged many more bleak election cycles to come. I remember looking down at my daughter’s face and thinking, Oh no, is this really what it’s like to be a girl?
The Backlist: Rebecca Makkai on ‘The Murderess’ and Reading in Translation

Sep 17, 2024 | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

There are words that we hesitate to use when describing women writers. Nice is certainly one, and approachable might be even more questionable. (Who exactly is approaching, and what are their intentions?) Still, these are the words that inevitably come to mind when I think of the novelist Rebecca Makkai. I met her via email seven years ago, after I randomly sent her a message to ask if she’d written a story I remembered reading in an anthology in the early 2000’s.
William Boyle on Discovering Donna Masini and a Great ‘Italian-American-Recovering-Catholic-from-Brooklyn’ Novel

Aug 21, 2024 | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

Nothing is more compelling than obsession. In About Yvonne, by Donna Masini, a Manhattan woman named Terry becomes convinced that her gallerist husband, Mark, is having an affair with a woman named Yvonne. Acquaintances remark on the physical similarities between Terry and Yvonne, and Terry soon learns that they have more subtle characteristics in common too: they are both professors of poetry, both admirers of W.B. Yeats.
The Backlist: Margot Douaihy and Polly Stewart Revisit Patricia Highsmith’s ‘Edith’s Diary’

Jul 16, 2024 | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

With her first two novels, Margot Douaihy has created one of the most memorable characters in contemporary crime fiction. In Scorched Grace and Blessed Water, her tattooed, punk rock nun/private investigator, Sister Holiday, solves crimes while following her vocation in the troubled, magnolia-scented streets of New Orleans. One of the things I love most about her novels is the way they draw on the tropes of classic crime fiction while creating something that is inarguably new.
The Backlist: Joe R. Lansdale on a Forgotten Classic of Southern Noir

Jun 9, 2024 | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

There’s no one quite like Joe R. Lansdale. It’s hard to think of a writer who has taken so many chances in his writing career, or who’s had so much fun. He’s written not only mysteries and suspense but also horror, science fiction, and Westerns, as well as screenplays and comic books. In his long career, he’s won just about every award you can think of, in multiple genres, and he’s also an international martial arts hall of famer who has founded his own school of martial arts, Shen Chuan.
The Backlist: C.J. Tudor on the Wild, Inventive Noirs of Michael Marshall Smith

May 1, 2024 | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

I love writers who mix genres. It’s like an athlete who plays sports and somehow, improbably, manages to be good at all of them. C.J. Tudor’s novels cross boundaries between mystery, horror, and thriller, managing to bring out the best in each of them while creating something wholly new. Her newest novel, The Gathering, delves into the aftermath of a grisly murder that may have been committed by an isolated community of vampires in rural Alaska.
The Backlist: Kellye Garrett on the Legacy of Valerie Wilson Wesley

Apr 2, 2024 | crimereads.com | Polly Stewart

When I first became aware of Kellye Garrett’s work, I couldn’t wait to run out and grab a copy of her breakthrough novel Like a Sister. Who wouldn’t want to read a novel with a beginning like this: “I found out my sister was back in New York from Instagram. I found out she’d died from the New York Daily News.” The novel went on to be a Book of the Month Club and an Oxygen Book Club pick, as well as being nominated for an Edgar Award and winning the Lefty Award for Best Mystery.