About

“Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.”
—Raymond Chandler ‘The Simple Art of Murder’

About the Editor

Steven Powell

Steven Powell is a leading scholar of American crime fiction and member of the Crime Writer’s Association. His book James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) was nominated for the HRF Keating Award for Best Biographical/Critical work. He is the editor of the anthologies Conversations with James Ellroy (2012) and 100 American Crime Writers (2012), and the forthcoming The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy’s Noir World to be published by Bloomsbury in 2018. You can contact me at stevenpowellwriting (at) gmail (dot) com.

Your Editor-in-Chief introducing Thief at Picturehouse at Fact in Liverpool

Venetian Vase Columnists

Jason Carter is an unofficial Ellroy scholar with 20-years of Ellrovian tutelage under his belt. A devoted follower of Ellroy since the age of 14,  Jason now has the enviable honor of calling Mr. Ellroy his friend.  Although, don’t think of asking Jason for any personal details about Ellroy, as Jason is ferociously protective of Mr. Ellroy’s privacy. Jason, like Ellroy, lives in Denver, Colorado.

Diana Powell has taught courses on women in crime fiction, Scandinavian and Golden Age crime fiction. She has published in Oxford Bibliographies Online, 100 American Crime Writers and has a co-authored a chapter, ‘American Notes and English Guidebooks: (Re)Writing English Literature in Melville and Dickens’ in Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity, 1780-1850: Subjects, Texts, and Print Culture.

Chris Routledge is a freelance writer, editor and academic whose 1998 PhD dissertation was on Raymond Chandler. In the 1990s and early 2000s he published several academic articles on crime fiction, including this one. He is also co-editor, with Adrienne Gavin, of Mystery in Children’s Literature (Palgrave, 2001).

His most recent book is a history of the Robert Cain Brewery in Liverpool entitled Cain’s: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint (Liverpool University Press, 2008). With Siobhan Chapman he is co-editor of Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). He is blogging about his latest project at Letters to Elizabeth and his personal website is here.