A few days ago I airily declared to a colleague that cinema never really did it for me, not as much as fiction, in any case. I'd always rather read a novel than watch a film. That snooty belief in the superiority of the written word has been as happily shaken up as my boggled brain itself since I emerged from a screening of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.
- Hermione Herby, writing for the Guardian.co.uk
Police in Iran believe they have caught the country's first female serial killer and are claiming she has disclosed a literary inspiration behind her attempts to evade detection: the crime novels of Agatha Christie.The 32-year-old suspect, named only as Mahin, stands accused of killing at least six people, including five women, according to officials in the city of Qazvin, about 100 miles north-west of Tehran.
"Mahin in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself," Mohammad Baqer Olfat, the Qazvin prosecutor, told Iranian journalists.
- Robert Tait, writing for Guardian.co.uk
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The summer reading season kicks off this weekend, and if May’s books are any indication, the beaches of America will be dark and chilly this year. The list is replete with period pieces in which characters survive (or don’t) hard times. A novel of commerce is filled with market-rigging and subterfuge. A murder mystery throws in Satanism for good measure. And did you know that killer gases can lurk below the placid surface of a lake? Yikes! What will June bring?
