Somewhere in the last few months, I came across a discussion of the use of supernatural elements in crime fiction. I can’t recall any novel that uses them so overtly, and so well, as The Coroner’s Lunch, by Colin Cotterill. In this story of an aging Lao doctor pressed into running the country’s only morgue following the Communist takeover of 1975, the supernatural consists not just of […]
The supernatural in crime fiction
In the James Lee Burke novel “Jolie Blon’s Bounce,” he introduces a character named Legion Guidry, a man who appears by the end of the book to be, if not the Devil himself, then at least pretty high up in Lucifer’s chain of command. Burke has flirted with the supernatural before, with the ghosts of “In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead” and the dead partner who […]