Ron Franscell's Blog

I’ve heard the word closure in courtrooms, on front porches, in hospital hallways where you can’t quite forget what’s happened. It’s usually spoken with relief. Sometimes with gratitude. Almost always […]

The post A Place to Stand: The myth of ‘closure’ appeared first on Ron Franscell.

We have a mythology about small towns in America, and it goes something like this: people know each other, watch out for each other, leave their doors unlocked at night. […]

The post Rural Noir: What Raymond Chandler didn’t tell you appeared first on Ron Franscell.

Writers like to pretend stories are found objects—arrowheads in the dust, waiting for the right set of eyes. We talk about stumbling onto them, as if narrative were a vein […]

The post Rewriting Reality: Who owns a crime story? appeared first on Ron Franscell.

There are two kinds of priests in fiction. The first wears immaculate vestments, speaks in ecclesiastic riddles, and inevitably knows more about the murder than he lets on. The second […]

The post The Second Coming of Father Bert Clancy appeared first on Ron Franscell.

There’s a small, mischievous part of me that believes every crime novel should come with a magnifying glass and a wink. As I put the finishing touches on DEEP END, […]

The post The small, strange details in DEEP END you might not notice appeared first on Ron Franscell.

For a true-crime writer, the world is seldom what it seems. Every place hums with a past life; every peaceful landscape casts a longer, darker shadow. When I moved to […]

The post Ghosts of Placitas: The Real Crime That Haunts DEEP END appeared first on Ron Franscell.

I have always been a little suspicious of tidy labels for messy things, and nothing is messier than human beings. Yet here we are, happily sorting ourselves into generational bins […]

The post A Slightly Skeptical Guide to Generational Labels appeared first on Ron Franscell.

We read about crimes (and I write about them) not merely to know “whodunit,” but to peer into the hidden architecture of choice—the fragile lines between decency and destruction, the […]

The post The Pull of a Dark Road: Why We Love Crime Stories appeared first on Ron Franscell.

There’s something seductive about the edge of the map. We talk about remote places the way earlier generations spoke of monasteries or islands—as if distance itself confers virtue. Move far […]

The post The Allure of Nowhere: Where the Roads Ends, Mystery Begins appeared first on Ron Franscell.

Reporting tells us what happened; fiction asks why it matters. Up to 2020, I wrote bestselling true-crime books like THE DARKEST NIGHT and SHADOWMAN. Then COVID-19 shut down my field […]

The post True Crime to Crime Fiction: A plot twist I didn’t see coming appeared first on Ron Franscell.