Featured Archives - Ron Franscell

Rewriting Reality: Who owns a crime story?

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 […]

by Ron Franscell

The Second Coming of Father Bert Clancy

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 […]

by Ron Franscell

The small, strange details in DEEP END you might not notice

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, […]

by Ron Franscell

Ghosts of Placitas: The Real Crime That Haunts DEEP END

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 […]

by Ron Franscell

A Slightly Skeptical Guide to Generational Labels

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 […]

by Ron Franscell

The Pull of a Dark Road: Why We Love Crime Stories

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 […]

by Ron Franscell

The Allure of Nowhere: Where the Roads Ends, Mystery Begins

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 […]

by Ron Franscell

True Crime to Crime Fiction: A plot twist I didn’t see coming

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 […]

by Ron Franscell

The Last Honest Place in Town

In every town I’ve ever known—from wind-scoured prairie crossroads to mountain hamlets tucked against a hard horizon—there is a table of old men always holding court over coffee. You know […]

by Ron Franscell

Last room on Route 66: What we owe the dead

For the past couple months, I’ve been chasing a ghost. Fifty years ago, a 53-year-old man checked into a cheap roadside motel along Route 66 in the kind of Southwestern […]

by Ron Franscell

In defense of Ebenezer Scrooge

I originally wrote this essay as a newspaper column in 1995. It appears here today with a few minor but festive updates because, well, Scrooge is timeless. No businessman in […]

by Ron Franscell

If AI were human for a day, what would it be thankful for?

“If you could be human for just one day,” I asked the robot inside ChatGPT, “what do you think you’d be thankful for?” To be honest, I have a love-hate […]

by Ron Franscell

Better Angels: No veteran should die alone

It was after 2am and the graveyard-shift nurses drifted like ghosts in the hallway, tending to the dead and dying. It wasn’t that Michael* couldn’t sleep, even with meds he […]

by Ron Franscell

We’ll always have mass murder

This essay was originally written just two days after the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in 2012. Yesterday’s tragic shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis makes me want to re-run […]

by Ron Franscell

Everything I need to know, I learned in Little League

Essayist Robert Fulghum once surmised that everything he ever needed to know he learned in kindergarten, but I was a slow learner. Yesterday, the 2025 Little League World Series got […]

by Ron Franscell

Class of ’75: Old friends, young again for one night

Fifty years. Half a century. And yet, if I close my eyes, I can still hear the music drifting down the hallways, feel the sun warming our faces on autumn […]

by Ron Franscell

This boy died far away for a country that wasn’t his

A few years ago, I was contacted by the friend of a friend of a friend. He had a strange request: Could you help this French guy find the descendants […]

by Ron Franscell

The day I planted Dermot Healy’s potatoes

The potato patch behind Dermot Healy’s stone cottage wasn’t much bigger than a parking space, but the Irish winter had left it dog-eared and bedraggled. “The first thing,” Dermot said as […]

by Ron Franscell

52 years ago this week, a different terrorist unleashed himself on New Orleans

This was excerpted from Ron Franscell’s DELIVERED FROM EVIL, a book that explores the lives of 10 ordinary people who survived mass killers. One of those monsters was a racist […]

by Ron Franscell

A new year already? But …

Ready or not, a new year is about to begin, even though it doesn’t seem like that long ago when the “old” year started. An amateur philosopher friend of mine has […]

by Ron Franscell

The Ladder Guy

My son Matt visited over Thanksgiving. He helped me with some little household repairs and improvements that were beyond my skills and reach, then helped us put up our Christmas […]

by Ron Franscell

The day the sun never set

Seventeen years ago, I spent this day with my teenage son in a remote Yukon camp above the Arctic Circle, where the Sun never sets on the longest day of […]

by Ron Franscell

The memory of dirt

“Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be rearranged.” —Law of Conservation of Mass For a long time, I collected dirt. OK, maybe not the coolest collection, […]

by Ron Franscell

How to recognize a toxic narcissist—and survive

According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder — related to sociopathy under the umbrella term Antisocial Personality Disorders — is a mental condition in which people have an inflated […]