In 2006, Craig McDonald published a collection of interviews with crime and thriller writers, Art In the Blood, featuring Q&A-style conversations with genre novelists discussing the craft of writing.

Head Games features fictional novelist/screenwriter Hector Lassiter, a character McDonald introduced in a 2005 short story (The Last Interview) that was selected for an online Mississippi Review anthology of “High Pulp.” The novel launched a series of further books featuring the Lassiter character.

The Lassiter novels have been translated into German, Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Mongolian and Korean, among other languages.

McDonald's Lassiter series uses historical crimes and personages, including several appearances by Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles.

"[4] In her study, The Noir Thriller (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), in a chapter examining "Literary Noir in the Twenty-First Century," Lee Horsley identified McDonald as one of several "neo-noir" authors who embody "a recurrent motif of men in pursuit of a lost, treacherously illusive notion of masculinity …"[5] Picking up a similar theme, Woody Haut, critiquing McDonald's second-published novel, Toros & Torsos, commented, "(McDonald) critiques the effect of masculine values on the culture, and examines the relationship between reality and fiction.