SEE IF I CARE by Rob Lopresti When I started the blog Little Big Crimes my mission was simple: say nice things about short mystery stories. That’s why I announced I would review the best story I read that week. What’s the point of criticizing them? Who said “like breaking a butterfly on a wheel?” […]
DEFINE YOUR TERMS by Rob Lopresti Last time I tried to write this piece I wound up with this one instead. Second time’s a charm, I hope. I’m not trying to replace Noah Webster, but I do love a certain type of definition: a witty or at least pithy one. I collect those related to […]
CRUEL TO BE CRUEL by Rob Lopresti The other day I was looking at Improbable Research, a website dedicated to some of the more unusual accomplishments in the field of science. (They give out the Ig Nobel Prizes to honor “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”) To my surprise […]
THE HILLSIDE BANDIT by Rob Lopresti Twenty-five years ago my wife and I, along with our daughter were living in Hillside, New Jersey, a nice little town, only one block from Newark, the state’s largest and arguably scariest city. Not the safest place in the world to live, perhaps, but we had a nice little […]
SEPARATED AT BIRTH by Rob Lopresti So, it’s your first day at the studio as a casting director. Congratulations! The Producer’s secretary invites you into the great man’s office. He smiles vaguely at you, waiting for the secretary to whisper in his ear some hint of who you are and why he has sent for […]
ISLAND OF SPIKES, WORLD OF COPS by Rob Lopresti I discovered James McClure in college when I took a course on mystery fiction. The professor used him as an example of one type of mystery: the one that tells you about some culture or occupation. We read The Steam Pig, the first in McClure’s series […]
BEAT COP or So, here’s a new thought about long story titles by Rob Lopresti Recently I read a story by Peter Turnbull in the March/April issue of EQMM. The title is “The Man Who Took his Hat Off to the Driver of the Train.” It was an interesting piece but I’m mostly concerned with […]