Our Christmas Contest continues—check it out here. OBSERVED IN THE BREACH by James Lincoln Warren One of the supreme moments in mystery fiction occurs when Watson asks the Great Detective a pointed question: “Is there any point to which you wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” […]

REMEMBER by James Lincoln Warren I am sometimes asked why I write historicals. My mother-in-law Nadeshda (“Hope”) Dmitrievna Semyannikoff1 grew up in Rostov-on-the-Don, just to the northeast of the Crimean Peninsula, in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Her father, a local attorney who specialized in arbitration, was arrested by the OGPU, the precursor […]

A few days ago I was contacted by L. Sue Durkin of Weaving Dreams Publishing, a small press in Illinois, and politely asked if I would post the following letter. As regular readers of this blog know, Criminal Brief does not generally allow promotional messages, but I will always make an exception for a legitimate […]

WHAT’S IN A WORD? by James Lincoln Warren Etymology is the study or description of how words evolve. Its own etymology starts with the Greek etymon, meaning the literal sense, or “true” meaning of a word as opposed to its figurative applications. There has been some discussion of the word gothic here lately, so let […]

BELIEVE IT OR NOT by James Lincoln Warren Usually when I write a story that involves contemporary police, I will set it in an imaginary or unnamed city. You could ascribe this to a certain laziness on my part, because it means that I don’t have to do any research into how any actual police […]

JUSTIFYING MURDER by James Lincoln Warren Mass murderers always seem to justify their heinous and insane acts by claiming that they are performed for the greater good. Adolf Hitler believed he was saving civilization from the Jews. Timothy McVeigh famously wore a tee-shirt emblazoned with a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must […]

Caveat: This is another eggheady column about grammar, one of my favorite hobby horses, so those of you who find the topic unbearably dull are advised to tune in tomorrow, when Rob Lopresti will provide us with a thought-provoking piece of American judicial history from a Surprise Witness. —JLW SYNTHETIC ENGLISH by James Lincoln Warren […]