TICK-TOCK by James Lincoln Warren All things being equal, baseball is my favorite sport, so naturally this column hinges on … football.1 Having grown up in Texas, I have an abiding love for football. In the Lone Star State, the most important venue for gridiron heroics is the Friday night high school game. When I […]

IMPRECISELY, MY DEAR WATSON by James Lincoln Warren “For parlor use, the vague generality is a life-saver.” —George Ade Military folks love to tell jokes about military life, either berating rival services or making light of the vagaries of their own. One of my favorites goes like this: The Difference Between the Services Define the […]

WHAT A CONCEPT by James Lincoln Warren Enjoyable genre fiction usually strikes a balance between convention and novelty. This is particularly true of mysteries. For example, in the fair-play mystery, the clues are hidden in plain view and at the climax, the puzzle is solved by the detective; the novelty is usually in the nature […]

EDITORIAL ASIDE by James Lincoln Warren Early Thursday morning, I caught a flight to San Francisco, to attend the Annual Communications of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of California — I’m an officer of my lodge, Santa Monica-Palisades #307 F&AM, and this year was entitled for the first time to vote in […]

ADVENTURELAND by James Lincoln Warren You are not having a sudden attack of déjà vu. You really have been here before. Titles, as most everyone is aware, can’t be copyrighted. Deborah has already used the title of this piece for one of her columns, but since it also perfectly suits my (completely different) topic today, […]

MAKING SPORT by James Lincoln Warren September is one of my favorite months, mainly because I like team sports. Now, I’m not one of those sports junkies who knows every player on every team and has an encyclopedia of arcane statistics at my instant command. I couldn’t tell you what any pitcher’s ERA is and […]

Here is Chapter VI and the Conclusion to Pushkin’s famous novelette, “The Queen of Spades”. I’ve appended a brief afterword. —JLW THE QUEEN OF SPADES by Alexander Pushkin VI “Attendez!1” “How dare you say ‘attendez’ to me?” “Your excellency, I said ‘attendez, sir.’”2 Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world […]