WARREN’S LAWS by James Lincoln Warren Criticism says more about the critic than the piece being criticized. Length of critical comments are directly proportional to the size of the critic’s ego. Good criticism is terse and specific. Uninformed opinions are meaningless. Creativity without craft is futile. Craft without creativity is dull. The problem with living […]

I wrote the following over a year ago for a previous incarnation of The Scribbler, and stumbled upon it while looking for something else. It struck me as appropriate for Criminal Brief, so I brushed it up — I can never read anything I’ve written without rewriting it, even just a little — and here […]

LA VIE EN ROBE by James Lincoln Warren The other night I selected a CD at random from my boxed set of Édith Piaf recordings and played it on the stereo. I love French cabaret music, and after Belgian chanteur Jacques Brel, Piaf is my favorite — she sang utterly without inhibition, declaiming her broken […]

GRAND ALLUSION by James Lincoln Warren Story tellers use all kinds of techniques to achieve economy in story telling, and one of the most advanced is the gentle art of allusion or reference. To the literate reader, a skilled allusion imparts a tremendous amount of information without having to strike the nail on the head. […]

THE LOST OASIS by James Lincoln Warren Today the United States is speckled with so-called convenience stores, the most famous of which is 7-11, but including Circle-K, Stop’n’Go, and of course, the fictional Kwik-E Mart of “The Simpsons” fame. A couple blocks away from my condo in L.A., there’s a convenience store called the K7 […]

Readers may notice that the “Log in” page has changed from featuring the Criminal Brief visual theme to the generic WordPress login screen. This is because as a countermeasure against spambots, I have now made it a requirement for new users to provide a first and last name when they register, and I haven’t yet […]

TIPPING THE BLARNEY by James Lincoln Warren BLARNEY. He has licked the Blarney stone; he deals in the wonderful, or tips us the traveller. The Blarney stone is a triangular stone on the very top of an ancient castle of that name in the county of Cork in Ireland, extremely difficult of access; so that […]