PHONING IT IN by James Lincoln Warren I read a novel last week by a best-selling mystery writer, which I found myself not liking very much. In keeping with my invariable practice of not criticizing living writers, since I begrudge no writer his success, I will withhold the author’s name, but the problem with the […]

AND THE CROOKED SHALL BE MADE STRAIGHT1 by James Lincoln Warren I have noticed a tendency over the last several years for mystery short stories to be more commonly about the commission of crimes than their detection or solution. Now, there are some very good stories that follow this particular path. For example, both my […]

THE MICE TRAP by James Lincoln Warren Deborah’s column last week gave us a list of reasons, at least according to an evangelical religious sect, why good people do bad things. Along with the title of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play alluded to last week in this space, that reminded me of a famous acronym used by the […]

DO TELL by James Lincoln Warren I have three busts of famous people, heroes of mine, sitting on top of one of my bookshelves. One of them is of William Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest story teller of all time. Shakespeare’s genius did not lie in his plots, which he almost always cribbed from some other […]

STRIP SEARCH by James Lincoln Warren In Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, there was a three inch column on page AA2 (in “LATEXTRA”, the section following the front page section which supposedly contains late-breaking news) stating that the Tribune Company, which owns the Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles TV station KTLA TV (which […]

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN by James Lincoln Warren All crime fiction depends on a central fact of human nature: people behaving badly. Back in the 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great codified the Official Roman Catholic List of Cardinal Sins, based on earlier work by theologians and references in scripture. Dante made a couple other adjustments […]

THE ART OF THE SHORT STORY by James Lincoln Warren Here’s the presentation I gave to the Orange County chapter of Sisters in Crime on Sunday, August 15, 2010. It is essentially the same presentation I gave in tandem with Melodie Johnson Howe last year at the California Crime Writers Conference, but without Melodie’s contributions, […]