THE STORY GENE by Rob Lopresti I just got back from a week of visiting family on the east coast. I spent a few days with all three of my siblings for the first time in a decade – although we’ve all seen each other more often than that. There were nine family members, plus […]

EENY MEENY MURDER NO by Rob Lopresti My wife has one shortcoming, which is reassuring, because perfection is so intimidating. Her flaw is this: she prefers science fiction to mysteries, Shocking, I know. When she reads a mystery it is usually because it is funny (Kinky Friedman, Donald Westlake) or because she thinks the setting […]

POP QUIZ by Rob Lopresti Below you will find 21 familiar authors and 21 mostly unknown titles.  The problem is that the words in each column have been jumbled.  For example, Raymond Chandler did not write a book called Naked You Advertise (and that’s a shame, really.)  He did, however write Farewell My Lovely and you […]

NON-MYSTERIES FOR THE MYSTERY FAN by Rob Lopresti No mysteries today. Instead I want to discuss some of my favorite novels that are almost mysteries, books that practically achieve that high standard. In other words, books that, ahem, transcend the mainstream, and almost acquire genre-dom. Island This is a novel about con artists, written by […]

CLIFFHANGERS by Rob Lopresti LOOK OUT! Don’t you see that car fishtailing up the road, barely staying on the pavement? It’s heading straight to the cliff, zooming like the brakes have been cut, and it seems that in just a few seconds it will crash to certain doom. We may have just enough time to […]

INCIDENT IN TACOMA by Rob Lopresti Here is a sort of mystery story, about a very famous mystery story. I’ll be interested to see if you figure out the destination before we get there. Michael S. Sullivan has a terrific article in the Spring issue of Columbia, a magazine about Northwest history. He tells us […]

PASTICHE NUTS by Rob Lopresti The first time I ever saw the word “pastiche” was in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, back in the 1970s. In those days EQ used to publish a lot of stories that reflected on the past of the field and these included parodies and pastiches. Parody is a fairly easy concept. […]