ADULT CONTENT AND DISCONTENT by Robert Lopresti Last month I updated my anti-virus software and, in a fit of Buyer’s Glee, I managed to turn on all the features, including parental controls. No one in my house is under eighteen. In fact. everyone in my house has been married longer than that. So I didn’t […]

PILE UP by Rob Lopresti Today I was almost the sixth car in a five-car pile-up. I was on the highway, driving home from a business meeting, when a car zoomed past me in the left lane. He (why do I assume the driver was male?) tried to find a way between two cars in […]

GETTING SPOOKED by Rob Lopresti Happy Halloween. I hope you get visited by lots of charmingly costumed kids who eat the candy so you don’t have to. The haunted connection The fact that my column was falling on this holiday made me think about the link between ghost stories and mysteries. I mean, I don’t […]

THE CASE OF THE BLIND LIBRARIAN by Robert Lopresti Last week James Lincoln Warren printed part of an essay by Doris Lessing in which she complained that one result of Communism was the idea that fiction had to be “about” something. That is, The Maltese Falcon is really about capitalism, and The Murder of Roger […]

PLAYING CONCIERGE by Rob Lopresti A few years ago I received an email from a “relatively new fan” who had enjoyed one of my stories. He correctly diagnosed that I was a Jack Ritchie fan and asked which Ritchie stories I recommended, and what other authors did I think he should try? I recommended some […]

TOM SWIFT LIVES by Robert Lopresti I suppose this gets filed under Criticizing My Betters. I am reading a novel by a best-selling mystery writer. It is my first encounter with her and, I suspect, my last. I have found it a hard slog and I just realized what part of the problem is. I’m […]

THE OTHER EDGE by Robert Lopresti A few weeks ago I wrote about the only soap opera I enjoyed as a kid, the mystery-oriented show, “The Edge of Night”. Today I want to talk about what the show taught me as a writer-to-be. First and foremost I learned the essence of storytelling. It isn’t plot. […]