NEITHER NOIR NOR NEO-NOIR by John M. Floyd Even though this is a blog about mystery/crime/suspense short stories, I sometimes veer off into the area of mystery/crime/suspense fiction in general, which includes movies. Among those I have written about in the past are Double Indemnity, Witness, The Spanish Prisoner, Dial M for Murder, Blood Simple, […]

SELLING THEM SHORT by John M. Floyd One of the only bigtime authors I know well is Nevada Barr, who writes the Anna Pigeon mystery series. An indication of Nevada’s kindness toward aspiring writers like me is that she once introduced me to a friend by saying, “This is John Floyd — the only person […]

BITS AND PIECES by John M. Floyd In the summer of 1981, when I acquired my first VCR and our first cable TV hookup at our house, I started doing something that would continue for the next thirty years. I started videotaping and saving certain scenes in movies that I really liked. (I also taped […]

UNFINISHED BUSINESS by John M. Floyd Question: How do you feel about stories with unresolved endings? Rick DeMarinis, in his book The Art and Craft of the Short Story, says: “Chekhov, Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, among others less well known, created a new trend: the open-ended story, the story in which plot is almost nonexistent and […]

IN THEIR SPARE TIME by John M. Floyd Since most of what we discuss at this blog involves crime fiction, it makes sense that most of the series protagonists we discuss are connected in some way to law enforcement. Detectives, beat cops, marshals, sheriffs, lawyers, federal agents, etc. They’re the heroes because they’re in the […]

ADVICE COLUMN? by John M. Floyd According to Wikipedia, an advice column is, appropriately enough, “a column in a magazine or newspaper written by an advice columnist (colloquially known in British English as an agony aunt, or agony uncle if the columnist is a male).” If you regularly visit this blog, you might already know […]

FORT LAUDERDALE VICE by John M. Floyd A little over a year ago I did a column at this blog on the fiction of John D. MacDonald, and that would normally be enough to make me steer clear of writing about him and Travis McGee for a while. After all, how much can you say […]