THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY by John M. Floyd As writers, we know we have a “voice.” I don’t mean a set of opinions that need to be heard, I mean a fingerprint of style and content that identifies each of us. Or at least identifies our work. It consists of many things (structure, rhythm, […]

HEY, YOU! YES, YOU!! by John M. Floyd As you probably realize by now, we Criminal Brief folks occasionally veer off the plainly marked mystery/crime/suspense pathway to cavort in the wildflowery fields of other subjects. This is one of those detours. I invite you today to relive with me those incredibly dull high-school classes where […]

MURDER, TEXAS STYLE by John M. Floyd For quite a while now, I’ve been thinking of doing a column on a movie that I really liked but that nobody else — at least nobody down here in my end of the forest — seems to have heard much about. It’s Blood Simple (1984), the first […]

CHAPTER AND VERSE by John M. Floyd My friend Carolyn Haines, one of the most talented and prolific mystery authors around, once said to me that when she started writing novels she tried to avoid short chapters. Her reason was that she’d always heard a writer should never give the reader an opportunity to put […]

NOW AVAILABLE IN TWO FLAVORS by John M. Floyd If there’s one question about writing that seems to come up over and over again at meetings and blogs and conferences, it’s this one: what’s the difference between genre fiction and so-called “literary” fiction? We’ve wrestled with it several times here at Criminal Brief too, but […]

COEN CRAZY by John M. Floyd As I grow older, I tend to gravitate toward certain authors I know I like. I still experiment now and then, and that’s a good thing: otherwise, I might never have discovered Marcus Sakey, Joe Lansdale, Harlan Coben, Steve Hamilton, and other fantastic writers whose books I tried without […]

THE SAME OLD STORY by John M. Floyd Something that we don’t often see is a rewritten version of a previously published novel or short story. (It does happen, of course: one example is the longer edition of Stephen King’s The Stand, which appeared twelve years after the original.) But a remake of an old […]