TO EVERYTHING THERE IS AN END by Deborah Elliott-Upton This has been a year of endings. Good-bye “24”, “LOST” and “Law and Order.” I’ve said so long to many favorite characters, but I wasn’t prepared for this last one. I’ve been in a state of mourning for about nine months now though the official death […]

THE BIG SLEEP by Deborah Elliott-Upton An article in Sunday’s newspaper grabbed my attention as all headlines should. “‘Big Sleep’ author to get wish.” It seems although Raymond Chandler allowed his hard-boiled detective, Phillip Marlowe, to quip that it didn’t matter where you lay when you were dead, in real life Chandler did care. He’d […]

GOING RETRO by Deborah Elliott-Upton Yesterday I found myself an hour away from home in a quaint, small town complete with a main street library that looked like it once may have been a barbecue restaurant with dark-stained wood siding on the exterior. I stepped inside hoping to research a new idea for a novel […]

YOU DID A BAD, BAD THING by Deborah Elliott-Upton Left on my front door were a bundle of pamphlets published and distributed by a religious sect (you can guess which one). The cover caught my attention with the words Why Do People Do Bad Things? Being a mystery/crime story lover, I decided to see what […]

LONE STAR SLEUTHS by Deborah Elliott-Upton Like most Criminal Brief readers, I’m always on the lookout for a new book to read. First on my list are mysteries (although I am open to all sorts of genres). In my search, I found Lone Star Sleuths: An Anthology of Texas Crime Fiction, a collection of excerpts […]

BE MY FRIEND? by Deborah Elliott-Upton “Even though we’ve changed and we’re all finding our own place in the world, we all know that when the tears fall or the smile spreads across our face, we’ll come to each other because no matter where this crazy world takes us, nothing will ever change so much […]

SHOW ME A STORY by Deborah Elliott-Upton If one picture is worth a thousand words, how many pictures would one short story be worth? I was thumbing through an art book and stumbled upon a painting by Jacques-Louis David, La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat), that had always fascinated me. When I was […]