And YOU THINK AMAZON is only about BOOKS by Leigh Lundin Business classes teach about horizontal and vertical integration. Say you’re a bookstore, and you expand by carrying music and movies by buying a competitor. That’s lateral expansion, otherwise called horizontal integration. If you bought a book printing company, as Amazon did with its controversial […]

WRITER’s BLECH by Leigh Lundin I don’t have enough mileage to experience writers’ block, but I get writer’s blech. Writer’s blech happens on days when the words I put on paper come out heavy and dreary despite my best efforts. I look at what I’ve written. I picture my old English teachers giving it an […]

TITLES and ASSETS [1] by Leigh Lundin I remember the title of an adult book I read in the third grade, Fritz Lieber’s Gather Darkness. Without the context of the novel, the title is evocative, but considered with the story, the title is multi-tiered with meaning. Gather Darkness is an exemplary title. Contrasting that with […]

Ask OXFORD by Leigh Lundin The words ‘Oxford’ and ‘free’ aren’t normally seen in the same sentence, so when I saw Oxford University Press was sponsoring an Ask Oxford web site, that got my attention. It has a number of useful articles for writers (and readers), but today I focus on their Commonly Confused Words. […]

Lucy ebullient! DOGGED PURSUIT by Leigh Lundin Cats have come to dominate mystery cosies. Aficionados embrace multiple cat novel series, cat blogs, cat conference panels, and fans talk of a cat mystery convention. If cats symbolize the cosy, mutts must represent noir. Cats are feminine. Dogs are masculine. Cats are positive. The cat’s meow and […]

NO PUN IN TEN DID by Leigh Lundin We at Criminal Brief like words and word play. In the past couple of weeks, these showed up in my mailbox: Criminal lie ability determines a detective’s worth. A dyslexic man walked into a bra. A peanut walks into a bar and was a salted. A toothless […]

A BIRTHDAY ESSAY by Leigh Lundin My friend Dale Andrews offered me inauguration tickets and lunch at the Jeffersonian Club with his agent if I would post an article for him on 11 January. Naturally, I declined, being unbribable with such paltry inducements. On the other hand, his wonderful wife, Pat, puts up with the […]