EIGHTY-SIX BANDERSNATCHES by Steve Steinbock According to our records here at Criminal Brief Central, this is my eighty-sixth column on this esteemed web-log. Eighty-six is an odd number. According to mathematicians, it is a semi-prime number as well as a happy number. In binary, it looks like this: 1010110. When Mel Brooks and Buck Henry […]

ON THE FIFTH DAY OF HANUKKAH1 by Steve Steinbock Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah and Joyous Whatever to all my friends in Criminal Briefland. Tonight, we in the Steinbock household will be lighting the sixth candle on our menorah, so I thought I’d take this time to share some end of the year goodies from […]

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by Steve Steinbock The mome raths have been falling in toves lately. If you’re unfamiliar with mome raths, or are wondering why I said toves rather than droves, then you clearly need to gimble and gyre over to this website or read the first chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking […]

BEHIND THE MASK by Steve Steinbock In my column of last week , I spoke briefly about the difference between pulps and digest magazines. I thought I’d begin this week on the topic of the most famous of the pulps, Black Mask. Launched in 1920 by H. L. Mencken, the magazine claimed “the best stories […]

CRIME WITH A HITCH by Steve Steinbock The other day I picked up the latest issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine at the bookstore. It is a gem of an issue. From stem to stern, this issue was a treat well worth the sixty-four bits I paid out for it. (Full disclosure: As of this […]

STORIES OF NOVEL WRITING by Steve Steinbock It’s getting very near the end of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and I confess, I didn’t do much with it the last ten days or so. It isn’t that I ran out of steam – although to an extent, I did. Rather, I found that just as […]

COFFEE WITH A BANDERSNATCH by Steve Steinbock As I write the opening paragraph of this week’s Bandersnatch column, I’m sitting at my desk in the attic on the third floor of my Maine home. There’s very little bare space on the surface of the desk. In fact, if I wanted to bring a cup of […]