LUNCH WITH BOB THE BUILDER by Steve Steinbock National Novel Writing Month Last week I had lunch with Bob the Builder. To be more precise, I had lunch with William Dufris, the actor who provided the voice for the Nickelodeon cartoon character Bob the Builder. I met Bill over a decade ago at annual lobster […]

FAST TRACK FICTION WRITING by Steve Steinbock This month is NaNoWriMo. Sounds like a disease, doesn’t it? Or a microscopic poetry-writing machine. But NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is an annual event started in 1999 by Chris Baty in which writers and regular folk sit down with the goal of hammering out 50,000 […]

KINKY MUSINGS by Steve Steinbock As regular visitors to Criminal Brief probably already know, I’m the only regular CB columnist who hasn’t published short mystery fiction. That’s a personal detail that may change at some point in the future, and regular visitors to Criminal Brief will be amongst the first I’ll tell if it does […]

CHASING MOONBEAMS by Steve Steinbock I realize that the title of today’s Bandersnatches sounds like something borrowed from a Fred Astaire movie or a Cat Stevens song. I’m also following up on Deborah’s Femme Fatale column from yesterday which waxed on climate in fiction. But I actually found myself doing that very thing — chasing […]

2000 YEAR OLD SIGNATURE by Steve Steinbock Happy Friday to everyone. As the sun is rising on my weekly column, I’m aboard an airplane heading toward Baltimore for the 2008 World Mystery Convention, better known as Bouchercon. This afternoon at 1:30 I will be sitting with fellow CBers Angie, Melodie, James, John, and Leigh for […]

THE ART OF THE DETECTIVE STORY by Steve Steinbock Two weeks back I spent a lot of column space telling you very little about R. Austin Freeman and his 1923 essay, “The Art of the Detective Story.” Today I’ll tell you a little bit more. But first, reading Freeman put me in an interesting verbialogical […]

A BANDERSNATCH MISHMASH by Steve Steinbock Has it been a week already? It’s late evening, and I’ve just set myself down to read today’s Criminal Brief column, and I see that it’s Thursday. I haven’t written my Bandersnatch for tomorrow. What a week it’s been! I’ve been reading like mad and writing even madder (more […]