LEAVES FROM THE QUEEN’S NOTEBOOKS by Steven Steinbock It’s a new year, and I’d like to start it by launching the first of an occasional series of columns revisiting past issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Today we’ll do a retrospective of what you’d find if you opened an issue of EQMM a half century […]

EREV CHRISTMAS by Steven Steinbock Today is Erev Christmas ( ), literally Christmas Eve in Hebrew. Actually, the more common way of saying Christmas in modern Israel is Hag Ha-Molad (or ; literally “the Festival of the Nativity”). I’m guessing most of you didn’t know that. I’m also guessing that most of our regular readers […]

VISITING PAT AND REMEMBERING ED by Steven Steinbock As I mentioned in last week’s column, my son and I were traveling through upstate New York looking at colleges. It’s not a good time of year to be travelling to upstate New York. But we managed safely and found the region beautiful. (It was my first […]

ROLLING “R”s by Steven Steinbock Your Jabberwalking journalist and his beamish boy (Nate, the 17 year-old, not Sam the 13 year-old Travis McGee fan) are on the road visiting colleges. In that academic spirit I’m going to wax linguistical. There are funny things going on with that eighteenth letter of ours. I was cooking the […]

REMEMBERING LEN by Steven Steinbock The mystery fan community lost a pioneer earlier this week. Len Moffatt, of Downey California, died early Tuesday morning at the age of 87. His wife, June, said that it was just a few days before their 44th anniversary. If you recall, last week for my Criminal Brief column, I […]

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. For today’s Bandersnatch, I’ve invited my son, Sam, to contribute an essay he wrote for school. His Language Arts assignment was to write—in letter form addressed to the teacher—an account of a book he read. I had recently recommended The Deep Blue Good-by (as the first of the “Travis McGee” novels by […]

MORE TOUGH GUYS by Steven Steinbock This past week I’ve continued my mission as the evangelist of noir for The AudioBook Community. They’ve given me an official identity and even a cute little hard-boiled avatar. If you haven’t stopped by, the discussions have been in the the Get Caught Listening discussion area. The celebration of […]