Donald J. Sobol is the Edgar-winning author of the phenomenal Encyclopedia Brown juvenile mystery series, which I first started to read back when they first came out in 1963. Each of the Encyclopedia Brown books features 10 short stories, each a mystery solved by the eponymous hero (or on occasion by his sidekick and bodyguard […]

HOW TO BE A DETECTIVE by Robert Benchley

Several of us have over the last three years described how we’ve come up with or developed some of our stories. But as I have so often observed, no two writers work in exactly the same way—the “creative process” (how I loathe that phrase! but clichés do have the advantage of being unambiguous, so I’m […]

Faithful Criminal Brief readers have heard from Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, all now revered as important figures in the development of the American short story. But there was a time when the short story was the Rodney Dangerfield of literature. The man who changed that was Professor James Brander Matthews (1852-1929) […]

In honor of the Vancouver games, here is a mythological account of the origin of the Olympic Games as recounted by Pindar, a Greek lyric poet of the Fifth Century B.C. —JLW THE ORIGIN OF THE OLYMPICS by Pindar1 Of that light in the life of a man before all other deeds, that first of […]

We’ve featured Kurt Vonnegut’s list of rules for writing short fiction before—here’s a link—but here they are again, this time in his own voice. HOW TO WRITE A SHORT STORY by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

One of the most common plot devices used in crime fiction is the idea of being falsely accused. A current trend in detective fiction is to concentrate on the effects of a crime rather than on how it is solved. These two ideas are united in this short story by one of the greatest writers […]