The ADVANTAGE of DISADVANTAGE by Leigh Lundin Several weeks ago, Melodie Johnson Howe recently wrote about people who dissed mysteries and thrillers. While I have heard of various genres and even fiction itself being dismissed, I realized I’ve never actually heard anyone criticize mysteries and “thrill” fiction to my face. Perhaps it’s the company I […]

POINT of VIEW by Leigh Lundin One of the techniques an aspiring writer has to master is ‘point of view’ or PoV: who is telling the story. Stories, poems, songs, movies are almost always told in one of three ways which we call voice. 1st person ("I" pronoun) 2nd person ("he, she, they" pronouns from […]

BULLY PULPIT by Leigh Lundin My brother Glen is responsible for today’s column as well as the stitches in my side from laughing so damn hard. Last week, I’d written about insults and childhood thugs, and one of the nastiest was Lester (whose last name we won’t divulge to authorities) who could have whupped Scut […]

INSULTS and INJURY by Leigh Lundin In my recent columns, I have been exploring and playing with words. A reader sent me an eMail called When Insults Had Class. I don’t know that the sender intended me to build an article from it, but hey, anything’s fair game. When I was a little kid, our […]

WOMEN in CRIME by Leigh Lundin In the heyday of the TV-Movie-of-the-Week, Oxygen, and WE cable movies for women, I once suggested creating a ratings web site for (re)viewers with the following categories: RATINGS women good, men bad women good, men bad (son maybe good)women good, men bad (but grandfather maybe good)women good, men bad […]

POETIC SYNERGY by Leigh Lundin One of my tertiary characters was a noir poet who reads poetry over the radio. As such, she devises poems suitable to her dark personality, and so I attempted to draw upon my sophomore poetry class to cobble a poem or two together. It occurred to me afterwards that I […]

BAD WORDS by Leigh Lundin Once again I write about forbidden words but in a different context. As usual, however, they may not be what you expect. Writers, I like to believe, see the world in a skewed way, and in articulating an odd-angled view, teach, entertain, wonder, or ponder. I suspect mystery writers, who […]