PROFESSIONAL TIPS– Lemony Snicket by Leigh Lundin You’re a fan of crime writing and you haven’t heard of Lemony Snicket? Leigh at Borders (2005) Lemony Snicket might be accused of the crime of writing, which would undoubtedly please Lemony no end. To be candid, I’ve read only one LS novel, The Bad Beginning from the […]

POETICAL PLAY by Leigh Lundin In the era before television and video games, nursemaids, mothers, and teachers employed poems and word play to get their children thinking about words and their meanings, and of course Shakespeare loved playing with words. You may have noticed that most of us at Criminal Brief enjoy word games too. […]

NOT-SO-COLD OLD CASES by Leigh Lundin Before I wrote mysteries, my interest focused on the puzzle, figuring out the whodunit or howdunit. Classics where the puzzle reigns paramount are still my favorites. As I turned from reading to writing and my drive for verism and verisimilitude, I grew interested in true crime, which I once […]

PROFESSIONAL TIPS– Israel Zangwill by Leigh Lundin I finally got around to an often overlooked classic, The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill (downloadable here or here). The title comes from its setting in Bow, England, not the American West or a cosy of Little Bo Peep in a large pink ribbon. Perhaps the story might […]

HALLOWEEN CRIMES by Leigh Lundin What better time to catch up with weird crime news than Halloween? Read on! Carpooling Corpse (click to read) As disturbing as this story is, it’s difficult not to feel sympathy for two women in dire distress. Still, it’s not a place to trick-or-treat. Dangerous Drugs It seems the US […]

A FISTFUL of VALOR by Leigh Lundin Today, meet a heroine. Her name is Marisol Valles García, a 20-year-old criminology student. She’s the new police chief of Praxedis G. Guerrero in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico (near Ciudad Juarez and Guadalupe) a law officer who doesn’t carry a gun but packs two personal bodyguards. I’m […]

TRIALS and TRIBULATIONS by Leigh Lundin Hello to everyone at Bouchercon! While I like mysteries designed with a solvable riddle, I appreciate realism in stories. Sometimes the realism blurs with the bizarre, the topic of today’s article. Two ghastly crimes have come up for trial, both stranger than fiction. Collaring a Suspect On 28 August […]