A CONFESSION by Deborah Elliott-Upton My husband already knows, but I have had a long-standing affair with another man. I admit to thinking about him at all times of the day and night, finding secret times I could spend with him uninterrupted, and I never tire of his voice and stories. I fell in love […]

CLOSE YOUR EYES AND WATCH THE SHOW by Robert Lopresti As a writer of short stories there are a few pleasures that have passed me by. Peter Jackson hasn’t turned one of my flash stories into a three-picture epic. The New York Times bestseller list hasn’t cleared a space for me. But I can make […]

CRANKY Or; There Is No Satisfying Her by Melodie Johnson Howe Recently I attended a cocktail party in Los Angeles. Most of the guests work in “the biz.” Clutching my chardonnay, I found myself listening to a TV writer. He was talking about himself. I nodded my head and tried not to stare over his […]

GRAVE MATTERS by James Lincoln Warren It is no secret that writers of crime fiction are frequently inspired by actual events. Leigh Lundin’s award-winning story, “Swamped”, was inspired by the actual bizarre behavior of a Florida jurist. As a writer of predominantly “historical” crime fiction, I’m no different—the story is true, but the names have […]

CHICKLIT 451° by Leigh Lundin In a recent commentary, Patricia Smiley wrote that she found the term ChickLit demeaning, which set me to thinking about it with resulting mixed reactions. (A hard-boiled male detective sub-genre came to mind, probably unprintable in these refined pages.) Assuming we define ChickLit as any light entertaining form of stories […]

Readers of the first “Mystery Masterclass” column may remember that Charles Ardai referred to “a recent article in the Wall Street Journal [that] spoke of a mystery short story renaissance.” The author of that article was Tom Nolan, the WSJ’s regular correspondent for mystery fiction and the editor of Strangers In Town: Three Newly Discovered […]

A SHORT AND INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF SHORT STORIES by Steven Steinbock The beauty of participating in a project like Criminal Brief is the serendipity of ideas that happens when like minds come together. Since writing to you about Poe (Bandersnatches May 18), I’d been doing a lot of thinking about the history of short stories. […]