THE CASE OF THE BLIND LIBRARIAN by Robert Lopresti Last week James Lincoln Warren printed part of an essay by Doris Lessing in which she complained that one result of Communism was the idea that fiction had to be “about” something. That is, The Maltese Falcon is really about capitalism, and The Murder of Roger […]

ON FIRE by Melodie Johnson Howe The Santa Anna winds are blowing and Southern California is burning which makes me want to reread Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. T.S. Elliot called April the wickedest month, but for us who live here, it’s October. October beguiles with a stimulating sense of fall in the air. A […]

BLACK MASK by James Lincoln Warren “I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.” — Dashiell Hammett Next month, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine introduces as an included feature the return of Black Mask, the legendary pulp magazine that gave the world the hard-boiled P.I. story. This is cause […]

Y CANADA by Leigh Lundin Occasionally, I sit in on a monthly literary gathering run by Liz Ruch at the Morse Museum‘s Pavilion. They like to like Southern writers, but they love Canadian writers, including Ann-Marie MacDonald and Mary Lawson, just to name two. Talk at Tuesday’s meeting brought to mind a small college north […]

AS SEEN ON CNN by Angela Zeman In Pittsburgh on Tuesday, October 16th, according to a CNN report entitled, SPY CAUGHT UNDER SUV, a woman spying on her husband crawled beneath his Suburban which he’d parked in front of his girlfriend’s home. A friendly neighborhood cat accompanied her. The detective business not being the exciting […]

PURPLE SERENDIPITY ALL AROUND by Steve Steinbock I’ve been going on about serendipity for several weeks, and if you bear with me, it will all be out of my system in another column or two. Meanwhile, I have a story to share with you that smacks of serendipity, or kismet, or just dumb coincidence. Or […]

BELIEVING LIES by Deborah Elliott-Upton “In our openings, we are most likely to lie.” – Anton Chekhov It’s easy enough to lie. Criminals beat lie detectors every day. Lovers cheat and get away with it – at least for a while – and confessions written as a hypothetical version of what could have happened are […]