VERY OLD MYSTERIES by Robert Lopresti Last month I attended the Bible and Archaeology Fest in San Diego. This is one of those events that can best be described as “fascinating to people who are fascinated by that sort of thing.” I’m sure some people would rather listen to a dramatic recital of the phone […]

BRAVO EQMM & FORGIVE THE RANT by Melodie Johnson Howe Black Mask is back in Ellery Queen. The first short story is Dashiell Hammett’s “Bodies Piled Up.” He takes the discovery of the body in the closet and turns that moment into dark satire. It’s great to be back in San Francisco, with the Continental […]

A LOST ART by James Lincoln Warren “Brevity,” counseled Polonius, surely one of the biggest windbags in all of literature, “is the soul of wit.” Leaving aside the fact that Shakespeare obviously intended this particular passage to drip with irony (“large gobbets of irony that splash around your feet,” observed my wife Margaret), Polonius had […]

WIKI by Leigh Lundin Rather than lacking attention, having ADD means almost everything interests me. Often I start to research a project or story, and I turn to the internet and become lost for hours trailing the bread crumbs of follow-up links. For a couple of years, I’ve been caught in a particularly insidious cerebral […]

QUEEN’S QUORUM: THE BEST OF DETECTIVE AND MYSTERY SHORT STORIES by Barry T. Zeman In 1942 a year after they started publishing Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM), the two cousins from Brooklyn writing under this famous pseudonym produced a most unusual book, The Detective Short Story: A Bibliography. This limited edition volume was self-described as […]

A PAIR OF HANUKKAH LIGHTS by Steve Steinbock Hanukkah Candles are kind of like short stories. There’s not a lot of wax, but they shed a nice, warming glow. They only burn for 30-40 minutes. And you usually find them in a group. Greenwood Press is, of all things, putting together an encyclopedia of Jewish […]

SMALL TOWN SECRETS by Deborah Elliott-Upton Friends should always show up for their friend’s events, and if they are writers, be a sport and buy their book! A frequent Criminal Brief comment provider, Alisa Dollar, is one of my former students. Although the classes with Alisa were online and we have met in person at […]