William Dylan Powell, winner of the 2007 Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for Best First Short Story, is a Houston-based freelance writer. He is a member of the Houston Press Club, the American Marketing Association and the Texas Writer’s League. He is the author or co-author of a half-dozen books, including Houston Then and Now. […]

THE THEFT OF SOMETHING PRICELESS by Robert Lopresti Back in the 1970s I used to climb out of my playpen and toddle over to the TV to watch “McMillan and Wife,” the witty cop show starring Rock Hudson and Susan St. James. More than once I had a strange sense of déjà vu, almost as […]

WHO’S REALLY A NOVELIST? by Melodie Johnson Howe In today’s (I’m writing this on Monday) Los Angeles Times I read that screenwriters are taking the time, due to the strike, to write the novels they’ve always wanted to write. However, many of them are coming up against the stark reality of the publishing world. Money. […]

LOADED MAGAZINE by James Lincoln Warren For Christmas, my wife got me Otto Penzler’s anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, an epic collection of hard-boiled crime fiction from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. Highly recommended; it’s a wonderful collection and I have been enjoying every bit of it, even the abysmally bad writing […]

eBOOK SILLINESS by Leigh Lundin I’ve written about eBooks, mobile cell phone novels, and readers such as the Amazon Kindle (that article most notable for having popularized the fabulous OmiBod). This week, I received two bits of eBook humor.   Medieval Tech Support This YouTube video seems to be a Norse version of Monty Python. […]

TITLE TALE by John M. Floyd Let me ask all you crime-fiction readers a question: What first attracts you to a story or a novel, if you know nothing about it beforehand? Its author? Its length? Its cover (or, if it’s a short piece, its illustration)? The fact that, when you flip through the pages, […]

A ROUGH WEEK by Steven Steinbock My original plan for this week’s Bandersnatches was to describe Doubleday Crime Club books and discuss their merits. But life (and it’s departure) intervened. In the latter half of this week’s column, I’ll introduce Crime Club, among other things. Next week I hope to tell you more about the […]