GUMSHOE WARDROBE AND MEETING MR. MOTO by Melodie Johnson Howe Phillip Marlowe is certainly one of the great private eyes, if not the greatest. When we first meet him in The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler has Marlowe describe himself right down to his socks. Yes, his socks. “ … black wool socks with dark blue […]

LITERARY CATS by James Lincoln Warren I think that Rita Mae Brown and Lilian Jackson Braun, to name just two, have a lot to answer for. I am not constitutionally disposed against cosies like Otto Penzler, but I draw the line at violating feline literary dignity. A couple months ago, we lost our cat Molly. […]

99 WAYS to KILL by Leigh Lundin In my perambulations and peregrinations around the World Wide Web, I stumbled across a fragment of an article originally published by the Chicago Sun-Times, but archived for an annoying fee by High Beam Encyclopedia, which touts itself to be the comprehensive digital archive for information seekers of all […]

FUNNY BUSINESS by John M. Floyd Pat Walsh, the founding editor of MacAdam/Cage, once said that the most difficult thing to write is a sex scene, and the third most difficult is dialogue. The writing task that comes in at second place is something that surprised me only because I figured it would have taken […]

REVISING HISTORY by Steven Steinbock This past week I had the pleasure of re-reading Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers (republished as Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978). Back in the 1980s, when Simon & Schuster was reprinting Finney’s Time and Again as a trade paperback (under their Fireside Books imprint), they collected […]

RITUALS by Deborah Elliott-Upton A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one. –J. Pierpont Morgan ***MY NAME IS DEBORAH ELLIOTT-UPTON AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE*** Everyone has their own little rituals. My first subscription was to ’TEEN magazine, which I paid for myself. My first fiction magazine […]

THE COLLECTED NOTEBOOK OF ROBERT LOPRESTI by Robert Lopresti A major milestone passed at my house this week. (And none of you sent flowers or a card… don’t think I didn’t notice.) Specifically, I finished a new pocket notebook and started a new one. And by the way, I can’t believe how hard it was […]