TIMING IS EVERYTHING by Deborah Elliott-Upton This past week mystery writers have suffered through a bad time. We’ve lost two of our best: Elaine Flinn and Tony Hillerman. Elaine was the creator of the Molly Doyle series and Tony of the Navaho tribal police team of Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Although I never knew […]

TEMPORARY AUTHORS by Rob Lopresti I want to tell you about some authors you have never heard of and I have to start out with a warning. You are going to think I’m making these people up, especially since a previous column I more or less did that. But I swear on my next royalty […]

Melodie’s taking yet ANOTHER week off, but this time it’s because we’ve got this wonderful piece by Dale Andrews, who won 2nd place in the Ellery Queen Readers’ Choice Awards this year. —JLW THE PASTICHE by Dale C. Andrews I attended my first Bouchercon this year, and had the pleasure (and privilege) of tagging along […]

SAD NEWS by James Lincoln Warren I first learned from Dr. Larry Gandle at Bouchercon that Elaine Flinn, one of my all time favorite people, had been diagnosed with lung cancer that had metastasized to her brain. Today, our mutual friend Paul Guyot informed me that Elaine passed away this weekend.

FIVE BY FIVE by James Lincoln Warren Sometimes, it’s best to go to the source—to read Shakespeare’s plays instead of Bartlett’s snippets of them, or to go to Homer for red-blooded heroics instead of Joseph Campbell’s pale abstractions thereof. In such a spirit, the other night I pulled my Penguin Classics version of the Rig […]

In the prefatory remarks to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe analyzes the five analytic powers of observation, inference, intuition, imagination, and identity.

CHARACTER SKETCH by John M. Floyd One of the things I’ve always found difficult, as a writer, is presenting characters in a way that makes them real and believable and interesting to the reader. In fact — because it’s an extremely important element of fiction — it’s something I work hard to try to improve, […]