2000 YEAR OLD SIGNATURE by Steve Steinbock Happy Friday to everyone. As the sun is rising on my weekly column, I’m aboard an airplane heading toward Baltimore for the 2008 World Mystery Convention, better known as Bouchercon. This afternoon at 1:30 I will be sitting with fellow CBers Angie, Melodie, James, John, and Leigh for […]

BLAME IT ON BOB VILA by Deborah Elliott-Upton Fairy tales can come true … I feel like I’m living a fairy tale life, but it’s not what you think. I’ve been working harder than ever and now I don’t even get to go to the ball, although unlike Cinderella, I had an invitation. Most of […]

LOST WEEKEND by Robert Lopresti Friday 6 PM. Get home. Open the mail. Big brown self-addressed envelope contains one of my stories. The rejection note is one typed sentence: I found the story compelling, but not what we are looking for right now. Then the editor’s hand-signed name. White wine is cold and compelling. Pour […]

THE BIG DIALOGUE by Melodie Johnson Howe To call someone insular is a high-minded way of saying they are narrow-minded and therefore intellectually and creatively ignorant. According to the AP, not only did Horace Engdahl, a member of the Nobel Prize for Literature jury, call American writers insular but he also added that they, “… […]

TONY & ME by James Lincoln Warren Before heading off to Bouchercon, I thought I would share a few thoughts concerning a man I never met: William Anthony Parker White, a.k.a. Anthony Boucher. My first awareness of him was when I was in high school in the early 70s. I had just joined the Science […]

X-RATED WORDS by Leigh Lundin We writers appreciate word play and several of us have written about words, their meanings, and sometimes their oddities. Tony Harris, physician, writer, and Criminal Brief reader, has contributed a couple of lists dubbed X-rated words. Trix are for Kids First are words that not merely end in –x but […]

A SENSE OF DISCLOSURE — PART 2 by John M. Floyd Last week, I wrote about the fact that I usually don’t tell others anything about my “stories in progress,” whether the stories are in idea form or outline form or already half-written. My point was, a storyline that’s not yet completed becomes less interesting […]