A BIRTHDAY ESSAY by Leigh Lundin My friend Dale Andrews offered me inauguration tickets and lunch at the Jeffersonian Club with his agent if I would post an article for him on 11 January. Naturally, I declined, being unbribable with such paltry inducements. On the other hand, his wonderful wife, Pat, puts up with the […]

SHORTER THAN SHORT by John M. Floyd Since you’re reading this blog, you are probably (as I am) a fan of short crime fiction. But what if, now and then, you want something even more bite-sized than a short story? Nibble-sized, maybe. Well, there’s always the short-short story, of course, and even that vague little […]

BANDERSNATCH IN BINARY by Steve Steinbock “There are two kinds of people in the world,” Robert Benchley once wrote, “Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.” Truer words were never written. I’m always skeptical of dualities. Most dichotomies, I find, are false. The world is rarely […]

GETTING STARTED AGAIN by Deborah Elliott-Upton When I agreed to my first speaking engagement of 2009, I assumed I would probably be standing in front of or at least near a podium or somewhere I could place a few index cards with notes. Instead, the former radio host asking for the interview in January said […]

WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN? by Rob Lopresti Back in 1987 there was a mystery conference in New Jersey. I don’t remember the exact title but it amounted to a salute to Otto Penzler and to the Mysterious Press, which he had founded, and which had changed the entire field of mystery publishing. There […]

DON’T TELL ME THE PLOT by Melodie Johnson Howe My friend Lenore called yesterday. “Hello?” “Literature smit-a-ture,” she announced angrily. “You read my short story?” “No. I was three hundred pages into An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser…” “That means you have about two thousand more pages to go.” Undaunted she continued to rant, “and […]

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE? by James Lincoln Warren My first appearance at a major crime fiction conference was at Bouchercon 2003 in Las Vegas. I was on a panel about historical mysteries moderated by the late Bruce Alexander Cook, author of a series of distinguished novels featuring Sir John Fielding, the Blind Beak of Bow Street. […]