THE STORY GENE by Rob Lopresti I just got back from a week of visiting family on the east coast. I spent a few days with all three of my siblings for the first time in a decade – although we’ve all seen each other more often than that. There were nine family members, plus […]

The Encyclopædia Britannica contains the following entry: E. C. Bentley (British author) born July 10, 1875, London, Eng. died March 30, 1956, London British journalist and man of letters who is remembered as the inventor of the clerihew and for his other light verse and as the author of Trent’s Last Case (1913), a classic […]

MAKING SPORT by James Lincoln Warren September is one of my favorite months, mainly because I like team sports. Now, I’m not one of those sports junkies who knows every player on every team and has an encyclopedia of arcane statistics at my instant command. I couldn’t tell you what any pitcher’s ERA is and […]

THOMAS CARLYLE by Leigh Lundin Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish essayist, historian, and satirist, pivotally influenced English literature, but there’s an important lesson of his that stands out in the literary world: Make backups! Back up your data. Back it up to a CD, a DVD, a keychain flash drive, but make backups. Back up frequently. […]

ANOTHER BOX OF CHOCOLATES by John M. Floyd About eighteen months ago I did a column here at Criminal Brief — a quiz, actually — on movie quotes, called “Dialogue is Like a Box of Chocolates.” The idea was to remind both readers and writers of the importance and variety of fictional dialogue, and that […]

MEME THIS by Steve Steinbock A meme, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. The term, coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is an amalgamation of the word gene […]

THE GIFT OF MURDER by Deborah Elliott-Upton I met mystery writer Tony Burton several years ago through the Short Mystery Fiction Society, an online group. Not unlike Criminal Brief, SMFS’s members are mostly writers whose discussions are usually about writing, although here our emphasis is more on sharing our love of the mystery short story, […]