GOING VIRAL by Rob Lopresti I am afraid I am not my usual charming self today. More in a mood to cuss and kick the furniture. I was almost not able to provide a column this week. It looked for a while like James might have had to fill the space with a Mannix rerun […]

Here is the beginning of the introduction of my good friend two-time Edgar-winner Daniel Stashower‘s new book, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. I had decided to have a piece about the Mary Rogers murder and how it inspired Poe’s second detective story today, and was looking […]

AMBIENT NOYES by James Lincoln Warren Have you ever heard of Ernest U. Kinsey? Probably not, but I’ll lay you fifteen to one that you’ve used his invention, or at least the simplified version of it introduced by Noyes Palmer Chapman. Kinsey invented a puzzle consisting of 35 numbered square tiles inside a square frame […]

NEWSWORTHY (Update) by Leigh Lundin An earlier article about the temporary loss of Apple’s latest iPhone focused on legal efforts to weaken freedom of the press. The so-called democratization of news is poised to leave reporters and even crime writers with fewer civil liberties rather than more. As newspapers around the nation wither into ashes […]

THE FIRST LITTLE PIGGY by John M. Floyd Last September I did a column about reference books for the craft of writing, which included resources like Stephen King’s On Writing, Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages, etc. I have a weakness for that kind of how-to book, and as you might expect, some of them […]

READ MY LIPS by Steven Steinbock My lips don’t move when I read. But if you watch carefully, you might catch a slight movement of the mouth muscles. People often bandy that about as an insult. “His lips move when he reads” is another way of saying that someone is uneducated or a poor reader. […]

CHARACTER SWITCH by Deborah Elliott-Upton In workshops, I often instruct writers to become a reporter and interview their characters. I stress they should ask pressing questions to expose underlying thoughts to develop the characterization. Mainly, I wanted them to dig into what makes them who they really are beneath the façade. Recently, I added another […]