MOVIE TALK by John M. Floyd My name’s Friday. I carry a badge. Just kidding. Actually my name’s Floyd and I carry a cell phone. But I’ve always found it interesting that lines of dialogue from movies and TV can work their way into our language, and as a writer I’ve found that observing fictional […]

WHERE AND WHEN by Steven Steinbock It wasn’t until the late 1700s that science began to reconcile that space and time were the same stuff. “Stuff,” incidentally, isn’t a scientific term; nor, as a noun, is it a very helpful literary term. But sometimes no other English word will do. Twenty-three hundred years ago, Euclid […]

IN SEARCH OF A PERFECT NAME by Deborah Elliott-Upton One thing about being a mystery writer is nothing is a chance encounter. Anything could lead to a crime and most important, people are most interesting when they don’t realize I’m a writer who is taking mental notes for future reference. I don’t write a character […]

DEPARTMENT OF ODD SOCKS VIII by Rob Lopresti You can’t argue with success they say, so I suppose I have no business criticizing the working style of a man who manages to rip people off for three million bucks, but seriously. . . . If you were in the U.S and trying to pull off the Spanish Prisoner […]

Originally, the word novel was merely a synonym for novelty. Its application to literature comes to us courtesy of the Italian Renaissance author and humanist Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), who used it in the sense of “amusement” to represent an engaging tale—as with the century of short tales he wrote in his magnum opus, The Decameron, […]

EDITOR! EDITOR! by James Lincoln Warren I am fond of claiming that a writer without an editor is like a criminal defendant without a defense attorney. If you don’t have one, you’re probably going down. And along the same lines, the writer who steadfastly insists on being the sole editor of his own work has […]

STAMPING out CRIME by Leigh Lundin Swedish Crime Academy key                 (artist: H. Lauritzen) 1. Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers)  2. Jane Marple (Agatha Christie)   3. Gideon Fell (John Dickson Carr)    4. Father Brown (G. K. Chesterton)     5. Jules Maigret (Georges Simenon)      6. Auguste Dupin (Edgar Allan Poe)       7. Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)        8. […]