COSTCO, COFFINS, & BOGIE by Melodie Johnson Howe Our standard poodle peed on our new goose down duvet. Stripping the bed (and the dog) I decided we needed a back-up duvet, so with my writer friend Kathleen Sharp I ventured into Costco. Grabbing a shopping cart about the size of a Smart car, I immediately […]

MY REPLY TO STEPHEN FRY by James Lincoln Warren Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography – Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo. Today I’m wearing my Diction Cop helmet. As I mentioned last week, my work in fiction lately has been dominated by trying to find the right voice, and there is nothing more important in voice […]

POETICAL PLAY by Leigh Lundin In the era before television and video games, nursemaids, mothers, and teachers employed poems and word play to get their children thinking about words and their meanings, and of course Shakespeare loved playing with words. You may have noticed that most of us at Criminal Brief enjoy word games too. […]

OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB by John M. Floyd A few weeks ago JLW mentioned that one his stories and one of mine in AHMM last year were recently named by Otto Penzler as “Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2009” (an addendum to the Best American Mystery Stories 2010 anthology, edited by Lee Child). It’s […]

MORE TOUGH GUYS by Steven Steinbock This past week I’ve continued my mission as the evangelist of noir for The AudioBook Community. They’ve given me an official identity and even a cute little hard-boiled avatar. If you haven’t stopped by, the discussions have been in the the Get Caught Listening discussion area. The celebration of […]

LUCKY WRITERS by Deborah Elliott-Upton “You are so lucky to be published writers,” a woman said to my group of author-friends sharing a book signing event. Actually, the process was more than luck and involved a lot of work by each of us, I thought, but didn’t say. I knew her word choice was not […]

A WELL-DESERVED KICK IN THE SIDE by Rob Lopresti Thinking about villains last week made me think about that other regular in the field of mystery fiction, the hero’s sidekick. The loyal Watson’s main job is to make the hero look brilliant but he or she may also do the legwork, play the reader’s surrogate, […]