RADIO ACTIVITY: A TRUE STORY by John M. Floyd As my friends and family and some of our Criminal Brief readers know, I’m hopelessly addicted to movie and TV trivia — especially mysteries and westerns. In fact, my CB co-columnists are probably the ones who razz me the most about it. Over the years my […]

ED’S WORLDS by Steven Steinbock I think it’s fair to say that Edward D. Hoch was best known for his tradition mystery stories. The stories about Dr. Sam Hawthorn are all impossible crime “problems.” Most of his other series characters also dealt with impossible crimes or paradoxical situations. Nick Velvet was cast from the mold […]

A LIFE WITHOUT DANGER by Deborah Elliott-Upton Some days I feel like the Roadrunner, but more often I walk in the footsteps of Wile E. Coyote. That coyote has been trying to catch the roadrunner for a long time and though he’s mail-ordered probably every gadget the Acme Company has in its catalog, he hasn’t […]

THE HILLSIDE BANDIT by Rob Lopresti Twenty-five years ago my wife and I, along with our daughter were living in Hillside, New Jersey, a nice little town, only one block from Newark, the state’s largest and arguably scariest city. Not the safest place in the world to live, perhaps, but we had a nice little […]

EGOLESS by Melodie Johnson Howe Director Sidney Lumet died earlier this month at the age of 86. The April 11th issue of the Los Angles Times had a thoughtful appreciation of the director’s films from his first, “Twelve Angry Men” in 1956, to his last, a little known film titled “Before the Devil Knows You’re […]

CONTRAPHOBIA by James Lincoln Warren The Gentle Reader may be forgiven for not being familiar with the word I have opted for my title. You won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, nor in most other dictionaries. I learned it from my father, a psychiatrist (now retired), on the occasion of watching a foolish […]

PAGES of STORIES, Part II A Locked Room Mystery by Leigh Lundin with John M. Floyd Fair warning: Leigh and I teamed up again this weekend for a two-part column honoring the electronic magazine Pages of Stories, which thus far features two Criminal Brief writers. At Leigh’s suggestion, my article Saturday contained a reprint of […]