KINDLED by Melodie Johnson Howe My son, Geoff, gave me a Kindle for Mother’s Day. His boss gave it to him for Christmas. He decided since he is loaded down with Apple this and Mac that he had no use for it. And now I have it. He spent the afternoon getting me connected. The […]

MIRRORS by Janice Law John Floyd’s good March 12 blog on literary genres got me thinking about other differences between work focused on art and work focused on entertainment, not that those categories are ever mutually exclusive. Shakespeare, after all, was big on contemporary genre entertainment: revenge tragedy, cross-dressing siblings, blood and gore warfare, and […]

WOMEN WRONGED by Leigh Lundin ‘Sexually-assaulted girl forced to pay $45,000 in legal fees.’ That’s the short lead-in— the rest of the story isn’t much different but is terribly hard to fathom. At least three boys (two aged 18, one younger) locked a 16-year-old girl in a bedroom at a party. Clothes and morals were […]

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING by John M. Floyd Two sanitation engineers being conveyedon their environment service vehicle. We at Criminal Brief often find ourselves writing about word usage and wordplay. A few of us (excluding me but including JLW) are experts on the subject. And the one thing we all seem to agree on is that […]

JABBER-WALKING PART TWO by Steven Steinbock When we left off last week, I had left off my narrative with James Lincoln Warren and myself at Penn Station boarding the Express train Washington, DC. It was Friday, April 29. I feel a little like a character from a Mark Twain adventure – Innocents Abroad or Roughing […]

OTHER THINGS by Deborah Elliott-Upton Sounds of nothingness surround me as if I were in a tomb. At first my mind questions the static not quite silence, but soon accepts it. I usually write with music in the background, sometimes quiet as if an afterthought, but often nearer to blaring. As a teenager, I’d always […]

SEE IF I CARE by Rob Lopresti When I started the blog Little Big Crimes my mission was simple: say nice things about short mystery stories. That’s why I announced I would review the best story I read that week. What’s the point of criticizing them? Who said “like breaking a butterfly on a wheel?” […]