Mystery Writing, by the numbers
The 2019 “Six-Word Mystery” contest sponsored by the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Mystery Writers of America drew more than 200 entries...
Immigration, Integration, and Imagination
A reader of Lethal Fetish and the other Riley mysteries asked me why I chose one of this Irishman’s haunts to be a Polish bakery—and how...
Why is "normal" good?
Lethal Fetish is now available (via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Pen-L) . And real controversy may be hot on fiction’s heels! The day...
A Dark Genre’s Enlightening Lessons
Last semester I taught an undergraduate course on crime noir, including films, radio programs, readings, and (of course) writing. Upon...
The Original Femme Fatale
The term femme fatale, used to describe a dangerous and alluring woman, originated in the mid-1800s and became a staple of noir mysteries...
Uncovering Cover Art
The cover art for Lethal Fetish, my upcoming mystery novel in the Riley series features sultry, salacious, even lascivious images. Conor...
1981 = WKRP + 64K RAM + Frogger + Bread Bowls
One of my favorite endeavors in the course of writing is research. I relish digging into maps, photos, magazines, and recordings to...
A Blind Pig and a Million Monkeys
While my stories will not be among the great works of the 21st century, every so often I nail a sentence—or so I like to tell myself as a...
Darkness in Glaring Sunlight
Earworms are songs that stick in your head. Midland, Texas, is my eyeworm. Cultivating a noir sensibility means looking keenly into...
Rarefaction, Riches—or Readers?
I bristle at the notion that basic science, which eschews the crassness of economic utility, is more virtuous than applied research,...
