JEFFREY A. LOCKWOOD

The 2019 “Six-Word Mystery” contest sponsored by the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Mystery Writers of America drew more than 200 entries from ten states and three countries. The results of this year’s competition were decided in December, and the winner is… me! By the slimmest of margins, my numerical noir finished on top. Sex, violence and justice combined to pique the imagination of the judges and voters: 36D, .44 magnum, 20 to life. I thought that toxic tales might be f

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 I crafted believable, immigrant dialogue (crafting realistic dialect is one of the great challenges in writing). As for the “why”, I sensed a connection between Ireland and Poland. Both countries are grounded in working class lives. Both places have been oppressed by outside forces and have suffered terribly at times. Both countries embra

Lethal Fetish is now available (via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Pen-L) . And real controversy may be hot on fiction’s heels! The day after the book was released, my publisher asked whether it should be tagged as “containing adult content” (to warn/discourage youthful readership). This had never occurred to me. The question was whether parents would be upset if their kid read a story involving sex (violence is evidently okay). The concern was not hypothetical; another Pen-

Last semester I taught an undergraduate course on crime noir, including films, radio programs, readings, and (of course) writing. Upon reflection, I think there were five things that the students realized—“lessons” about this genre and perhaps even life—along with what I learned about my students... First, noir is not a past-tense, old-school, has-been genre. Initially, many students thought noir meant black-and-white gangster movies (not that most of them had watched many s

The term femme fatale, used to describe a dangerous and alluring woman, originated in the mid-1800s and became a staple of noir mysteries in the 20th century. Classic films might’ve justified an inverted “Me Too” movement led by Frank Chambers (played by John Garfield in “The Postman Always Rings Twice”), Philip Marlowe (Humphry Bogart in “The Big Sleep), and Walter Neff (Fred McMurray in “Double Indemnity”). These poor saps were controlled by the likes of Lana Turner, Laur

The cover art for Lethal Fetish, my upcoming mystery novel in the Riley series features sultry, salacious, even lascivious images. Conor Mullen—my immensely gifted and creative artist—and I worked with various images to evoke the decadence that unfolds in the story. We settled on three evocative features (not including the less subtle elements in the storefront windows): stiletto heels, fishnet stockings and San Francisco’s Coit Tower. So why are these so suggestive? Accor

One of my favorite endeavors in the course of writing is research. I relish digging into maps, photos, magazines, and recordings to capture the place and time of a story (San Francisco in January of 1981). And so for Lethal Fetish, I pursued some strange and compelling topics—with excerpts from the book—including: 1980s culture Video games: “images of jumping frogs, frenzied gorillas, and a yellow ball wandering through a maze.” Computer technology: “Carol regaled me with t

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 way of continuing to write. Maybe I’m like one of the million monkeys pounding away at a typewriter, but here are a few lines that strike me as pure Riley from my next mystery, Lethal Fetish... With regard to Carol (Riley’s girl-Friday who actually runs Goat Hill Extermination): Carol grabbed a handful of my graying hair, looked me in the

Earworms are songs that stick in your head. Midland, Texas, is my eyeworm. Cultivating a noir sensibility means looking keenly into dark, bleak, and dangerous settings: the back alleys of New York (Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder), the fetid underbelly of Chicago (Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski), the dreary winters of Boston (Robert Parker’s Spenser, who grew up in Laramie, Wyoming—a little known fact about fiction), or the fog-shrouded streets of San Francisco (if this w

I bristle at the notion that basic science, which eschews the crassness of economic utility, is more virtuous than applied research, which pursues gritty questions and messy answers needed by farmers, nurses and soldiers. Maybe this distinction is rooted in the Plato’s separation of the heavenly forms and the shadow on the cave wall (when in doubt, blame Greek philosophers). In reading Erik Dussere’s, America is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture, I