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...

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...

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....

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 com...

     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...

          In my mystery writing, I hope for three things.  First, I want to draw the reader into a good story through a plot that builds organically and dialogue as real as an overhead conversation.  Next, I aspire to cr...

     There is no doubt that various groups have been terribly oppressed.  This history combined with contemporary politics has produced a strategy in which those at society’s margins describe themselves as victims—...

          Murder on the Fly, the second installment of the “Riley the Exterminator” mystery series, is available for pre-ordering at pen-l.com/MurderOnTheFly.html.  In addition to trying to provide reade...

          In Poisoned Justice, I used a murder mystery to walk the line between vengeance and justice—a most difficult philosophical problem.  One can read the book without worrying too much about w...

          With Valentine’s Day around the corner, you might not be associating romantic love with crime noir.  A reader of POISONED JUSTICE wrote to me saying that Riley—the (...