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 th...

       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...

     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/disco...

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 wha...

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...

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 (S...

          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 an...