I can’t resist time-travel stories. So when I happened across The Time Traveler’s Almanac on Amazon, I hit the “buy now” button at very nearly the speed of light. If I’d been even quicker, maybe I could have read this post without the trouble of actually writing it. Or something like that. When you really analyze any story about time travel, things quickly have a way of […]
This time with feeling
I‘m writing fiction again. As with running, it’s been awhile. After publishing a number of stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine a few years ago, I let it slide. I wasn’t happy about it, but I had my reasons. First, the financials weren’t working. Dividing payment for each story by the number of hours I put into it, it worked out that patrolling city streets for lost […]
Now available at newstands not quite everywhere
It’s nice to see my name in print again. It’s also bittersweet, since “Dead Black Cadillac” is a story I wrote a couple of years ago, and sold a couple months later, and only now appears in print in what may be the least-read magazine in America. But I’m not complaining. Well, maybe I am complaining a little. A few months ago I concluded that cooler heads […]
Maybe Sin City isn’t much of a muse
OK, I’ve plunged back into crime fiction, but I seem to have started at the shallow end of the pool: Murder in Vegas, a 2005 anthology of short stories edited by Michael Connelly. I found it at the library a few days ago and I was in a hurry. I like short stories, even though it’s rare to find a really good one. The yarns here — […]
Reflections on some ancient tomes
Whenever I visit my folks’ place in Montana, I can never head back home without a sack lunch and a hundred pounds of books. Mom’s always got a lot more food around than the two of them can eat — some of it a few weeks past the sell-by date — and a lot more books than her groaning shelves can safely hold. Putting away the lunch […]
36 mystery tales for the price of none
The problem with buying anthologies of mystery stories is that if you love them as I do, you’ll find quite a few you’ve already read. So it is with A Century of Great Suspense Stories, edited in 2001 by Jeffery Deaver. Of its 36 stories, I recognized maybe half a dozen, by such luminaries as Ruth Rendell, Lawrence Block, Harlan Ellison, Fredric Brown. So right away, I’d […]
In fiction, short is not always so sweet
One of these days I suppose I should admit that my preferred creative form, short crime fiction, is all but dead. When’s the last time you enjoyed a good detective yarn that was under, say, 8,000 words? I thought so. Me too — even though I like writing short stories, I sure don’t read many of them these days. So why am I stuck on short stories? […]