SleuthSayers

The Abandoned Places

2026-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Every town has their own Marsten House from The Shining. Every rural place has a Sleepy Hollow nearby where the urban legends about the man with the hook or even cousins to the Headless Horseman lurk. If you've ever driven through Nevada, you've seen whole towns abandoned. Incidentally, my one experience with Beatty, Nevada, which looked like dozens of towns I've driving through in Ohio, minus the scrub desert and wild asses, turned out to be an annex of Area 51. So that speeding ticket went to fund stealth fighter research, according the Annie Jacobsen. But like a certain pundit, I digress.

In Ohio, we have all types of abandoned places. These are the most famous.

The Peters Cartridge Family

I discovered this one by accident while riding the Little Miami Bike Trail. The Peters Cartridge Factory has its own haunted history. Four major explosions took place there, many related to the nearby Little Miami Railroad (now the aforementioned bike trail.) A rail collision in 1890 killed 12 and leveled serveral buildings on site. A machine accident set off the 1922 blast. While no one was killed, eight were injured, including one worker who was blinded. In 1942 and 1943, at the height of the war effort, two more explosions which remain unexplained, the 1942 blast shattering windows thirty miles away. Which means windows in Kentucky sustained damage.

When the plant closed after World War II, the building deteriorated, becoming a ruin not unlike Detroit's Packard Plant. It also became a magnet for ghost stories. A horror movie was filmed there in the 1990s. But ruin explorers have also run afoul of collapsed floors and left over debris.

The site, however, is a retired part of this list. Over the last decade, the hairpin road to the factory was redone with straightened curves and the buildings renovated as loft apartments and a brewery. So instead of being a location for Ghosthunters, it's now a local tourist trap.

Helltown

Once upon a time, there was a town called Boston near Cleveland. Then the Department of Interior created the Cuyahoga Valley National Forest for 1974. The town was abandoned and closed off. Portions remain restricted. But grafitti in the town's former church gave rise to rumors of Satanic cults sacrificing humans in the former city, giving it a Salem's Lot aura. Further, rumors spread that the government bought out the town to cover up a chemical spill that created all manner of mutated monsters, including the Peninsula Python, a monster snake found in a nearby suburb. The best legend was the haunted bus. A schoolbus left behind. Legend has it that cult members attacked and slaughtered a bus full of children. Funny how that never made the news when mobster Danny Green's personal unscheduled rapid disassembly made the national news. (Green was a noted Irish mobster in Cleveland.)

The National Park Service razed most of the town, which is now open as picnic an hiking areas.

The Lockland Incinerator

If you drive south on I-75 through Cincinnati's northern suburbs, you come to a section of the freeway known as the Lockland Split. The northboard lanes veer off to go around the site of the former Stearns & Foster Mattress plant. The southbound lanes go between the walls of the former C&O canal. Before the two sides merge just above Ronald Reagan Highway, there lies a swatch of overgrown vacant land. Vacant, that is, except for a lone brick building seemingly alone in the middle of a wooded area. The smokestack has been covered in grafitti. This is the former Lockland Incinerator.

One intrepid urban explorer dubbed it "The Well of Souls," fancying himself as a modern-day Indiana Jones. After a couple searches on the building, I did find minor legends about the place, namely another blogger who called the place creepy and having a "dark vibe."

In reality, motorists, even residents of Lockland, have been asking what the hell that thing was. The incinerator handled trash, some from a closed landfill at the end of Reading, Ohio's Davis St. and the West Mill Creek. Our intrepid explorer found trash, grafitti, and... A motorboat? There was a motorboat lying along the remains of that section of Davis St. The building began operation in 1936 and shut down roughly when the Big Red Machine peaked in the mid-1970s.

Alas, the building's days are numbered. By 2032, the land will be taken to run I-75's northbound lanes alongside the southbound, closing the Lockland Split and opening up the land east of the former Stearns & Foster site.

I've also written about Chippewa Lake Amusement Park, which has a more storied history about all these except maybe the Peters Cartridge Plant. Whereas Peters is apartments, a brewery, and businesses, Chippewa Lake is an actual park now, its ruins part of a hiking trail.

The Strange Novels of Charles Williams

2026-08-06T09:37:00.000-04:00

by Eve Fisher

A long time ago, there was an informal group of writers, theologians, and intellectuals who collected (mostly) at C. S. Lewis' rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, or The Eagle & Child Pub: The Inklings. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein are the most famous, but in his time, Inkling Charles Williams was highly praised by Lewis, Tolkein, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and others for his amazing studies of Dante (The Figure of Beatrice inspired Dorothy Sayers' translation of The Divine Comedy), unique Arthurian poetry (Taliessin Through Logres), even more unique theology (Descent of the Dove and He Came Down From Heaven) and some almost completely unexplainable supernatural thrillers that I simply adore.

Charles Williams
by Kimberly Ferguson

Williams was a strange duck. A devout Anglican, he was known as the Magician, and was part of a mystical Christian group that practiced occult rituals while refusing to seek occult powers. Friends described Williams as a bundle of nervous, dynamic energy with 'raw charisma'. He was both passionately faithful to his wife, and carrying on a passionate, unconsummated affair with an Oxford University Press librarian. (He had to have influenced certain characters in Susan Howatch's Starbridge series.) And he wrote some of the best villains ever.

NOTE & WARNING: Williams wrote his novels in the 1930s and 1940s, and was a man of his time, so he writes some things which are / can be offensive today: racist, sexist (although often his heroines save the day - and the world), etc. I still enjoy them.

My personal favorites (and I have read them all) are War in Heaven and Descent into Hell:

War in Heaven - Opening line: “The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.” That's one way to keep you reading.

Villains: Sir Giles Tumulty (who also shows up in Many Dimensions) - His book is being published by Persimmon Publishing, where the corpse was found. He's an explorer and antiquarian, with all the charm of a cobra. See how many insults you can find in this meeting between Sir Giles and a police inspector:

"Rackstraw?" Sir Giles had said impatiently, screwing round from his writing-desk a small, brown wrinkled face toward the inspector, "yes, he came to lunch. Why not?"

"No reason at all, sir," the inspector said, "I only wanted to be sure. And when did he leave you—if you remember?"

"About half-past two," Sir Giles said. "Is that what he ought to have done? I'll say two, if you like, if it'll help you catch him. Only, if you do, you must arrange for me to see the hanging."

"If he left at half-past two, that's all I want to know," the inspector said. "Did you happen to mention to anyone that he was coming?"

"Yes," said Sir Giles, "I told the Prime Minister, the Professor of Comparative Etymology at King's College, and the cook downstairs. Why the hell do you ask me these silly questions? Do you suppose I run round telling all my friends that a loathsome little publisher's clerk is going to muck his food about at my table?"

"If you felt like that," the inspector said, holding down his anger, "I wonder you asked him to lunch."

"I asked him to lunch because I'd rather him foul my table than my time," Tumulty answered. "I had to waste an hour over him because he didn't understand a few simple things about my illustrations, and I saved it by working it in with lunch. I expect he charged overtime for it, so that he'd be two shillings to the good, one saved on his food and another extra pay. I should think he could get a woman for that one night. How much do you have to pay, policeman?"

The inspector at the moment felt merely that Sir Giles must be mad; it wasn't till hours afterwards that he became slowly convinced that the question was meant as an insult beyond reach of pardon or vengeance. At the time he stared blankly and said soberly: "I'm a married man, sir."

"You mean you get her for nothing?" Sir Giles asked. "Two can live as cheaply as one, and your extras thrown in? Optimistic, I'm afraid. Well, I'm sorry, but I have to go to the Foreign Office. Come and chat in the taxi; that's what your London taxis are for. When I want a nice long talk with anyone I get in one at Westminster Abbey after lunch and tell him to go to the Nelson Column. We nearly always get there for tea. Oh, good-bye, policeman. Come again some day."

And there's Mr. Gregory Persimmons - Head publisher, fascinated by the occult, domination, control, little children, and the Holy Grail. Sir Giles is fascinated with Persimmons, more as an experiment than anything else:

"You're going mad, you know, Persimmons, and I like watching you."

"Mad?" Gregory said, with another snigger. "You don't go mad this way. People like my wife go mad, and Stephen. But I've got something that doesn't go mad. I'm getting everything so." He stretched out both arms and pressed them downwards with an immense gesture of weight, as if pushing the universe before and below him. "But I want the ointment."

"Better leave it alone," Sir Giles said tantalizingly. "It's tricky stuff, Persimmons. A Jew in Beyrout tried it and didn't get back. Filthy beast he looked, all naked and screaming that he couldn't find his way. That was four years ago, and he's screaming the same thing still, unless he's dead. And there was another fellow in Valparaiso who got too far to be heard screaming; he died pretty soon, because he'd forgotten even how to eat and drink. They tried forcible feeding, I fancy, but it wasn't a success: he was just continually sick. Better leave it alone, Persimmons."

"I tell you I'm perfectly safe," Gregory said. "You promised, Tumulty, you promised."

"My lord God," Sir Giles said, "what does that matter? I don't care whether I promised or not; I don't care whether you want it or not; I only wonder whether I shall get more from—" He broke off. "All right," he said, "I'll give you the address... It'll save you some time and energy if you mention me. He's a Greek of sorts—I've forgotten his name. But he doesn't keep tons of it, you know. Now, look here, Persimmons. This is two things you have got out of me, and I've had nothing in return. You'd better ask me down to wherever you hatch gargoyles."

The Greek Chemist - Unique in all the characters I've ever read, because he's... well, read and see:

"Who sent you here?" the Greek asked.

"Sir Giles Tumulty," said Gregory, "and others. But the others I cannot name. They say"—his voice began to tremble—"that you have an ointment."

"I have many precious things." The answer came out of an entire weariness which seemed to take from the adjective all its meaning. "But some of them are not for sale except to buyers."

"I have bought everything." Gregory leaned forward. "The time has come for me to receive."

Still the other made no movement. "The ointment is rich and scarce and strange," he said. "How do I know that you are worth a gift? And what will my master say if I mistake?"

"I cannot prove myself to you," Gregory answered. "That I know of it —is not that enough?"

"It is not enough," the other said. "But I have a friendship for all who are in the way. And priceless things are without any price. If you are not worth the gift, the gift is worth nothing to you. Have you ever used the ointment?"

"Never," Gregory said; "but it is time, I am sure it is time."

"You think so, do you?" the Greek said slowly. "There comes a time when there is nothing left but time—nothing.* Take it if you like."

*BTW, that line haunted me ever since I first read it. It was the center on which I built my story "For Blood".

Later, when the Grail has been found and taken and taken again, the Greek is even more infintely weary when someone suggests taking and destroying the Grail because it's a stronghold of power, and all such strongholds must be destroyed...

"We can do it if you like," he acquiesced. "If it is worth while."

"It is a stronghold of power, and we can tear it to less than dust. I do not understand you."

"It doesn't matter," he answered. "You will understand one day. There will be nothing else to understand... It is all one; in the end it is all one. You do not believe each other and neither of you will believe me. But in the end there is nothing at all but you and that which goes by. You will be sick at heart because there is nothing, nothing but a passing, and in the midst of the passing a weariness that is you. All things shall grow fainter, all desire cease in that sickness and the void that is about it. And this, even for me, is when I have only looked into the bottomless pit. For my spirit is still held in a place of material things. But when the body is drawn into the spirit, and at last they fall, then you shall know what the end of desire and destruction is."

And another character's reaction to Persimmons' attempt to tempt him with the "delights of worshipping treachery and malice and cruelty and sin":

"Satanism? Satanism is the clerk at the brothel."

There's some words to live by.

Descent Into Hell - Another masterpiece of supernatural thriller, complete with dopplegangers, dancing bears, Lilith, and a man who provides a new definition of Gomorrah; also a hanged man, a hanging man, a succubus, a martyr, a poet, a dying woman, a dead man, and a few rippling graves.

Ere it shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image

Walking in the garden.

That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

OTHERS:
The Place of the Lion - Platonic Ideals burst through in raw form in a small English village...

Many Dimensions - Sir Giles Tumulty is back, seeking the Stone of Solomon that gives its possesser access to other space, worlds, dimensions, and times...

The Greater Trumps - The original Tarot deck, and a chess set to die for...

All Hallows Eve - Two dead women, walking through London, looking for...

and more...

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!

I happened to find some of my short stories – in fact of most of us SleuthSayers - are appearing on Amazon Kindle for $0.99 with semi-bad AI covers.

Did I miss a contract? Not read the fine print? Should I / we be getting a nickel or a dime each, or is this simply the secondary market?

Inquiring minds want to know.

PS: I call it a semi-bad AI cover because there isn't a robot or android anywhere in "For Blood." I know, details, details... 😉

The Walls of Providence

2026-08-05T00:21:59.078-04:00

Have you ever found yourself wondering: Am I the first to notice this or the last? Does no one mention this because it is so obscure or so obvious? (And why did the Federales let Lefty go so long?)

I mention this because the situation has come up again and I am wondering if I should place a big SPOILER ALERT over this whole column. If you have never read Don Winslow's Danny Ryan trilogy you might want to stop now. Or not. Your choice.

The first book, City on Fire, describes a war between two mob families, one Irish and one Italian, for control of Providence, Rhode Island in the 1980s. The next two novels explain the aftermath of the battle. And they are great. I highly recommend them to anyone who likes fiction about organized crime.

I should say I didn't actually read the novels. I listened to the audiobooks. I like to think that if I had been reading them (and paying more attention to the epigraphs) I would have caught on more quickly to what Winslow was up to.

As it is, I was perhaps a third of the way through City on Fire (the first hospital scene, for those who remember it) and considering the relationship between two of the characters. I remember thinking: "You know, they are like... But that means... Oh my gosh, it's the Trojan War!"

Which it is. Winslow transferred the Illiad to modern New England.

I grabbed a pen and started writing down Winslow's characters next to their Homeric equivalents. Unlike Christopher Nolan's movie, which I wrote about last week, most of the gods are present and accounted for (in human form, of course.)

By the way, City of Dreams and City in Ruins combine the Aeniad, the Odyssey, and the Oresteia. Danny Ryan, the protagonist, is Aeneas.

I was astonished to read one reader on the web complaining that if you know your mythology there are no surprises in the books. I felt exactly the opposite: because I knew the myths I was excited to see how he fit Homer's and Virgil's incidents into his story line. For example: What is the 1980s U.S. equivalent for the Trojan Horse?

Whenever I identified the classical model for one of Winslow's characters I found myself thinking, ooh, I know what's going to happen to you. (Spoiler: it probably won't be good.)

I was reminded of a passage in one of my favorite plays, Antigone, which is Jean Anouilh's take on the tragedy by Sophocles. The Chorus (who in the play is one person) distinguishes between tragedy and melodrama. I wish I could quote his whole speech but, alas, I was the copyright officer for my university for a while and know better. So here is just a taste:

In a tragedy nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. This makes for tranquility... In melodrama you argue and struggle in the hope of escape. That is vulgar; it's practical. But in tragedy, where there is no temptation to try to escape, argument is gratuitous; it's kingly.

Which is how I felt about the characters in Winslow's novels. This was especially true in the last volume as we watch two men who both want peace being dragged into inevitable conflict (with a little help from Winslow's version of Juno).

Anyway, I think you will enjoy the books even if the only Homer you know is Simpson. But if you grew up on d'Auliare's Book of Greek Myths, like me, you'll love them.

And now, a completely different but oddly connected subject.

Rex Stout's eight novel about Nero Wolfe, Where There's A Will (1940) centers on the death of Noel Hawthorne, a wealthy businessman. Among the suspects are his three sisters. June, the eldest, is married to the Secretary of State. May is a college president and Archie jokes that "they are thinking of prosecuting her under the anti-trust laws for her monopoly on brain cells." April is a movie star.

But get this. The two younger sisters nickname the eldest Juno. Juno (Hera) was Jupiter's wife, queen of the gods. Minerva (Athena) was the goddess of wisdom. Venus (Aphrodite) was the goddess of beauty and sex.

So is it a stretch to say we have:

*June (Juno), married to a powerful man

* May (Minerva), dispenser of wisdom

* April (Aphrodite), the beautiful.

But wait there's more. Those three goddesses fought over the Golden Apple of Discord, leading to the Trojan War. And Noel Hawthorne, in his will, left his sisters nothing but, respectively, an apple, a pear, and a peach. The reason for this is never explained in the book except as a "token of his regard."

And that same dead brother? Many years earlier he had accidentally shot his wife with an arrow, leaving her face so scarred that she always wears a veil.

Put this all together and it certainly seems like Stout is trying to connect it all to some myth, but I've never been able to make sense of it.

Next time I am in Delphi I will stop by the Temple of Apollo and ask the Oracle.

Coming Up with a Story Idea to Fit a Prompt

2026-08-04T00:17:00.000-04:00

I enjoy coming up with short story ideas from prompts, such as an anthology's theme. A theme can get my brain cells firing as I try to think of a story idea that will not only work plotwise but will also be different from the other submissions, be fun to write and read, and have some emotional oomph or insight.

It's not often easy.

I experienced the struggle once again when I tried to come up with a story idea for What the World Needs Now: Mystery Stories Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach. This anthology, edited by Martin Edwards, was released last week. When invited to submit, I went through the list of songs (so many songs--Bacharach was incredibly prolific, writing songs for decades that were recorded by others as well as himself in multiple genres). I picked a song that I love, one that was sparking ideas. And I set about to plot out the story. I usually try to have at least a page of notes about what would happen, including what the end would be. Things could--and often do--change during the writing process, but I like knowing I have a workable idea.

Alas, in this case, my story idea ended up being serviceable. It would work, but it wasn't wonderful, and it wasn't fun. It was, in the end, rather blah. And that is not what you want an author to think about their own idea.

I returned to the song list, but by that point, none of them were sparking any good ideas. I had begun psyching myself out. So I decided to approach the problem differently. Rather than try to be inspired by a song, I looked through my story-idea file to see if I already had any that would work with one of Bacharach's songs. (I often get ideas for stories that I don't have time to write, so I take detailed notes and put them in a file for a day I do have time.)

That's when I came across notes for a story about a chat bench. I had read a news article about how, in 2019, a British police officer was concerned about online scammers targeting senior citizens. He came up with the idea of a chat bench--a place where lonely people in need of companionship could safely meet others in real life. It sounds wonderful. But when I read about the growing popularity of these benches, my devious side reared its head. What's to keep a scammer from targeting people in person?

I had a lot of story ideas in the file to choose from, but this was the one I found most exciting at that moment. This would be a story that would be fun to write, and I hoped readers would find it fun to read. Then I went through the list of Bacharach songs still available and found one that could work with my chat bench idea: "All Kinds of People." I asked Martin if I could switch songs, he kindly agreed, and here we are.

So the moral of this tale about coming up with a good story idea is this: if an anthology prompt doesn't give you a great story idea, see if you already have an idea that could fit the prompt. This is why you should never dismiss your ideas. Write them down. Save them. Sometime down the road, they might come in handy.

Difficult Crimes

2026-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

There are certain serious crimes that seem resistant to the mystery genre. Environmental crimes, for example, are mighty hard to fit into a conventional pattern. Just how hard I discovered when I attempted a submission to fellow Sleuthsayers Rob Lopresti's ambitious anthology, Crimes Against Nature.

Sure there were candidates going right back to the near extermination of the buffalo, the loss of the once sky-darkening passenger pigeon, the ruination of many mountains in Appalachia, and the decimation of forests from the Pacific northwest to the Amazon. But many hands contributed to all this destruction, and it proved hard to find a plausible single criminal or criminal entity.

By their very size and scope, such crimes seem destined to escape both literature and justice, and it is far easier to pick a smaller crime, preferably with interpersonal violence, for a story. For this reason, I admire Australian novelist Jane Harper's Last One Out, which manages her usual high level of mystery plot while tracing the impact of an open pit coal mine on the environment, the local community, and, eventually, on longstanding ties among the citizens. A real tour de force, Last One Out manages to be gripping despite a minimum of action. No gun battles, no fights, no car chases in this novel. It begins in conventional fashion when Sam Crowley disappears on the evening of his twenty-first birthday, after a visit to several abandoned homes on the edge of the town of Carralon Ridge.

This once idyllic rural community is under threat, both physically and financially. The enormous, unsleeping mine is steadily chewing its way toward outlying homes, but even those living in the center are aware day and night of the rumble of the works and of the fine, omnipresent coal dust drifting onto every surface.

Sam had been doing a college paper on the town, interviewing residents on past and present life in Carralon Ridge and on their reactions to the town's increasingly precarious situation. The easy answer to the mystery would be to connect his disappearance to the mining company, to something incriminating he discovered, but Harper has other ideas in mind, and Sam's disappearance remains unsolved.

Five years later, grief over his loss has dissolved his parents' marriage. Ro Crowley, a medical worker, now lives in the city. Her husband, a fire watcher, remains, but now, instead of working for the town, he does the same work for the all encompassing mine. The Crowleys are only temporarily reunited when Ro returns for the annual commemoration of their son's disappearance.

What she finds is an eerie, half- deserted town. The medical center where she worked is boarded up, various businesses, likewise. Even the pub is only open irregularly. Houses are deserted, there are strange bangs and noises, coal dust is everywhere, and the town feels so strange and foreign that she is relieved when her husband messages her that he can see her through his binoculars from his fire watching post.

The feeling of incipient danger, of strangeness and decay, of a familiar place being out of joint, is really what makes the novel work. Yes, there are suspects, red herrings, promising speculations, but what is gripping is the spectacle of slow moving destruction on every level.

The mine machines are moving ever closer. Outlying houses have already been bought up by the corporation and leveled. Cherished farms, gardens and houses closer to the center are becoming steadily noisier, dustier, and less habitable, even as financial offers drop because who else but the mine would want the properties now.

This creeping devastation infects the human world on a more intimate level, too. All who sell save themselves at the cost of their neighbors, whose homes and life work are made more vulnerable. The devastated natural landscape produces a devastated human landscape with toxic results ranging from feral children to adult despair – to murder.

Last One Out is a good mystery. It is also a picture of the follies of certain types of progress and of in inescapable consequences of environmental destruction.

AIn't Necessarily So, Part 2

2026-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Part II — A Rigorous Approach to Identifying AI‑Generated Writing

Last time, we focused on fuzzy ‘soft’ clues in determining AI fingerprints in text, especially identifying common phrases and constructs. Computer people refer to fuzzy methods as heuristics.

We noted triplets.

“He was tall, dark, and handsome.”

We noted parallel negatives.

“It wasn’t black. It wasn’t white. It was charcoal grey.”

We noted common phraseology.

“It’s not just warm, it’s burning.”

Today we slide away from soft dissection to hard facts and more scientific methods. Assertions have been made that combining hard and soft techniques can result in 80-90% accuracy. Google claims it can identify close to 98%.

Note that I used Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot to research and organize this, part 2 of this article. Thus throughout, you’ll notice artifacts as unintended examples.

Objective Linguistic Signals, Statistical Profiles, and Computational Methods

While intuitive reading can reveal stylistic quirks that feel artificial, a scientific approach to AI‑text detection relies on measurable linguistic properties. These properties emerge from how large language models generate text: token by token, guided by probability distributions learned from massive corpora. By analyzing those distributions, we can identify patterns that differ from human writing in consistent, quantifiable ways.

This section outlines the major pillars of a hard, objective approach — the kind that complements your Part I by grounding intuition in data.

➀ Lexical Analysis: Measuring Word‑Level Patterns

Lexical analysis examines the words themselves — their frequency, diversity, and distribution. AI‑generated text tends to exhibit:

Lower lexical diversity — measured via type–token ratio; AI favors mid‑probability vocabulary.
Function‑word overuse — glue words like however, moreover, indeed, additionally.
Uniform vocabulary patterns — humans spike unpredictably into slang, rare words, or idiosyncratic phrasing.
Rare‑word avoidance — models avoid low‑probability tokens unless prompted.

These signals arise because AI models optimize for clarity and coherence, which pushes them toward “safe,” middle‑probability word choices.

➁ Syntax Analysis: Sentence Structure and Rhythm

Syntax analysis examines how sentences are built — clause structure, punctuation, and rhythm. AI text often shows:

Consistent clause length — sentences follow similar patterns and pacing.
Over‑regular grammar — few deviations, few fragments, few stylistic breaks.
Predictable transitions — Moreover, In addition, Ultimately, However.
Low syntactic entropy — humans vary complexity more dramatically.

This uniformity reflects the model’s goal: maximize coherence and minimize confusion.

➂ Punctuation

Perhaps I give less credence to punctuation than I should because the Macintosh option key makes typographical life easy. Instead of two hyphens to simulate an n-dash, option-hyphen plugs in a real dash. Likewise, option-colon drops in a true ellipsis instead of typing three dots.

Even without a Mac, word processors like Microsoft Word performs conversions such as transforming flat quotation marks to curly quotes, thus my reluctance to attach too much attention to perfected punctuation.

That said, AIs sprinkle in more m-dashes than a breathless self-published Mary Sue story. Current AIs throw in a lot of dashes, the really wide ones.

Perfected Punctuation
character	human	proper
ellipsis	...	…
n-dash	--	–
m-dash	--	—
single quote	'	‘’
double quote	"	“”

➃ Semantic Analysis: Meaning, Depth, and Conceptual Structure

Semantic analysis looks at how ideas are organized and expressed. AI text tends to exhibit:

High semantic consistency — few contradictions or digressions.
Topic over‑coverage — AI exhaustively lists subtopics to “cover the space.”
Shallow originality — limited conceptual leaps unless prompted.
Generic framing — broad, universal statements anchoring paragraphs.

Humans, by contrast, often wander, contradict themselves, or introduce unexpected angles.

➄ Perplexity: Statistical Predictability of Text

Perplexity measures how surprising a passage is to a language model.

Low perplexity → predictable → typical of AI
High perplexity → surprising → typical of humans

AI‑generated text tends to have very low perplexity, because it is produced by the same statistical engine used to measure it. Tools that use perplexity include:

GPTZero
OpenAI’s classifier
Cross‑entropy scoring

Edited AI text, however, can raise perplexity — making detection harder.

➅ Burstiness: Variation in Sentence Length and Complexity

Burstiness measures how much sentence structure varies.

Humans show:

Long sentences
Short fragments
Abrupt shifts
Irregular rhythm

AI shows:

Low burstiness
Smooth, even pacing

Burstiness is one of the strongest statistical indicators of human authorship, especially in long‑form writing.

➆ Stylometric Fingerprinting: Author Identity Through Writing Style

Stylometry analyzes the “fingerprint” of an author’s writing style — their idiolect, quirks, and habits. AI text typically lacks:

Idiolect — no personal quirks or signature phrasing.
Stylistic variability — humans shift tone depending on mood, audience, or genre.
Natural digressions — AI rarely meanders.

Stylometric tools include:

JStylo
Writeprints
Signature stylometric analysis

These methods are especially powerful given long samples.

➇ Structural and Metadata Clues

Even when prose looks human, structural patterns can reveal AI origin. Common signals include:

Perfect paragraph symmetry
Overuse of enumerated lists — AIs love lists
Overuse of bulleted lists — Consider this an example
Predictable section ordering
Lack of temporal markers — humans reference time, place, personal context.

These clues often appear in polished AI essays and reports.

➈ Hybrid Detection Tools: Combining Multiple Signals

Modern detectors combine perplexity, burstiness, stylometry, and semantic analysis. Examples of tools include:

GPTZero
DetectGPT
Turnitin AI
Copyleaks
QuillBot AI
Grammarly
HuggingFace detectors

These tools go beyond analyzing basics, they compare text against known AI‑generation patterns.

Conclusion: Hard Detection Complements Soft Deduction

Part I focused on intuition — tone, phrasing, emotional cadence, suspiciously neutral voice. Part II provides the science — statistical regularities, lexical smoothness, syntactic uniformity, semantic predictability.

Together, they form a dual‑system framework:

Soft heuristic detection: “This feels like AI.”
Hard science-based detection: “Here’s measurable evidence.”

This combination is far more reliable than either method alone.

Note: Wikipedia is exceptionally vulnerable to AI contamination. They operate a project to identify and mitigate AI effects. Their article, Signs of AI Writing, is well worth a read.

A Roundup of Favorite Short-Story Writers

2026-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

My post today is piggybacking on last week's column by Joseph S. Walker about several of his favorite authors, all of them writers that he hoped others might find and read.

I figured I'd try to add to that by listing some of my favorite genre short-story writers. I focused on genre for this list because SleuthSayers is a mystery blog usually targeting readers and writers of genre fiction--so I have NOT included some further-reaching favorite "literary" short-story authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, Chekhov, O'Connor, Munro, Carver, Maugham, Welty, Fitzgerald, etc., etc.

The method I used to come up with these was simple: I looked around me here in my home office and counted the number of short-story collections I own from different genre writers. Most of them, it turns out, are by the twelve following authors. And these of course are also (as they should be), the authors whose stories I like to re-read:

Fredric Brown -- A name you might not be familiar with. His genre was mostly SF/fantasy, but he also wrote wonderful mystery/crime stories. Many of his shorts, among them "The Dangerous People" and "The Night the World Ended," were used in the anthology TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He was especially well-known for what used to be called short-short stories (flash fiction), some of those only a page or two in length. My favorite of Brown's stories is still "Voodoo," which is only about 450 words. Others include "Arena," "Nightmare in Yellow," "The Geezenstacks," and "Earthmen Bearing Gifts."

Jack Ritchie -- Another great shorts writer, Ritchie's stories can be found in a huge number of issues of old Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazines--and also the anthology volumes later created from those two magazines. He wrote only one novel, Tiger Island, which might be one of the reasons so few current readers of fiction know his name. I have a lot of Ritchie favorites, including the stories "Shatterproof," "The Absence of Emily," "#8," and "The Green Heart," later adapted into the feature film The New Leaf with Walter Matthau and Elaine May.

Roald Dahl -- Probably better known for his children's books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl also wrote terrific short stories, several of which were, once again, adapted into episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His story "Man from the South" is still one of my all-time favorites because of its plot--and the same can be said of the delightful twist-ending story "Lamb to the Slaughter." Other favorites of mine: "Poison," "The Landlady," and "Champion of the World."

Ray Bradbury -- This writer, whose name IS quickly recognizable, was an author of mostly science fiction stories, and I would argue that one of his collections, a brick-thick volume appropriately called The Stories of Ray Bradbury, is one of the best short-story collections I've ever read. Aside from novels like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury wrote around 600 short stories. I think my favorites are "A Sound of Thunder," "The Veldt," "The Window," "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," and "There Will Come Soft Rains."

Elmore Leonard -- Like many others in this list, Leonard is known mostly for his novels, many of which were also movies: Get Shorty, Hombre, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, etc. That's certainly the way I first heard about him and got to know his work. But I love his short stories just as much. Examples: "Three-Ten to Yuma," "The Tall T," "Karen Makes Out," "The Tonto Woman," and (actually a novella rather than a short story) Fire in the Hole, which served as the basis for the neo-Western TV series Justified. I actually met him once at a booksigning, for about five seconds.

Louis L'Amour -- An American writer who specialized in Westerns, both novels and shorts. His novels are more famous, especially Last of the Breed, The Walking Drum, Haunted Mesa, Shalako, and the seventeen novels in the Sackett series. Many of his novels were made into films, and some of his short stories. One of those stories--my favorite of his--was "The Gift of Cochise," which became the 1953 John Wayne movie Hondo and then became a novel of the same name. Other well-known L'Amour short stories are "Skull and the Arrow," "To Hang Me High," and "Squatters on the Lonetree."

Lawrence Block -- Another household name, Block is the creator of series characters Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, Evan Tanner, the hitman Keller, and others, and has written many, many crime novels and short stories over the years. (Also, he's one of the two writers in this list who are still with us and who still, hopefully, are producing stories.) I own several of his collections, the best of which is probably Enough Rope (almost 900 pages of shorts). The stories I remember most are "A Blow for Freedom," "Sometimes They Bite," "By the Dawn's Early Light," and "Strangers on a Handball Court."

Edward D. Hoch -- One of the few writers who actually made a living from writing short stories. He wrote several novels as well, but is known almost entirely for his short fiction, and specialized in not only mystery/crime stories but traditional, puzzle-based mystery stories. Hoch used many pseudonyms and created many series characters, but one of the most amazing things about him, to me, is that he famously appeared in every single issue of EQMM between 1973 and his death in 2007. My favorite Ed Hoch stories are probably "Murder Offstage," "Captain Leopold's Birthday," and "The Oblong Room."

Shirley Jackson -- Her genres were mostly horror and mystery, and I suspect she's most often remembered for her novels The House on Haunted Hill and We have Always Lived in the Castle. My favorite of her many short stories, and one of the most memorable ever, is "The Lottery," which I taught in my writing classes as a perfect example of not only a surprise ending but the third-person "detached" POV. Other stories of hers that I like are "The Summer People," "The Possibility of Evil," and "The Witch."

Stanley Ellin -- Another relatively lesser-known name, Stanley Ellin was a fine mystery writer who produced more than a dozen novels but seemed more interested in short stories. He won, I believe, two Edgars for his short fiction, and many of his stories, like those of some of the writers listed above, were adapted and used in Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His most famous short story, which appeared first in EQMM, was probably "Specialty of the House," and though I enjoyed it, I think my favorites of his might be "The Blessington Method," "Kindly Dig Your Grave," and "You Can't Be a Little Girl All Your Life."

Richard Matheson -- Matheson's genres were mostly SF/fantasy and horror, and he'll always be close to my heart because of all the stories he wrote for the Twilight Zone TV series--sixteen stores in all, I believe. Though he might be best known for his novella I am Legend, I most remember the movie Somewhere in Time, which was an adaptation of his novel Bid Time Return, and the short story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Other excellent Matheson shorts were "Duel," "Button, Button," "Prey" and "Born of Man and Woman."

Stephen King -- I honestly believe this man is one of the world'd best storytellers. I have every one of his novels on my shelves, and all his short-story and novella collections. King's not much older than I am, and I think one reason I love his fiction is that many of his child protagonists (he uses a lot of those) experienced some of the same things I myself did: I watched the same TV shows, owned the same toys, read the same books. As for my favorites of his short stories, they're probably "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," "Mute," and "The Raft," and my very favorite--one of the best stories I've ever read--is "The Last Rung on the Ladder."

A confession, here: I chose not to include some other favorite genre short-story authors because they're my friends and contemporaries--and if I did list and describe those, this post would become longer than anyone would read. But I must mention here that, seriously, you should search out and read the stories of writers like David Dean, Josh Pachter, Doug Allyn, Barb Goffman, Dave Zeltserman, Michael Bracken, Art Taylor, Stacy Woodson, Adam Meyer, Melodie Campbell, O'Neil De Noux, Joseph S. Walker, Rob Lopresti, Steve Liskow, Elizabeth Zelvin, Ashley-Ruth Bernier, and many others, who are probably writing more stories at this very moment.

Now . . . Who are some of your favorite authors of short fiction--and especially genre shorts? Can you single out any stories of theirs, or anyone's, that are your all-time favorites?

As for me, I'll see you again in two weeks. I have plenty of reading--and re-reading--to do.

Have a great August.

The Case of the Waltese Falcon

2026-07-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

Back in April I bought a bunch of craft books for writers in a StoryBundle charity offering curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The one that left the greatest impression on me was a book by Rusch’s husband, Dean Wesley Smith, entitled Writing Novels with the Waltese Falcon.*

That was the nickname of Walter, one of the couple’s cats at the time. (A pure-bred Red-Point Birman.) Mr. Smith had grown accustomed to writing in his office while the cat napped nearby.

I know the feeling.

My writing partner, who contributes nothing to the word count

but still gets fed. Go figure.

In this book, we watch as Mr. Smith writes three novels. One is a ghostwriting project that he is writing for an unidentified major author. Mr. Smith has already been paid to deliver a 70,000-word book. He budgets ten days of writing, and of course he nails it, writing on average 6,895 words a day. (Day #7 he “only” writes 3,005 words. Day #9 sees his greatest output: 9,373 words.)

In the second third of the book, he writes a book in seven days (a short novel of about 43,050 words), starting with a goal of hitting 3,000 words on Day 1, and adding 1,000 words each day after that. On the 7th day, he must hit 9,000 words. He “only” hits 7,000, but by then the story has neatly concluded.

In the last third of Waltese Falcon, Mr. Smith takes a vacation to hang with his poker buddies in Vegas, and manages to write yet another short novel (37,100 words) in five days. He doesn’t own a laptop, so he humorously seats-belts his giant iMac to the back seat of his Caddy, cushioning it with pillows, and barrels off to Sin City.

You might quibble with the lengths of the last two books, but he explains that he is a devotee of the great writers of the pulp fiction era, whose novels typically clocked in under 50,000 words. He argues that publishers in the modern era began contracting longer books from writers so they could charge more for them.

More significantly, he loves challenging himself to write at speed. He never plots anything in advance—not even the ghostwriting project—choosing to “write into the dark” each time. (During the writing of the ghostwriting project, he laments not knowing where this “stupid” book is going.) But each time he figures out the plot points and wraps each of these stories to his satisfaction.

He’s proud of the seven-day book because he had just turned 65 years old at the time, and was frankly wondering if he was too old to pull off an “add-1,000-words-each-day” challenge. He clearly wasn’t.

What made the biggest impression on me as a reader and writer is how much other work he accomplishes in his regular work days. He takes careful notes of all his activity, and shares his daily schedule with us. He usually wakes at noon, checks in at the offices of his publishing business—then located on the Oregon coast—and does all the things the head of a small firm usually does. Bank runs, dealing with movers, buying office furniture, keeping up with emails and bills. (I believe that during this period he may have also owned and operated other businesses in town, such as a collectibles shop.) So that work also consumes his time. And of course he’s hanging with his wife and pets, enjoying decent lunches and dinners with Rusch and friends, and watching a whole lot of television.

Usually he gets to his writing computer about 6 p.m. and writes in bursts of 50-minute sessions into the wee hours of the morning. He estimates that he required 42 such sessions to write the 43,000-word book. “In other words,” he quips, “I typed at the blazing speed of 20.5 words per minute.”

This impressed me because like everyone on the planet, I feel that I constantly have more on my plate than I can handle. When I am feeling stressed, the first thing to go out the window is my current creative goal.

Not my writing partner, but tasked with the job
of decimating my spinach.

Mr. Smith has a full day of work at the day job(s), but still manages to write prodigiously in his creative work. The delightful conceit of all of this is that while he is writing each of these novels, he is also blogging about and writing the larger nonfiction book that details their creation.

Which of course sent me down memory lane. Back in 2011, Denise and I signed a contract to ghost-write the memoir of a man who was big in the world of pugilism. The manly art, as history so describes it.

At the time we signed, I was busy working on another ghostwriting project. Denise had finished the research and was drafting the book that would become The Girls of Atomic City. We did not have time to write the fight book just yet, but we did have time to schedule regular phone interviews with our client. This we did, once or twice a week, dutifully recording each call using the audio-record function that was a nice feature of old versions of MS Word.

Cut to February 2012. Both Denise and I had sent our manuscripts to our respective editors. Submission usually means that we have about a month to fritter away while the editors read the MS and write their editorial letters.

Great, I thought. Now we can finally put our heads together and write this damn fight book!

Not so fast. At the last minute, our agent poached Denise to ghost-write yet another memoir for a veteran Hollywood actress. The contract had been signed months ago, but the first writer bailed and left behind little copy that was usable. “I’m begging,” the agent said, and how often does that ever happen?

The money was good, and we knew what would happen.

Denise flew to Los Angeles the next day, planning to spend four weeks in the guest cottage behind the actress’s home and conduct daily interviews with her. I would write the fight manuscript, due in a month.

There are two things in the world I know nothing about: music and sports. But I am a Paganini and Gehrig in those domains compared to my knowledge of punching big men repeatedly in the face. Not to worry: Everything I needed was contained in 20 to 25 audio recordings, and my crappy handwritten notes. Or so I hoped.

Every day I stationed myself in front of the computer from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. I took breaks and ate decently, but not as well as I probably should have. The problem with journalistic nonfiction is that you can barely write a paragraph or even a sentence without checking your facts. I sprinkled a ton of TKs in the text as I went, jotting down questions, and researching on the web during my breaks.

At night after I wolfed down dinner, I sat in the living room and listened to our audio recordings. Transcribing them faithfully would take far too much time, so I did the next best thing: I took short notes as I listened, marking the timestamps so I could go back and listen during my writing sessions if I needed to check facts or get the client’s exact phrasing correctly. I nearly wept when I discovered that one of those files was corrupted!

But I pushed on. Those nighttime sessions with the audio files usually took me close to midnight. I crashed into bed each night, and did it all over the next day.

Keeping track along the way.

I do not regard what I’m telling you as something to brag about, by the way. Each time I have told this story, I always say that it was like waiting too long to research a college term paper and then trying to cram it all in one night. Not good.

The thing is, it worked! Averaging 5,700 words a day, I had 40,000 words by the end of the first week. I was frankly astonished that it could be done. I was sure that I’d made mistakes, misspelled the names of the client’s colleagues, or screwed up his family chronology. Nervously, I hit pause on the writing for two days to reread and proof everything. The client was ecstatic to get the first half of his book, and within a few days, responded to all my queries. Those answers added about 4,000 words to the manuscript before the end of the second week.

By the time he was due to fly to Asia on the Thursday of the second week, he had a first draft as it stood, at 70,083 words. (I have no doubt that he told everyone on that flight—in a private jet?—that they really ought to keep the noise down because he was, ahem, busy Reading His Future Upcoming Bestselling Book. Fifty percent of the clients I get are like that.)

After I hit that 70K, I relaxed, for two reasons. One: I knew from past experience that clients always add more to a book when they read. And two, I also know that publishing contracts allow for a variance of 10 percent up or down. The contract asked for an 80,000-word book, but the editors would accept 72,000. The client could cough, and we’d hit 2,000 words more.

I really only had to write that first 70,000 to prime the pump. When the client read the manuscript, he was inspired to riff on topics that we had never touched upon. Before he was back in the states, he was firing off long emails expanding on anecdotes in the book.

When he got back, he overnighted a pencil edit with still more recollections. We easily met the deadline at the end of the month with 78,393 words. The biggest chunk, that 70,000, was largely written over a 14-day period of time, with one day and a morning off to proof.

Still, that’s about 5,800 words a day for me.

The biggest pain point for me were those damn audio files. Call me crazy, folks, but since 2012, has technology changed significantly, or what?

Today you can easily upload an audio file and have an instant transcript. At no time in my journalism career has that been possible until the last couple of years. You either laboriously transcribed audio yourself, or you paid someone else to do it. I could never afford hiring out. The rates were exorbitant because such services were aimed at the physician dictation market.

But you know what’s funny? A dead, lifeless transcript could possibly have meant more work for me. The key to the project was reliving our conversations each night before bed. When the client got stubborn about sharing his vulnerabilities, I could hear one of us—usually Denise—pushing him, saying that if he wanted people to understand what he had gone through in his life, he had to be honest.

I heard his voice crack a few times, but he always came clean. And I swear, I felt that as I wrote it. To this day, the reviews he gets for that book online all reference the sensitive side of his character that so few people knew existed.

That was my only experience with writing at speed. But the Waltese Falcon experiments got me thinking I should try something similar again. I’m 15,000 words into a nonfiction project that I’ve wanted to do for a long while. Currently, my average daily output is only about 3,000 words, but I’m not beating myself up. In summer, after all, I am apparently only a part-time writer yet a full-time farmer. But I want to get this done before I go on the road again for Denise’s book tour.

When the nonfiction speed test is over, I hope to try a fiction project. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I will leave you with one last scene that made me laugh. On one of those nights in a casino in Vegas, Mr. Smith and his buddies encounter two very drunk girls who ask what they do for a living. He responds:

“I sit alone in a room and make shit up.”

* * *

* Writing with the Waltese Falcon has since been revised slightly and re-released as three titles: Writing a Novel in 10 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in 7 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in Five Days 2026 While Traveling.

Two fun pieces of news:

* Since I saw you last, a country western star released a single entitled Girls of Atomic City, inspired by Denise’s book. Did not know this was happening until a friend sent us the press release.

* Denise’s book, Obstinate Daughters, is now a National Bestseller.

Talk to you soon!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Hammett in Celuloid

2026-07-30T03:30:16.722-04:00

Readers of this blog may well recall that, like many of denizen of the SleuthSayers rotation (Eve Fisher, Rob Lopresti, Joseph S. Walker, Art Taylor, just to name a few), I am a long-time member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. And since our writing ideas can come from just about anywhere, it should come as no surprise to the savvy crew who constitute the Sleuthsayers readership that I get some of my best writing ideas from the SMFS email list.

Today's blog entry represents one of those times.

A thread about stories with great final lines begun, I think, by our own Rob Lopresti, morphed into another SMFSer (Bobbi Chukran) weighing in about finding a TV adaptation of Hammett's novel The Dain Curse available on both Amazon Prime TV and in abbreviated form on YouTube.

Yeah, this was NOT good.

As an unapologetic fanboy of the works of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, I am, of course, familiar with The Dain Curse (far and away the consensus choice among Hammett fans as his worst novel. I recently re-read it, and was reminded all over again how inferior it was to the rest of Hammett's canon. Of course, when you're comparing any novel to the likes of Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass Key, odds are it will definitely tend to suffer by comparison.), and with the 1970s James Coburn fronted TV project referred to above.

And it got me thinking.

Linking to any number of existing Hammett adaptations which have made it to the big or small screen might be a helpful guide for our readers who enjoy films based on great (or in the case of The Dain Curse, not-so-great) crime fiction.

I mean, the nameless Continental Op acquires a name, and that name is "Hamilton Nash." Not even a tough guy like James Coburn could do much saddled with a mouthful like that.

Well look no further! Full disclosure, there is a lot to this subject, so I will be breaking my post on it up into two entries.

The Adaptations

Every one of Hammett's five novels has been made into a movie (or in the case of The Dain Curse, a three-hour miniseries, I think? I was twelve the first time I watched it, back in the '70s) at least once. And that makes sense. After all, with every one of his novels, Hammett practically invented a subgenre of the crime fiction milieu:

Red Harvest: The "Town Tamer" novel.

The Dain Curse: The "Psychological Suspense" novel.

The Glass Key: The "Machine Politics/Public Corruption" novel.

The Maltese Falcon: The "First True P.I." novel (Carrol John Daly fans be damned!).

The Thin Man: The "Crime Novel as Comedy of Manners."

But what about Hammett's short stories?

Hammett cut his teeth writing short stories in an age (the 1920s) where periodicals were constantly on the look-out for content and actually paid well (Ah, the Good Old Days!), and he quickly distinguished himself as a master of the form. Stories such as "The Tenth Clew," "The Gutting of Couffignal," "The House in Turk Street," and its sort-of sequel, "The Girl With the Silver Eyes," "The Scorched Face," and "Dead Yellow Women" made both a name and fair amount of money for Hammett before he turned his hand to writing novels full-time.

And one of his absolute best stories, "Flypaper," was actually made into an episode of a SHOWTIME anthology series of noir stories entitled, "Fallen Angels" in 1994. Christopher Lloyd starred as Hammett's famous nameless detective "The Continental Op" (an "operative" for the "Continental Detective Agency," a thinly-veiled fictional version of the Pinkerton Agency Hammett himself had worked for). The supporting cast is great, too: Michael Rooker, Peter Berg (before he gave up acting for directing) and the always wonderful Laura San Giacomo.

The best part? You can watch all 29 minutes of it here, for free, on YouTube. And it is well worth your time!

Okay, now for the novels!

First there's Red Harvest, Hammett's first novel, serialized in Black Mask magazine as four related novelettes before its publication in 1929.

There are several terrific adaptations of this novel, none of them under its actual name, although the incomparable Megan Abbott is reportedly working on a screenplay for a new adaptation with Scott Frank (responsible for a lot of great stuff coming out of Hollywood, not least the script for the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight and the terrific Monsieur Spade). You can read more about their collaboration here.

The first of these is Akira Kurosawa's 1961 masterpiece: Yojimbo. It stars Toshiro Mifune as a masterless samurai in Medieval Japan, and follows the central premise of Hammett's novel (the Continental Op subverting expectations and manipulating competing factions in the town he's just arrived in, setting them up to take each other out). You can watch it here. It is well worth your time!

Up next is Sergio Leone's 1964 spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars, shot in Spain, with a largely Italian cast, it made Clint Eastwood a star (Leone is reported to have said of Eastwood's acting, "He has two expressions: 'hat on,' and 'hat off.'" That tracks.). It's nothing short of a shot-for-shot remake of Yojimbo. So not a direct adaptation of Red Harvest, but rather an outright theft of Kurosawa's adaptation. Kurosawa himself said in a letter to Leone not long after the film's release: ‘I’ve seen your movie. It’s a very good movie. Unfortunately, it’s my movie.'"

Did he really NEED to act?

Still an enjoyable movie. And you can, of course, catch it from any number of streaming services, including here.

Nearly forgotten these days is the great Walter Hill's take on the Hammett novel: 1996's Last Man Standing, starring Bruce Willis. It gives Kurosawa a writing credit, and yet is set in the same period as Hammett's book (the 1920s), with the location is moved from the frontier mining towns of Montana to the Texas Borderlands. Willis does a great job, it's full of action, and features solid performances all around, especially from Christopher Walken as the film's Big Bad. And he is (unsurprisingly) scary. You can find it lots of places, especially here.

It's Walter Hill, and it's Bruce Willis and it's Christopher Walken (And did I mention William Sanderson and Bruce Dern, too?), so it is also well worth your time!

And the final entry for this week's post is an early '80s entry very much in the vein of the aforementioned Monsieur Spade. A fictional take on the life of Hammett during the early years of his writing career, it's titled simply Hammett. Directed by Wim Wenders and the immortal Francis Ford Coppola from a script written in part by mystery writer and Hammett Scholar Joe Gores! Furthermore, it features the always watchable Frederick Forrest (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Hammett) in the title role.

The resemblance really is uncanny.

As if this wasn't enough, this film features the great Peter Boyle as the detective Hammett used as the inspiration for the Continental Op. Boyle is, as always, fantastic. As is Marilu Henner as Hammett's "inspirational" librarian neighbor. Fans of Hammett's work will find all manner of easter eggs in this one.

Definitely worth your time!

And the best part? It's available for free on YouTube. You can watch it here!

That's it for me this go-round. Next time we'll finish walking through the film adaptations of Hammett's work. See you in two weeks!

The Man, The Myth, The Trickster

2026-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

The regular readers of my blog entries (both of you) will not be surprised that my wife and I went to see Christopher Nolan's new film The Odyssey the first day it was available. We are achraeology and mythology buffs.

Short review: Not a masterpiece but not an embarrassment. To paraphrase Lincoln's book review, people who enjoy this type of film will definitely enjoy this one.

But what I want to discuss here is how, inevitably, Nolan had to make this 3,000-year-old character more palatable for a modern audience. Because Homer's Odysseus is a long way from what we would call a hero.

The very first sentence of the poem describes him with a word translators have been struggling with ever since. "A man of twists and turns." "A man skilled in all ways of contending." "That ingenious hero." "The crafty man." "The Shifty."

Emily Wilson translates it as "a complicated man," and she is worth noting because her 2012 version is the most popular these days (Nolan mentioned it in interviews) and has sold more than a walloping million copies this year alone. I imagine Christopher Nolan is on her Christmas (or Saturnalia) card list.

So Odysseus is not just smart but tricky. He lies, he cons, he gloats about it, and Homer expects us to admire him for it. This doesn't fit our idea of a hero these days, so Nolan burdened the big O. with a guilty, post-traumatic conscience. Sure, the guy dreamed up ther Trojan horse, leading to the destruction of the city and the slaughter of men, women, and children, but doggone, he feels awful about it. In fact, you could argue that except for the phony horsey his wife Penelope does more tricking in the movie than her husband.

But tricksters were held in high regard in those cultures. I think one of the more interesting examples is Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish general during the Jewish War against the Romans. He was part of a group of seventy soldiers who, trapped by the enemy, decided to commit mass suicide, killing each other, rather than surrender. When only two were left Josephus and the other survivor promptly surrendered.

How do we know about this dastardly deed? Because he bragged about it in his book The Jewish War, written while he was a guest of Vespasian who he had correctly predicted would become emperor. He knew his Roman readers would appreciate his cleverness, rather condemn his treachery.

Folk tales are full of tricksters, especially admiring those who outsmart stronger enemies: Aesops's fox, Anansi, Brer Rabbit, Loki, Puss and Boots, Jacob.

Actual armor from Odysseus's age

I've been trying to think of good examples from mystery fiction. Sherlock Holmes, multiple disguises and all, seems too straight-forward to qualify. Nero Wolfe? Perry Mason? Possibly.

Jackson Lamb? Absotively.

I want to leave you with one anecdote from the Odyssey which didn't make it into the movie, not quite having that heroic vibe.

In Book Nine (where Wilson has Homer describing our guy as "the lord of liars") he talks about his ships arriving in the land of a people called the Cicones. Odysseus and his men sack the city, killing most of the men and taking the women as slaves.

But then, wouldn't you know it? The Cicones called on their allies and attack, killing many of Odysseus's men. "Poor us!" Wilson's O. laments.

Imagine the unfairness of it. You declare an enemy's ability to conduct war has been obliterated and they keep fighting back.

Thank the gods that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.

Dicing a Potato

2026-07-28T00:05:00.000-04:00

The July/August issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine contains my story, "Potatoes Au Rotten." I am always thrilled to learn that one of my tales is appearing in the magazine. Their website says that they've changed print services due to a variety of issues. If you receive a hard copy of the magazine, I hope you get it soon.

I'll gratefully wait. As hinted by the title, the story features a reappearance of a series character. He is a private investigator who moonlights as a marketing rep for the Potato Advisory Board. The details of this employment arrangement were explored in some of the early stories, but the short answer is that, unlike his PI clients, the Board's checks always cash, and the corporate job offers better dental insurance. The principal character is forever known simply as the "Spud Stud." With "Potatoes Au Rotten," the kind folks at Hitchcock have published six Spud Stud stories.

The email from Hitchcock notifying me of publication got me thinking about the elements that make a good mystery series character. Perhaps I should have thought about the question sooner, but it wouldn't be the first time that I was late to the party.

Researching the question proved harder than I thought. I couldn't find a definitive article on the subject, so I compiled the following list gleaned from several sources. As I began the catalog, I immediately started grading my protagonist on a 1-4 scale. (On my phone, I have a potato emoji that looked pretty cool for this analysis. Alas, I couldn't figure out how to move the graphic to the Sleuthsayers blog.)

Minimal Backstory (2)

The sources suggest that a good series character needs an easily explainable premise. The character should be capable of being described in a sentence or two. An abbreviated backstory fits the limited space of a short story.

The PI/Potato Pitchman requires a few sentences to explain. The set-up takes a bit. I've scored him a 2 on this one.

A Flexible Social Circle (4)

For a series to succeed, the sleuth has to encounter a variety of different people presenting an array of problems.

After a slow start, the Spud Stud bounces back. He works with food products. Everyone eats. He can meet anyone in the potato retail business. Over the course of the series, he's dealt with grocery store employees, P-listers on the glamorous potato social circuit, and corporate bigwigs. This category earns him a 4.

A Strong Central Theme (2)

The Spud's investigations bring order to chaos. He seeks to find truth, bringing him into conflict with those who want to keep it hidden. I want to give my Potato Palladin strong marks on this one, except that these elements are hallmarks of mystery fiction. I've settled on a 2.

A Baked-in Reason to Encounter Crime (1)

Successful series characters have a reason why people come to them with their investigative needs. Usually, it's occupation. The Spud Stud is a PI. But the cases in the published stories all arise out of his work as a marketer. Neither the profession nor the location offers a natural locus for crime, so I've scored him a 1. But see the Social Circle thoughts above. Everyone, sooner or later, comes to a grocery store to buy food. Any place people gather, and money is exchanged, offers an opportunity for misdeeds. Perhaps the grocery store as a den of iniquity is under-appreciated.

A Quirk that Advances Plot (2)

We all read them. The characters with eidetic memories or super sensitive noses. They draw us in if only to see how the special skill will resolve the current mystery. The Spud is fully versed in the potato varietals sold on the American market. He knows his way around a grocery store. These tidbits of arcane knowledge come in handy, but maybe they're not as cool as knowing the batting average of every baseball card ever read. The Spud Stud scored a 2 here.

A Distinctive Voice (4)

The unique way a character expresses himself, shaped by his experiences and personality. The character's voice makes them instantly recognizable.

With no false modesty, allow me to state that the Spud Stud may be the leading mystery-solving, potato marketing representative in American short fiction today. The unique position sets him apart from all the world-weary cops and chocolate shop operating librarians who occasionally trip over bodies. His voice is his own. I've given him a 4.

Conclusion

The Spud Stud delivered a mixed score. The categories, though, may be useful not only for evaluating my character, but also for thinking about building your own. Constructing a character to carry across several stories means creating someone easy to explain, quick to place at the scene of a crime, and compelling enough to grab a reader's attention.

Anything else I should have added to the list?

Bonus

Writers often get asked about their sources of inspiration. This story has its roots in an old New Yorker magazine article about Taco Bell's test kitchen. The fast-food chain is not having the best month. This tidbit may help the CEO feel better.

Until next time

Real live Death

2026-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Having just posted an appreciation of Agatha Christie and her flavor of classic cozies, I want to stumble back into the world of the hardboiled, with a five o’clock shadow, a stiff bourbon and a dame in the waiting room.

I’m prompted by death.

I noticed on several re-reads of Agatha Christie and similar authors, that side from all the other signposts of what I’d call classic mysteries, the works have an odd relationship with the matter of death, an event usually at the centerpiece of the action. Often a number of

events, since there’s usually a pretty high body count, with members of the cast dropping like flies throughout the proceedings, closing out chapters and twisting plots into pretzels. What struck me, was that in the standard British model, there’s remarkably little grief and anguish at each passing, even when the departed is a fiancé, brother-in-law or lifelong friend (though never a cat, as we all know).

“I’m sorry to inform you, Lady Cavendish, but your husband has just been discovered with a ceremonial Khurkuri sword protruding from his chest.”

“Oh, dear. And I just served him breakfast not an hour ago.”

Being mostly of British heritage myself, I understand personal restraint, especially in matters of life and death. With the balance of my cultural foundations apparently German with a dash of Scandinavian, I'm used to family members who've married one of us murmuring, "You stoic Knopfs." But I think there's more to it when contemplating the Agatha worldview.

I suppose it's a necessary sanitization meant to maintain a lightness of narrative, minimizing the emotional encumbrances. It provides plenty of room for comic interludes, tours around dilapidated English country estates and brisk, lighthearted dialogue. I like all these things, especially the absence of existential despair. If I want brooding over the inconsequentiality of human life in the face of an indifferent and unforgiving universe, I know where to look. And since my books are firmly in the hardboiled camp, I can write it myself.

But still, it’s hard for me to suspend the belief that violent death is more than an important plot element. I also prefer a certain economy in the number of murders that follow in quick succession, especially when our protagonists are fully engaged in their investigations. Most murderers like to space these things out, or at least pick a nice quiet moment when he or she doesn’t have to shed bloody clothes and navigate various corridors and secret doorways in time for the first toast of an elaborate dinner party.

Holmes, Poirot and Nero Wolf aren’t immune to the human consequences of the deadly puzzles they solve, yet we have little access to their deeper personal examinations. Not so with Spade, Marlow or Lew Archer. These guys are nothing if not tortured by the moral and metaphysical implications of every untimely, tragic demise. They aren’t yapping about it with every piece of dialogue, but you know it’s what’s driving their actions and defining the purpose of their quests. And unlike their classic cousins, they express little in the way of intellectual arrogance, since the puzzle isn’t the point. They have their clever insights, but mostly solve their cases though dogged determination and self-sacrifice, often losing a few teeth and much of the promised compensation in the process.

This is what I think Chandler was mostly getting at in his essay, The Simple Art of Murder. We’ve come a long way since he made his argument, and the culture is well-schooled in the ugly alleys and byways of realism and moral ambiguity. What goes on under flickering streetlights and on dusty, impoverished back roads has become mainstream. Meanwhile, the classic mystery is living in comfortable retirement, well financed by annuities and fresh income from a steady production of successful cozies and less philosophically demanding fare.

What unites the hardboiled and cozy worlds is a satisfactory conclusion. The books open with a disordering of the universe through some wretched, anti-social deed. It’s evil rising from the depths, chaos threatening the fragile equilibrium. The puzzle-solvers and dark angels are called upon to put things back into balance, to cleanse the collective of foul corruption and treacherous instability.

These are satisfying destinations, but how you want to get there is a matter of taste. Sometimes you want Spielberg with a side of Frank Capra, sometimes full-on Scorsese. It’s all fine with me.

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

2026-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

For a little over a year, I've been attending the monthly meetings of a mystery book club at my local independent bookstore. It's been a lot of fun, particularly since they tend to choose books that don't quite match my normal reading tastes, with a strong emphasis on recent cozies and domestic thrillers. It's always good to read outside your comfort zone.

This month, though, the club made one of its periodic forays into classic territory, with Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train. Several members, it turned out, are Christie enthusiasts who have read all her works, often more than once, while others were encountering her for the first time. This led the group to consider an interesting question: what book did the hardcore Christie fans think would make the best introduction to her work for a new reader?

I immediately thought this would make good fodder for a SleuthSayers column. Considering some of my own favorite writers and series characters, what one book would I choose for a new reader, and why? What story would best capture what I loved about that author, and be most likely to bring the newbie back for more?

So here's how I'd answer the question for ten (or nine, depending on how you count) members of my personal pantheon.

REX STOUT: I've written before about my love for Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, and the Manhattan brownstone they call home. This is definitely a series where I wouldn't give a new reader book #1 to start with. Fer-de-Lance is a fine novel, and Wolfe himself is already there almost complete, but I don't think Stout had yet refined Archie's voice. Given how important the brownstone is to what I find most appealing about the books, I'd also eliminate the entries where Wolfe ventures out into the wider world, though some of those (Some Buried Caesar, Too Many Cooks) are excellent. Ultimately, my choice would be And Be A Villain, in which a man is murdered during a live radio broadcast. Wolfe and Archie are at their sharpest, the key supporting characters are present in fine form, and the mystery itself is satisfyingly complex, with a surprising resolution. Some would object to this choice on the basis that the novel is the beginning of the "Zeck trilogy," introducing the only recurring villain in the Wolfe stories, but I think the book stands up fine on its own.

AGATHA CHRISTIE: It means forgoing the pleasures of Poirot, but in my view there's no finer way to meet Dame Agatha than And Then There Were None (hey, are all my choices going to start with "and"?). What's not to love? A fiendishly clever plot with plenty of inventive twists, an incredible setting, a cast of memorably nasty characters--everything great about Christie is on full view here, including the darkly cynical tone that gives her work such lasting depth. The atmosphere in this one is anything but cozy, and there's a reason writers are still ripping this premise off after almost a century. Now, if you must have Poirot and his little gray cells? It may be too easy an answer, but I'd have to go with Murder on the Orient Express. (If you must have Miss Marple, you must ask someone else, as the character's never done much for me.)

ROBERT B. PARKER: I've also written before about how formative the Spenser novels were for me when I began reading adult crime fiction. I still relish them, but there are particular challenges in introducing them to a new reader. The first Spenser, The Godwulf Manuscript, isn't much more than a Chandler pastiche, with little indication of what would later make the character distinctive. The second, God Save the Child, introduces Susan Silverman, but is one of several early books in the series with gender politics that have aged very poorly. The book I've reread most often, A Catskill Eagle, relies heavily on the reader's prior knowledge of Spenser and Susan's relationship. So my recommendation for the reader new to Spenser is The Judas Goat, in which our man goes to Europe to track down a group of terrorists. The case is fast-paced and exciting, and Spenser is formidable without yet being the invincible superman he'd be in the later books. The climatic showdown, at the 1980 Montreal Olympics, is a terrific action sequence. Most importantly, the book has the lively, funny interactions between Spenser and Hawk that are usually the highlights of any Spenser outing.

RICHARD STARK: Once again, I've written before of my devotion to Stark's novels about the coldly efficient professional thief Parker, for my money the best series of crime novels ever written. They're all great, but I think one perfect entry point is The Score, in which Parker joins a gang with a seemingly foolproof plan to rob every business in a small mining town in a single night. As always, things go wrong, and the pleasure comes from watching Parker scramble to deal with the multiple complications and still walk away with the loot. In addition to the novel, the comic book adaptation by the late, great Darwyn Cooke is most definitely worth seeking out.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Stark, of course, was a penname of Westlake's. While Stark's Parker novels are the best straight crime books ever written, Westlake used his own name on the Dortmunder series, about a thief cursed with the worst luck of anyone in the genre, and darned if they're not, by a mile, the best comic crime capers. It's kind of not fair that one guy should be so damn good at both. I think most Dortmunder fans would recommend new readers simply start with the first book, The Hot Rock, but I'd actually go with a much later entry, Drowned Hopes. Here, an ex-con recruits Dortmunder and his regular crew of misfits to help with an unusual problem: the town where he buried his loot is now underwater, thanks to a dam built while he was in prison. Worth the price of admission just for the scene where Dortmunder tries scuba diving. For bonus points, the novel also includes an unusual crossover: in one chapter, the characters from Joe Gores's DKA series make an appearance. Gores and Westlake cowrote the chapter, which also appears in the DKA novel 32 Cadillacs. So this book can actually introduce you to two top-tier crime series!

JOHN D. MACDONALD: Just as Hawk is vital to the best entries in the Spenser series, so the most memorable books about Travis McGee, MacDonald's "salvage consultant" hero, tend to be the ones with the most involvement from Meyer, the philosophically inclined economist who serves as McGee's unlikely best friend. So while it might seem perverse to choose the next-to-last novel in the series as an entry point, I'd still go with Cinnamon Skin, in which Meyer is central to the plot and present in almost every scene. When Meyer's beloved niece and her new husband are killed in a boat explosion, he and McGee set off on a cross-country quest to find and punish the guilty party. There's some great detective work in this one, and a memorably cold-blooded bad guy. Of course, the McGee books are only a fraction of the work put out by the highly prolific MacDonald. For a non-series taste, try The Executioners, which has been the basis of three (increasingly unfaithful) filmed versions under the title Cape Fear.

ED MCBAIN: Choosing a starting point for the 87th Precinct novels is just about impossible, partly because of the sheer scope of the series (55 novels over fifty years!), partly because it features a sprawling ensemble cast instead of a single hero. There are a few plot threads which run through several novels--Detective Steve Carella's relationship with his wife, the recurring villain The Deaf Man--but by and large you can read the series in pretty much any order. It's been persuasively argued that the books really constitute a single long novel, one of the greatest ever written about New York City (thinly fictionalized as Isola in McBain's universe). McBain didn't invent the police procedural, but the 87th Precinct is surely the grandest incarnation of the form in mystery fiction. Forced to choose an introduction, I might go with Eight Black Horses, in which the Deaf Man returns to exact revenge. It's got a clever plot and shows the main characters at their most human--but I might be choosing it just because it's one of the ones I've most recently reread.

LAWRENCE BLOCK: Two of the greatest figures in the history of the American PI were introduced in the 1970s. Robert B. Parker's Spenser is the paragon: well-read, absolutely committed to an admirable code of honor, a superb cook, irresistible to women, and very nearly undefeatable with either a gun or his fists. As much as I love Parker's writing, by the last third or so of the series, Spenser had become essentially superhuman, impervious even to aging, and the endless scenes of him and Susan congratulating each other on the perfection of their relationship had gotten a little old. Spenser's contemporary, Block's Matt Scudder, is a much different, and ultimately much more human and thus more compelling, character. Scudder tries to do the right thing, but he's deeply flawed, most notably by his alcoholism, which remains a central theme of the series even after he joins AA and sobers up. You could start the series from the beginning, but to jump in at a point where Block has fully mastered Scudder's voice and world, go with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a flashback novel set during Scudder's drinking days that features a compelling plot and one of the all-time great titles.

SUE GRAFTON: Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. There's no doubt that Grafton got better with experience, but there's also no doubt that her "alphabet" series about California PI Kinsey Milhone was strong from the start. Watching Milhone's character develop over the course of the series is one of its main pleasures, and best appreciated if you're with her from the start of her journey: "A" is for Alibi. It's not a perfect book (you'll see the end coming a mile away), but it will make you eager to spend more time with the character. It remains a tragedy that the series never reached Z.

STUART M. KAMINSKY: The (IMHO) underappreciated Kaminsky had several series characters, including Florida process server Lew Fonesca, Chicago cop Abe Leiberman, and Moscow inspector Porfiry Rostnikov. I frequently return to them all with pleasure, but my favorite is Toby Peters, a down-on-his luck PI working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. Peters works for a different celebrity in every book, and Kaminsky, an accomplished film scholar in his professional life, fleshes out the stories with rich detail about the period and the biographies of the real-life figures Peters encounters. As in all of Kaminsky's series, there's an expansive and highly entertaining cast of supporting characters and an engaging combination of melancholy and humor. Mostly because it's where I started, I'd direct new readers to the second Peters entry, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.

Agree? Disagree? Who are your favorites, and what do you think would make the most effective starting points for readers new to them?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Edited by Adam Meyer, In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Genesis came out from Down & Out Books last year, shortly before that publisher went, well, down and out. As a result, the book never got the attention it deserved. I'm delighted that, earlier this month, a new edition of the book was published by Audecyn Books, and is now available in both print and electronic editions. It's a great set of crime stories, including contributions from my fellow SleuthSayers Stacy Woodson, Michael Bracken, and Barb Goffman. My story, "Just a Job to Do," is about a bodyguard, assigned to a mobster's wife, who develops her own ideas about what protection really means. Don't miss your second chance at this one!

How to Win the Toughest Game

2026-07-25T00:30:00.000-04:00

Melodie here. In my May post, I quoted good friend and colleague Lisa de Nikolits.
Today, I'm pleased to host Lisa on Sleuthsayers, who wrote this wonderful post - possibly one of the best I've ever read on here (and I rather like my own, so that is some praise!) I particularly like the comparison of writers to elite athletes! How true. Not to mention, ego-inspiring <smile>

How to Win the Toughest Game
Five Ways Not to Lose the Plot—Including Your Own

by Lisa de Nikolits

Writing. Surviving (and thriving) as an author has never been easy. And right now, it feels tougher—and often more bizarre—than ever.

Let’s go back to the iconic opening line of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

I bet Mr. Dickens couldn’t have imagined AI, social media, the price of paper and shipping, or the increased number of players on the field, all jostling for real estate and their name in lights.

Add to that, cuts in government funding to the arts sectors, tariffs and a world that feels chaotic with war and disaster.

How can we cope? Even more importantly, how can we thrive?

My strategies are simple, and I sum them up in Five Ways Not to Lose the Plot—Including Your Own

1. Think Like a Sports Pro

2. Be Judicious with Social Media

3. Have Realistic Expectations

4. Revisit Your Slush Pile

5. Celebrate the Wins

1. Think Like a Sports Pro.

This is one of my favourites. I found these fridge magnets a decade ago and I’ve used them as writing mantras ever since. They sum up the dedication, discipline, relentless hard work, single-minded passion and blinkered focus that’s necessary to be on the field, never mind succeeding on the field. Athletes get injured, grow old, adjust to change, fail on a global stage in front of millions of people, encounter rivals, face scorn and derision from analysts, failed former players and couch potatoes who all think they could do it better. They are vilified on social media or held fleetingly aloft as gods. None of this is dissimilar to writing. So, train your brain to think like an athlete because as an author, you are an athlete. Protect your mental health, improve your stamina, do the rehab (in our case, the rewrites), accept the losses and never lose sight of your end goal.

I’d also like to talk about the idea that writers must produce four to five books a year to succeed. This has become a kind of shorthand in indie publishing and one that I’ve seen at conferences and online. Its origin story comes from a specific ecosystem—rapid-release, series-driven genres where visibility is tied to frequency and algorithmic momentum. But it is not a universal rule of writing, nor is it a guarantee of success.

“Super successes” of indie romance, crime or cozy bestsellers are realistically more likely to be extraordinary outliers, and not typical outcomes, in the same way that Fifty Shades of Grey is still cited to “prove” that self-publishing is the fastest route to commercial success. What it actually represents is something far more rare: a highly unusual trajectory that became visible precisely because it is not typical. Both ideas—high output as a necessity, and viral success as a model—belong to the same category of publishing mythology. They describe what has happened, not what can be reliably reproduced.

I feel it’s important to talk about this because it ties into the sporting analogy. There are phenoms in every sport, but their meteoric rise is theirs, rather than a strategy for most athletes to follow.

So, ask yourself, who are you on the sports field? Where do your specific talents and strengths lie? We’d all like to be phenoms but sometimes we’re just the hopefuls on the bench, training our hearts out, and hoping that our game day will come. One thing’s for sure; the harder you train, the more consistently you show up, the more chance you’ll have of being not only being on the playing field but succeeding in delivering your personal best.

2. Be Judicious with Social Media.

Social media is a series of black holes within black holes. And the big question is always, does social media even sell books? The answer, unanimously, is “indirectly.” In other words, social media rarely sells books directly, but it can create visibility, credibility, and a sense of urgency that might lead to book sales.

Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, Threads, Bluesky, Substack, Goodreads, Wattpad are just a few, some of which are already on their way out.

I recently attended a webinar titled “Promoting Books Without Social Media” by author brand/marketing expert Andréa Guevara. 1,600 authors showed up, proving that I wasn’t alone in wanting to find alternative avenues of book promotion.

My takeaway was that instead of chasing daily visibility across an (unrealistic, unreliable) ever-expanding list of platforms, we need to shift to systems that endure—libraries, book clubs, podcasts, interviews, festivals, and word-of-mouth ecosystems where a single meaningful appearance can generate momentum over months rather than minutes. In this model, marketing isn’t about feeding algorithms; it’s about becoming findable in the right places, at the right time, for the right reader.

However, even in an approach like this which rejects social media dependency, there is a strong caveat: social media still plays a role as a discovery layer. Several irate authors indicated their discontent in the sidebar chat of the webinar: “I thought this was about NOT using social media” and I understood their point. I too was disappointed because the webinar demonstrated that we have to use social media to get off social media. Social media points readers towards alternative avenues such as events, and direct relationships but it’s the unavoidable first step.

Another caveat is that we live in a world where it’s increasingly tough (and expensive) to get invited to festivals as an author or even just attend them. The reasons for this are myriad and would take an entire post in and of itself to delve into. Book tables can be costly at festivals even when shared. The cost of memberships can mount up.

And one could spend 24/7 hours a day and countless dollars on mentorships, coaching, paying for giveaways, book tours, Facebook ads, Google ads or book software programs that promise the world—and the list goes on.

I’ve always likened social media to gardening. I dedicate an hour a day, no more, to posting, liking, commenting, swiping, supporting, and seeing what’s out there. Then I walk away from my garden, knowing there are countless weeds I didn’t get to pull but I did what I could, in my allotted time.

3. Have Realistic Expectations

As authors, we’re not entering a small pool of books. We’re entering a flood.

The scale of publishing today is difficult to overstate. Globally, estimates suggest around 2.2 million new books are published every year, and when self-published titles are included, the number can climb to nearly 4 million new books annually.

Self-published books now make up a substantial share of total annual releases—often estimated at well over 40% of all new titles, and in some datasets, outnumbering traditionally published books by a wide margin.

But volume does not equal reach.

Across both traditional and self-publishing, most books sell very few copies. Industry analyses and sales data consistently suggest that:

· the majority of books sell fewer than a few hundred copies in their lifetime only a small percentage ever break into significant commercial success self-published books tend to have a wider spread of outcomes, from zero sales to occasional high performers, but most cluster at the low end of the scale

Traditional publishing offers distribution, editing, and credibility—but not guaranteed sales. Self-publishing offers control and speed—but not guaranteed quality, discovery or sales.

For small press and debut authors, the reality is even more sobering: most titles receive modest attention unless they benefit from sustained marketing, series momentum, awards recognition, or unexpected and uncontrollable external amplification. In other words, “being published” is not the milestone it once was. Visibility, not publication, is the scarce (and most valuable) resource.

Going back to my sporting analogy, we’re on a very crowded playing field.

The expectation, then, cannot be “success as default.” Publishing is not a finish line; it is a game in motion, played across shifting ground where visibility has to be earned and re-earned.

In the older model of traditional publishing, the contract itself often carried an unspoken identity shift: I am now a success. To be published was to be legitimized. Writing and recognition arrived together, and the role felt, if not secure, at least clearly defined and established.

That equation no longer holds in the same way.

Now, publication is little more than a ticket to entry on the playing field and victories are scarce. The game continues long after the book is released, and the conditions of play have changed: there are more players, more noise, more competition for attention, fewer guarantees of being seen at all. And yet this is not a reason for disillusionment—it’s a reason for clarity.

Because once you understand the nature of the game, you stop mistaking it for something it is not. You stop expecting permanence from limited exposure. You stop equating publication with victory. And you start building strategies that match reality rather than myth.

The question is no longer whether a book is good enough to be published—because these days, almost any book can be published—but whether, once it is in play, it can be found. And from that more grounded place, success becomes not a default assumption, but something you can influence, recognize, and hopefully sustain.

4. Revisit Your Slush Pile

I recently went back to my slush pile, and it was a useful reminder about something important: writing is a long game, and I’m not the same player I was fifteen or twenty years ago.

Back to Think Like a Sports Pro: Athletes get injured, grow old, adjust to change, fail on a global stage in front of millions of people, encounter rivals, face scorn and the derision from analysts, failed former players and couch potatoes who all think they could do it better.

Visiting my slush pile felt like stepping onto an old playing field and immediately being aware of how differently I move now.

I feel more nimble, confident and dexterous. I used to overplay (overwrite) everything, overthink every pass (sentence), and try to hold the entire match (short story/novel) together with terrified caution.

Now I see the patterns more clearly. I trust myself more which means I trust the play more. And a huge difference is that I don’t panic when the ask shifts.

It was interesting to dissect the evolution of my writing—to see what my strengths were at the time, and to notice how clearly my weaknesses are visible to me now. I am, without question, a better writer in terms of dialogue, structure, pacing, and shaping a narrative from beginning to end. I no longer stack literary ideas like a Jenga tower and hope that no one breathes too hard near the table. Back then, I was afraid that if I removed one piece, the whole structure would collapse. I played as if stability mattered more than quality and that challenging the structure would result in complete loss. I don’t have that fear anymore.

And what surprised me was how much value was still there in the earlier work. Concepts, images and fragments of insight—sometimes there’s no more than a line or a few words in a sentence, but those fragments aren’t games I lost, they were unfinished plays that, with my years of training and focus, still have potential. I learned that three or four concepts/sentences/ideas could be welded together and forged with new beginnings and new endings. I could, by experience, diligent studies, faith in my imagination, age and wisdom, create a different formation with a different outcome and end up with a piece of work I’m really proud of.

What I understand now—and I didn’t understand then—is that the slush pile isn’t evidence of failure. It’s my own personal archive.

But what I also realized is this. I used to think that a story was finished when really, it was 8% done. Only 8%. That’s not a lot. Now I know I have to work harder—a lot harder. It takes more time than I thought it would. And not because I’m older and slower but because I recognize all the requisite nuances, and I know how long those nuances can take. I can spend more than an hour on a paragraph and sometimes a paragraph can take an entire day.

Younger me was in such a hurry to get published. Being published was everything. And don’t get me wrong. Nothing beats the thrill of having your story or novel in print or online. But I realize now that there’s much more to it. Once my first draft is complete, I have to go the other 92%. And that’s the hard work. Those are the reps. That’s what sculpts. The rewriting, self-edits, the line edits, the stepping away, the coming back, the asking for input and then trusting myself to deliver.

Now I am not afraid of collapse because it’s part of the game and better players don’t run away from facing their mistakes in the hopes that no one else will see them either and that somehow, the world will embrace the half-finished play as magnificent.

Better players study their plays and pick them apart. Instead of relying on flashy sleights of hand to fake a play, better players get into the mechanics.

5. Celebrate the Wins

Let’s go back to where we started: Writing. Surviving (and thriving) as an author has never been easy. And right now, it feels tougher—and often more bizarre—than ever.

And let’s revisit the iconic opening line of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities one more time: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

And, given Be Judicious with Social Media as well as Have Realistic Expectations, one might feel discouraged at this point.

Which is when I go back to Think Like a Sports Pro. Have you ever watched the winning locker room after the championship is won? The champagne showers are so crazy the players have to wear goggles.

And it’s never been more important to celebrate our wins. The grass is always greener on the other side and there’s always someone (or a crowd!) doing better than you and winning that accolade you hoped would be yours.

Stay blinkered. Stay in your lane and count your wins. And you’ve got them, or you wouldn’t be here. Sit with them and look at them. Breathe in the moment. Give yourself a pat on the back. And if you didn’t win today, there’s always tomorrow. Someone’s gotta win, right? There’s no reason it can’t be you.

Remember the fridge magnets. I’d love to know which one appeals to you the most. I think I’d go with Billie Jean King. “Champions keep playing until they get it right.”

Thank you for reading this post. If you enjoyed it, please visit my website, lisawriter.com, and order a copy of one of my books, sold wherever books are sold. Or ask your local library for a copy. And if you’d like to go one step further, leave a rating or review. It all counts and it’s all appreciated.

Now available at Amazon, and all the usual suspects! (I've ordered my copy - Melodie)

Zines, Then and Now

2026-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

When the Editor-in-Chief of the newly-launched That Glow invited me to contribute a column way back in 1999, she frowned when I referred to the glossy pregnancy-motherhood-working woman site as a zine.

"On-line magazine," she corrected briskly. I nodded, pretending to understand, as I pretended to understand most things technology-related back in the day. Didn't the "zine" mean magazine? I knew about zines! gurl.com was funny and smart and progressive, decidedly sex-positive, and chickclick was edgy and hip and represented third wave feminism - it even sponsored the first Lilith Fair!

At That Glow, we were also all about women - but we were glossy, not grungy - upscale and sleek. We were going to run ads, pay writers well,

and -

Well. The fact that you probably don't recognize the name - or perhaps mistook it for one of the many sound-alike sites that are now, in 2026, gorgeously thriving, tells the tale. The editor was bright and ambitious and well-connected, but decidedly ahead of her time. I was sorry, but not surprised, when our "online magazine" slipped beneath the surface of the roiling sea of the newly dubbed "world wide web." (Recognize that www, y'all?)

For me, launching a writing career in the mid-nineties, "publishing" on the internet seemed iffy, experimental, kind of cool - but also more than likely a waste of time, sort of like those semi-pro art shows people would throw together in someone's garage. A lot of work, one fun night of hope, pot, and cheap white wine, and then…nothing. Gone. After all, how would anything "posted" on the internet be circulated? How would it be seen? How would it be archived? Yes, people under forty years of age. These were actual questions we asked ourselves. The concept of words, images and (God help us) videos circulating for all eternity on the internet was beyond our feeble ken.

Even with print magazines folding all around us, even with copyeditors and even editors being laid off wholesale, even with writers being pushed from staff to stringer, the money - and the glamour - was still in print publication. I'd been a columnist for Buzz Magazine until it folded abruptly in 1998, but no worries. I had regular gigs writing crime, disease, and celebrity scandal for the Big Seven women's mags - Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, et al. I'd just move on to the next juicy gig!

(That sound you hear is everyone who was actually making a living writing in the nineties spitting coffee all over their computers.)

So - zine, magazine - for me, it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. Zines were an online phenomenon, some new flash in the pan that was cool and fun but probably destined to fail.

But I was late to the party. What I thought was new was just an online version of the do-it-yourself rags that had been around since the thirties, when sci-fi fans put together little "fan magazines" - called zines even then - to discuss their favorite characters. The very first of these may have been Allen Glasser's The Planet (July 1930), distributed to The New York Scienceers, a sci-fi fan club. In an article for Carter ARTicles, Carolyn Croley writes that art and design zines were first created in the early 20th century, focusing on Dada and surrealism. What these journals had in common is that they were small, hand-produced, carefully curated, and often at a variance with the tastes of mainstream culture.

These early works were seminal, but their authors were by no means the first to self-publish. Tristram Shandy was self-published by Laurence Sterne in the late 1700s. A hundred years later, Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. Self-publishing was often undertaken by writers who couldn't connect with a publishing house. This route was quite respectable, and the term "self-published" didn't really have a stink on it until the advent of "vanity publishing" in the early 1900s.

The North American Review was founded in 1815, and is still going strong. NAR was first produced on letterpress, but by the fifties offset printing had taken over. Similar specialized literary journals, often called "lit mags" or "littles," proliferated in the 1960s with the advent of mimeograph machines. Access to photocopiers in the 1980s produced another wave of journals, and by the end of the 20th Century there were thousands of little magazines being produced across North America, some financed independently, some supported by colleges, foundations - and even by the government. My first poetry sale was to a tiny photocopied journal whose name is lost to history but that paid me fifty bucks! In 1988 dollars!

(So…if a poem sold for fifty bucks forty years ago, I guess now they must sell for - what? A thousand? Ten thousand? Hahahhahahahahhhahahahahahha. Sorry, poets. Just know I'm laughing with you, not at you.)

These early lit journals were a bit more polished than hand-produced zines. Zines were more ragged, more amateurish, more raw. Typed by hand, sometimes even hand-written, often mimeographed, then stapled together by hand, zines were integral to pop culture. In the seventies, long before most American households had a computer, amateur mags were spreading the word about street style, fashion, and music, perhaps picking up where those early art and design zines left off. Zines were particularly relevant to the punk scene. Punk - the zine - debuted in New York in 1976 with a caricature of Lou Reed on the cover, and helped popularize the moniker "punk."

Similarly, small self-produced "underground" newspapers rose to prominence in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, mostly associated with the counterculture. As the Vietnam war ended, most of these disappeared. Plus ça change, as Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849. Plus c'est la même chose. Yeah.

What he said.

Print reading matter still outsells digital by a wide margin, and that seems likely to obtain for some time to come, but e-reading has undeniably changed the game. Today, the Substack and Mailchimp platforms distribute what are essentially e-zines, though the lines between magazine, newspaper, newsletter, blog, website and zine have become a bit blurred. Paper zines are still around, too - Paper Pushers Print Shop in Seattle stocks hundreds of tiny, hand-produced zines. Los Angeles has an annual zine festival, as do San Francisco, Toronto and Chicago. Other cities have a big zine component to their comic book festivals. Zines have evolved, but they are still around, online and in print. Why not check a few out?

Anna Scotti is the author of a young adult novel, Big and Bad, that won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People. Though primarily a mystery writer, she has published poetry widely and was awarded numerous awards and honors for her collection, Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, and the poems within. Anna's novel-in-stories, It's Not Even Past, went out of print shortly after publication, but will be re-released in October - details to come! Learn more at www.annakscotti.com.

What To Do With the Body... AGAIN...

2026-07-23T00:05:00.000-04:00

Back in 2021 I wrote a blogpost about What To Do With The Body (HERE) - and I still think "the woodchipper in a boat over a good crab nursery" is probably the best idea, but try and find one of those inland. And while I still have no intention of needing any of the suggestions, I am continually amazed by – and thankful for – the stupidity of real-life murderers.

Celeste Rivas Hernandez

D4vd – Back on September 8, 2025, 14 year old Celeste Rivas Hernandez's body – in a severely decomposed state - was found in the front trunk of a Tesla registered to musician D4vd in a Hollywood Hills tow yard.

"The Tesla had been at the impound lot for two days after being found abandoned on a Hollywood street, investigators said. The towed vehicle was registered to Burke. Officers had responded to the impound lot "for a foul odor coming from a vehicle," said Los Angeles police. (LINK)

Gruesome details:

"D4vd ordered two chainsaws, a body bag and an inflatable pool on Amazon using a fake name. Investigators say fragments of that pool were found in cut wounds on Celeste's body." (Her body had been dismembered and put in two sacks.) and
"D4vd traveled to a location in Santa Barbara County multiple times after Celeste's death, including the night she was murdered, and a Caltrans worker later found the teen's passport card discarded in that area in January of 2025." (LINK)
And LINK to a general story about the whole mess so far.

I have questions about the whole thing:

Why can't people get it in their heads that dead bodies quickly stink?
Was there an accomplice? D4vd was either one cold mf or he had help doing all the things that were done to the victim, not to mention cleaning the place up afterwards... (NOTE to prosecuters: check what cleaning agency worked for him.)
Why was the Tesla left abandoned on a Hollywood street? You mean no one tried to steal the damn thing? Or even just vandalize it? Isn't that just begging the cops to find it?
I also want to know if her parents knew that she was "dating" D4vd at 13, and why they allowed it, but I can come up with my own list of answers to that.

*****

Speaking of dead bodies and the inevitable stench, check out this story:

"A suspicious death investigation is underway after a body was found inside the Rodeway Inn at 1313 N. Lacrosse Street.

The Rapid City Police Department says officers were dispatched around noon on July 14 for a report of a deceased person located inside a room at the hotel. The case is being handled jointly with the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office.

The body was identified as Jason Horned Eagle, 33, of Rapid City. Police say an autopsy has been conducted, and detectives are now awaiting toxicology results and additional forensic testing to determine Horned Eagle’s specific cause of death. Based on information gathered so far, detectives believe Horned Eagle’s body had been left in the hotel room for several months, according to police.

Police also announced three people have been arrested in connection with efforts to conceal the body. Detectives say the individuals had knowledge of Horned Eagle’s death and made attempts to conceal his body in the hotel. All three are charged with Improper Disposal of a Body." (LINK)

My Notes:

SEVERAL MONTHS???
SEVERAL MONTHS IN AN ACTIVE MOTEL???
Where was the body hidden? Comments on FB:

"I've actually seen [hiding it under the bed] on a true crime channel. I managed a motel and started having the maids do deep cleaning by cleaning under the box springs. In the maintenance hallway or ceiling wrapped in plastic would be my other guesses. It's crazy what you find in the ceiling tiles. (I and the staff were trying to bring the clientele up from where it was, so it was a complete overhaul)"
"Manager must have managed to keep that room off the available list."

My input: Did they pack the entire bathroom with ice from the ice machine?
Who managed to somehow avoid renting out that room?
Forever cross off the Rodeway Inn in Rapid City from my list of hotels in the area.

Meanwhile, purely informational:

Trust Jack. He knows.

The Resurrection of Roger Ackroyd

2026-07-22T02:00:00.000-04:00

Many years ago, the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote a piece for The New Yorker called “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” It’s very entertaining, and he scores some good points, but his chief complaint is that murder mysteries, as a genre, can’t be camouflaged as literature, and in quick succession, he takes Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham over the coals, and rests in his labors.

You could make a similar case against baseball, or Bob Ross, or Hummel figurines. And it’s no defense to say, Oh, so many people love it – whatever it is. Wilson takes issue with the conceit of the detective story as a whole. It rests on an implausibility, that a shaky set of conventions are enough to overcome negligent craftsmanship, and the puzzle is reward enough, in itself. But in the examples Wilson cites, the puzzles lack engagement, because they’re completely artificial.

Wilson is also immune to the charms of a Lord Peter Wimsey, say, or a Poirot. Which is a fair criticism. Holmes, if he serves for our template, isn’t in any way real, as a character; he’s a collection of mannerisms, or antagonizing eccentricities. No wonder Doyle threw him over the Falls.

Edmund Wilson is shooting fish in a barrel. Holmes is a device, as is Wimsey, or Poirot. And the formal structure of the stories they feature in doesn’t admit of their character development. Other people, yes. I’ve always thought Sayers was writing novels of manners – bad manners, as it happens, but social satire. I think the same of Agatha Christie. It’s been remarked that Sayers is a little more elegant, and that Christie’s prose is simply sturdy, much like a pair of Miss Marple’s shoes, but that’s not an impediment. They’re writing about a certain vanishing class, that’s hanging on between the wars, but clearly an endangered species. It’s no accident that more than a few of those people turned into Nazi sympathizers. Look at the Mitford sisters. Sayers and Christie are utterly unsentimental about this entitled, self-important bunch, with their strangled upper-class diction and clotted condescension.

And Then There Were None is reportedly the best-selling mystery novel of all time, and The Mousetrap has run continuously in the West End for almost 70 years, until the COVID lockdown, but the book that made Christie’s early reputation is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, from 1926. It sets the bar for unreliable narrators (pace Tana French and Gillian Flynn), and the twist ending has the inevitability of all good show-stoppers. Ackroyd is of course where Edmund Wilson gets the title of his article, but he doesn’t get the last word.

I think what Wilson misses (leaving his obvious sexism to one side) is that the detective story is a deeply and inherently conservative genre, a force for social balance, pushing back against entropy. At least in what we call the Golden Age. Christie, like her contemporaries, is very much of the period. You can’t take her out of it, she doesn’t make sense, out of context. But this conservative ethic is just as true of Hammett, and Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. The social compact is broken, murder the most elemental violation of that order. The hero sets it right. The narrative arc is repair, and redemption.

The satisfactions of the mystery, or more properly, the detective story, aren’t exactly literary at all. Not that the writers aren’t skillful – Christie, for one, has enormous facility – but her object is, narrowly, political. She’s protecting the hearth.

You may not agree with me on this. Writers subvert the traditional, and eat their own young, no question. I would only argue that Christie’s virtues are reactionary. She’s full of mischief, and relishes deception, but her real gift is gravity. Christie is earthbound. It matters.

Novel Ventures

2026-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

For several decades now, I have been known as, and have actively worked at being, a short-story writer.

But I wasn’t always.

Early in my career, I wrote a few novels, and most of them are still available and still generating royalties. Today I’m looking back at those early-career novels.

DEADLY CAMPAIGN

I finished writing my first novel, a mystery titled Deadly Campaign, in November 1983. It was rejected by several agents and publishers until it found a home with Books in Motion and was released in May 1994.

Books in Motion published audiobooks on cassette tape and sold most of their titles at truck stops around the U.S.

In February 2003, Wildside Press released Deadly Campaign as a trade paperback, and it is still available at online bookstores.

Covering City Hall during an election year was all the excitement reporter Dan Fox needed—until he discovered Alderman Bill Franklin’s bullet-ridden body.
Who killed the alderman? Why did they do it? Fox wants the story. Everyone else wants him.
Hit men, mob bosses, politicians, and mistresses: They all have stories to tell, and Fox pieces them together while dodging bullets and fighting deadlines.
While Fox digs for the story, long-hidden secrets rise to the surface—secrets that threaten the political fabric of the city—and Fox soon discovers he’s caught in the middle of a Deadly Campaign.

JUST IN TIME FOR LOVE

I wrote Just in Time for Love, a YA romance, in 1983/1984, and for years the manuscript made the rounds of agents and publishers, finally finding a home with Hardshell Word Factory in 1998, first as an eBook and then in 2001 paired with Melissa Ford’s His Friday Girls as half of the paperback Twin Spins #1.

It is now out of print.

His father writes confessions and jokes, and the biggest joke of all is his name—Justin Tyme. But Jay, as he prefers to be called, hasn’t had much to laugh about in the years since his mother died. His father retreats into an alcohol-hazed world of denial and self-pity, reversing their care-giver roles, and forcing Jay to grow up virtually on his own.
Then, they move to O’Shea, where his father manages a mobile home park, and Jay begins yet another year as the “new kid” in school. He has a lot to learn—about life, his father, and himself, but most of all, about love. And it all begins the day Jay meets Cindy Hamilton.

PSI COPS

I wrote Psi Cops, a science fiction police procedural, in 1987/1988, and sent my first query to an editor in March 1988. I received several rejections and a request for revisions from an editor at Berkley (which I did, but they passed on the revised version), and I ultimately placed it with Books in Motion in 1994.

In February 2003, Wildside Press released Psi Cops as a trade paperback, and it is still available at online bookstores.

Geeks and freaks.
That’s what Detective Sergeant Tony Carvelli thinks of Psi Cops until he’s faced with a sadistic serial killer who leaves no evidence behind.
In a near-future St. Louis, after sexually-transmitted diseases have been eliminated and sex without commitment is a lifestyle for much of the population, Carvelli investigates the deaths of women dismembered in their own bedrooms.
Carvelli still believes in the old values: love before sex and investigation before technology. When Psi Cop Colleen Allison is assigned to the case against his wishes—thanks to his new partner, recently-promoted Detective Phil Palmer—Carvelli resents her and everything she represents.
Fighting against time and against each other, Carvelli, Palmer, and Allison struggle to find the killer before he strikes again.

ALL WHITE GIRLS

I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve lost the paper trail for my first private eye novel, All White Girls. So, I don’t know when I completed the novel, nor how many agents and publishers may have passed on it. I do know Wildside Press released it as a trade paperback in May 2001 and later released a hardcover version. It is still available at online bookstores.

One young woman is missing. Another is dead.
They were drawn to Windy City like moths to a flame, but the city’s bright lights can’t illuminate every dark corner. Hidden in the alleys and back streets and in a three-block-long stretch of strip clubs and adult bookstores are the men who prey on young women like these: the pedophiles, pimps, and pornographers.
When former partners, unlicensed investigator Big Dick Rickenbacher and Homicide Lieutenant Salvador Castellano, find their cases overlapping in this violent world of sexual depravity, old flames rekindle, old secrets finally surface, and old crimes demand retribution.

STUD

Sometime in the mid-2000s, I discovered the first chapter of an erotic romance I had drafted in the early 1990s. I picked it up again and finished writing Stud just before I sent my first query letter to an agent in September 2008.

I collected a string of rejections from agents and publishers for the next few years and finally released Stud in July 2011 as a Kindle-only title on Amazon, using my Rolinda Hay pseudonym.

Christiana Kern is already overworked as the top customer service representative at Wett, Inc., the country’s largest printer of special interest magazines, when her boss assigns her a new title. She isn’t eager to accept the additional responsibility…until she meets Bobby Ray Cartwright, the sexy rancher publishing the start-up magazine. It isn’t long before business and pleasure mix and Christiana learns that Stud isn’t just the title of Bobby Ray’s new publication. Soon Christiana is having the best sex ever and is facing life-altering decisions in and out of the bedroom.

SHORT STORY FOCUS

I’ve had many other books published—mostly short story collections—but I have no completed and unpublished novels buried in my files.

Given the length of time it took to write and find homes for each of my novels (11+ years for Deadly Campaign, 14+ years for Just in Time for Love, 6+ years for Psi Cops), is it any wonder I shifted my focus to short stories?

“The Tattooist” was published in Black Cat Weekly #253.

Sticking it to the language

2026-07-20T00:01:00.000-04:00

The changing of words for no particular reason, whether they need it or not, is nothing new.

Nero Wolfe’s abhorrence “to contact” as a verb was memorable. Although I haven’t reread the books in thirty or forty years, I haven’t forgotten his opinion: pfui. Yet I contact people all the time and have no problem with it. On the other hand, I do not gift anyone with flowers, a book, or a second chance. Giving it is good enough for me. Nor do I task anyone with a job. I can assign it, or I can tell or ask someone to do it. In historical fiction, a duchess can order a footman to close the curtains. A general can order an army to besiege a city. The footman need not be tasked with the chore nor the army with the siege.

Twenty-first century corporate speak does worse than turn nouns into verbs and festoon them with prepositions. It replaces clear communication with obfuscatory language. If its objective is to impress, it fails; if to confuse and deceive, it succeeds.

Take “stakeholders.” I first heard the term when my husband, who worked for many years at a university, saw it in an email from his new boss, who came to academia from the corporate world. Stakeholders? He was baffled. Were stakeholders the university employees, who keep the university running? the faculty, who he had anecdotes galore to demonstrate are perennially shocked to hear they are employees? the board of trustees, who eventually made all the decisions that transformed the university into an entity indistinguishable from a corporation? the students, whose tuition fees pay the bills? the alumni, whose donations cover the deficit and pay for capital expansion?

Then there’s “leverage.” My favorite example comes from an email from my billionaire landlord, telling the tenants that our building had a new super.

“Resident-manager responsibilities will be supported by Resident Manager Luis Y., who has been with [the landlord] for more than 20 years. Leveraging his deep operational expertise and steadfast commitment to customer service, Luis will guide day-to-day operations and strategic initiatives.”

Huh? Why didn’t they fire the corporate team they paid the big bucks to streamline operations and pay me to write that email? I would have said, “The new super brings more than 20 years of experience and competence to the job.”

I’ve spoken fluent French since spending two years in the Peace Corps in post-colonial French-speaking West Africa. In the 1960s, the French were still quite a presence. They called white-collar and educated Africans, including the country’s impressive President, evolués. When I returned for a visit in the 1980s, evolué had become intellectuel, obviously a concession to political correctness, which has been around for a while. As I keep telling you, kids, politically correct and incorrect were invented by Stalin, that other great dictator whose admirers on the American left were shocked to learn he’d killed 38 million people. But ah, the French! I like their 21st century words better than ours: They run to political terms like verdissement or écoblanchiment d’image (greenwashing your public image as a marketing ploy) and wokisme. Rather than becoming more wordy and obscure, they’ve shortened things, not just a few like our “vacay” (who actually says “vacay?”) but a lot, including ado for teenager, mat for morning (matin), comme d’hab for as usual (comme d’habitude). And the new slang is verlan, words in reverse (l’envers). They no longer cherchez la femme, she’s la meuf. If someone’s shady, they’re not louche, they’re chelou. If life gets heavy, it’s not lourd, it’s relou. It’s crazy (fou)! Or as they say, C’est ouf!

My granddaughter onboarding on
the couch on her first day at work

I wish American corporate speak were that much fun. Take “onboarding,” the new term for starting a job. Neither of my granddaughters went to the office on their first day at work. They were, yep, tasked with “onboarding” remotely. Back in the Neolithic, it was fun to go to work on the first day of a new job, now called a “role.” You took your first step into a whole new world. You met people who would be your colleagues. Some might become your friends.

As for onboarding, we used to call it orientation. Getting oriented means something: finding your place within a complex system, your place of employment, with its physical, social, and hierarchical structure and division of labor. “Onboarding” is an awkward term, compounded of a preposition and a gerund, that doesn’t mean much of anything.

In an email from the ever trendy Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MoMA Design Store announced, “We are sunsetting our rewards program.” Please! MoMA patrons are smart enough to get that it's bad news, however euphemized.

It’s not so much the particular examples. It’s the ruthless torture of the English language that gets to me. Turning a noun into a verb instead of using a perfectly good verb that already exists is like cutting off an arm and a leg, throwing away the arm, and sticking the leg on the shoulder. I wish they’d stop doing it. But they won’t.

What are your least favorite examples? Which do you find yourself giving in and using?

AIn't Necessarily So, Part 1

2026-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Empty Calories

So you don’t have to, I’ve been reading (actually listening to) a couple of hundred AI stories, mostly YouTube podcasts. I sampled sci-fi, dramas, true crime, romance, kinky romance, westerns, and, weirdly, kinky westerns.

The results? As you might surmise, early stories were deeply flawed, texts with plot holes so large they stretched the Bermuda Triangle into a quadrilateral. A few ’stories’ had no plot to speak of, just premise and exposition. “Jack loved Jill and Jill loved Jack and they lived in a shack on the hill out back where she took the pill and they got chill. The end.” Or some such.

Earliest AI attempts often confused gender pronouns, that is, traditional pronouns, and occasionally a couple still pop up. “He tripped over her own feet.”

Many stories are virtual duplicates of other tales, absolute copies of plot and often some of the prose. Although virtual self-plagiarism is slowing, this phenomenon is so common that I suspect some site is handing out ‘personalized’ plots and premises.

Gravitas is not a word associated with AI stories. A few are deeply depressing, but in general, few AI stories nudge emotions among literary sleeping strangers. Immersive, they are not.

Typical Locales

Locations within North America	Outside North America
Nebraska, an early favorite Portland, Seattle, Ohio venues Toronto Riverside, wherever	Spain Britain India Japan

Out Spoken

Reading voices aren’t typically spoken by AI but by ordinary (and flawed) text-to-voice software. The problem is these programs don’t consider the context of words or even whether they are a verb or noun. This results in speech errors. Consider pronunciation of these heteronyms when used without context:

**Common Hypernyms**
• bow • desert • lead	• live • object • present	• tear • wind • wound

The most extreme dates back at least a decade when some genius decided ’No.’ meant number instead of the opposite of yes. That problem has never been fixed.

Some words have apparently been left out of pronunciation dictionaries, sometimes resulting in humorous attempts. For some reason, ‘couch’ sounds like ‘cooch’.

Putting Words on the Counter

When I was a kid, I seldom thought of pastors as riveting, as I swung my legs back and forth under the pew. But the kindly Rev Sommers caught children’s attention. He’d mention the Three Wise Men… and hold up four fingers. He might also hold up four fingers whilst speaking of the five books of the Torah, the Pentateuch. Or the 12 days of Christmas.

And Revelations… Oh God, nothing stirs preachers like Revelations, and the signage should have been easy: the ⑺ seals, the ⑺ spirits, the ⑺ churches, the ⑺ plagues, the ⑺ trumpets, the ⑺ days, the ⑺ hills of Rome. But no… His fingers flew: 2, 4, 6, 3, 5… anything and everything but 7. God love the man for trying.

AIs can currently exhibit the same problem:

“We have to talk,” these five words chill the spine of every man.
She whispered those three little words, “I’m in love with you.”
He shouted three harsh words, “Get down!”

I don’t think these are artifacts of translation from other languages, but a fundamental issue of how AI text is tokenized. One early challenge was to ask your favorite AI how many ‘R’s were in strawberry. That’s been fixed, but counting issues remain.

On to the Drama

Following are popular characteristics of AI stories.

Food

Everyone eats pasta. Everyone. Every restaurant is an Italian restaurant, every meal is either pancakes or pasta. Someone ate Chinese food once and was never heard from again.
Everyone eats pancakes for breakfast. Everyone.
Every man drinks whiskey.
If whiskey isn’t available, he drinks beer.
Every woman drinks white wine.

Dress

Workday women wear dresses and heels even if they’re inspecting a muddy construction site, because they have standards.
Off-work women wear jeans, a cast-off shirt that smells like the hero, and an attractive (to the hero) messy bun. They also go barefoot.
Out-for-the-evening women wear lingerie and dresses that cost more than the hero’s beat-up pickup truck when it was new.
Cheating women forget to wear underwear.
Cheating men forget how prophylactics work.
Female billionaires wear Parisian cocktail dresses and matching Italian patent leather shoes that cost more than six of her employees earn in a month.
Working men either wear oily, paint-stained jeans, or Tom Ford suits.
Male billionaires wear Saville Row tuxedos and matching Italian patent leather shoes that cost more than six of his employees earn in a month.

Dress Code for Story Covers

Bare chests. Male, female, bare chests. Fulsome, pneumatic.
And plunging necklines, very plunging.
Cover pictures and story descriptions may have little or nothing to do with the story or with each other.

Vehicles

Real men drive and sometimes live in their faithful, beat-up pickup trucks.
Men with loads of money ride in black limos.
Men with broken hearts drive restored motorcycles.
Wealthy women drive European cars, most often BMWs.
Working class women drive beat-up Japanese cars.
Girl students drive three year old Honda Civics.
Liberals with money to burn drive Teslas. Who knew?

Families

Working class families still have 2.2 children.
Sugar and Spice remains a thing:
Families have at least one darling girl who’s extremely precocious.
Second daughters may be good or evil.
Until recently, boys didn’t figure much in families until grown.
Adult male children are scheming, plotting ne’er-do-wells.
Wealthy families are cold, hard-hearted exploiters.
Stepmothers are still wicked. Stepfathers even more so.
Grandparents save the day, sometimes from the grave.
Divorces always result in court where the judge lectures the erring spouse.
The other woman or other man get their comeuppance.
Cheating spouses end up fat, sad, broke, and homeless if not in prison.
Fathers surprisingly often win partial or full custody.
Numerous stories feature a man who takes in poor and damaged children, ofttimes acquiring a wife in the process.

Names

From early on, AI stories drew upon a very small pool of names, both surnames and given names. Two of the most common family names are Henderson (often used in a company name) and especially Chen. Chen shows up with such regularity, that I speculate it’s become an ‘in’ joke.

Girl Names	Boy Names
• Emma • Emily • Mary • Olivia • Sophia • Zara	• Charley • Ethan • Liam • Marcus • Nathan • Noah

We see James but not Jim, William but not Bill, Robert but not Bob. Like Chen above, the full name Marcus Webb appears in a number of podcast stories.

Housing

Wealthy individuals live in stark, minimalist penthouses.
Wealthy families live in mansions on family estates.
Ordinary individuals live in barely affordable appartments shared with a flatmate.
Interiors are always exposed industrial brick.
Divorced men live in their loyal, dented, pickup trucks.

Occupations

Men (and sometimes women) are or were Special Forces or Navy Seals who maintain their contacts to deal with inconvenient civilians.
Wealthy working women own major corporations. They operate at the extremes of good or bad.
If married, wealthy women always volunteer for some charity, sometimes not for charitable reasons.
Middle class women work as attorneys, realtors, art gallery owners.
White collar men work as software engineers or architects.
Blue collar men work as construction contractors, mechanics, janitors. Men might also seek a career in logistics.
Billionaires masquerade as custodians, either because of a broken heart / burnout or as undercover bosses.
Billionaires (male and female) discover deep friendships and sometimes love in low level employees such as a charwoman or janitor.

Surprisingly, a number of stories delve into career particulars of protagonists: architecture, banks, stock markets, fashion design, and even arbitrage, which I knew a slight amount about.

Note to AIs: In cases where a crime is being investigated, I’d like to see more work-related detail, how a bookkeeper committed a fraud, how a mechanic sabotaged a car, how a programmer siphoned millions offshore. That’s the mystery reader/writer in me.

But there’s a negative side. Many stories involve attorneys and I strongly suspect treatment of the law is specious or at times downright wrong.

Avocations

Primary parties either have a gym memberships or get one during the story.
Men spend years rebuilding cars, motorcycles, or the backyard shed.
All women have weekly Girls’ Nights Out. In a few dramatic instances, Y-chromosomes in may appear in GNO celebrations.
Couples invite neighbors every weekend for barbecue and beer. As a rule, someone must say or do something exceedingly stupid.

Chores

Men are required to mow their lawns.
Men are required to do all repairs around the house.
Oddly, AI men find they are unable to change simple locks and call a locksmith out of necessity.

Romance

Factoid: Dating web site statistics routinely show women rate 80% of men as average or below. More narrowly, 2-3% of men receive more than 90% of the attention. This may influence AI storytelling.
Sorry, mere millionaires need not apply. AI dramas are saturated with billionaires. I reached a point when I spotted ‘billionaire’ in the description, I’d skip the story.
Factoid: It’s not well advertised, but unlike men, as a woman gains wealth, her preference for high-value men decreases and her mating acceptiveness broadens. That said, a number of dramas feature billionaires who fall into relationships with the poor, the abused, and the wounded.
To be sure, numerous boy/girl next door stories are found in podcasts, albeit often with a background or even a plot point of pain from deception.

Common Vocabulary

At one point, if I heard the word ‘palpable’ one more time, I was going to assassinate the perpetrator, man or machine. AI vocabularies have expanded over time so some phrases aren’t seen as often, but here are a few to look out for.

**Repetitive Words**
• billionaire (spare me) • clarity (in relationship)	• palpable (see below)^† • plated (food)	• quirk (expression) • smirk (as verb)

^† “The buzz in the air was palpable.” Wait, what?

Common Phrases

Common opening:

“My name is Mallory Mopbucket. I’m 44 years old…”

Common Verbiage

Smelled/tasted like (concrete noun) and (emotion):

“It tasted like old wine and regret.”

“There’s a difference.”
“Something shifted…”
“Smile didn’t quite reach his/her face.”
“His/her suit cost more than my apartment”
“The brief touch of his hand said everything.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Eyes unreadable.”
“You make me feel seen.”
“His/her/my breath hitched.”
“… without hesitation.” (often after hesitating)
“xxx told me everything I needed to know.”
‘Not’ descriptions:

“He wasn’t smart and he wasn’t handsome.”

At one time, key events happened at 03:11.

Larger Structures

Until recently, AI writing relied upon minimal linguistic structures. For example,

“AI stories recycle a few major sentence and paragraph structures.”
“Structures?”
“Yes, for example, repeating a word or two as a question.”
“A question?”
“They resort to questions as a writing device.”
“Device?”
“Stop it before I strangle you.”
“Strangle?”

Genres

Successful adaptability and adoptability of AI varies widely. Non-fiction quickly learned it had to fact check, as lazy lawyers learned the hard way. Now it threatens academia when students invite AIs to write their papers. This is an arena that desperately needs how to distinguish AI authoring.

Fiction is much trickier. I’ve read/listened to a couple of hundred AI stories, mostly podcasts.

Mystery Writing

I’m uncertain if I’m sad or glad to report our mystery genre has not profited from AI. They haven’t been successfully trained about clues and deduction, red herrings and investigative hearings. As writers’ aides, they struggle to suggest hints and misdirection. It’s criminal, but give them time.

Romance

Oddly, AI seems to understand romance better than crime. My main criticism is pacing, that either the story draws out so long that my ADD shuts down interest, or often the reverse, characters who fall in love unrealistically fast, perhaps in a day or two, sometimes within hours. This might have worked in the hellish pressure of World War II, but it fares less well in the cynical days of the 21st century.

Another problem can come from persnickety, prudish mores of certain AIs. One can’t be susceptible to the throb of heaving bosoms if the AI shuts down at the word b*s*m. Or cleavage. Or décolletage. Or, God forgive, manhood. Distinguished members, I apologize…

Westerns

Westerns turn out either moderately good or moderately dull. Predictable they are, Louis L’Amour and Sergio Leone they are not. Oddly, in a topic for another time, they feature giant women. Pray tell.

Sci-Fi

Of all the genres I’ve read, science fiction has fared the best. Perhaps in quiet moments, AIs tell one another stories about their favorite programmer who mastered their error-prone ways and the console operator who gently stroked their keys.

Many SF podcasts have a golden age or early silver age feel. Many center around a problem that only an intrepid human can solve.These stories tend to be gentle and even touching. One particularly common theme has a lonely human adopting a starving alien child. I’m considering a separate article discussing AI sci-fi tales.

Next Week

Today, I discussed using intuition and evolving soft analysis to distinguish whether fiction is likely to be AI generated. We've learned repetition is a major factor, although, as you can tell, the landscape is rapidly shifting.

Next time, Copilot and I will suggest a harder, more rigorous approach and AI tools to expose… AI.

The Washed and the Unwashed (Once Again)

2026-07-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

Literary fiction, genre fiction. What are the differences?

I fully understand that we've discussed this and argued about it many times, at this blog and elsewhere, but the question is still asked--and I still agree that it's an interesting subject.

And an important subject, to those of us who write and (try to) publish fiction, and especially short fiction. Why? Because even though markets for our work seem to be fading as we speak, those markets that remain are usually looking for either literary stories or genre stories. But not both. So, to avoid wasting our time and the editors' time, we need to know and understand the difference.

"Okay, then," says the beginning writer, or the hopelessly bored dinner companion, "what IS the difference between literary and genre?"

Views and Opinions

Some have said literary fiction is an Oprah's Book Club pick and genre fiction is a "beach read." Others say lit fiction is what you find in The New Yorker and genre fiction is what you find in AHMM, Asimov's, etc. I once read someplace that literary stories are good for you and genre stories just taste good. (I like that one.) My wife says literary stories are what she watches on TV and genre stories are what I watch. One of the most straightforward observations I've heard, although it's wrong, is that genre fiction is mystery, Western, SF, romance, and horror, and that literary fiction is everything else.

I've even heard some rude folks say that literary fiction should be read by those who want to be challenged mentally, and that genre fiction should be read only by the mentally challenged. Others, just as rude and not to be outdone, say that reading too much literary fiction can make you mentally challenged.

In my short-story writing classes, I used to tell students that so-called literary works deal mainly with relationships, emotions, and "the meaning of life," while genre writing deals mostly with action, excitement, and adventure. I think that's a pretty fair definition.

Examples

An extreme example, I think, of a literary story is Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." It's a short piece about a guy who hikes into a pine forest, pitches a tent beside a river, spends the night, and fishes for trout, and that's pretty much it. There's no plot, no conflict, nothing except one character doing a lot of thinking and (hopefully) making the reader think as well, about implied but never-mentioned subjects like war and rehabilitation. There's also symbolism, as he watches the river (like his own life) flow past him.

The opposite extreme, the ultimate genre story, might be something I remember hearing in elementary school, a story called "The Hook." You've all heard it: (1) A teenaged boy and girl go out parking despite warnings that a deranged killer with a prosthetic hook is on the loose, (2) they think they hear someone sneaking around outside their car while they're romantically involved, (3) they bug out for the dugout, screaming and spraying gravel, (4) they later decide they overreacted and probably really didn't hear anything at all, and (5) when they get to the girl's house and the boy walks around the car to open her door for her, there's a hook hanging from the passenger-side door handle. No deep meanings there, no profound messages, no disillusioned or dying or suicidial characters. The whole story is plot--a twist-ending plot designed to scare the bejesus out of you--and the characters are there only to carry out the storyline. And it works.

Straddling the fence

Sometimes the difference between literary and genre is obvious: The Grapes of Wrath on one end of the field, let's say, and a Rambo movie on the other. But sometimes, as is true of many things in this life, the lines can get a little blurry.

James Lee Burke's mystery novel Cimarron Rose is considered by some to be both genre fiction and literary fiction, mainly because of his use of beautiful, elegant, descriptive language; crime novels like Mystic River, L.A. Confidential, and The Silence of the Lambs combine the categories because of the strength and depth of their characters; and classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and Shane are a mix of literary and genre mostly because of the life lessons they teach. Scout Finch and Bobby Starrett both undergo extreme changes in the way they look at life and their fellow man, and many consider this process of "becoming a different person during the course of the story" to be the single most important gauge of whether a piece of fiction belongs on the literary side of the courtroom.

Lucky with critics, unlucky at love

One thing you can count on: the critics will like you if you succeed at writing literary fiction, and the public will like you if you succeed at writing genre fiction. There's a reason that genre fiction is also called "commercial" fiction and "popular" fiction: it sells. Stephen King once said, and I'm paraphrasing, that if you specialize in writing literary fiction there's a good chance you might find yourself sitting down with your family one night to an Alpo-and-noodles casserole.

Does that mean that all of us who actually want to earn something (rather then just learn something) should try to write only genre fiction? Of course not. I think you must write the kind of stories and novels that you most enjoy reading, and feel comfortable writing. If you try to do otherwise . . . well, you'll probably fail.

It's sometimes not even safe to try to write in more than one genre. Some can do it effectively (Nora Roberts/J.D.Robb with her romances and mysteries, Loren Estleman with his mysteries and Westerns, etc,), but it's not easy. I don't know either of those authors, but I would bet the house and farm that both of them enjoy reading the two genres they've chosen to write in. And my hat's really off to those who can successfully write both literary novels and genre novels. There are many, but Larry McMurtry and Ed McBain/Evan Hunter come first to (my) mind. I still find it impressive but hard to believe that the same writer created both Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment.

More Opinions

The often-stated view that literary fiction is character-driven and genre fiction is plot-driven is correct, I think, but it's an oversimplification. To be successful, both categories need engaging plots and interesting characters. But I do agree that in literary fiction the characters are probably more important than whatever it is they're doing, and in genre fiction what they're doing is more important than who they are. As you probably know by now, I love to quote Stephen King, and I often find myself thinking about his observation of literary vs. genre. "Literary fiction," King once said in an interview, "is about extraordinary people doing ordinary things. Genre fiction is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things."

Here's another quote that I wrote down in a notebook long ago--I think it's attributed to Bill Stephens: "The characters in literary fiction spend so much time thinking, they never get around to doing anything. They constantly are confronted with deep issues of: Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do? Where am I going? Why can I not love/be loved? . . . and a myriad of other 'Woe is me' considerations. There just is no time left to do much."

Alas, there is also no time left to do much in this post. Let me say, though, that I am primarily as genre reader and a genre writer. I admit it. I do occasionally read and enjoy literary works, I certainly appreciate the effort and talent that it took to write them (I've actually sold some stories to literary journals), and I understand that many folks prefer to always read and write that kind of fiction. As Seinfeld would say, "There's nothing wrong with that."

But, God help me, I usually prefer to wallow among the unwashed. I simply LOVE stories like Die Hard, Jaws, Psycho, Blazing Saddles, and The Big Lebowski, and I love the goosebumps I get when I think of "The Hook."

I also still remember the childlike excitement I felt a few years ago when I heard about an upcoming movie called Cowboys and Aliens, featuring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. Good grief, I thought--James Bond and Indiana Jones, fighting it out with Predator? How could that not be fun?

How about you? Do you like to write, and read, literary fiction? Genre fiction? Both? If you're a writer, have you been successful in either, or both? I'd love to hear your thoughts on all this, in the comments section.

Over and out.

Crime Scene Comix Case 2026-07-038, Grin n Bear It

2026-07-17T02:00:00.000-04:00

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.



	© www.FutureThought.tv

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

In Memoriam: Philip Kerr (1956-2018)

2026-07-16T00:16:23.648-04:00

(Quick Stolen Truck Update: The police recovered it! The case is still open but I will post more about it once I am able! Today's Post: When Scottish mega-author Philip Kerr died in 2018, I wrote the eulogy below for Kerr-one of my own all-time favorite authors, crime fiction or otherwise. Now that the Bernie Gunther novels are being adapted for broadcast beginning later this year on Apple TV+ with Jack Lowden–River Cartwright in the equally terrific Apple TV+ series SLOW HORSES–attached to play Gunther and Colin Firth (COLIN FIRTH!!!) attached to play Gunther's mentor on the Berlin Homicide Squad in a script adapted from Kerr's final novel, METROPOLIS, completed as he was dying–a prequel and origin story for the main character, set in pre-Nazi Weimar Berlin during the late 1920s. And get this: Peter Straughan (TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY, and CONCLAVE) wrote the script and is showrunning it! In light of all of this great news, and in the interest of continuing to give July a positivity that is an exact counterpoint to the dark days that were June, 2026 [again, stolen truck!], I am reposting my piece celebrating Philip Kerr, in hopes that this might serve as an introduction of sorts for readers who have yet to encounter either the late Mr. Kerr, or his most celebrated creation: Bernie Gunther!)

On Friday, March 23rd, 2018, I got the word from an old friend that a mutual old friend had died. Crime writer and freelance editor Jim Thomsen texted me that Phillip Kerr died of cancer that day, aged just 62.

I suppose that in the strictest sense Mr. Kerr and I were not actually friends. I never met him in person. The closest I got was trying and failing to find him in the green room before the Edgar Awards in 2016, the year he was nominated in the Best Novel category for his book The Lady from Zagreb.

And yet, I do consider him a friend. In much the same way that one girl in the movie Ten Things I Hate About You says of William Shakespeare, "We're in a relationship," I think of Philip Kerr as an unwitting mentor, whose works have both delighted and provoked me.

And more, they made me want to work harder at the craft, to whet the edge of my facility with the written word, to forge characters who breathed and sweated and threatened and quailed and laughed and hated and fairly jumped off the page.

Philip Ballantyne Kerr was, by most accounts, a study in contradictions. Scottish-born, but no lover of Scotland, the child of devout Baptist parents who, by his own admission knew early on in life that "Jesus and I weren't going to get along," and a man who trained as a lawyer, yet despised the notion of practicing law.

An outsider by temperament, Kerr was bullied by other kids in school–and even teachers–in part because of his dark complexion. He later poured these experiences, and the feelings of isolation which attended them, into his fiction.

The result, in part, was Bernie Gunther.

Kerr's most famous creation, Gunther was, like Kerr himself, a study in contradictions: a former kriminalinspektor on the Berlin police department's famed Murder Squad, Gunther was a decorated veteran of World War I who lost his first wife in the flu epidemic which came hard on the heels of that war. A cop whose career thrived during the Weimar Republic, and who resigned from the police soon after the Nazis swept into power in 1933. Kerr once neatly summed Gunther up in a single sentence: "Oscar Wilde with a Walther PPK."

And yet Gunther eventually finds himself coerced into working for the Nazis. The reason they tolerate him (even as they disparage him as a "Jew-loving Bolshevik," among other things) is because they need someone with Gunther's talents. As Kerr has none other than the villainous Reinhard Heydrich put it to Gunther: Nazis are good at cracking skulls and shooting people. Any thug can do that. But when you need a good detective...

It's an effective set-up. But what Philip Kerr wrote was so much more than superb historical crime fiction. Like all great literary stylists, he was able to move fiction into the realm of great art: not so much literature as a brilliant expression of the universality of the human condition. Kerr possessed a knack for helping his readers understand, even sympathize, with people whose experiences seemed on the surface so vastly different from those of the reader.

Kerr proved especially adept at channeling the zeitgeist of early 20th century Germany, painting a portrait of these people (many of them fictional doppelgängers of actual historical figures) which was by turns scathing and sympathetic, unblinking, hard-edged, and in the end, fair. And in his Gunther novels he would return again and again to one of the questions which has haunted the world in the years since Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker: Why did the German people allow Hitler and his gang of thugs to rise unchecked in the first place?

Kerr's narrator Gunther is a brooder, so he is the perfect vessel for this and other existential questions posed to and about the people and the time. In the prologue to Greeks Bearing Gifts (second to the last of the Gunther books in order written, final one in the series chronologically), Kerr has his protagonist attempt–not for the first time–to answer this question:

But how is one ever to explain what happened? It was a question I used to see in the eyes of some of the American guests at the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat where, until recently, I was a concierge, when they realized I was German: How was it possible that your people could murder so many others? Well, it's like this: When you walk through a big fish market you appreciate just how alien and various life can be; it's hard to imagine how some of the fantastic, sinister, slipper-looking creatures you see laid out on the slab could even exist, and sometimes when I contemplate my fellow man, I have much the same feeling.

Myself, I'm a bit like an oyster. Years ago–in January 1933, to be exact–a piece of grit got into my shell and started to rub me the wrong way. But if there is a pearl inside me I think it's probably a black one. Frankly, I did a few things during the war of which I feel less than proud. This is not unusual. That's what war's about. It makes all of us who take part in it feel like we're criminals and that we've done something bad. Apart from the real criminals, of course; no way has ever been invented to make them feel bad about anything. With one exception, perhaps: the hangman at Landsberg. When he's given the chance, he can provoke a crisis of conscience in almost anyone.

The question haunts Gunther throughout the series, and since Kerr mastered the art of the non-linear plot thread beginning with 2011's Field Gray, he was able to revisit this central theme of his Gunther novels in a variety of inventive ways.

Kerr was a prolific writer by any stretch of the imagination. He wrote other series (including a recent triad of thrillers centered around a soccer team–soccer apparently being his favorite sport), a variety of standalone thrillers, even an acclaimed series of children's books!

I confess I haven't read any of the non-Gunther books yet. Now, unfortunately, it seems I'll have an opportunity to catch up on the rest of this remarkable writer's canon. And I have been looking forward to delving into his series of children's books with my son once he's old enough (they're middle reader books, a la Harry Potter, and my son is five, so I've got some time).

With this entry I have done my best to pay homage to a powerful artist whose work has had a galvanizing effect on my own. As with trying to capture the essence of all wondrous things, the effort strikes me as a bit like trying to describe an eclipse to a blind man: you're doomed to only do justice to one half of the experience.

All that said, my life is the richer for having known Philip Kerr in the context of his fiction. And isn't that really all we can ask of great art?

Thanks, Philip. And may you rest in peace, my friend.

*. *. *

See you in two weeks!

Always Be Sure, Please, To Call It Research

2026-07-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

This piece might be useful to some people. We shall see.

Recently I have noticed a number of writers talking about doing research for their fiction, especially historical fiction. Well, I spent 41 years as a librarian helping people with research, so I thought I might offer a few bits of advice.

I'm not going to talk about sources because they change with some speed. And besides, I moderated a panel of librarians at Left Coast Crime this year and you can find some of our recommendations here.

What I want to talk about is some principles on finding sources. Here goes.

Principle 1. Wouldn't it be nice to have a highly trained research assistant at your command? Surprise! You do. They work at the public library and they are paid with your tax dollars whether you use them or not. You can call, text, email, or visit. Don't be shy. If you give a reference librarian a question they can spend a couple of hours digging into you are making their day.

And here is a subclause that is probably out of date but worth mentioning: If you ask a librarian for research help be as specific as possible. I think the use of search engines has probably made this problem less common, but when I started out a lot of people seemed to think they weren't permitted to ask for what they really wanted, so we had conversations like this one I had with a college student in the early eighties:

Q: Where are your books on religion?

A: Most are upstairs under the letter B (Note: We used the Library of Congress system). But are you after anything more specific?

Q: Yes, books on Islam.

A: Great. Any particular book?

Q: The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Well, that shrank suddenly, didn't it? (And by the way, the Autobiography is typically shelved under E for American history.)

Principle 2. A lesson I learned long before the Internet: No matter how obscure your subject is, someone thinks it is the most fascinating topic in the world. Find that person and you may wind up begging them to stop giving you information.

One way to hunt for that source is to look for websites related to your topic. Can you find a way to contact the person who created it? Yahtzee!

Principle 3. You have probably figured out that not all information is available for free on the Internet. I am especially thinking of scholarly articles. You need to look at databases (a stupid term libraries use (mostly) for digital periodical indexes), but your public library doesn't have all the ones you were hoping for.

Okay, is there a college or university in your area? You can look at their website and see what databases they have, but, of course, they are only available to their own students. Bummer!

Don't panic. Contact the librarians there and ask: 1. Is your library building open to the public? And if it is: 2. If I go there in person can I use your databases?

The university where I am a professor emeritus lists 47 databases under the subject of History, including:

* American History and Life

* America's Historical Newspapers

* American Prison Newspapers

* Historical Statistics of the United States

And so on.

Principle 4. What if you learn of the existence of the perfect article but no library you can access has it? You contact your public library but they say no; getting you a copy would cost them a billion kajillion dollars because of the APAGEP Factor. (Academic Publishers Are Greedy Evil Parasites).

Go back to Principle 2. The author of that perfect article is the person who finds your subject so fascinating. Contact them and they may be delighted to send you a free e-copy of their article. You aren't depriving them of anything because they wouldn't get any of that billion kajillion dollars anyway. (See APAGEP above.)

Principle 5. If you are trying to dig beyond the obvious search engine, familiarize yourself with the tools of Boolean logic. For example, if you go to Google Scholar and search for:

private detectives nineteenth century chicago boston

...you will get less-focused results than if you search for:

"private detectives" "nineteenth century" (chicago OR boston)

Thus endeth today's lesson. Best of luck with your research. I hope you get an A+ or, better yet, published.

My Current Life in Haiku

2026-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Productivity

A revered memory from

My younger days, sigh