by Eve Fisher We do get some interesting crimes in South Dakota.  Some of it is that, when you have a very few people scattered over very large distances, privacy can lead to... odd behavior.  Or criminal behavior.  As Sherlock Holmes once said,  “It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” “You horrify me!” “But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. Th ..read more

  I just spent a long  weekend in Bellevue, WA for Left Coast Crime: Seattle Shakedown, and I had a great time. More than 500 mystery writers and readers. Saw a lot of old friends (including SleuthSayers Michael Bracken and Brian Thornton) and made some new ones.  Excellent organization and a very nice hotel. If I have a complaint it is that the out-of-staters will get a completely false idea about our weather.  It was dry and fiftyish the whole time.  I don't suppose the committee is responsible for that, though. A few things you should never miss at LCC: The firs ..read more

Recently, Agatha Award-winning short-story author Toni L.P. Kelner asked if she could run a guest post here on SleuthSayers, highlighting this year's Agatha Award finalists. Toni will be moderating our short story panel next week at Malice Domestic. I happily agreed. — Barb Goffman Killing in Different Ways by Toni L.P. Kelner Television performer Stephen Colbert says, “I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn’t like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would ..read more

Recently my six-month-old Bouvier puppy mistook one of my Sue Grafton books for a chew toy. I apologize to anyone who is squeamish about crime scene photos, but this is what I had to deal with. During her life and since her death, I cannot count the number of conversations I’ve had about Sue Grafton and her character, Kinsey Millhone.  Women detectives in novels get me every time. My bookshelf and bank account concur. Like any love affair - I’m committed, invested and have opinions. After I taped the cover of the book, I looked at Sue Grafton’s site and found a quote from N Is ..read more

Words. They're kind of important in writing. Words are comprised of letters, optimally in the correct order. I'm a liberal arts major and know these things. And yet. The mind and typing fingers can struggle. I'm actually a darn good speller, or I was. I hung in there on spelling bees as a kid, and nobody geeked out more on PSAT vocabulary than this guy. One thing the young me could've learned better was typing. My mom considered typing a life skill and made us take runs at her IBM Selectric. A sweet machine, the Selectric. The clack of keys, the thump of ball element, precision stuff enginee ..read more

When I dreamed of writing a novel in high school – my goal was to be a paperback writer, like the song. Twenty years after graduating from high school my first novel was published as a paperback original – GRIM REAPER. An early definition of a paperback book said it was of lower quality than a hardback original books and written for mass consumption. Yep, that was GRIM REAPER.  I've been a paperback writer since (with occasional hardback editions of my paperbacks and lots of eBooks), so I hit the mark. Along the way I learned how to write a short story and have had many publish ..read more

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 ..read more

“We were just leaving the movies - Casablanca, with Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan…”  I had the idea one time to use this as the opening of a story, to signal it was alternate history.  This casting was supposedly floated, at some point, but it was a public relations stunt; Hal Wallis, the producer, later said he never wanted anybody but Bogart.  Quentin Tarantino published a book, year before last, called Cinema Speculation, and my first thought was that he’d speculate.  For example, Howard Hawks once claimed that he was set to direct Casablanca, and Michael Curtiz was a ..read more

        On the day this blog posts, life takes my traveling companion and me to southern Florida. The overlapping events provided an ideal time to resume my irregular series of posts on Constitutional Tourism, a geographic review of major Supreme Court decisions on criminal law matters. For those interested in where their law comes from, today we're venturing to The Sunshine State.      No surprise to Crockett or Tubbs, but drugs flow through South Florida. Much of this region's Supreme Court case law deals with drug interdiction. Hopefully, the fol ..read more

I’m in my seventies, which makes me officially an old person.  In our euphemism-afflicted age, the preferable term is Senior, though I still think that label is better suited to someone in the twelfth grade of high school. Another sop to this PC frenzy is to call someone like me older.  Okay, older than whom?  My brother is older than me, and always will be.  He was when I was ten and he was fourteen. They say you’re only as old as you feel.  I feel like I’m in my seventies, at least with regard to aching joints and memory lapses.  The rest of the brain appea ..read more