The Top Ten Sherlock Holmes short stories When I first sat down to make this list, I thought I’d be deliberating for weeks; sifting through Conan Doyle classics, weighing up excitement, humour, thrills and the exquisite pleasures of deduction. But then I realised I’d already done a lot of this work, for in my […]
The Complete Dr. Thorndyke – Volume II: Short Stories (Part I): John Thorndyke’s Cases the Singing Bone the Great Portrait Mystery and Apocryphal Material (Hardcover) Author Name: R. Austin Freeman Edited by: David Marcum Volume II contains roughly the first half of the Thorndyke Short Stories. In all, there are over forty Thorndyke short stories, spread over […]
The Complete Dr. Thorndyke – Volume II: Short Stories (Part I): John Thorndyke’s Cases the Singing Bone the Great Portrait Mystery and Apocryphal Material Author Name: R. Austin Freeman Edited by: David Marcum Volume II contains roughly the first half of the Thorndyke Short Stories. In all, there are over forty Thorndyke short stories, spread over six […]
If You Can’t Dream Up an Original Idea…Steal One Like most published writers, I’ve moderated quite a few workshops in the art and craft of writing thrillers and mysteries. In virtually every one of these sessions, one of the attendees will invariably raise his or her hand and tell me that they’ve been trying […]
The Redacted Sherlock Holmes (Volume 5) by Orlando Pearson Five sensational Sherlock Holmes stories by Orlando Pearson followed by three meditations hinting at the most radical theory yet about the Great Baker Street Detective. • A Type of Infamy – Holmes investigates a mysterious disappearance in 1938; • The Fourth Student – shocking events in […]
Collaborating on Novels: A Bed of Roses or Forest of Thorns? It started as an experiment. When we met, we were both journalists and got used to sharing and discussing what we were reading and what we were writing. We started to have conversations about the idea of writing together. It was all very speculative. […]
FROM JACK REACHER TO SHERLOCK HOLMES THE ENDURING POWER OF PREQUELS “LET’S START AT THE VERY BEGINNING” Those of you humming the song that begins with the title of this piece will likely know the next line is “A very good place to start…” but, for us authors, that’s usually not true. Think about […]
The World of Small-Town Policing I’m a rabid fan of crime fiction, especially hard-boiled procedurals. Back in the ’70s, I cut my literary teeth on Joe Wambaugh and Elmore Leonard. These days my favorites include Mike Connelly, Don Winslow, Tami Hoag, and T. Jefferson Parker. Each of them is known for procedural detail and characters […]
John Hart’s Top Ten Reads As a novelist, one of the great ironies and frustrations of life is that I am rarely able to read as much as I’d like. Strange, I know, but there’s a reason for that, and the cause is unavoidable. Many qualities contribute to the creation of fine writing, and […]
Lisa Gardner’s Top Five Writing Tips When I started my career as a suspense novelist, I was seventeen years old. I wrote my first novel on a shared computer in the college computer lab during my free time after my classes, homework and work-study job were all completed. Basically, I drafted three unpublished novels in […]