GO FIGURE: FIGURING OUT YOUR CHARACTERS AS THEY FIGURE THINGS OUT FOR YOU  As a writer of thrillers and mysteries, my job is, in part, to have my protagonists figure stuff out under tense, suspenseful circumstances, usually with life-or-death consequences. If I’m working on a cozy, my hero or heroine might be trying to solve […]

CONFESSIONS OF A STORY-TELLER by Rennie Airth I can’t say for certain when the urge to tell a story first came to me, but I suspect it was when I read Kipling’s The Jungle Book. It wasn’t a mystery, of course, like the books I was later to write, but I can remember to this […]

Lisa Unger and John Lescroart on Steinbeck I don’t usually list John Steinbeck as one of my favorite authors or early influences, though he is unarguably one of our finest writers. Steinbeck was a clear-eyed chronicler of American life in a certain place, at a certain time, for a certain person who might not otherwise […]