So it’s New Year’s Day again, is it? I’ve been living in a chocolate fog for the last two weeks and it’s snuck up on me. It’s New Year’s Day and I’m not hung over, and that’s a very good thing. In fact, I haven’t been hung over for a very long time and that’s…
Derek Pacifico’s recent Crime Writer’s Homicide School was another sizzler. This is my third session with Sgt Pacifico, a law enforcement trainer for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. I didn’t need to worry about being bored sitting in a dull classroom in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley for three days. Pacifico is a spell-binding…
Because I’m immersed in my third murder mystery set in Santa Monica, I read other murder mystery authors almost exclusively. Why? I’m interested inthe dark trappings of murder and death. It’s the puzzle. It’s keeping violence and mayhem at a distance maybe. It’s hoping to learn some new wrinkle on human behavior. I’m curious to…
What happens when an idea for a book strikes and won’t leave you alone? What if it’s something you know nothing about? Such as organized crime in Santa Monica as in my second Dave Mason mystery titled Rip-Off? I read Chechen newspapers in English for three years and everything else I could find on the people…
I read Donna White Glaser’s The Enemy We Know with great pleasure. The cover with its bloody knife stood out, particularly the circle with A Letty Whittaker Mystery and the words 12 Step within the triangle, within the circle…
Years ago a group of spiritually-minded forest lovers began hanging mementos of personal significance on the branches of a semi-circle of pines high on the side of a mountain here in California. The site looked onto a distant mountain which, according to the legends of the native people, was the Center of the Cosmos. Someone dragged a…
I’m still thinking about going to the Occupy LA venture last weekend with my friend Mindy Moffat. After a long drive down from the mountains, we parked at the North Hollywood subway station, and seven or eight stops later we got off near Los Angeles City Hall. On the subway were other riders heading to…
The Murder Mystery/Thriller World – Everyone in the mystery and thriller world goes to Bouchercon, named after Anthony Bouchercon the first literary critic to raise mystery fiction to literary status.
Everyone is there to network as well as hear established authors and see what’s new. I went to talk about my debut mystery, No Dice…
I’m a real straight-arrow so I never get to meet the “nose-pickin’, booger-eatin’ morons” that Sgt Derek Pacifico talked about in his Homicide Investigation school for Crime Writers last weekend in Covina, California. For a long time I’ve been collecting “stupid criminal stories”, but Derek topped them all. I just never meet AHs (figure it…
Cal EPA and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control has hit Chemical Waste Management with yet another fine, this time for $400,000 and an order to purchase $600,000 worth of new equipment to properly test the hazardous substances they’re processing. Have they taken down their website? I can’t find it. If I were running the place, I’d be hiding my head in…