I imagine those of you who are mystery writers have also received this memo. Everyone is writing murder mysteries these days. There are mysteries that open an aperture into the world of dogs, of Boston gamblers, Icelandic housewives, Venetian art thieves, and even...
A work of fiction has to be about something, doesn’t it? And really good books are about a lot of things, some of them heavy social issues. Raymond Chandler’s novels are about crime and corruption in the 1940s in a place he called Bay City, in truth, Santa Monica. No...
I’ve asked myself countless times why I’m fascinated enough with murder and mayhem to write three crime fiction novels about Santa Monica? Why do I feel such glee in learning the forensic details of death and dying? If I were alone in this fascination I’d...
My second mystery novel, Rip-Off, is a whodunit about Chechen organized crime set in Santa Monica, not Boston. The news unfolding in Boston has me and the rest of the world gob-smacked, as the Brits say. It may be that Chechnya in the end has nothing to do with the...
My friend Vicky Bingaman is a wildlife rehabber who takes in injured creatures, nurses them back to health, and pushes them back out into the wild. You can’t feed a Cooper’s hawk or a rat snake on cat kibble. So when I see a squirrel on the roadway who has succumbed...
