Spent part of the evening talking over my short story The Body and the Bomb with Marko. This is an Inspector Crandall mystery, one I’ve several I’ve written, in which I had experimented with having a co-investigator, local Constable Nouri. One of his comments sort of threw me for a loop: I don’t really need […]
“There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.” — S.S. Van Dine, “Twenty […]
I’ve been looking for interesting books lately to help with my writing, particularly plotting. I found a great one not too long ago: The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception, by Keith Melton and Robert Wallace (though most of the text is by professional magician John Mulholland) Basically, back in the 1950s, the CIA […]
I haven’t actually forgotten this site! Things have just been a little busy around here (who knew it would be that hard to put in an extra outlet for the A/C, even with someone else doing most of the work?) but I’ve been working hard on planning this novel. (Discussion of plot follows, but no […]
After finishing A Stab in the Dark, I decided to revisit the novella that kicked off my mystery-writing spree, Where Do They Bury the Survivors? If you missed it (easy to do, as it hasn’t been accepted anywhere for publication) it’s a locked-room murder mystery that takes place on a space station in interstellar space. […]
I finished up the most recent short story yesterday afternoon. I trimmed a few scenes, but made up for it by adding a whole other one (I’ll be curious if anyone coming back to this post can figure out which scene was added). It’s a good piece, one of the better mysteries-per-se that I’ve written. […]
I finished up a rough draft of my work-in-progress. I wound up wrapping it up at around 6300 words, though I may expand it a bit on the next draft. I added a scene looking for a particular piece of evidence, and discovered that the character addition from earlier shortened that scene considerably. Now comes […]
Just finished up a good bit of writing: Just shy of a thousand words, net, on the current mystery story, A Stab in the Dark, after going back and making some revisions based on my notes from the plane. Adding a character (now Sgt. Van Rijn) was very much the right thing to do, the […]
Well, that was interesting. Thanks to the thunderstorms, I spent far too much time in an airport yesterday, and didn’t get home until midnight. But the end result was more work on that piece of flash fiction (which may no longer be flash, I’ll have to type it up and word-count) and managed to overcome […]
To commemorate the starting of This Here Blog, I thought I would go back and dig up an essay I wrote last year, looking at the doctrine of Fair Play, and looking at how it can be applied to science fiction. I went through and spruced it up, cut some dead weight, and added some […]
John P. Murphy 