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M. Jaynes

Is a Good Mystery Hard to Find? Part II: The Lehane Addiction

August 6, 2010

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Cover of Shutter Island: A Novel One of our blog readers made an excellent point in response to Part I of this series of blog posts (Thank you Katie!). She stated that most mysteries are more plot-driven than character-driven. [...]

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Is A Good Mystery Hard To Find?

July 23, 2010

Cover of Crooked House (Minotaur Mysteries) As a child, I grew up admiring and reading such super-sleuths as Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown. My tastes changed as I grew older and I found myself drawn to true crime novels where the only mystery was what made a person crack and commit such heinous acts as [...]

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Books That Influence: A Coney Island of the Mind

June 23, 2010

Lawrence Ferlinghetti via last.fm Starting out as a young writer I never wrote stories. Poetry was more my speed. And as a young poet I wrote my share of really, really bad poetry complete with awkward rhymes and sappy subject matter. But somewhere in my junior year of high school I was introduced to a [...]

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Drawing Them In: Advice on Creating Opening Lines

June 7, 2010

Image via WikipediaWhenever I walk into a Barnes and Noble two things happen: 1. I breathe a little easier because being surrounded by books is like therapy for me. 2. After that euphoric experience my senses become immediately overloaded with all the possibilities. Which book should I choose? Do I go with an old reliable [...]

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Frankie “The Gasket” Colletti

May 24, 2010

Image via WikipediaFrankie “The Gasket” Colletti acquired his nickname by killing off hundreds of so-called “Rats” for the Gervasio crime family over the past thirty years. Sitting in the courtroom under the glaring lights the man didn’t move. Not even when his own lawyer smacked the podium next to him did he bat an eye. [...]

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