Satire: Great Moments in Crime Fiction History, Part 1

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Great Moments in Crime Fiction History

1494: The Exchequer Rolls document the first recorded sale of Scotch.

1839: Amid a laudanum-induced rampage through Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe utters the nonse phrases “Dupineriffic” and “I smell genre.”

1864: A boarding school chum drops trow and moons Wilkie Collins with a perfectly English, alabaster bum.

1883: A highly attractive female client enters the Pinkerton offices in Wichita, Kansas. The detective on charge makes a note of it.

1919: H.L. Mencken, desperate for a Halloween outfit, settles for a black mask at Woolworth’s.

1922: An automobile ride through the Cotswolds awakes in Agatha Christie a latent desire to murder county folk, school marms and exotic visitors elaborately. She does so again and again, entire hamlets, fortunately only on the page.

1935: Raymond Chandler takes a really, really good look at Los Angeles.

1973: A buddy tells Robert B. Parker that the novel is great. “But,” he says, “it feels like it needs a black guy.”

1984: After years of turning them down, Thomas Harris tries fava beans.

2002: Stieg Larsson witnesses a painful tattoo removal.

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This Blog Last Year: Show Some Love For Effie Perine

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The Best of Blog Bobaloo last year…A favorite character in a favorite work…

Dashiell Hammett earned his place in literary lore if for only for the opening dialogue in The Maltese Falcon. In what has become Hammett’s scene and borrowed into cliché, secretary Effie Perine walks into PI Sam Spade’s office to say: Continue reading →

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Fun With Fiction: “Dearest Clara”

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August 22, 1883

Dearest Sister Clara,

It is quiet here in Pee Wee Valley, for the summer heat makes it all I can do to keep the tobacco tended. Our cow has given birth to a fine young calf with only minor assistance required from myself and Silas Junior, who bestowed on it the name Chester after our President. I do fear the boy will come to regret doing so when it falls upon him to slaughter the beast.

Yesterday I journeyed into Continue reading →

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The Fall and Rise of Draft 1

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Day One

“We’re putting together an anthology,” they say. They have an email to prove it. Very few combinations of five words so excite The Short Story Guy. Maybe “short stories turn me on,” or “sure, we’re a paying market.”

It is not a literary style I’ve written in. Despite that, perhaps because of it, I am intrigued.

I fire up the idea engine.

Nothing happens.

Day Thirty

I have read on this strange literary technique, its shining authors and common subject matter. I have started and abandoned a few concepts. Having tossed out the chaff, now is the time of wheat. Surely, I think, an inspired idea is assured. Any time now.

Nothing Happens.

Day Thirty-Seven Continue reading →

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