This last weekend, my wife, Elizabeth, and I celebrated our seventh anniversary (Monday, October 4).  We left Emeryville on Saturday and drove to what has emerged, over the years of our marriage, as our favorite California neighborhood, the Monterey area.

We always stay in the city of Pacific Gro… Read full post »

Not long after Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, I punched the off-button on MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann’s Countdown show for good.

I started watching Olbermann right after he first appeared on the Colbert Repor-tuh in March 2006. I was drawn to his presence and/… Read full post »

Genre fiction can be thought of as a “conservative” fiction, mostly because of its tight adherence to the traditional storytelling form that was codified way back when in  Aristotle’s Poetics.

The thought is fair. Even so, on occasion, someone brill… Read full post »

Announcing the release of my contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark later this year from Ambler House Publishing in POD and e-book formats!

The contented residents of a sleepy High Sierra paradise know him only as an elderly reclusive landowner who lives alone… Read full post »

“I’d pull my pants down on Times Square if I thought it would get me an audience—”

--attributed to Orson Welles, film maker, magician, wine seller

Earlier this year, this correspondent decided to join the swarm into the brave new world-hive of independent publishing&md… Read full post »

[SPOILER ALERT!]

“History,” a writer named Kevin Briggs once sincerely declared to me, “is better than fiction.”

Kevin’s maxim may be overbroad, but a strong proof for it can be found in the pages of Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre (Harmony; $25./… Read full post »

Early this year, as I’ve done every year for the last several, I set myself the task of reading one book from Western Literature’s Great Canon.

But first a spoonful of autobiography: Where literature is concerned, I’m completely self-taught. I took one American… Read full post »

One of the best novels I read last year was The Devil’s Redhead by Northern California author David Corbett. Just recently, he’s presented highbrow thriller fans another literate, emotional, and gritty nail biter entitled Do They Know I’m Running?, a novel… Read full post »

Greetings Salon members:

Announcing the publication of my contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark for Fall 2010 by Ambler House publishing. The prologue to his ripping, gripping, hair-raising horror yarn it can be read and commented on at  the Scrib'd website.

As for Sam Peckinpah, my essay/rem… Read full post »

 

In Which The Red Room Website for Writers Asks “What’s Your Favorite Children’s Book?” and I Reply.

The first book I ever loved was The World of Pooh by A. A. Milne. I still have my copy, maybe the

only archeological proof that I ever was a small… Read full post »

The following was taken at the Huntington Museum Rose Garden in 2009.

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For over thirty years, eighteen novels, and three collections of novellas, author Peter Straub has blazed himself a unique courageous trail. I first encountered his work in his landmark 1978 novel Ghost Story, a fiction that finally persuaded me,… Read full post »

On February 25, 2007, the Italian composer Ennio Morricone strode onstage at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood for another of the awards that he’s been collecting for over forty years—one that he’d earned dozens of times over—that gold-plate doorstop nicknamed Oscar. With Clint E… Read full post »

One book I finally picked up after months of sidelong glances was The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by British author Kate Summerscale. As I closed it the other night, I decided I was right: Another one I'd waited too long to read.

For all crime readers, fact and fiction alike,… Read full post »