Okay! Obviously, we have come to the time when I get myself in all kinds of trouble again. So, before we begin, I want to point something out–the last time I took up this topic, a poster to this blog not only signed off for good, but stopped speaking to me.  At all. Ever. And…

Okay, for what it’s worth–I agree with Robert. The use of the word “traditional” for the third kind of detective story on my list is problematic. The problem is, I can’t think of another term, and the distinction is important. I would say, by the way, that both Conon Doyle and Stout wrote soft boiled…

Every once in a while, I screw up a blog post so badly that I have no idea where to start to correct the misimpression I’ve caused, and that turns out to be true today. It seems as if most of you took me to mean that “hard boiled” was anything with a lot of…

A long time ago–around the time I first met Bill–I came up with a kind of schema for classifying detective novels, a way of sorting them out for the purposes of talking about them. The schema used to drive Bill nuts, because, as he said over and over again, “nobody else uses that.”  And nobody…

Okay, I couldn’t help myself.  This http://www.derailingfordummies.com/ appeared on Facebook yesterday, and I’ll admit it so completely floored me I couldn’t respond to it right away.  In fact, it had been so long since I’d seen something quite this idiotic, I’d actually started to thing we were past all this now. Since we seem not…

In general, I don’t have a lot of tolerance for converts.  People who go from left to right or from right to left tend to be more Catholic than the Pope in every ssense of the word, and they also tend to be more apocalyptic.  I get tired. However, today, I found this http://frontpagemag.com/2011/04/22/about-the-birth-certificate/ at…

It’s Sunday, and the first thing I have to do is apologize to some of you.  It is the case that when things go wrong I tend to disappear for a while, but that’s only when things go very, very wrong, or when they entail a lot of getting up ridiculously early and running around.…

Here is something to know about me, assuming you want to know anything at all:  there is something seriously wrong with me on any morning when I prefer to listen to Beethoven instead of Bach. It’s not that I don’t like Beethoven, because I do, in spite of the fact that he seems to have loved…

So, here I am, sitting in a classroom where I am giving an exam, meaning I have nothing to do for an hour and a half except sit here and let them ask me questions, which mostly they don’t do.  I’m giving the exam today because Greg’s surgery is tomorrow, and I know I’m going…

Some days, I will admit, my mind just sort of wanders off.  Right now, it has wandered off here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=781&bih=415&site=search&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=Bodh+Gaya&btnG=Search I don’t actually know if you can get there by clicking on that, but what you should find, if  you can, are images from Bodh Gaya, the Place of Enlightenment, in central India. Bodh Gaya…