Transmissions

I remember when Tony Bennett died just a couple years ago in July of 2023, less than two weeks shy of his 97th birthday. It wasn’t just the end of one singer’s rich and diverse seventy-year career as a steward of The Great American Songbook. It was the end of an era....

The Northeast Ohio writing community is about to lose one of its most valuable resources at the end of this coming week. Before anyone rushes to sound the alarm or launch a campaign of some kind, let me be clear: No libraries are closing. No literary organizations are...

The early years of rock and roll are filled with hits that seem to defy time itself. They sound just as compelling and infectious in the here and now as they did on the day they were recorded and released decades ago. Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (1958) comes to...

My first encounter with Ultraman was sometime in 1969, when I was still in kindergarten. It was one of my classmates, a boy named Mike, who tipped me off. Mike lived on my street, and he had an older brother – a worldly wise fifth grader – who was dialed in to the...

Ten years ago today, I held my breath, threw the switch, and released my debut novel, The Midnight Guardian: Hour of Darkness. Set in 1936, it’s the story of a masked vigilante who takes on a sociopathic crime lord in a fictional metropolis called Union City. Part...

Today is July 4, 2026. I’m well aware of what this day is all about. Like every other American of every other generation, I was introduced to the history and the mythology at an early age. And I’m well aware that this particular July 4 – the 250th anniversary of the...

One of the greatest gifts my father ever shared with me was his vast and detailed memory of the radio programs of his youth in the late 1930s and ‘40s – the detective stories, westerns, comedies, mysteries, and adventure tales that entered the living room of his...

I’m back home and still unpacking – physically and mentally – from ShortCon, the annual one-day writing conference in Alexandria, Virginia, for writers of short crime fiction. Launched in 2024, ShortCon focuses primarily on the writing craft, but also serves as a...

Sometime in the early 2000s, after reading a boatload of American and British literature in high school and college, and an even bigger boatload of crime novels and thrillers in the years after college, I caught the pulp fiction bug. Maybe it started with the Tarzan...

On the centennial of trumpeter and composer Miles Davis’ birth, there’s nothing I can say about him that hasn’t already been said by writers and historians far more knowledgeable about his music – and about jazz in general – than I will ever be. But I can remember the...