Transmissions
A continuous signal on any and all frequencies about any number of topics. The aim is to be interesting and engaging, without ranting or screeching. If you’re looking for a glimpse of what’s percolating in one writer’s gray matter on any given day, you’ve come to the right place.
Using the Beta Capsule
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 Past Midnight
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...
The Eyes of the World
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...
Resurrected Radio
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...
Short Report
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...
Chinatown Revisited
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...
100 Miles
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...
Requiem for a Pup
We let Wendel go yesterday. He was a 13-year-old collie-shepherd mix who joined our family in the fall of 2013. He was just ten weeks old at the time, and our kids were twelve and ten years old. Several months ago, he started having trouble getting up and down the...
Roger Corman’s “X” Factor
Somewhere during my middle school years in the mid-1970s, I started dialing in to the late-night sci-fi/horror movie of the week that the CBS affiliate in Cleveland (WJW, Channel 8) aired every Friday night after the eleven o’clock news. I was probably twelve or...
A Shadow Takes Shape
The Shadow, the star of his own pulp magazine and a popular radio drama during the 1930s and ‘40s, takes another incremental step closer to his 100th birthday this month. We can be fairly certain that he’s figured out in that stretch of time what evil lurks in the...