Oscar Chump!

“What’s that secret you’re keeping?”   When Oscar Chump passed, news of his demise spread through the county like wildfire. By noon, twelve hours after Doc Neilson had reluctantly drawn the white sheet over Oscar’s slack face with a...

The Nottingham Connection…

  When I first met Charlie Resnick, John Harvey’s jazz-loving detective inspector, on the page in 1991, I was thrilled.  Here was a new series from a British crimewriter I hadn’t read before.  Three books in, and I was hooked — on Harvey’s...

The Art of Collaboration!

  In the days before writing romances together as Stephanie Browning, Susan Brown and I wrote mysteries for middle-grade readers. We also co-authored scripts and dabbled in a bit of television, but the following article was, in fact, our first “official”...

The Perfect Pitch: How to Write a Query Letter

  I once had a creative writing student with a marketable manuscript who was absolutely convinced that no one would ever look at her work. She had no writing experience, no publishing history, and no connections. But she did have a PhD in Microbiology, a penchant...