In my neighborhood, children don’t trick-or-treat. This seems incredibly sad to me, as I adored the whole process when I was young—dressing up, rinigng doorbells, getting the cool treats, sorting and trading with my siblings for what we wanted. But I understand my neighborhood is not the only one where parents would rather send their…
According to the LA Times, new photos of Wyatt Earp’s early life came to light this week when two brothers discovered Earp’s personal photo album in an antique shop. Inside the worn, leather-bound album were more than two dozen tiny tintype and carte de visite pictures showing Earp as a child, a teenager and a…
Great news for fans of Mark Harmon. He’s set to play the lead in John Sandford’s Certain Prey movie on USA. The movie will air for the first time Sunday, November 6 at 9pm. No word as yet from USA about whether there will be more Prey movies, but one assumes that if this one…
According to UPI, last week a fifty-foot bridge was stolen in Pennsylvania. The estimated value of said bridge was $100,000, and officials believe it was stolen to be sold for scrap metal. But the strange doesn’t stop there. As I discovered when searching the Web for more information, this is actually not the only time…
The New York Post reported today on the capture of a library-robbing rat by a tough NYC bookseller. Andrew Hansen has allegedly been stealing books (mostly graphic novels) from the New York Public Library and reselling them to various used bookshops around town. He’s had his library privileges revoked, been banned from the Strand, but…
Blame Google Alerts for sending this one our way during Sports Week here at Criminal Element. According the The Independent (UK), “Inmates at a jail in South Wales have lodged a formal complaint with the prison authorities – because they want more sports channels on TV.” Say what? I thought prisoners were supposed to get…
Nine years ago, Charles Ardai, founder of Hard Case Crime, first heard about The Cocktail Waitress, the last novel written by noir great James M. Cain before he died in 1977. The book had never been published and no one seemed to know where the manuscript had ended up. Ardai knew the book would be…
Perhaps because my own family had more than a few “boundary issues” and privacy was at a minimum, I’ve always been fond of mysteries that focus on long-hidden family secrets. In her newest novel, Hell To Pay, Wendy Corsi Staub reveals more buried secrets than any genealogical excavator could possibly hope to find. In many…
Have you ever wondered what happens to a book after it leaves your hands when you donate it to a library sale, leave it at a hotel’s trading library, or just forget it on the bus? Have you ever wished you could track your pulp? Then BookCrossing is for you. With BookCrossing, you register your…
For those disappointed in the short season Bones will have this year due to Emily Deschanel’s pregnancy (six episodes in the fall, seven in the spring, with the spinoff, The Finder, holding the space in the winter), some good news from Fox: they will be producing four “bonus” episodes as well. That will bring the…
