The oldest alley in San Francisco's Chinatown, Ross Alley was originally home to gambling houses and brothels in the wild Barbary Coast days. Today, the narrow passageway between Jackson and Washington Streets retains enough of its character to have been featured in movies like Indiana Jones and the Temple of...

Last weekend the mother of all crime fiction conferences was held in San Francisco. Dubbed "Bouchercon" to honor Anthony Boucher, a crime fiction writer and reviewer who scribbled for the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times, this year's edition of the annual conference drew...

Mike Padilla's debut novel, The Girls from the Revolutionary Cantina, tells the story of a group of Mexican American women in the San Fernando Valley trying to cope with career pressures and romantic relationships while maintaining lifelong friendships. A heartfelt comedy, Padilla...

In my late twenties, I waged a bitter struggle for the affections of a belly dancer named Lotta. This "battle of Lotta" cost more time, money and self-respect than any crusade for companionship from the opposite sex I've undertaken before or since....

Email forgery or "spoofing" involves changing the sender address to make it appear as though an email originated from a different source. Usually it's done with messages sent over the Internet--as opposed to messages sent within a company--and often it's employed with...

As part of a project to raise money for chess schools and clubs, independent publisher Mongoose Press has just released an anthology of chess fiction entitled, Masters of Technique. All the short stories in Masters were donated, editor Howard Goldowsky contributed his time and...

What do the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and Young Junius, a forthcoming crime novel by Seth Harwood, have in common? At first blush, not a whole heck of a lot. But if you do a little research, you'll find they share at least one characteristic: the way...

Last weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the campus of UCLA could be seen as a microcosm of the publishing industry in 2010. With over 130,000 book lovers and more than 400 authors in attendance, the event proved that reading remains popular in Southern California, just...

Raymond Chandler, who along with Dashiell Hammett perfected the American hardboiled detective novel, died a lonely man. Buried at the expense of the county at the Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego, California, he was widowed, childless, and isolated at the time of his...

Invitations to this hush-hush event were limited and could only be picked up in person at the front counter of City Lights Books in San Francisco. Sealed in black envelopes, these ducats featured a noirish, black and white photograph of Ross Alley--a narrow throughway...

Brett Singer may not be a familiar name, but she has the distinction of coming from a great writing family, being the granddaughter of I. J. Singer and grand-niece of Isaac Bashevis Singer. And when "The Petting Zoo"--the novel she was working on when I took her creative writing class...