Woody Allen, the Bard, and Immortality

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Woody Allen was once asked whether he hoped to achieve immortality through his movies or his writings. After a moment’s reflection, he answered, “I hope to achieve immortality by not dying.” I thought of those words as my wife Margi and I took our lawn seats under the stars in Shakespeare Glen in Forest Park…
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“If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On”

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Under a beautiful night sky in the Shakespeare Glen in Forest Park, Margi and I enjoyed one of those perfect St. Louis evenings: a full moon overhead, warm breezes, chilled wine, delicious picnic dinner, and a brilliant and hilarious production of Twelfth Night by the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis. Everything about the production—the cast, the set…
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Mysteries and the Unreliable Narrator

Posted on by Michael Kahn
As a trial lawyer by day and an author by night, I don’t find the “unreliable narrator” an abstract concept. Indeed, I have been mulling over the subject for awhile. I have already posted some musings on this website, but I realized that the topic is particularly relevant to those of us who write or read mystery novels….
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The Rashomon Effect and the Unreliable Narrator

Posted on by Michael Kahn
In my recent musings on unreliable narrators in literature and the law, I kept coming across the term “the Rashomon Effect.” Indeed, Google that term and you will get links to fascinating essays in a variety of fields ranging from psychology to anthropology to sociology to historical interpretations to the law. Stated simply, the “Rashomon effect” is…
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The Unreliable Narrator and the Law

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let us now consider the unreliable narrator. Within the field of literature, the “unreliable narrator” is a storyteller who violates our trust. Most readers start a book quite literally taking the narrator at his word.  The unreliable narrator, however, is a storyteller who provides us with inaccurate or incomplete…
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Don’t Pun Me, Bro

Posted on by Michael Kahn
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently published a piece on Fred Firestone, a friend and St. Louis businessman who travels to New York City once a month to co-host with his daughter Jo an event that the newspaper states “is drawing critical acclaim from the New York media and attracting sellout crowds to a club in Brooklyn for their wild and…
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Nine Mysteries for Literary Snobs: A Compendium

Posted on by Michael Kahn
A while back, I did a post on the Poisoned Pen Press blog about the challenge of convincing literary snobs that there are indeed great works of literature that meet all criteria of that lowly genre known as Mystery. As I explained, there are 3 basic requirements of the genre: (a)  A mysterious murder or missing person or…
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