First Review of The Dead Hand

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Writing is a lonely pursuit. You spend all those hours on your own, writing and rewriting your novel, hoping that it’s working, hoping that your readers will enjoy it, worrying that maybe you’re kidding yourself, that maybe you’re producing the literary equivalent of the Hollywood bomb. Thus nothing makes an author more jittery than news…
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Fire Birds: An Israeli Murder Mystery Film (June 7, 2016)

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Murder mystery writer introduces murder mystery film to murder mystery fans at this year’s St. Louis Jewish Film Festival. The writer is me. The film is Fire Birds. And if you’re a fan of the noire mystery movie–a rich tradition that dates back to such classics as The Maltese Falcon and The Third Man while forever reinventing…
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Baseball Walk-Up Songs for Mystery Detectives

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Time for my annual baseball post. Last year I wrote one on the Top 10 Baseball Walk-Up Songs in Literature. For the uninitiated, a walk-up song is that hard rock, hip hop, or country tune that blares over the speakers throughout the stadium as the ballplayer walks from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box. True…
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In Praise of the Lowly Weed

Posted on by Michael Kahn
If, like me, you have a lawn out your front door, then taking a Word Association Test using “dandelion” will likely trigger an array of negative terms, including perhaps Weed B Gon and other chemical warfare products offered by Scotts, Ortho, and Monsanto. Thus imagine my surprise at the nearly childlike wonder I experienced earlier this…
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Dylan, Hemingway, and a Peek Behind the Curtain

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Bob Dylan made headlines this month when a group of Oklahoma institutions announced their acquisition of an extensive archive of Dylan’s private work. According to the Bob Dylan Archive website at the University of Tulsa,  the trove includes 6,000 items of “never-before-seen handwritten manuscripts, notebooks and correspondence; films, videos, photographs and artwork; memorabilia; personal documents; unrecorded…
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Jellyfish and Herrings and Bombs, Oh My!

Posted on by Michael Kahn
I have a chronic condition that many of you share. What is it? A  nagging curiosity about the origins of certain words and expressions. The most recent flare-up occurred last week on a family vacation along the Riviera Maya south of Cancun, Mexico. As I walked with my grandson Oliver down to the beach, we passed…
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Some X-Rated Thoughts

Posted on by Michael Kahn
As an intellectual property lawyer by day, I can confirm that my area of law is, to quote Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, “the gift that keeps on giving the whole year.” Not a month goes by without the arrival of yet another quirky case. Copyright law? Hard to top JCW…
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“You Can’t Make This Stuff Up”

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Fiction versus reality. I have written occasionally, and contemplated more often, the profound wisdom behind the old saying that truth is stranger than fiction. The laws governing the real world are, in fundamental ways, different than the laws governing the world of fiction. Coincidence is a fact of life–right out there in the open, obvious…
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