One of the most common complaints about mystery novels is that they’re unrealistic. It’s just not believable, the nay-sayers say, for an amateur sleuth to solve a crime that baffles the experts. But a 1980s case from the Australian Outback shows the assumptions upon which that claim is based, and disproves them.

Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, is a huge sandstone…

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My uniform pocket, meanwhile, felt rather heavy. And increasingly hot.

That midnight, while Greentree and those who couldn’t escape continued the search, I rappelled down the outside wall of his apartment building, let myself into his bedroom, and planted the ruddy things in the trouser pocket of the uniform he’d worn the previous day. It seemed a decent enough plan at the time, and my skills weren’t so rusty that I left any fingerprints that would incriminate me. And I must admit to…

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Most commonly, it’s the perpetrator’s fingerprints that land him or her in jail. But in the kidnapping of Charles Urschel, it was the victim’s fingerprints that lead to the capture of a notorious Prohibition era gangster.

 

The crime

Charles F. Urschel, oil millionaire and philanthropist, and his wife Berenice were entertaining their friends, the Jarretts, at the Urschels’ Oklahoma City home with a game of bridge on July 22, 1933, when two bandits armed…

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Yes, you get some formatting errors when you upload your usual word processing doc to Kindle Direct Publishing. And yes, there’s a free and relatively easy way around this problem. I’m preparing a short how-to manual, teaching self-pubbing authors how to format their work for a seamless Amazon.com upload without formatting errors, in four steps. But honestly, the most important part of the process is detailed in the instructions listed on my… Continue