Crime authors get to research all sorts of interesting things and last Saturday I spent a fascinating morning at the Fingerprint Bureau at Hampshire Police Support Headquarters at Netley, UK, learning how the fingerprints taken at the scene of crime and of people in police custody are identified. Although I'd researched this before and have had lots of advice from the Fingerprint Team I went there specifically to ask questions that relate to the…

This is my first blog post on Crime Space...I'm the author of "Murder & Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949" (2012, Schiffer). I have a regular blog at www.mikeb63.blogspot.com that has spotlighted crime stories and other things for the past year. Visit my author website www.michaelthomasbarry.com for more…

In his drug war novel Roll Call, Glenn Langohr illustrates how the U.S. has made drugs more desirable by making them taboo, which has increased the demand for them, throwing gasoline on Mexican cartel wars, along with breeding gangs in California's prisons.…

There were usual suspects in the beginning: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, published in 1868, and Emile Gaboriau's first Monsieur Lecoq novel L'Affaire Lerouge, released in 1866 were generally known as the first detective fictions giving birth to this great genre. Occasionally some reserachers were bringing up some records of earlier works here and there; but in…

Luther Longlow is talking about his stubborn daughter, her beau, Sheriff Sylvester Tilghman, and events in Fallen From Grace at http://franorenstein.weebly.com/1/post/2011/12/final-character-interview-fallen-from-grace-by-john-lindermuth.html?

I was asked to be a guest blogger on Dames of Dialogue at http://damesofdialogue.wordpress.com/.  Its a great site for writers and readers.  My contribution is the second one from the top.

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…

It's not a mystery or a crime, but during the 1950s some parents thought rock and roll was criminal. Used to the lovey dovey tunes of the 40s and early 50s, all of a sudden there were these wild-sounding, hip-swiveling acts and parents were really worried that rock and roll would corrupt their youth.

Donald Riggio traces the history of rock and roll from it's R&B…