I was surfing Google and found this San Diego Tribune article about police officers carrying saps: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20061007/news_7m7saps.html

I'm in the middle of A Rage in Harlem by Chester B. Himes and there is a big difference as to how he introduces the main chacaters to his series of books.

In the first paragraph of the first chapter of The Maltese Falcon we get a detailed description of Samuel Spade. Through the course of the novel where we are Sam Spade is as well. Philip Marlowe guides us through every step of Raymond Chandler's novels.

In A Rage in Harlem Grave Digger Jones and…

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There is a riveting account of a police raid in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle. You can check it out here.

The introduction of The Ultimate Spy Book has a section titled "Who Spies?". It divides the motive of spies into 4 categories, encompassed by the acronym M.I.C.E.: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego.

Money is pretty straight forward. Financial gain or financial troubles are strong motives for just about anybody.

Ideology is the beliefs a spy has in the country they spy for. The book mentions people who believed in communism and spied for the USSR. On the other hand I…

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Really, I can't.

The case is The People vs. Dota, 33 F3d 1179. A business president is sweet on his secretary, but she won't return the favor because she has a boyfriend. So the president hires someone to kill the boyfriend. The guy he hires turns around and hires someone else to do the killing for him. That guy hires 2 more people to help him.

They beat the boyfriend with bats and shoot him. The boyfriend survives. When the secretary phones work that that she can't…

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First off, please forgive my morbid curiosity with the cases I look up.

While searching in the Law Library I ran across the case of The People vs. Edward Vargas. The citation for it is 91 CalApp4th 506.

The Facts describe some of the workings of the Nuestra Familia prison gang. Of interest: there is a "bank" where gang members contribute money for a general fund; there is a written constitution; NF devised the Northern Structure in order to take the heat off themselves.

Just wanted to throw a spotlight on Crimeandclues.com. In the Testimonial Evidence section there's a great article by Susan H. Adams about statement analysis, and a great series by Wesley Clark as well. It sparked many ideas of how to slip in clues in the course of story. If you haven't read them it's well worth the visit!

I visited the local law library today for the first time. It was very eye opening and I would highly recommend it for anyone looking to research. I used just the first resource I was directed to and spent 3 hours mining it.

The staff was very friendly and gave me cheat sheets on how to use the library. The most important one was How to Read a Cite. It named 3 different ways something could be cited, and how each would break down into case name, volume number, book title, and page…

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