San Diego's 300 electronic bulletin boards Mank Larson, a San Diego writer, claims he'd be useless without a computer. "I bought this thing two years ago just for word processing. Now it's taken over my …

Idyllic Spanish Village shaken by mystery stabbing “Then I heard male voices outside on the patio. I didn’t look up because I didn’t want to be noticed. The voices moved left to right. I never …

Herb Klein — the perfect man for Helen Copley Gerald Warren, unlike Neil Morgan, is not on the list of close friends Klein named in the preface to his book, and there has been much …

Roommates from Hell I walked outside to the storage door. I pushed on the door and opened it. I saw the rope around John’s neck and John’s face looking at me. I screamed and ran …

Hard-boiled local Brizzolara recalled an evening when, together with three other suspense writers, he was invited to Grounds for Murder, a San Diego mystery bookstore, to discuss his work. “There was some controversy about Wirecutter. …

Everybody I Need to Know I Met in Kindergarten “My dad told me that blacks were moving in because they couldn’t go anywhere else,” Kenny recalls. “But he told me they were just like us.” …

Zielinski was a community college professor in the Imperial Valley who wrote for the Reader in the early 1990s. Editor's picks of stories Zielinski wrote for the Reader: Friends Forever Steve Esmedina had the biggest …

Esmo’s phone manner was so hugger-mugger that I could be sitting four feet away and could not make out a single word. For all I could tell, he might have been laying fifty on a pony.

Steve Esmedina had the biggest head I had ever seen on a human being. He also had the biggest heart — one that became more corroded over time, leaking pain and despair. The droll demeanor, …

Once upon a time, I was a non-hippie proto-post-punk semi-amniotic undergraduate at UCSD, floundering in the concrete-and-topsoil wastes of an almost brand-new Muir College—searching for a major, a mentor, or something magic (not to mention …

"I worked for the city engineering department for years, writing manuals and things — and when I got the first inkling of a poem, I’d come home and write down some ideas or the first few lines."

"The following pages will ... reveal a shocking conspiracy of silence and cover-up..." This subversive notion — extracted from a locally self-published book, The Truth about the Cause of AIDS — showed up recently downtown. …

It’s an empty middle-of-the-week hump night, Wednesday, two-thirty a.m. The moon is full; the uncommonly illuminated sky is azure and clear, bright as it most often is a half-hour before sunup. University Avenue looks broader …

It’s Sunday, 2 a.m. A dark balmy night. Imperial Avenue is quiet, almost deserted, but there’s action up ahead, across from the old welfare office on 25th Street — now fenced in and vacant. A …

“This town’s not getting any smaller," Gordon sighs. “We’ve got too much urban sprawl.” Dorothy cuts in. “The main problem is too many foreigners coming here. We’re just too close to the border.”

I’m Talking Monster Books Amy had a title on this book. She called it Wind and Water. She was using the theme of the I Ching. I looked at these synopses of the stories, and …

What books lie on teachers’ nightstands? This innocent question about reading habits and tastes has the power to befuddle, embarrass, or provoke impressive lists. Some teachers lament not having enough time or energy to turn …

Mank Larson, a San Diego writer, claims he'd be useless without a computer. "I bought this thing two years ago just for word processing. Now it's taken over my life.” Larson (who prefers not to …

The novel remained in a storage locker in Mission Valley, in the shadow of the Jack Schrade Bridge and mountains of gravel. My Cardiff saviors encouraged me to unearth the book, to find an agent.

Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.