JWH

  Artificial Intelligence. The more you look at that phrase, the stranger it gets.   As I was reading a fascinating article   in the New Yorker recently about AI, I came across this quote about the struggles of trying to teach a computer to write poetry: “…even when you activate two discriminative networks that train […]

Harper returns to take care of unfinished business.  The novel takes place in Zurich, Spain and Italy.  It will be published August 28th.

    Image Patterns   A quarter of a century ago, I decided to teach a course in crime fiction at the university where I worked for most of my adult life. The focus was on crime novels set in Florida. I had plenty to choose from, ranging from John D. MacDonald’s smart, tough and

This is a King Midget, my first car.  My brother, John, (pictured here with Baby, the neighborhood dog) drove it before he turned it over to me when he got his first car, a ’52 Chevy I believe. The King Midget was powered by a Briggs and Stratton engine, 3 horsepower.  That engine had once

This week I reached the point in the new novel where I decided it was time to do an outline.  That point is roughly 75 percent into the book. My version of an “outline” is a one or two sentence summary of each chapter I’ve written so far.  This helps me see the larger shape

I’ve been lucky to meet many of the writers I’ve long admired and in some cases I’ve been even luckier to have become friends with some. Back in the early eighties, before I’d published a novel, I was teaching a course at the university in mystery writing.  One of the books I used in that

(This is a view of the ‘restored” library.  The First Presbyterian Church (which I attended in my youth) is on the far right.) NUDE WOMAN IN THE GRASS My love affair with books began as most serious romances do, when I was least expecting to fall in love. I was ten years old, maybe eleven,

      Forests of the Night by James W. Hall Published by St. Martin’s Minotaur 352 pages, 2005 Buy it online     Novels by James W. Hall: Under Cover of Daylight (1987) Tropical Freeze(1990) Bones of Coral (1992) Hard Ground (1993) Mean High Tide(1994) Gone Wild (1995) Buzz Cut (1996) Red Sky at

Okay, I write thrillers, so I should be used to this.  Still it’s strangely hard to accept the fact that on the opening page of the Kindle version of When They Come For You the reading time is listed as approximately 4 hours. And when the reader reviews starting piling up, there’s one refrain that