As you can discern by the presence of new posts on this page, my recent computer problems have been overcome—for the most part, anyway. My longtime IT guy swung on Friday afternoon to reinstall my machine, complete with a new hard drive, CD/DVD player, and scanner. The only remaining hassles are, I can’t retrieve my e-mail files (which I’m assured are still resident on my hard drive), nor can I receive messages sent to my usual address. Resolving those issues will take more time, as well as some back-and-forth between me and the sort of tech people with whom I barely share a language.
Going three weeks without computer access wouldn’t have proven so difficult, had I been on vacation or otherwise planned such a separation. However, being unable to function in my role as a writer was harder to bear when those circumstances were precipitously forced upon me. The upside of being without a computer was that I had much more time to read; I made it through a stack of books over the last three weeks, among them Thomas Dann’s Midnight in Memphis, Con Lehane’s The Red Scare Murders, and Malcolm Kempt’s A Gift Before Dying—all works of crime fiction—plus Jac Jemc’s delightful historical novel, 2024’s Empty Theatre, and Elyse Graham’s non-fiction work from that same year, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II.
I also exhausted an inordinate number of hours in front of the television. This was beneficial, in that I could finally catch up with a few crime dramas I hadn’t found time to watch before, such as A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, starring the ever-magnetic Lucy Boynton as the last woman hanged in Britain (see its trailer below); Jenna Coleman’s The Jetty; and the Jason Watkins/Robson Green thriller, The Game. Less rewarding, though, were the spans wasted in front of situation comedies I really didn’t need to see again.
Yet all of that is in the past now. I’m firmly planted back in my office chair, trying to complete several projects I had hoped to finish off before the calendar ever turned to 2026. Those should be rolling out over the next couple of weeks—provided no new technical nightmares play havoc with my schedule. Fingers firmly crossed!
Sunday, January 18, 2026
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3 comments:
Glad to have you back. You’ve been missed!
I'll share this - I enjoy the remaining consistent crime fiction bloggers around because it seems to me that over the past five years or so, so many really good sites have either shut down or move on. I'm finding it seems to be harder to find the more dark and under the radar really good crime fiction than previously. Col. Keane's passing is one, and ones moving on are like Hardboiled Wonderland, that have moved to a different platform. Another thing that is distressing is how in America, reading books is at an all time low and the changes in the reading market, to me anyway, in ways are responding and not in a good way (though, one very great benefit of the Internet is how I never would have heard of so many writers that I have come to enjoy as easily as I have).
Welcome back, Jeff! I can completely sympathize, as someone who is nursing along a 10-year-old computer with hopes it will last a while longer. If you use a PC, I hope you don't have to upgrade to Windows 11, as I've heard it has a host of problems.
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