Dean Gilbert's Writing Blog

I had to post a short entry as a bit of celebration. Last week I completed a draft of a non-fiction work for my employer. It is a robotics training manual designed in a modular fashion, based on a slide deck. It consists of about 250 slides, many with multiple screenshots from simulator software that show the exact steps in an operation. The modular design will let me adapt it quickly to custom courses. I consider this a milestone for myself because it proved to me that I could write a longer work of nonfiction. Yes, not as exciting for you as for me, but it did help me understand my own writing process and that means more content for you. Look for more content related to mysteries and magic in the next entry. Sent from my iPhone

 I could not let this day pass without a quick post. It's Sherlock Holmes Day. Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday. We can't exactly celebrate Holmes' birthday, because, while he was conceived, he was never born. But a lot of plots have been hatched thanks to Doyle's character. Not only are there imitators of Holmes, but of Doyle, including some very good adaptations, thank you Guy Ritchie, and some not so good (Elementary, The Seven Percent Solution ). Many fictional sleuths refer to Holmes, and who knows how many of the authors we follow today were inspired by the stories of murder and mayhem in old London. And nobody can deny that Sherlock Holmes stories still have the power to entertain and amaze. If you haven't read them, or it has been while, maybe this day is your sign to revisit the work of a master. Enjoy!

In my last blog entry I promised you an Easter egg from The Blacklist. What I didn't know then was that I would notice another. I will admit up front that these are probably known to diehard fans, but I had fun spotting them. They both appear in season one. At one point we see the main character Raymond "Red" Reddington in front of a painting of a boat. The picture is "Storm on the Sea of Galilee" by Rembrandt which was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston in 1990 and has never been recovered. I also promised to connect this with a James Bond film, Dr. No. In the film Bond is about meet the doctor for dinner in his lair. As he climbs a staircase he passes a painting that is visible to the audience. It is Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which had been stolen the year before the film was released, and not recovered for several years after.  In fact, the Bond franchise repeated this effect in Skyfall, this time with a missing Mod...

Welcome to my blog! I am here for mysteries, magic, and puzzles, and I hope you are too. When you visit here you can expect to read about my own writing, the mysteries I like (both real and fictional), magic and magicians, and occasionally puzzles. My main goal here is to provide some entertainment and introduce you to my fiction. I got hooked on mysteries myself way back in fourth grade when I read some Edgar Allan Poe stories. Then one dreary Sunday afternoon I discovered my father’s copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I looked for a story I had heard of, The Adventure of the Dancing Men, since it was mentioned in a book about codes and ciphers in my school library. From there I strayed into more Holmes stories for a bit then moved on to other genres. It wasn’t until college that I turned back to mysteries in a serious way. I read everything I could by Doyle (thank God for Dover reprints), Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers (wished I could dress like Lord Peter), G. K. Chesterton, a...