Aug 19, 2026 · 3 min listen · Last updated August 19, 2026
From storyflo. This is your daily audio brief. Here are today's top 5 true crime stories. Let's get into it. First, from CrimeReads (Literary Hub). 6 Humorous Mysteries That Are Actually Funny. Look, I’m going to say a thing and it’s going to sound a little bit foolish, but stick with me, we’ll work it through.
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Daily True Crime Brief · August 19th
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6 Humorous Mysteries That Are Actually Funny
Look, I’m going to say a thing and it’s going to sound a little bit foolish, but stick with me, we’ll work it through. I don’t like comedy books, I like funny books. Yeah, I know. I can see the face you’re making. I understand it. It’s like saying, “I don’t like eggs, but I do like eggs.” But, as you probably know, you can have your eggs in a hundred different ways. There’s a subtlety to cooking a good egg and that matters. Although I do have to admit, I don’t actually like eggs but let’s gloss over that for the sake of apt metaphor. So, R.J, I imagine you thinking now.
Thomas Kenniff on Writing a Prosecutor After Twenty Years as a Defense Attorney
For the last two decades I have made my living defending people the government has accused of crimes. When I finally sat down to write a novel, I handed it to a prosecutor. That surprised me more than it surprised anyone who knows me. I spent twenty-five years trying criminal cases before I ever tried to invent one. I prosecuted hundreds as an assistant district attorney and defended soldiers as a JAG officer, including from a law office I stood up in a combat zone in Iraq. For the last twenty years I’ve been a defense attorney in New York, most notably for Daniel Penny.
Twisty Mystery: 6 Crime Novels with Astonishing Narrative Turns
I labor intensively over the twists in my novels, and what strikes me most of all is that the best writers make a twist look so easy, a flick of a wrist in a magic trick. In all of my novels, but especially my latest two releases, Caller Unknown and That Night, I engage in what I call “fair dealing” with the reader: all of the information is presented fairly to you so that you should be able to guess the twist. But you won’t. Here are six novels that do the same.
Burbank, California, is a small city, but it has some notable long-term residents. Warner Bros and Walt Disney have their studios here, and Universal Studios is a very close neighbor. Johnny Carson filmed The Tonight Show at Burbank’s NBC Studios for 20 years, and though the phrase “Beautiful Downtown Burbank” was first coined on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which also shot at NBC, it was Carson who made it famous across America. In short, Burbank was the affectionate butt of a joke.
The Other Woman’s Name: The Triangular Love Saga of Dorothy L. Sayers, John Cournos and Helen Kestner
Mrs. H. Attwood, formerly Mary Stokes In 1935 Dorothy L. Sayers published Gaudy Night, her tenth Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel in a dozen years. Today the book is widely deemed the greatest of the author’s brace of Wimsey mysteries, although over the decades it has as well, it must be allowed, attracted some passionate and vocal detractors (usually, it would seem, men, including, among more notable names, George Orwell, Raymond Chandler and J. R. R. Tolkien).