I’m still wet between behind the ears when it comes to running a blog. A tight ship here, it isn’t. I don’t know what to do about comments, for example. People leave interesting comments, a discussion ensues, and how do I point it out to people who’ve read the post originally and haven’t gone back to look again?

   Posts like this one, I suppose. Let me mention a few earlier posts that people have left comments on that might be worth your going back and taking another look.

   The post that seems to have struck a chord with the largest number of people stopping by is the obituary I did for Philip Craig. This was nearly a month ago, and that particular piece has generated nearly 10% of the traffic here on the blog ever since, and by far the largest number of comments have been left there than for any other post. Readers and fans of Philip Craig’s work seem to have been as stunned when they learned of his death as I was. They’ve loved his books and characters deeply, and by extension, the author himself. Statements of condolences to Phil’s family predominate here.

   More recently, Peter Rozovsky and I had a genial discussion (and partial disagreement) of the merits of Grofield, the character who sometimes teams up with Parker in Donald Westlake’s “Richard Stark” books, and who sometimes works along. Our conversation follows my review of Pity Him Afterwards, a stand-alone crime novel that Westlake wrote under his own name.

   A recent review of a western novel that L. P. Holmes wrote as Matt Stuart, Edge of the Desert, produced an inquiry that caused me to do some investigating into some of the other westerns that Holmes wrote. Even though he died in 1988, Holmes’s books still come out at a rate of about one a year.

   Juri Nummelin’s question about George Marton in a post about the latter’s death produced a couple of fascinating followup full-fledged blog entries about Zeno, and the man behind the pseudonym. I hope you didn’t miss them. Do a blog search for Zeno in the box on the right, and you’ll find both of them.

   In fact, if you go to Google and type in [ zeno “play dirty” ], the first of the two M*F posts will appear as #1 of about 180 results. At least it does when I do it, but from what I know of Google’s searching algorithms, your results may vary.

   Sometimes, strangely enough, blog entries generate a ton of traffic but hardly anything in the way of comments. The list of Most Reprinted Authors and Stories in Anthologies was one, to pick a fine example. The day after that was posted was the busiest one ever, with the possible exception of the day the news of Donald Hamilton’s death was confirmed.

   And yet only one comment has been left so far — thanks, Bill! — or two, if you count my reply. Go figure, as some mad mathematician was once heard to say.