SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

Lawrence Ong provide an in-depth analysis of G.K Chesterton’s mysteries and presents a case for their immense influence on the mystery genre!

Every mystery fan has surely encountered the “whodunit.” They have likely encountered the “howcatchem” (the inverted mystery in which the killer is known in advance, exemplified by the TV series Columbo). Fans of the classics have also encountered the “howdunit” (including impossible crimes, such as locked-room mysteries). Rarer than these, however, is the “whydunit.” Merriam-Webster defines this as “a mystery having as its primary interest the motivation rather than the identity of the criminal.” The label is most often applied when one seeks motivation for murder. But there is another sub-genre of whydunit in which the “why” is asked of some bizarre action (or set of actions) that is proximate to the crime but not the crime itself.

Of course, seeds of this already appear in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, with the most obvious example being “The Red-Headed League” (1891), in which the central mystery is why a pawnshop owner has been hired by the title organization to copy out the Encyclopedia Britannica. But the true early master of this genre—the one who cemented what would become its central tropes—is G.K. Chesterton. His first Father Brown collection, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), comprises twelve mystery stories published in the Saturday Evening Post from 1910 through 1911. Of these twelve, at least four can be understood as whydunits; they are (in order) “The Queer Feet,” “The Honour of Israel Gow,” “The Wrong Shape,” and “The Sign of the Broken Sword.”

Three of those four (all except for “The Honour of Israel Gow”) additionally explore a concept also used in “The Secret Garden,” “The Invisible Man,” and “The Sins of Prince Saradine”: camouflage. Chesterton’s belief that the deepest truths can best be expressed in pithy, counterintuitive epigrams earned him the moniker “the prince of paradox.” His use of camouflage as a plot device is in keeping with his love of the counterintuitive, as the particular facet of camouflage he was most interested in elucidating was how context causes us to miss or misinterpret the truth.

Of the stories in The Innocence of Father Brown, “The Invisible Man” has the solution that is discussed most often. But in this post, I’d like to analyze a story whose premise and solution may have been even more influential, albeit mostly indirectly (as people do not trace the trope back to it). This is “The Sign of the Broken Sword.” My analysis will necessarily spoil the plot of the story. But if you haven’t read it before, never fear. It is in the public domain and may be found here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/204

The occasion for my analyzing Chesterton’s story is the publication of my own story “Murder on Pins and Needles” in the most recent issue (July/August 2026) of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. This is my second story featuring medical examiner Hank Lau. And, like my previous story (“Murder under Sedation”—March/April 2024)—and (I hope) all future stories starring Lau—it is a fair-play puzzle-plot whodunit in the Golden Age style. But this one is also a whydunit, in which the detective must ask, “Why did the murderer stick dozens of acupuncture needles into the victim after killing him?” Although I will not provide the answer here (because I hope you’ll read my story!), I can say that the plot mechanic is based on a trope I date back to “The Sign of the Broken Sword.” Thus, in whichever order you might choose to read them, Chesterton can shed light on what I did in my story, and my story (plus this analysis) can hopefully shed light on what Chesterton did.

“The Sign of the Broken Sword” differs greatly from the other stories in The Innocence of Father Brown in its basic setup. Whereas in the others, Father Brown witnesses a crime and/or aids in catching a criminal on the loose, “The Sign of the Broken Sword” concerns a crime that happened in the past. (We are not told the exact date, but it is more than twenty years before the time in which the story is set.) The whydunit concerns the highly uncharacteristic actions taken by two fictional historical figures—the English general Arthur St. Clare and the Brazilian president and general Olivier—during an Anglo-Brazilian war of Chesterton’s invention. Here is Father Brown’s summary of the crucial events, as understood by the public:

The public knows that Arthur St. Clare was a great and successful English general. It knows that after splendid yet careful campaigns both in India and Africa he was in command against Brazil when the great Brazilian patriot Olivier issued his ultimatum. It knows that on that occasion St. Clare with a very small force attacked Olivier with a very large one, and was captured after heroic resistance. And it knows that after his capture, and to the abhorrence of the civilised world, St. Clare was hanged on the nearest tree. He was found swinging there after the Brazilians had retired, with his broken sword hung round his neck.

The twin difficulties are first, that St. Clare was “a prudent commander, particularly indignant at any needless waste of soldiers” and yet attempted a reckless attack that was sure to fail; and second, that Olivier was “magnanimous to the point of knight errantry” and “[a]lmost every other prisoner he had ever captured had been set free or even loaded with benefits.” Thus, as Father Brown says, this story is “a mystery of two psychologies”: the first mystery is “what had become of the English general’s head?” and the second is “what had become of the Brazilian general’s heart?”. These are the whydunit components.

To solve this, Father Brown puts together information from four quite varied sources: the memoirs of St. Clare’s eventual son-in-law (Captain Keith), dispatches sent by President Olivier, a remark by one of St. Clare’s colonels that Father Brown heard secondhand, and an English soldier’s diary that Father Brown obtained while attending to a dying former Brazilian official. Over the course of the story, Father Brown recounts what he learned from each of these sources to his longtime companion, Flambeau, leading eventually to the revelation of what really happened.

The conversation between the two men takes place in a forest surrounding a funerary monument to St. Clare. This is not the story’s only forest. In addition to the literal one that they are traversing, there is a metaphorical one at the heart of the parable Father Brown uses to explain the solution. Let us attend, in the remainder of this post, to how Chesterton uses the literal and metaphorical forests—and tree imagery in general—to create the story’s effects.

First, the story’s opening lines:  

The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold.

The first line immediately establishes an analogy between trees and human bodies—what will become the story’s central metaphor. The third sentence imagines a cold hell rather than a hot hell. If the reader does not immediately think of the circle of ice in Dante’s Inferno, they will later when Father Brown explicitly makes the connection.

This forest houses a church. We are told that “It rose abruptly out of the ashen wastes of forest in a sort of hump or shoulder of green turf that looked grey in the starlight.” The opening lines forged the connection between trees and human bodies, but they did not specify whether the bodies are living or dead. This sentence, by mentioning “ashen wastes,” makes it clear that the trees symbolize corpses—an image further enhanced by the graves surrounding the church, which are mentioned in the next sentence.

Following this paragraph, Father Brown and Flambeau have their first exchange, which reads as follows:

“Where does a wise man hide a pebble?”

And the tall man answered in a low voice: “On the beach.”

The small man nodded, and after a short silence said: “Where does a wise man hide a leaf?”

And the other answered: “In the forest.”

There was another stillness, and then the tall man resumed: “Do you mean that when a wise man has to hide a real diamond he has been known to hide it among sham ones?”

“No, no,” said the little man with a laugh, “we will let bygones be bygones.”

Flambeau correctly understands that Father Brown is introducing the idea of camouflage, but misunderstands the specific kind of camouflage that the latter has in mind. Flambeau leaps to the idea of hiding a real object among sham lookalikes. But Father Brown’s examples all involve hiding an object among other equally real objects of the same kind. (This, of course, turns out to be the solution first of the story’s two whydunits: why St. Clare launched his ill-fated attack.)

The next mention of trees is of a specific one: the one St. Clare was found hanged from. This establishes yet another connection between trees and corpses. This is reinforced a few sentences later, when Father Brown and Flambeau pass “many hundreds of grey and ghostly trees.” As the two men walk farther, the landscape around them shifts:

[T]he road swept downwards across a clear, moonlit valley, till it dived again like a rabbit into the wall of another wood. The entrance to the farther forest looked small and round, like the black hole of a remote railway tunnel.

The trees of the next forest do not shelter the rabbit. They form a wall—a dead end. And the entrance to the forest is a black hole, like the black holes in the opening paragraph of the story, which were likened to the entrance to hell (which could be interpreted as another Dante reference). Lest the reader be unsure that the black hole is meant to serve as death imagery, Chesterton soon describes Flambeau staring “firmly at the grey façade of forest in front of him, with the one black gap in it, like the mouth of the grave, into which their path plunged.” This description directly follows Flambeau’s first guess at the solution: that St. Clare’s maneuver was his way of committing suicide by the sword of his enemies. Father Brown tells Flambeau that this scenario is nowhere near so horrid as the truth. Chesterton writes:

“Yours is a clean story,” cried Father Brown, deeply moved. “A sweet, pure, honest story, as open and white as that moon. Madness and despair are innocent enough. There are worse things, Flambeau.”

Flambeau looked up wildly at the moon thus invoked; and from where he stood one black tree-bough curved across it exactly like a devil’s horn.

St. Clare will soon be unmasked as precisely the sort of horned devil that this bough evokes.

The literal and metaphorical forests merge in the next passage:

[T]hey plunged into the black cloister of the woodland, which ran by them in a dim tapestry of trunks, like one of the dark corridors in a dream.

They were soon in the most secret entrails of the wood, and felt close about them foliage that they could not see, when the priest said again:

“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest?”

“Well, well,” cried Flambeau irritably, “what does he do?”

“He grows a forest to hide it in,” said the priest in an obscure voice. “A fearful sin.”

The religious imagery has turned from evil to good (“black cloister of the woodland”) even as the bodily metaphor remains (“entrails of the wood”). The positive religious turn is linked to Father Brown and Flambeau’s journey out of the forest. As Father Brown unfurls the solution, we are told that the “path through the woodland began to go upward,” as they escape this metaphorical hell. As their pursuit continues, we are told that “they felt as if they were ascending a winding staircase. The priest’s voice came from above out of the darkness.” They are moving into the light as the truth becomes clear.

However, it is the continuation of Father Brown’s parable that is what has resonated throughout mystery fiction: the idea of growing a forest to hide a leaf. As we soon learn, St. Clare was a traitor and thus (Father Brown reminds us) among those whom Dante condemned to the frozen Ninth Circle of Hell. (The meaning of the story’s ice imagery now becomes clear.) Major Murray confronted St. Clare with this fact. So, the latter brought the former out of view of the other soldiers—to what is first described as “behind a clump of trees” and later described as “the fringe of tropic trees by the bridge” (trees again!)—and killed him, accidentally breaking off the tip of his sword in the process. This spurred St. Clare to make the momentous decision to grow a forest to hide the leaf:

St. Clare was a hell-hound, but he was a hound of breed. Never, I’ll swear, was he so lucid and so strong as when poor Murray lay a cold lump at his feet. Never in all his triumphs, as Captain Keith said truly, was the great man so great as he was in this last world-despised defeat. He looked coolly at his weapon to wipe off the blood; he saw the point he had planted between his victim’s shoulders had broken off in the body. He saw quite calmly, as through a club windowpane, all that must follow. He saw that men must find the unaccountable corpse; must extract the unaccountable sword-point; must notice the unaccountable broken sword–or absence of sword. He had killed, but not silenced. But his imperious intellect rose against the facer; there was one way yet. He could make the corpse less unaccountable. He could create a hill of corpses to cover this one. In twenty minutes eight hundred English soldiers were marching down to their death.

Father Brown then reveals his proposed solution to the second of the story’s two psychological mysteries—why Olivier showed no mercy. The premise is false. Olivier was merciful, after all. It was St. Clare’s own men—who had discovered his treachery—who hanged him.

This concludes my review of the story itself. But what of its impact on future stories, which I have alluded to repeatedly? The forest of bodies in Chesterton’s story are corpses in a battlefield. But mystery fiction soon came to consider a different way in which corpses quickly accumulate: when a serial killer is on the loose. Serial killers have afforded authors a chance to use two variants of Chesterton’s forest. The first variant matches the initial setup of the parable: hiding a leaf in an already extant forest. In such mysteries, there is more than one killer: the serial killer and a single-victim killer who takes advantage of the former’s existence. The single-victim killer murders a target of their own choosing, in a manner consistent with the serial killer’s modus operandi, thus camouflaging the death as just one in an actually unrelated series. The second (more directly related) variant conforms to what St. Clare did: the perpetrator becomes a mass murderer themselves, rather than glomming on to the murders of another person, but only one of their targets matters; the others are just for camouflage. The modus operandi is a ruse.

Apart from these variants of the forest, there is a trope related to the broken sword instead. St. Clare instigated the massacre not merely to hide Major Murray’s body, but also to account for how his sword was broken. Killers in later mysteries often leave a mark that would give them away—an injury to themselves, damage to an object that cannot be jettisoned, etc. They then need to do some bizarre action to account for that mark, such as staging an accident that they will claim as the source of their injury. Stories that do this tend to lean heavily on the “whydunit” aspect.

What later mysteries am I referring to? Ah, well to reveal their names would spoil them for those who haven’t read them! To find out which ones I’m talking about, please go to my blog (https://encluesiast.blog/) where I analyze mysteries in the same fashion as I have in this essay, also using a Spoiler Index that allows you to see connections to only the mysteries you’ve read. My next two posts will be follow-ups to this one: the first traces the idea of camouflage through the other stories in The Innocence of Father Brown and the second shows how these ideas appear in seven episodes (!) of the TV series Monk.

In this special post, learn a bit about how EQMM regular Terena Elizabeth Bell drew on her life experiences as well as a popular TV show to come up with her debut novel, Recursion, which will be published next year by Sagging Meniscus Press. In the meantime, don’t miss her latest short story, “Good Fences,” in our July/August issue, on sale now!

My debut novel, Recursion, publishes in September 2027 with Sagging Meniscus Press. It took roughly ten years to write and another six to sell.  When I first had the idea, I was driving to work and got stuck behind a van with this really weird painting on the back that for some reason made me think of my college boyfriend. He was a real ass, but also my first love, and first loves are hard to shake. This was just after our five-year reunion and we’d started talking right before; I was trying to make up my mind as to whether five years was enough for him to have changed. So there I am on my way to work, stuck behind this van, and all of a sudden it hits me: If we’d gotten married after college, we would have already been divorced. This got me thinking about why smart women stay in bad relationships, and the core of my novel was born.

In Recursion, the main character uses the 2002 Washington, DC sniper shootings to cover up the murder of her college boyfriend’s wife. Her goal, of course, is to free him up so she and he can be together. But almost immediately after the wedding comes the regret — not regret necessarily that she killed someone but regret that she’s even with him: Shouldn’t she have just moved on? Now there she is in a horrible marriage she can’t exit from because how do you divorce your husband when you killed someone to be with him.

I say the novel took ten years to write, but the first two to three were really more thinking. I kept writing the first page or two over and over, which is unlike me. In both life and writing, I make a decision then execute. But I couldn’t figure out how she killed the wife or where the story began. Initially, I had her hiring a hitman with Bitcoin, which was still brand new back then (this is how my character got her job as a coder—something still in the book today); however, the more I thought and the less I wrote, it hit me she had to do it herself.

I don’t remember when I shifted the story to her using the sniper shootings to camouflage the murder. In fact, I had completely forgotten my original plotline was a hired gun until tonight (hey, it was 16 years ago!). I’ve been bingeing “Castle,” the ABC program about a mystery novelist who helps a NYPD homicide detective solve crimes. I watched it religiously when the show originally aired—around the same time I started thinking toward my novel. I liked it so much that I scheduled work flights for the morning after it aired so I wouldn’t have to miss. The show’s streaming for free on Roku, so I decided to rewatch it for the first time since. (And yes, it does hold up better than a college relationship!) I’m midway through season 4 and get this: episode 9 is about a DC copycat sniper.

Now, I didn’t steal my idea from “Castle.” Outside of the premise, the plots are radically different. But I do believe everything we take in as people sits in our heads as writers and great fiction comes from a combination of the sundry that lies therein. This episode aired in 2011, back when I was still focused on the Bitcoin plot—obsessed, really, with the idea that my main character needed to dirty her hands, reworking crypto into a cash transaction where she physically gives the money to the killer, which set up other problems with the then-increasing technological surveillance that an in-person handoff would create. It was important she get away with it. Otherwise, how could she marry the husband? And how could the only justice stem from the psychological battle within herself? She had to pull the actual trigger. The character is from rural Kentucky, just like me, and when I was a child, my father taught me how to hunt plus every child I knew took riflery through 4-H. The sniper shootings were also still pretty strong in the American zeitgeist then, hence why they could be used in an episode of “Castle.”

So this is what was sitting in there, this is what was in my brain, and maybe how it might have come together. But then again who knows? How do any of us ever get our ideas?

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Terena Elizabeth Bell’s short story collection Tell Me What You See was named one of the “best books of the century” by New York Society Library. The title story was a New York Foundation for the Arts grant winner, and another from the collection has been optioned to become a feature film. A Sinking Fork, Kentucky native, she lives in Manhattan.

In this engaging Q&A with an EQMM regular, learn all about Pat Black’s writing process, reading habits, newest projects, and some of his ideas for genre-bending mystery fiction! Here readers can also find a teaser for the short story Pat is currently working on. Pat’s latest story, “Honey,” can be found in our Jul/Aug issue, on sale now!

EQ Editor: How did you come to write this story? What was the inspiration and/or what are the techniques you used?
Pat Black: “Honey” came about from people-watching at a hotel one weekend. I noticed some guests were dining alone, which was of course nothing to do with me. So, my brain started its engines. Were these people there on business? Making a stopover? Taking a break from reality for an evening of quiet and luxury? Or up to no good? Being one of my stories, I went with the last option.

EQE: Do you read and/or write mainly short fiction, or do you read and/or write at other lengths as well?
PB: I’m writing full-length novels, but I always make time for the odd short story. A first love I can’t quit—I’m with Stephen King on that one. Most of my ideas are for short stories. If nothing else, I am blessed with ideas. More than I’ll ever write.
As for what I read, that’s a broad spectrum these days. Fiction, non-fiction, even a spot of poetry. Format’s no issue for me, either. Ebooks, audiobooks, dead tree books—take your pick. I am a fearful dipper. About 10-15 books on the go at any one time. I’ve got that lovely Daphne du Maurier short story collection to get through, soon—that was my top request from Santa last Christmas. A six-month gap is a quick turnaround from my TBR shelf these days!

EQE: What are some topics you’d like to see covered in the mystery-/crime-fiction genre?
PB: I’d like to see more crossover tales—which leads me to the next point:

EQE: Do you ever write stories that are genre-bending?
PB: Yes, all the time. I’ve got a cracking detective story idea involving time travel and interstellar space. If EQMM does an April Fool’s special issue, it might be a good fit!

EQE: What is your writing process?
PB: I fit it in when I can. I have less time than ever. Tomorrow is a case in point. Right after work I have to pick my youngest up from school, then a quick turnaround, then we are off to do some singing practice. It’s taking place in a cathedral—and that’s the time for me to break out the laptop and write a chapter of the latest work in progress. A cathedral is a fine place to fantasise about murder.
It’s a bit of a tightrope really. I do get through the work, but at odd times—5am, 11pm, quick stints during lunch break, etc. It isn’t easy at the best of times, but being in full-time work, and a full-time dad, does tend to stretch you. I remember one well-meaning festival organiser saying to me: “I’ve seen your books around—why aren’t you out promoting them as much as you can?” I wanted to giggle. That’s the goal (full-time writing, not giggling).
Writing really is a form of madness. I can’t adequately explain why I am compelled to do it, but I’m glad that I do.

EQE: Can you reflect on a recent publication, event, or topic in our literary community? 
PB: AI, that’s a sticky one. I wrote a blog two or three years back—it may have been for EQMM in fact—in which I lamented its arrival, but concluded that whatever hells it unleashes, I am going to keep writing and passing it on to other humans to read, whatever happens. Hey, I’ve written in futility before, I can do it again!
I think it’s among us already. I can think of one author who shall go nameless who said in public he thinks AI is great. I think in creative terms it’s a disaster—not now, but in the next decade, when you can’t tell the difference between AI and hand-made, human stuff. Bad news for art. Bad news for democracy. Bad news for our souls. It’s a matter of truth, and it may at some point be a matter of legality. I have signed up to the Society of Authors’ Human Authored scheme here in the UK.  
All I can do is promise that my own work is the real deal, and it will stay that way. Warts, stretch marks, hairy bits and all.

EQE: Share a book review, movie or television review, or interview with us.
PB: Masters Of The Universe was a lot of fun, but problematic. I can see why it didn’t do as well as hoped. It didn’t quite nail the tone. It couldn’t be ultra-serious—I mean, c’mon, He-Man? Beast Man? I don’t think it’s something Christopher Nolan would make. But I’m not sure who it was made for, or who it was making fun of. It was nice to see a movie drenched in lovely colours, all the same. None of that blue filter/half-light stuff.
I sneaked out to see it one spare Thursday morning (when I should have been writing, yes). Me, and three other middle-aged men. Baw-Jaws, White Top, Bloat-O and Square-Eyes. We scuttled in and scuttled out, except for one guy, who sat through the credits. Holding out for an Orko.
I’m not sure why I went; what I was looking for; even how I wanted to be entertained. I liked He-Man as a kid—I was in the right age group for its imperial phase, and I saw the Dolph Lundgren/Frank Langella effort from the 1980s in the cinema. I am that old in human years. But as many others have noted before me, I don’t feel as nostalgic about it as I do about other properties from this era of childhood.
Maybe I wanted to cling to the idea of heroism. Maybe I wanted to see the goodies win, for once—unironically. It’s the reason I started writing stories, really. There’s an innocence to this idea, in adult life, on this planet. Maybe I wanted to feel that again. Maybe it’s a stunt double for hope.
Nicholas Galitzine, the lad who played Adam/He-Man, was very good, and I hope he gets another turn out of the furry pants and feather cut. And yes, there’s no getting away from it, Jared Leto’s Skeletor was terrific, with an all-time reading of the word “balls”. But a special mention must go to the most memorable villain . . . Adam’s HR supervisor, played by Sasheer Zamata. She was brilliant, as scary as Skeletor, and possibly even more sinister. 

EQE: What’s next for you?
PB: I am writing the first entry in what I hope is a new series of novels. Going well so far. I hope to put the full stop on the first draft this summer. It’s not as hard-edged as Inspector Lomond, though naturally, there is a murder, and naturally, someone to solve it.
We’ll see where we go with Inspector Lomond in long-form, but I am happy to write the short stories for EQMM, if they’ll have me. That’s where he first appeared.
I’m also writing another short story; these are an itch that must be scratched. It’s a bit mad, a meditation on life, death, performance, and bearing witness. This is the first paragraph:

Flo paused just for a second, her finger a quarter of an inch off the touch screen, while she composed a note to herself about that night’s shopping list. And that’s when a man dressed as a nun stole her phone.

Learn all about how a cluttered closet and a lunch date with an editor friend helped inspire Meredith Anthony’s latest short story for EQMM! Find “Decluttering” in our July/August issue, on sale now!

There’s an old joke that writers always tell. A famous author dies and goes, of course, to heaven. St. Peter greets him at the Pearly Gates and says, “Welcome, sir. But before you go in, I just have one question.” 

The writer is flustered and starts to mutter, “I swear, I thought she was older—”

But St. Peter raises a white-robed arm and stops him. “No, sir,” he says. “I just want to know. Where do you get your ideas?”

Well, in the case of my short story, “Decluttering,” in the July/August issue of EQMM, I know exactly where the idea came from.

I was having lunch with my friend, Rachel, a former editor who has a side hustle helping people in a variety of ways. I had hired Rachel soon after my husband, writer Lawrence Light (PAYBACK) and I moved into our glamorous Sutton Place apartment with its view of the Chrysler Building. I was pleased with the modern, black and white décor, the edgy but playful art. The apartment was chic and stylish. Nevertheless, I found that I still needed someone to help me declutter.

Like many people, I had my secrets. A small utility room crammed with boxes of items I had no place for. A pantry that was bursting with unused serving dishes and aging small appliances and outdated ingredients. A spa-like bathroom with a medicine cabinet crammed with sample-size fragrances and half-used makeup items. A closet with at least a dozen white linen shirts with subtle design differences, none of which worked for me any longer.

Rachel rolled up her sleeves. She guided me gently and, together, we took care of it all. She wasn’t judgy. She never expressed a strong opinion, but somehow, under her watchful eye, I was able to send full bags to thrift stores, boxes to charity, a few items to vintage resale outlets.

But Rachel was more than my decluttering genius. She had worked in publishing and was a wonderful editor.  She was also a writer, struggling to sell women’s fiction inspired by her “Sex and the City” lifestyle. We always critiqued each other’s work. So, one day at lunch she asked me for a writing prompt. She had run out of ideas.

I didn’t hesitate. “Write a story about decluttering,” I told her. It was perfect. She could craft a plot around two women who spend some time together and get to know each other’s secrets.

Rachel loved the idea. She noodled around for a couple weeks before she gave up. “I can’t make it work,” she told me. “You do it.”

I review mystery and thriller novels for a living (Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine) and I hadn’t written a short story for a couple of years. I had no intention of writing one now. But I found myself sitting down at the laptop. What if a declutterer is working with a client and sees something she shouldn’t . . .

I wrote the story in an afternoon and attached it to an email to Rachel. I called her before I hit “send.”

“I wrote the story,” I said. “Could you read it and tell me what you think?” Rachel agreed enthusiastically.

But I hesitated. “Rachel, darling, there’s one more thing . . . Is it ok if I kill you?”

 “Of course,” Rachel said promptly. “It would be my pleasure.”

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Meredith Anthony reviews mysteries and thrillers for Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. She also writes the occasional short story. Many of her stories have appeared in EQMM and AHMM. She lives in New York with her writer husband, Lawrence Light. You can follow her @meredith.anthony.3 on Threads, or  @meredith.a on Instagram.

Here Gabriela Stiteler reflects on the conversation with her Abuelita that helped inspired “A Well-Worn Path,” her latest story for EQMM in our July/August issue, on sale now!

“A Well-Worn Path” came to me after a conversation with my Abuelita, who, thanks to a
long-ago investment in an insurance policy, had the help of comfort care companions twice a
week. Until very recently, she lived independently with the support of family and a dedicated
cohort of helpers driving her around, chatting with her, and doing light cleaning.

During a visit in 2024, my sons and I were staying with her in her Squirrel Hill
apartment. The four of us walked to the Manor Theater to see Jurassic Park, took the city bus to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and ate noodles and dumplings from the place across the street while Abuelita told us about the dog parade she and her comfort care companion had attended.

That night, after a game of Parcheesi and one of those delightful William Powell Philo
Vance movies, I couldn’t stop thinking about that dog parade and Abuelita and her companions.

The seed was planted.

But it needed a little time and space to germinate.

Because of my background in human development and education, I’m always thinking
about why people do what they do and what they need to thrive. Self-Determination Theory boils it down to three essential “nutrients”: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

By the fall of 2024, I was still thinking about the comfort care companion, the dog
parade, and how important and hard both independence and interdependence are as people age. In Maine, where I live, these caregivers are vital to individuals, families, and our society. In my community, many of these caregiving roles are filled by immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.

The story developed from there.

I wrote and submitted “A Well-Worn Path” in December of 2024.

A lot has happened since then.

My Abuelita fell, broke her leg, and has moved to live with my aunt in Mexico, where the cost of care is less and the winters are a little more forgiving. In January, I sat in a committee
meeting where a woman I admire—a parent, refugee, and beloved member of a tight-knit Maine community—disclosed that she did not feel safe leaving her home. She worried for her two grown sons. Her sixth-grade daughter didn’t want to go to school because she was scared. Her husband, a Mainer by birth and veteran, shared his frustration about perceptions of his wife, about feeling helpless to change things. A long-time member of our community was picked up and taken away while her children watched. My children came home from school asking where their friends were. My fourth-grade son asked to stop and buy sports cards from Don’s to put in with the schoolwork folders because he wanted his friends to know he was thinking of them.

I’m anticipating a lot will continue to happen until the storm passes. Until the ship rights
itself.

When I read the story now, the seed is the same. My Abuelita and her companion and that dog parade. But the branches have grown in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated. Empty desks and baseball cards.

I think the ending stands, but it sits a little heavier on the chest.

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Gabriela Stiteler is a writer and educator based in Portland, Maine. Her short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut story, “Two Hours West of Nothing,” was a finalist for the Robert L. Fish Award and was short-listed for The Best American Mystery and Suspense of 2024. She is a 2025 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Bodwell Award recipient and received Ellery Queen Readers’ Choice recognition for her 2025 story “The Usual Reasons.” Her story “Beautiful, Dangerous Things” will appear in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2026. 

In this post that is as thoughtful as it is entertaining, S. B. Watson recounts a spirited discussion around a question that many of our readers have likely had before: What truly makes a great mystery?

Years ago, I was sitting at a dingy table in the backroom of a musty public house, “house”being the operable term—it was a residential building that had somehow gained the zoning to be turned into a tavern. Every room had garishly different lighting than the last, every table was of a different design and make, and every chair was a one-off. The walls were covered in old playbills, movie posters, inexpensive pop-culture memorabilia. The place was a minimalist’s nightmare. The only consistent factor between rooms was the pervading odor of stale spilled beer.

I went there weekly, meeting with a few friends to play nerdy card games. (Android Netrunner, not Magic, in case anyone wonders.) One of our players fancied himself a writer of literary fiction. Since I was just starting to write seriously, we occasionally talked shop… until he discovered I was working on locked-room mysteries.

He said he didn’t like locked-rooms. Said they forced a writer to sacrifice character depth and plot quality on the altar of form. Said they were all shallow. Said they all hinged on word-trickery and that it was impossible to write a story with emotional value while dabbling in such.

Well, I tried to disagree, but he used big words, and fell back on an insufferable knowledge of the Classics and philosophy, and his experience as a writer, and a deep confidence in his ability to discern “good” mysteries from “bad.” Nothing I said changed his mind. If memory serves, I also lost my match against him . . . injury to insult.

That was the first time I’d ever experienced, first hand, the infamous bias against locked-room mysteries. Undeterred, I kept on writing them, but that conversation—and the criticisms it voiced—stayed with me. It lingered in the back of my mind as I wrote for years. I found myself trying to prove my friend wrong, crafting locked-rooms with emotional weight and plausible motivations, warping plots even more than necessary to infuse forced weight and depth into stories that didn’t need them.

It’s been more than a decade since that beer-soaked discussion of philosophy and writing and detective fiction. Locked-room mysteries are no longer theoretical to me—I now have a small bibliography to my name of impossible crimes, of varying bizarreness and implausibility. I think it’s the right time for me to give that friend an ‘official’ response. This is it.

Structure is fine. Free-form poetry is nice, but so are sonnets, and anyone who argues that Elizabeth Barret Browning or Shakespeare were wasting their time constraining themselves in a formal scheme of meter and rhyme has altogether missed what makes poetry powerful. (Just my opinion.)

Shallowness is fine. I just finished reading the ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson, which involves hundreds of characters, hundreds of locations, plot arcs that span thousands of pages over multiple novels, and emergent storytelling that forces the reader to parse what they’ve just read when they’re given context hundreds (sometimes thousands) of pages later. It was marvelous. Amazing. Incredible. But I now have a stack of standalone dime-novels and pulps that I’m more excited to dive into than a puppy with a closet of fresh Italian-leather shoes. Depth, complexity, subtext, are all dynamic tools in the hands of a master writer. But sometimes it’s the pulpy, low-stakes stories that stick with us and never leave. Case in point—Sherlock Holmes. (Just my opinion.)

Word-trickery . . . isn’t what good locked-rooms hinge on at all. Here’s an example of my friend not understanding what he was criticizing. Sure, some impossible crimes make use of language-play and word tricks. But the best ones often don’t. There’s no denying many locked-rooms play fast and loose with character depth and emotions, but, again, sometimes they don’t. The truth is, all these things are mere tools in the hands of the locked-room craftsman—if the story requires emotional depth, then it’ll have it. If the emotional depth would hurt the effect or the payoff, then it won’t be there. Criticizing locked-rooms for being all word-play and no grist is naïve. (Just my opinion.)

Magicians trick people. They’re honest about it—you know they’re going to try to deceive you up front. Sometimes, you even catch them at it. As long as their presence is compelling enough, and their talent deft enough, nobody complains—the challenge of trying to see how they do it is part of the fun. And when you fail to catch the tells, and you’re genuinely surprised, well, that’s its own kind of entertainment entirely.

Locked-rooms inhabit this same space, a neverland between rational sense and accepting impossibilities as fact, even temporarily, in lieu of more plausible explanations. The reader usually knows up front they’re going to be challenged with a problem—their enjoyment comes from the deftness in the telling of the problem, catching some clues on the way, falling for a few misdirections, and the brilliance of the solution. If, for even a moment, the writer can seduce the reader into admitting complete wonderment and confusion over the impossibility-factor of the crime, then he has succeeded. Obviously, then, the higher the impossibility-factor, the better the payoff can be.

And there lies both the problem, and the solution, of locked-room mysteries as they relate to their Bigger Literary Brothers. Bad magicians do exist. Boring magic shows have cursed corporate banquets and children’s birthday parties for decades. Bad locked-rooms are out there; they’re bad for the same reasons. It’s the magic not the illusion that makes good magic good in the first place. The sense of wonder, confusion, and surprise. It’s the same for locked-rooms.

So, these days, I don’t worry about following form. I don’t kill myself to have deep, philosophical characters. Likewise, I don’t force myself to stay away from word tricks, and if I think a low-blow will get the job done best, so be it.

The main thing I worry about is keeping the impossibility-factor high, the misdirections engaging, the clues fair and open, and the solution as sharp as possible. I’m fine with shallow. I’m fine with pulp. I don’t care if I’m not the next T. Pynchon or Homer. I just want to shock you, puzzle you, challenge you to outsmart me as you read, and for you to have fun doing it—sometimes, simple pleasures can be the best ones.

Just my opinion.

In this special blog post, Japanese literary scholar and critic Yusan Iiki gives readers a deep dive into the development of and differentiation of Japanese crime fiction in the 20th century

I’d like to pose a question: Is there a name for a subgenre that encompasses the writing styles of Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts, S.S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr. Terms like “traditional,” “classic,” “whodunnit,” “puzzler,” and “cozy” each come close, but are incomplete.

In Japanese we have a word—Honkaku—which I suggest covers it all. In the following article I would like to explain the definition of Honkaku and its scope in describing mystery fiction as used in Japan.

Defining Honkaku

The word Honkaku has been used in regard to detective fiction since before World War II. At that time, Honkaku meant things like “standard” or “orthodox.” In Japan until the 1920s, “standard” referred to mysteries such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “Dupin” series and Conan Doyle’s “Holmes” series. In short, Honkaku referred to a style of fiction writing in which the central theme was the detective’s process of unraveling clues to solve a mystery.

Eventually, works by British and American authors of the Golden Age—writers like Agatha Christie, S.S. Van Dine, and Ellery Queen who wrote “fair-play” mysteries—began to be translated into Japanese. As these books became available to Japanese readers, the style of these authors became the standard. Thus, the definition of Honkaku was further clarified to include the element of “fair play.”

Prior to World War II, the Japanese literary world didn’t make clear delineations between genres. Around 1934, Japanese detective novelist Saburo Koga complained that “lately, even science fiction, horror, and adventure stories are being referred to as detective stories.” Arguing for a more refined definition of detective fiction, Koga that anything other than Honkaku fiction should not be called “detective fiction.” Koga was saying that the term “detective fiction” (tantei shosetsu) should only be applied to works that have the solution of a mystery as its main theme and that practiced fair play with the reader. In other words, Koga was suggesting that “detective fiction” and honkaku were synonymous.

This distinction carried through to the period after World War II. Between the end of the war and around 1980, the most popular mystery imprint in Japan was the Sogen Mystery Library (Sogen Suiri Bunko), an imprint of Tokyo Sogensha. Each book’s cover had a symbol indicating the style of the work.

Reading from right to left, the labels for these symbols are:

“Honkaku Mystery Fiction” (image of a detective with question mark),

“Hard-Boiled” (image of a pistol),

“Thriller/Suspense” (image of a cat), and

“Other Mystery Fiction: Courtroom Mystery, Inverted Mystery, etc.” (clock image).

Interestingly, while most of Agatha Christie’s works are included in the “Honkaku” category, the publisher labeled Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? and The Seven Dials Mystery under the category of “Thriller/Suspense.” The publisher took these definitions seriously. Works that didn’t have “solution of a mystery” as their main focus were excluded from the Honkaku genre. Thus, readers who enjoy the process of solving mysteries and care about fair play needn’t worry about the author’s name. All they needed to do is read books that have the word Honkaku written on the cover. Writers who cared about the process of solving mysteries and playing fair with the readers also began to label their books as Honkaku.

And so, the Honkaku genre flourished in Japan.

The Scope of Honkaku

Authors whose books have been labeled Honkaku by the Sogen Mystery Library include Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts, S.S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr, all of whom have great popularity in Japan. In fact, there is likely no other subgenre that includes as many popular authors.

The Honkaku label isn’t limited to Golden Age authors. In a 1948 essay, Edogawa Rampo introduced authors such as Michael Innes, Nicholas Blake, and Margery Allingham, and collectively referred to them as the “British New Honkaku School.” In Japan, scope of the Honkaku subgenre has come to include works in the style of Innes and others.

So far, we’ve only discussed Western authors and their works and have neglected Japanese authors.

After World War II, authors such as Seishi Yokomizo, Akimitsu Takagi, and Tetsuya Ayukawa wrote many excellent detective stories which were heavily influenced by the Honkaku authors of the Golden Age, such Queen, Carr, and Crofts. For this reason, their style has come to be an integral part of Honkaku.

A seismic shift in Japanese mystery fiction occurred in the early 1960s, brought about by the detective stories of Seicho Matsumoto which explored human psychology, corruption, and societal malaise. Matsumoto’s novels became bestsellers and attracted many fans. This style of writing came to be called social mystery. It seemed at the time that the social mystery genre had eclipsed and driven out Honkaku mysteries. But the truth is that Honkaku and social mysteries are not incompatible. Social mysteries, for example, don’t ignore the importance of solving the mystery or playing fair with the readers. Matsumoto’s first novel, Ten to Sen (1958, translated as Points and Lines; recently published in a new translation as Tokyo Express) is highly regarded as a Honkaku mystery.

Many people assume that Matsumoto was critical of Honkaku mysteries in some of his essays. However, this is not accurate. If you read Matsumoto’s essays carefully, you will see that he was rejecting only one aspect of the Honkaku mystery genre, not the entire genre.

Let me explain this in more detail. At the time that Matsumoto began writing, Honkaku mysteries tended to rely on certain plot devices—misdirection, illusions, playing with the reader’s perception—which in Japanese we refer to as torikku (from the English “trick”). In Japan, works that use original “tricks” were highly valued. Matsumoto rejected works in which the author focused too much on gimmicks which neglected the culprit’s motive for using those tricks to commit murder.

Within the world of the novel, the person who devised the trick is the culprit, not the author. The culprit devised and used the trick not to boast about the originality of the trick, but to avoid being suspected. For example, in Matsumoto’s Ten to Sen, the culprit devised a false alibi to make the murder of two people look like the double suicides of two lovers. This deception was consistent with the culprit’s motive to discourage the police from conducting a detailed investigation. Matsumoto was critical of Honkaku mysteries in which the authors did not consider these things and neglected the culprit’s motive.

There’s another important proof that Matsumoto didn’t reject the entire Honkaku mystery genre itself. In 1966, Matsumoto served as the supervisor and editor of a series published by the Yomiuri Shimbunsya, which he named Shin Honkaku Suiri-shosetu Zenshu (New Honkaku Mystery Novel Collection).

The tradition of Honkaku mysteries continues into the present. In 1987, Yukito Ayatsuji made his debut with The Decagon House Murders (published in English by Locked Room International in 2007). Many other authors followed suit and made their debuts. When Ayatsuji and others were young, they were avid readers of the Honkaku branded works in the Sogen Suiri Bunko. They succeeded in writing Honkaku mystery novels in the style of Christie, Queen, and Carr. Their works and the works of their disciples came to be called Shin Honkaku (“New Honkaku”) Mysteries.  And so, the Honkaku mystery movement has spread and continues to be popular in the Japanese publishing world.

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Yusan Iiki is a translator, critic, and scholar of traditional detective fiction. Considered the foremost authority on the works of Ellery Queen, his nom de plume, when sounded out in Japanese, comes out as “EQ3” or “Ellery Queen the 3rd.” He is three-time winner of the Honkaku Mystery Award in the category of Best Criticism and Research for his books, including Ellery Queen Theory (2010, Ronsosha Publishing), The Charm of Honkaku Mysteries (2017, Nanundo Publishing), and The Mathematician’s and Philosopher’s Locked Room (2020, Nanundo Publishing. His translations from English to Japanese include Francis M. Nevins’ Ellery Queen: The Art of Deduction and Joseph Goodrich’s Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen. as well as the two Ellery Queen story collections The Tragedy of Errors and Other Stories and The Adventure of the Murdered Moth and Other Radio Mysteries. His works also include The Complete Guide to Ellery Queen (2021, Seikaisha Shinsho), The Locked Room Mystery Guide (2023, Seikaisha Shinsho), and The Detective Guide (2024, Seikaisha Shinsho).

Herbert De Paepe returns to EQMM in our May/June issue with “The Defixio Murders,” another spine-tingling mystery translated from the Dutch by Josh Pachter. Here Herbert discusses how a trip to “The Rome of the North” along with some mysterious artifacts helped inspire this latest piece

My story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s May/June 2026 issue is titled “The Defixio Murders.” Now don’t feel bad if you don’t know what “Defixio” means, because up until last summer, I didn’t either.

Last summer is when I visited the city of Trier in Germany, located just a few hours from Belgium, where I work and live. Trier is the oldest city in Germany, one of the four capitals of the Roman Empire during the Tetrarchy period in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. It’s aptly nicknamed “The Rome of the North,” not because of its size—which is modest—but because of the overwhelming concentration of well-preserved Roman ruins in the very city center. As a history buff, my visit to Trier was long overdue. And I was not disappointed.

One of the most striking archeological sites is Trier’s amphitheater, where gladiators fought fierce beasts, and each other. On the theater grounds, dozens of small lead plates were excavated, inscribed with ancient spells. In Latin, these plates were called “defixiones,” meaning curse plates, thrown into the arena by spectators. When soiled with gladiator blood, the cruel and colorful spells on the plates—often aimed at an unfaithful spouse, a toxic boss or a debtor refusing to pay up—were supposed to come true.

I was so impressed that I got a story idea on the train back home. What if I infused a contemporary serial murder case on the streets of Trier with a whiff of classical Roman mystery, by making the local detectives find a defixio on the body of each of the victims? Wouldn’t that be intriguing?

Veteran crime writer Josh Pachter, who’d already translated several of my earlier stories for the magazine’s ‘Passport to Crime’ department, certainly thought so. He liked the story, translated it and agreed to pitch it to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. But he wasn’t sure about the working title: “Defixio.” Although an enthralling word, he thought it might be too unfamiliar and asked me to come up with a different title. I suggested “Roman Curse,” but that was probably too obvious. Now, using an esoteric word in a title doesn’t have to be an editorial curse, or else a bestselling novel like “The Quincunx” should have been a major flop, which it definitely wasn’t. So Josh came up with “The Defixio Murders,” keeping the cool Latin word (which made me happy), but at the same time making the title instantly appealing to the crime-loving readers of the magazine, whom I hope will enjoy this cursed trip to the blood-soaked streets of The Rome of the North.

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Herbert De Paepe is a journalist and fiction writer who lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. He is currently working on his 9th crime novel. His short stories have appeared in EQMM, the short story collection Dutch Treats, and In Tenebris, a Belgian fantasy-fiction magazine.

EQMM regular and Readers-Award winner David Dean shares some of the background and thought behind the stories in his Dr. Marchland stories, with the most recent being “Marchland’s Missing Patient” from our March/April issue

When EQMM contacted me about writing a blog, the request contained a list of prompts to aid the writer in selecting a subject, such as ‘How did you come to write this story?” In the past, I’ve not paid much attention to these but struck out on my own. This time, however, since the March/April issue contains a story of mine—“Marchland’s Missing Patient”—I thought I would take the opportunity to introduce you to the story’s characters and the world they live in.

As to how I came to author the Marchland stories—they form a series—is simply told. During the Covid lock-down I took the opportunity to read, or re-read, classic novels and short stories from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Being a crime fiction writer I now viewed them through a different lens and saw crimes woven throughout many of them, the opportunity for re-interpretation abundant and beckoning. All that was needed was a Victorian alienist to take them on. Enter Dr. Marchland.

Both the stories and their creators are introduced at the beginning of each case with a quote from the work and attribution to the writer. Hence, “Mrs. Hyde,” March/April 2023, is inspired, not surprisingly, by Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Crown v Marchland” July/Aug 2023, takes flight from De Maupassant’s “The Diary of a Madman,” and “The Carfax Lunatic Society” Jan/Feb 2024, from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, the current story (very loosely) from Wilke Collins’ “The Woman in White”. . . . Each of these revisited by our very own Dr. Marchland who takes us along for a romp through murder, mystery, and twisted psychology, Victorian-style.

“Patient” is the seventh installment in the ongoing saga of Dr. Beckett Marchland of London. In this bygone age of developing interest and study of the human psyche, Marchland maintains a lucrative private practice while moonlighting as an expert witness. This last entails examining prisoners for psychological fitness for trial by Her Majesty’s Criminal Court or, conversely, hiring out to solicitors and barristers who wish to introduce mitigating factors for their clients’ defense. Often, he simply stumbles into cases as when he’s invited to a country house in Lincolnshire in “Aswarby Hall” March/April 2025.

A liberty I take with these stories is the coming and going of both historical personages of the era and fictional ones from the same. Marchland encounters both Oscar Wilde and Count Dracula, M. R. James, and Dr. Jekyll—Victorian fiction blending with Victorian reality.

In her comments regarding “Shall I Be Mother,” July/August 2024, editor Jackie Sherbow described Marchland as a person of whimsical sensibilities, and she was right. Of course, Marchland takes himself quite seriously. He is a man of his time and place and blinkered by many biases. As a result, he is often wrong in whole, or in part, in his endeavors, which are altruistic in the main. Neither does he have trouble in seeing himself as a victim, and sometimes really is one as in “Crown v Marchland.”   

In such situations, he must rely on a number of people. As the reader arrives at, or begins, the current story, Marchland’s very large and somber butler, Owens, has been a constant presence. His “Welsh Ogre” as Marchland has referred to him, is a retired army color sergeant. The late Colonel Marchland described him as, “The most dangerous man in my regiment.” Owens is a fixture and condition of Beckett’s inheritance.

However, Marchland does not view the perpetually disapproving Owens as an asset (at least not publicly) but rather a watchdog set upon him by a stern and distant father who had little understanding of his intellectual and frivolous son.

Owens confirms this suspicion in “The Carfax Lunatic Society,” when he says, “Your father, the colonel—good man that he was—said that I was to stay close to you, sir, whenever you might be in danger or…embarked on some foolishness as might be in your nature.”

Marchland’s response? “Did he, Owens? Well, really! What an irritating person he could be.”

However reluctant Marchland may be to admit to any virtues that Owens might possess, he is rarely without him—which has proved most fortunate for him on a number of occasions.

Also in residence is Mrs. Owens—Mrs. O to Marchland—who heads up the cooking staff in his household. It is she who provides an island of comfort and normalcy in her warm and busy kitchen. Marchland is often to be found at her cluttered table being fed scones and jam, or other sweets, as if he were a lost waif wandered in from the street.

Yet far from being isolated from the outside world, Mrs. O is a fount of information, having members of her large family in service in households all over the city. Marchland gratefully mines these resources as is demonstrated in the current story.   

In the first of the series, “Mrs. Hyde,” Marchland rescues a boy from the dangerous streets of London. Jamie, having barely escaped being murdered by his own father, still bears the scar round his neck as proof. He lives by theft and sleeps in sheds and cellars that he breaks into at night and slips out of at first light. The Owens’s take him in hand. His hard-earned street skills prove useful to Marchland’s investigations.

There are yet two more added to the cast in the fifth installment, one in the person of Lydia Houghton, late of Dublin and Kilkenny. This lovely young woman first appears in “Aswarby Hall” and again in “The Portrait of Adrian Whyte,” May/June 2025. She is in England to help establish her family’s whiskey business abroad. Marchland, who enjoys strong spirits perhaps too much, wholly approves her venture. In fact, he finds little to disapprove of in Lydia Houghton with, perhaps, the exception of her ‘Irish humor’. Being vain (a la Oscar Wilde, he wears his auburn hair shoulder-length), he dislikes ever being the butt of a joke. This attitude does not deter Lydia from chiding him. He also discovers that she handles a pistol expertly and is a fearsomely competent archer. She figures prominently in “Marchland’s Missing Patient”.

Also fearsome is Maeve, Lydia’s lifelong companion, and maid, who finds nothing to like in the Englishman, and does little to mask her feelings about him. Marchland finds her intimidating and unpleasant, perhaps the only person in his circle that makes Owens tolerable by comparison. So there you have the premise and characters of the Marchland series up to the moment of this current issue. I do hope you that consider giving the story a read, and if you do, that you enjoy it and will wish to read the others. Many thanks, also, to those already following the adventures of Dr. Marchland, and rest assured, this is not the final story.

In this post that is sure to enlighten fans of the craft of storytelling, Richard Z. Santos extolls the virtues of brevity while outlining his evolution as a writer who came to learn that less is often more

For writers, sometimes the things we’re best at can become a little too easy to fall back on. There’s a fine line between showing off your skills and indulging yourself. For example, if you’re good at dialogue, then maybe your fiction has long stretches of characters exchanging witty, natural dialogue that doesn’t actually move the story forward very much. Who knows, maybe you’re so good at describing faces that your readers will know exactly what everyone’s eyes look like but not what they actually think.

Leaning into what we’re good at is natural and it’s not a bad thing. But more and more I’ve been trying to put constraints around my writing in order to force myself out of my comfort zone.

I tend to over-complicate things. Maybe this is also true with personal interactions and relationships, but I’m speaking of my writing here.

My stories and novels tend to become labyrinthine, knotted, multi-vocal. My debut novel, Trust Me, took me seven or so years to write because I kept adding new POV characters. Each new character required me (so I assumed) to deepen the mystery of what was happening in order to accommodate them and their choices.

While I think the published product is balanced, early drafts were overstuffed and it made the writing process more difficult than it needed to be. I added historical asides that dived into the history of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The ghost of Billy the Kid popped up. I worked so hard to make my novel everything, that it kept getting away from me. Only when I cut most of the nonsense out and focused on the story, did the novel actually come together.

In addition, my work tends to swirl around conspiracies, the machinations of the powerful, secret cabals, hidden power brokers and their impact on everyday people. I’ve probably watched too many paranoid moves from the 1970s; although my time working in Washington, DC myself also plays a role here.

Of course, as a result of these complicated plans and deceptions, my word count can skyrocket. Recently, I set out to write a quick ghost story for an anthology. By the end, I had written about World War I, the use of exploited Latino and Native American laborers to build ski runs and roads in the Rockies, characters with secrets I didn’t know they had, a love story, mining towns, and more. Hungry ghosts, also. The story was supposed to be under 5,000 words, but my first draft was just over 11,000. Oops.

So, because I know my tendency to paint myself into corners and laboriously write my way out of them, I’ve been trying to simplify.

With my third novel, Graft versus Host, I limited myself to a single POV character. It is possible! The novel still includes a vast conspiracy, shady real estate developers, corrupt cops, a dead white supremacist, and a protagonist who might be losing his mind, but it’s a tidy 70,000 words. What to some might seem like too slight of a book, feels like admirable restraint to me.

With “A Trail Job” I wanted to write a quick story (under 2,000 words) in the PI genre that didn’t turn into Chinatown or a Chandler novel where no one (not even the author) really understands the plot. No red herrings that lead our hero off the track and into a deeper, parallel mystery. No switching POV to a different character whose suffering aligns with our protagonist’s. No smoke-filled rooms, no faces only glimpsed in shadows (well maybe one), only a small story with small people.

Don’t get me wrong, the real world is complex. Forces outside our control are dictating how we live our lives, and sometimes those systems become so manifest, and violent, that we’re all forced to confront our role in society. But also, for most people most of the time, our daily lives are kind of boring.

So, could I write a PI story that is true to the boring, or at the very least familiar, parts of life? Would it be under a million words long? Would it be interesting?

That was my goal. I leave it up to y’all to decide.