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.
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.
Sheila Kohler returns our blog with a special post where discusses what makes the fiction of the Brontë sisters so special to her, as both literary fiction and mystery fiction. Be sure to check our Sheila’s book on the Brontës, “Becoming Jane Eyre,” published by Penguin
I have often wondered what makes the Brontës, the three sisters from the remote Yorkshire village of Haworth, so beloved. How and why have they remained both critically acclaimed and so popular over years. Their books have been continuously published and made into plays and movies. There are over 30 adaptations of Wuthering Heights alone, by some counts, since the first silent film in 1920, including the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier, and the 2026 adaptation. What is the secret of their success?
I would suggest that they use the basic elements of the great mystery story: the imminent threat of violence, the conflict between secrecy and confession, and the reality of an evocative and detailed place, often the wild moors of Northern England or the “haunted houses” which echo the inner reality of the characters’ emotions. All of this with the Brontë’s expressive language has enabled them to remain immensely popular through the years.
Matthew Arnold famously wrote of Charlotte Brontë’s work being filled with “rebellion and rage.” Some of her first critics found her “coarse” and even “vulgar,” and it is true that all three of these apparently humble, reserved, and religious daughters of a clergyman, who initially adopted a pseudonym to hide their sex, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, create characters, both male and female capable of extreme violence. We have only to cite a few.
In Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte we have Bertha Rochester, née Mason, of course, Mr. Rochester’s wild wife hidden in the attic of his ancestral home. We first sense her presence through her guardian, the mysterious Grace Poole whose laugh, the peal low and slow, thrills Jane initially. It is Grace Poole who drinks and thus enables Bertha , ready for revenge, to set her husband on fire in his bed and stab and bite her brother.
Bertha is intemperate, exotic, an icon of violent and unrestrained sensuality and madness. She is capable of murder and arson. Bertha is the dangerous and unleashed part of Jane Eyre, our heroine, lurking in the upper floors at Thornfield Hall, ready to strike. Jane, and the reader with her, fear this initially unknown creature: “I was afraid of someone coming out of the inner room,” she tells her employer, Edward Rochester who has left her alone to guard Bertha’s stricken brother when Edward Rochester goes to get the doctor. Bertha kills herself by burning the ancestral Thornfield down in the end and almost killing Edward who remains blinded and maimed as a result.
In Wuthering Heights we have Heathcliff himself, the antihero, half demon, half Byronic hero, an orphan whom Mr. Earnshaw brings from Liverpool one night into the bosom of the family. He says, “See here wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life but you must take it as a gift of God though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.”
Heathcliff is capable of both great passion or obsession and great cruelty. He marries Isabella just to spite her brother, Edgar Linton, whom Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff’s great love has married for his money and position in society. Heathcliff hangs his wife’s dog Fanny; he digs up his love, Catherine’s corpse “I got the sexton to remove the dirt from her coffin lid and I opened it.. I would have stayed there when I saw her face again..” ; he hates his own weak, sickly son, Linton, the child he fathers with Isabella. He hovers all through the book, dangerous and violent, from the first extraordinary scene when he thinks he sees his dead love, Catherine at the window, “Come in! come in!” he sobbed, to the last scene when Nelly Dean, the housekeeper finds him lying on his bed, wet with rain. “His eyes met mine so keen and fierce. I started; and he seemed to smile.” But he is dead. Heathcliff dies, unredeemed at the end though he gets his wish to be buried with Catherine.
Vivid, terrifying, but all absorbing, he is unforgettable. I have a memory of reading this book as an adolescent and one of our teachers asking us how many of us would have liked to marry Heathcliff. Appallingly, all the hands in the classroom shot up.
Even Anne Brontë in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall introduces a husband on a par with Heathcliff if he does not have his fascination or his passion. Arthur Huntingdon is an alcoholic and entirely self-centered. He leaves his wife Helen alone for months on end, and blatantly carries on an adulterous affair while drinking himself to death. She can only escape him by running away with her son, changing her identity, taking on a false name to hide from him in Wildfell Hall. We follow her difficult endeavor with interest. Who is this my mysterious tenant? What is she hiding?
At the center of all of these books there lies this basic conflict between secrecy, anonymity, what is not known, and confession. So many of these fascinating characters come with their secrets which are hinted at so skillfully from the start and only gradually, though sometimes spectacularly, revealed as we read on, turning the pages to discover the emotional truth which we find in these books.
In Jane Eyre we have of course Mr. Rochester whom Jane first meets as she walks back from town, and he falls from his horse. He is obliged to accept Jane’s aid to remount, all of which of course presages the end of the book. The spectacular scene of revelation occurs at the “wedding” when we discover the existence of a wife, Bertha whom Mr. Rochester has hidden as best as he can at Thornfield Hall on the third floor. The scene in the church when the stranger speaks up as the parson pauses, and exposes Edward Rochester’s secret: “He paused as the custom is. When is the pause after that sentence ever broken by reply! Not, perhaps, once in a hundred years,” is wonderfully convincing and shocking.
Less spectacular but just as interesting is another character, Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s “Villette” who comes to us as our narrator but with no background, no childhood, no parents, no siblings, no class. Even her name is not given to us for the first chapter, and we only learn her age, fourteen when we first meet her, much later in the book. She remains a calm, detached, and often distant observer, giving us detailed and often disapproving descriptions of others, like the little girl Polly who comes to stay, who, unlike Lucy expresses her strong, moving emotions. It is Polly or Paulina who has lost her mother and had to leave her father and suffers terribly in her small heart in the big calm rooms with Lucy and her godmother in Bretton.
A little later on we meet the woman Lucy Snowe works for, Lucy now suddenly as an adult obliged to earn her keep. Miss Marchmont, the night before she dies, expresses all her sorrow at her beloved’s demise in their youth, while Lucy Snowe listens calmly to her tale of woe. Lucy remains all through the book something of an enigma, arousing our curiosity: what trauma has taken away her ability to feel and express emotion? She makes us think of the war veteran, Septimus in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, who cannot feel. Only Lucy’s terrible loneliness as she walks the streets of the strange town of Villette, which even drives her, a firm protestant into a Catholic church to confess comes to us with great poignancy. We turn the pages, waiting for something more to be revealed about her past, as in a good mystery story.
Heathcliff himself in Wuthering Heights appears as a child with little information about his past. We never discover his parentage though it is hinted at he might have gypsy ancestry or even be the child of a slave ( Liverpool being a slave trading post.) . He remains a stranger, an unknown, someone Other and therefore intriguing to as is Bertha with her Creole heritage.
All these secrets are wonderfully echoed by the places where these characters reside which are so precisely and vividly portrayed: the moths fluttering over the heath and harebells, the wind breathing through the grass , the tap of the fir-bough against the window, and the rough stones of the moors around Wuthering Heights or the narrow, low and dim corridor “like a corridor in some Bluebird’s castle,” of the third floor at Thornfield Hall where Jane first hears Bertha’s strange mirthless laugh; the large peaceful rooms of the house in Bretton, the city with its quiet and clean streets, filled with sunlight where Lucy Snowe visits her godmother and first meets Graham who becomes the beloved Dr. John who rescues her in the dark, strange town of Villette.
We have here in all these books the violence of the mystery story, and all the seduction of its secrets and yet miraculously the ability to find emotional truth in these many pages, truth that both engages, sustains, and delights as does the great mystery story.
Marilyn Todd discusses some of the formative childhood experiences that led to her becoming a writer who has penned over 100 short stories. Check out her latest, “Lest We Forget,” in our March/April issue, on sale now!
Drip. Drip. Drip.
I was ten years old when our teacher, Mr. Harris, set the class the task of writing an essay about anything we wanted, providing it was set on “a day like today”—in other words, raining. (London, eh?) Two days later, my mum was summoned to the headmaster’s office, where Mr. Harris was also waiting for her. Good grief. What on earth had her little angel been up to??
Imagine her surprise, OK relief, when Mr. Harris passed her my red exercise book, and told her that this story proved that my talent needed to be nurtured. Which is what the meeting was about. My stories, he said, hooked the reader from the start, and each had an ending which was totally unexpected.
To be honest, I don’t remember a damn thing about this particular tale. The only reason I remember that it started “Drip. Drip. Drip” is because it became a talking point in the family. For me, it was just one of a thousand I told inside my head, so you can imagine how excited I was to be given the green light to write them all down. I haven’t stopped since.
The idea of going professional never crossed my mind until the song “Scarlet Ribbons” inspired a short piece for our local hospital radio—and gave everyone who listened a much-needed lift, when they were stuck in hospital over Christmas.
Since then, I’ve had 23 historical novels published, over 100 short stories, and whether it’s Ancient Rome, the Wild West, or the Swingin’ 60’s, I find inspiration everywhere. Take that headland in Sweden, where I watched two people take a walk and imagined only one of them coming back. Or saw Medusa as a sculptress, not a monster, chiselling lifelike figures out of stone. Supernatural crime, comic fantasy crime, nothing and nowhere’s off limits. I just like killing people. As for the upcoming Firefly series . . .
This time my crime’s In Edwardian times, With a heroine sharper than lime. They’re nail-biting thrillers, But while she catches the killers, She doesn’t half have a bloody good time.
In this terrific essay, Nick Guthrie discusses how being in a rock band and being raised by a jazz-loving father inspired his latest story, “Where’s Pete?” from our Jan/Feb issue
I used to play lead guitar in a band. Badly. Everything we played was fast and loud, we performed in all manner of seedy dives and pub back-rooms, but we were never punk. And like many aspiring bands, we used that speed and volume to cover up our, at best, workman-like musicality.
At face value, it’s easy to accept the cliché that punk rock was not exactly a movement for music connoisseurs, being more about attitude and image than the finer points of melody. As Stephen Palmer observes in his excellent A History of Punk, when people talk about songs, particularly punk, they often just focus on the lyrics and spirit, overlooking the fact that all the successful bands, even if they were only playing three chords as fast as they could, were full of great musicians. Even the most ranty, shouty punk song has musicality of one variety or another. And so it is with the Guttersnipes, four kids from just beyond London, united by the spirit and energy of punk, but—crucially—revolving around at least one member who is a truly talented musician. But what do they do when, on the night of their big break, that musician goes AWOL?
That’s the premise of “Where’s Pete?”, in the Jan/Feb issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. It’s rooted in that period around 1976, when Britain’s punk bands were just starting to have an impact on the mainstream. The story is set in a fictional London pub, based on accounts of pubs like the Hope and Anchor where the real punks started to get their breaks. That setting, and its backdrop, is also inspired by my own youth—not as a punk rocker, but as an observer of friends who suddenly had their hair in wild cuts and colours and started to swear a lot. And there’s another inspiration, too, one that I only saw in hindsight, and which ties punk rock into a long tradition of radical music.
As my late father grew older, he often repeated the same stories, as so many older people do, the details of events several decades ago far more vivid than the present day. One of these stories was of the time when he was a young soldier who had been recruited in the early 1950s to learn Russian at a top secret language school in Cornwall. (The school was so top secret that as soon as a young squaddie turned up in the town, locals would say, “Ah, you’ll be here for that secret spy school, won’t you?”)
As a Yorkshireman, whenever he got a few days’ leave, he would head home on a long route that took him by train into London, where he would stay overnight before getting another train up to Yorkshire. The highlight of these journeys was that it gave him the opportunity to call in at the Humphrey Lyttleton Jazz Club on Oxford Street. Lyttleton’s band alone was worth the visit, but the bandleader’s reputation was so high that whenever any of the great jazz musicians of the time were in London they would turn up as guests, sometimes surprising even Lyttleton himself as they appeared at the bottom of the stairs and pushed through the crowd to get on stage and play or sing with the band. An added bonus was that if anyone turned up in military uniform they would be waved through the door, free of charge.
For a young jazz-lover this was paradise, and I remember how my father’s face would transform and his eyes light up, even 60 or more years later, as he recounted this story. His description of the little door among the shops of Oxford Street that you could so easily not notice, and the narrow staircase down into the basement, which then opened out into a surprisingly large club with the stage directly opposite, was so clear I could picture it as if I’d been there myself.
Back in 2019 I went to a gig in London. One of my favourite bands, Darts, still together some forty or so years after they first hit the big time, was playing one of their once or twice a year shows at a venue called the 100 Club. I can be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, and this was one of those occasions.
Walking along Oxford Street, I almost missed the entrance, because it was a tiny door, sandwiched between shopfronts. Once inside, there was no space, just a long staircase heading down into the basement. And yes, those stairs came out opposite the stage, and I realised, finally, that this was the jazz club my father had talked about, albeit going under a different name now. Confirming this, the walls were covered with framed photos of the artists who had played here over the years, and sure enough, a lot of them were the jazz greats. But also there were The Who, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks, as well as lots of more recent bands.
And there, among all the musical greats, were pictures of the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Siouxsie and the Banshees, part of that seamless tradition of music on the radical edges, running all the way from the 1940s, when American GIs did the jitterbug here even though it was banned at almost every other venue, through the decades to the 1970s, when the 100 Club became critical as a home from home to perhaps the most rebellious musical movement of the 20th Century, and beyond. That night at the 100 Club, as well as enjoying a fantastic gig, I started thinking about how even an anti-everything movement like punk could never have been anti-music because, particularly looking back, we can see how all the key bands revolved around some truly talented musicians.
I like to think that my visit to the 100 Club eventually led me to writing “Where’s Pete?” and that the Guttersnipes, if they somehow managed to get past the disappearance of their musical lynchpin, would one day have got to play at that legendary basement venue. Maybe they would even have had their picture on the wall among the greats.
Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier is an Ellery Queen regular and St. Thomas native. In this thoughtful post, she describes how the rich, detailed settings of mystery fiction are one of her great joys of reading and writing
From novels to TV serials to Super Bowl halftime shows, storytellers everywhere have looked for creative ways to bring a vibrant but unfamiliar setting to life for those that consume their tales. Characters and events are supremely important, of course, but some of the greatest stories include setting as a force of its own, driving the story forward and pulling the reader (or viewer) in. Short fiction isn’t immune to this. In fact, many short fiction writers find themselves facing the unique challenge of packing interesting characters, a twisty plot, AND an authentically crafted setting into a tiny word economy. For many writers whose tales have found their way into the pages of EQMM, this challenge was cheerfully and bravely accepted—and as a frequent reader, I’ve loved being transported to bright and dazzling cities, quiet and sinister countryside estates, chilly industrial towns and picturesque, well-kept neighborhoods: all perfect settings for twisty and compulsively readable crimes!
No matter the setting or the media through which it’s portrayed, though, authors have the responsibility to bring that setting to life authentically—emphasis on the “authentic” part. Readers bring ideas and knowledge they already have to the setting of a story. This is a great place to start, of course, but it could also lead to some misconceptions if their schema is wrong or incomplete. Should every story set in Miami include cigars, guayabera shirts, and bikinis, or every story set in New Orleans include Mardi Gras and jazz bands? Perhaps, but I know writers from those locales would insist that there’s so much more to their cities than just those well-known themes. Including familiar aspects of a setting is a great way to connect with readers, but when the details veer from surface-level familiarity to a deeper exploration of the features that make a setting unique, it can create the kind of experience that lingers with the reader long after the story is finished. EQMM does a wonderful job of selecting stories for their Passport to Crime feature that accomplish this regularly.
In my case, I definitely have a preferred setting when I write, and it’s a place that may be unfamiliar for many readers. Although I’ve lived in the continental United States for a few years now, my stories are mostly set in my homeland of St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. I’ve written a few stories set in other places, but one of my biggest joys as a writer is putting my Caribbean culture front and center on the page to share with readers. I’m also keenly aware of the fact that many readers arrive at my stories with the kind of schema we try to sell in our tourism commercials—sunshine, sandy shores, clear blue water, and a healthy . . . okay, maybe a little unhealthy . . . amount of rum. While I include some of this in my stories, my goal is to showcase parts of the culture that aren’t seen from the cruise ship deck or the taxi van window. It means including areas of the island that feel mundane or ordinary. It means featuring cuisine that may be unfamiliar to readers. It means having my characters speak in dialect or using idioms that we toss around on-island. It means welcoming readers into an authentic experience—making sure the story feels less like a comfortable guided bus tour and more like inviting someone to walk through a slightly messy yard and onto the back porch for a totally different view.
A few years ago, many Virgin Islanders took part in a viral social media trend. The idea was to post a picture of something seemingly mundane—the morning commute to work, the view from the living room window, the afternoon jogging route—that was actually a gorgeous vista, with the caption “I live where you vacation”. I try to keep this thought in mind when I write my St. Thomas-based fiction, but not in the context of the original meaning. When I write my stories, “I live where you vacation” feels less like a boast about living in paradise and more like a reminder that no matter how gorgeous the island is, people still live here. My characters still have to shop for groceries, deal with power outages, clean their houses, navigate heavy traffic, and go to work. This is where I find the opportunities to make the setting most relatable and authentic—which, in turn, allows my characters space to speak and act realistically, to make all the terrible decisions that lead to a great crime or mystery story.
In my story for the March/April issue of EQMM, “Two-Hour Vacation,” I try to combine the mundane and the uniquely beautiful realities of life on St. Thomas. First, I tap into my own experience as a mom of little ones living on-island. Our oldest three children were born on St. Thomas, and trust me, there’s nothing like balancing the joy of spending the day immersed in the beauty of world-renowned beaches with the reality of lugging along several bags of supplies and toys, bringing home what felt like half the beach’s sand in the car, and spending the evening washing everyone’s hair. I also try to include different views of the same island—postcard-worthy vistas from winding hillsides, but also a chicken-scratched dirt yard tucked away in a quiet neighborhood; imported gourmet groceries as well as the slow and simple goodness of bush tea and butter bread in the middle of the afternoon. Finally, I try to tap into the feeling of being so busy with the routine tasks of life and parenthood that the perks of living on a gorgeous island are forgotten. I hope these details make the setting feel more accessible for readers, and that they enjoy the “vacation” as they dive into the story.
On that note, every well-written story should make us feel like this—like we’re taking a bit of a vacation from reality to enter an unfamiliar but intriguing world—and an authentically written setting, no matter how exotic or how mundane, can help to ensure that feeling. I look forward to all the armchair traveling I’ll be doing with my EQMM issues this year!
In this reflective post, Meenakshi Gigi Durham discusses her relationship to photography as well as its role in a few iconic mysteries. Read on to discover how it inspired her latest story, “Photograph,” from our March/April issue, on sale now!
My short story “Photograph”—my fifth for EQMM—unsurprisingly features a photograph, a large black and white image that evokes a range of emotions from the characters in the story: wistfulness, prevarication, fury. Visual media have that kind of raw power, eliciting reactions from deep places within us. In her brilliant book on photography, A Cruel Radiance, the media theorist Susie Linley writes, “Photographs excel, more than any other form of either art or journalism, in offering an immediate, viscerally emotional connection to the world. . . . There is no doubt that we approach photographs, first and foremost, through emotions.” The photograph in “Photograph” is large; it is erotic; it may or may not be the work of a celebrated cameraman. This photograph looms over the complexly interlaced lives of the people in my story: a student, an aging libertine, a daughter, a neighbor.
I am an avid mystery reader, devouring short stories, novels, and flash fiction with equal gusto. I can think of some brilliant works of fiction where photographs play pivotal roles (J.B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?) One of my favorite mystery short stories that centers on a photograph is Eileen Dreyer’s The Sailor in the Picture, referencing a picture we all recognize and adding a twist that pulls us into a startling turn of events. “The photo is iconic,” the story begins. “A young nurse is caught up in the arms of a sailor. Her leg is curled, her foot up, her head impossibly far back as people run past, laughing, waving, dancing along the black-and-white reaches of Times Square.” The year is 1945. The picture was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt. We all know it. But the story is not about the people in that picture: it’s about the girl the sailor kissed before he kissed the nurse and the violent events that unfold as a result.
Photographs are potent, provocative, political. Photographs have ended wars, upended public opinion, motivated Senate hearings and legislation, sparked laughter and galvanized grief. Photographs are exquisitely intimate, too: I am sure we all keep photographs that mean something to us, images of people or places or even things that awake or break our hearts. These days the images are on our phones, though that likely doesn’t diminish their impact. I gaze often at photographs of my newborn daughters, now grown, and to this day I am wracked by waves of emotion. In my story “Photograph,” an image is the pivot for the kind of longing for love that can destroy lives—and does.
This summer will see the launch of mystery fiction’s first-ever live-in writing workshop at Newberry College in South Carolina. Learn all about the program, from how it started to what it will feature, to how to apply, in this informative post by organizer and EQMM regular Michael Bracken
The science fiction/fantasy genre has long had the annual Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop (established in 1968), its progeny Clarion West, and similar workshops featuring intense multi-week live-in programs that serve as training grounds for new generations of SF/F writers. The crime fiction genre has not.
Until now.
What has become crime fiction’s first Clarion-like workshop began on February 23, 2023, when I posed this question on my Facebook feed: “If I or any other Mystery Writers wanted to improve our craft in a multi week workshop setting, what would we do? Science Fiction and fantasy have the Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey workshops. Literary writing has similar workshops. What does the mystery field have?”
The next day I learned Warren Moore had pondered the same question and that we had both dreamed of an intensive in-person workshop for crime fiction writers similar to Clarion. We discussed establishing one, had conversations with Clarion and Clarion West organizers, developed a plan, and Newberry College in Newberry, South Carolina—where Warren is a professor of English and Creative Writing—agreed to host the intensive four-week workshop.
The Launch
This summer sees the launch of the Newberry Crime Writing Workshop, an intensive, in-person, four-week workshop focused on the fundamentals particular to the writing of crime, mystery, and suspense fiction held July 6–31, 2026, on the campus of Newberry College. Each week’s session will be led by an established crime fiction author, and the 2026 instructors include Joe R. Lansdale, Cheryl Head, Warren Moore, and me.
Workshop participants will be selected from applicants who demonstrate potential for successful writing careers, based on writing samples accompanying applications. Though the workshop is targeted at writers in the early to middle stages of their writing careers, more advanced writers are also welcome.
The fifteen participants will be housed in college apartments with classes held in nearby seminar facilities. Lunch and dinner will be provided in the dining hall, and continental breakfasts with coffee will also be available. The writers-in-residence will live nearby and be continuously available to students. Mornings will be devoted to critiquing manuscripts in a workshop setting. Afternoons, evenings, and weekends will be devoted to individual writing, conferences with the current writer-in-residence, and the completion of class assignments.
Tuition and fees include the workshop, housing in one of the college’s newer residence halls, and meals. A limited amount of financial aid is available.
To learn more about the Newberry Crime Writing Workshop, visit the website.
Now accepting applications, click here to apply today.
It’s been two years since I first posed the question about a Clarion-like workshop for crime fiction writers and Warren responded, and I’m looking forward to greeting our first participants this summer.
Michael Bracken is the Edgar-and Shamus-nominated author of more than thirteen hundred short stories, including stories published in AHMM, EQMM, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year. Additionally, he’s the editor or co-editor of three dozen anthologies, including three Anthony Award nominees.
V.G. Burke discusses how the years he lived in Savannah, GA helped inspire his story “Skeleton Crew,” which features in the Jan/Feb issue of EQMM
Home is where the heart is . . . I know, right? Still, it’s true. Though I haven’t lived in Savannah for six years, my heart never left. That beautiful, unique city has always fueled my fiction muse. I’ve completed one novel (unpublished . . . seeking an agent) and the first draft of a second, both set in the Hostess City. Savannah’s fame is, of course, its history, the squares, those magnificent oaks and, fairly recently, its food scene. And SCAD, never forget SCAD.
But since 1974, Savannah has also been the home of the 1st Ranger Battalion. They’re based at Hunter Army Airfield, nestled on the Southside. I tended bar on River Street in my early twenties, and many of my regulars were Rangers. Looking back, most of them were (1) still-maturing twenty-somethings who missed home more than they’d admit, and (2) legitimate bad-asses. I’ve never cared for formulaic novels, movies or television series built around such characters; the lack of character development erases their humanity. But they sell . . . especially recently.
Also, the skyrocketing suicide rate among our veterans, particularly in the Spec Ops community, which became the tip of the spear following 9/11, saddens me.
These realities provoked two questions in my heart:
What would happen if the military mentally broke one of its deadliest Operators?
Can I write a good character-driven story about such a character?
My test lab was “Skeleton Crew” (thank you, Webb Wilder). Jackie Sherbow’s request to buy it was both a blessing and an answer. I hope “Skeleton Crew” provokes the heart of everyone who reads it, to ponder how we treat our vets, maybe to visit my hometown and, when you see that guy at the bar with the high-and-tight haircut, buy him a drink.
Following successful careers in law enforcement and higher education, Vic spends his time cycling and writing with his wife from their home near the Georgia/Florida line. Skeleton Crew is his first published fiction. If you’d like to connect, visit him at http://www.vgburke.com.
SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN 