Tom Andes has had stories in a variety of literary journals and crime-fiction publications, including Best American Mystery Stories 2012. He also won the 2019 Gold Medal for Best Novel-in-Progress from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society. A musician as well as an author, he’s released two well-received EPs. His most recent fiction is a story for EQMM entitled “Hell-Bent for Leather,” which appears in our current issue (September/October 2024), and a soon-to-be-published novel, Wait There Till You Hear From Me (Crescent City Books, 2025). In this post Tom talks about a mystery writer who moved him from an early age and whose work continues to be impactful for him on rereading. —Janet Hutchings

Not all our adolescent loves hold up over the long run. Play me the music I loved in junior high, and odds are I’ll cringe. My first rock concert at age 13 was David Lee Roth’s Skyscraper tour, with Steve Vai playing the heart-shaped guitar with three fretboards (eat your heart out, Jimmy Page). I can’t tell you the last time I listened to that record, or for that matter, anything Roth did without Van Halen. Metallica’s Master of Puppets? I haven’t put that on in decades—though late in the pandemic, I did find myself listening to a lot of Judas Priest, which inspired my story, “Hell Bent for Leather.”

More interesting for me is what survives. I don’t know how many hundreds of hours I’ve spent listening to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street since I discovered it on vinyl in my parents’ record collection when I was 15. I still love that album. Ditto The Pogues’ Rum Sodomy and the Lash. For months, in ninth grade, I felt asleep with REM’s Green in my headphones. Every few years, I find myself doing a deep dive on that, Document, and the band’s other records from the same era.

I’ve returned to certain books and found myself disappointed. I’ve returned to other books and felt like I was reading completely different novels. That’s how it was with The Catcher in the Rye. First time through, I identified with Holden. The second time through—only a few years later—I thought, “man, this kid’s a jerk.”

Again and again, I’ve gone back to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory. Though I suppose both are literary novels, Greene maintained he learned how to write novels by writing what he called “potboilers,” which seems as good a way as any to transition to what we’re talking about today, which is mystery fiction.

A few years ago, I found myself arguing with a friend. I made the innocuous (so I thought) statement that mystery and crime fiction moved me more profoundly and gave me a deeper, richer, more resonant emotional experience than most literary fiction. This person had spent their life writing literary fiction, and they felt invalidated by what I was saying, as if I were dismissing their life’s work.

Of course, I hadn’t meant it personally, and I hadn’t meant to slag this person’s writing off, either. Whatever genre we’re writing in, the rewards seem so small, the payoff so negligible, I understand why they felt that way: especially writing literary fiction, the edification that comes from the sense we’ve written something of enduring artistic value is often the best payoff we’re going to get. And this person is a brilliant writer. Still, here I am all these years later defending myself—or perhaps I’d just like to return to this point because it’s still the truth.

I don’t care whether literary or mystery fiction is “better,” mind you. Most hierarchical ideas about quality in writing are a moving target, based on a contingent set of standards that have more to do with what a given audience wants to believe about itself than with any eternal verities of storytelling. Just look at a list of Pulitzer winners from 100 years ago if you don’t believe me. I’m interested in what keeps me up at night. And it’s still the truth: mystery and crime fiction move me more profoundly and give me a deeper, richer, more resonant emotional experience than most literary fiction.

At the time I was having this argument, I was halfway through rereading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. I was trying to explain to this friend how I could be moved to tears by Spenser’s relationship with Hawk, despite the obvious artifice of a detective novel, and despite the fact Spenser and Hawk are both tropes, the Detective Hero—descended from the Cowboy Hero and the Rugged Individualist—and his Black sidekick.

I’d approached rereading the Spenser novels with trepidation, to be honest. I loved those novels when I was a teenager. They’re part of the reason I wanted to write. Picking them up again, I was hoping for an injection of straight storytelling magic, a shot in the arm I could carry into my own work. What if with hindsight, they sucked? What if the magic was gone, or anyway, worn off? What if they’d aged less like Exile on Main Street than Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet?

To be sure, they’re a product of their era. In the first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser is a swinging single, and he hooks up with his client and later, her college-aged daughter. Hey, it was the seventies.

Over the course of those first few books, though, something happens. Susan Silverman enters the picture, and she becomes Spenser’s romantic partner. Susan’s a psychiatrist, and she often ends up explaining Spenser to himself, and by extension to the reader. She gives voice to the code he lives by, which is a code he doesn’t often articulate, though he does understand it. For all that he’s a tough guy, Spenser has an interior life; he can be brutal, but he’s not a brute. To be sure, aspects of their relationship are idealized. Sometimes Susan is, too. Yet over the course of the series, Spenser and Susan have an ongoing conversation about the paradoxes of long-term partnership, marriage, and monogamy, and that deep, heartfelt examination of romantic love is part of what forms the subtext of the series and makes rereading it so rich and rewarding.

I suspect the subject of long-term romantic partnership was close to Parker’s heart. He and his wife Joan separated for a time. When they got back together, they moved into a house in Boston with three floors, one for Parker, one for Joan, and one in the middle, which they shared.

Aspects of Spenser’s relationship with Hawk might strike contemporary audiences as being “problematic.” Yet literary fiction in the 1980s was lily white, and if Parker’s ideas about race sometimes seem ham-handed—he insists that it’s okay for Spenser to use the n-word, for instance, because he’s pals with Hawk—the Spenser novels nevertheless acknowledge the reality of racism in the United States, and the fact that race is an organizing principle in our culture. By and large, Parker’s white literary contemporaries elided the subject of race altogether.

Not that Parker was highfalutin. The Spenser novels are action-adventure stories like Mickey Spillane’s books or like The A-Team, something else I loved when I was younger, though I haven’t tuned in to see how it holds up. Like Shakespeare, Parker wasn’t writing for posterity. He told an interviewer he was writing to put food on the table.

None of this is to say that you should agree with me about Parker’s books. What keeps me up at night might put you to sleep. Not that I don’t believe in verities of storytelling, either, because I do—deeply and profoundly, as an article of faith.

I was fortunate enough to take a few workshops with the great short story writer Lee K. Abbott before he died. Lee was a literary writer, but he had a soft spot for crime fiction. He loved Tana French’s novels, and his eyes would light up when he talked about James Lee Burke. After Lee died, I read an interview where he gave this piece of advice to apprentice writers: read what moves you and try to figure out what about it speaks to you, so you can emulate it in your own work. Read what moves you—not necessarily what’s “good,” and certainly not what’s “literary.” I’m still trying to figure out what it is about Parker’s novels that I find so moving. All I know is that when I reread them, I feel like I’m sitting down with a group of old friends. And that’s still the ultimate test of a book for me: above and beyond genre or what’s “good,” it has to be something that engages me, that keeps me up at night.