A Shamus, Derringer, and ITW Thriller award-nominated fiction writer, Andrew Welsh-Huggins has produced eight novels in a series starring P.I. Andy Hayes. The latest, Sick to Death, releases this month. The Ohio author’s three dozen-plus short stories have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including EQMM and AHMM. His latest EQMM story, “Through Thick and Thin,” is featured in our current issue (September/October 2024). In this post the author talks about a switch from the series’s usual point of view that he used to create a darker mood for the new story.     —Janet Hutchings

When I first began mapping out my Columbus, Ohio-set private eye series, the one thing I knew with certainty was my chosen point of view. In keeping with the classics of the genre, I would tell the story in first person, with all action seen through the eyes of my protagonist, ex-Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator Andy Hayes. I fell in love with private eye fiction reading novels told in first person by everyone from Sue Grafton and Robert B. Parker to Loren Estleman and Sara Paretsky, and saw no reason to tinker with the trope.

Then came the day, while reading one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, that I realized with a bit of surprise that Child occasionally changed things up. Though I reveled in the terse, third-person narrative of most of Child’s books—epitomized by that iconic line, “Reacher said nothing”—I soon discovered that some of the best books in the series were told by Reacher himself, including Persuader and Gone Tomorrow. Intrigued, I researched this phenomenon and found that Child is hardly alone in occasionally switching from third-person to first or vice versa.

Michael Connelly, for example, wrote most of his Harry Bosch novels in third person but put the narration in Bosch’s voice when the character took a detour as a private eye in Lost Light and The Narrows. After Connelly has Bosch quit the force mid-series, he explained, “I thought I’d write about him as a private eye. And since the great private eye novels are largely first-person, I thought that would be a challenge,” according to a 2015 Los Angeles Review of Books profile. He later acknowledged that he’d made a mistake taking Bosch out of the LAPD and returned him to the force, and to third person. (By contrast, Connelly writes his Mickey Haller novels all in first-person.)

Patricia Cornwell began her long-running Kay Scarpetta series with a first-person narrative in Postmortem in 1990, switched to third-person for most of the following novels, and eventually returned to first-person. “I went to third person because I wanted the ability to take on all these other personas and show the reader things that Scarpetta doesn’t experience herself,” Cornwell told The Washington Post in 2011. Ultimately, she returned to first-person out of discomfort at inhabiting the minds of criminals.

“When I shifted back to first person, it was like returning to someone I hadn’t visited in years,” she told the Post. “It was much more comfortable, for me and for the readers. In the first person, the readers feel smart, like it’s them solving the case. And because they’re holding her hand, so to speak, they feel safe, even when bad things are happening in the story.”

For his part, Ed McBain wrote most of the volumes in his 13-book series about defense attorney Matthew Hope in the first person, including the 1976 opener, Goldilocks. But he too made the switch, writing the last volume, The Last Best Hope, in the third-person. Similarly, Archer Mayor began his novels about Vermont detective Joe Gunther in the first person, then changed to third-person because it provided more creative latitude and gave other characters a voice, according to a 2013 profile.

Mayor told me in an email that he “sweated bullets” before making the switch but was rewarded when not a single reader commented.

“I felt enormously liberated, in that I could now use my new ‘God’s eye view’ position to hover over all the characters,” Mayor told me. “I never wanted to return to First Person, as a result.” He cited the new POV freedom he experienced writing 2002’s The Sniper’s Wife, told mostly from the perspective of Gunther sidekick Willy Kunkle.

As it turns out, even Sara Paretsky tried the switch, including a six-chapter third-person narrative in Total Recall in 2001, and in the short story: “The Pietro Andromache,” which appeared in 1995’s Windy City Blues, a collection of V.I. Warshawski stories. “When I wrote that story – which was relatively early in V I’s life – I wanted to explore what she looked like to people outside her head,” Paretsky shared with me in an email. “To them she seemed confident and upbeat; they didn’t see the self-doubts that often torment her.”

Emboldened by the experimentation of writers whose work I admire, I decided to try my own hand at switching POV. The first attempt, an Andy Hayes short story titled “The Whole Story,” appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine in the fall of 2020. I noticed right away that the switch darkened the tone of the tale and took the edge off my character’s normally waggish narration. Despite the change, the tone felt perfect for the story, about a prison inmate whose drunken driving caused an accident that killed his daughter, but who has enough questions about that day that he hires Hayes to dig into his case.

I wrote other Andy Hayes books and stories afterward in the first-person but decided to try again in “Through Thick and Thin,” which appears in the September/October issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Once again, shifting to the third-person guided the story—about a client with a violent past he’s desperate to keep hidden—down a marginally darker path that felt perfect for the subject matter.

Here are three things I learned switching from my customary first-person to third-person:

At its most basic, the change was an enjoyable way to freshen up a long-running series and main character, not to mention a lesson in learning new things about my character by examining him from a different angle.

As I’ve already suggested, the switch subtly darkened the mood of the stories, which forced me to keep the elements of my character that readers enjoy—his sarcasm, wit, and skepticism—while sending him down slightly meaner streets.

The switch gave me newfound confidence in the character and the series, by discovering that Hayes’ story—stories—can be successfully told in a variety of ways.

And with that, Welsh-Huggins saved his work, closed the file, and shut off his computer for the day.