Drawing from her early days going from John Cheever reader to a fan of short mysteries, Anna Scotti reveals the profound influence short-form fiction has had on her life, leading to her status as a prolific author today! Be on the lookout for more of her work in future issues of EQMM

I grew up in a house piled high with stacks of newspapers, books, and journals. My parents subscribed to four daily newspapers and just about every magazine published in English, from The Saturday Evening Post to Morbidity and Mortality, from Look and Life to The American Journal of Political Science.

We weren’t hoarders—paper went out as steadily as it came in, with boxes of well-thumbed reading matter delivered to neighborhood dental offices and medical waiting rooms on a regular basis. The local library and high school, too. If you came for dinner, you might go home with copies of Time, National Geographic, or Scientific American tucked under your arm, and a few suggestions about what to read and what to skip. There was no paper recycling back then—what periodicals weren’t claimed were used to wrap garbage or line the guinea pig cage.

My father was both a trained chemist and an inveterate alarmist, so we didn’t ever store newspapers. I can still hear Dad explaining how sunlight magnified through a window could cause compressed paper to ignite. Apparently, once burning, stacked newsprint is so thoroughly self-insulated that a fire can smolder for hours before erupting into flames, all the better to surprise you in your sleep. We had regular fire drills in which we had to roll out of bed and crawl down the stairs to the front door with our eyes closed, to the bafflement of our dog and of any guest unlucky enough to be having a sleepover.

My parents had escaped from an apartment fire—with their newborn, a book, and the clothes on their backs—as young marrieds, so fire was always on their minds. But they also—and by “they,” I mean my dad—also worried about drowning, poisoning, electrocution, falling off ladders, building collapse, infectious disease, and attack by wild animals – perhaps to excess.

It’s a bit of a joke on the internet right now that Gen-Xers expected adulthood to involve more quicksand, piranhas, and pianos tumbling from the sky. If only the small, but somewhat thrilling, possibility of encountering man-eating fish had been the worst of it! My brothers and sisters and I knew exactly what to do if we fell through an asbestos ceiling, accidentally broke a thermometer and swallowed mercury, or were attacked by racoons. (I’ll spare you the part about thumbs and eyeballs, but be aware that it’s essential to save the carcass so it can be tested for rabies; otherwise you’ll endure daily shots in the stomach for weeks on end.) We knew how to kick a person loose from the toaster mid-electrocution without getting shocked, and what to do in case of a gas leak, burst pipe, or accidental scalding. At ten, I could differentiate between coral snakes and king snakes (red on yellow, kill a fellow), how to take control of a runaway car if the driver had a heart attack, and whether a person might perform the Heimlich maneuver on herself if she chokes while dining solo. (Reminder: cut your meat small, chew thoroughly, and before you sit down to dinner in a restaurant or at a friend’s house, identify the nearest straight-backed chair.)

            Sometimes I miss childhood.

But not often.

In fairness, my high-alert upbringing left me well-prepared to write  murder mysteries. I already knew just about all the ways a person might die, from slipping on a throw rug at the top of the basement stairs to becoming trapped in the fold-out sofa while tidying up after overnight guests. Bathrooms were a special minefield. One might forget ninth-grade chemistry and scrub the sink with a bleach and vinegar mix (inhalation of chlorine gas!) or breathe spores of toxic stachybotrys chartarum from the folds of a moldy shower curtain, or pass out while vomiting and drown in the toilet, or slice an artery with a shard of broken Prell bottle (no plastic shampoo containers back in the day!). These things do happen (just check Morbidity and Mortality) but probably not with the frequency I grew up anticipating.

It’s not that we were particularly sheltered. Like all kids of the time, we rode bikes without helmets, stayed out until the streetlights came on, and chatted cheerfully with strangers at the bus stop and at the newsstand and the library. My sister made the first skateboard in our neighborhood from rollerskate wheels and a discarded one-by-four. I had a unicycle and regularly waded in the filthy neighborhood creek. We walked on stilts, stole cigarettes, befriended stray dogs, and played with rusty nails and firecrackers. So we had tons of fun – we were just ever-mindful of everything that could go wrong while doing it.

Just about the only thing we were not allowed to do was watch television. And so we read voraciously, but discerningly. We’d fight for the good stuff that arrived in the afternoon mail before we got home from school. My parents’ professional journals were stultifyingly dull, as were Popular Science (except for the titillating ads in the back) and The Upper Rooms my grandparents sent – the poor dear optimists. But nothing compared with The New Yorker in terms of opaque, incomprehensible prose. I never knew what the heck the articles were supposed to be about – they went on and on, in the sixties and seventies, sometimes thirty thousand words or more. Those articles were nearly as long as some of the novels I was reading – Love Story, for example, and Giovanni’s Room and Purposes of Love. But unlike Segal and Baldwin and Renault, New Yorker articles were as dense as cement blocks, at least to a twelve-year-old. The New Yorker did run some good cartoons, although the editors had an annoying habit of scattering strange little line drawings around the pages that promised to be cartoons, but weren’t. No captions. No punchlines.

But then—oh, happy day! I discovered John Cheever. I can’t tell you which story I read first, and even now, fifty years after the fact, they tend to run together in my mind. What I loved about Cheever was that I recognized the milieu. His stories were set on the upper East Side of Manhattan, in the pricey suburb of Westchester, and in little beach communities of New England, places I’d never been. But I recognized the adults in Cheever’s stories: their steady drinking, their mature, bitchy conversation, and above all their complicated, obsessively introspective upper-middle class angst. I grew up in Chevy Chase, a neighborhood technically within the district line of Washington, D.C., though very much a WASPY suburb in spirit. Cheever’s characters were my neighbors, my friends’ parents, even my teachers at school! Their inward-looking despair, their shallow but privileged lives, were familiar to me and allowed me not only to enjoy the stories, but to see beneath them to their foundations—how the writing was constructed. Each story was—though I certainly didn’t realize it at the time—a lesson in craft.

I’d been reading short stories for years, of course. In fact, I wrote about my sister’s and my shared love of the Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines in “Sisters Reading Sisters,” which will appear in the upcoming 85th anniversary issue of Ellery Queen (September-October). But it had never occurred to me that the delectable murder morsels we scarfed up like candy could have anything in common with fiction printed in an intimidating and desert-dry tome like The New Yorker. Ellery Queen was dames and stiffs and payphones and cigarettes stubbed out with stiletto heels. It was cops in trenchcoats and old ladies who baked fruitcakes stuffed with dates, walnuts, and rat poison. Man, I loved those stories! But they were like visiting a foreign country—a country where people kept guns in gloveboxes (we had neither weapon nor car) and hid bodies in barrels, in concrete, in trunks and closets and garages and ponds. Men cussed, but judiciously, and women wore tight knee-length dresses and knew how to lure a fellow to perdition just by crossing their legs and lighting up a smoke. My god, the glamour of the characters who peopled those murder mags! But Cheever’s folks were like us: brainy, awkward, feckless, dissatisfied without really knowing why.

With the discovery of Cheever, my love affair with the “literary” short story was launched. I devoured the form obsessively—Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Salinger’s Nine Stories, Joyce’s The Dubliners, anything by Poe, Carver, and Dahl. My father introduced me to Chekov, Kafka, Malamud, and our shared favorite, O. Henry. Dad even tracked down an old copy of The New Yorker from the forties so I could read Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and my brothers and I passed around dog-eared Bradbury collections until they fell to pieces. And those were early days, with Jhumpa Lahiri, George Saunders, Edwidge Danticat, Lauren Groff and other contemporary virtuosos still to come – at least for me.

It’s hard to fathom now, with The New Yorker firmly established as the premier intellectually challenging mainstream journal in America. The publication of a poem, article,  or short story in its pages can be a bona-fide career-maker. But in its early days the magazine was considered a bit frivolous, with a decidedly middle-brow focus on satire, society gossip, and theater reviews. As late as 1953, Cheever thought that his association with the magazine might be harming his literary reputation. He ultimately triumphed, of course, with a Pulitzer in 1979 and 120 stories published in The New Yorker’s pages.

Any indignities once heaped upon The New Yorker’s hallowed pages for being plebeian have been heaped a dozen times higher on the likes of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Because those journals have traditionally published a range of genres, from pot-boilers to whodunnits and police procedurals to cozies and capers, their more literary offerings have at times been overlooked.

In fact, the list of authors who have published in EQMM is astonishing: a partial roll call includes Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammet, Jack London, Patricia Highsmith, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, along with a few surprise players like Jose Luis Borges, Alice Walker, Rudyard Kipling, and A.A. Milne. No doubt I’ve left out many fan faves (including a few of my own) but the point is that high-brow literary authors have been publishing anywhere and everywhere they can for a very long time. More than forty Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award winners have published in EQMM alone—and that number doesn’t include the nominees who didn’t win. Joyce Carol Oates, five-time finalist for the Pulitzer, is generally considered one of America’s most celebrated living authors. Her short stories have appeared in EQMM dozens of times and are often included in the “Best ofs.”

Some readers, and some critics, and even some authors still differentiate between commercial and literary fiction, but they’re a dying breed. The term “literary fiction” is mostly an invention of publishers and of the MFA programs that rose to prominence in the 1980s and 90s. The term didn’t appear until 1976, when a Bantam editor used it to describe fiction that, in essence, wasn’t easily categorized in a particular genre (mystery, horror, romance, etc.) The fact is, lines have always blurred. I know with utter certainty there’s a legion at my back when I state that several of  the most celebrated “literary” novels of the near past century are unreadable. And I also know that I owe my admirable GRE verbal score largely to Ruth Rendell, whose nearly 70 published novels are all good—entertaining, clever, and intelligently constructed – yet would never be classified as literary. Seriously, I challenge anyone to read one of Rendell’s tasty little thrillers without adding at least three words to their working vocabulary!

There’s good fiction, and there’s really, really good fiction, and there’s also junk. And those are the distinctions we should be making as we read, and as we write, with less concern as to classification and more about quality and the enduring nature of our work.

So many years have passed since I sprawled on the checkerboard couch in our comfortable living room, legs flung over the sofa arm, a stack of magazines tucked securely at my side to guard against marauding siblings. My parents are gone and my siblings are gone, or scattered far and wide. But I still spend most of my time reading. I read every issue of Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock cover-to-cover, usually upon arrival. And these days, I can say the same for The New Yorker. But you will find nary a single copy of Morbidity and Mortality on my nightstand or in the TBR pile on the coffee table in my living room. Sorry, Dad. I’ve got a throw rug in the bathroom and there’s a spider living on my patio that could very well be a black widow. These days I’m living dangerously, like Hunter S. Thompson, “skidding broadside in a cloud of smoke.”