SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

Meghan Leigh Paulk’s first published fiction, the story “It’s Half Your Fault,” appears in EQMM’s current issue (July/August 2023) in the Department of First Stories. The Texas author has also written a novel entitled Hollywood Down Low, which is currently with her agent. The book  was a finalist in the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas manuscript contest and was also selected for Pitch Wars 2022. In this post Meghan gives us a glimpse of how her interest in and perspective on crime fiction (and crime!) changed through real-life experience. —Janet Hutchings

Would you recognize a killer if you worked for him?

I always wanted to write mysteries. As a kid, I devoured mystery novels the way other kids devoured Doritos. I started with Nancy Drew, moved on to Trixie Belden, graduated to Agatha Christie, then began raiding my parents’ bookshelves for John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books. The Westing Game became a particular favorite of mine. I loved the puzzle-solving that mysteries offered. I viewed life through the lens of a mystery novel. When my family visited a lake cabin in the summer, I thought up places to dispose of a body there. When I met someone new, I’d think of ways I’d describe them (suspect or a victim?) in a book.

But I never expected to stumble into a real-life mystery. And I never expected to be so unprepared to encounter actual killers.

It happened in 1995 while I lived in Los Angeles. I’d moved to L.A. from Iowa in 1993 with the sense I needed to see more of the world if I wanted to write about it. After a year spent piecing together odd jobs to pay the bills, I took a waitressing gig at a high-end strip joint called Bailey’s Twenty/20 in Century City. The club catered to celebrities. I figured it might make a good setting for a story someday. Unfortunately, that venue suddenly closed in 1995 due to legal troubles.

I found myself unemployed with little savings. A good friend of mine from Bailey’s got me a waitressing gig at another strip club, Bare Elegance. I needed the work. So, I took the job.

Little did I know at that time, the Bare Elegance was at the center of an unsolved L.A. mystery.

A former co-owner of the club had been murdered in 1989. Horace “Big Mac” McKenna was mowed down by machine gun fire while he sat in his chauffeured limousine, waiting for the gate to his estate to open. McKenna, a six-foot-six bodybuilder, had been a colorful figure. He’d been a California Highway Patrolman before his arrest for running a prostitution ring and his conviction for passing counterfeit money. McKenna spent four years in federal prison but, after his release, he became a wealthy strip club owner. His hilltop estate in Brea boasted a menagerie with a tiger, a jaguar, and an alligator. He was described variously as kind, eccentric, and intimidating.

I never met McKenna but I heard whispers about his murder while I worked at Bare Elegance. One employee even hinted she knew enough that she might not be “allowed” to leave the job. You see, rumor had it that McKenna’s business partner and former CHP partner, Mike Woods, orchestrated the hit. Woods’ bodyguard, David  “English Dave” Amos, also benefited from the murder—becoming a club co-owner after McKenna’s death. The two men certainly didn’t keep a low profile. In 1994, they collaborated on film called The Takeover about rival drug lords in a turf war.

But the McKenna case remained cold while I worked at Bare Elegance.

And I didn’t believe the rumors. Yes, I’d grown up with a head buried in mystery novels but, when faced with a real-life mystery, my head retracted into its shell like a turtle. After all, these were my bosses. I saw them every Monday night when they showed up for the club’s dance contest. They drank at the bar. They complimented my outfits. They couldn’t be murderers. Could they? When people brought up incriminating stories (e.g., Amos’s girlfriend died suspiciously in a helicopter accident), I dismissed them. All my mystery-solving instincts deserted me. I simply couldn’t believe that anyone I knew would be capable of murder.

And yet I considered myself to be quite jaded. A cold-eyed observer of human nature. I still read murder mysteries during this time period. Patricia Cornwell and Sue Grafton were two of my favorite authors. Both authors depict scrappy, savvy female detectives. Yet, despite all the red flags at my workplace, it never occurred to me to dig for the truth. Some part of me didn’t want to dig too deep.

In 1997, I left the Bare Elegance and, in 1999, I started law school at Vanderbilt University. I thought I’d put the Bare Elegance behind me.  

Then, in February 2000, I heard that the murder had been solved. The gunman himself had finally given authorities a break. Johnny Sheridan, a manager at the strip club, admitted that Amos had hired him to do the hit. He agreed to wear a wire in order to catch Amos. The sting operation succeeded. Amos then turned on Woods, the mastermind of the crime. Police arrested all three men in October 2000. Woods was convicted of first-degree murder while Amos and Sheridan both pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter.

The outcome of the case shocked me. I never suspected Sheridan. I’d worked with him daily. He was a considerate, if haphazard, manager with a lovely wife and adorable daughter. The British Amos exuded lively charm. Only Woods, who had a reptilian chilliness, seemed to fit the part of “murderer.” But I learned that you can never really know what someone is capable of doing—even someone you think you know well. I wonder sometimes why I wasn’t willing to look at the darkness behind the club’s neon façade. These events loosely inspired parts of my manuscript HOLLYWOOD DOWN LOW, where a strip club co-owner’s suspicious death sets the story in motion. I used that manuscript to work through my feelings about looking the other way when faced with a real mystery. I kept the events highly fictionalized, inventing a new topless joint called Club Ten and creating a different set of owners. But the day-to-day world of the club is very similar to the places where I worked. I never solved a real-life mystery, but my protagonist, Allison Patrick, does catch the killer.

A recipient of a New Mexico fiction-writing award, Jennifer Black makes her debut as a professional fiction writer in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s current issue (July/August 2023) with the story “Heatstroke.” Her day job, she tells EQMM, is creating videos that focus on land, water, and wildlife issues; she also films and edits training videos for a national manufacturing company. In this post she looks at fiction writing from a fresh perspective, one she gained partly through her husband’s Navajo heritage. Her own ethnic background is diverse, including Korean, European, and Mexican ancestry—all of which contribute to the points of view she brings to her fiction.  —Janet Hutchings

I reached into a black widow nest today. Its host was crouched at the bottom of the biggest spider tunnel I’d ever seen, a couple feet from the irregular web stretched between a fence and stack of wood. I plunged my hand into sticky silk until it covered half my forearm, then swirled my whole appendage, gathering white webbing to my skin like cotton candy. When I was satisfied with the bounty, I moved away unbitten, rubbing what remained of the spider’s creation between and over both hands.

Why?

The internet said Navajo women are known to rub spider webs over their hands before weaving. If it worked for them as weavers, maybe it’d work for me as a writer. What I didn’t account for is how proper research often leads to better outcomes.

All this started because I’d finished reading Murder on the Orient Express. I was—and still am—fascinated by the way Agatha Christie wove the story together, eventually making it okay for me to accept the murder of a man. Within the story, she tells us what it takes for authors to craft mystery fiction: “Every minute detail of their evidence was worked out beforehand. The whole thing was a cleverly-planned jigsaw puzzle . . .”

Weavers also have details to work out before starting a project. Yarn choice, which loom to use, dimensions, spacing, shrinkage after washing, slack versus tension, the necessary math needed to produce the desired pattern, and the list goes on. Perhaps weaving and storytelling are more alike than different.

In an interview with Agatha Christie on February 13, 1955, she said, “I think the real work is thinking out the development of your story and worrying about it until it comes right.”

But what makes it right?

Elements like a great hook, the power of characters, plot, setting, the crime, clues, and red herrings all lead to a satisfying ending. Each element has its own thread, its own color, and its own purpose that an author uses to pattern the whole story with quality and appeal. That’s how I think about mystery fiction. That’s what it takes to write a good story.

All these thoughts about weaving reminded me of Spider Woman. Not the Marvel Comic character but the woman in Navajo creation stories. The remembrance set me wanting to ask my Navajo husband about his cultural teachings. But I hesitated because creation stories are to be told in winter, and it’s already summer. So, what to do?

I tried to remember what I’d been told about Spider Woman, but all that came to mind was a fogginess about weaving . . . and maybe storytelling, but I might have made that part up. Instead of asking my husband, I went to the internet. What I found is that one of Spider Woman’s roles is being the vigilant helper of humans who also taught Navajo women how to weave. And bam! Via encyclipedia.com, Google told me that some Navajo women rub their hands in webs to absorb the teachings of Spider Woman.

Now, I’m not Navajo and clearly don’t know the teachings of Spider Woman, but maybe I’ll learn how to weave. Near my writing desk, a Navajo loom rests on the floor. It was gifted to me and holds a mostly finished rug that contains a design of an eagle. The top quarter of the rug still shows the long lines of the warp, the yarn attached to the loom that runs up and down. But below that, the warp is covered by the tight weave of the brown, cream, blue, and tan yarns making up the design.

The warp reminds me of how authors drape a story over portions of their life experiences, or how research makes stories credible. I wonder if Murder on the Orient Express would’ve ever come to fruition if Agatha Christie hadn’t heard about or experienced certain events: her first train ride on the Orient Express, a subsequent ride she took on the same-named train whose travel was paused for twenty-four hours, a blizzard that halted the train for six days, or the tragic kidnapping and murder of a two-year old boy. Agatha Christie based her novel on these real events. It shows how she brought her experiences—either direct or indirect—into her writing.

When she was uncertain about something, she did proper research . . . which isn’t what I did before sticking my hand in the black widow nest.  Thankfully, some things are easily corrected.

My husband’s late mom was a master weaver. She raised and sheered sheep, dyed wool with plants, hand-spun the wool, and wove rugs that cost thousands of dollars. Her mom taught her, whose mom taught her, and so on up the lineage, all the way back to the teachings of Spider Woman. Perhaps my husband is a credible source. Instead of asking him to tell me creation stories, I asked if he knew whether his mom had ever rubbed a spider web onto her hands before weaving.

“Yes,” he said. “I saw my mom and grandma do that lots of times.”

I’m not sure why his answer surprised me, but it did. When I finally gathered enough sense to form a follow-up question, the only thing I came up with was asking him to tell me more about it. His explanation included nothing of black widow nests, but of beautifully designed webs with hosts out of sight. Many thanks to him and the women in his family, to their teachings, and to Spider Woman for affording me the opportunity to begin a journey of learning something new.

The experience of reading Murder on the Orient Express and about Agatha Christie has raised my curiosity about the history and importance of weaving in my own Korean, Anglo, and Mexican cultures. It piqued my interest in reading mystery fiction written by Korean, Mexican, and Navajo authors. It has also taken me on outdoor searches for intricately designed spider webs that catch the sun’s morning rays as it rises over Sandia Mountain, near Albuquerque, New Mexico. On one such occasion, I found a beautiful, tiny web on the fencing of my sheep corral. When I was sure the web was abandoned, I swirled a finger in it, then rubbed it between my palms in honor of my mother-in-law, Spider Woman, and the art of weaving.

Glasgow, Scotland native Pat Black returns to EQMM in our current issue, July/August 2023, with “Twos on That,” a thrilling entry in his Lomond and Slater series. A journalist currently living in West Yorkshire, Pat is also the author of six novels (as P.R. Black). In this post he takes up a topic that is on the minds of most authors and publishers these days. In addition to giving us some food for thought with this post, he has recorded “Twos on That” for our July first podcast. Don’t miss it!  —Janet Hutchings

Well . . . “yes,” is the answer to that one.

By now we’ve all had a chance to think about AI and its effect on writing fiction. ChatGPT and other AI-driven software has opened new frontiers in creativity—none of which augur well for the creative individual. Especially if that creative individual wants to . . . (hits CTRL plus I) get paid for it.

We’ve heard the counter-arguments already. That AI isn’t sophisticated enough. That it’s a jumped-up version of auto-correct, or the little paperclip person that helped you out on primeval versions of MS Office. I get that—but you’d be naïve to think that the technology will stay that primitive, that it won’t become more intelligent, more intuitive, even sophisticated.

I once mentioned in conversation that AI-driven technology might be a godsend when it comes to human medicine and surgery; where humans can err, and sometimes catastrophically, a machine may be much less likely to do so. I was mocked for this. And I concede: No, the technology isn’t there yet. But it will be one day.

I’ve no wish to discuss general doomsday scenarios as a result of AI’s interference here: There’s a lot of that speculation around at the moment, by people much better informed on the subject than me. But the technology and its possible use does provide a problem for the arts.

If we treat any story in any medium as a formula, whether in derivation from a strict algorithmic sequence or as a mutation of it, then it stands to reason that AI will replicate that formula and produce art. It won’t be good art, to start with, but like all computer technology, it’ll evolve, and improve.

Crime novels are perhaps the most formulaic of all, and therefore one of the easiest to replicate in this near-future of AI-driven authorship.

Take the whodunnit. You have the crime, usually murder. You have a victim. You have suspects. You have motives. You have clues, red herrings, plot twists. You have a resolution—on the author’s part, hopefully it’s one that readers won’t guess easily. You have a protagonist, too—in most cases, a detective. Add in a setting, both physical, geographical and temporal, and a method of murder, and, yep . . . .you’ve got it. It can be argued that all you need to do is fill in some blanks.

The key test will be: Can machines takes this formula and its possible permutations and make better stories than humans?

Part of the AI revolution is already taking place. At time of writing, the “Abba Voyage” is still ongoing in London, still packing in the crowds and becoming a tourist destination as much as the London Eye or the Houses of Parliament or Madame Tussauds. Although members of Abba did pop up at the venue for a record-setting performance the other day, there has been surprisingly little commentary over the fact that anyone going there is not actually watching Abba.

For all the chat about motion capture and 3D holographic smoke and mirrors effects and faithfully reproduced live vocal performances, anyone going to Abba Voyager is effectively watching a video. The “experience” part of it probably depends on your own personal Abba threshold.

My Abba tolerance has risen in recent years—everybody ends up liking them eventually—but I can’t help but feel that the impressive 3D “Abbatars” have an “Emperor’s new clothes” element to them. Some people have pointed out his bare bum, but not many. It’s a simulation. No matter how you dress it up, you’re watching a recording. It’s not a live event. The art is driven by machines.

I can foresee a future—not too distant, either—when AI linked to this no doubt closely-watched entertainment phenomenon brings back musical acts which are becoming rarer as their natural record reaches the end of the groove. Many outrages and blasphemies are possible, here.

Imagine The Beatles, reformed, down to the flecks in the black and white footage, playing brand new songs modeled by AI that sound as good, if not better than the classic Lennon/McCartney numbers. Any number of resurrections might take place—take your pick, really—Johann Sebastian Bach, Wagner, Elvis, John Lennon, Frank Zappa, you name it. All fully customisable. Let’s have Jimi Hendrix having a duel with Paganini, why not?

At the touch of a button, you might even generate collaborations, no matter how outre. Iron Maiden and Nana Mouskouri. Napalm Death and Conway Twitty. Lou Reed and Metallica . . . wait, that one’s been done in real life.

There are only so many musical notes, discernible to the human ear. There are only so many ways they can be combined, only so many chord progressions, only so many melodies, only so many beats. To a computer powerful enough, replicating these mathematical patterns might seem basic, with something that sounds like “Across The Universe” being generated in less time than it’d take for you to click your fingers.

In the amount of time it will take for all The Beatles to die, and then for everyone who lived at the same time as The Beatles to die, then this might not seem like a bad time. It might sound quite good. It might be indistinguishable from the original.

So too with the written word. Ask AI to create Borges’ “Library Of Babel,” with every possible combination of letters, and it might be possible—it might be already.

For fiction, the outcomes are similar, and perhaps equally horrifying. I will stress again that this is all theoretical for now, much like my robotic surgeon which won’t nick your artery, or remove the wrong kidney, or insert a toxic implant in your breast, or leave its scalpel and forceps stitched up inside you, or leave its initials soldered on your very bones for a laugh.  But let’s say you were to feed into a powerful computer every single sentence written by an author—say, JRR Tolkien.

Now, say you added into this database every other piece of surviving written work by him— letters, notes, introductions, reviews, essays, shopping lists, whatever. And then say we blended this with every single piece of Tolkien’s biographical data and its historical context. Is it possible this could be used to come up with a new piece of epic fiction as good as, and indistinguishable in style from, The Lord Of The Rings? If so, it might be a crime of sorts to deny anyone the opportunity to read that.

For some, it’s a crime to create it. But consider what’s happening right now—thanks to human agency, not machines. Take Sherlock Holmes, and the amount of literature and movies and TV shows that are still created up to the present day featuring Conan Doyle’s great detective. I read a short story by Val McDermid at Christmas, in her festive anthology. Collections of brand new short stories featuring Holmes and Watson appear just about every year. With Holmes now having passed out of copyright control in the US, you can now expect far more of these.

And for absolute clarity, if anyone offers me a chance at writing a Holmes story, I’ll take it quicker than you can light a pipe. Elementary.

Culture regurgitates. AI won’t change that.

Think about the torrents of fan fiction out there, licensed fan fiction, at that, based on any intellectual property we might think of. How many novels are out there, based on the Alien universe, alone? If Kingsley Amis did it with James Bond, then it’s fair game for anyone, really.  So, if anyone’s ever of a mind to complain about content generated based on existing properties, an appropriation of beloved characters and stories, then living, breathing humans are way ahead of AI.

To confront the thing we fear directly: can I see any instance where I might use AI? I can.

Neil Gaiman wrote a story, I think part of his Sandman universe, where someone is cursed with having too many ideas. Like most writers, I think I have this curse as well. I’ve often wondered at the word count of my ideas file, stretching back more than 20 years. It’ll probably be novel-length by now. And it grieves me to think that not all of these ideas will become finished stories—in fact, I’ll be lucky if 1% of them make it beyond the one-line concept stage to an actual page, whether that’s for people to read, or just languishing on a hard drive.

If I was facing the end of the road, and such tools were available to me, would I consider using AI to turn these ideas into finished stories, based on my own writing and style, and within set parameters? I might just be tempted to do that.

The issue is authorship, of course, and being up-front about how stories are created from now on. Publishers have a moral duty to let readers know if the tales they’ve paid for were created by a human or a machine—even if it’s genre work, pornography, fan fiction, or anything we might uncharitably call hackwork, we’ve a right to know that it’s an honest endeavor.

As a fellow writer said to me recently, it may be a matter of legality; publishers might be obliged to tell us exactly how the words got on the page. Because it wouldn’t do for them to simply skip employing and paying humans for work a machine could do… But some of them will, when the technology is ready, in maybe a decade or two. It then falls upon the publishers to be honest, to allow people to make an informed choice, and hopefully a good one.

Who knows—maybe AI will unleash the sort of technological devilry that might make the publishing industry itself redundant. If people have AI tools at their disposal, then maybe readers of the future will buy the software itself and make their own stories and novels from scratch, and not bother with books by anyone else at all. Those werewolf/regency romance mash-up stories you’ve always had in your head? Go right ahead with those, don’t bother with the middle man. Dinosaurs Vs Elvis? Complete retelling of Shakespeare as dirty limericks? Or you, as a great warrior or lover or racing driver or superhero or a Starfleet captain . . . or God? You can see how it might go. Endless reiterations and mutations.

As for the humble writer, well, I wouldn’t call myself a luddite. But AI’s rise is irrelevant to me. Even if every door to sharing my work with the public slams shut, and no-one, not even my own family, want to read it, I’ll still be writing my stories, with all their flaws, errors, tortured logic, and everything else that makes them uniquely, unmistakably mine. Even if “computer says no,” I’ll find a pen and paper.

The human impulse to create cannot be superseded by technological innovations. People still paint, people still sing, people still act, and people still write. I trust that the corresponding desire among my fellow humans to experience that art cannot be defeated either. 

Kristopher Zgorski debuted as the reviewer for EQMM’s Blog Bytes column (replacing Bill Crider) in our May/June 2018 issue, around the same time that he received the Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his review site BOLO Books. BOLO Books (www.bolobooks.com) remains under his direction. The site is designed to highlight new books on or just before their release dates and also features in-depth reviews, author interviews, guest posts, composite sketches (often of people in the publishing industry), and critiques of cover designs and trends in covers. Kristopher has also recently launched, in conjunction with author Shawn Reilly Simmons, the YouTube vlog, WE ARE WHAT WE READ (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjGBcvh9gj0czjxlvxWueTg), in which authors talk about books they’ve read that have impacted them. (Be sure to tune in!) In 2024, in recognition of his contributions to the Malice Domestic community and the Malice Domestic genre, Kristopher will receive the Amelia Award from the Malice Domestic Convention. In this post he takes up an important topic not only for readers but for those of us who work in the publishing business. You can find more insights from Kristopher in each EQMM’s Blog Bytes department—a column that surveys and evaluates many different types of websites and blogs focused on crime and mystery fiction.  —Janet Hutchings

Let’s take a moment to contemplate the concept of sub-genres within crime fiction. The first thing readers need to remember is that there are logical reasons for placing books in categories. These are largely marketing decisions that serve several purposes: They help with bookstore placement; they aim to improve target advertising; and they help to manage reader expectations. But sub-genre classification is not meant to be any type of definitive statement. It is a guideline, just one of many tools designed to guide readers toward enjoyable reading experiences.

It is easy to tell it is not an exact science, because even within the industry and amongst readers (both sides of the equation) people don’t necessarily agree on the categories themselves. How many sub-genres are there? Too many to contemplate, given that if you can classify a handful of books by some similar characteristic, it may be valid to call that a sub-genre—even if you are the first person to make such a connection or claim. However, the reality is that a book can—and typically does—fit into more than one sub-genre.

For example:

The Police Procedural—This is likely a story in which some official investigation of a crime is the central driving force for the narrative. Readers are privy to how evidence is collected, clues are interpreted, and leads are followed until—usually—the culprit is uncovered and brought to justice.

The Serial Killer Novel—This is a narrative in which the central murder is part of a string of similar crimes, often perpetrated against victims with some common denominator such as physical or personality traits that may or may not be the root cause of the crime. Often the driving force propelling this type of narrative is the criminal’s preparation between crimes.

In this example, what happens when these two sub-genres are combined within one novel? Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs contains both procedural elements and some foundational components of the serial killer novel. This does not mean that every fan of police procedurals will enjoy the book. A reader simply might not relish the idea of serial crimes and would rather read about a different type of investigation. Similarly, a reader may find the mind of serial killers to be fascinating and yet have no interest in how the police investigate such cases. 

When we think about publishing in these terms, we begin to see how sub-genres can be useful tools but are not hard and fast rules.

There are even disagreements about what the core characteristics of a sub-genre really are. Let’s look deeper into one of these cases.

The Cozy Mystery—This is typically defined as a mystery novel that has an amateur citizen conducting an independent investigation that contains little to no on-page violence, bad language, or sex and most often takes place in a small, insular community.

But what happens if you break just one of those unofficial rules? Is a book that would otherwise have been classified as a cozy no longer a cozy? And if that is the case, then what is it? Fans of crime fiction will know that this leads to new artificial designations such as “an edgy cozy.” Or like Rob Osler recently proclaimed after Devil’s Chew Toy (his cozy mystery with a gay main character) was released, a “Quozy” (that is queer + cozy). These are useful qualifiers that help to join the right reader with the right book, but in the end aren’t they all still cozy mysteries at their core? (Let’s not even get into what’s so “cozy” about murder and/or whether Agatha Christie, the Grand Dame herself, wrote cozy [she didn’t].)

To complicate matters further, writers are now intentionally mixing genres in an effort to manifest something exciting and completely unique. This ability to craft cross-genre novels only works because there are genres (and sub-genres) in the first place. Here we see how a reader’s expectation going into a certain type of novel can be circumvented by an author who is then able to anticipate what a loyal reader assumes will happen and proceed to do something completely different.

But at what point do we see several similar cross-genre novels and then declare that style of book to be a new sub-genre of its own? Three, ten, a hundred?

These are artificial ways of categorizing books, but they are helpful. Right? Even that is debatable.

Anecdotally, I queried several of my friends who read way more than the average and each of them said that sub-genre rarely affects their decisions on what to read. They seem to be more interested in relatable characters and complex plots regardless of the particular crime fiction sub-genre a book most adheres to. The most often expressed caveat was some type of delineation between novels that are “too dark” or “too light,” but almost always with the qualifier that exceptions are possible on a case-by-case basis.

In contrast, when I asked individuals who are more likely to only consume one or two books a year, sub-genre seemed to be more prevalent in their thinking. If you are looking for a light beach read for your yearly vacation, it makes sense that if you previously enjoyed a cozy mystery, you might stick with that when the next opportunity presents itself. Why rock the boat when relaxation is the goal? (It’s worth noting that a common refrain with these more casual readers was “I look at the bestseller list,” which is a topic for another day.)

In the end, every single novel written is a combination of elements that already exist. Readers get to choose what they want to read based on any criteria they deem appropriate. The job of marketing teams at publishing houses is to make it easier for readers to make the most informed choices. Sub-genres are just one of those methods. A tool to be used—or not—as each individual reader sees fit. In many ways, it’s almost like magic that the right books reach the right readers at the right time—almost like an invisible thread links the two on some astral plane that controls the universe. Hey, wait a minute, has anyone ever written a book about that?

This week EQMM’s July/August 2023 issue went on sale. In it you’ll find “Death in the New Age,” a new story by Mehnaz Sahibzada. The author  is a 2022 Jack Hazard Fellow in fiction writing. Since debuting in our Department of First Stories in 2010 under the name Mehnaz Turner, she’s had stories in Jaggery, Strange Horizons, Mystery Magazine, and other publications. Mehnaz is also a poet; her poetry collection My Gothic Romance came out in 2019. It’s the connection between poetry and mystery that she discusses in this post.—Janet Hutchings

I read my first mystery novel when I was eleven years old and on a train cutting through the Swiss Alps. The book in my hand was Agatha Christie’s, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, a handsome navy hardback with the paper jacket removed. I loved the causal flourish of diving into Marple’s St. Mary Mead as the train snaked its way through tunnels and across bridges that broke into an expanse of deciduous trees. I had lugged the novel from California to Saudi Arabia, where me and my Lahore-born parents, as well as my younger sister, would reside for three years during the 1980s before returning to the U.S.

Now on a family trip to Europe, I was finally reading the book.

My father, a physician, worked at Al-Hada Hospital in Taif. My mother, a stay-at-home wife during this era, busied herself with trips to the souk where she sought out spices for the curries and cakes she placed before us on the long dining table inside our desert abode. On weekends we’d visit the Kaba in Mecca or picnic by the Red Sea with a tin of kababs. And somewhere amid living in Pakistan, America, and Saudi Arabia, as well as my family’s travel excursions through Europe & Asia—I fell in love with the mystery genre. I couldn’t understand why every text in a bookstore wasn’t a mystery, nor why every person I encountered wasn’t a diehard fan. My proud young mind pitied the human who found little interest in the whodunit. How dull their reading lives must be, I reckoned. It wasn’t just amateur detectives, like Jane Marple, who appealed to me, but also the aesthetics I associated with the cozier moods of the genre: mahogany dressers, magnifying glasses, lush countryside, and cups of peppermint tea. I devoured Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden stories; watched Murder She Wrote, Scooby-Doo, and Colombo to the detriment of completing my homework and spent more time than I care to admit trying to perfect my pronunciation of Poirot (a feat I’ve yet to master). My favorite board game, predictably, was Clue, and I could amuse myself at any dull gathering my parents dragged us to by imagining the cohort of guests as a sea of suspects. I wondered about the inner lives each body guarded—who might be guilty of something yet to be discovered? 

This habit of reframing reality so it was refracted through the lens of a mystery has accompanied me into adulthood and my present life. I have relied on it through college courses, faculty meetings, weddings, and plane flights—reading the room with as much curiosity and anticipation as I would a good detective novel. Yet while the reading of mysteries was my first love, as a writer I gravitated toward poetry, which I began writing with a preternatural ferocity around the same age as I discovered detective stories.  At school teachers passed out the odd printed copy of a poem for us to squint over in class, but at home, I wasn’t drawn to reading poetry even if my notebooks teetered with the earnest rhymes I’d penned myself.

As I came of age, this identity of being a poet became part of my social image—but my alter ego, I noticed over time, had the silhouette of a detective. The classic detective as a loner, stoic, and observer—having an unsentimental yet probing nature—has always been a draw for me. As a Pakistani-American introvert, born in one country and raised in another, with a childhood marked by international travels and experiences, I could relate to the sense of alienation romanticized in the aloof figure of the sleuth.  At the same time, writing poetry gave me a space to piece together the clues and red herrings my shifting realities presented.  I explored spiritual questions like, is there really a God?  And practical ones like, why don’t most American women veil?

All through high school, college, and beyond, I kept my nose in mysteries, finding joy in the fresh scent of a book and a cup of hot chocolate. In graduate school, pursuing an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies (1999), I read thrillers while working on my thesis—where I researched Islamic Numerology and attempted to solve the puzzle of why certain numbers (like three, seven, and forty) have become familiar patterns in literature and religious rituals.  It wasn’t until later, when I became a high school English teacher and began teaching mysteries, that I seriously entertained the possibility of occasionally writing them as well, and came to understand mystery stories as the suspenseful sibling of poetry, the genre I wrote in most frequently over the course of my life, and as I grew older, appreciated more and more, as a reader. 

I consciously began to grasp how the practice of engaging with mysteries for the poet might represent some understandable pattern when I read W. H. Auden’s 1948 essay, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,” in which he explores both the allure and archetypal elements of traditional mysteries. In the essay, Auden comments on the psychological appeal of the genre and how it provides readers with a sense of order in a chaotic and uncertain world. The detective, as an emblem of the pursuit of justice, is usually the figure to help restore it. As a mystery-loving poet, I found solace in Auden’s essay.  And in researching his career in poetry, I stumbled upon his poem “Detective Story,” which I have returned to again and again when searching for poetic responses to the mystery genre.  Poetry and mystery writing, while distinct forms with conventions all their own, have much in common:  they can present a riddle for the reader to solve and rely on atmosphere to immerse them in a game of appearance versus reality, often maintaining a degree of emotional restraint. The detective, as archetypal lone wolf, works to uncover the truth; yet the poet is often a keen observer of reality, piecing together clues to uncover deeper meanings. While the poet explores the mystery of being through fragments, the detective parses together fragments to solve crimes. Poetry has a long history as a vehicle for social justice while mysteries can explore the brutal consequences of murder, greed, and social inequities. 

These connections did not occur to me all at once: they unfurled over time, making my relationship with both genres simultaneously more intimate and more strange.  Not only could my reality be reframed when observed through poetry or mystery goggles, but viewing the mystery genre through the lens of poetry and vice versa deepened my appreciation of both these forms while complicating their aesthetics.  There seemed to be something synchronistic about the meeting of these genres in my mind: both shared the obsessive philosophical quest to discover the truth. I understood that in surveying reality we are always operating through a particular lens or set of lenses: mine also hinged on the meeting point of poetry and mystery writing.

The summer after I turned twenty I wasn’t yet ready to piece together the clues of my own life to understand how my passion for poetry and mystery would later intersect.  But in June of 1994, I walked into the Tate Gallery in London, the first stop on my backpacking trip with a college friend; in the gallery I wandered aimlessly alone, gazing fleetingly at the art on the walls, until I stumbled upon James Waterhouse’s 1888 painting of “The Lady of Shalott,” inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem of the same title.  I stood so transfixed by the painting, I couldn’t move for several minutes. Something in the Lady’s expression seemed to capture yearning in a way I had never before surmised.  Later that morning, in the museum store, I purchased a poster of the painting and a stack of postcards of it as well.  The latter would become bookmarks for the many mystery novels I was to consume in the years that followed.  But it would take me another decade or so to make a connection that surprised me:  I entered my classroom one morning to teach and closely analyze, for the first time, Tennyson’s 1832 poem entitled, “The Lady of Shalott,” with a group of high-school seniors. It was a piece I vaguely knew. My heart skipped a beat when we encountered the lines, “The mirror crack’d from side to side; ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried The Lady of Shalott.”

With a shudder, I realized that the title of the first mystery I ever read on that train ride through the Alps came from a line of poetry. 

I thought again of the Waterhouse painting that had arrested my attention at the Tate Gallery: it wasn’t just the Lady’s mysterious yearning that had struck me that day in the museum, but also this glimpse into my own reserved nature spontaneously overflowing into lyric.

Next week EQMM’s July/August issue goes on sale. It contains a new story by Bev Vincent, “His Fathers’ Son.” The Bram Stoker, Edgar, Ignotus, and ITW Thriller award nominated author of more than 120 published stories has not appeared in our pages for many years. We’re glad to feature his work again.  Bev is also the author of several nonfiction books, including The Road to the Dark Tower and Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences. He also co-edited the anthology Flight or Fright with Stephen King. He is, as you’ll see from those credits, an expert on the work of Stephen King, and he makes several references to the “King of Horror” (who is also an MWA Grand Master and multiple Edgar Award winner!) in this post. The post provides an interesting take on a question that must now  concern many editors: Are readers ready for stories about the Pandemic?—Janet Hutchings

In Avengers #74 (March 1970), comic book writer and publisher Stan Lee wrote a Stan’s Soapbox column in which he addressed a frequent question from readers about why the comics contained “so much moralizing.” Comics, according to these readers, are supposed to be escapist reading and nothing more. “None of us lives in a vacuum—none of us is untouched by the everyday events about us—events which shape our stories just as they shape our lives,” Lee wrote.

Do people read mysteries or watch crime series to escape from reality? Some people would say they do, but what exactly are they escaping from? Even the cosiest of mysteries usually contain at least one murder most foul—even if the deed itself is off-screen—or some other dastardly deed, and the motives for the crimes are often familiar and ugly. Something from everyday life.

In the not-so-cozy realm, we often read about the brutal thing people do to each other. Domestic violence, beatings and torture. Grizzly murders. Ruthless behavior. Not exactly escapist. Real world stuff.

Mysteries are usually set against recognizable backdrops. We layer our fictional constructs on top of the familiar world. Many have been set during the chaos of war or in the aftermath of well-known geopolitical or social incidents.

It isn’t realistic to completely ignore certain events, but when is it “too soon”? It’s hard to imagine a crime novel set in the 1940s that didn’t acknowledge World War II. How many years did it take after 9/11, though, for writers to feel comfortable incorporating that tragedy into their stories? Did this reluctance come from writers’ feelings about the experience or from worries they might alienate audiences by referring to something so fraught with emotion? Perhaps a little of both.

I remember (vaguely) a high school English class in which we discussed some romantic poet who talked about how you can’t write about an experience while you’re still in the middle of it. A period of reflection is required to process it. But how long? Stephen King foreshadowed the destruction of the World Trade Center as a plot element in the final Dark Tower novel in 2004, and I remember some readers confessing their discomfort about it.

One of the most impactful incidents in recent years, of course, has been the coronavirus pandemic. It has been interesting to observe how writers—both in print and on screen—have responded to it. Some have chosen to ignore it completely or pay the minimum lip service. A recent episode of Law & Order, for example, featured a murder suspect wearing a “Covid mask,” without any other reference to the pandemic.

Grey’s Anatomy was the first major TV series to tackle the pandemic head on, which made a lot of sense for a medical drama. Even that series, though, postulated a post-Covid reality after that initial season, even though the pandemic was ongoing. Their viewers may have been exhausted by both living through and re-experiencing Covid. The actors, too, probably.

Writing crime stories set after early 2020 has its challenges. The way people have been living has changed. Working remotely means people aren’t as likely to get into violent conflicts with co-workers or experience road rage while commuting to the office. On the other hand, incidents of domestic violence have increased because people in strained relationships were spending much more time together.

As writers, we have to adjust to this new reality if we mean to be contemporary and realistic. I recently published a caper story where a gang of inept criminals has their latest get-rich-quick scheme stymied by the pandemic. Petty thieves don’t find many bills and coins in cash registers at convenience stores these days, since a lot of people have converted to digital forms of payment. A recent TV episode had a character using his presence on a Zoom teleconference as his alibi in a murder investigation, only to have a savvy forensic technician discover he had hacked the conference with a pre-recorded loop. Before Covid, that scenario would have required much more setup to make it relatable to a general audience. These days, most people are all too familiar with Zoom.

When King was working on his 2021 crime novel Billy Summers, he originally intended for it to be set in 2020. However, he reached a point in the story where he needed to get a couple of secondary characters out of town for a while. At first, he thought he’d send them on a cruise, but by mid-to-late 2020, no one was going on cruises. His solution to the problem was to move the entire novel back a year, pre-Covid. That’s the choice facing a lot of writers—incorporate the new reality or find a way to work around it.

In his forthcoming crime novel, Holly, King is going all-in on the pandemic. The main character, who has appeared in five previous stories, is a hypochondriac, so her fastidious attention to personal hygiene serves her and the story well. Other people in her immediate sphere have been seriously affected by the virus. There’s long Covid and Zoom funerals and all the other changes we’ve experienced since early 2020. Fist/elbow bumps. Are you Team Moderna or Pfizer—or no team at all? Negotiating when to mask and when not to. Covid denial and fake news.

King has always written about people in familiar circumstances, so it should come as no surprise that he decided to tackle something we’ve all experienced recently. There’s something else, though. It may be wise to chronicle the wound of lockdowns and prolonged acute illness and death while it is still fresh in our minds. We have been reflecting on it for a while now—perhaps it’s time to turn that reflection into prose. In a few years, we may not think as much about the days when we stockpiled toilet paper, masked before entering crowded rooms, used hand sanitizer like never before, and adopted the phrase—and the associated behavior—“social distancing.”

Writers who incorporate the pandemic into their work now are acting as social historians, in a way. Chroniclers of a unique period in our recent history. There will be, no doubt, many non-fiction books written about the pandemic, but those works may not be as accessible to a general audience. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, when people are reading works of popular fiction written today, they will learn about what it was like to live though a pandemic from the perspective of people who experienced it, but in the more accessible vector of fiction.

This is the reality of 2023. At some point, as writers, we’ll probably all need to face it one way or another.

This week Thrillerfest is being held in New York City. The event includes master classes, seminars on the craft of writing, and advice from pros on how to pitch thrillers to agents and editors. It also includes a banquet at which the International Thriller Awards will be presented. This year four of the nominees in the short story category are from EQMM. One of them is a story from our Passport to Crime department: “Russian for Beginners” by Dominique Biebau. In this post, Dominique talks about the relevance of crime fiction to today’s world. We wish him and all of the other nominees from EQMM—Smita Harish Jain, Joyce Carol Oates, and Anna Scotti—good luck on Saturday night, when the award winners will be announced! —Janet Hutchings

Sometimes, writing crime fiction seems an irrelevant, even somewhat banal, occupation in a world that verges on catastrophe. The war in Ukraine, pandemics, climate change . . . As a thriller author, it is hard not to feel like a violin player on the Titanic. Do these times really need stories about fictional crimes when there is no shortage of real problems? How relevant is the thriller genre? Is it still morally acceptable to read crime stories, let alone write them?

In moments of existential doubt, I always turn to Hercule Poirot. 

As a teacher and a Belgian thriller writer, I spend one third of my life apologizing for the fact that I have too many holidays. Another third is spent apologizing for investing my time in something as frivolous as crime stories. The final third, however, I spend pointing at maps, showing where my native country is situated and explaining that, no, it’s not a part of France, and—God forbid!—I am not Dutch. 

Belgium is a bit like Delaware. No-one actually knows anything about us. We only have three famous people, two of whom are fictional: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tintin, and Hercule Poirot. (Yes, Jean-Claude Van Damme is, despite appearances, a real person.)

Of these three, Hercule Poirot has influenced me the most. 

An egg with a moustache. That’s how I got to know Agatha Christie’s top detective. For me—as for so many others—the British actor David Suchet is the ultimate Hercule Poirot. Suchet portrayed the sleuth the way his creator probably intended him to be. Vain, cool, but with a mild benevolence towards anyone with fewer little grey cells than himself. 

Later in life, I continued to devour Agatha Christie’s crime novels and—as I became a crime writer myself—Poirot started to symbolize the way the world looks at crime fiction. At the beginning of most of Christie’s novels, Poirot is perceived as a clown, an eccentric buffoon. This appraisal, however, changes as the quirky little man morphs into an avenging angel bringing down the hammer of justice on his former mockers. The same can be said about crime stories in general: Seemingly innocuous and trivial, they too contain more than meets the eye.  

My favorite Poirot book is, without a doubt, Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. In this book (written in the 1940s, published in 1975), an old, ailing Poirot goes after an unremarkable man who has committed five murders without raising any suspicion. Poirot throws himself into the case with the ferocity of a Nemean lion, something that will ultimately cost him his life—and that of the murderer. The book shows Poirot at the apex of his powers, a master leaving the stage with one final bow. By killing the murderer himself, the detective outpaces fate. He becomes fate.

In Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, as in all of Agatha Christie’s books, nothing happens without good cause. The book is a meticulously constructed game of dominoes, where each stone topples another. Personally, I find that a particularly comforting thought. In real life, fate may strike with blind hunger, but in the Queen of Crime’s books, fate always has its reasons. Wanton, senseless violence has no place in Poirot’s universe and in the end, every question gets a satisfactory answer. 

During his time as an inspector with the Brussels police, Poirot has learned the tricks of his trade and he applies this knowledge with an almost autistic thoroughness. He takes his time. That idea, too, can be particularly comforting. In Agatha Christie’s books, no one dies unseen. Every life gets the attention it deserves, even if that attention often comes too late: in Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, for instance, it takes decades before the crime is punished. 

Finally, Agatha Christie gave her famous detective the background of a refugee, a Belgian who has fled the ravages of the First World War. Poirot’s status as an exile makes him an outsider, someone who is regularly subjected to ridicule because of his outlandish ways. His foreign background, however, enables him to puncture the social delusions underpinning early 20^th-century English society. 

The reader may find it strange that Poirot, having fled the horrors of war, throws himself into fighting crime with apparent pleasure. Hadn’t he grown tired of misery by then? Yet, on a deeper level, his choice is understandable. Wars are hard to stop, even a genius like Poirot can do nothing but flee. This inability forces him to shift his field of action to a level he can handle: the world of personal conflict. This shift contains a poignant message: Poirot, faced with the inevitability of history, only picks the battles he can win. He takes personal responsibility, but also meekly bows his head when reality exceeds his capabilities. This way, he creates isles of justice in a world that is engulfed by violence and indifference.  Too often, thrillers are accused of being nothing more than escapist entertainment. Those who read them would do so to escape reality or to marvel at someone else’s misery. The Hercule Poirot books have taught me that this is not so. Even though his adventures deal with murder and mayhem, they also create a vision of a world that is intrinsically better than ours: a place where every victim gets justice and every villain their comeuppance; a world where—on the rubble left by wars and climate change—poppies of justice can grow and flourish.

Andrew McAleer is the author of 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists and a co-editor of the anthology Edgar & Shamus Go Golden. In that volume, as he notes in the following post, he included a story by his father, John McAleer, that was discovered long after its author’s death and more than eighty years after it was written. John McAleer was known in our field not only for his mystery short stories but for his Edgar Award-winning biography of Rex Stout. Andrew McAleer, who is also a published mystery short story writer, tells us he recently completed a volume of short mystery stories featuring his father’s Golden Age detective, Henry von Stray. In this post Andrew turns his attention to another of our genre’s revered writers of the recent past: Edward D. Hoch—a subject dear to our hearts at EQMM.   —Janet Hutchings

Devotees of crime literature (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine readers especially) will always remember Edward D. Hoch as a true master of the genre. A master of puzzles, deduction, humor, and the impossible crime. Additionally, as Francis M. Nevins, Jr. correctly observed in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, Mr. Hoch was, “[T]he sole surviving professional writer of short mysteries.”

Ahh . . . but Mr. Hoch was more . . . much more—he was also a poet!

Mr. Hoch denied being a poet even though proof to the contrary exists. Twenty years ago I held in my hands an original poem written by Mr. Hoch on his official letterhead. How did I track down this poetic evidence? On February 24, 2003, I sent him a letter asking him to write me one. He did.

When I mailed the request I figured it was a long shot at best he’d reply. After all, Mr. Hoch was, among many other things, an MWA Grand Master, Edgar winner, and, by 2003, a monthly contributor to EQMM for three decades. No question about it, he would, quite understandably, be too busy to respond—let alone find time to author an original Nick Velvet poem for my fledgling magazine Crimestalker Casebook. I was wrong.

A mere seven days after posting my letter (Boston to New York), I sat at my desk reading an original Edward D. Hoch poem, “Nick Looks Out For Gloria.” The humorous verse consists of six lines with a delightful and clever rhyming scheme structured around Mr. Hoch’s iconic Nick Velvet caper-story series. As a great admirer of the Clerihew verse created by E. C. Bentley (Trent’s Last Case), I thought—and still do—that Mr. Hoch’s poem was as good as anything Bentley wrote in this tradition.

A signed cover letter dated March 3, 2003, accompanied the poem. Mr. Hoch humbly wrote: “I’m certainly no poet . . . feel free to reject it.” The poem did not receive a rejection and appeared in the Fall 2003, Volume 5, No.2 issue of Crimestalker Casebook. Other than finding a home in Edgar and Shamus Go Golden, for my father, Edgar winner John McAleer’s Henry von Stray mystery story (discovered eighty years after first penned in 1937), publishing an original work by Edward D. Hoch ranks as my highest literary honor. Fortunately for me, and all of Mr. Hoch’s fans, fate played a helpful role in making it all happen.

Here’s why:

I founded Crimestalker in 1997 at a time when authors seeking outlets for short crime fiction had few options. The pulps were long dead. Online magazines were virtually nonexistent. As a result, the short supply of hard-copy crime fiction magazines couldn’t meet demand. The few respectable mystery magazines that come to mind from that period are Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Murderous Intent, and Mystery Time. In response, I founded Crimestalker Casebook, a publication dedicated to new mystery authors of merit. Ideally, each issue would include a veteran crime fiction author. This way, new authors would appear alongside industry veterans and could start building a publishing platform. Some of the veterans who generously contributed to Crimestalker include: William Link, Robert B. Parker, June Thompson, Gregory Mcdonald, Peter Lovesey, William G. Tapply, Katherine Hall Page, and Tom Sawyer. All literary giants; however, when it came to the mystery short story, Crimestalker authors couldn’t have hit a bigger jackpot than to appear beside Edward D. Hoch. Such praise still holds true today, as no author accomplished—or ever will—what Mr. Hoch did in his chosen literary field.  

In Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, William L. DeAndrea echoes Nevins’s observation that with the death of the pulp magazines, Mr. Hoch was the only one of his colleagues to make a living as a freelance, full-time writer of mystery short stories. EQMM Editor Janet Hutchings (Mr. Hoch’s editor for many years) confirmed in a recent correspondence that Mr. Hoch had a story appear in every issue of EQMM from May 1973 until December 2008. (See also, the Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, Rosemary Herbert.) As an aside, the November 2008 EQMM had a story by Mr. Hoch finished by Jon. L. Breen. Mr. Hoch had been working on the story at the time of his death on January 17, 2008. An unprecedented thirty-five year plus run!  

More documentary evidence refutes Mr. Hoch’s “no-poet” claim.

“Nick Looks Out For Gloria” was not Mr. Hoch’s first published poem. He later wrote me that he’d had another published: “Who Killed Lenore?” This poem appeared in the briefly revived Saint Magazine (August 1984). Ironically, if more mystery short-story publishing outlets had existed in 1997,  “Who Killed Lenore” might be a stand alone.

Looking back I may have been a bit naïve asking Mr. Hoch to write a poem for my magazine consisting of about six subscribers, but I’m thankful I did because it provides us with the only other known example of this major American writer’s poetry. Perhaps more importantly, it provides us with one of the many examples of his kindness toward a new generation of mystery writers.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Andrew McAleer forwarded a copy of “Nick Looks Out for Gloria” to EQMM, and we thought readers should have a chance to see it. Here it is!

NICK LOOKS OUT FOR GLORIA
by Edward D. Hoch

Do you need an orange rind or a swizzle stick,

A burnt candle or a weathered brick?

Do you have the cash, the fifty grand for his fee?

If you use Nick Velvet it won’t be for free.

He’ll get what you want, bring it right to the house,

Then buy a gift for his high-maintenance spouse.

An essayist, short story writer, and popular-fiction aficionado, Kevin Mims frequently contributes to this site. In this post, he reveals something he hasn’t alluded to before—his childhood love of model trains. Adult model-train enthusiasts were common in past generations, but as Kevin points out in this post, contemporary crime fiction (especially on TV) has created a  cliche of the hobby as associated with potentially dangerous minds. I agree with Kevin that this is a lazy trope—the kind of thing all good writers should avoid. I hope the post will lead to a discussion of other lazy shortcuts common in our genre. —Janet Hutchings

Growing up, I always wished I had a model railroad. But I was one of six children, and my parents couldn’t afford such elaborate toys. So I never had one. My wife, a baby boomer like me, also wanted a train set as a child. But she was a girl, and thus such a gift was deemed inappropriate. One of my best friends, Don K., is another boomer who grew up coveting a model train set. He never got one either but, even at 70 years old, he still loves to visit model train expositions. I sometimes think you can divide all American baby boomers into two groups: those who had model train sets as a kid, and those who wanted one but never got it. I’ve worked in bookstores for much of my life. Every time I sold a book or magazine about model railroading, the purchaser seemed to belong to my own approximate age group. For most of the twentieth century, model railroading seemed to be a respectable, if somewhat eccentric, hobby for grown men to pursue. But in the twenty-first century, model railroads seem to have become a symbol of a dangerous fixation on the past, primarily among older white guys. This trend has become particularly prevalent on TV crime shows. For the last twenty years, lazy Hollywood screenwriters have turned a love for model train sets into a clichéd way of representing baby boomers with an unhealthy nostalgia for a bygone time.

In HBO’s The Sopranos, the character of Bobby Baccalieri Jr. (played by Steve Schirripa) is a late baby boomer (born around 1964), a mobster, a killer, and a model train enthusiast. The Sopranos is, among other things, a show about American men trying to deal with a world in which white, male privilege is rapidly giving way to greater roles for women and nonwhites. Bobby’s love of model trains seems to represent his desire to return to a simpler, more homogenous past. In the second to last episode of the series (spoiler alert!) Bobby is killed by members of a rival mob. Fittingly, he is shot dead in a hobby shop where he is checking out a model of a Blue Comet train set. Two gunmen open fire on him and he falls dead across a model train display. Symbolism doesn’t get any more heavy-handed than that. His refusal to evolve and his nostalgia for an earlier, less complicated America are directly related to his death. Just in case you needed another nudge in the ribs, the episode was titled The Blue Comet. It first aired in June of 2007.

Two years later, on the Showtime series Dexter, viewers were introduced to a character called Arthur Mitchell ( played by John Lithgow), a baby boomer (born 1949), a Christian, a family man, and a model-railroading enthusiast. Alas, Arthur is also a serial killer known as Trinity (the FBI believes his killing sprees always come in threes). Arthur’s life went bad in 1959, at age ten, when his older sister saw him spying on her in the shower. She slipped and cut herself and bled to death in front of him. His parents blamed him for the death. His childhood—and his family—both pretty much ended with the death of his sister. As an adult serial killer, only his model railroad set can take him back to the innocence of his early childhood, before his sister’s death destroyed everything he loved.

In the second season of HBO’s prestige TV series Big Little Lies, fabulously wealthy businesswoman Renata Klein (Laura Dern) learns that most of her assets have been seized by the government because her Boomer husband, Gordon (Jeffrey Nordling, born in 1962), has been arrested by the FBI for insider trading and stock manipulation. Gordon, it turns out, is a model train enthusiast. Renata is horrified when she discovers that Gordon’s expensive toy train set is one of the few family possessions that he has managed to shield from government seizure. She makes this discovery in episode two. But her anger over it continues to boil until (Spoiler Alert), in the final episode, in one of the climactic scenes of season two, she takes up a baseball bat and destroys his little toy village and the expensive model train that runs through it. Gordon managed to remain unnervingly calm throughout most of season two, despite the fact that both his wife and daughter are suffering great emotional distress as a result of his malfeasance. But seeing his beloved train set—symbol of a simpler, more male-friendly past—destroyed by a shrieking female is more than he can take. Finally, the horror of what he has done seems to be dawning on him, and he appears to understand what Bob Dylan meant when he wrote “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry.”

Also in 2009, in an episode of Midsomer Murders titled “Small Mercies,” Olivia Colman (who would go on to win an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 2018 film The Favourite) played a mentally unstable woman whose life revolves around a miniature village with a model train set that runs through it. The episode was partially filmed at the Bekonscot Model Village and Railway, located in Beaconsfield, England. Naturally, Colman’s character, Bernice, ends up being a murderer, and the first of her victims is killed because Bernice discovered him desecrating the model railway village by having sex on the site of it. Bernice couldn’t stand the thought of such disrespectful behavior towards a model railway and miniature village. Bernice isn’t a baby boomer herself, but she’s engaged to marry a boomer named Edward Palfrey (played by Paul Bentall, born in 1948), and she appears to share his somewhat older, stodgier worldview.

More recently, in August of 2021, Netflix debuted a new 8-part thriller called Clickbait. In this series, when family man Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier) is kidnapped and murdered, suspicion begins falling on the multicultural cast of characters who lived in his orbit: his fortyish wife (Betty Gabriel), her lover (Motell Gyn Foster), the older brother (Daniel Henshall) of a Millennial woman Nick was believed to be having an affair with, Nick’s Millennial co-worker (Ian Meadows). But in the end (spoiler alert!), it turns out that Nick wasn’t killed by any of these people. No, the killer turns out to be Ed Gleed (played by Wally Dunn, born 1960), a Baby Boomer introduced only in the final act of the drama and given little character development. About the only thing we ever learn about Ed is that he loves his model train set. And the model train set he loves isn’t incidental to the plot. The viewer is led to believe that if Wally had paid more attention to his marriage and less attention to his model trains, the tragedy of Nick Brewer’s death never would have occurred.

In the 1970s, when Hollywood wanted to signal to TV or movie viewers that a character might be unstable they often made him a disgruntled Vietnam War veteran. This made a little bit of sense. Plenty of veterans of that war suffered emotional and psychological scars from their service that made it difficult for them to reenter civilian life. But the stigmatizing of model railroaders seems completely misguided. For nearly as long as we have been married (43 years) my wife has been dragging me to various northern California model railroad shows and exhibitions. I have met and chatted with plenty of model railroad enthusiasts at these gatherings. And, yes, most of them have been baby boomers like myself. But I’ve never read anything about a connection between a love of model railroads and anti-social behavior. Mostly these guys seem like friendly, neighborly fellows. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of these hobbyists are probably pretty conservative. They have a love of the past that seems to echo William F. Buckley’s definition of a conservative as someone who stands athwart history yelling Stop! But evincing a fondness for the 1950s, the 1940s, or even the 1890s shouldn’t automatically get one labeled a sociopath. Plenty of boomers simply long for a time when life didn’t constantly move at the speed of sound. You can’t really stand athwart history, but you can stand athwart a model train set and bring a tiny version of an American small town to a halt if you so desire. Is that so bad?

Kate Hohl makes her fiction debut in the Department of First Stories of our current issue (May/June 2023) with the evocative historical crime story “The Body in Cell Two.” She’s clearly well versed in history, including famous true crime cases, as you’ll see in this fascinating post. We hope to see more from her at both novel and short-story length soon! —Janet Hutchings

Gangsters. Chorus girls. Corrupt Tammany Hall politics. The disappearance of a prominent judge and subsequent manhunt. Sounds like the plot of a mystery novel. Or maybe a pitch for a limited series on Netflix. But once upon a time, these were the elements in a real-life missing person case that captivated the nation. A story so big that every detail of this unsolved mystery was splashed across the front pages of newspapers from coast to coast.

Before Amelia Earhart, there was Judge Crater. In 1930, Crater, a New York Supreme Court justice walked out of a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen and seemingly vanished into thin air. Once touted “the mystery of the century”, Judge Crater’s disappearance baffled law enforcement and spawned countless amateur sleuths determined to crack the case.

I first stumbled across Judge Crater’s name while watching an old William Powell movie. In it, Powell’s character refers to someone “pulling a Crater.” When I heard the phrase referenced in two other movies, I had to know more. As someone who loves to read and write historical mysteries, I became fascinated with this real-life case of a missing person.

Here are the details that are generally regarded as facts: August 9, 1930, was a hot day in New York City that slipped into a hazy and humid night. Judge Crater hailed a cab after having dinner with two friends at Billy Haas’ Chophouse located on 330 West 45^th Street. Sally Lou Ritz (a writer would be hard-pressed to craft a better name) a showgirl and the judge’s rumored girlfriend, and William Klein, an entertainment lawyer, would be the last people who claimed to see Judge Crater alive.

So, what secrets and scandals had transpired in Crater’s life that led to his disappearance on that night in Prohibition era New York?

Joseph Force Crater was born in 1889 into a wealthy family in Easton Pennsylvania. Crater’s grandfather owned a grocery store and surrounding orchards that were the source of the family’s wealth. After graduating cum laude from Lafayette College, Crater decided to study law. Much to his mother’s dismay, he chose Columbia over Harvard. Somewhat prophetically, his mother declared that the New York City of 1910 was a “horrible place. A den of iniquity.” After graduating from Columbia Law school, he took a job at New York University, teaching law at night. During the day he worked as a secretary for Robert F. Wagner, a big name in local New York politics.  Crater worked for him up until Wagner’s 1926 election to the United States Senate. Crater, blessed with charm and quick wits, soon realized that politics could be his path to easy money, so he threw himself into the local dealings of Tammany Hall.

Crater would often work late hours on party affairs, mixing business with pleasure. That dedication paid off. He formed relationships with influential figures like charismatic New York Mayor James J. “Jimmy” Walker, Governor Alfred E. Smith, and then New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Friendships that seemed to cement Crater’s future in New York Democratic politics.

As a member of Tammany Hall and the Cayuga Democratic Club, Crater also rubbed shoulders with gangsters and bootleggers like Jack “Legs” Diamond, a notorious gangland figure of the time.

During the height of Prohibition, Crater frequented the speakeasies that went on to become some of the most famous and glamorous nightclubs in the world:  The Stork Club, the Cotton Club, the 21 Club.  By all accounts, Crater’s marriage to Stella Mance Wheeler was strained by his playboy lifestyle.

Ten years after he’d left Easton, Pennsylvania for the bright lights of New York, Crater was flourishing. In 1929, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the governor of New York, named him to the state Supreme Court. Rumor had it that Crater’s next step on the political ladder would be an appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Then came the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, that sparked the Great Depression. A time of soup lines and dance marathons. Shirley Temple was a box office darling and “Happy Days Are Here Again” topped the hit parade in 1930, but few Americans were living the good life. Unemployment skyrocketed, people lost their houses, and the Dust Bowl with the resulting crop failures meant that many were caught in a downward spiral of poverty.

But unlike so many other Americans, Crater not only managed to hold onto his money, he grew his fortune. Tammany Hall politicians had countless creative schemes to make money from its constituents and by all accounts, Crater was an enthusiastic participant in many of them. One deal might have proven to be his undoing.

In 1929, Crater was made Receiver in a high-profile foreclosure. Libby’s Baths, a hotel located at the corner of Christie and Delancey Streets were indebted to Irving Trust—a firm with Tammany Hall ties—to the tune of a hefty $1.5 million (over $27 million in today’s dollars). Libby’s was forced into foreclosure by Irving Trust before they could file for bankruptcy. As Receiver, Crater was tasked with trying to maximize profits for the lender, Irving Trust. Rumors pointed to the fact that Crater cashed in on both sides.

In the days before his disappearance, while staying with his wife at their summer house in Maine, Crater received a call from New York. He told his wife he had to return to the city to “set some people straight.” Upon his return to his office, his law clerk claimed that the judge withdrew five thousand dollars from the bank and packed it into two suitcases that he brought to his apartment on lower Fifth Avenue.

On that hot August night in 1930, Judge Crater arranged to go to see a Broadway show with Sally Lou Ritz, his girlfriend who was rumored to have gangland ties.  Sally Lou later claimed that she decided not to accompany Judge Crater to the show. At 9:15 pm Crater, wearing a green and brown pinstripe suit and a straw Panama hat, climbed into the back of a cab in front of Billy Haas’ Chophouse deep in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen and was never seen again.

In those days before cell phones and social media, it took four weeks before anyone realized that Crater, along with the suitcases that contained the five thousand dollars, was missing. His business and political colleagues believed he had rejoined his wife up in Maine at the family’s summer house. His wife thought he was still away on business. When his disappearance was finally discovered it hit the front page of the newspapers like a bomb. A high-profile judge with connections to powerful businessmen, politicians and organized crime, the story was immediately newsworthy. A nationwide manhunt ensued, with false sightings reported almost daily.

But Crater had disappeared without a trace.

Police initially believed that Crater had taken the money and hopped a train out of town to avoid the scandal of being implicated in a corruption investigation. Then came the speculation that Crater may have been kidnapped or murdered because of his connections to organized crime. The media attention ratcheted up to a frenzy when his wife Stella Wheeler Crater went public with her belief that her husband had been the one investigating corruption in the New York justice system and had, in fact, received death threats.

Crater’s disappearance shone a spotlight on the illegal activities of Tammany Hall and was one of the contributing factors that led to the downfall of the political machine. The political career of mayor Walker was one of the casualties.

To “Pull a Crater” became synonymous with someone vanishing without a trace. Comedians of the day integrated the phrase “Judge Crater, call your office!” into their acts. There were countless reports of Judge Crater sightings a la Elvis Presley through the years, all revealed to be hoaxes. In 1939 almost ten years after his disappearance, he was declared legally dead.

Over the years, there have been many theories about the case. That Crater was the victim of a gangland hit, his body dumped in the Meadowlands. A policeman’s widow believed she found evidence that her husband, a New York City police officer and his brother, a cabby, killed Crater and buried him under the boardwalk in Coney Island, at the site where the Aquarium would be built. Another story went that Crater was buried in someone’s garden in Yonkers, but no human remains were ever found there.  In 1979, missing person’s file number 13595, a case that had stayed open for fifty years, was officially closed.

As the legend of Judge Crater has faded over time, the New York City that he inhabited has also slipped away. The building that housed Billy’s Chophouse on W. 45^th Street was torn down in the 1960’s and replaced with a nondescript brick apartment building. The Stork Club and the Cotton Club are long gone. The 21 Club, the legendary eatery that opened on New Year’s Day 1930, the year that Crater went missing, finally shuttered its doors in 2020, a casualty of the pandemic.

The world has significantly changed since that day Judge Crater climbed into a taxi and headed west toward Ninth Avenue never to be seen again. But our fascination with true crime and unsolved mysteries remains as strong as the day he disappeared.