SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

In today’s post, Kevin Mims, a frequent contributor to this site, takes a stab at defining one of the broadest of entertainment genres—the thriller. Each year, when EQMM makes its submissions for the best-short-story award given by the International Thriller Writers, we have to make judgment calls as to what counts as a thriller and what does not. It never seems to get easier, but Kevin’s take on the subject is interesting. —Janet Hutchings

One of the most difficult popular fiction genres to define with any precision is the “thriller.” For the last half century or so, when publishers or p.r. reps or reviewers have applied the word “thriller” to a novel, it has usually been done to convey to potential purchasers that the book is fast-paced and suspenseful, a novel you “won’t be able to put down.” Such books are also sometimes called “page-turners” or, if they contain some aspect of supernatural horror, “chillers.”

On her self-titled blog, Savannah Gilbo, a so-called “book coach,” has compiled a helpful list of “Ten Things Every Thriller Novel Needs.” But even this list leaves room for some quibbles. For instance, Gilbo lists “a crime” as the first element that every thriller novel needs. I disagree with her. I consider Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws to be one of the greatest thrillers of the twentieth century, but it isn’t a crime novel. The villain of Jaws isn’t a criminal; it is a force of nature. Likewise, I consider Michael Crichton to be one of the preeminent thriller-writers of the last sixty years, but in many of his novels— Timeline, Jurassic Park, Sphere, The Lost World, Disclosure, The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, etc.—crime is not a major part of the plot. The 1962 novel Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, is one of the greatest thrillers of the Cold War era but it isn’t a crime novel. It is about a series of technical and procedural failures that causes the U.S. to accidentally target the Soviet Union with warplanes carrying nuclear weapons that could wipe out all of Moscow and its environs. The 1958 airplane thriller Runway Zero-Eight, written by Arthur Hailey and John Castle, tells the nightmarish tale of what happens when the pilot and co-pilot of a passenger jet flying across Canada are stricken with a case of food-poisoning and can no longer fly the plane. Early on, foul play is eliminated as a cause of the food-poisoning. This is a thriller with no bad guys and no crime. But it is nonetheless riveting.

So, if a thriller isn’t necessarily a mystery or a crime novel, what is it? I would argue that, at the very least, all thrillers need a relatively brisk pace and a great deal of suspense. They also need relatively high stakes. Ira Levin’s 1967 novel, Rosemary’s Baby, is widely regarded as one of the best American thrillers of the twentieth century. The stakes are high: a young pregnant woman tries to prevent a satanic cult from sacrificing her unborn child to the devil. Levin does a good job of ratcheting up the suspense, so that the final one hundred pages or so of this relatively short (218 pages in paperback) novel fly by. The book has been justifiably described as a horror novel and a novel of psychological suspense. It is also a crime novel as well as a mystery. But, for me at least, the term “thriller” seems almost tailor-made for books like Rosemary’s Baby. This is clearly a book meant to be gobbled up in a sitting or two. Though it is a horror novel about Satanism, Levin doesn’t delve too deeply into the history of Satanism or its impact on world culture, the way that Anne Rice’s novels often stretch back centuries in order to explore vampirism or witchcraft.

Here are some of the other novels from the same approximate era that I would categorize as thrillers: William Goldman’s The Marathon Man (despite also being a crime novel) and Magic (despite also being a crime novel and a psychological – as opposed to a supernatural—horror novel), Ken Follett’s The Eye of the Needle (despite also being a spy novel, a war novel, and a historical novel), James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor (also a spy novel and a crime novel), Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (also a sci-fi novel and a social satire), Stephen King’s Carrie (also a horror novel), John Farris’s When Michael Calls (also a crime novel), The Day of the Jackal (also a crime novel), Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction (also a crime novel and an adventure novel), and Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are the Children, A Stranger Is Watching, A Cry In the Night, and The Cradle Will Fall (all of which are also crime novels).

Do I have a foolproof formula by which I can separate the thrillers from the crime novels, or from the horror novels, or from the spy novels? No, not really. What Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography is true of me and the thriller novel, “I know it when I see it.” Or, perhaps more accurately, “I know it when I’ve read it.” Many fans of the genre say that a ticking clock (or a hard-and-fast deadline of some sort) is a necessity for a good thriller. I don’t think a ticking clock is an absolute must for a thriller, but I do prefer thrillers that take place over a relatively short period of time. Andrew Klavan’s 1995 novel True Crime (the source of the 1999 Clint Eastwood film) is a classic of the ticking-clock thriller genre. It is the tale of a crusading journalist who has just a few hours to find evidence that will prove the innocence of a man scheduled to die in the state’s gas chamber for a murder he didn’t commit. Many of Michael Crichton’s novels unspool over a short period of time. Rising Sun covers just three days. Congo unfolds over the course of thirteen days. The Andromeda Strain covers a span of just five days.

Are suspense novels and thrillers the same thing? I don’t think so. I think of Patricia Highsmith as a writer of suspense novels (which are usually also crime and/or mystery novels). Although her novels sometimes provide thrills, they are generally much more slowly paced than traditional thrillers. Graham Greene called her “a poet of apprehension.” Her novels are full of tension and unease, but they often move very slowly (by intention). Highsmith didn’t write “page-turners,” she wrote “slow burners.”

Although John D. MacDonald was capable of writing good thrillers—such as Cape Fear—his best-known works, the Travis McGee novels, are detective stories rather than thrillers. Thus I think of MacDonald as a crime writer or a detective novelist. The same is true of Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer books. Crime writer (or mystery writer, or spy writer, etc.) is not a lesser designation than thriller writer; it is simply a different designation. I consider Lee Child and Harlan Coben to be thriller writers, even though crime and mystery permeate their works. I consider Thomas Harris to be a thriller writer, even though his books all deal with crime. Although her books contain plenty of crime and mystery, I consider Mary Higgins Clark to be a writer of thrillers. The same is true of Tess Gerritsen.

Now let’s talk a bit about the various subcategories of thrillers. Michael Crichton was said to specialize in techno-thrillers. The term seems fair to me, even though some of his thrillers (such as The Great Train Robbery and A Case of Need) contain nothing that would strike a contemporary reader as cutting-edge technology. Tom Clancy was a writer of political thrillers or military thrillers. Clive Cussler has been described as a writer of nautical thrillers (although that term doesn’t describe all of his books). Robin Cook is the master of the medical thriller. The Genesis Code, John Case’s 1997 novel of cloning and international adventure, has been described as a bio-medical thriller. That sounds about right to me.

And then of course there are Scott Turow and John Grisham and all of their fellow lawyers-turned-bestselling-authors. When Turow’s Presumed Innocent first hit the bookstores in 1987, the publisher could have promoted it as a “legal novel” or a “courtroom drama,” appellations that had been applied to earlier bestsellers such as The Caine Mutiny or The Anatomy of a Murder. But, by the 1980s, “thriller” was the term of choice for the kind of books that were known to keep pop-fiction junkies sitting up all night in their armchairs. And so the publicity department for Farrar Straus & Giroux promoted Presumed Innocent as a “legal thriller.” It might not have been the first use of the term, but it was the first time the term was applied to a cultural juggernaut, a book that, in its way, would become as seminal as Rosemary’s Baby or The Day of the Jackal or Jaws. Four years later, when John Grisham, a lawyer like Turow, broke into the big time with his second novel, 1991’s The Firm, the appellation was just waiting there to be exploited. As it happened, Grisham would go on to be the most successful author of legal thrillers (as measured by book sales) of the twentieth century and (so far, at least) the twenty-first. Of all the subgenres of thriller, the legal thriller is probably America’s most popular, thanks in large part to Grisham.

I have written before about my prejudice in favor of short thrillers. If I were appointed America’s czar of popular fiction, I would decree that no book longer than 400 pages could be labeled a thriller. Sadly, I have no such authority. What’s more, I must concede that, over time, I have grudgingly begun to appreciate the long thriller. Stephen Hunter’s nearly 500-page novel Dirty White Boys is one of the most thrilling novels I have ever read. The Thomas Harris thrillers The Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs are both over 400 pages long and I wouldn’t want them even a sentence shorter. My admiration for these and a handful of other very long thrillers has convinced me that it would be foolish to impose an arbitrary limit on the length a thriller novel can run.

Let me close with a list of authors whom I believe deserve to be categorized as thriller writers. This list is purely subjective, obviously. For instance, it contains far more male writers than females ones. This isn’t because men write more thrillers than women. It’s because I read more thrillers by men then women. The authors on this list might just as easily be categorized as crime writers or horror writers or fantasy writers or science fiction writers or adventure writers. Few of them confined themselves to a single popular genre. But, if forced to categorize them, I’d place them in the thriller genre, as hard as that genre may be to define. Here we go:

Ira Levin

Michael Crichton

Richard Matheson

Thomas Harris

Robert Harris

Stephen Hunter

John Grisham

Ken Follett

Frederick Forsyth

Dean L. Koontz

Mary Higgins Clark

William Goldman

Dan Brown

Lee Child

Harlan Coben

Robin Cook

The writing team of Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston

Gillian Flynn

Allan Folsom

David Morrell

Nelson DeMille

Tess Gerritsen

Alistair MacLean

John Katzenbach

James Rollins

Trevanian

F. Paul Wilson

Jack Higgins

David Wiltse

David Martin

Feel free to recommend other thriller writers in the comments below. The above list emphasizes authors who wrote multiple thriller novels. It doesn’t include authors such as Patrick Suskind, who wrote Perfume, one of the most unusual thrillers of the twentieth century, but no other true thrillers. James Dickey wrote two great thrillers—Deliverance and To the White Sea—but he’s better remembered as a poet than as a novelist, so I left him off the list. Walker Percy’s 1987 novel The Thanatos Syndrome is a bio-medical thriller, but all of his other novels are mainstream stories of life in the American south. Norman Mailer’s 1984 novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance is a great thriller. But it’s the only true thriller in his rather extensive bibliography. There are plenty of other one-off thrillers out there, books whose authors either produced only one thriller or, in some cases, only one really good one. Perhaps I’ll devote an entire essay to them at a later date. Until then, stay safe, keep reading, and have a thrilling time.

Twist Phelan is the author of the Finn Teller spy novels and the Pinnacle Peak mystery series (both for adults); her latest book, Snowed, is her first middle-grade mystery, due for release this fall. She’s also a short-story writer whose honors include two ITW awards and Canada’s Arthur Ellis award for best short story. Many of her stories have had their first appearance in EQMM. She’s got a haunting one, “The Kindness of Strangers,” in our current issue (September/October 2022). If you’ve been following her work in EQMM, you’ll know that Twist produces a wide range of types of stories—something she discusses in this post. —Janet Hutchings

My mother was a lifelong modern and contemporary art groupie. As a kid I was taken not only to museums and galleries, but almost as often to artist’s studios—warehouses, garages, stone quarries, furnaces, lofts, even a tent in the forest that smelled of mildew and cat.

Mom, a scientist by training, was fascinated by creativity, particularly how art was made. She liked hearing artists talk about their process—where ideas came from, how a piece was planned and executed. Several painters and sculptors became friends. Some became famous; most did not. On occasion an artist would give or sell her work, which decorated the houses my family grew up in. I didn’t really appreciate what hung on the walls or was tucked into the corner of the family room until I started visiting museums and galleries on my own, where I recognized a few names on the wall labels.

I’m big into eavesdropping (or, as writers call it, doing research). During studio visits, the artists were usually kind enough to give me some materials to play with. While I dabbed paint onto canvas, made armatures out of wire bits, glued together wood scraps—and once started a small fire using a shard of stained glass—I listened.

I remember one abstract artist describing how he’d carry around a scene or idea in his head for weeks, even months, until he felt ready to paint it. He’d start with a sketch, adding enough detail until he thought it would be a sufficient guide. Next, he’d work out the color palette, mixing pigments until the hues were right. Then he’d prepare a very large canvas and go to work, spending long days and sometimes nights in the studio. (I saw more than a few sleeping bags in artist’s workplaces.) He’d first lay down what he called the bones of the piece, the paint strokes that would be the basis for the work. The next pass would include secondary shapes and the addition of color. The final stage was adding details until he knew the painting was finished.

Some sculptors worked from sketches or a maquette (small-scale model of a larger work), others preferred taille directe, going straight to carving the chunk of wood or stone, Once a sculptor had me stare at a large cube of marble for several minutes. “What do you see?” she asked. “Just rock,” I admitted. She saw more—on our return visit months later, a large mountain lion was emerging from the stone block. “I just chip chip chip away what doesn’t belong,” she said, paraphrasing Michelangelo, when I asked her how she did it.

I liked seeing mixed media artists work, assembling cloth, paper, wood, paint, and found objects until the arrangement was right. “Sometimes I want to emphasize color,” one explained. “Other times, it’s shape or texture. You work until the piece shows what you want to highlight.”

Visual art and writing have their respective advantages. A picture can indeed be worth a thousand words—that is, a complex idea often can be more effectively demonstrated by a single image than a written description. Such is the power of the graphic! But while a photograph or painting can perhaps better convey a scene, words usually excel at describing the action taking place before, after, and therein. The best prose constructs the setting in your imagination, allowing you to paint your own picture of what is happening. And a story needs a lead character reacting to a catalyzing event to set off the action, while a piece of art may by inspired by something the artist experiences or imagines, the specifics usually unknown by the viewer.

Even though what they depict may differ, visual art and writing are similar when it comes to their creation. Both require talent, the learning and practice of technique, the development of the creator’s particular style or voice. Both benefit from uninterrupted time during creation. Both are usually better if started with a plan—ranging from an idea of the beginning and ending to a detailed outline in the case of a story; preliminary sketches to a precise model for a painting or sculpture—developed through multiple passes, and finished with a unique take in the big-picture sense of things. Searching for the right word or phrase matters as much as mixing the right shade of color; narrative style is as important as brushstrokes. And both writers and painters usually end up spending more time than they want to staring at a blank page/canvas.

My time spent around artists apparently has blurred the line further for me between making art and writing; I begin each short story as though I were creating a painting or sculpture. (Perhaps this is why visiting art museums is a favorite way to recharge my inspiration.) Word count determines the medium I use as a model.

I think of a long-form story (ten thousand words up to novellas) as though it were a triptych painting—three large canvases filled with shapes and colors, quiet broad strokes and busy details. Each act is one of the panels; as with the painting, not complete without the other two. Both are often embellished with inside jokes, surprises, and twists that require concentration to discern; layered tales in a limited space, often suggesting more beyond their parameters.

My shortest works—around two thousand words—are like sculptures. The story usually arrives nearly fully formed in my mind. I quickly put it down, in full, on paper before I lose it, ending up with a block of words without paragraphs and sometimes even sentence breaks, XXX substituting for a description or character name here, the right word there. It’s like a piece of marble with a finished sculpture hiding inside. I then edit edit edit away until it’s honed to the essential, revealing just the story, including its final devastating paragraph, the unexpected yet inevitable ending, the twist or reveal that lingers. Like a sculpture, a very short story still has to support its weight, be anchored around its center of gravity. Its negative space—the words that were cut or never put down in the first place—defines its boundaries and brings balance and focus. Stop too soon with the red pen and the end result lacks refinement. Cut too much and you can ruin the entire work.

My stories in the six- to eight- thousand-word range most resemble mixed media works. Some elements (voice, character, plot, theme, prose, setting, imagery) are emphasized over others, but in the end everything comes together in perfect balance. This freedom to choose what is highlighted and what is consigned to the background is very useful when one of the goals is misdirection!

Finally, there’s the title. I craft it to be a maquette, giving a hint—and more, to be understood after the story is read—of what the larger work is about. Triptych painting and novella, sculpture and very short story, mixed media and character/plot/theme-driven works—is creating art and fiction writing more alike than not?

By this week or next, nearly all public schools will have reopened, bringing an end to summer vacation for kids and with it the end to summer reading—both assigned and voluntary. For fifteen years, writer Mark Harrison’s day job has been in education—for the past ten years as a special education teacher. There may still be time for some kids to squeeze in a little summer reading, and this post contains interesting ideas for it based on Mark’s own experience. For adults in search of a late-summer read there’s Mark’s own debut story, “Dogs in the Canyon,” which appears in the Department of First Stories of our current issue (September/October 2022). Don’t miss it! —Janet Hutchings

The Killer Angels held such promise.

After having spent the previous summer with Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote, I had finally been assigned something of interest, a novel that was more Fletch than Pride and Prejudice. The mystery, I assumed, was set in Florida, at a private country club that housed a senior golf league known as the Angels. A private investigator would be hired by the club to investigate which of the Angels was murdering its other members, just like Matthew Scudder in A Long Line of Dead Men.

The Killer Angels was no mystery, though. It was a historical novel written by Michael Shaara, set during the Civil War, focusing on the Battle of Gettysburg. 

Mr. Green said it would be a good read, but it wasn’t, at least not for me.

I wanted more Lee Child, not more General Lee. 

Schools don’t really do mysteries, though, not even during the summer. You won’t find much Chandler or Connelly or Parker in the English Department’s book closet, though I once saw a copy of Early Autumn tucked between O’Brien and Poe.

“Too much plot,” a teacher once told me. “Not enough meat on the bone.” 

Better to assign a 518-page novel about the history of philosophy (Sophie’s World), which is what happened to me. 

“A Novel About the History of Philosophy.” That was the book’s subtitle.

The story itself was fine. I learned a lot about Kierkegaard and Descartes, Spinoza and Hume—more so than I probably wanted to—and I understood its purpose as a foundational text, especially when paired with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.   

But I didn’t enjoy it.  

I always figured that if I had the opportunity to assign summer reading I would say, “Just read whatever you want.” I wasn’t being lazy or glib and didn’t mean to come across as disinterested or indifferent. I believed in summer reading, but it wasn’t important to me if the student read Stargirl, The Chocolate War, or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Better, I thought, to give students a choice and let them select whatever book they wanted, of any length, from any genre. If it were short, there was a chance that the student might read another book, especially if they enjoyed the first. A shorter book might serve as a gateway to something else by that author or to someone else whose stories were similar. 

That’s how it works. 

All I wanted was for my students to read and to eventually enjoy reading.

That, to me, was the point of summer reading, especially for students who struggle to read. I couldn’t imagine forcing one of my students, at sixteen, to struggle through 1984 after reading, in succession, Lord of the Flies, The Odyssey, and Brave New World. It seemed cruel. I had no problem if a student wanted to read a graphic novel, a romance novel, or a science fiction novel. If she grew up on Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew, perhaps she would have discovered Lois Duncan and read Ransom or I Know What You Did Last Summer.

As a teacher, it didn’t make sense to assign a novel that wouldn’t be read. I knew that there was no way my students were spending their free time reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or Of Mice and Men.

Not happening.

But when it came to assigning summer reading I turned out to be no different than anyone else. I didn’t say “read anything.” Instead, I selected a specific book, recommending High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. 

Everyone likes music, right? 

Well, thirty students claimed to have read High Fidelity when they returned to school in September but the actual number was closer to two. 

Thank you, Sarah, and thank you, Matthew. It would have been a long and painful class discussion without you, though the fault was entirely my own. Perhaps I overestimated the interest a sixteen-year-old would have in a thirty-five-year-old’s top five breakups, lead-off album tracks, and novels, The Big Sleep chief among them.   

I haven’t bothered making any recommendations for summer reading since High Fidelity, but with the end of summer approaching, I’m often reminded of Hornby’s debut. I even went to our school library just the other day to see if we had it. We did, though I almost missed it, its cover different, the novel buried on the bottom row. Finding the book was a comfort in part, affirming its place as a potential high school text, but I felt embarrassed flipping through its pages, half-wishing there was a more sanitized version. 

There isn’t, at least not to my knowledge, but in skimming through the text, I wondered what Rob Fleming, the book’s protagonist, might recommend if it were August 15th and he was looking for one last book to read. What would he have offered as a Top 5 if he were going on vacation and could only list crime novels and mysteries? The Friends of Eddie Coyle (George V. Higgins), The Bat (Jo Nesbo), Small Crimes (Dave Zeltserman), The Goodbye Look (Ross MacDonald), and Defending Jacob (William Landay)?

I’m only kidding about Defending Jacob, which, for the last eight years, has been a running joke in our house, my wife recommending it whenever I finish a book and am in search of something new to read. Maybe an early Peter Swanson novel would be more fitting, something like The Kind Worth Killing. 

I just finished reading Swanson’s Nine Lives, which was good, inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

I’ll probably give his novel Before She Knew Him another read when I’m on the beach this month. With any luck, I won’t see any children racing to complete their assigned reading. I’d prefer to see them reading whatever they want to read, even a magazine. 

I suppose that if they have to read something like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, they can always watch the video.

George did.

And I’m pretty sure that’s what Matthew and Sarah did.

There’s no character named Jack Black, kids.

Art Taylor made his fiction debut in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in 1995 and he’s gone on to become one of the most celebrated short-story writers in the crime/mystery field. He won the Edgar for his EQMM story “English 398: Fiction Workshop”; he received the Agatha Award for Best First Novel for his novel-in-stories On the Road With Del and Louise (a book largely composed of stories from EQMM); and his short stories have also earned multiple individual Macavity, Agatha, and Derringer awards, as well as an Anthony Award. Readers can find a number of standout stories in his latest collection, The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense. What some of our regular readers may not know is that Art is also a teacher of creative writing and an associate professor of English at George Mason University. This post brings together some insights derived from his writing and teaching. It also gives some background to his story “We Are All Strangers Here,” which appears in our current issue (September/October 2022). —Janet Hutchings

My story “An Internal Complaint” (EQMM, June 2007) took direct inspiration from Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” (1899), explicitly echoing that famous story of infidelity and its consequences.

In “An Internal Complaint,” Philip—an aspiring writer studying Chekhov’s story to hone his craft—begins to suspect that his wife is having an affair. The story shuttles between 19^th-century Russia—Philip’s retelling of scenes from the perspective of the cuckolded husband of the lady with the dog—and present-day North Carolina as Philip begins surveillance on his wife and her lover. (The manuscript title of “An Internal Complaint” was “Episodes from the Story of Evgeniy von Diderits,” which editor Janet Hutchings wisely asked me to change; the ultimate title is drawn from a key passage about the title character’s deception of her husband.)

While “An Internal Complaint” broadcasts its connections to “The Lady with the Dog,” my latest story for EQMM—“We Are All Strangers Here” in the September/October issue—owes an equally strong debt to Chekhov, even if the inspiration is so indirect there’s zero chance anyone would recognize it.

The Chekhov story in this case is “In the Cart” (1897), in which a schoolmistress is driven back to her village after collecting her small paycheck in town. Along the way, she has brief conversations with her driver and reflects on her late parents and estranged brother. She meets a local landowner and wonders what it would be like to be married to him, then dismisses the idea. She stops at a teahouse, where some of the patrons are drinking vodka; the driver reprimands them for speaking vulgarly. Back on the journey, they have to cross a river, the driver nearly tips the cart, and the schoolmistress gets her boots wet. While stopped at a railway crossing, she glimpses a woman on the train who looks like her mother, and she begins to cry, but then has a passing moment of happiness in which she imagines that the hardships she’d endured might have been a dream—before the driver calls her back to reality and they return to the village.

(If you’re waiting for what happens next, I’m sorry. That’s it.)

In “We Are All Strangers Here,” an attractive woman is sipping an amaretto sour in a hotel bar when a man claims the open seat beside her, obviously hitting on her. She surprises him by admitting that she’s married, then admitting she’s grateful for some diversion from her husband. Soon, the conversation turns to the subject of open marriages, and when the two of them are joined by another young woman, there’s a hint that the encounter might evolve into a threesome.

I’m skipping a key bit of information here—strategically, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. But I’m pausing to emphasize that it might be tough to connect that schoolmistress in the cart to a woman in a bar chatting about open marriages. Not once does Chekhov’s schoolmistress consider a ménage à trois with her driver and that landowner.

Though both women do reflect throughout their respective stories on their lives—where they’ve come from, where they’re going—the connection between the stories is more structural, with all credit to George Saunders and his terrific craft book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

While I’ve taught fiction workshops for many years at George Mason University and feel like I know a few things about the craft of short fiction, Saunders’ book proved an eye-opener—pointing me toward new perspectives on crafting character, plot, style, and structure and inspiring my own work in the process.

The first section of A Swim in a Pond analyzes “In the Cart” one or two pages at a time—twice as many pages of analysis after each printed page of the story itself. That analysis tries to chart what readers know at each point in the story, what they might be curious about, and what they might expect from the next step of the schoolmistress’s journey. Importantly, from a writers’ perspective, Saunders also explores how Chekhov builds on and twists (“exploits” even) those reader expectations at every turn. For example, the meeting with the landowner suggests that this story might become a romance of sorts, saving the schoolmistress from her accumulating disappointments, emotional and financial both—but after weighing this idea, both character and plot move in a different direction, to the story’s great credit.

Building on this analysis, Saunders writes more generally, “A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were.”

Thinking about that analysis, thinking about short fiction as a series of small segments which deliver information, build reader expectation, and then move in unexpected directions with awareness of potential reader expectations . . . all that led me to try this out myself, systematically—an exercise that eventually became “We Are All Strangers Here.”

The key bit of information that I strategically withheld above is also one that I strategically withheld within the story—at least til the end of the opening scene, where I hope it provides a nice jolt of surprise. After that, I tried to take this new information and complicate it further, then parcel out fresh reveals, with their own fresh complications, a bit at the time. To quote Saunders again, I hope that each subsequent section of my story does indeed offer a new “incremental pulse” and bring the reader to a surprising “new place” in their relationship with and understanding of the characters.

Another writer at the EQMM blog explored this same idea in a different way—also with reference to Chekhov. In “Chekhov for the Gun-Shy” (an essay now regularly on my syllabi at Mason), Reed Johnson talks about the idea of “ghost plots” and writes that “the fictional narrative, and the mystery story above all, is not one story but two: The first is the plot as it actually exists on the page, and the second a sort of ghost plot that consists of anticipated but unrealized events—a chain of otherwise that exists in a sort of a continually evolving dialectic with the actual.”

We often think of stories as a series of escalations: a character in a crisis or quandary facing increasingly steep troubles as the plot works toward its climax. (Google “Lester Dent’s Master Plot Formula”) But Saunders and Johnson emphasize that in addition to wrangling with plot and character, we writers also need to maintain a focused awareness on the reader and on the various potential readings of our story in order, in Reed’s words again, “to constantly innovate both within and against the conventions of the genre to avoid giving the mystery a predictable solution.”

I know there are other writers in our genre who are fans of Chekhov and draw inspiration from his work—Travis Richardson stands out, for example, with his excellent “Chekhov Shorts” project—and Saunders’ book draws also explores stories by Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev to explore other aspects of short fiction writing: the pattern story, for example, and the importance of what’s left out as much as what’s included in a short story.

All this may seem very far from modern mystery and suspense fiction, but sometimes appearances deceive . . . which may be a clue to reading my own new story as well. And hope you enjoy! 

Most of the many stories author David Dean has contributed to EQMM over several decades have been contemporary. Many are cases for his series policeman Julian Hall, and readers can now find several of them in the collection Tomorrow’s Dead, just released by Genius Books. Prior to publication, the book won second place in the Public Safety Writers Association’s Writing Competition, in the unpublished-story-collection category. Several more collections of the New Jersey author’s stories are forthcoming, but readers will not find in them many examples of his historical fiction. That genre is one he’s turned to frequently only recently. In this post, we get a glimpse of what spurred his interest in the historical crime field. Readers will find the first in the new series he discusses here in the March/April 2023 issue of EQMM.  —Janet Hutchings

In a previous post on this site entitled “A Day in the Life of the Creative Writer”—which reads like the biography of a squirrel—I wrote of the perils of distraction. Writing can be hard work (at least for me) and I am always looking for a way out of it.  Just this morning, I took off twenty minutes to meet and greet the crew of a septic system company who’d arrived for reasons you don’t want to know.  But this is a blog about creative ideas, not so much the actual donkey work of writing.  This is about the fun part.

I’ve been writing since 1989 so I’ve managed to have a few ideas for stories along the way, some have even referred to me as “prolific.” I’m hardly that, I think. That mantle is better worn by such stalwarts of the short crime fiction world as John Floyd, Michael Bracken, and Brendan DuBois—astoundingly creative and fertile minds. I’m more of a plodder. Yet, when you’ve been writing for over thirty years, that plodding can add up to some considerable mileage, and mileage requires ideas.

Most writers would agree, I think, that almost any story you can dream up has already been written in one form or another, so the challenge lies in somehow making this plot your own.  It’s not that writers are endlessly plagiarizing, but more that they’re reimagining through their own unique lenses the material that has filtered down to them through the ages. 

Additionally, if you write within a particular genre of fiction, you’re somewhat bound by the conventions that govern them.  Luckily for me, I write crime fiction—some horror—but mostly crime—and it’s a very forgiving genre.  It’s a house that contains many mansions, to paraphrase a passage in the Bible—cozies, historicals, impossible crime puzzlers, classical whodunits, noir, police procedurals, literary (Crime and Punishment anyone?); even science fiction (Crime Travel), the aforementioned horror (“The Tell-Tale Heart”), and Westerns (nearly every one of them) frequently feature a crime or crimes. You might even say that it’s a transcending genre.  The very suggestion of a crime may qualify a story for inclusion.  So crime fiction writers are given a lot of latitude.

Still, it ain’t easy.

Whenever an idea leaps forth, I snag it as quickly as I can by jotting down a sentence or two about it in my Big Book of Ideas. This book—an actual notebook—has become hoary with age, as have I.  Whenever the well runs dry, I dig it out, flip through its crumbling yellow pages, focus on one jotting and ask, “What the hell did I mean by that?” 

Fortunately for me, there’s usually some other scribbling that reveals its genius and I’m saved to write another day.

However, about two years ago I hit a patch that stretched before me like a hike through the Mojave in midsummer.  I’d gone dry.  So I did what I normally do and consulted the BB of I, but its words remained indecipherable and no comfort was to be found there. I ask She Who Walks In Beauty—my wife of many years, Robin—and She suggested household chores and other unfinished, or never taken up, tasks in order that my mind might relax and thereby be fruitful.  I recoiled from this idea as unnatural to my particular creative processes.  Time went by.

I considered the wisdom offered me once by the gifted Doug Allyn, who had suggested during a discussion on this very topic that I revisit some of my older stories with an eye to reworking one from a different angle.  At the time of our meeting I found this quite useful.  But in this instance, when I trolled through my bibliography I came away with zilch . . . nada . . . nothing.  So I took to reading. If I had nothing to write I might as well read some things that I had never had a chance to read before, as well as some that I had, this time bringing to them a more mature perspective.  Such was my state of affairs. 

Then came the epiphany that I had been awaiting.  Not just from the classic novels and short stories that I’d been reading, but also from a book that was much more modern, and if not a classic yet, certainly one with a cult following.  But more on that in a moment.

Deep in the night, as SWWIB serenely slumbered at my side, even as I tossed and turned in my anguish, the answer was provided.  Like the Sphinx’s riddle, it posed a question—If so many great stories were lying about in the form of dusty classics such as I was reading and were, more importantly, in the public domain, what need I of new ideas?  The heavy lifting had already been done! All that was needed was to—as Doug had suggested of my own work—come at them from a different angle! 

Having just completed reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, my mind began to percolate. That story contained a crime; in fact, several of them. What if I revisited it using not only the characters original to the tale, but introducing characters of my own creation as well as historical ones of the period? What if there was a mysterious Mrs. Hyde who feared for her husband’s health and sanity at the hands of Dr. Jekyll?  What if she reached out for help to another doctor, one who specialized in the vicissitudes of the human psyche? Enter Dr. Beckett Aquinas Marchland, alienist.

I’m not the first to use this particular method of constructing a story, of course. If only I were that original a thinker! Nicholas Meyer had done so with his homage to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in The Seven Percent Solution. But the writer who sparked my particular creative resurgence was Kim Newman who wrote the imaginative and entertaining Anno Dracula, published in 1992.  This is the modern novel I referred to earlier.  Newman blazed the trail that I subconsciously followed with what has become the Marchland series, and the premier story, “Mrs. Hyde,” will debut in EQMM next year. 

Something similar was also done by writer Alan Moore and illustrator Kevin O’Neill who created the graphic 1999 novella, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which they peopled the pages of their adventure/sci-fi/steampunk tale with the likes of Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll, Allan Quartermain, and other characters from Victorian classics.  Dozens of films have utilized this same devise in recent years as well.  Retellings of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” done up as modern stories also spring to mind.  In my case, I stuck to the period the original was set in.

It was fun, but exacting, to write in this manner, since millions of people are familiar with the book or some film version thereof, requiring a careful adherence to the flavor and detail of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But this only upped the challenge.  Like most writing, it was a bit like putting a puzzle together, only in this case, using two puzzles to make one whole as I introduced characters and events of my own into the fray. I kept expecting a ghostly Stevenson to show up and cry, “Damn the cheek, man!” while quirting me with his riding crop.  Or perhaps he would’ve gotten a chuckle out of it.  “Mrs. Hyde” does have some funny bits. 

Not content to stop at mining one classic, I went next for Guy De Maupassant’s short story, “The Diary of a Madman,” followed by Bram Stoker’s Dracula (in which I discovered several non-supernatural crimes when viewed through a different lens), and finally H. H. Munro’s brilliant tale, “The Open Window.”  All of these have characters that required the scrutiny and somewhat questionable acumen of Dr. Marchland’s intervention. I should say that you need not have read any of the aforementioned stories in order to understand and, hopefully, enjoy the Marchland series.  Though you might get even more out of them if you have.  In the end it’s all a bit of a mash-up of classic story, crime fiction, and historical mystery, dosed with splashes of humor.

I’m now eyeing The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde which also features several crimes and is ripe soil indeed for a nascent criminal psychologist. Even my current story in EQMM, “The Wedding Funeral,” trades on a bit of Victorian folklore (not literature in this case) concerning premature burial.  The characters and setting are, however, modern and far from Britain.

So, for now at least, my cup runneth over and I am once more content at my trade. I’ve even come up with a few plot ideas without the aid of the old masters, though I’m much indebted to them for their benevolent assistance during my troubles. As is often said, you can’t be a writer without reading, and this has certainly proven true in my case.    

A former journalist for the Washington Post and Bloomberg, Anne Swardson has lived in Paris for twenty-six years. Her very first mystery story was selected for the Mystery Writers of America’s 2012 anthology, Vengeance, and she has followed up with stories for a variety of other publications. She makes her EQMM debut in our September/October 2022 issue (which goes on sale August 16) with the story “Uncaged.” It’s set in Paris, and in it she makes wonderful use of her knowledge of that city—a city that, as she explains in this post, is made for mystery.  —Janet Hutchings

My husband and I have lived in three neighborhoods since we moved to Paris 26 years ago. Each time we moved, we bought a 3X3 aerial photo of the new quartier from France’s geographic service, hung it on the wall and took a look.

Initially, we focused on what we could see and recognize. The parks where we took the kids to play when they were little. The tourist spots, such the Musée d’Orsay or the Invalides. Our apartment building and the ones around us.

But there was so much in those photos that was hidden from the street. What was that huge garden in back of a government building across the avenue from us? Who knew the homeless shelter two blocks away had a verdant courtyard behind its walls? Was that a fountain behind the high gate that never seemed to be open?

Our experience was, and is, a constant reminder of how much more to Paris there is than what’s visible on the surface. As I began writing fiction, it also helped me realize why Paris is an ideal setting for a mystery: The real story is hidden behind layers of obscurity at best, deception at worst.

Secrets are a key part of any mystery, of course. But in France in general and Paris especially, secrecy is a public pastime. That’s true whether you are a long-timer or just got off the plane, whether you speak the language, and whether you are French or étranger (a word, by the way, that means both stranger AND foreigner.)

So much is hidden. Government buildings, even the parliament, the presidential palace and the ornate City Hall, are largely forbidden to the public. Only once a year, on a designated September weekend, can people queue for hours to see what their taxpayer dollars are paying for. That’s when they can see the incredible gardens, too.

A monument to the deportees of World War II is literally underground, a bunker-like structure behind Notre Dame, with only a small sign to mark it. A lane featuring some of the best street art in the city can be found only by heading uphill into the city’s Chinatown district, then making a sharp right. No signs. Stores mostly don’t post their opening hours on the door, and you have to click through innumerable times on a museum web site to learn what its weekly closing day is.

But it’s not just about what your eyeballs can see. It’s what people say, and don’t say. The French call it “le non-dit”—that which is left unsaid. I don’t think we have a word for that in the U.S., especially these days. We say too much.

You can attend a dinner party in Paris and come away with no idea who the other guests were, except that they have very interesting ideas about the latest film or 18^th-century hunting paintings. No one ever reveals their occupation.

Your waiter does not want to know if you are having a nice day or still “working” on your dinner, and the proprietor of that delicious bakery cares only that you greet him with a proper “Bonjour” upon entering, not what you think of the croissants.

The codes are often unspoken, at least to non-natives. You may think you know the rules to get along and then discover you read the operating manual all wrong. Invited to a dinner at the home of French friends, you show up at the appointed hour of 8:30 p.m.—to find the hostess drying her hair and the host still in jeans. The French guests all turn up half an hour later.

Until a few years ago, politicians, almost all of them male, could carry on affairs with impunity, even with underage women. They were left alone by the press on the grounds that everyone has a right to a “secret garden.” Francois Mitterrand, president in the 1980s, raised a second family with the full knowledge of the political and journalistic elite, but not a word appeared in public until he died.

“Knowledge is power,” Thomas Jefferson often said. In France, it’s the other way around: Power comes from withholding knowledge. The public deserves to know as little as possible. The government, for instance, does not record statistics about minorities. There are no figures on the country’s black population, or Muslims. It makes it rather difficult to keep records of racial discrimination in, say, employment.

There are whole categories of people, too, who hide in plain sight. Prostitutes in the Bois de Boulogne, a huge park west of the city, offer their services along the principal avenue even in daytime. Most of them are from eastern European countries, and not all knew what they were getting into when they arrived here. Not far from them is the Polo de Paris, an exclusive club, hidden behind high hedges, where the wealthy lunch at tables next to the field and gossip between chukkers.

Have you ever visited the Eiffel Tower and noticed the dark-skinned souvenir vendors? They stand by the blankets that display their wares, hawking tinny version of the real thing and keeping an eye out for the cops in case they need to grab their blankets and run.

I’ve talked to them. They come from real countries—Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Togo, Senegal—and have real stories. So does the one-man band who plays his instruments just outside the Tuileries park as tourists drop coins into his upturned hat. Have you ever ridden a public Métro or bus in Paris and wondered how the driver can bear to ply the same route every day? I can assure you, very few in Paris have asked themselves that question.

Whole neighborhoods in Paris are secrets, too, except, mostly, for those who live there. They boast vibrant street art, fantastic Ethiopian and Afghan restaurants, incredibly cheap open-air markets selling halal meat and very tacky discount stores with amazing bargains. I don’t see a lot of foreign tourists there.

And these ethnic quartiers are just as French as the Champs-Élysées. Walking through the Goutte d’Or (Drop of Gold) area in northeastern Paris with some friends a couple of years ago, I approached a Black vendor and asked the price of his papayas.

He reared back.

“Madame!” he snapped. “You didn’t say ‘Bonjour.’” Fair enough. I did, and then bought a couple papayas.

A professor and a former journalist, Meenakshi Gigi Durham made her debut as a fiction writer in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in December of 2004 with the story “The Drum.” Like many of her subsequent stories—including 2008’s “Storm Surge” (EQMM) and her upcoming EQMM story “Magic Beans” (November/December 2022)—it was told from a child’s point of view. In this post the author explores the role of the child in mystery fiction. As a college professor her work centers on media representations of children and adolescents, and she tells EQMM that she is currently exploring issues of vulnerability and violation as a starting point for social justice work.  —Janet Hutchings

To paraphrase Shrek, my favorite mystery stories are like onions, layered and pungent: each narrative lamina discloses new surfaces that give way to others, until I am jolted by a revelation at the core; and so often, at least in the mysteries I love the most, that final revelation involves a child, usually a child who has been hurt.

I’m not sure what it is about childhood vulnerability that compels mystery writers and readers, but trauma in childhood is a motivating force in a great deal of contemporary mystery fiction. Of course, children have played pivotal roles in mystery writing for a long time. One rather keen insight regarding a child appears in the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Copper Beeches,” first published in 1892. A particularly nasty 6-year-old sparks Holmes’ awareness that a seemingly happy family is not as beatific it seems. “I have never met so utterly spoiled and so ill-natured a little creature,” the child’s governess Violet Hunter tells Holmes. “He is small for his age, with a head which is quite disproportionately large. His whole life appears to be spent in an alternation between savage fits of passion and gloomy intervals of sulking. Giving pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to be his one idea of amusement, and he shows quite remarkable talent in planning the capture of mice, little birds, and insects.” She adds, “But I would rather not talk about the creature, Mr. Holmes, and, indeed, he has little to do with my story.”

“I am glad of all details,” Holmes responds noncommittally, “whether they seem to you to be relevant or not.”

The child’s monstrous behavior turns out to be very relevant, although he is but a blip in the overall tale. His parents, a seemingly genteel upper-class English couple, are villains, too. “The most serious point in the case,” Holmes observes after their misdeeds have been revealed, “is the disposition of the child.”

“What on earth has that to do with it?” demands Watson.

“I have frequently gained insight into the character of parents by studying their children,” Holmes explains. “This child’s disposition is abnormally cruel, merely for cruelty’s sake, and whether he derives this from his smiling father, as I should suspect, or from his mother, it bodes evil . . . ”

This notion of a “bad seed” is actually fairly rare, however. In most mysteries involving children as a key plot device, the children are sympathetic characters whose vulnerability to evildoers both animates and exposes the dark underside of family life as it connects to criminality. We all doubtless remember that in another classic mystery—Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934)—the kidnapping and killing of a toddler catalyzes the vicious murder of the millionaire/gangster Samuel Edward Ratchett. “It wasn’t only that he was responsible for my daughter’s death and her child’s and that of the other child who might have been alive and happy now,” explains Mrs. Hubbard, the murdered girl’s grandmother, at the novel’s denouement. “It was more than that: there had been other children kidnapped before Daisy, and there might be others in the future.” Revenge for the murder of a child as well as the safekeeping of all children motivates the murder, as Hercule Poirot, with his usual uncanny brilliance, understands.

In more contemporary fiction, I find that true darkness in the form of the emotional and/or sexual abuse of children lurks in the shadows of the plot. For example, in Tana French’s haunting In the Woods (2008), the mysterious disappearance and (bloodstained) reappearance of three children is intertwined with the murder of a 12-year-old two decades later, and the ongoing torment of the victim in her home upends the reader’s assumptions. Ann Cleeves’ wonderful Shetland series begins with the murder of a teenage girl and backtracks to an earlier child’s murder (Raven Black, 2006). Dervla McTiernan’s debut novel The Ruin (2018) begins with the removal of two children from a derelict dower house in which their mother has apparently died of a drug overdose, and the children’s early life—which includes sexual abuse at the hands of a religious zealot—plays out in a murder when they are adults. PD James’ Innocent Blood (1980) pivots on the protagonist Philippa Palfrey’s discovery that her birth parents were child rapists and murderers; Ruth Rendell’s masterpiece The Vault involves a child who witnesses a murder and is later psychologically abused by a mountebank “therapist.” Her 2006 novel The Water’s Lovely involves a stepfather whose accidental drowning unleashes dark truths about incestuous sexual predation. Kate Atkinson’s debut novel Case Histories—declared by Stephen King to be “the best mystery of the decade,” with which I’d concur—focuses on the disappearance (and, we learn, the murder) of the young daughter of a math professor, and sexual abuse is a factor here, as well.

The theme ripples through Nordic noir, as well, perhaps most famously in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, particularly in the childhood sexual and physical abuse of Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed, playing-with-fire, hornet’s-nest-kicking girl of the book’s titles. It surfaces in other books in this genre, such as Camilla Läckberg’s The Ice Princess.

The children in question are almost always girls, almost always white, and almost always middle-class (Salander is an exception to the last category). They are, in the scholarly literature, “ideal victims,” damsels in distress. The Swedish criminologist Tea Fredriksson writes that such victims depend “on the simultaneous construction of equally ideal villains and saviors.” But in fact, in a number of mystery novels, the children themselves grow up to be the saviors, or are later disclosed to have taken matters into their own hands. They are not reliant on the police, or on their frequently malfeasant parents or guardians, or some other external force: they deal with their assailants themselves, though not always in ways that are safe. Of course, in other cases, they are just victims, plain and simple.

Why, I wonder, is the victimization of children such a frequent trope in murder mysteries? In part, I believe it is because the safeguarding of children is a societal norm. In most cultures, there is a common agreement that violence against children, especially sexual violence, should not happen. The revelation of such abuse in a mystery novel usually comes as a shock, especially when it is as graphically described as in the Millennium trilogy, and it cries out to the reader This should not happen. This must not happen. This is wrong. On the other hand, the norm of protecting children from abuse is, in real life, constantly abrogated: the physical and sexual abuse of children is far too common, a dark secret harbored in many homes and communities and institutions, and the mystery novel reveals what is too often concealed, rupturing our complacency about our societies’ commitments to children and underscoring the far-reaching effects of those betrayals.

A friend once confided to me that whenever she hears an ambulance siren, she wonders if something has happened to one of her children. Indeed, as parents, harm to children strikes at some deep chord within us, speaking to the not-so-secret fear we all harbor, that some danger might befall our own child. The hurt children in mystery novels connect viscerally with that fear.

I realize, in reflecting on this topic, that novels by mystery writers of color don’t seem to hinge on childhood abuse—or at least I haven’t encountered it, though children’s vulnerability to violence is still a theme in some stories. For instance, in Attica Locke’s powerful first novel Black Water Rising, the Black protagonist Jay Porter is left fatherless when a gang of white men murder his father while his mother is still pregnant with him; this is not a vital aspect of the plot, though it figures into Jay’s backstory. In the novel’s conclusion, after becoming ensnared in high-level political and corporate corruption and escaping all manner of violent villains, Jay imagines himself back in the womb, trying to feel his father’s caress; he is both vulnerable and protected in that moment. We think, of course, of Emmett Till, of Tamir Rice, of other Black children and their vulnerability to violence.

I am always both saddened and reassured by the persistence of themes of violence against children in mystery novels. Saddened because children ought not to be targets of violence; as the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child asserts, children need “special safeguards and care,” nurture, love, and safe spaces in which to grow and thrive. But reassured because, in reminding us of children’s vulnerability and the pure evil of those who commit violence against these most fragile members of our societies, we can recognize and embrace the moral imperative of an ethics of care, not only for children but for all vulnerable people.

Times of political upheaval and intrigue often generate a wave of fictional portrayals of the period. As short story writer, essayist, and book reviewer Kevin Mims shows in this post, the Watergate era produced a remarkable number of thrillers that borrowed from real elements of the crisis. We’ll have to wait to see if our current era produces as many thrillers still worth talking about a half century hence.   —Janet Hutchings

Whenever an American presidential administration ends, books about it come flooding forth. Usually these are memoirs by people who served the administration in one capacity or another. I tend to ignore most of these. I’m a pop-fiction fan and prefer novels to nonfiction. And that is why I consider the Nixon administration to have been the best administration of my lifetime. Oh sure, it produced a bunch of scandals and ended with the president’s resignation, but it also included in its ranks the greatest number of pop-fictioneers ever to come out of an American presidential administration.

One of the first important members of the Nixon administration to depart in a cloud of criminal indictments was vice president Spiro Agnew. Although the Nixon administration will forever be remembered for the Watergate scandal, Agnew’s crimes had nothing to do with Watergate. He took kickbacks from contractors during his years as Governor of Maryland. By the time this behavior came to light he was Nixon’s vice president. He resigned after pleading guilty to a single count of tax evasion. Not only was Agnew ahead of the curve on Nixon administration criminal activity, he also got a jump on the others when it came to producing pop fiction. In May of 1976, Agnew published his first and only novel, a political fiction called The Canfield Decision, about a sitting U.S. vice president pondering his own run for the White House. The book was not a huge critical success, but it had its champions. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, John Kenneth Galbraith, who served as an advisor to four presidents, noted that Agnew flailed a bit in the opening chapters but, “As the book proceeds, one does have the feeling that Mr. Agnew struggles less and gets better.” At any rate, the novel, published by Playboy Press in hardback, sold well enough to dig Agnew out of the financial hole his legal troubles had created for him.

Next up was William Safire, a former speechwriter for both Nixon and Agnew. Safire was that rare Nixon White House employee who left office with his honor and dignity intact. He departed in 1973 to become a political columnist for the New York Times. In January of 1977, about seven months after the publication of Agnew’s novel, Safire’s first novel was published, a political thriller called Full Disclosure. Safire’s novel is a thriller about a U.S. President who is blinded in a botched assassination effort and then finds his own cabinet members trying to remove him from office via the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution. Safire was a gifted writer and Full Disclosure is a much better literary product than The Canfield Decision. Safire would go on to write three more novels including Freedom (a massive Civil War novel), Sleeper Spy (an espionage novel) and Scandalmonger (about muckraking journalists in the age of Thomas Jefferson).

Agnew’s and Safire’s books may have started the trend of former Nixon aides writing novels, but it was the Watergate scandal that really intensified it. Nixon resigned from office in disgrace on August 9, 1974. Many of the most memorable books arising from the Watergate scandal were nonfiction works, memoirs written by Nixon administration insiders who served jail time such as John Dean, H.R. Haldeman, Charles W. Colson, Jeb Stuart Magruder, John Ehrlichman, and G. Gordon Liddy. Writing about the phenomenon in his own memoir, Another Life, longtime Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief Michael Korda noted that, “It was said that what you needed to survive in Washington in the early seventies was a good criminal lawyer and a book contract.” I’m sure those books were all very intelligent and sober, but I didn’t read many of them because, well, because they were serious and sober and I like pop fiction.

Fortunately for me, after the tsunami of nonfiction Watergate books came a much smaller (and less well-remembered) wave of Watergate fictions, which is to say novels written by Watergate-connected figures. These included two books by the wife of John Dean. Maureen Dean—often referred to by her nickname Mo – published her first book in 1975. Predictably, it was a memoir, called Mo: A Woman’s View of Watergate. Mo never committed any crimes nor went to prison, so she followed up her memoir with a couple of novels—Washington Wives (published in 1987 and widely believed to have been ghostwritten by literary agent Lucianne Goldberg) and Capitol Secrets (a crime novel about a murdered tabloid reporter that features a U.S. Congresswoman contemplating a bid for Speaker of the House). Capitol Secrets is the better of the two, which is surprising because I can’t find any evidence online that it was ghostwritten. Also on the list are two thrillers by G. Gordon Liddy: Out of Control (1979) and The Monkey Handlers (1990). The Monkey Handlers is the better of the two and somewhat of a surprise because, in it, Liddy, an arch-conservative, sympathetically portrays the members of a PETA-like group of animal-rights activists.

The best-known fiction writer associated with Watergate is probably former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, who spent 33 months in jail for helping to plot the Watergate break-in with G. Gordon Liddy. He wrote 73 books during his lifetime, including many crime and spy novels, often using aliases such as Robert Dietrich, David St. John, Gordon Davis, and P.S. Donoghue. In 1946 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his writing. Although Hunt didn’t write any novels about Watergate, his publishers weren’t above using his connection with the scandal to sell books. The front cover of the paperback copy of his 1973 novel Lovers Are Losers identifies the author as “The Former CIA Agent and Watergate Conspirator.”

The first member of the Nixon White House to go to prison for his Watergate involvement was Charles Colson. Known as Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Colson was willing to do just about anything to keep Nixon’s enemies at bay. According to Wikipedia, Colson once proposed firebombing the Brookings Institute and then pillaging its files during the ensuing chaos. Colson also was the man behind Nixon’s infamous list of enemies, a list that included such terrifying figures as actors Paul Newman, Tony Randall, Barbra Streisand, and Carol Channing. By the time he emerged from prison, Colson had become an Evangelical Christian speaker and writer. He also produced one novel, a 1995 political thriller called Gideon’s Torch, co-written with Ellen Vaughn. It is the story of a fictional pro-choice Republican President who uses a spike in crime as a pretext for shutting down the pro-life movement. It is rife with murder, terrorism, political intrigue, and other elements of the contemporary thriller. Though it can be a bit preachy and cheesy at times, the book is mildly entertaining and not horribly written.

But is “mildly entertaining and not horribly written” as good as it gets with novels written by Watergate and Watergate-adjacent figures? After all, almost all of these books are now long out of print and largely forgotten. Are any of them still worth reading all these decades later? Happily, the answer to that question is an unqualified yes. There is one Watergate conspirator whose fiction you ought to seek out if you like intelligent thrillers.

John Ehrlichman, along with his former UCLA classmate, Bob Haldeman, helped run three political campaigns for Nixon. He was there in 1960 when Nixon narrowly lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy. Two years later he helped out when Nixon ran a losing campaign for Governor of California against Pat Brown. And he was there in 1968, when Nixon once again ran for president, this time successfully. Nixon rewarded Ehrlichman’s loyalty with a job in the administration, first as White House counsel and then as chief domestic-policy advisor.

I’ve always felt a great deal of fondness for Ehrlichman because, like me, he was born in the state of Washington, later moved with his family to California, and was a Boy Scout. Sadly, that’s where the similarities end. Ehrlichman was not only a Boy Scout, but an Eagle Scout as well, the highest rank in American Scouting. Ehrlichman won the Distinguished Flying Cross for participating in 26 bombing missions over Germany during the Second World War. He graduated from UCLA in 1948 with a degree in Political Science. A few years later he graduated from Stanford Law School. Ehrlichman began his law career at a firm in Seattle, where he specialized in land use and developed a reputation as a fighter for environmental causes. Alas, once he was ensconced in the White House, Ehrlichman seemed to lose his Eagle Scout sense of Honor, Duty, and Civic Responsibility. Like his boss, he became secretive, occasionally unscrupulous, and convinced that enemies in the press and the federal bureaucracy were eager to take the administration down. But even now, nearly fifty years after the famous Watergate break-in that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation, many questions remain about just how guilty men like Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and even Nixon really were. Even towards the ends of their lives, Ehrlichman and Haldeman were still insisting that the Watergate break-in was engineered not by the White House but by the Committee to Re-Elect the President and its chairman John Mitchell, Nixon’s former Attorney General. When Nixon found out about the crime, he actively participated in the cover-up, even instructing Ehrlichman to use money from an illegal slush fund to buy the silence of the Watergate burglars, which included Liddy and Hunt. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman regretted their participation in the cover-up, which tarnished the final year of their service to the president, but in fairness to him, it should be noted that Ehrlichman did not spend his entire White House career breaking laws. In fact, as Nixon’s chief of domestic policy he fought for some important causes including workers’ rights, sovereignty for Native American tribes, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

After the Watergate scandal broke, Ehrlichman was found guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury and various other crimes. He was sentenced to a jail term of up to eight years. While waiting for the appeals process to play out, and hoping for a pardon from Nixon, Ehrlichman left his wife and five children and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he grew a bushy biker beard and set about writing a novel in the hopes of making enough money to offset the cost of his legal woes. To educate himself on the fine points of thriller writing, Ehrlichman told an interviewer for Esquire back in 1976, “I read every Travis McGee novel that John D. MacDonald ever wrote.” It seems to have paid dividends. The book Ehrlichman wrote, The Company, sold more than a million copies and was made into a twelve-and-a-half-hour, six-part ABC-TV miniseries called Washington: Behind Closed Doors. Eager to get on with his life and his new writing career, he decided to voluntarily enter prison while the appeals process was still ongoing. He served eighteen months at a low-security federal prison near Safford, Arizona. After leaving prison, Ehrlichman, now divorced, returned to Santa Fe, remarried, had a sixth child, and continued to pursue a career as a thriller writer.

While in prison, Ehrlichman began work on his second novel, The Whole Truth. This novel is, in many ways, simply a retelling of The Company. But The Whole Truth is magnitudes better than The Company. Ehrlichman clearly took his time with this book, and it shows. The characters are more fully developed, the dialog is better, and the plot is complex but still highly plausible. Ehrlichman also put his legal knowledge to use in The Whole Truth. The centerpiece of the book is a Senate hearing clearly modeled on the Watergate hearings. Presiding over the hearing is Harley Oates, a drawling Democratic Senator from the Deep South and obviously patterned after real-life Senator Sam Ervin, Jr., who presided over the Watergate hearings. The portrait is not meant to flatter Ervin. Oates is a preening phony, waxing poetic about the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution while secretly accepting bribes from the President and the Attorney General in exchange for steering the inquiry away from the White House. Ervin was indeed a Constitutional scholar. He also had a tendency to preen before the cameras. But Ervin was not a crook. And he appears to have been angered by Ehrlichman’s fictional portrait of him. Ehrlichman’s The Whole Truth was published in May of 1979. In December of 1980, Ervin came out with his own nonfiction account of Watergate and appended Ehrlichman’s title to it: The Whole Truth.

Though Ervin might not have liked it, critics mostly approved of Ehrlichman’s second novel. Kirkus Reviews’ unnamed reviewer wrote: “Ehrlichman has wrapped his basic narrative flair around scores of behind-the-scenes goodies and dozens of hints of further Nixon-era nastiness–a combination that’s likely to prove that The Company wasn’t just a first-time-lucky fluke.”

Ehrlichman’s next novel took years of research, as he traveled all across China and elsewhere to get the details right. Published in May of 1986, The China Card is Ehrlichman’s best and biggest book. It is a political thriller set against the backdrop of Nixon’s efforts to renew the American diplomatic ties to China that were terminated in 1949. This time, Ehrlichman doesn’t bother disguising his Nixon White House cronies behind aliases. Here Richard Nixon plays Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger plays Henry Kissinger and H.R. Haldeman plays H.R. Haldeman. Also appearing as themselves in this novel are Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Soong Ching-Ling. Ehrlichman seems to be the only novelist who understood the grand operatic nature of Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China. A year after The China Card was published, Nixon in China, an opera by composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman, made its debut at the Houston Grand Opera, validating Ehrlichman’s belief in the dramatic potential of the event. The opera is not based on Ehrlichman’s novel, but it covers much of the same ground. Neither the novel nor the opera was an immediate critical success. Though the opera is now considered a modern masterpiece, it received decidedly mixed reviews in its original run.

Ehrlichman’s book got the same kind of reception. Kirkus Reviews, which had enthusiastically reviewed his two earlier novels, called The China Card “padded and contrived . . . heavy with self-importance but light on originality.” Sadly, The China Card never got the kind of critical reassessment that has made a modern classic of Nixon in China.

In the 1970s, legions of young Americans were inspired by the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein to seek careers in journalism. By 1986, many of those young would-be Bernsteins and Woodwards were ensconced in the highest levels of American journalism, and they all seemed to share a contempt for Nixon and his cronies. Nicolas Kristof, of the New York Times, was one of those young journalists. At about the time that The China Card was published, Kristof wrote a piece for the Times called “The Success of the President’s Men,” which briefly reported on what the likes of Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Liddy, Hunt, Colson, and other Watergate felons were doing nearly a decade and a half after the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters. Kristof seemed saddened to learn that, for the most part, all the president’s men were doing fine, thank you. They were writing books, running businesses, traveling the lecture circuit, appearing on TV news shows and on talk radio, and basically using their former notoriety to their advantage.

It is easy to understand why Americans were angry about the crimes these men committed. But it seems downright un-American to begrudge them the fact that, having served their time in prison and rehabilitated themselves, they were now thriving. Alas, The China Card seems to have suffered as a result of Nicolas Kristof Syndrome, the tendency to want to take swipes at the men who were brought low by the great Woodward and Bernstein.

What Ehrlichman’s harshest critics couldn’t see was that his books were an ongoing condemnation of his own behavior as a White House advisor. From his prison cell, Ehrlichman sent an audio-taped statement to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., in which he said: “I abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to somebody else. And if I had any advice for my kids, it would be never, ever defer your moral judgments to anybody. I’m paying the price for that lack of willpower.” This is a lesson that every one of his fictional counterparts ends up having to learn.