SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

Kevin Mims is a short story writer, essayist, and, often, a book reviewer for this site. This time he reviews a title that belongs to a category we don’t often see, the nonfiction novel. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was the first well-known example of this type of book, in which novelistic techniques are used to convey a story about real people and events. It sounds, from Kevin’s assessment, as if the 2012 novel Sutton is one no fan of this genre should miss. See what you think.—Janet Hutchings

With true crime currently enjoying a wave of popularity, fictionalized accounts of true crimes may also be of increased interest to readers of this blog. One such book is J.R. Moehringer’s 2012 novel Sutton, a fictionalized account of the life and career of American bank robber Willie Sutton, who lived from 1901 until 1980. This novel is, essentially, a tale being told by Sutton himself on Christmas Day, 1969, to two New York journalists (a reporter and a photographer). Sutton had been incarcerated in a New York prison (Attica) for seventeen years at that point but, because he was believed to be in ill health, had been granted a Christmas Eve release by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The next day, the two reporters pick up Sutton in a battered Dodge Polara. He has promised their newspaper an exclusive story in exchange for financial consideration. Sutton hands the two journalists a map of New York City on which he has circled roughly fifteen locations. These locations mark significant events in his life—banks and jewelry-store robberies he participated in, prison breakouts, romantic liaisons, brief stints of lawful employment, etc. He instructs the men to drive to each location and he will tell the story of his life while the photographer snaps photos of what the spot looks like now. This is a somewhat gimmicky narrative strategy, but it works.

Despite having little formal education, Willie Sutton was a rapacious reader and a decent writer. According to Moehringer, he spent many years working on a novel called The Statue in the Park, but was never able to get it published. He did publish two (highly inaccurate) memoirs in his lifetime. The first of these, Smooth and Deadly, appeared in 1953. The second, Where The Money Was, came out in 1976. They were written for a quick buck with the help of ghostwriters. After reading Sutton, I couldn’t help wondering how the book might have been treated—by reviewers and ordinary readers—if it actually had been written by Sutton and published some time in the 1970s. In my estimation, it would have competed with E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and Judith Rossner’s Looking For Mr. Goodbar for the title of most-talked-about crime book of the decade. All three are set almost exclusively in and around New York City. All three incorporate a great deal of actual history in their narratives. Curiously, Sutton is probably the least violent of the three novels, because Willie Sutton deplored violence and never fired a gun during any of his robberies. J.R. Moehringer is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and the author of a highly regarded memoir called The Tender Bar (George Clooney directed a 2021 film based on the memoir for Amazon Studios). Sutton was his first and, to date, only novel. And it is a surprisingly beautiful piece of work. It is filled with history, humor, hardship, and heartbreak. It contains scenes of great beauty and scenes of pure horror. An episode in which Sutton tries to swim his way to freedom through a prison sewer pipe was so disturbing that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it out of my head. An interlude in which Sutton finds employment tending the gardens of a fabulously wealthy New Yorker is filled with descriptions of lush foliage and dazzling flowers that wouldn’t have been out of place in a love story (which Sutton, essentially, is).

Upon its publication in 2012, Moehringer’s novel received plenty of complimentary reviews. But I don’t think it got anywhere near the attention it deserved. In my estimation, Moehringer’s book is every bit as good a “true crime novel” as Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980.

One of the most interesting sections of the book describes the time that Willie and several confederates escaped from Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. When the confederates need some sort of device to aid in their escape plan they always turn to a fellow convict named Kliney, who has a knack for acquiring the unobtainable. Willie notes that, “If you gave Kliney two weeks he could get you Ava Gardner.” This is almost certainly a nod to the Stephen King novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” whose narrator says, “Yeah, I’m a regular Nieman-Marcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came to me in 1949 and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I said it would be no problem at all.”

Although Sutton is more of a crime novel than a mystery, there is at least one great mystery at the center of Moehringer’s novel. In February of 1952, Sutton was recognized on a New York City subway car by a fellow passenger, twenty-four-year-old Arnold Schuster. Sutton, having again escaped from jail, was in the midst of one of his robbery sprees and was listed among the FBI’s ten most wanted criminals. When Sutton got off the subway car, Schuster followed him. Eventually he was able to inform the police of Sutton’s whereabouts and Sutton was arrested and jailed for the final time. By this point Sutton was a folk hero. Even the cops who arrested him asked if they could pose for a photo with him. New Yorkers would stand outside the police station and chant Willie’s name. But when a local paper wrote an article publicizing Arnold Schuster’s role in Willie’s capture, tragedy soon ensued. Schuster was a likeable young man, part of a close-knit Jewish family in Brooklyn, and engaged to be married. But a few weeks after the newspaper story was published, Schuster was executed gangland style near his Brooklyn home one night. It was long assumed that Sutton must have put out a contract on Schuster as payback for turning him in to the police. From the very first pages of Moehringer’s novel, the two journalists are trying to get Sutton to talk about Schuster’s murder, but Sutton refuses to tell his story out of chronological order. We learn about Schuster’s death early on, and a get a few teasing references to it, but not until the end does Willie go into detail about it, finally wrapping up that particular mystery.

So there you have it, my assessment of an underappreciated 2012 crime novel that would probably by now have been deemed a classic had it been published in the nineteen seventies and written by the actual Willie Sutton. As it is, the book seems to be languishing in relative obscurity. Perhaps that is because, by the time it was published, few Americans even remembered the events it describes. Timing, they say, is everything. And nobody knew that better than Willie Sutton.

Sandeep Sandhu is a writer based in London who recently completed a Master’s in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, where he was an editor for From Arthur’s Seat, an anthology of prose and poetry. He was long-listed for the Alpine Fellowship Fiction Prize 2021. In EQMM’s next issue, July/August 2022 (on sale June 14), Sandeep will debut as a professionally published fiction writer with the story “Servant of the Gentle,” in our Department of First Stories. This post should be of equal interest to readers and writers, since, as the author says, it’s likely that many readers as well as writers fancifully plan the perfect murder in their heads. —Janet Hutchings

To misquote Tolstoy, all imperfect murders are the same, but each perfect murder is perfect in its own way. That’s to say, killers are often caught for the same reasons: sloppiness, or the mental effects of guilt and remorse taking their toll. Those who get away with it—well, we don’t know, do we?

Like many writers (and even more non-writers) I’ve spent what might be considered a worrying amount of time planning murders I have no desire to commit. With the meteoric rise of true crime podcasts, the release of umpteen bingeable crimes series, and, of course, the everlasting popularity of crime and mystery books, I have no doubt this morbid pastime is increasingly common—even if most who do it don’t go to the length of storyboarding the entire thing as many authors do (it’s a common joke among writers that if anyone got our search history, we’d be in a lot of trouble).

Anybody who has given this more than a passing thought will know there’s no catch-all method to avoid detection; no standard best practice for murdering. This is especially true today, when we’re being watched in more ways that we can imagine. The sharpened icicle that melts away leaving no evidence might have done the job half a century ago, but when your phone confirms you were at the murder location at the time of the killing, it’s not quite so easy to play dumb. Like all of the most successful things in life, tailoring your murder to your circumstances is the only surefire way to give yourself a fighting chance of getting away with it.

Choosing a victim is paramount to the success of any perfect murder. While some would argue mysterious people make the best murder victims thanks to their lack of communication with others, it can also be argued that those who follow the same routines on a day-to-day basis are easier targets. In The Secret History by Donna Tartt, the murder is planned on the basis that the victim follows the same route every time he takes a walk. Yet, if your victim has slipped through society’s net so nobody knows their whereabouts on a day-to-day basis, like the homeless victims in Robert Swindells’s Stone Cold, that’s just as useful as any clockwork-like routine. This feels like quite a dialectical thing: the more extreme the potential victim is in terms of mystery or reliability, the more useful that particular habit is to the potential murderer.

It’s not just the victim’s habits you need to take into account either. Killing people is hard—even killing animals will likely take a toll on your psyche unless you’re built in the right way (a la Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory). It’s a well known fact that armies have to propagandise soldiers to make them kill because most don’t want to—and that’s in a warzone situation, where their own lives are at stake. There’ a reason so many murders are crimes of passion, after all. Sometimes you can even have a completely willing victim and it’s still a struggle, like in Muriel Spark’s In the Driver’s Seat. Without a burst of emotion, or some kind of psychosis, it can be near impossible for most to murder. But that passion and change of mental state is also what leaves us clues.

Literature has taught us there are some must-dos if you want to escape detection. The one thing we learn from Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the other greats is the importance of motive. So, it follows you should pick someone you’re not connected to as your victim—or, like the characters in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, find someone to do a murder swap with (that is, you kill their victim, and they yours). But that, of course, opens you up to another potential link. If you are the sort of person who can kill, as the last paragraph established you need to be, then murdering a stranger shouldn’t be too out of the question. But even if you psych yourself up for the task with all your might, you might find it’s still not enough.

In probably the most famous psychological crime novel of all time, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, our protagonist Raskolnikov talks about wanting to murder someone who deserves it and being the right type of character to get away with it: a “Napoleon,” in his words.The perfect murder needs the killer to have that level of confidence, but without veering into arrogance. In the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky discusses those who have gotten away with much worse crimes than Raskolnikov, concluding: “. . . those people had the courage of their convictions, and so they were right.” And, despite convincing himself that his original victim deserved death, describing her as a parasite and louse who has personally made his life harder, Raskolnikov still couldn’t stomach the crime. There’s no doubt one of the best tools a detective has in solving a murder is something they have no control over: the murderer’s sense of guilt.

So, you’ve got your victim and you’re in the right headspace: now you need to come up with some ingenious way to kill them and leave no (or very little) evidence. Perhaps like the murderer in Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger you’ve managed to find a way to make the death look natural, or you’ve discovered a foolproof method of disposing of the body. Everything is planned out to a T – but more problems remain. For whatever reason—some cosmic connection with the universe, a primal sort of instinct—human beings can often have a sixth sense that something is awry. Bobby Rupp, the boyfriend of one of the victims of Truman Capote’s infamous In Cold Blood, claimed that when he left the victim’s house the evening of the murders he was sure the killers were nearby: “Only now when I think back, I think somebody must have been hiding there. Maybe down among the trees. Somebody just waiting for me to leave.”

The problem really is that murder itself doesn’t seem to be as easy as many think it is. Perhaps we’re obsessed with the perfect murder because Dostoyevsky was right: it’s a super power to be able to do exactly what you want and have no remorse, especially if that thing is breaking the most sacred of human bonds, and because being kind and caring for each other is such an intrinsic part of the human condition. That also explains why people love true crime in the way they adore high-level sportspeople doing their thing: we get to see someone do something almost superhuman, even if that something is truly horrific.

W. Edward Blain is the author of two novels, the Edgar Allan Poe Award nominated Passion Play and Love Cools. At EQMM, we’re more apt to think of him as a nearly thirty-year veteran of the mystery short story; his work has been appearing in our pages since 1995. The latest of his stories, “The Secret Sharer,” is forthcoming in our July/August issue (on sale June 14). It’s set at a boarding school during the pandemic, when students were forced to stay at home and all classes had to be conducted by Zoom. Like his central character in that story, the author was, at the time it was written, still a teacher of high school English at such an institution. He retired in 2020, after 44 years teaching English, and now writes full time. In this post, he talks about the scary part of writing fiction. —Janet Hutchings

Decades ago a friend of mine, just out of college and uninsured, made what he thought was a mutually beneficial arrangement with a nearby medical school: he would get free health care in exchange for allowing any interested medical students to observe his examinations and treatments. All went well for a while, but then he developed a stubborn skin rash. The dermatology professor asked him to remove all his clothes and stand on a table in the center of an examination room. He complied, and soon he was stark naked, elevated well above the floor, when the door opened to admit a dozen or so medical students, male and female, who circled him and stared while he stood like a blushing Greek statue and his physician used a pointer to discuss his condition. When I heard that story, I immediately thought that it was a perfect metaphor for being a writer: You have to stand on the table and take off all your clothes.

That is, if you’re going to be a writer, you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable, perhaps even distressed, as you share the truth of both story and storyteller with your readers. Those readers expect you to take them to places where they’d never have access without you as their escort. When the Wizard of Oz orders Dorothy and her companions to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, they ignore him because behind the curtain is the most interesting place to look. Readers enjoy touring backstage, slipping behind the velvet rope, entering the private areas off limits to tourists; such reading pleasures are easy enough for us writers to provide if we are discussing familiar locales. But sometimes a piece of writing calls for the kind of revelation that makes us squirm.

When I was teaching high school English, every writing assignment came with the same mantra:  Write something only you can write. As an example we’d look at the speech delivered at the University of North Carolina in 1996 by Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, who told the story of how, as a schoolboy, he dutifully wrote an essay called “A Day at the Beach,” which featured a colorful toy bucket and the miniature spade he used to scoop sand into it. Only later did he confess the truth:

[My mother] desperately wanted to do something for us, so off she went to a hardware store and bought not the conventional seaside gear that we desired but a consignment of down-to-earth farm equipment which she could utilize when she went home: instead of bucket and spade, she brought us a plain tin milkcan and a couple of wooden spoons, durable items indeed, useful enough in their own way, but wooden spoons for God’s sakes, totally destructive of all glamour and all magic. I hope it will be obvious why I tell you this: I want to avoid preaching at you but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another. Calling a spade a spade may be a bit reductive but calling a wooden spoon a wooden spoon is the beginning of wisdom.

Only as an adult did Heaney understand the depth of his dishonesty in that essay. He had not simply invented a toy bucket, but because he had been a self-conscious child who had feared humiliation, he had concealed the very essence of a lovely, heartbreaking story about an impoverished mother who wanted to give her children a day at the shore but who couldn’t waste her scant income on toys. There, he realized, was his essay, and he had betrayed it.

If you believe that writers of fiction need not observe this level of honesty in their works of the imagination, then you are quite mistaken. Fiction can be dishonest in many ways. It can force characters into improbable, illogical behavior for the sake of a plot twist demanded by the author. (People have been arguing since 1885 whether Mark Twain is guilty of such an infraction during the final “Evasion” sequence of Huckleberry Finn.) It can sell out for glib sentimentality rather than follow its way to tragic inevitability. (Compare O. Henry to, say, Flannery O’Connor.) It can pose as fact or autobiography. (Remember James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces?). It can pander to an audience for the sake of a sale or a vote. (See any transcript of a political speech.) When we write honest fiction, we struggle to present characters who are true—true to human behavior, true to their own personal histories, true to what William Faulkner called “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.” When we write honest fiction, we must be willing to allow our characters to go where they want and to do as they must, even if we feel queasy at their decisions, even if we reveal ourselves to be ruthless. I still feel guilty over the fate of poor Penn Conrad, a character in a story I wrote ages ago, a character I liked a lot, but a character who ended up mortified and humiliated because that was how the story had to end.

Consider James Kestrel’s Five Decembers, the recent and greatly deserving winner of the Edgar Award for best novel of 2021. In this magisterial tale we readers accompany Joe McGrady, a detective attempting to solve a brutal double homicide, as he embarks on a harrowing adventure during World War II. Kestrel, the pseudonymous author, is far too young to have experienced that war, but every word in his novel rings true. Why? Partly because he did his homework with extensive research, but primarily because he allowed McGrady to be McGrady. It’s clear that Kestrel loves McGrady, a good, decent man trying to do right. But Kestrel puts this character through devastating experiences. The character feels the pain, and the reader feels the pain, and in order to render it so effectively, Kestrel had to feel the pain as well. I don’t know much about this writer, not even his real name.  But his novel reveals a creator with a profound sensibility, a writer of empathy who isn’t afraid to explore the dark places or to test his characters in fire.

Thomas Mann famously defined a writer as someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. And of course he’s so right. If you’re a writer, you care desperately about getting exactly the proper word into exactly the correct spot. You strive to cut and to polish and to clarify. But you also struggle to discover the true version of your story. You explore numerous dead ends before you find the right passage to your destination. For the sake of the story, for the sake of connection, you unlock your secret garden and invite readers to roam there. And if you sense that you really are onto something, if your characters have heartbeats and want to set out on a path that you already know is going to be disastrous for them, you gulp and sigh and then, in preparation for the journey, you stand up on the table and begin to unbutton your shirt.

Derek Haas’s first story for EQMM, “Snitches Get Stitches,” is coming up in the Black Mask department of our next issue (July/August), on sale June 14. Its central character is an antihero with whom readers will nevertheless sympathize. It’s the challenges of creating this type of character that the author discusses in this post. He’s created another such character, a hit man called Columbus (whom the New York Times has called “devastatingly cool”) for his series of novels, the most recent of which is The Way I Die. The California-based author is also a screenwriter who co-wrote the screenplays for 3:10 to Yuma, Wanted, and The Double, and he’s the creator of the TV shows Chicago Fire and FBI: International. —Janet Hutchings

I prefer liars, killers, outcasts, outliers, orphans, and rough souls.  I like characters who suffocate federal judges with saran wrap; who step on a mark’s neck until his bones crack; who use bare hands to choke the life out of their unrepentant fathers. I like protagonists who tell the reader again and again “do not trust me, do not like me, I am not to be admired.” I like protagonists who are the antagonists of their own life stories. 

I wish they wouldn’t be. I’m glad they are.

I’ve always been drawn to literary bad boys. I loved Crime and Punishment and Eye of the Needle and The Ax and Fight Club and more recently The Force and Billy Summers. I followed Clarice Starling but I cheered for Hannibal. Milton had me rooting for Lucifer. (That’s an amazing trick when you think about it, getting a reader to root for the devil.) I appreciate novelists who treat villains with the same reverence they do their heroes. 

I don’t think I’m alone. 

In crime fiction, so many of the protagonists—even the anti-heroes—are inherently good guys. They might be flawed—the private investigator with the drinking problem, the cop who is always mixing it up with his sergeant—but when it comes to right and wrong, these detectives and Feds and agents and spies make the moral choice, solve the case, put the murderer away, catch the villain. They get the witty dialogue, they find the obscure clue, they make the logic leap that only a brilliant mind can make.

Yet, there are brilliant minds on the other side of the tracks, too. These hustlers play street chess, not the kind with pawns and rooks, but the kind with pimps and dealers and marks and traitors. They have to plan moves ahead, shuffle pieces around the board, give ground to gain loyalty. Their stakes are different, too:  not “Can we crack the case and put the perp away?” but “Can I stay out of jail and… alive?”

The stakes are different for the writer, too.  How can I get a reader to pull for a villain?  How can I flip her expectation, so she is rooting for the criminal to outsmart the detective?  So he is hoping the murderer gets away with it? 

There are a few weapons an author employs. One is to write the story in first person. If the reader is inside the head of the narrator, seeing the plot develop from his point of view, then the reader feels an automatic kinship with the protagonist. His problems are my problems. His anxieties are my anxieties.   The reader is walking the mile in his shoes, and tries to anticipate the dangers and obstacles lurking in every dark alley, every brush with the authorities. There’s a great line in season one of the show Narcos: “The bad guys need to get lucky every time. The good guys just need to get lucky once.”  Villain protagonists have to walk a higher tightrope, and first person can be quite effective at garnering sympathy toward a character quickly.  In a way, we need the protagonist to survive so we can find out how the story ends.  The plot is an existential threat to the story itself.

If the author chooses to go the third person route, it does not constrain him from getting inside the protagonist’s head.  Omniscient narrators know the thoughts of all the key players. The writer can drop a couple of lines of dialogue from an objective point of view, an exchange between a detective and a con man, say, but then push right inside the con man’s head and color our perception of the interview.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the con man might protest aloud. In the next line on the page, the author might write:  This bastard has me up against the wall.  I’m a dead man if I don’t give him something to chew on.  But what . . . what?  Immediately, the reader is right there with Jimmy, trying to figure out how to wriggle off the hook. We’re sweating under the fluorescents, just like Jimmy. He may be a bad guy, but he’s our bad guy. 

Of course, all humans are shades of gray, darkness and light battling for prominence.  Great protagonists —whichever side of the law they occupy—are the same. A thoughtful author will chart that struggle, so we’re pulling for the bad guy because we understand the depth of his conflict. Stephen King does this so well, in so many books. His most recent, Billy Summers, focuses on a hit man who is set up to take a fall.  And what does King do, halfway through the book? (Spoiler alert)  He gives the hit man an abused young lady to protect, who drops out of the sky (or is literally pushed out of a van) in the middle of Billy’s escape. It would be so much easier for Billy to walk away, duck out of there, get on with his exit strategy, but the reader is pulled to his side because Billy sacrifices his own safety for the protection and rehabilitation of Alice.  Putting others above oneself? What’s more heroic than that?

Another author trick is to reveal the principal’s past at a strategic point in the story. The protagonist may be a villain, but how’d he get there?  Did he overcome an abusive childhood, did someone hurt him, did he have his heart stepped on, or did someone set him on his fallen path when he was young and vulnerable?  The backstory is key to lining up the reader behind the hero.  We may not appreciate that he commits crimes in the present, but we understand them.  We expect them.  And we root for him to overcome the weights holding him down. Television series give writers an even greater sprawling canvas to build up sympathy. Over multiple seasons, we watched Breaking Bad’s Walter White transform from mild-mannered chemistry teacher into full Heisenberg, a ruthless meth-producing kingpin. By the time he was committing heartless murders to control his empire, we were pulling for him because we had witnessed his struggle to take care of himself and his family over hours and hours and years and years on our screens. The writers built up our affection for him from the pilot, and cast him as an underdog, so that by the time he was sitting on the throne, we were all on his side.  It’s a lot harder to do in a few pages of a short story, but I do love a challenge.

So here’s to the Tony Sopranos, and the Becky Sharps, and the Richard IIIs, and the Professor Moriartys, and the Anton Chigurhs and the Rodion Romanovichs. They committed unsympathetic acts but we rooted for them all the same.  And here’s to you, reader, if you ever attempt to put a villain at the center of your story.  You have to live longer inside that dark head than anyone, thinking about things sane people shouldn’t think about. 

Still, do it for your fiction, for your readers.  Just don’t get caught.

Sylvia Maultash Warsh is the author of the Dr. Rebecca Temple novels, one of which, Find Me Again, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best paperback original in 2004. The other two books in the series were nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award (To Die in Spring) and a ReLit Award (Season of Iron). Her many short stories have been short-listed for both Arthur Ellis and Derringer awards.  Despite all this success in our genre, the gifted Canadian author wasn’t always sure she wanted to write mystery—as you’ll see in this post.  —Janet Hutchings

My serendipitous discovery of William Goldman’s novel, Marathon Man is a marker in my writing life. Before and after. In the Before stage, I spent too long shopping around a literary novel no publisher wanted to touch. I finally gave up and was licking my wounds, trying to distract myself by reading mystery novels. They were charming amusement and I loved them. Then I stumbled upon Marathon Man and realized that an entertaining book could have gravitas. It made me rethink what I wanted to write. Though many years have passed, I still remember thinking while I read it: if I could write a novel half as good as this one, I’d be happy.

I am a finicky reader. I don’t say this with pride but embarrassment. Some books considered essential reading for mystery writers gather dust in my library. I want to read them but have trouble getting past page three. It’s humbling to admit but I have precious little control over my mind. It thinks what it thinks. And if it thinks Nancy Drew is a bore, well, my eyes glaze over on page three. When I find a book I like, it’s a revelation. I was never a fan of thrillers, but Marathon Man pulled me into its life and wouldn’t let go. The story throws the reader around as much as any in the genre, but it also takes the time to develop character, devoting more pages than you’d expect to delineate the leading roles—Babe, Scylla, and Doc—though it’s painless because Goldman knows how to keep our attention. Sometimes you wonder if you’re actually in a thriller, then all hell breaks loose. Goldman doesn’t follow rules. He aims to entertain, but also takes great pains to make us understand.

The villain in the book, Szell, is a Nazi dentist who worked on concentration camp prisoners, but the emotional depth of the story arises out of family relationships. Babe and his older brother, Doc, are tied together by their tragic past: their father, a brilliant historian committed suicide after being accused of spying during the McCarthy era. (I only recently learned that Goldman’s own father had committed suicide.) Though the brothers live in different cities, they are close; Babe was ten when he discovered his father’s body. Afterwards Doc, ten years older, becomes a surrogate parent.

One of Goldman’s many talents lies in manipulating the reader, holding back crucial information until he deigns to reveal it. Deliberate obfuscation. But isn’t that why we read mysteries—to have the writer pull the wool over our eyes and then be thrilled when the blind is lifted bit by bit until the secret is revealed? Halfway through Marathon Man Goldman hits the reader with a gut punch. The construction of the book with its different points of view hides a key piece of information in plain sight. We have Babe, a brilliant grad student in history, who is training in New York’s Central Park to run a marathon; Scylla, a tough secret agent whose main job seems to be killing people; and Doc, traveling the world in the oil business. And there’s a short chapter about a mysterious unnamed man traveling in disguise from the Paraguayan jungle to Manhattan.

Doc comes to New York at Babe’s invitation to meet the woman he’s fallen in love with. In a swanky restaurant, Doc throws hostile questions at Elsa and implies that she has ulterior motives for her affair with Babe. Soon after the unnamed man arrives in New York, Scylla meets him in Central Park. From their conversation we know they have a working relationship. So we are astounded when the man pulls out a long switchblade knife attached to his arm and stabs Scylla in the stomach, leaving him for dead. It’s a brutal scene that was edited down in the film version because the preview audience found it too violent. Scylla manages to pull himself up and stumble away, holding his stomach together with his arms.

(Spoiler) The shock comes when Doc shows up at Babe’s door, mortally wounded. Only then, in an emotional moment of clarity, do we connect Scylla with Doc. Not wanting to die alone, he drags himself to Babe’s apartment to die in his brother’s arms. I’ve never forgotten that instant of realization, like scales dropping from the eyes. Goldman was a magician.

I envied him, playing mind games with the reader. I wanted some of that fun for myself. In the spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I lifted a few items from Marathon Man for my first mystery novel, To Die in Spring.

Though it is not original to Goldman, he uses chapters from different points of view to advantage. In the end, the sum of the parts creates a rich mine of character and setting. He performs sleight of hand by presenting three points of view which are, in fact, only two people. But I’m not Goldman (who is?) and the plot points in my book are less of a twist (by a wily writer) and more a result of events held back from the reader (by a writer trying to be wily). I admired his skill with structure and decided to include three points of view in my novel: Dr. Rebecca Temple, a young widow who practices medicine in Toronto in 1979; her patient, Goldie, who is paranoid after being tortured in Argentina in the 1970s by the junta; and Nesha, who survived the Holocaust as a child while most of his family were murdered.

Marathon Man is a chase, while To Die in Spring is a puzzle. The Scylla chapters move frenetically and once he’s killed, the pace ramps up for Babe. The Nazi can’t understand that Scylla, the double agent, struggled so hard to reach Babe in his final moments not to tell him the secret about the diamonds stored in the safe deposit box, but to die in his brother’s arms. The dentist tortures Babe by drilling into a nerve (tapping into our worst nightmares about dentists) but he’s a marathoner and manages to escape. I don’t enjoy reading or writing torture scenes, but Goldie’s past in Argentina required it. It was a similarity between our books that I hadn’t planned.

Putting together a puzzle is much harder than it looks. The pieces must all appear at odds but then must fall into place. It took me years of writing and rewriting to build the puzzle of the novel into a satisfying whole. It was an evolution from my “literary” past. What sets the genre story apart from the literary one is plot and structure. A literary book is forgiven for meandering if the writing is stellar. A mystery novel, not so much. Some people feel that genre stories are formulaic, but there is so much room to maneuver that they can be taken almost anywhere. The lines are often blurred and stories by literary authors like Margaret Atwood get awards for crime writing.

In homage to Goldman’s running theme, I had Rebecca take up speed walking. She is in mourning after the death of her young husband from complications of diabetes. As a doctor, she should have recognized the signs earlier and carries around guilt. To feel better, she buys new running shoes and speed walks through Kensington Market, a landmark as iconic to Toronto as Central Park is to New York. The settings in both books are focus points for much of the action. While both novels have Nazi villains, the dentist in Marathon Man is clearly defined as evil, while the officer in To Die in Spring, once identified, is more nuanced, almost bureaucratic, thereby more frightening.

In a weird coincidence, I wrote the Nesha character, with his soulful eyes and dark curly hair, with Dustin Hoffman in mind. The same actor who played Babe in the Marathon Man movie. After it was published, To Die in Spring was nominated for a Crime Writers of Canada award for best first novel. If not for Marathon Man, the book might never have been written.

Author of the acclaimed thriller novels 48 Hours to Kill and Heavy Metal, Andrew Bourelle has also coauthored with James Patterson the New York Times best sellers Texas Ranger and Texas Outlaw. His short stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines and in various anthologies. Two have been included in volumes of The Best American Mystery Stories. A professor at the University of New Mexico, Andrew makes his EQMM debut with the story “Blue Sky,” in our current issue (May/June 2022). In this post he discusses revenge as a motive for behavior pivotal to crime fiction. It’s a topic rarely addressed on this blog, and I think you’ll find his observations interesting!  —Janet Hutchings

I love revenge stories.

Revenge can be a powerful motivator for either the protagonist or antagonist. Whether you’ve read the thousand-page epic or not, you’re likely aware of Alexandre Dumas’s famous The Count of Monte Cristo, where the wrongly imprisoned Edmond Dantés exacts long-awaited revenge on the men who betrayed him. Dumas also uses revenge to drive the plot in Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, only this time it’s the antagonist who seeks it.

How do you create a single villain that’s a worthy adversary for not one, not two, not three, but four of the greatest soldiers/swordsmen/adventurers in all of literature? You make the adversary motivated by revenge. The cold-blooded Mordaunt seems almost superhuman as he seeks to avenge his mother, Milady de Winter, executed in the first book as a result of her quarrels with the musketeers (in which, come to think of it, she too was motivated by revenge).

Recall that as much as Frankenstein is a science fiction novel about the dangers of scientific hubris, the plot itself is driven by revenge. First, the creature seeks revenge against Victor and is so motivated by it that he’s willing to kill innocent people to make his creator suffer. Then it’s Victor who seeks revenge, chasing the creature across the frozen ice fields of the arctic. At the end of the novel, neither character wants to go on living except to punish the other. As readers, I think we can empathize—at least at times—with both of them. Which brings me to what I love most about revenge stories: the moral ambiguity revenge stories must confront.

As readers, I think we can relate to the desire for revenge. However, the question looms: can or should characters go through with it? Even though someone else has committed evil, is the answer for the protagonist to commit evil in response? If revenge was easy, Hamlet would be a much shorter play. Instead, the prince of Denmark vacillates for pages and pages (or hours and hours on stage), debating how and why and if he should avenge his father, only for his journey to end with a long trail of bodies in his wake, including his own. Often, it seems, no one wins in a revenge tale.

We want the bad guys punished, yet we don’t want our heroes to lose their souls in doing so. But a good revenge story recognizes that it’s pretty much impossible to do the first without the second.

Plenty of mystery novels, new and old, grapple with elements of revenge in a variety of interesting and thought-provoking ways, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay to S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears. The list goes on. However, my favorite revenge tale isn’t a novel but a short story: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” Pretty much everyone I know read this in a high school English class, but if you haven’t read it since, it’s worth revisiting.

You probably know the plot: In an unnamed Italian city, during Carnival, a nobleman named Montresor invites his enemy, Fortunato, into the catacombs beneath his home to sample the wine he’s recently purchased. Once there, however, we discover there is no cask of amontillado. It’s a trap. Montresor chains a drunk and confused Fortunato to a wall and proceeds to use brick and mortar to cover him up, essentially burying him alive.

The story evokes a claustrophobic dread, but what I love most about it are the indeterminacies that leave the reader wondering throughout. We don’t know what Fortunato has done to Montresor. The narrator claims he’s suffered a thousand injuries, but he doesn’t specify what they are. And Fortunato doesn’t seem to know. Or does he? After screaming for help, and then trying to laugh off what is happening as a good joke, he goes quiet. Is the silence indicative of his realization of what is actually happening—and why? We readers are left wondering just how crazy Montresor is. Or is he even remotely justified?

I love also what the point of view does for the story. This isn’t a third-person story where we’re getting the narrative through the lens of an objective, omniscient narrator. Montresor himself tells the story in first-person, narrating it with a double-I perspective a full fifty years after the events of the story. In short: This story is told by a man who got away with murder. And as much as he seems to come across as feeling no guilt for what he’s done, there are hints that the man telling the story did experience—or still does—at least some moral dilemma for his actions. At the end of the story, troubled by Fortunato’s silence, Montresor says his “heart grew sick”—then he quickly qualifies that this was because of the dampness of the catacombs. What a strange, eerie confession he is making. He readily admits to mocking Fortunato’s screams—of screaming back at him with even more zeal—yet his only hint of regret is excused as something else. The narration is made even more frightening by the fact that this is someone who’s had plenty of time to wrestle with the moral implications of what he’s done and this is the way he’s decided to tell his story? If the story was told in third-person, or in first but without the fifty-year remove, I don’t think it would be nearly as creepy.

I find in my writing that I’m often grappling with questions associated with revenge. In my latest book, 48 Hours to Kill, a prison inmate has a forty-eight-hour furlough to find who is responsible for his sister’s murder. What he’s going to do with the person or persons if he finds them (bring them to justice or exact his own personal revenge) looms in the protagonist’s mind during the hunt. Similarly, my short story “Cowboy Justice,” found in The Best American Mystery Stories 2015, is about two brothers who take the law into their own hands to avenge their other brother against drug dealers. They find that revenge comes with a high, horrifying cost. In my latest story, “Blue Sky,” out in the new May/June issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, revenge isn’t a major part of the narrative, but there’s definitely an “I’ll get you for this” moment instrumental to the plot.

I love revenge stories not because—or not just because—of what the revenge can do for the plot, but because of what the revenge says about characters. The lengths a character will go for revenge—and how they feel about what they’ve done or are doing—says a lot about them. For good or bad. Case in point: Montresor. It’s one thing to bury someone alive for insults, real or imagined. It’s another altogether to live with the crime for fifty years and still tell yourself you’re okay with it.

Minnesotan Tyler Fiecke makes his fiction debut in EQMM’s current issue (May/June 2022) with the story “Runner.” A graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, he makes his living as a chef and has been part of the culinary scene around the Twin Cities for over ten years. Although his debut story is not centered around that scene, the characters in his stories often derive from people he’s met in his career, for he enjoys exploring character through people’s eating preferences—as he explains in this post. —Janet Hutchings

When I read Anthony Bourdain’s first crime-fiction novel, Bone in the Throat, my mind was opened to the fantastic world of “normal” people.

The story was about an unremarkable, heroin-junkie chef from New York City who got himself caught up in the last dying vestiges of la cosa nostra, an FBI investigation, and a murder. It was the first fictional account I’d come across where the characters were regular working-class restaurant people. That was the first time I had married in my mind the characters of fiction and the real world.

Before then, aside from mass market paperbacks inherited from friends and uncles, my reading was composed of the classics, the ones we all read in high school. I’d met Gatsby, Holden, Piggy, Lizzie Bennett, and Captain Ahab. I had visited the dystopian world of Orwell and the seaside lilt of Hemingway. Bourdain dropped me into a broken-down kitchen with bad lighting and no ventilation, tucked beneath a New York city street. There, nothing ever happened . . . until it did.

When I opened Bourdain’s slim paperback I met “The Chef.” He wasn’t handsome, rich, or on television. He had a crumbling lower-left molar, a bad back, and no health insurance. His living situation was squalid and tenuous at best, just barely avoiding homelessness by the skin of his next payroll check. He had a not-so-secret heroin habit and I followed him to the Lower East Side to score dope in an open drug market with an ingenious system of “customer” screening. He lived with the conscious awareness that he was not especially talented or TV worthy. He was not, and would never be, Paul Bocuse. He was a workaday line cook who had just enough capacity for leadership to be put in charge of a half-dozen burnouts and a pile of broken equipment. The chef was trusted by an owner to bang out just-decent-enough food for a less than discerning public, and to not poison anybody with bad shellfish while at it.

What I loved about Bourdain’s book was that he saw everybody. So many small characters received fair consideration to enter the stage. I met a frustrated server who wanted to be an actress. She wasn’t sultry or sexualized. She was a person, working a job, living her life. There was an immigrant bus boy with no motivation other than to work three jobs and send money South. Neither of them got involved in the main plot. They all made the story lovable. Any one of those persons could have been overlooked. Bourdain saw them.

Bourdain also gave me, a marginally-talented chef myself, the permission to pursue my dream of writing fiction. Growing up in a small Minnesota town, I never believed writers were people like me. Writers were intellectuals with large glasses, tweed blazers, and fluffy hair. They were from big cities and had big lives. I didn’t see people like me represented in stories or by storytellers. It took Bourdain and his little crime novel to give me the belief that I could write and that I had interesting stories to tell. I began to see a novel or short story everywhere I looked.  

I saw the quasi-legal immigrant standing next to me, day by day, dunking fries in hot grease for wages most would never consider. I saw a story, a heroic one at that. What had this person gone through to get to America to do a job that nobody else wanted? Why was he so impossibly cheerful and hardworking? How does he never get sick? 

Often, as crime and mystery writers, we tend to think in terms of really good guys and really bad guys. We line up teams of gumshoe cops against well organized, professional robbers. But most criminals and many of life’s mysteries occur more casually. They can’t all be brilliant villains with a panache for showmanship and rhyming in their magazine-clip-out ransom letters. Look in the police reports of your local newspaper. Follow a local Sheriff’s Department on Facebook. You will see that most criminals are far from evil geniuses. They are drunks, addicts, and perpetual screwups with more bad luck than good. The average real-life hero is just a person who goes to work, pays some bills on time, eats meatloaf in front of the TV, and forgoes a life of crime.

As a chef, Bourdain had a very specific style of handling what and how his characters ate and drank. It was realistic and humanizing and unforgettable. In one memorable scene, pecan pancakes were smothered in butter and syrup, cut up into even bite-sized pieces so that Tommy could pop them into his mouth left handed while he handled his newspaper with the right. It was pleasantly quaint and quiet, a breakfast anyone has had a dozen times. Then, an FBI investigator walks in to harass Tommy about what his wannabe-gangster uncle may have done in the restaurant after hours. The agent then exits the diner, leaving Tommy, and his breakfast, completely ruined. It was deliciously unforgettable.

Just like shoes and haircuts, you can tell a lot about a person by what they eat and drink. Better yet, you can tell a lot about a person by how they like their eggs.

Imagine a soft-scrambled with goat cheese type of guy who watches Gordon Ramsay videos on Youtube? That guy might be the type to iron his underwear and obsess over germs on door handles. Maybe he always wanted to be a chef and became enraged with a local restaurant owner after they refused to hire him due to lack of professional experience.

How about a grown woman who makes herself an egg-in-the-hole? I would imagine that someone who goes through the hassle of making egg-in-the-hole as a grownup must have deep emotional connections to the dish. Maybe she was close to her grandmother, who died early, lacking proper medical care, due to prescription drug costs. The granddaughter now stands over her non-stick pan, buttering a slice of brioche as she contemplates bludgeoning the local prescription-drug sales rep.

Consider the thirtysome-year-old single male who makes an omelet stuffed with American cheese then smothers it in hot sauce. I’d be willing to bet that that guy knows at least one local weed dealer. What if the two of them hatch a hair-brained scheme to knock over a card game and buy some herb in bulk? What if the two of them get away with it and nobody ever finds out? I bet that American-cheese-omelet guy clocks in at a convenience store the next day and takes his brush with criminality with him to the grave. But, before going home, he buys himself a dozen eggs, so he can have an omelet for breakfast.

It’s the little details that make us love the characters who populate our stories. Those are the things that I want to know. Those are the details we never forget. Little details are what made Bone in the Throat a special book.

So, how do you like your eggs?

Daniel C. Bartlett’s short fiction has appeared in a number of literary and crime-fiction publications, including Iron Horse Literary Review, Chiron Review, and Mystery Magazine. He’s also a novelist whose first book has been signed with a literary agent while a second nears completion. He’s comfortable writing both short and long fiction, but in this post he discusses the ground in between: the long story or “novella.” If you want a good example of the form, you need look no further than his story “A Complicated History,” in EQMM’s current issue (May/June 2022). It’s his EQMM debut! —Janet Hutchings

Flash fiction, short story, long story, novelette, novella, novel. Personally, I love all lengths and types of mystery fiction. What intrigues me is that each distinct form has its unique allure. So I wanted to reflect a bit on what I find appealing about those works that are longer than a typical short story but shorter than a typical novel.

I’m thinking of those stories that might be called long stories, novellas, or novelettes. Depending on who you ask, there might be some specifications that distinguish these. But those distinctions aren’t always clear and aren’t even consistent. What’s the minimum word count for a long story? What’s the maximum? Is a novella the same as a novelette? Is a novelette just a short novel? The answers to these questions vary. And honestly, that’s fine. I’m not one for strict rules.

So for my purposes here, I’ll refer to the long story, the novella, and novelette interchangeably. What interests me is the novella or long story’s unique position as not exactly a short story but not quite a novel. Existing obscurely in the range between the short story and the novel, the novella utilizes techniques of both long and short fiction. What I love about the novella or long story, is that it’s a hybrid form that can offer readers and writers the appealing attributes of two distinct forms of fiction.

The novella is at once extended like a novel and compact like a short story.

Fans of mystery stories are probably familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s writing as well as his critical ideas. Poe was a proponent of the short story form, and he established what he considered some rules of the form. Poe cites unity of effect, brevity, and writing toward a denouement as the principle guiding factors in the short story form. Of course, Poe also described conventions he identified as essential to detective fiction as well, but my focus here is on unique aspects of short, intermediate, and long fiction.

Although Poe’s “rules” for writing might seem a little narrow to contemporary writers and readers, his guidelines do point to some generally helpful insights. Poe argues that the power of the short story lies in its focus upon a single character, event, emotion, or the series of emotions brought about by a single event. The short story’s narrative method, according to Poe’s requirement for unity, brevity, and singularity of effect, is intensively focused selection of details. I tend to think there’s some accuracy to Poe’s idea, although again, I’m not advocating for particular rules. There are always wonderful exceptions, but generally speaking a short story likely doesn’t hold together all that well if it ventures too far beyond its primary focus.

For Poe, and probably also for devotees of the short story form, the short story’s concision and singular focus give the form an artistic advantage over longer forms, such as the novel. Readers can read a complete short story in one sitting, but readers more likely must come and go from the novel, breaking the unified impression. For Poe, that meant that novels could not benefit from what he referred to as totality. Novels generally extend beyond the focused selection of short stories. Whereas the short story generally operates by limiting, selecting, and focusing, we can generalize that the novel functions by developing and expanding the narrative elements—more developed characters, sub-plots, scenes, backstory, and so on.

The long story/novella, however, has a unique ability to maintain focused, singular intensity while more fully developing and expanding the story. So the long story/novella’s length enables writers to focus primarily upon a single narrative component (much like the short story) but to also expand the development of the narrative so that it achieves the wider implications and overall wholeness of the novel.

In general, the novella can elaborate beyond the scope of the short story. And, in general, the novella can attain a more unified effect than the novel. One of the primary flexibilities of the novella, as opposed to the short story, is that there is space to develop multiple points of view, multiple characters, and multiple plot-lines, and to develop them in the extended manner often found in the novel. However, the novella remains limited as to the number of points of view, characters, and plot-lines, and the depth of complexity of each perspective established. Whereas the novel can develop multiple points of view in depth, the novella risks losing its unity if it takes too many points of view too far.

Certainly, a well-crafted novel requires its own degree of selectivity and focus. The novella, however, demands a higher degree of selectivity, unity, and focus. In fact, the form generally relies upon such techniques for its narrative method. Likewise, it would be an overgeneralization to suggest that a short story cannot expand to reveal a full experience, a full life, or a full social setting. Yet the novella is capable of doing so to a greater extent.

The typical novella must expand and develop beyond the typical short story and must compress and select more than the typical novel. At once too short (to be a novel) and too long (to be a short story), novellas give readers something amazing: the intensity of the short story AND the expansion of the novel. The novella provides the ideal form for readers and writers who want an intense, concentrated emotional effect but also want a more fully developed story that creates a larger sense of experience.

In order to avoid playing favorites here, and because I love such a range of mystery types, I’ll leave it to readers to think of examples that have grabbed their attention. I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate the unique power and effect of those intermediate-length stories. If you’ll forgive the use of a cliché, novellas/long stories are able to give readers the best of both worlds.

The author of many popular nonfiction books, Sharyn Kolberg is a relative newcomer to fiction writing. She makes her EQMM debut in the issue that goes on sale next week (May/June 2022), with the story “The Thesaurus of Love and Death”; her previous stories appeared in Mystery Weekly Magazine, Literal Latte, Mensa Bulletin Fiction Issue, and Akashic Books’ Mondays Are Murder. She tells EQMM that she’s just completed her first novel, One Bam, Two Crak, and is at work on a second entitled Shoots and Ladders. She’s off to a great start, but as you’ll read in this post, like many fiction writers, newcomers or veterans, she often has to deal with the daunting fear of the blank page.   —Janet Hutchings

I am not a particularly anxious person. There are, of course, some first-world situations that I find super scary. Killing spiders. Driving on major highways. Writing mysteries.

These are things I can almost always avoid. If I see a spider, I can run away. I’m usually able to find a backroads route to travel instead of a high-speed four-lane roadway. And nobody puts a gun to my head to write mysteries. I do it of my own free will, even though just the thought of it sends shivers up and down my spine.

That’s just me. I’m sure there are people who don’t feel that way at all, who revel in the creative process, who view the whole activity in a positive light. Don’t get me wrong—I love the challenge, the freedom, the self-expression of writing. It just scares me to death. Every part of it. Especially . . .

The Beginning:
I have an idea. It’s just a little one, nibbling at a corner of my mind. Maybe it’s a name or a setting or even a half-baked plot. The idea turns into a thought: This could be story. This could be torture is more like it. Because no matter how many stories I’ve previously written, my second thought is always: I don’t know where to start. I’m not sure if everyone has this thought, but I am pretty confident I’m not the only one who experiences, at least to some degree, this kind of insecurity when starting a story.

It’s nerve-racking, staring at a blank page, trying everything I can think of as a way to begin. That’s how procrastination is born and grows into the frightening monster that lives inside me. It’s funny that when I am about to start a new story, I suddenly have a plethora of urgent errands I have to run. Or I forget to put my earrings in and I can’t possibly write with naked ears. I’m hungry; I’ll start after lunch. But wait, I write better in the a.m., so maybe I’ll just begin tomorrow morning. Or maybe I won’t start at all.

I’ve learned that I work best under pressure. There’s nothing like a deadline to get your creative juices flowing, whether it’s to comply with a submissions window or to meet a self-imposed goal. It’s one of the reasons I belong to a writer’s group—at some point I have to put on my big girl panties and submit whatever I’ve got. Which means I have to work backwards, calendar-wise, and figure out exactly when I’ll have to start in order to complete the aforementioned “assignment.”

So exactly how do I begin? Decisions have to be made. I could start with an action (Suzie Q picked up the gun. It went off.)? I could start with an image that helps the reader slip into the appropriate mood, time, or space (Suzie Q’s room made me think that a train loaded with yesterday’s pizza had exploded in it.)? Or I could start with a question that pulls the reader in immediately because they have to know the answer (How could Susie Q’s murderer gain entrance when the door was locked?).

The best part of beginning is that it’s never written in stone. Most writers I know frequently change the beginning—especially the opening sequence—of a story several times before they deem it publisher-worthy. And that’s a good thing, because those changes often lead me in a different—and usually better—direction than I initially imagined. You can research all you want, you can outline to your heart’s content, but eventually it all comes back to a variation of the old quote from Lao Tzu: A journey of a dozen pages begins with a single word. Even though the scariest part is actually . . .

The Middle:
You’ve gotten the basics out of the way. You’ve set the stage (Gritty city streets? Old country estate? Suburban sprawl?). You’ve introduced your main character (Aging Private Eye? Middle-aged amateur sleuth? Millennial innocent bystander suddenly drawn into dangerous situation?). Your first dead body has been discovered (Hidden amongst the mayor’s forsythias? Thrown into the highrise’s garbage chute? Face down in the back alley behind the protagonist’s small-town pickle shop?).  

It is time for the plot to be thickened.

Ah, the plot. In order for you to build one of those, you have to know what’s going to happen in your narrative. Right? Maybe, maybe not. Most of the time, I have no idea where my story is going. I belong to the tribe of no-outliners. I know there are people who lay out the plot step by step and then follow along as they write. I wish I could do that. If I had a roadmap of my story all laid out before I got bogged down in the “what’s next” swamp of ideas, it would probably reduce the fear factor by a lot. And outlining does work for many writers. Just not for me.

I follow my instincts from one word to another, from one plot point to the next. This sometimes propels me to go north when I thought I was heading south, east when I swore I needed to go west. Often, this “seat of pants” kind of writing leads me to a totally unexpected situation; a character I’ve never met before jumps onto my page; or someone I thought was a charming hero turns into a crafty villain.

While I have learned that for me, writing means being as flexible as an Olympic gymnast, I’ve also learned to keep this old saw in mind: everything happens for a reason. In a mystery—especially a short one—reckless zigging and zagging is for first drafts, and must be followed by careful editing to make sure there are clear signposts readers can follow to a satisfying conclusion.

Most importantly, I have learned that I have to have faith in myself and my gut to keep going even when I’m lost in the weeds. I have to trust that eventually I’ll get to . . .

The End:
To me, the ending is really the scariest part of writing a mystery. There’s so much anxiety involved. How can I satisfy myself as well as each and every reader? I probably can’t; all I can do is write. And edit. And rewrite. And finally realize that I have indeed finished this book or this story and it’s time to give it wings and send it out into the cosmos.

There’s nothing worse than enjoying a short story or novel and coming to a weak and disappointing ending. All those crooked pathways have to merge; red herrings, false clues, and distractions must be revealed. Lingering questions can linger no more. Even a surprise twist at the end has to come from somewhere, lest you leave your readers feeling frustrated or cheated (unless, of course, you want to leave some things to be resolved in the next installment).

Getting to the end can also be the most fun. You’ve been traveling through a universe only you could have created, and although there have been detours, a couple of traffic jams, and maybe even a train wreck or two along the way, the journey has been well worth it. There are many avenues to solving a mystery, even if some of them have sent you hiding in the closet.

I was channel surfing the other day and came upon a Hallmark movie where somebody’s grandmother was dying. Okay, so I was actually watching the movie. On her deathbed, Grandma turned to the used-to-be child star of the film, who was facing the usual anxious-to-fall-in-love-but-scared-of-heartbreak dilemma and said, and I paraphrase, “All you have to do is face up to the scary and the rest is easy.” Sometimes the truth comes from the strangest places. Hallmark or not, I think Grandma had the right idea.

Rebecca K. Jones made her fiction debut in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in September/October 2009 with a story cowritten with her father, frequent EQMM contributor and translator Josh Pachter.  This month, her first novel, Steadying the Ark, was published. In the intervening years, she sold several more short stories and worked as a sex-crimes prosecutor in Arizona. In this post she answers a question most fiction writers get asked at some point—How much of your work is based on real incidents and real people? The question, as she illustrates, often has special significance for those employed by the government or in possession of confidential information.  —Janet Hutchings

The most common question I get about my writing is “How much of it is real?”  I imagine this is true for most writers who write fiction set within the world of their day job—from veterinarians to cops—and since I almost always write about a youngish female prosecutor in Arizona and I am a youngish female prosecutor in Arizona, I understand the impulse to ask.  My answer, much to people’s surprise, is “None of it . . . almost.”

I was raised by parents who were voracious readers in homes that were filled with books, and both of them inspired in me an early love of good stories. My dad is also a writer whose name will be familiar to readers of EQMM: Josh Pachter. His stories and translations have been appearing in EQMM, AHMM, and many other magazines and anthologies since the 1960s, and I was aware even as a child that my father and many of his friends were published authors. As a result, becoming a published author myself never seemed that out of reach. My first short story, “History on the Bedroom Wall,” was co-written with my dad and appeared in EQMM in 2009.  That story was set at Middlebury College, where I did my undergraduate work, but the people populating my version of Middlebury, and the story itself, were entirely fictional.

Since that first story, I’ve written several more and done two French to English translations of stories by Thomas Narcejac, all of which have appeared in various magazines and anthologies.  The short stories, and my debut novel, have all featured Mackenzie Wilson, a gay prosecutor in Arizona who rises through the ranks at the Tucson District Attorney’s Office and has adventures in all of her assignments. 

Many people enroll in law school not knowing what kind of law they want to practice, but I knew before my first day of classes that my goal was to be a sex-crimes prosecutor. In fact, I knew at sixteen that that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I joined the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office in 2012, my dream was to make it to the sex-crimes unit, an elite group of senior prosecutors, in five years. But at that time the office was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, and I wound up in sex crimes only fourteen months after beginning my career as a prosecutor.

In 2015, I’d already written the first short story featuring Mack Wilson (although it didn’t find a home for several years), and I had really enjoyed writing about her.  Mack’s life as a prosecutor is almost entirely dissimilar to my own, but who wants to read a book about someone who sits behind a desk all day and goes home at five?  So it was with Mack in mind that I set out to participate in National Novel Writing Month, and I decided to write about what I knew, just a more interesting version.

I wanted to write a courtroom drama, a thriller in the style of the authors I most often read: Marcia Clark, Linda Fairstein, John Lescroart, and Michael Connelly. I was focused on two things: writing a compelling story in which my protagonist would face realistic challenges—both professional and personal—and writing fiction. 

It was the fiction part that was the challenge. My workload at the time averaged around seventy-five cases on any given day, and I was handling somewhere around two hundred separate cases a year. By the time I began my NaNoWriMo project, I had accumulated approximately six hundred real-life fact patterns just from my own cases—not to mention the hundreds of my colleagues’ cases we’d discussed and the many cases I’d heard about during my training—and to avoid any potential ethical issues I had to avoid borrowing from any of them.  Although it is theoretically possible to fictionalize real cases without crossing ethical lines, I’ve never wanted to even come close to a gray area.  Although there is an advantage to fictionalizing real cases, that I don’t have to use time inventing a plot, there is also the possibility of a serious disadvantage—I could get in trouble with my employer or the bar association. The worst-case scenario is that a defendant I prosecuted could conceivably have grounds for an appeal or a post-conviction relief action.  Weighing all those factors, it has never seemed worth it to me to take the risk.  I would think that this is a concern for any author who has a day job where they’re dealing with confidential (or even just personal) information, and it should be especially true for government employees who work as arbiters of justice.

When an attorney handles a large number of cases with similar subject matter, patterns emerge. This was true for me during my years in sex crimes (and, later, in four years of handling drug-trafficking cases), and I know from colleagues that it’s true in a wide variety of other kinds of cases, too.  My familiarity with these patterns allowed me to paint, in very broad strokes, the outlines of two main cases for Mack Wilson to face: a complex child-molest case involving multiple victims and a straightforward voyeurism trial. There were also some additional elements I wanted to explore in the book—arcane LDS theology, common defense strategies in cases that seem heavily weighted in the state’s favor, and what happens when politics get in the way of a dedicated line prosecutor in her pursuit of justice. 

In my first drafts, regardless of the length of the piece, I always try just to tell the story, and I don’t worry too much about elements of real cases sneaking in. Mack has never retried any of the actual cases I’ve handled, and I always let my invented plots dictate the specifics of the situations she faces. My knowledge of the system informs my first drafts much more than the facts of any of my real-world cases. I write stories that are accurate in terms of the way a case proceeds through the system and in how prosecutors cope with the darkness they face every day. 

As I revise those first drafts, though, I constantly test elements of Mack’s cases. Where did this idea come from? Did I have a case that included this fact? Did I hear about a case where something similar to this really happened? 

Part of my revision process for the book involved having friends I’d made in the sex-crimes unit read drafts. Their input made the book stronger in many ways, but my primary question was always Do you recognize any of this? Revision was a lengthy process, but by the end I was satisfied that no elements of Mack’s cases were taken from my own or my colleagues’ cases. 

Similarly, I always need to be sure that none of the people in Mack’s world are based on real people. Mack works with cops, defense attorneys, judges, and a wide variety of child-abuse professionals. I worked with all of those categories of people when I had Mack’s job, and I still work with cops, defense attorneys, and judges today. It is important to me—both in theory and because I write fiction, not memoir—that none of the people in Mack’s world should be based on real people. I wanted to avoid any chance that people I know might read my work and find themselves speculating about the “real” identities of my fictional characters. Instead, I again think about the patterns I’ve noticed and let the plot dictate the specifics. As a result, there are no real people in my fiction . . . well, with one exception. 

There is in fact one real person in Mack’s fictional world—an attorney I met when we were both new sex-crimes prosecutors and who has become one of my very best friends. I didn’t set out to include her in Steadying the Ark, but Mack needed a mentor and a friend, and I couldn’t invent one that was better than the one I knew in real life. In my first draft, I let what I knew about my friend Elizabeth shape the character of Jess Lafayette, with the intention of ultimately editing Jess into fiction. When I began to revise, though, I couldn’t bring myself to divorce Jess from my friend.  I eventually asked Elizabeth if it would be okay to include a character closely based on her in my otherwise fictional world. “As long as I don’t turn out to be the killer,” she said, and that seemed like a reasonable request. 

Regardless of whether Mack is appearing in a short story or a novel, my process for ensuring the separation between her world and mine is the same.  Bella Books, which published Steadying the Ark this March, has asked me to turn Mack Wilson into a series character, which means I will continue to repeat this process.

As I very slowly start working on the sequel, I find myself stepping outside my comfort zone. In this second book, Mack will be handling homicides—which are a kind of case I’ve never dealt with myself. For my outline and first draft, I’ve been following the same method I always use: just telling the story. When it comes time to revise, I will have to rely heavily on homicide trainings I’ve attended and the experiences of my friends and colleagues. I’ll ask the same kinds of questions, and change details accordingly if anything from reality has snuck into my fiction. 

My hope is that people who read my books will walk away not merely entertained but with a sense of how the justice system works—at least in Arizona, at least from a prosecutor’s perspective. Although the stories are invented, and so are (almost) all of the people, the emotions, the high-stakes atmosphere, and the passion are very real. Those qualities, I think, are what make for a compelling story. I hope I’ve done them all justice!