Lou Manfredo’s latest story for EQMM, “Sundown,” appears in our current issue (March/April 2022). In it he brings back some characters who featured in a series of stories published in this magazine between 2009 and 2013. Those five previous tales starred Gus Oliver, constable and later unofficial private investigator in the small town of Central Islin, Long Island, with cameo appearances by his grandson Jo-Jo. The new Central Islin story in our current issue fast forwards nineteen years from 1960 to 1979 and finds Gus retired and Jo-Jo on the local police force—but consulting his grandfather on cases. Lou Mandredo is also the author of the Joe Rizzo series of novels and stories. His honors include having a story chosen for The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years, edited by Otto Penzler. In this post, he connects the urge to write to a passion for reading. —Janet Hutchings
So—what have you been up to these past couple of years? Doing some traveling, visiting old friends, making new ones, seeing new places? Or, maybe, not so much. Yeah. I get it.
But here’s our silver lining: we are readers. Each and every one of us, readers. And so, yes, we have been traveling, we have been seeing old friends and making new ones, visiting new places—often via a newly arrived issue of EQMM. I’ve also been spending lots of days and nights in Boston with my old buddies, Spenser and Hawk, and a new bestie, Sunny Randall. And, being so close to Paradise, Massachusetts, I naturally dropped in on Jesse Stone a time or two. And thanks to my local public library, most of the expenses for such prolonged travel have been quite negligible. Nil, in fact.
And while engaged in this binge reading, I was reminded of something, a very important moment in my life. It was on a long-ago Sunday afternoon in December, and I had just seen “From Russia, With Love” at my neighborhood movie house. I rushed home to immediately report my astonishing discovery of James Bond to my father, giving a glowing review of the film and the embodiment of all things Bond, Sean Connery.
“Bond?” my father said, then led me to the stack of paperbacks piled beside his bed and rummaged through it. “Here,” he said, handing me a book, “it’s one of the novels the movies are based on.”
It was Dr. No. Remember that one? I have good cause to never forget it. Not yet even a teenager, I was being entrusted with a real -life, grown-up novel. No more Hardy Boys. Bond, James Bond. Although too young at the time to fully realize it, a torch had been passed.
And so I reflected on all that as I read my way through these current times. You see, way back on that long ago December Sunday, I was even then facing a demon beyond my control: Seventh grade French class and Florence McBaron, school teacher. The remembrance of irregular French verbs, combined with the steely-eyed glare of ol’ Flo, still stirs my nape. Yikes. But with the help of musings from Ian Fleming, all that paralyzing terror could be erased, temporarily at least, and replaced instead with an energizing excitement as Bond and I flew off to face dangerous adventures and, best of all, meet yet another beautiful heroine.
So, okay, I now thought. Bring it on, COVID. Spenser will rescue me, just as Tom Sawyer had after a particularly tragic Little League strike-out with the bases loaded; just as Huck Finn had when a nose pimple threatened my social standing at school; just as Henry Gregor Felson and his hot-rodding teenage creations had on a rainy, dismal vacation day at my grandmother’s summer bungalow. Me and a good read. Tough combo to defeat.
Is any of this sounding familiar? Of course it is. Dedicated readers know exactly what I’m talking about.
All this factored heavily into why I first began to write. Over the years, I have been honored to meet many writers, some famous, some not so much, but all talented and conscientious purveyors of finely crafted alternative realities for us to laugh or cry in, play or tremble, love or hate, find tragedy or joy and maybe, sometimes, take solace in. No small task. It occurs to me that despite meeting so many writers, I don’t recall asking or being asked, what actually motivates anyone to face that dreaded blank page and dig in their heels to fill it. What indeed.
But maybe I’ll save that for another time and simply say this much, and I suspect it would apply to every writer everywhere throughout history. Sometimes in the small, dark hours before dawn, I find myself stirring and wondering: Is someone, somewhere in the world, at that very moment, reading a novel of mine, a short story, perhaps an essay such as this one? And is it possible that read, despite the often-dark tones of my work, is somehow distracting or easing some of that reader’s grief or pain, boredom or loneliness, fear or anxiety?
I’ve come to view my writing as payback, probably equally owed by all writers. Payback of my part of a debt due the Hardy Boys, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Holmes and Marlowe, Wolfe and Spade, Mason and all the Robert B. Parker boys and girls of Boston, with a special duty of debt owed to Salinger and Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, and William Goldman.
Yes, it’s a massive debt, and one I realize I can never fully repay. But I intend to do my best to put a very large dent in it.
So, in retrospect, maybe that’s why writers choose to face that daunting blank page.
One of the things that struck me most forcefully within my first few months as the editor of EQMM was the dedication of our magazine’s fans. The 1991 Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Pasadena, California occurred during EQMM’s fiftieth anniverary year and included a very well-attended panel devoted to EQMM and its history. As a newcomer only four months on the job, I was astounded to look out from the table where we panelists were seated and spot several fans holding small stacks of file cards which they used throughout the hour to make notations or to reference stories published in the magazine decades before. I was astounded by this—I’d never before experienced fandom of such fervor firsthand. And I was entirely unable to answer the majority of the questions that wonderful audience posed. Fortunately, everyone else at the table was a true EQMM expert—including two people who will be mentioned later in this post, Edward D. Hoch and Marv Lachman. They fielded everything thrown at us with assurance and grace.
The event left a lasting impression on me, so much so that when we put together this eightieth anniversary trivia contest, my main concern was to make sure it was hard enough to challenge the most committed fans. As it turned out, I think we made it a little too difficult. For one thing, thirty more years of issues have come out since that anniversary panel of 1991, making it magnitudes more unlikely that any one reader would be familiar with all of our decades of content. Our decision to include questions not only about EQMM but also about the magazine’s founders, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, added yet another layer of challenge. We also went into this contest with four of the top EQMM experts—Francis M. Nevins, Marvin Lachman, Josh Pachter, and Dale C. Andrews—unable to enter, since it was from them that we obtained the contest questions.
All of that said, we had some very worthy entries to the contest: No one got all of the answers right, but our first-place winner, with whom our second-place entrant very nearly tied, had only two incorrect answers. Which brings me to something revealed by the entries: A couple of the questions were ambiguous in ways we did not foresee, and the answer to another question is, in truth, a matter of opinion. We’ve tried to clarify the equivocal questions in the answer key below, and we hope you’ll enjoy picking up bits of EQMM trivia you likely did not know. As for me, after thirty-plus years at the magazine’s helm I still would not presume to call myself an EQMM expert, but I would have been able to answer all but a couple of this contest’s questions without looking anything up (had the answers not been supplied along with the questions!). That’s a long way to have come from that 1991 panel, on a journey that has been, and continues to be (thanks to our incomparable writers and fans) full of variety and fun.
And now, congratulations to (imaginary drum roll, please) the winners . . .
First Place:
Alexander Zapryagaev
Runners-up (in order):
Kurt Sercu
Arthur Vidro
Joe Meyer
Thanks to you all!—Janet Hutchings
80th Anniversary contest QUESTIONS and ANSWERS:Which of the following celebrated authors did NOT make their professional fiction debut in EQMM’s Department of First Stories?
A. National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez
B. MWA Grand Master Edward D. Hoch
C. Multiple Agatha and Anthony Award winner Nancy Pickard
D. MWA Grand Master Stanley Ellin
Answer: B
2. Who is the only person to appear in EQMM’s Department of First Stories twice?
Answer: Josh Pachter: first in 1968 with the story “E.Q Griffin Earns His Name” and again forty-one years later, in 2009, with “History on the Bedroom Wall,” cowritten with his daughter, Rebecca Jones.
3. In a 1936 review of Ellery Queen’s Halfway House (Revista Hogar, October 30, 1936), Jorge Luis Borges praised the credibility of Ellery’s logical solution, noting that in good detective stories the solution cannot be premised on devices such as “hypnotism, telepathic hallucinations, elixirs of evil operation, witches and warlocks, real magic and recreational physics.” However, a magician in fact played a crucial role in the history of EQMM. Who was that magician?
Answer: Clayton Rawson, who was EQMM’s managing editor from 1963 until his death in 1971, was also a professional magician. Rawson was the author of four detective novels featuring his magician/detective “The Great Merlini.”
4. The town of Wrightsville provides the locale for five Ellery Queen novels (six, if you count The Last Woman in His Life, where the town is featured in one chapter). Wrightsville was also the locale for seven Ellery Queen short stories published in EQMM between 1953 and 1967. The town of Wrightsville does not, in fact, exist. But what New England town is Wrightsville almost certainly modeled after?
Answer: Claremont, New Hampshire Claremont shares with Wrightsville the singular distinction of having a town square that is in fact a circle, from which emanate the town’s streets like spokes in a wheel. And Claremont was the hometown of Manfred B. Lee’s wife Betty. (Manfred B. Lee was, of course, the coauthor, with Frederic Dannay, of the Ellery Queen novels and stories.) Lee’s daughter Patricia Lee Caldwell has stated “I remember clearly that my mother told me that Wrightsville was based on Claremont.” During the course of a visit to Claremont Lee himself confirmed the same, as reported in the July 10, 1959 edition of the local newspaper, The Claremont Eagle.
5. EQMM editor in chief Frederic Dannay, together with Manfred B. Lee, authored a wealth of Ellery Queen novels and short stories. What other editor, while serving on EQMM’s staff, used the Ellery Queen characters in detective fiction?
Answer: Janet Hutchings, whose pastiche “Change of Scene,” featuring Ellery and Nikki Porter in 1934 Chicago, is included in the recent anthology The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen, edited by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews (Wildside Press, 2020). Or, we’ve accepted the answer Jon L. Breen. When his EQ pastiche “The Gilbert and Sullivan Clue” was published in the September/October 1999 EQMM, Jon was the EQMM columnist for The Jury Box—so a member of our staff. And he is also an editor, having compiled anthologies in the field.
6. An early mystery concerned the division of labor for the writing team of Dannay and Lee. That mystery has largely been solved, and it is now common knowledge that the Ellery Queen stories, while plotted by Frederic Dannay were drafted by Manfred B. Lee. In addition to his gift for creating prose, what other hidden artistic talent did Lee possess?
Answer: Manfred B. Lee was an accomplished violinist. According to his daughter, Patricia Lee Caldwell, he led a small band in the mid 1920s that played in various locales and on cruises.
7. Dannay and Lee wrote the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery, as an entry in a writing contest sponsored by McClure’s Magazine. When they were informed that they had won the contest, what did the cousins do to celebrate?
Answer: They went to Dunhill’s Tobacconist and bought each other meerschaum pipes with the initials EQ engraved on the stems.
8. EQMM was launched in the fall of 1941 and has now been around for 80 years. But EQMM was not the first mystery magazine launched by Dannay and Lee. What magazine holds that honor?
Answer: Dannay and Lee’s first mystery magazine was titled Mystery League, and was launched in 1933. A total of only four issues were published. To quote Manfred B. Lee: “Mystery League Magazine was the child of the Queen imagination and early ambition. It was published on the proverbial shoelace . . . Fred and myself were the entire staff. We did not even have a secretary. We selected the stories, prepared copy, read proofs, dummied, sweated . . . and almost literally swept out the office as well.”
9. Why did Dannay and Lee adopt a pseudonym?
Answer: The primary reason a pseudonym needed to be decided upon was that the McClure’s Magazine contest for which TheRoman Hat Mystery was written required, for fairness’ sake, that all submissions be made under a pseudonym. There are many theories as to why the name Ellery Queen was decided upon. One is that the name was inspired by the face cards in a deck of cards during a game the cousins were playing.
10. What was the worst typographical blunder involving an author’s name in EQMM’s history?
Answer: Opinions differ on this. Many (like your current editor) would say the worst typographical blunder was the misspelling of Agatha Christie’s name on a cover from the fifties or sixties (due to a boxing of issues, we are currently unable to give the issue date). Others would argue that the mistake on the cover of the very first issue of EQMM was worse. Anthony Abbot (a mystery-writing pseudonym for Fulton Oursler) was misspelled. EQMM mistakenly added an extra t to the last name.
11. What author has had the most stories published in EQMM in the magazine’s history?
Answer: MWA Grand Master Edward D. Hoch. For more than thirty-five years he had a story in every issue of EQMM. We’ll leave the math to you!
12. During its eighty years, EQMM has had six outstanding reviewers of crime fiction. Can you name them?
Answer: Howard Haycraft, Anthony Boucher, John Dickson Carr, Allen J. Hubin, Jon L. Breen, Steve Steinbock.
13. In 1948, Anthony Boucher translated a story by Jose Luis Borges into English—the first story by that eminent Argentine author to appear in English. Since EQMM launched its Passport to Crime Department in 2003, many stories originally in other languages have been translated into English for EQMM. Which translator has translated the most stories for Passport to Crime?
Answer: Mary Tannert
14. What do the following four authors have in common?: Lillian de la Torre; Harry Kemelman; David Morrell; Susan Dunlap
Answer: They each had their first story published in EQMM.
15. A “series character” is one (usually a detective) who appears in two or more stories or books. Name the series character(s) who appeared in EQMM by the twelve authors listed here. (Note: Some of the authors created more than one character. Try to name any or all of their series characters.)
a. Ngaio Marsh — Inspector Roderick Alleyn
b. Ross Macdonald — Lew Archer
c. Ian Fleming— James Bond
d. Raymond Chandler — Philip Marlowe, Carmady (another, earlier name for Philip Marlowe; 2 Carmady stories were published in EQMM), and John Dalmas (another earlier name for the same character—one story in an EQ anthology)
e. Edgar Rice Burroughs — Tarzan
f. Agatha Christie — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Tommy and “Tuppence” Beresford, Parker Pyne, Harley Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite
g. Lillian de la Torre — Dr. Sam: Johnson
h. William Dylan Powell — Billy Raskolnikov and his monkey Ringo
i. John Lantigua — Willie Cuesta
j. Amy Myers — Auguste Didier, Tom Wasp, Parson Pennywick, Jack Colby, Sherlock Holmes
k. Charlaine Harris — Lily Bard, Anne de Witt
16. What’s the longest time span between an author’s first appearance in EQMM and their most recent, and who is the author?
Answer: William Link. He debuted in 1954 with a story cowritten with Richard Levinson. The pair went on to create classic TV series such as Columbo, Mannix, and Murder, She Wrote. William Link (who died at the end of 2020) continued to write solo short stories for EQMM until 2015.
This new post by Kevin Mims, essayist, short story writer, and frequent contributor to this blog, addresses again a subject he discussed in his September 2, 2021 post “A Semiforgotten Masterpiece of Short Fiction”—the short stories of Frederick Forsyth. If you love short fiction, I think this review will make you want to try to find a copy of the Forsyth collection Kevin focuses on this time, a book that first saw print twenty years ago. —Janet Hutchings
Last September, I wrote an appreciation of No Comebacks, Frederick Forsyth’s excellent 1982 short story collection. I ended the essay by writing, “It is a shame that Forsyth hasn’t written more short stories, because he has a real knack for it.” Fortunately, Jon L. Breen, who knows more about crime and mystery fiction than almost anyone alive, contacted me to let me know that Forsyth had continued writing short stories even after the publication of No Comebacks, and five of them had been collected in The Veteran, published by St. Martin’s Press back in September, 2001. I got hold of a copy of TheVeteran in September of 2021.
No Comebacks was such a brilliant collection, published during the author’s heyday—a fourteen year period (1971-1984) during which he brought forth The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Shepherd, The Devil’s Alternative, No Comebacks, and The Fourth Protocol—that I assumed The Veteran, a much later production, would prove to be a bit of a letdown. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. If anything, The Veteran may be an even better collection of stories than No Comebacks. The paperback edition of that earlier collection contained ten stories in 289 pages, for an average of about 29 pages per story. The paperback edition of The Veteran contains half as many stories spread across 344 pages, for an average of nearly 70 pages per story. Longer stories are not necessarily better than short ones. Oftentimes, they are worse. But that is not the case with those in The Veteran. It is a cliché when reviewing a collection of good longer stories (novellas, novelettes, whatever you want to call them) to say that each story has the heft of a novel. That is what many reviewers said of the four stories in Stephen King’s collection Different Seasons, which was published in hardback by Viking Press in August of 1982. The cliché is not always warranted but it was definitely true of Different Seasons, and it is equally true of The Veteran. Each of the five stories feels as if it could easily have been expanded into a full-length novel.
The book’s title story starts out as a straightforward police procedural about the search for the young thugs who brutally beat to death a disabled war veteran in a seedy part of London. This is a gritty cop story and fans of darker British crime dramas such as DCI Banks, Scott & Bailey, Happy Valley, Broadchurch, and the like will be sure to enjoy it. I said that “The Veteran” starts out as a straightforward drama. This is true of most Forsyth stories. They always start out as if they are going to proceed predictably from Point A to Point B and eventually to Point Z. But no Forsyth story I’ve read ever remains on the straight and narrow path. Every one of his stories contains at least one jaw-dropping twist to it, and many of them contain multiple such twists. It takes the police detectives quite a while to discover the identity of the victim of the brutal beating that is at the heart of “The Veteran.” Eventually, however, we learn his name and that he was a member of a close-knit band of British military brothers who fought valiantly together in a foreign war. The reader gets his first major jolt when, after the two thugs who committed the killing are arrested, another member of that band of military brothers, now a highly regarded London barrister, agrees to defend them. The police were originally confident in their case, even though much of it is circumstantial. But when they learn that the eminent James Vansittart is going to be arguing for the defense, their confidence completely vanishes. Vansittart’s firm is wealthy and has much greater resources at its disposal than the public prosecutor. But why would Vansittart agree to defend such miscreants? Suffice it to say that Forsyth has plenty more twists in store.
The second story in the collection is called “The Art of the Matter,” and it is a much cozier mystery, involving art theft and forgery and some rather unexpected reversals of fortune. After the grittiness of the title story, this one comes as a bit of a palette-cleanser, but it is nonetheless a fully-fleshed-out crime story that could easily have been stretched out to novel length without much effort. It is a somewhat comic heist caper that will satisfy anyone who enjoys a good revenge tale.
The third tale in the book is called “The Miracle.” In his fiction, Forsyth often likes to weave together events from different timelines. “The Miracle” is a story that operates on three different timelines. The framing story is set in Siena, Italy, on July 2, 1975. It concerns a middle-aged Topeka, Kansas, cattleman and his wife who have traveled to Italy to witness the Palio di Siena, a horse race that takes place there every summer and attracts roughly 40,000 spectators. These two Americans have arrived late. They failed to book a hotel room on time and thus had to stay at an inn far from the city. Their rental car overheated on the drive to Siena, and now, traveling on foot, the wife has twisted her ankle just a quarter mile away from where the race is set to begin. She sits down in a cobblestoned courtyard. A foreigner who speaks English takes a look at her ankle. He informs her that it is not broken but that it needs to be wrapped. He offers to tear up a shirt into strips and wrap the ankle for her. The husband asks the stranger who he is, and the stranger responds that he is a gardener. He is actually being modest. He is a trained doctor. In fact, he was a Nazi surgeon during the Second World War. He was stationed in Italy and exactly 31 years earlier, on July 2, 1944, he witnessed a miracle in that courtyard that changed his life. At this point we get our first story-within-a-story, as the gardener/doctor tells his wartime tale. He tells this story in the third person, not acknowledging that he himself is the doctor at the center of the tale. Siena was in the middle of an area being hotly contested by both the Allied and Axis powers. The courtyard where the American couple now sit peacefully was, in July of 1944, a makeshift emergency field hospital for wounded German soldiers and Allied prisoners of war. As American General Mark Clark and his troops advanced into Siena, the Germans evacuated, leaving behind soldiers and POWs too wounded to be moved. All of the medical staff are evacuated with the retreating German Army except for a young German surgeon and an even younger Italian girl who has been pressed into service as a nurse. The German surgeon cannot speak Italian and the Italian girl cannot speak German. The young surgeon and his nurse have been left in charge of 220 men, all of whom are near death. He assumes that by the time the Allied troops arrive, nearly all of his patients will have expired. In fact, three days later, when the French and American troops arrive in the Sienese courtyard, all 220 patients are alive and on the mend. The surgeon attributes this miracle to the ministrations of the mysterious nurse. To explain this miracle, he goes back even further in time, to 1540, when Siena and the surrounding countryside were “a vision of hell,” wracked by plague and famine and riots and revolts and clashing clans. To look after the community’s most wretched sufferers, a young noblewoman named Caterina established a sort of makeshift hospital in the same courtyard where, years later, in 1944, the Germans would set up their own makeshift hospital. Forsyth spends the rest of the story tying his three timelines together in surprising and entertaining ways.
The fourth story in the collection is called “The Citizen” (Forsyth often gives unaccountably bland titles to thrilling stories, a habit he—thankfully—doesn’t extend to the titles of his novels). This is a gripping story about a British Airways 747 Jumbo Jet that is traveling, full of passengers, from Bangkok to London. Midway through the flight, one of the stewards finds a note that a passenger has left in the galley. The anonymous note is addressed to the captain and informs him that two of the passengers appear to be smuggling drugs from Bangkok into London. The captain finds all this a bother. He’d prefer to ignore the note and let British Customs find the drugs (or not) on its own. But aviation law requires him to radio ahead to Heathrow and let the authorities know about the note. And when he does, the tension ratchets up and the plot, naturally, takes some odd twists.
Which brings us to the final story in The Veteran. Writers and their editors often like to begin a story collection with the second best story in the book and conclude with the best. You want a very strong story to lure the reader in. You want an even stronger one with which to send the reader and (especially, perhaps) the book reviewer off. If the middle stories are of a slightly lesser quality, a good final story will often help the reader/reviewer overlook that shortcoming. None of the stories in The Veteran are less than riveting. But “Whispering Wind,” the final story in the collection, is an absolute masterpiece, one of the most inventive fictions Forsyth has ever written. At 140 pages it is the longest story in the book and the one that seems the most novel-like. In fact, it essentially is a novel. It begins in Montana in 1876, just a few days before General Custer’s foolhardy attack on the Indians at The Little Big Horn. The main character is a Scottish-American frontiersman named Ben Craig, whom Custer’s Army has enlisted as a scout, both because of his knowledge of the terrain and his ability to speak the language of the Cheyenne Indians. Here is another case where Forsyth’s status as a conservative ex-military man who is generally quite fond of America and Americans may cause the reader to entertain false expectations of how the author will treat this historical subject. In this story Forsyth evinces no fondness whatsoever for the American military. His sympathies all lie with the Indians (Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho). Early in the tale Ben Craig witnesses an appalling massacre of Indian women and children by some of Custer’s military officers in the days prior to Custer’s Last Stand. They shoot a beautiful young girl named Whispering Wind through the leg as she tries to escape the slaughter. Ben Craig ministers to her wounds, but he is ordered by Custer’s men to keep her tied up. They plan to return later to gang rape her and then kill her like the rest of her tribe. Craig, who is disgusted by what he has seen of the American Army, sets her on a pony and allows her to escape. Custer will sentence him to death for this. Fortunately, Custer delays Craig’s execution until after the planned raid on the Little Big Horn. He wants the Indian-loving Craig to watch as the General and his men slaughter the warriors gathered there. Craig does get a front row seat to the slaughter, but not the one that Custer was promising.
This story goes through more permutations (a favorite word of Forsyth’s) than any other Forsyth tale I have read. It starts out as a Western tale and pretty much remains one until the end. But it also manages to satisfy the requirements of many other pop-fiction genres —the fantasy tale, the romance, the time-travel tale, the revenge tale, the chase story, etc. It is also a pretty good example of The Hero’s Journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell.
I’m not exactly sure why The Veteran never became as popular as No Comebacks. The advance review that ran in Kirkus Reviews was headlined “Big Pro Shows His Stuff. Boffo.” As it happened, however, the book was released just a few weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, a time when readers across the globe were still obsessed with nonfiction accounts of the attacks and their aftermath. Few paid any attention to Forsyth’s story collection with its bland-sounding title. Thanks to Jon Breen, I was made aware of this underrated collection, and I’m glad I was. Anyone who loves thrilling stories ought to seek it out as well. And if, after reading No Comebacks and The Veteran, you’re in the mood for more Forsyth short stories, well, I’ve got good news. You can find them in two more books. The aforementioned volume The Shepherd, published in 1975, was given the stand-alone treatment, but it’s a very slim book, heavily illustrated, and it contains a single short story, written as a Christmas present for his wife Carole. And then there is Forsyth’s 1991 book The Deceiver. This book has always been marketed as a novel but it is in fact a collection of four discrete stories all of them featuring a British spymaster named Sam McCready. The stories began as episodes of a British TV series called Frederick Forsyth Presents, which debuted in 1989. Forsyth himself introduced each episode of the TV series, a la Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling. A total of six episodes were produced. After all of the episodes had aired, Forsyth collected four of the stories into The Deceiver. The McCready character seems to have been inspired, at least in part, by TV’s Lieutenant Columbo. Throughout the book he is variously described as “a crumpled fellow,” “quirky” and “irreverent,” “somewhat scruffy,” and “a diamond in the rough.” At one point he is described as “the medium-built, rather rumpled man with thinning brown hair in a gray raincoat.” Like Columbo, he is forever being underestimated by those around him. Each story can stand on its own, and each story is thrilling. If there are any other Frederick Forsyth short stories out there, I am not aware of them. But perhaps Jon L. Breen is.
All regular EQMM readers know who Steve Steinbock is: He took over the chief reviewing position in our distinguished book-review column The Jury Box in 2011, he became a published fiction writer in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in 2010, he’s done special-feature interviews and articles for the magazine over the years, and (starting in our July/August 2021 issue) he’s become one of our translators from Japanese. The latter is the topic of this fascinating post. —Janet Hutchings
A few years ago at a Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda, ten of us were gathered around a dinner table. Josh Pachter was a few seats away from me. Since the mid 1980s, Josh has been translating stories, articles, and books from Dutch into English. In recent years, he’s also translated from Flemish, Spanish, Italian, Afrikaans, Romanian, and Chinese.
Someone at the table asked Josh how many languages he spoke.
“Only English and Dutch,” he said.
We all stared at him.
“These days,” Josh continued, “with Google Translate, you don’t need to speak a language to translate it. You just need to know how to adapt a Google translation into coherent English.”
“Josh,” I said. “Maybe you can do that with French or Spanish, but it won’t work with Japanese.”
“In my experience,” Josh said, “it works with every language.”
Josh is my friend and mentor, and he’s the greatest EQMM translator since Anthony Boucher. But with regard to Japanese, relying on Google Translate is problematic.
On a daily basis, I use Google Translate and other machine translation tools like DeepL and Yandex. They make my job as a language learner, and a translator, much easier. If you copy a paragraph of Danish, Dutch, French, or Spanish into Google Translate’s webpage, you will get a perfectly sensible, more than adequate translation of that paragraph into English. Chances are you’ll also have good luck translating a text of Azerbaijani, Malaysian, or Urdu into English.
With Japanese, however, if you rely completely on Google Translate, most of it will sound awkward, half of it will be confusing but ultimately understandable, and about ten to twenty percent will be bafflingly incomprehensible.
Below, for example, is a paragraph from the Japanese Wikipedia page for “Detective Novel” translated into English using Google Translate:
The name “mystery,” trees Takataro is Ondorisha in science fiction broad sense, including the mystery when supervised the Monographs, Ranpo Edogawa and Mizutani quasi reportedly those named have been proposed in. There are also other names such as detective novels, mystery novels, and suspense novels, but the former name is because the character “Detective” is restricted to this kanji. It is no longer used. There are some overlaps with crime novels, but they are not completely synonymous.
(Keep in mind that Google Translate, like nearly all machine translation tools, uses artificial intelligence. Every time a human being uses it and makes a correction, the software “learns” and improves. If you enter the same paragraph tomorrow, your mileage may vary).
The problem is not with Japanese, or with English, or even with Google Translate. The problem is that the syntax, word usage, idioms, and literary conventions of Japanese and English are so different from each other that no piece of software (let alone most human brains) can decipher and convert an intelligent text from one language into an intelligent text in the other. As technology advances, the situation will get better. In the field of computer science, there’s been a fair amount of research into developing algorithms that can parse the grammar of both languages. But at this point it’s still a work in progress.
There are many reasons why Japanese is so difficult to translate. I’ll outline a few of these below. But it’s important to keep in mind that translation between any two languages is never a simple matter of substituting words from one language to corresponding words of the other.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice examined the mirror mounted above her fireplace and imagined the world on the other side. She wondered if “looking-glass milk” tasted different, or if objects would operate by different rules. How would a chessboard knight move on a looking-glass chessboard? She managed to climb through to the other side of the mirror where she discovered a world that indeed operated by a different set of rules. When Alice tried to read a book, she realized “it’s all in some language I don’t know.” She held the book up to a mirror so she could read the words—but found it was all “Jabberwocky.”
To translate is to experience the world from both sides of a looking glass. Languages operate differently on the other side.
What Makes Japanese so Difficult?
Just to be clear, my intention isn’t to bash the Japanese language (or English, or Google Translate). But the fact is that both English and Japanese are complicated languages, and it’s those complications that make translation between the two so complex, while at the same time so satisfying. The very things that make Japanese linguistically incompatible with English are what makes it exciting for me. A difficult Japanese paragraph is like a crossword puzzle. I can stare at one clue for hours. But as soon as I solve another clue, everything fits into place.
Below are some of the curious characteristics of Japanese that make English translations so complex.
1. Syntax. There are several aspects of Japanese syntax that make translation challenging. First is the use of particles—single characters or short words that are attached to the end of words, like suffixes in English, and which serve the same functions as English conjunctions, interjections, and prepositions, or serve as markers of case, phrase functions, subject, object, or topic of a sentence. A second characteristic of Japanese is that there are no spaces between words, making it hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins, or whether a particular character is a particle or an actual word. A third challenge is that Japanese word order is more or less the opposite of what it would be in English. Below is an example of a sentence in English followed by the same sentence in Japanese, then a word-for-word translation with the particles included in parentheses:
I want to try on a suit I saw in the shop the across the street from the hotel.
ホテルの向かいにある店で見たスーツを着てみたいです
Hotel (of) opposite (to) store (at) saw suit (direct object) try-on want.
Not a very pretty sentence in English, but it makes perfect sense in Japanese. I found a similar, simpler example in the DuoLingo language app. One of the quiz questions was to translate into Japanese:
“I put flowers in the vase.”
The answer, translated word for word with grammatical particles in parentheses, is
“Vase (in) flower (object marker) put in (past tense ending)”
You might have noticed something missing from the Japanese sentences. Nowhere do they contain the first-person pronoun (“I”). Which brings us to the next big difference . . .
2. Dropped subjects and missing pronouns. Japanese grammar is often very economical. If anything can be understood from the context, there’s no reason to say it. This is especially true with first- and second-person pronouns, as well as subjects that were named earlier in a text. Regarding pronouns, it’s generally considered rude, abrupt, or arrogant to use “me” or “you” (or any other first- or second-person pronoun) in speech or writing.
To illustrate this, below is a paragraph I came across in a discussion on Quora:
Here’s what I got when I ran the above paragraph through Google Translate:
I had asthma when my child was small, so I sent him to a swimming school. At first she was all about putting her face in the water, she couldn’t do just one thing in the lesson, and she came home crying. But she never said she would quit. She is still in high school. He has been on the stone for three years, but this year he will finally be competing in the national competition.
An astute reader can figure out the writer’s meaning, but it’s confusing. The Japanese paragraph doesn’t contain a single pronoun, so Google randomly inserted pronouns (usually incorrectly) wherever English grammar required one. Regarding the remark “on the stone for three years,” it’s an ancient idiom about patience. The meaning is that when the writer’s child (we’re never sure from the context whether s/he is male or female) was young, that child had asthma, and didn’t like swimming. But the parent was patient, and the child eventually became a competitive swimmer in high school.
3. Words with different ranges, nuances, and definitions. Translations are approximations, at best, since very few words in any language have exactly the same meaning as the corresponding word in another language. You may have heard of the blue/green distinction in Japanese traffic lights. Throughout the world, “red” means “stop” and “green” means “go.” But for a variety of reasons—mostly having to do with history of color words and where the Japanese draw the line on a color map between blue and green, a Japanese traffic light signifying “go” is referred to as “blue.” In English, we use “blue” idiomatically to mean “sad” (“I’m feeling blue”). But in Japan, referring to someone or something as aoi (blue) implies that it is young, unripe, or unskilled. Infants and people who have had too much to drink are referred to as “red.”
Japanese uses a lot of English words, but in Japanese they take on new meanings. Manshon (from “mansion”) refers to any high-rise apartment building. Eyakon (from “air conditioner”) refers to heat pumps, whereas an air conditioner is called a Kūrā (from “cooler”). A smorgasbord or all-you-can-eat buffet is called a Baikingu (from “Viking”). In English, we draw a distinction between comedy and drama, but in Japan, Dorama (from “drama”) is any TV series, be it a tear-jerker or a situation comedy. An electric outlet in Japan is called a Konsento (from “consent”) and I have no idea why.
Since I’m in the book business, literary terms are important to me. But divergent definitions had led to confusion more than once. In English, we make a clear distinction between novels and short stories. But if you translate “novel” into Japan, you get shōsetsu (小説), which in Japanese can mean both novel and short story. On the other hand, translate “story” into Japanese and you’re likely to get either monogatari (物語), which usually refers to a classical story or an epic, or hanashi (話), which is a tale told in spoken conversation.
In English, “maybe” and “probably” have different meanings. No one has ever quantified it, but most English speakers would say that “maybe” means anywhere from 0% to 60% likelihood, whereas “probably” describes something with a likelihood of 80% or greater. The Japanese word tabun (たぶん), however, is translated as both “maybe” and “probably.” A similar issue occurs with the word “omoshiroi” (面白い – which literally means “white faced”). This word describes something as being “amusing” or “comical” as well as “fascinating” or “intriguing.”
Everything is relative, especially when it comes to relatives. I recently read a story in which the crime victim’s only living relative was his twin brother. So I was confused when the police went to interview the victim’s little brother. I thought at first that I was missing something. I must have either gotten “only living relative” or “twin” wrong. I finally remembered that Japanese uses specific words for siblings based on relative age: a male sibling is either an older brother (ani) or a younger brother (otōto), even in the case of twins.
Japanese adds the prefix “gi-” (義) to family words signifying that the relationship is legal rather than biological. This leads to confusion for Western readers since, for example, gibo (義母) can mean both “stepmother” and “mother-in-law.”
Family terms aren’t limited to family members. I pointed out earlier that using a second person pronoun (meaning “you”) is disrespectful. One polite workaround when speaking to someone who is older than oneself – even when they are complete strangers – is to address them as “older brother,” “older sister,” “uncle,” “auntie,” or if they are significantly older, “grandfather” or “grandmother.” A male restaurant, bar, or shop owner is often referred to as a danna (旦那), which also means “husband.”
A daughter isn’t always a daughter. In Awasaka Tsumao’s “Fox’s Wedding” (EQMM July/August 2021), the victim of a traffic accident was, according to Google Translate, “a Judo instructor’s young daughter.” Upon careful reading, I figured out that the victim was actually “a young female Judo instructor.”
The word for male offspring is even more problematic: musuko (息子) literally means “son,” but it’s often used euphemistically for “penis.”
4. Name-games. Japanese names are descriptive. The characters that make up a person’s name have specific meaning. Remember the “Judo instructor’s young daughter” who was the victim of a traffic incident? (Incidentally, she survived). The cause of the accident was a drunk red bear. At least, that’s what I learned from Google Translate. It turned out that the drunk driver was very human but was named Higuma (緋熊) which translates as “scarlet bear.” This happens often with Japanese names. When an artificial intelligence like Google Translate sees a common name like Tanaka (literally “amidst the field”) or Yamaguchi (literally “mouth of the mountain”), it has no problem recognizing it as a proper name. But less common names are tricky, and are often translated literally. The hero of a mystery series by Arisugawa Arisu is named Himura, which Google usually translates as “fire village.” The author of “Fox’s Wedding” is Awasaka Tsumao, which Google translates as “bubble slope wife husband.”
5. Idiomatic Idiosyncrasies. Idioms almost never translate from one language to another. This doesn’t just go for Japanese and English, but for all languages. In fact, idioms are often so mired in history and misinterpretation that most of us would be hard pressed if we had to explain them. I understand things like “walking on eggshells” or “throw a wrench in the works” but what does it really mean to “beat around the bush?” And why do we say “pardon my French” when nearly all English curse words have Anglo-Saxon and not French origins?
Japanese uses a lot of idioms and idiomatic phrases in everyday speech. There are even some elements of Japanese that are not idiomatic, but just sound so, because they are culturally unique to Japan. For example, to this day, the size of a room or apartment is not measured in square meters or square feet, but in tatami mats. In traditional Japanese buildings, the floor is made up of straw mats measuring approximately 3 by 6 feet. Thus, a hundred-square-foot bedroom would be a “six mat room” and an apartment measuring seven hundred square feet would be referred to in a real estate advertisement as being “forty tatami mats.”
In a mystery story I recently read, I encountered a truly baffling measurement. A lethal dose of cyanide was described as “an earpick’s worth.” It turns out people of East Asian heritage tend to have drier, almost crystal-like earwax (in contrast to the goopy, yellowish wax in the ears of people of African and European ancestry). Rather than cotton swabs, Japanese traditionally clean their ears with a special tool, usually made of metal or bamboo, with a tiny spoon-shaped scoop at the end. In Japanese recipe books, instead of a “dash” of salt, you’re likely to find “an earpick’s amount” (耳掻き一杯).
Many idiomatic phrases were imported from China over a thousand years ago. A majority of these are called yojijukugo (four-word idioms) because they are each comprised of four Chinese characters. For example, for “everything is going well” you might say jun-pū-man-pan (“gentle winds full sail”). An over-the-top billboard or TV advertisement is referred to as yō-tō-ku-niku (“sheep’s head dog meat”).
If you’re getting impatient with my long-winded explanation, you might ask, soko ga miso nandaro? (roughly meaning, “what does that have to do with miso?”)
Japanese employs hundreds of mimetic words in everyday speech. These are slang words, usually a doubled sound, that describe noises, feelings, textures, conditions, and anything else you can think of. “Waku-waku” means “excited.” “Niko-niko” is a bright smile. “Jiro-jiro” is the act of gaping. If you ever find yourself translating a hot love scene, don’t be surprised if you encounter something like:
He held her nyurun-nyurunpai-pai. The munyun munyun body was all pika-pika and kira-kira with beto-beto sweat. She said, “Uncle, your chin-chin is so bikun-bikun.” It really was jin-jin. His heart was doki-doki and his head was guru-guru. And then . . . dopyo-dopyo. Afterwards he was boro-boro, and when she heard him goo-goo, she knew he was suya-suya asleep.
I won’t translate that. But I trust that your imaginations can get the idea.
K.L. Abrahamson’s story “Paleolithic” appears in EQMM’s current issue (January/February 2022). I cannot think of any recent EQMM story that relies more heavily on setting and atmosphere than this evocative suspense tale. I was therefore not surprised to see that the Canadian author had chosen setting as the topic for this post. Her novels include the Detective Kazakov series and the amateur sleuth Phoebe Clay series (see the upcoming Within Angkor Shadows). She also writes in the fantasy and romance genres, and her short fiction, which includes a story that was nominated for Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, has appeared in numerous anthologies. —Janet Hutchings
I’ve been reading a lot of stories and novels lately by newer authors. They always remind me of the three key elements of a story that my mentors repeated again and again. Character, setting, and problem (plot) are necessary for a story to be a story—at least to meet the expectations of anyone who has grown up in western civilization. While new authors seem to be fully aware of the need to have a character that the reader will (hopefully) care about, and also have absorbed the need to have something happen in the story (the plot), the importance of setting seems to have eluded many of them. Setting seems to be the unsung hero of the story.
In many of the stories I’ve been reading, I find myself dropped into a character’s head with no idea of where I am. A farmhouse, I’m told. Or a restaurant. Or a forest. But what farmhouse? What restaurant? What forest? As readers we bring our own expectations and experiences to a story. For example, I’ve seen a lot of farmhouses and lived in a few. Is it the farmhouse I knew? Does it look exactly like the one I have in my head with the same chipped white paint and sagging front porch? Does it have a summer kitchen off the back? Is it surrounded by lush gardens or overgrown lawn? Is there a dark pine forest behind it or rolling, sunlit canola fields?
As readers, when we sit down to read, we are relinquishing control of our imagination to the writer, so that we can be transported to the place and time of the writer’s story. The writer needs to provide the setting clues that ensure the reader can place the character in context. Otherwise, in the story I’m reading the farmhouse is my farmhouse, while the character could be visiting a very different farmhouse for the next reader.
So, being clear about setting helps ground the reader so they experience the story as the writer intended. The best writers take control of our imagination and place us exactly where they want us in the story. That’s a talent writers should aspire to because as readers, that’s what we want to read. We want to be transported. But setting can be so much more than simple description.
I started my adult life working in the criminal justice system. As a probation officer responsible for supervising offenders, I also prepared in-depth pre-sentence reports for the court about those offenders. The court had found these individuals guilty, but the judge was uncertain about the most appropriate sentence. The judges requested assessments to provide a better sense of the guilty party and to provide insights into an appropriate sentence.
In my reports I delved into the individual’s history from birth to present day. I tried to provide clarity about their upbringing and attitudes to help the judge understand them and what might be the most fitting sentence. You might suggest that this is all about character, not setting, but what was critical to this understanding was knowledge of the person’s past and current environment, their family, friends and community. Why? Because all of these things provide the context—aka setting—that explains the offender, who they are now, and who they might be in the future.
The same thing goes for characters. The context—aka setting—and the character are constantly interacting, thus getting to know the character requires readers to see how they act and react to their setting. The reader has to understand the character’s environment, family, community and even country. Why country? Because different nationalities have different ways of seeing the world and of presenting themselves. So understanding your character’s background setting helps illuminate their perspective on the world of the story. For instance, someone who grew up in a wealthy household in the city would probably have a far different perspective of my old farmhouse than the nostalgia I feel.
In my own Detective Kazakov mystery novels, starting with After Yekaterina, grounding the reader is doubly important because these novels are set in an alternate history where what remains of holy mother Russia is a small country trapped as a buffer between the Chinese Empire of the Sun and the Ottoman Empire. Detective Kazakov’s country is snared in dreams of Russia’s past greatness, and in the mystique of Catherine the Great. This perspective colors everything, including the crime, the detective, and the investigation.
At its best, setting can be far more than something the character reacts to and interacts with. Setting can be a character in the story and/or a metaphor for the story as a whole. Taking a step away from mystery for a moment, surely no one can argue with the fact that Shirley Jackson’s Hill House is a character in her famous horror/gothic novel, The Haunting of Hill House:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Wow. That is setting. It fills the reader with dread and clues the reader into the less-than-sane story to come. The house and how it affects those within its influence has moved beyond the sphere of setting and become the story. Wonderful.
Within mystery, strong setting abounds. James Lee Burke’s New Orleans-set Detective Dave Robicheaux series positively oozes with sweltering humidity and Louisiana mud—a wonderful metaphor for the underbelly of crime in the South and for the way that the relentlessness of crime and darkness can threaten everything light and good and beloved—including our souls.
In my mystery novel, Through Dark Water, the roiling dark ocean that threatens the heroine during a kayaking trip off the west coast of British Columbia is very much a metaphor for the heroine’s overwhelming guilt at surviving a horrific school shooting.
The setting of each of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mysteries echoes the theme of the current novel, but all of them bring us back again and again to the small town of Three Pines, a place ‘you can stumble upon if lost, but rarely find on the way to somewhere else.’ A place aptly described as ‘on the road to nowhere.’ But readers of the Gamache books remember Three Pines for its peace, its small community of characters, its gardens and for the fact that it is surrounded by a less-than-tamed wilderness at the edge of the US/Canada border. Readers remember the quiet times before the bistro fire, the food, the parties, and the way darkness and danger threaten beyond the wavy-glass windows of this modern-day Shangri-La. People die in Three Pines, and yet Louise Penny has built a setting so replete with Norman Rockwell-esque images of life well lived that we trust the town and those who live and visit there—to our peril.
Setting becomes more critical when mysteries take us beyond the familiar world of our country, state or province. Jane Harper does a stand-out job of dropping us into the heat of drought-stricken Australia in The Dry. Her opening prologue immediately sets the tone of the place:
It wasn’t as though the farm hadn’t seen death before, and the blowflies didn’t discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse.
The drought had left the flies spoiled for choice that summer. They sought out the unblinking eyes and sticky wounds as the farmers of Kiewara leveled their rifles at skinny livestock. No rain meant no feed. And no feed made for difficult decisions as the tiny town shimmered under day after day of burning blue sky.
“It’ll break,” the farmers said as the months ticked over into a second year. They repeated the words out loud to each other like a mantra, and under their breaths to themselves like a prayer.”
We haven’t got any characters yet, other than the generic farmers, but we still feel the overwhelming heat and hopelessness of the dry and hear the buzzing of the flies over the carcasses. We may never have been in a drought before, or experienced the horror of having to destroy our livestock or watch them starve to death, but Jane Harper has taken us there, to that dark place. Now we just need to watch the characters interact with such a bereft place.
Jackson, Burke, Penny and Harper are all masters of their craft. They take us, through their use of specific details, to places we haven’t been before and make us squirm with more than a little discomfort at the heat, the humidity, the dry and the darkness. They make places—settings—come alive both through the character’s eyes and by presenting setting as a character itself. Reading any one of these wonderful writers is a reminder of the heroic nature of setting and why it is one of the trinity of writing elements.
Indian writer Raghu Roy currently lives in Mumbai. He makes his fiction debut in the Department of First Stories of our current issue (January/February 2022) with the story “The Policeman and the Dead.” As its title suggests, the story’s protagonist is a policeman—a high-ranking inspector. In this post, the author gives us a look at how he came to create the character. —Janet Hutchings
Everything was going just fine. The earth was going around the sun. I had a morning routine that changed only when I went to bed late at night—very late, that is—after which the day followed with the predictability of meteorological forecasts! Overall, I lived an ordinary, uneventful life. Then everything changed. The earth was still going around the sun, but that seemed like an afterthought on its part, or, someone might say, just to maintain a semblance of normalcy. I am, of course, only giving the human perspective—nature and the animals appeared utterly unaffected.
It is two years now, but it has already become an old story, so much so that every new day becomes an old one even before it has called it a day!
It is not yet time to reminisce about these two years. I hope the time will come soon for us to do so over a glass of wine. But I reminisce now about a reminiscence I had in the early days of the virus. About a teacher who taught me English in my secondary school and introduced me to detective stories in a big way. “Every life is a detective story, Raghu.” He had said this in his peculiar drawl. He did not drink, but when he held a new book in his hand, he felt high. He had one at that time. A Bengali potboiler, with a cover that had the private detective shooting his way out with his gun in his left hand, a knife held between his teeth while he hung precariously from a sixteenth-story window. My teacher did not elaborate any further, but he had aroused my curiosity. Just to think my life was a detective story unfolding gave me goosebumps. He was unmarried, then. He was cryptic in his speech and did not take kindly to queries on his pronouncements. Soon, he got married, and very soon after that he ceased being cryptic and was a little more generous. I was too young to figure out the cause-and-effect relationships of this phenomenon, but I welcomed the development, and, one day, finding a window of opportunity, had asked him what he had meant when he said life was a detective story. I thought I detected a philosophical film glaze over his eyes when he turned to answer my question. Later, as I grew older, I would notice the film among many married men. By now, the film may be several microns thick in my eyes too, though my wife dismisses such creative musings of mine as nothing more than an advancing cataract.
I do not remember my teacher’s response to my question, primarily because I had found he did not make any sense. My wife had once remarked that sometimes men like to speak from a height and make seemingly profound utterances that make them feel good, although they are clueless about what they mean. I always agree with her, so this time was no exception.
However, I did not allow this to affect my reading and enjoying of crime stories and thrillers, both in Bengali and, later, in English. Soon other genres opened up. Literary writing, science fiction, fantasies, and Westerns. But I dreamt of writing mystery stories.
Years passed. But writing did not happen. I could not take out bulk time or get the focus needed to do that. Writing is a hard taskmaster. But time and again, I toyed with the idea of creating my own detective. There were too many of them to draw inspiration from. My favorites were the old-timers. After a lot of thought, shaping and reshaping characters in my mind, I decided that Christie and Doyle are too British for me to be able ever to emulate. Poirot was Belgian (but if he was not an Englishman, except to another Englishman, then I am Neil Armstrong). As for Sherlock Holmes, one Bengali writer had created Byomkesh Baxi, in Holmes’s mould, had written some brilliant stories, but ultimately Baxi was his own man. Which, anyway, is as it should be.
In my middle age, science fiction and fantasy writing took more of my shelf space than others. I read the newer crop of detective story writers sporadically. Whenever I wanted a different cuisine, I picked up one from my old favorites—Christie, Conan Doyle, Rex Stout, Chandler, and Dashiell Hamett.
Reading, after all, is always so much more fun than writing. I kept on writing, but mostly in bits and pieces. There is an almost-finished novel, a draft of nonfiction, and I experimented with forms and formats. But I was never in full earnest.
Then, when the world changed, I did not accept it immediately. Maybe no one did. For a month or so, I waited for life as I knew it to resume. That did not happen. Another month was spent on finding alternate means of escape. It wasn’t to be. Then came the thought . . . let me write short stories.
An endless vista stretched before me, like for the young boy when he was taken to the park for the first time. I remember the time and the boy. He did not know which way to run; all directions were open and equally inviting. So he ran every which way. The ground was full of grass, so he did not get injured when he fell, which he did several times. He enjoyed his aimless running but soon realized that every run must have a purpose, and it could be more fun that way.
Likewise, all my favorite genres beckoned to me. Isaac Asimov, David Gemmell, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, and scores of others.
Plotlines, story titles, first lines, first paragraphs followed, flitting from one genre to another. I realized I needed to be purposeful and start with one; the others would hopefully follow. Which one to start with? I was, like the coronavirus, going everywhere, yet going nowhere.
I remembered my schoolteacher. And the genre I had started out with.
Then it was a no-brainer. The boy had started his rendezvous with fiction by reading detective stories; in his sixty-ninth year, the man would start his writing with the same genre.
Decision taken, I needed a detective. The story could come later.
After a bit of thought, the character emerged as a cross of two of my favorites. Archie Marlow was born.
Now I needed to hatch a murder plot. I made three of them.
I picked up one to start earnestly.
Then I had a second thought. The trend now is for policeman detectives. Why not?
Assistant commissioner of police Venkatraman took shape. A man never in a hurry but quick, very quick. And pensive.
As you’ll read in this post, Australian short-story writer Cheryl Rogers is a former journalist and the author of two nonfiction books. For her short fiction, she is a multiple winner of both the Henry Lawson Society of New South Wales Short Story Award and the Queen of Crime Award given by Partners in Crime (Sydney). I’ll let her tell you more about the course of her writing career herself, but I will say that I hope to read her book Finding Marjorie King—A Daughter’s Journey to Discover Her Mother’s Identity when it comes out this spring, and EQMM readers can look forward to another of her short stories later in 2022. —Janet Hutchings
The aim of this piece is to encourage any aspiring writer who happens to read it, to have a go, give it a crack as we say in Australia. Do not be afraid to put your work out for scrutiny. Do your best and keep doing it, your writing will only get better. If you are both aspiring and young then start documenting your life experiences to use later, to fill all those pages you’ve yet to write.
That said, let’s start with a confession. There are often times when I don’t enjoy writing. In any form, it can be a grind. And writing short stories can be really, really tough. For an extra degree of difficulty, throw in a murder. Then try to solve it. Wrangling a plot can be as painful as wrestling an axe murderer on a bed of nails, metaphorically speaking. Of course, I have never wrestled an actual axe murderer, on a bed of nails or anywhere else.
Now that particular cat is out of the bag, another confession. As soon as the staple gun shoots its bullet into the top left corner, binding together those crisp, white pages of a new creation, I feel a sense of satisfaction that is beyond reason. Elation, even. Happiness. Those reading this, who also write, may identify with that emotion. Those who don’t, probably never will. A dear, close friend, after listening to me banging on about writing for probably longer than she cared, once advised: “Cheryl, not everyone thinks about writing all the time.” Oh?
For a few precious weeks, each new creation seems as near darned perfect as any offspring has a right to be. Sharp, clean, incisive, the pages even smell good. To me, at least. This is undeniably the honeymoon phase.
It leads to what I now think of as the matchmaking phase. No bow, no arrow, and at last some pragmatism. That’s when, in the case of a short story, I scout the lists of competitions or magazines with potential to be my perfect baby’s perfect match. Then I boot it out of the nest, electronically these days. In earlier times I queued, and licked stamps and watched the eye rolling of the man behind the counter at the post office when I requested international reply coupons to stuff in the envelopes.
Off would go each submission, fueled by hope. Then the long wait, to see whether bubsy had been ravaged, or scorned, or even treated with complete indifference. Ouch! Any writer who chooses to put their work “out there” knows that we shoot our babies from canons, over and over again. Never really sure on whose desk our precious cargo might land, nor how it will be received.
And when they limp back home, with “reject” written all over their dismal cover sheets, what do we do? We take them in, dust them off, patch them up, maybe tweak some plot or reinvent a character, pinch their cheeks to add a bit of color, and push them out again. No point taking it personally—rejection is part of the sometimes treacherous landscape we writers inhabit. “Suck it up princess, and get on with it,” was a lesson fast learned.
I once went so far as to give a character a sex change. A fairly insipid outback barman became a flint-eyed, flame-haired (bottle burgundy, actually), ex-cop in heels who’d taken on a run-down pub and “pulled it up by its bootstraps.” Eleanor Parry was a strong character and packed a far sharper punch than the wishy washy has-been she’d sent into delete. I loved her; she was so much more interesting to write. That was “Such Rage of Honey” (EQMM, March/April 2008)
Maybe that’s what drives some of us to invent, as pathetic as it may sound, that need to escape into a parallel universe inside our heads, to make our dull lives more interesting. Apart from blind hope, of course. That someone, somewhere, will love our baby almost as much as we do and pin a blue rosette on its romper suit, award it an honorable mention or maybe give it a good home in a decent magazine.
For more years than I care to admit, I probably wrote short fiction as just such diversion, to add a bit of color and variety into a frantically busy life, yet where something was missing. Having given up a career as a rural journalist, where I was paid to talk to people and write about whatever it was they said, and instead grow wine grapes/citrus trees/cattle/chickens/ducks/civic trees for landscapers greening urban space (not all at once, but over past decades these have all been part of our farm diversification), I can see now that I’d experienced a loss of identity.
Then along came more precious creations, in the form of our son Joel, and three years later our daughter Anna. Sleepless nights, gummy grins, then school runs that gave way to driver education and teen challenges and meanwhile both sets of grandparents aged and year after year seasonal crops rolled out and needed picking, pruning and selling to the steady line of customers they brought to our door. This is what’s known as Life. How does one write around that? Read on . . .
It is painfully obvious now that although I still thought of myself as a journalist back then, cramming country drives in pursuit of a rural feature story around the edges of farm and family life was never going to work. Mind you, I tried. Because we women are meant to do it all, right? Wrong! I speak from experience. We once did a five-hour round trip with a crawler, so I could interview a couple of farmers for a feature. And a few years later, a much longer solo drive out into our State’s vast wheatbelt, juggling farmer interviews in between the school drop-off and pick-up. Utter madness. The interview schedule ran way, w-a-y late. Not the happiest ending to a fraught day. Those stories were delivered on time, but I had to wonder: What on earth was I trying to prove?
Between babies, I did find a kind of balance in the most unlikely circumstance. Our good friend Gun Dolva and her husband Rodney Potter, had three beautiful children by this stage. Their middle child, Karina, has Down Syndrome. Not long after our son was born, Gun asked if I’d be interested in co-authoring a book with her about their first five years with a child with special needs. She thought it might help other parents, and health professionals working in the field of infant and child care.
Of course I said yes. Looking back, we were amazingly sensible in our approach to the job. We resolved to meet for one morning each week, with our boys rolling then crawling or bottom-shuffling at our feet, and our sole aim was to make some forward progress, no matter how small. This proved key, as it meant we felt we were gaining ground no matter how incremental, and success is a great driver of enthusiasm. New mother/writers take note.
It took a while to finish, mind. Joel was four months old when we started, and the call to say the book had found a home came on the morning of his third birthday. Anna was 18 days old, and I had a birthday party to host. That slim volume (20,000 words) was released exactly a year later, edits being done when the children had their afternoon nap, proof that it is possible to write around the edges, just be patient through those times when Life intervenes. Karina Has Down Syndrome was first published by Southern Cross University Press, Australia, and later by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, U.K. and Paidos, Spain. It was short-listed for the 1998 Premier’s Book Awards for Western Australia.
Just like farming, where we have had to diversify in order to remain productive, I was learning that forms of writing other than journalism might be my way forward. Be open, be flexible, and don’t be too hard on yourself, would be my advice now to that younger self.
Short stories seemed the most manageable option, but I had to learn the craft. As a journalist, believe it or not, I had stuck to the facts. Fiction seemed a bit scary, at first, but it soon became obvious that it also offered tremendous freedom. Writers of fiction make stuff up. How cool is that! The trick is to make it believable.
Hence, I tuned in to my surroundings here in the beautiful Swan Valley, outside Perth, in Western Australia, an area of red loams and endless blue skies, renowned for its vineyards and wineries.
Another confession—I once killed a woman in a wine cellar. Recently, I remarked as much, quietly of course, to a friend as we walked past aged oak barrels lining that very same cellar en route to a book launch for Perth writer Sally Scott’s debut crime romp Fromage. The mingling bouquet of muscat and damp took me back to the fun I’d had writing “Wine and Ice” (EQMM March/April 2013), also borrowing the tall Norfolk Island Pines and flamboyant mauve jacarandas from that same winery’s grounds for the story’s setting.
As writers, we must tap into what’s on hand. I’ve plotted murder while pruning grapes and also when picking oranges—there is something about physical work that frees the mind to wander, an excellent technique for moving forward a plot.
I’ve donged an unpopular local (“Cold War” EQMM September/October 2011) with a lump of ice that fell off an airplane and landed between our rows of chardonnay. The flight path into Perth airport crosses our farm and the ice lump this was based on was actually discovered by my husband, on a hot summer’s day. I gave thanks that he’d not been donged, obviously, besides there’s a copy of Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” in this house and I wasn’t sure what the police might make of that.
And now, the winds of change are stirring again. Writing submissions to oppose developments threatening the viability and ambience of the rural zone where we live, and the environment, have shifted to the head of the queue vying for my writing time. This is so annoying! With good governance it would be unnecessary. But all that time spent presenting fiction as fact has sharpened my focus for double speak and greenwash in a press release. Sadly, there is such a lot of fluff about.
Given my whinge here about the difficulties of writing short stories around the edges of a busy life, you will understand that I had never considered attempting a longer work. It would take energy. I didn’t think I’d have the stamina.
Then Life pitched another opportunity, one too good to let slip through to the keeper.
For all the years and more that I’d been inventing short mysteries, my old school friend Jennifer Durrant had been attempting to solve a real-life mystery of her own. For decades she’d been trying to find out more about her (now late) mother Marjorie’s true identity. Despite their extremely close mother-daughter relationship, Marjorie had always been reluctant to speak about her past. Nor were there ever any visitors from her relatives to their family home, just up the road from where I am writing this now.
This puzzle had been bubbling away at the edge of my consciousness for all the time I have shared with you here. Being a sucker for a mystery, and with some experience of genealogy, I too was drawn in, thinking it would take maybe six months to crack. Hah!
Like all good mysteries, Jennifer’s search combined red herrings, strong characters, lost opportunities, even hard science. These elements might be fun to play with in a piece of fiction, but proved frustrating in trying to solve her real-life puzzle.
At the lowest point, Jennifer admitted she’d accepted she would never find what she needed to know. She was 60. As the friend who’d jumped on board so confident of a result, I felt as useless as an ash tray on a motorbike. Then, like a line of dominos, in May 2018, the pieces suddenly began to fall into place and Jennifer had many of the answers to questions she’d been asking for so long.
Many who heard Jennifer’s story were adamant that it needed to be written. But in 2018, those close to the heart of it were still trying to process a vast quantity of new and unexpected information, after years of virtually nothing. It was all much too raw to touch.
Two years on, however, that landscape had changed. Then there was Covid. We closed the gate on citrus sales from home, streamlining sales through local Swan Valley fresh produce outlets instead. Both children had left home. So when Jennifer called and asked if I’d help tell her story, the writer inside me was ripe for the picking.
Helping shape Jennifer and Marjorie’s story has without doubt been the most exhilarating writing experience of my life. We knocked out 78,000 words in six months, hosting a family wedding at home in a glammed up hay shed, smack bang in the middle of it. All that writing around the edges had been worth it. As a writer, for once I felt match fit.
And all that sweat, creating mysteries in the short form and reading how others manage the craft, undoubtedly affected the approach I took to this much longer work. It imbued my writing with a confidence I very rarely feel—that sometimes comes later, once a piece has been honed and tweaked over and over again. Sometimes never.
The best bit is that a publisher likes the story, too, and in 2022 Jennifer will get to share her long and ultimately triumphant journey with others. Finding Marjorie King—a Daughter’s Journey to Discover Her Mother’s Identity is due for release in March. We know it will inspire readers to never, never give up on a personal quest.
Which brings me back to the beginning. Writing is not always easy, and it is only by doing it that we get better at it. We need to be brave. If the aspiring writer addressed at the start of this piece is still reading, don’t be afraid of failure, embrace it. Learn from your mistakes. Fake it ‘til you make it, and you will. It will be worth it.
I am so grateful that in 1979 Perth’s Countryman magazine took a chance on me as their new cadet, one who had an awful lot to learn, because now I know where that led. Writing has taken me into the heart of this amazing country, through the cobbled alleyways of London, to ballroom dancing comps at a holiday centre in North Wales, and to the hallowed halls of Cambridge. Such a rich source of settings to choose from when the crim inside my head starts to stir, and I feel the urge to pop someone off.
Iowa writer Karen Jobst is a poet whose work has appeared in various literary magazines. Her first published fiction, “Into Thin Air,” appears in our current issue (January/February 2022), in the Department of First Stories. It’s the story of a crime and subsequent flight. A flight story has, by necessity, a number of different settings, so it is appropriate that the author has chosen to write about the importance of setting in this post. —Janet Hutchings
Two pieces of literature I have never forgotten over the years are the poem, “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, and the short story, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. When I look back at them, one of the first things I remember is setting, from an ember-lit chamber to a sunny town square. From sedate to convivial, setting was the bedrock in these mysteries that paved the way for my full attention.
I was around twelve-years old when my mother put a book of poetry on the coffee table with a few pages she’d check-marked in the upper right hand corner as her favorites—of course one of those was “The Raven.” I loved to read, but at twelve, poetry wasn’t on my radar and probably never would be if it weren’t for that slim book of poems always staring me in the face whenever I sat down on the sofa.
A few times I would pick it up and leaf through it, bored out of my mind—the check mark didn’t help any—until one day, my mother pointed out two poems to me, one which isn’t relevant here, titled “Trees” which was beautiful in its own right, but all trees and no mystery was not enough to rewire my lack of interest. And the other one—something I hadn’t read the likes of in all of my Nancy Drew days: “The Raven.”
The first stanza of “The Raven” poured out loneliness as the following stanzas transformed the poem into an eerie mystery. There was no chase, no murder and no change of scenery like in my Nancy Drew books. Nancy was constantly traveling all over the terrain following clues to a mystery that kept me glued to the pages. What struck me about this weird and mesmerizing poem is that it took place in one room with a fireplace, a door that opened into the night and a window. Through that window, after all the rapping, a sullen and mysterious raven made its entrance. The narrator’s safe haven had changed and would never be the same again as the bird came to rest on a bust above the door and is still there. A room filled with drowsy atmosphere and the intrusion of a mysterious bird, its origin unknown, kept me reading.
The wording of “The Raven,” for me, was difficult to get through, but the setting laid all the groundwork in increasing my dread until the end.
A few years later, in my tenth grade American Lit class I was introduced to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” To this day, I can’t remember another story I read in that thick, required reading book except for Jackson’s. Right away, setting introduced itself and never left—a friendly town square between the post office and the bank where a crowd gathered for an event that looked to be as light and airy as the June day itself. There was a pile of rocks nearby some boys were guarding, but oh well—it’s the town square. What’s the big deal about a pile of rocks? Maybe they were going to build something.
As the crowd grew, they seemed to be at home in the square. Little did I realize a group of men, women and children along with their smiles and friendly conversations was leading me into a wicked mystery?
Then the black box arrived with the three-legged stool it sat on. Their entrance was a tradition, and traditions are part of life. Besides, it was all happening in a seemingly peaceful setting and in front of the whole town, presided over by the same guy who did the square dances, the teen club and the Halloween program. I wasn’t worried—not yet.
The box is opened and the papers inside stirred up. As the head of each family waited their turn to take out a slip, the atmosphere is flipped upside down. The sunny town square wasn’t so sunny anymore. Setting beckoned the mystery to come center stage and hold its characters captive. And it did. Everyone had become a prisoner in the square, waiting until that one person opened his or her slip of paper with the black dot that no one wanted.
Toward the end of “The Lottery,” I had almost forgotten about the inherent pile of rocks slipped into the story earlier, that the townspeople would need and used to end a woman’s life—all in the name of tradition.
From a lonely chamber to a crowded town square, setting was what kept me tethered to the story. Without it, “The Raven,” and “The Lottery” would have evaporated in my mind with all the other mysteries I read and cannot recall.
Nevermoreunderestimate the power of a cozy chamber at midnight and a raven—or a town square in the morning and a black box.
SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN 