SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

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.

Start with him. Archie Marlowe can wait.

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.

Nevermore underestimate the power of a cozy chamber at midnight and a raven—or a town square in the morning and a black box.

From our family to yours, wishing a happy and healthful 2022 to all. Stick with us for another year of mystery fiction.

Wishing you a happy, healthy, and warm holiday with just the right amount of mystery.

It’s not often that we see the topic of sports mysteries on this blog, and this time we’ve got one from a former professional athlete. Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional, and then coached high school football for five years. These days, he tells us, he’s traded in the pigskin for a laptop. His first novel, Don’t Know Tough, won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and will be published by Soho Press in 2022. Eli also writes a nationally syndicated sports column. Who better to explain why sports provide such good material for mystery fiction?  —Janet Hutchings

I’ve devoted the greater part of my life to two wildly disparate obsessions: American football and books.

I scored my first touchdown at nine. Played quarterback in high school, college, and even one season overseas. Then I came home and coached for five years. Throughout that time, my appetite for reading never waned. I also somehow managed to write in what little downtime I had between practices, games, and offseason workouts. As a college quarterback, I penned short stories on the bus to games in Georgia and Mississippi. As a coach, I made a daily ritual of writing in my journal, scrawling away at the pain and the pressure, trying to figure out how I could help all the young men who’d been entrusted to me.

And then, at the ripe age of twenty-nine—exactly twenty years after I scored that first touchdown on a rainy afternoon in Perryville, Arkansas, exactly twenty seasons later, seasons that had taken me to Boca Raton, Florida, and Karlstad, Sweden—I got out.

I quit. I retired. I’m not sure what the right word is, but I hung up my whistle, walked away from the field, and never looked back.

Okay. Wait. That’s not completely true.

I’ve never gone back to coaching, but I have, almost obsessively, tried to write about my time spent on the gridiron. I’ve written short stories, essays, even a few failed novels, but for whatever reason, I never could boil all the pain, violence, bravado and pageantry into the proper readerly stew. That is, until I stumbled upon the “mystery” genre.

I cut my teeth on gritty Southern literature. Think Larry Brown, Flannery O’Conner, Harry Crews. For years, I tried writing my football stories in the same vein, but something didn’t click. Something was missing. And that something was the mystery.

All sports, if you really think about it, are mysterious. Drop a football and there’s no telling which way it’ll bounce. That’s what draws us to the game, the promise of winners and losers. That’s why the games are played. We don’t know how they’re going to end. There’s an inherent mystery to every contest.

There are other reasons athletics are a good backdrop for mystery novels, one of which is the setting. The stadium or the arena. The locker room. The team. These tightly woven subcultures are perfect for mysteries. All the suspects are there already, trapped inside an enclosed space, all eyes on the scoreboard while blood is shed beneath the bleachers.

I am by no means the first one to come to this conclusion. Peter Lovesey hit on this same idea by setting Wobble To Death, the first novel in his Sergeant Cribb series, at a sporting event. A six-day, 500-mile, speed-walking race, to be exact. It’s an amazingly apt setting because the suspects are all trapped at the event. They’re literally sleeping (barely) in tents around the track! Sports venues open all sorts of opportunities for locked-room mysteries. The wide world of sports isn’t short on motives, either.

Teams are like families but without the blood to bind them. Teams work together. They live and eat together, and of course, they fight. Jealousies abound! Teammates vying for the same position, ready and willing to do whatever they can to win the top spot. With all this competition, there’s always some bad blood.

Megan Abbott is the queen of bad blood. Time and again she expertly weaves athletics into a cohesive, suspenseful narrative. She’s tackled competitive cheerleading, gymnastics, and ballet, in her latest novel, The Turnout. I had a chance to sit down with Megan a few months back and ask her why she continued to return to the world of athletics in her prose. Here’s what she had to say:

“My brother was a really good athlete. I grew up in a household where I would get dragged along to the Little League games and everything. But I never had any capacity to control my body, so I find it all really exotic. I like subcultures of any kind. I think physical ones are more suited to writing because you get to paint a whole world.”

There’s one part that stands out to me in there, and that’s “paint a whole world.” If I were a better interviewer, I would’ve asked Megan to expound upon this, but instead I moved onto the mannequin hand she had sitting on her desk (which was, of course, rather hard to ignore). But what did she mean? Why does an author get to “paint a whole world” when sports/athletics/physicality are involved?

The best answer I can come up with is because sports involve fanaticism. Think “Cheeseheads” and tailgates and bookies with big bucks on the line. In the South, where I’m from, college football is bigger than Jesus.

Now, nobody will admit this, of course, but it’s true. There are far more people in those gargantuan stadiums on Saturdays than in the pews on Sunday mornings. More money is spent at the concession stands than is left in the collection plates. And the only difference between preachers and coaches is that college coaches are multi-millionaires.

The proof, as we like to say down here, is in the pudding. Sports are the biggest thing going in the South. And it’s not just football. Parents of tee-ballers get into fistfights after games. Moms empty their savings account just to pay for their daughters’ gymnastics lessons. It’s all so desperate. That’s what it is. People clinging to something and trying to make it something it’s not. Trying to make it bigger. A father pushing his son to be better than he was, pushing him so hard the kid snaps.

Sport breeds an appetite like none other, and then displays it on courts and fields all across the world. But what happens when that red-hot desire bleeds over? Well, my friends, that’s where the story—the mystery—begins.

R. T. Raichev is one of EQMM’s regular contributors of short-story length classical mysteries—though they always have a modern edge! His story “To Slay a Stranger” appeared in our September/October 2021 issue and we have more of his stories coming up in 2022. A scholar of the mystery as well, he also contributes regularly to this site. This time, he compares the handling of a common plot element in two stories published many years apart in EQMM. —Janet Hutchings

Consider the fate of the corpus delicti in detective fiction.

In Agatha Christie’s play The Spider’s Web*, Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, after stumbling on Oliver Costello lying dead in her drawing room, asks her three loyal friends to take the body to the nearby Marsden Wood. Clarissa then prepares a bridge-playing alibi for all four of them. In Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley Under Water, the obnoxious Pritchard, intent on incriminating Tom Ripley, dumps the sack containing Murchison’s mortal remains on Ripley’s doorstep, then calls the police. Ripley quickly retaliates by dropping the sack in the pool outside Pritchard’s house. In Dorothy L. Sayers’s short story “The Man With the Copper Fingers” actress Maria Morano is killed by her jealous lover who then covers her body in copper and turns it into a statue gracing a sofa. Similar treatment lies in store for the young man suspected of having had an affair with Maria but at the eleventh hour the killer is prevented from duplicating the outrage.

These, of course, are examples of deviation from orthodoxy—the norm being for the body to be discovered where it fell, patiently awaiting forensic attention.

But what about those murder mysteries in which a person is made to disappear without a trace? This is the subject of John Dickson Carr’s short story “The House at Goblin’s Wood” and Boris Akunin’s “Table Talk, 1882.”

Carr’s story was first published in EQMM in 1947, and later in the collection The Third Bullet (UK, Hamish Hamilton, 1954). Like most of his other short stories, it is a compressed version of his particular speciality, the full-length “sealed-chamber” mystery—and as Julian Symons puts it in his study of the genre Bloody Murder—it “benefits for the compression.”**

Twenty years prior to the events described in the story, a young girl, Vicky Adams, the daughter of wealthy parents and supposedly “fey,” vanishes from her room in an isolated cottage on the edge of Goblin Wood, despite the doors being locked and bolted from the inside. When she re-appears a week later, she insists that she was spirited away, literally, that she has the power to de-materialize and that she had been living with faeries.

Back in the present Vicky’s cousin Eve persuades seasoned criminologist Sir Henry Merrivale to join a picnic party consisting of Eve, her fiancé Bill, and Vicky, and the three drive to Goblin Wood. Vicky gives every impression of being a shameless exhibitionist or at best delusional—but she contrives to disappear again—this time, it seems, for good.

Only she doesn’t. Sir Henry deduces that Vicky is dead, she’s been killed by Bill—at Eve’s instigation. The motive is money—as her closest living relative Eve will inherit Vicky’s fortune.

Bill—a surgeon—killed Vicky while she was showing him round the cottage, he then dismembered her body in the bathroom, packaging each part in squares of oilskin, which he then sewed up. The grisly parcels he fitted inside the “three good-sized wickerwork hampers with lids”—having taken out the picnic crockery first. The hampers were carried to Bill’s car and Sir Henry was one of the carriers—which gives us the story’s memorable last line: “I’ll always wonder if I was carrying the head.”

Most readers—and critics—rightly consider the story to be Carr’s best. (I also like the intricate simplicity of “The Incautious Burglar.”) It is certainly the one that stays in the imagination the longest. The plot is cleverly constructed according to the strictures of “fair play,” with ambiguities and misdirections set up from the very start. On page one, for example, Bill and Eve—both of whom are presented as nice and likable—are boldly referred to as “conspirators.” The reader takes that to mean that they conspire to persuade Sir Henry to expose Vicky as a “faker”—indeed, that is the explanation Eve gives. Their true intention, however, is to make Sir Henry their patsy, to use him as a reliable witness to Vicky’s “vanishing.” As Sir Henry puts it:

“I was on the alert for some trick Vicky Adams might play. So it never occurred to me that this elegant pair of beauties . . . were deliberately conspirin’ to murder her.”

On page two we see Sir Henry emerging from his club, stepping on a banana skin, slipping and falling, looking rather foolish—a delightful instance of a metaphor presented literally. It foreshadows the picnic invitation which Sir Henry receives moments later—it is in the course of the picnic that Sir Henry is to be made a fool of.

A lot of attention is given not only to Vicky Adams’s self-proclaimed power to “de-materialize” and her past disappearance which lasted a week—but also to her “inordinate sex-appeal” and the flagrant way in which she flirts with Bill. The result is that we are persuaded to focus on Vicky—to watch her carefully and try to work out what exactly she is up to—and our attention is diverted from the two killers and their murderous scheme.

The story’s title—“The House in Goblin Wood”—evokes a sinister, fairy-tale-like atmosphere, with more than a hint of the supernatural. Carr’s quality of “queer suggestiveness” (phrase coined by Dorothy L. Sayers in relation to Carr’s novel The Eight of Swords) is very much in evidence here. Goblin Wood is described as a “ten-acre gloom,” which around the time of the murder becomes “blurred with twilight.” Carr liked to play with the uncanny, though there is a rational explanation for every strangeness in the story, including Vicky’s previous disappearance. Early in the proceedings Sir Henry discovers the “trick window” through which, as a little girl, she managed to get out of the house. The house, we learn, used to be the hideout of a notorious gangster, the “swellest of the swell mob.” It was he who had the trick window put in. Sir Henry also rightly divines that Vicky’s disembodied voice that haunts and taunts him in the wake of her disappearance is in fact the voice of Eve: The two girls are cousins and their voices are similar.

It goes without saying that the story should be read as an intellectual conundrum and not as a credible blueprint for real murder. Carr’s trickery is rivetingly ingenious rather than plausible and some serious suspension of disbelief is needed when it comes to the denouement.

The reader is meant to accept that forty-five minutes are enough—we are given the exact time frame—for Bill, no matter how skillful a surgeon and with a bag full of sharp instruments at his disposal, to stab Vicky, undress her, dismember her body, wrap the parts in oilskin, sew up each piece with coarse thread to prevent blood from dripping and then store the parcels away in the picnic hampers—while Sir Henry and Eve lounge in deck chairs on the lawn outside. (We are told that Vicky is small of stature—which clearly will facilitate her disposal—still!)

What if Sir Henry had needed to pop into the bathroom? Would Eve have managed to deter the seasoned criminologist without causing him to become suspicious? What if Sir Henry had happened to notice something amiss about the hamper he was carrying and decided to glance inside? As this is a carefully premeditated murder and not a spur-of-the-moment one, some readers may be tempted to argue that killers who depend so much on chance are in the wrong profession.

When Sir Henry examines the bathroom the only detail that strikes him as odd is the bath tap “dripping in a house that hadn’t been occupied for months.” The bath tap is one of three physical clues—the other two being an unused piece of waterproof oilskin he stumbles across in the corridor and the discarded crockery that used to be in the picnic hampers—which allow him to reconstruct the killer’s actions. In addition to the psychological clue of Bill and Eve at various points looking scared—Sir Henry does wonder about it—but would that have been enough for him to solve the mystery?

Credibility is further strained by the fact that Bill should have been able to butcher Vicky and clear up the mess—and a lot of mess there was bound to be—without leaving a single incriminating drop of blood or a profusion of wetness in his wake. What about his clothes? No change of clothing is ever mentioned. Surely, it would have been impossible for him to avoid Vicky’s blood staining his clothes, yet we are only informed that Bill’s hair, his sports coat and flannels were “more than a little dirty”—which is attributed to the fact that he went picking, at Vicky’s request, wild strawberries in the forest. The wild strawberries are Bill’s alibi. Perhaps he stripped off his clothes while disposing of Vicky’s body, but if so, Sir Henry doesn’t think the possibility worth mentioning.

We find a very similar situation in Boris Akunin’s “Table Talk, 1882,” a short story originally written in Russian, its English translation first published in EQMM in 2003. It was later included in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Best International Crime (UK, Robinson, 2009).

Akunin is famous for his historical crime novels chronicling the detective exploits of Erast Petrovich Fandorin. In “Table Talk,” Fandorin is the guest of honor gracing a great lady’s salon. Indeed, he is described as “maddeningly attractive.” On a more mundane note we learn that he has served in the office of Moscow’s Governor-General as an “officer for special missions.”

The story reads as a Golden Age pastiche, its format bringing to mind Agatha Christie’s The Thirteen Problems: a group of well-heeled people relating tales of unsolved mysteries as after-dinner entertainment—each propounding a theory—with Fandorin in the omniscient Miss Marple seat.

The conundrum under discussion concerns the mysterious disappearance of “poor Polinka Karakina,” daughter of the “fabulously wealthy” Prince Lev Livovich, from their isolated wooded estate outside Moscow. Polinka is one of a set of twins—she and her sister Anyuta look identical—but for a birthmark on Anyuta’s face. The two young women—both princesses in their own right—are “far from being horrors” but their main attraction is their “dowry of millions.” Even though there are enough willing suitors, the old prince is irrationally strict, keeping his daughters virtual prisoners in their country house.

The prince makes the fatal mistake of commissioning a young French architect, a M. Renar, to build a belvedere in his park. Predictably, the daughters—now at the dangerous age of 28—fall in love with Renar. It is  the blemish-free Polinka he sets his cap at—she is also the one “far less settled into old-maidish ways.” An “idyll” follows, but that is terminated soon enough when jealous Anyuta discovers her sister and Renar in flagrante delicto and informs their father. The prince orders the Frenchman out while Polinka is sent to her room with her sister acting as jailer.

It is on the following morning, after Renar is hauled off to the railway station in a farm cart, that “marvels began to occur.” Anyuta—she of the unseemly birth mark—is found alone in the bedroom, in a catatonic-like state, as if in the deepest sleep. There is no trace of Polinka. Anyuta eventually recovers and claims to know nothing about her sister’s disappearance.

The initial theory is that Polinka has run away, that she has followed her lover—having given her meddlesome sister “something nasty” to drink which caused her to suffer a “nervous disorder.”  However, it is established beyond doubt that she couldn’t have left the estate. There was no trunk among the Frenchman’s luggage, in which she could have stowed herself away—all he carried were “some small suitcases, some bundles, a couple of hat boxes.” The park is surrounded by a high stone wall, there was a guard at the gate and the police find no evidence to suggest the guard had been bribed.

The old prince has an apoplectic stroke and dies. Anyuta, now sole heir to the Karakin fortune, abandons the estate and goes “to the very ends of the earth”—in fact, to Brazil. She settles down in Rio de Janeiro, having arranged for regular sums of money to be sent to her by the estate manager . . .

It doesn’t take Fandorin too long to work out what happened. (Nor should the perspicacious reader be baffled for long.) He calls it “one of the most monstrous crimes of passion about which I have ever had occasion to hear . . . it is a murder of the very worst, Cain-like sort.” He puts it rather picturesquely thus:

“There is no beast in this world more dangerous than a woman deprived of her beloved!”

It is in fact pretty Polinka who killed tarnished Anyuta, not the other way round. Polinka dragged her sister’s body into the bathroom, stripped off her own clothing as well as her sister’s, then cut Anyuta “into bits”—with a bread knife—and washed the blood away down the drain. The “dismembered flesh” left the estate in the various small cases and hat boxes belonging to M. Renar, who of course was Polinka’s collaborator. During the night there was an “evil ferrying” of the victim’s remains—she passed them over to him through the window—in “some kind of vessel.” Using black makeup Polinka then drew a birth mark on her face and passed herself off as her twin sister. Fandorin also suspects that Polinka poisoned her father, that she committed sororicide as well as patricide. Fandorin is positive that Polinka and the Renar are now living in Brazil . . .

According to the tenth commandment of Father Ronald Knox’s 1939 Detective-Story Decalogue, “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” Well, readers are prepared for the twins, that is not the problem here. The problem—as I see it—is that the evil-twin trope is employed a little too bluntly, without much variation.***

The story is entertaining, but it’s guessable. The very first mention of twins sets alarm bells ringing—we expect some kind of twin-related hocus-pocus—and we get it. We think, no, can’t be, there must be a ruse of some sort—but we are proven wrong. Add to this the detail of the naked princess with the bread knife in the bathroom—as one would say in Cluedo—and eyebrows may be further raised. (At least Bill in the Carr was a qualified surgeon and had his instruments with him.)

The story is translated into the kind of flowery, often rarefied kind of  English which smacks of a literal translation from the Russian.  (Unless that was the translator’s intention?) Consequently we are treated to phrases like “nabob of Hindi” instead of Indian nabob—“besotted by love” (besotted would have been enough)—“gentle-lady” instead of gentlewoman, and so on.  We are also told that “a good story is never hurt by adding a little pepper, as the English say,” when the expression the English use is “to add a little salt.”

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*Make sure you read the Agatha Christie play, not Charles Osborne’s over-faithful, over-reverent novelization which suffers from that curiously stilted kind of writing that suggests a detailed synopsis.

**The story is 11 pages long. At the conclusion of Carr’s novel The Hollow Man the elucidation of the mystery alone takes 20 pages. It is often referred to as “Gideon Fell’s celebrated locked-room lecture” — but some readers do find such technical pontificating tedious.

***Think of Michael Innes who defied the no-twins rule by introducing triplets into Night of Errors, his 1947 novel. That may be over-doing it a bit.

Andrew Welsh-Huggins is a reporter covering criminal-justice issues for The Associated Press in Columbus, Ohio. He is also the author of seven mystery novels featuring P.I. Andy Hayes. It’s a series Publishers Weekly has called “Intriguing,” but writing any series creates challenges, and Andrew discusses one of them here.  —Janet Hutchings

 Early in my new novel, An Empty Grave, my lead character—Columbus, Ohio, private eye Andy Hayes—is having a beer with a friend as he debates the logistics of letting his younger son live with him on a more permanent basis. It would be a big change from Andy’s current custodial arrangement with his ex-wife—ex-wife No. 2, if we’re counting, which for the purpose of this essay we must—and he’s worried whether it will work. “It’s the whole girlfriend problem,” Andy laments. “Late-night stakeouts are just as bad for child-raising as they are for romance.” He should know—or at least thinks he does.

After all, when my series opened, in Fourth Down and Out, Andy had two divorces and a broken engagement under his belt, along with a string of other, semi-disastrous relationships. By this point, his love life was reduced to a strictly-on-Sundays-only triste with a local judge in her condo, the unorthodox conditions dictated by her and not subject to negotiation. “Bodyguard with benefits,” Andy dubs it, referring to the job that initially brought them together. By the end of that first book, he’s met someone new, a college professor named Anne Cooper. They stay together for three more volumes, until Andy’s chaotic life drives them apart. Some readers still think they should be together.

And why not? Because if there’s one question I receive more than almost any other (after, of course, the perennial “Where do you get your ideas?”), it’s, “Will Andy ever have a steady girlfriend?” It’s a query I think about a lot, since these days the lone wolf private eye trope is both common and, frankly, a bit overdone. Why shouldn’t Andy hook up for good? Or as I like to put it: “To Girlfriend, or Not To Girlfriend, That Is The Question.” But as mystery fiction shows us, there’s not always an easy answer when it comes to detectives and significant others.

Starting near the beginning, Sherlock Holmes isn’t much help. He admires his rival, Irene Adler, an American and a former opera singer, acknowledging that she’s one of the few people to ever best him—and the only woman. But Arthur Conan Doyle makes it clear there’s nothing else there to see there. “It was not that [Holmes] felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler,” Doyle’s Watson writes in A Scandal in Bohemia. “All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.”  

For a long time, private eyes with steady partners were rare enough that it was considered remarkable when Brock “The Rock” Callahan, the Los Angeles private eye created by author William Campbell Gault, not only had a regular girlfriend in Jan, an interior designer, but married her in 1982’s The Bad Samaritan. (My character might take a lesson from Callahan, who, fictionally at least, was also a former pro football player, in this case with the Los Angeles Rams). More typical of the genre was John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, the self-proclaimed “salvage consultant” (and yet another former pro football player—for the Detroit Lions—turned investigator), who jumps from bed to bed throughout the twenty-one McGee books. “I had sure cut myself a wide swath through a wall of female flesh,” McGee notes in Free Fall In Crimson.

For his part, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe took an appropriately tough-guy attitude toward women. “I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin,” he says in Farewell, My Lovely. The only time he sleeps with a woman in print is at the end of The Long Goodbye, when he goes to bed with heiress Linda Loring. Ultimately, Chandler chose to marry the couple off, with Loring proposing to Marlowe in Playback, Chandler’s last finished novel. Poodle Springs, an unfinished Chandler manuscript completed by novelist Robert B. Parker, opens with the two of them married. For all that, it’s clear that Marlowe conducts most of his career as a loner.   

Speaking of Parker, his iconic Boston private eye Spenser bucks the single guy trend by spending the series romantically attached to psychologist Susan Silverman. Fictionally, the relationship works because both are solitary sorts who live on their own and don’t have children, although Spenser takes on an unofficial foster son named Paul Giacomin. Spenser and Susan also share custody, so to speak, of a succession of German Shorthaired Pointers named Pearl. Parker deserves credit for keeping Spenser, the quintessential tough nut, in a more or less monogamous relationship. But he also holds the pair at arm’s length compared to a traditional coupling, since it’s not as if you see them haggling over bill paying and whose turn it is to take out the garbage.

Juniper Song, Steph Cha’s Los Angeles-based amateur sleuth turned private investigator, frequently channels Marlowe as her inspiration. And even though Song appears to be headed for a semi-stable relationship at the end of Dead Soon Enough, her reflections on the impact that her professional life has on the ability to form relationships captures the tension so many fictional private eyes face.

It turned out that the events in my life that formed me into a good detective had also hardened the softer parts of my person, the parts that could start to trust and adore in a way that overwhelmed suspicion. I felt like one of those TV cliches, the lonely hero who finds truths and changes fortunes and ends the day in a quiet home with a drinking problem for company. Of course, those heroes were men almost by definition.

Another Los Angeles investigator, Easy Rawlins, the off-the-books hard-luck investigator created by Walter Mosley, experiences more than his share of romantic encounters even as he yearns for a long-time relationship. He marries and has a daughter, but his wife leaves him and takes their child to the South. For a while he focuses on raising his adopted son, Jesus, and daughter, Feather—“my beautiful patchwork family,” as he calls them—along with live-in girlfriend Bonnie Shay, an Air France flight attendant. Nevertheless, Easy’s demons run deep, and Bonnie’s liaison with an African prince weighs heavily on him. Whether Bonnie actually cheated is an open question, but the dilemma is too much for Easy even as Bonnie flies to Europe in Cinnamon Kiss to find medical treatment with the prince’s help for the terminally ill Feather. Easy himself strays twice while they’re away, but in the end decides to move on. “‘It’s not either me or him,’ I told the love of my life,” Rawlins says at the novel’s painful conclusion. “‘It’s either me or not me.’” (Later in the series, however, Easy has a change of heart and even proposes to Bonnie.)

Matt Scudder, Lawrence Block’s unlicensed New York private investigator, has a semi-permanent attachment with former call girl Elaine Mardell and eventually moves in with her. But he also takes up with another, considerably younger woman named Lisa Holtzmann. “I suppose it wasn’t much of a stretch to say she was like a drug or a drink to me,” Scudder says in A Long Line of Dead Men. “I’d thought fleetingly of calling the liquor store, reached for the phone, and called her instead.” Sara Paretsky’s Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski divorced after two years of marriage, and while she has a number of romantic relationships through the series, never settles down. As a Chicago Public Library blog post noted, Warshawski is “a complex woman with a law degree from the University of Chicago, a pile of dishes in her sink and the occasional man in her bed.” At least that’s better than Amos Walker, Loren Estleman’s tough-as-rivets Detroit private eye, a divorced Vietnam vet who apparently left romance behind for good after his split, the settlement of which looms large mainly because it ruined his collection of early rock and jazz records. “I could do without the depression playing one would bring on,” Walker says in Motor City Blue, which opens the series.

If Andy has a counterpart in complicated relationships, it might be Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s private eye working in and around fictional Santa Teresa, California. In comparison to Andy’s two ex-wives and periodic girlfriends, Millhone had two ex-husbands and plenty of relationships throughout the long series, including with fellow private eye Robert Dietz. But nothing ever seems to take for good. In R is for Ricochet, Millhone confesses that she understands men less and less the older she gets, and for that reason tends to shy away from them: “I’ve learned the hard way that love and work are a questionable mix.”

So, what’s the issue here? Why can’t fictional private eyes—or literary police detectives for that matter—have long-term relationships like the rest of us? Is stability within the pages of a book too much to ask? Are the ties that bind really so boring? Turns out they may well be, at least when it comes to storytelling. Because let’s face it: one reason for keeping investigators solitary—or at least constantly looking—is that solitude provides both entertainment and plot points. Personal baggage can get tiresome in real life but portrayed well it can enliven a fictional narrative at just the right points, from an ill-timed liaison to an angry confrontation that shakes loose a clue. Which, it goes without saying, is the difference between novels and real life. Most actual private eyes are unlikely to be beaten up, shot at, or chased down mean streets with anything close to the frequency of their fictional counterparts. They’re similarly likely to have regular girlfriends, longtime partners, or beloved spouses they go home to at the end of a hard day conducting online background checks or occasional surveillance jobs. Novelist and former police officer Colin Conway pointed out this discrepancy in a recent blog post in which he noted that despite the myth of widespread failed marriages among law enforcement personnel, police officers actually have lower divorce rates when compared to other occupations. Or as writer Eve Fisher has suggested, the profusion of modern characters so damaged that they’re unable to love—on the page or on-screen—reflects what she calls “jalapeno culture” or the contemporary tendency to wipe out subtlety in our fiction with sex and violence in the same way we drown perfectly good food with a smothering of jalapenos and melted cheese.

To be fair, some fictional detectives do settle down. Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey had his share of flings as a bachelor—in Busman’s Honeymoon, he declares, “that it is a gentleman’s first duty to remember in the morning who it was he took to bed with him.” But eventually he marries mystery writer Harriet Vane, a woman he considers his intellectual equal, and they have a family together. Louise Penny’s Quebec Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, have a long and happy marriage, as do French detective Jules Maigret and “Madame Maigret,” his wife Louise. Characters in four different series by Louisiana mystery writer O’Neil De Noux, himself both a former homicide detective and private investigator, have long-term relationships, including his 1940s-era private eye Lucien Caye, who started as a loner but becomes a family man. “It’s a lot of fun to write, mixing a sharp private eye with an equally sharp girlfriend and a precocious daughter,” De Noux told me of his Caye series. And, naturally, where would The Thin Man and its cinematic sequels have been without both Nick and Nora Charles?

In the end, from story to story and book to book, I haven’t ruled anything out when it comes to Andy Hayes and romance. He’s going to continue to carry a torch for Anne Cooper, his girlfriend over the course of the first three books—and the first woman he had a functional relationship with after a lifetime of bad boy behavior. He’ll still have a complicated, and occasionally romantic relationship, with Judge Laura Cooper. He’ll likely indulge in a fling or two, for better or worse—usually for worse. But most significantly, he’s going to place his relationship with his two sons and the demands of his job—hopefully in that order—above a monogamous coupling. Perhaps that certain someone is still out there for Andy. Or not. Only time, and maybe a few more chases down mean streets, will tell.

To all our readers, writers, and friends: We are grateful for you and wish you a weekend of warmth and peace.