SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

Drawing on Dostoyevsky and Highsmith, EQMM regular Sheila Kohler returns to our blog to espouse the many benefits that the mystery genre can impart on readers and writers

The mystery story or novel has two main but opposing advantages: its rigid structure and at the same time the freedom it gives both the reader and the author to follow their darker desires. The rigid structure helps the author find the plot, the drama, and the basic conflict perhaps more easily as certain elements are almost prerequisites: an unexplained and violent death for example often lies at the center of the mystery plot and provides the necessary questions to keep the reader turning the pages with interest, eager to discover why and how such an unlikely thing could have happened and who is responsible.

But these elements paradoxically allow the author and thus the reader more freedom to follow dramatic desires: moments of violent hate and anger for example or obsessive love or jealousy, hunger for power, or simply the belief that one is above the law, desires that are not always possible or plausibly expressed in straight fiction. This freedom when fueled by a rich and fecund imagination can lead to great writing and thus great enjoyment by the reader.

Basically, the mystery story at its best provides us with a reassuringly secure structure at the same time as allowing us to follow freely our desires and fears in imagination, desires which we cannot and would not want to fulfill in a moral life. On the page we can sometimes be active, we can live in a world where revenge is possible, where reversal and redemption occur, where injustice is punished, when in life so often we are obliged by a moral code to be passive or worse to be punished or humiliated by the mistakes of others.

An excellent example of both a skillful structure and the freedom required for great writing is the novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here we have a mysterious death given to us from the first sentence juxtaposed by unusual and realistic detail that the writer provides freely and unexpectedly, anchoring us in a precise and original world. All of this of course provokes from the start the initial questions that the reader wants answered and a believable voice which makes the events credible and leads us inexorably to the last page.

            The first sentence here is:

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.”

The coming and unexplained murder as well as the victim’s name is provided in the first line as well as the precise time and the action of the protagonist on this last day of his life, an action which ironically gives us the theme of religion and a hint of our whereabouts: near a river or the sea. There is a boat.

Why will Santiago Nasar be killed? Why is he getting up so early to go and wait for a boat with a bishop? Where are we? And why? A plethora of questions already team in our minds. Who could resist reading on?

This is followed immediately by the flashback to Santiago’s happy dream of gentle rain and his awakening feeling “completely spattered with bird shit.” Marquez, as in all his writing, is a fearless writer using brutal and even coarse language and juxtaposing this with gentle and lyrical description: “He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream. ”

Marquez juxtaposes the secure structure of the coming unexplained death with imaginative, precise, and original detail which create from the first page a voice with authority which leads us onwards into his world.

Another excellent example is from perhaps the greatest mystery novel of all time. We find this duality, which stirs both the reader and the writer in a dramatic plot as well as providing the necessary original, and imaginative details which give authority to the voice on the very first page of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

On the first page of his novel Dostoevsky writes: “I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles,’ he thought with an odd smile.” We are immediately in the mind of this anti-hero. And just a few lines on he wonders: “It’s because I babble that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I babble because I do nothing . . . Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that seriously possible?”

Here of course we wonder immediately what it is this young man wants to attempt. Where is he going? What is he contemplating doing? Here we do not yet know his name (it is Raskolnikov, of course) but we do know from the first page his fears of meeting his landlady on the stairs. We know he needs money desperately and that “ for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition verging on hypochondria.” In other words we have already some of his motivation, his unstable state of mind. To some extent he has already gained our sympathy, too. We are rooting for him: poor, half-deranged we suspect, young and downtrodden. Dostoevsky adds to this the heat in the street, the confusion, “and that special Saint Petersburg stench.” He too like Santiago Nasar is “spattered with shit.” Dostoevsky, too, uses the place, the smells, and above all the intimate voice, the mind of the murderer which we enter so directly and freely and convincingly. We are with him all the way.

My third and last example is from The Talented Mr. Ripley where Patricia Highsmith from the first page grabs us with Tom’s predicament: “Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt the man was after him.” Here too we have from the first line a hint of danger. Tom is being followed and hastens his step. If suspense can be summed up as putting a vulnerable creature in danger we sense that someone is after Tom though we do not know why at this point and we want to know of course. Then Highsmith like Dostoevsky brilliantly enters Tom’s mind and we follow his vacillations: “There was Raoul’s. Should he take a chance and go in for another drink? Tempt fate and all of that? Was this the kind of man they would send after him? They couldn’t give you more than ten years, Tom thought.” Why is Tom so fearful, we want to know? Why would someone follow him? What has he done? Why is he likely to be locked up? We are hooked.

Highsmith does here two things at once: makes us fear for Tom and also question his honesty if he himself fears being locked up for ten years. From the start she manages to interest her reader in Tom, to enter his mind, and suspect at the same time that he might be guilty of a crime. This double jeopardy is maintained all through the novel almost miraculously. She somehow makes us both root for Tom, will he or won’t he be caught? who like Raskolnikov becomes almost inevitably a murderer, someone who kills twice, getting away with his crime with the reader taking part vicariously in his nefarious deeds. All three of these authors know how to use a well-structured plot, putting the protagonist from the first page into sufficient danger (Santiago Nasar we know will be killed; Raskolnikov is plotting murder, and Tom we know has already committed at least a minor crime) At the same time the writer is able to give us sufficient original detail to make the high-stakes game believable: in Chronicle we have incongruously the boat, the bishop, the spattering of shit; in Crime we have the mundane lack of money, the inner monologue, the very realistic uncertainty: “Am I capable of that?” and in Ripley the fear and the unreliability “they couldn’t give you more than ten years” and in all three the use of both the outer and the inner world: the interior monologue and the dream of the endangered protagonists which keeps us reading, on to the bitter end.

In this week’s blog post, Jeff Soloway discusses how a friend’s birdwatching hobby helped inspire his latest story for EQMM, “Birds Are Like Beethoven”

People are always sidling up to us writers with story ideas that demand or cry out to be written, mostly ideas in which they play a starring role. Such types are usually best ignored, especially if they work in sales or M&A and/or their story embodies lucrative business or interpersonal lessons. We get a lot of those. 

More rarely, but more thrillingly, someone steps forward with a genuinely compelling story, one that may not demand to be written, but rather, over time, persuades. Such was the case for my latest in EQMM, “Birds Are Like Beethoven.”

The idea came from my friend Sarah (I’ll call her), whose life story is objectively fascinating. She was brought up by a single mother in East New York, landed a full scholarship to one of the finest and fanciest private schools in Manhattan, attended Stanford, and is now the head of a team investigating allegations of biased policing in New York City. She’s married to an Italian film critic. Their little daughter is named after the heroine of his favorite horror/action movie. 

One day, my wife and I invited Sarah and her family to our apartment. Sarah stepped inside, handed over the girl to her husband, my wife, and my daughter; shooed the trio off to the playground downstairs; accepted a glass of wine from me (the only remaining host); and informed me of the subject of my next story. It would be something not just personal to her but central to her self-conception.

Of course I was interested. This was no M&A blowhard. This was a Black woman who’d studied her way out of poverty and now busted cops accused of racist policing. And now she was about to reveal some hitherto unrevealed facet of her experience. 

What I want you to write about, she said, is birdwatching.

Seriously? I thought.

Now, I love to base my characters on reality. As a crime writer, I’ve been fortunate to befriend a number of usefully intriguing people: strippers, prosecutors, drug dealers, graffiti artists. (One of them liked to paint graffiti while selling drugs—it went about as well as you’d expect.) One of my closet friends was an interpreter for federal drug-trafficking trials. My wife is a former travel writer who now, like Sarah, investigates police misconduct in New York City. 

Why, I gently asked Sarah, the hell should I write about birdwatching? 

I knew birdwatching was her favorite hobby. I had no idea why.

Sarah was prepared for the question. Birders, she explained, are the ultimate natural detectives, being attuned to the tiniest clues in the behavior of tiny animals. From a few chirps, hops, or swoops, birders learn to interpret birdsong, mating behavior, interbird squabbles, and bird psychology, particular signs of fear or distress. Every birder, in short, has to be Sherlock Holmes, since birds themselves are as quiet and secretive as criminals, but much smaller. Also they can fly. Imagine, Sarah invited me, a birder who devoted her patience and sensitivity to the cause of thwarting crime.

Go on, I said. 

She expounded on the dramatic possibilities. Birders spend their days with their eyes lifted to the sky, or to higher tree-branches, or (in Manhattan) to ledges on tall buildings. They carry expensive equipment that could easily be mistaken for weaponry. They often operate at dawn and dusk. The intensity and obscurity of their observation attracts suspicion from civilians.

We gazed through the window down to my apartment complex’s concrete courtyard, where Sarah’s toddler-daughter was frolicking in the playground with my teen-daughter as our spouses looked on, and we talked through possible story scenarios. Afterwards, she lent me a bird book (What the Robin Knows—excellent) to assist with the facts. A few days later, I got started on the story—not the story I had expected to elicit from her, but the story I now urgently wanted to write.

Of course, my friend is more than her favorite pastime. As I puzzled out the story’s plot, my mind fixed not just on the concept of Birdwatching Sherlock but also on other elements I associate with Sarah. I imagined a birder stumbling into a dangerous police misunderstanding, the kind so often investigated by her agency. And as I envisioned how the birder would look and speak, I thought of her as well.

As the story took shape, the birder character remained central, but I decided to make the point-of-view character someone else. I settled on a 12-young-old boy, a non-birdwatcher, who at once loves and (being a 12-year-old boy) is baffled and exasperated by this family friend. A stand-in for the reader, he would be the one asking questions and receiving instruction, about birds but not just birds. This character was perhaps not entirely unlike my son when he was 12. Other details came from my life as well. The setting of the story became the apartment complex that I still Iive in and that Sarah came to visit. The courtyard that features in the story’s climax is where her husband and my wife and daughter took her little girl to play. 

After I finished, I sent Sarah the story. I doubt it was what she expected, but she insisted she liked it—after gently but painstakingly correcting a few of my birdwatching references. Her favorite line in the story became the title.

No one but me could have written the story, but I could never have written it without her. None of us really invents anything anyway.

Anna Scotti reveals the origin of Lori, her “librarian on the run” who has made numerous appearances in EQMM, and discusses how and why this recurring character’s arc differs from those of other famous names in mystery fiction. Be sure to read the latest story featuring Lori in Anna’s latest piece for EQMM, “Traveller From and Antique Land” in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]

Writers dream of creating realistic recurring characters like Kate Atkinson’s troubled, hapless Jackson Brodie or Caleb Carr’s contradictory Laszlo Kreizer, who seem to grow deeper and more complex with each incarnation. Don’t get me wrong—there are still plenty of plot-driven mysteries published in which the clues and reveal take the starring role, while the main character, once established, changes little or not at all—even over the course of a series. That’s called a “flat character arc,” and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, Miss Marple—all remained essentially as depicted in their first adventures. But readers seem to have a growing appetite for more character-driven fare, books that straddle the gap between fast-paced thriller and literary fiction.

Few readers—or critics— still maintain that there is a firm delineation between literary fiction and genre fiction. Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, Sarah Waters and dozens of contemporary cross-genre authors have put that argument to rest, bringing the elements of literature to commercial genres like thriller, mystery, and horror. Sophisticated readers who came of age reading Lawrence Block’s alcoholic Matthew Scudder, say, or Sue Grafton’s damaged, cynical Kinsey Milhone want a complex plot—something to figure out, something to solve—but they also want a three-dimensional protagonist with flaws, someone with real challenges and triumphs. To achieve that truly three-dimensional character—especially within the parameters of short fiction— the character must change, not just over the course of one tale, but over the course of the extended five or ten or twenty-episode story. At the same time, the writer must establish enough about the character to make him or her believable, memorable, and relatable. Add to that the necessity that every installment of a series must be able to stand on its own; the writer cannot assume readers have read the story or stories preceding. There’s a delicate balance to providing enough information that a story works independent of backstory, while limiting repetition for readers who may know the character’s circumstances well. And oh, yeah—don’t forget you’ve got a murder to solve.

I never planned, when writing “That Which We Call Patience” (EQ Nov/Dec 2019) for it to be the start of a series. My parents had moved into an assisted-living facility and I was amazed to realize that it was just like high school—there were the artsy types, the popular group, the outcasts, the mean girls—I knew I had to set a murder amongst these vital, vibrant senior folk.I wrote “Patience” without realizing I would fall in love with the brainy, erudite librarian at the center of the story, but I did, and have been inspired to write about her again and again. 

If you are a writer, or an aspiring writer, take advantage of a lesson I learned the hard way. If you are going to create a recurring character living under aliases, establish his or her name early in the game. I didn’t, and the decision has haunted me. In “Patience,” the librarian was called “Audrey Smith.” In the next installment, “What the Morning Never Suspected” (EQ Sept/Oct 2020) she became “Cam Baker,” but as she kept solving murders, blowing her cover, and being moved to new locations and aliases, she was also known as “Juliette Gregory,” “Serena Dutton,” “Sonia Sutton,” “Dana Kane,” and eventually by her real name, Lorraine Yarborough. When the collection of the first nine stories from EQMM was to be published by Down & Out Books, the editor asked me to write two new stories that had not been previously published. Not wanting to interfere with the ongoing EQ timeline, I wrote a story predating Patience—the character’s first WITSEC adventure—and another explaining how she adopted her pit bull, Lola, who appears in the latest stories in the magazine. The problem? I did not reveal the character’s real name—Lorraine—until the sixth installment. It created an awkward situation—readers often discover episodic stories out of order, and I didn’t want to undermine the very dramatic moment when Lori’s name is finally revealed. So as the series gained popularity and I began to entertain requests for interviews and speaking engagements, there was no good way to refer to my character except as “the librarian on the run” or “the librarian in WITSEC” or as “Cam Baker, but-that’s-not-her-real-name.” That was a problem when we were coming up with book cover blurbs and summaries for potential reviewers, too. So learn from my mistake—if you create a character living under an alias, establish one name early on so you have something consistent to call her!

So, character evolution. Remember back in AP English when Ms. Grundy told you about the four kinds of character arc? We’ve already noted a few iconic “flat” characters—those that, however brilliantly rendered, stay essentially the same from one story to the next, because they are solving crimes in a plot-driven bit of fiction. But character-driven tales must involve a character arc—a look at how the character is being changed by conflict. There’s the moral ascending arc (main character redeems himself!) moral descending (main character descends to the pit!) and the transformational (main character becomes a man!). Transformational arcs are most often found in young adult literature—i.e., the bildungsroman, or “coming of age” story. It’s the other two that concern us as mystery writers and readers—good folks gone wrong, or wrong folks gone good—or some kind of messy mix of the two.

Lori’s story begins long before “Patience,” in which she is seen to be a bright and resourceful young woman who has stumbled into trouble by trusting the wrong man. Lori’s master’s degree, nearly-complete PhD, and plum job at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago have not prevented her from being taken in by a villainous cartel boss who, as it turns out, wasn’t even trying very hard to disguise his true character. That’s right; bright gal falls for charismatic bad man. Who’d have thunk it? That concept worked well for the first few stories, as “Juliette,” and then “Audrey,” struggled with loneliness, disorientation, and the occasional murder, while tossing off Shakespearean bons mots and griping about her low-level jobs and reduced circumstances. Readers liked this “librarian on the run” very much—as did I—but in order to keep those readers engaged, something had to change. No one can live as Lori was living—desperately lonely, fundamentally deceitful—without profound changes to her outlook or even to her character. In the fourth story, Lori develops a massive crush on a dashing police detective who turns out to be very happily married, but she’s able to see the humor in her own chagrin. By the fifth, “A Heaven or a Hell,” our girl has established a friendship with the detective and his wife, though she’s careful not to spend too much time alone with him, noting that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson explained, “we are a puny and fickle folk.” Lori is still Cam at this point, but she has begun to change—she’s wry, a bit sardonic, less apt to rely on her pantheon of philosophers and literary deities for guidance than to trust her own bitter experience.

“A Heaven or a Hell” represented a milestone for both of us, protagonist and author, as the story was selected for inclusion in 2022’s The Best Mystery Stories of the Year (Mysterious Press) and Lori began to get fan mail, sometimes complaining that I’d mixed up some small detail of her existence—where her Piltdown Man tattoo is located, for example, or the genders of her faithful greyhounds. Lori is often found sipping on a beer or a glass of sauvignon blanc to unwind at the end of a long day of wrangling seventh graders or busting killers, but—she’s okay. She dreams of seeing her parents again (they’ve been told that she’s dead) and possibly of finishing that doctorate started so long ago. 

In the “Longest Pleasure” (EQ Nov/Dec 2021) Lori has moved again and is now working as a personal organizer in Venice, California. She starts to take notice of her handsome WITSEC handler, Owen James, flirting madly with him when he’ll allow it. She also gets to know a young man, recently released from prison, who will figure in a future story, and that’s more of the fun of building a fictional world, and another of the pitfalls, too. Because when you successfully construct an alternate reality, a world that doesn’t exist, but could, readers will hold you to the rules. If Dylan’s eyes are chocolate brown in story five, they’d better not be leaf green in story seven. There are a lot of details to keep track of: what exactly was Lori’s PhD dissertation about, and did she live alone, or with a roommate, or with her erstwhile, homicidal love? The author may forget, dashing off descriptions gaily, without thought of keeping an excel spreadsheet open to note details, but readers are ruthless and they will call you on your errors every time.

Lori is, by story six, fed up with living undercover, tired of being uprooted and moved again and again, drinking a bit more than she ought, and just in general ready for a change. It’s mid-pandemic, and when Owen James reveals that Lori’s father has died, she rebels, setting off a chain of disasters that reverberate through all the stories that follow. “It’s Not Even Past,” in addition to being the eponymous sixth story in the Down & Out collection, was selected for inclusion in the 2024 edition of The Best Mystery Stories of the Year (Mysterious Press) and was a finalist for a Derringer Award, the coveted prize given to short mystery fiction writers by their peers each year. So I was on top of the world—but Lori, not so much. By story seven she’s managing a run-down resort in South Carolina, a little out of shape and rather disillusioned with the world. “Into the Silent Land” was recorded by Rabia Chaudry for The Mystery Hour podcast, and even I was a bit surprised by its bleakness; the only bright spot is the growing chemistry between Owen and Lori, though he seems to choose professionalism over romance in the end.

Lori is experiencing a descending character arc. Though she remains fundamentally good, she struggles with incipient alcoholism, depression, and lethargy. In “A New Weariness” (EQ May/June 2024), Lori is forced to realize that the government may never release her from her “protected witness” status. She may never find her happy ending with Owen, she may never see her mother or her dear friends, the detective and his wife, again, and she will probably never finish her degree and reclaim her old persona. She’s no longer pretending to be a woman living in the shadows; she is exactly that. “A New Weariness” carried Lori and me to our third inclusion in Best Mystery Stories of the Year (2025 Mysterious Press) but it was something of a pyrrhic victory, for Lori at least, as the next installment finds her living on the island of Maui, drinking heavily and steadily, using one night stands to stave off her crushing loneliness—and that’s before things fall apart. 

In “Traveller from an Antique Land” (EQ May/June 2025) Lori has essentially hit bottom. She’s living in a homeless encampment on the streets of Los Angeles, no longer a prisoner of the state, but one of her own addiction and depression. But it can’t continue. A character must grow and change in order to stay of interest to readers, and for  Lori, the only direction possible is up. Stay tuned.

When the COVID-19 quarantine came into effect in the spring of 2020, we at EQMM already had experience working from home. Our last few offices had space-sharing schedules, and many of the workers in the NYC office lived outside of the city. So when we got the note to stay at home, I packed up my things and headed back to Queens, knowing not much about the situation but knowing one thing for sure: I did not like to work from home. 

I was one of the only workers in the office who generally came every day. And now, I was at home with more supplies than ever, along with decades of magazines from both EQMM and AHMM when our office closed fully, and “home” was a twelve by ten foot studio apartment. We knew how to do the work remotely; were well situated for it. But I wasn’t prepared for how the work became harder during the time of crisis, and how stale that 120 square feet would become. 

We did eventually get a room in a shared office floor, which was very nice. But after a few years of that, I found myself working from home more and more by choice. I began to think about this transition recently, and it occurred to me that all of the editors of EQMM have worked from home at times or even primarily during their long tenures. 

Frederic Dannay lived in Westchester, which is something I think about when I look at his papers and correspondence. It becomes the backdrop, for me, to his writing—and whenever I hear of the towns where he lived, I think of him. Eleanor Sullivan also worked from home, which means that it was hard to track down some of her papers for our 80th anniversary symposium. But it also meant she had a lot of correspondence. 

Of course, most likely nobody is going to be looking at the editors’ of today’s email inboxes in the decades to come. But when I started thinking about why I was now thriving, I realized that being at home gave me access to all the things I had brought into my life to help me feel stronger, more diligent, and mostly more creative. I thought of Dannay, who had a large personal library; in fact, the early editions of EQMM contained many reprints from books he had collected. He had an extensive poetry collection, like myself (but mine is NYC apartment sized—it’s still just a one-bedroom, you know). And I bet he stood looking and thinking and plucked a volume from the shelf when feeling stuck. 

There’s so much guilt around productivity in our culture. I felt guilty staying home, but once I remembered the through line connection of these figures from the past, I felt like I was continuing a long lineage. And I wasn’t alone. 

So, from my luckily warm home to yours, happy holidays and winter solstice ahead, from EQMM.—Jackie Sherbow 

Warm wishes and and thanks to all of our readers, contributors, and friends.