In this special blog post, discover how O’Neil De Noux uses his hometown of New Orleans as a constant source of inspiration for his stories. Be sure to check out his latest, “The Human Form Divine,” in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]
Like other New Orleanians, I became intrigued with the story of Madame Delphine LaLaurie when I was a kid and visited the only wax museum in the French Quarter, the Musée Conti. The wonderful museum (now closed) included a haunting display of lovely Madame LaLaurie and the horrors surrounding her. The story of this woman stayed with me, prodded me to write about her. “The Human Form Divine” took a long time to write and re-write and re-write until I got it right. Madame LaLaurie was the personification of beautiful evil.
When I began writing mysteries, I started with what I knew best—police procedurals. I was a homicide detective and wrote hyper-realistic novels and stories about homicide work. Meeting Elmore Leonard and writers George Alec Effinger and Harlan Ellison and others influenced me to write different types of crime fiction—private eye, suspense, thrillers, cozy, and classic mysteries. My education includes a degree in European History which drew me to write historical fiction. I also write in other genres from science-fiction to fantasy, children’s fiction, mainstream fiction, horror, western, literary, religious, romance, humor and erotica. I have fifty books in print and over four hundred short story sales.
After Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, my wife and I moved to a small town across Lake Pontchartrain. When people here ask what I do, I pass them a business card and tell them I am probably the most prolific local writer they’ve never heard of. My job isn’t to be famous. My job is to write.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, I became an Independent Writer (an Indie writer) and helped form BIG KISS PRODUCTIONS, an informal co-op venture of writers, artists, editors, and an entertainment attorney-agent. We collaborate to produce paintings, sculptures, photography, novels, story collections, short stories and scripts. We own and control our art. As a novelist, I write my book, select the cover art and what is written on the back of the book. Indie writers do not surrender their rights to a publishing house and share their royalties only with the printer and distributor. Our books never go out of print. Our books are instantly available as eBooks, trade paperbacks and audio books. Sales are sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but we persevere.
Since I retired from law enforcement, I write every day and feed neighborhood cats, opossums, bothersome raccoons, the occasional fox (both red and gray) and turtles who love dry cat food. I read more and watch less television than I used to. I search for movies and TV productions without excessive violence, explosions, gore, ridiculous characters. As for writing genre-bending stories, I’ve written stories which are a blend of mystery and erotica. I prefer writing novels and stories set in the past. To me it’s a less frenzied time, far less crazy.
Recent publication? NAUGHTY PRIVATE EYE—the ninth novel in my Private Eye Lucien Caye series, set in 1954 New Orleans. It is inspired by the paperback books of the 1950s, so is its cover.
EQMM regular Joseph Goodrich gives us a fascinating history of our magazine’s long tradition of publishing poetry. Be sure to read Joseph’s latest poem “Two Men Discuss Murder on a Rainy Night Near Patchin Place” in [our Nov/Dec issue, on sale now!]
EQMM is no stranger to poetry. Selecting an issue at random—May 1977, which featured stories by Michael Gilbert, Thomas Walsh, and E. X. Ferrars, among others—the reader finds not one, not two, not three, not four but five examples of verse. Light verse, I should add; less T. S. Eliot than Phyllis McGinley, these and other poems published in the magazine over the years leavened with humor the darker tales surrounding them. Poems continue to appear in EQMM, albeit in a darker, less humorous register.
Poets are no stranger to mysteries. Edgar Allan Poe—the patron saint of the genre—was, of course, a major American versifier. C. Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972, published a series of elegantly written mysteries under the nom de plume Nicholas Blake. Day-Lewis was a friend and colleague of W. H. Auden, whose fearsome appetite for the form was revealed in an essay titled “The Guilty Vicarage.” Auden put his cards on the table: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol.” Left-wing poet Kenneth Fearing added at least one classic to the canon—The Big Clock. Julian Symons not only authored dozens of novels and the ever-controversial history of the genre Bloody Murder but founded the magazine Twentieth Century Verse in 1937 and published two volumes of poetry in the late 1930s and early 40s. Frederic Dannay, founding editor of EQMM, was a passionate collector of volumes of poetry (first editions only, please!) and composed but never published a volume of his own.
And how could I neglect the fact that EQMM’s editor Jackie Sherbow is an accomplished poet who’s written so cogently of the links between poetry and the mystery on this very blog?
I make no claim for a seat at their table, but on occasion I’m seized by the poetic impulse—a sharp apprehension of some sort that crystallizes in verse. “Two Men Discuss Murder on a Rainy Evening Near Patchin Place” is the result of one of those impulses.
The last two lines of Archibald MacLeish’s famous Ars Poetica spring to mind at this juncture:
A poem should not mean
But be.
Explanation can take the mystery out of a thing; but if it has any kind of life to it—and I hope that “Two Men” has—perhaps some of the mystery still adheres after the author’s held forth. The desire to pay tribute, to acknowledge the work of others, is part of the ludic aspect of writing.
“Two Men” is a tip of the hat to poet and artist Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). Loosely affiliated with the Beat Generation—though a generation older than Kerouac and Ginsberg—Patchen mostly labored in obscurity. A spinal injury in his twenties ultimately left him bedridden for the last decade of his life. He was taken care of by his wife, the steadfast and devoted Miriam, to whom so many of his books are dedicated.
I’ve “borrowed” the Patchens for my poem. “Kenneth” is the man the murderous duo are waiting for. Like his namesake, this Kenneth writes and paints and is married to a woman named Miriam. Like his namesake, he’s had more than his fair share of trouble.
You’d be correct in assuming that the poem’s location—Patchin Place, a cul-de-sac in Greenwich Village that has counted the novelist Djuna Barnes; John Reed, the journalist and author of TenDays That Shook the World; and Marlon Brando among its residents—suggested Patchen as the putative victim.
There’s an even stronger connection to Patchen. The first poem of his I read was included in Dilys Winn’s Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion (1977). It’s titled “The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves” and consists of fifteen words: “Wait” repeated fourteen times, followed by the word “NOW.”
In 1958 Patchen recorded some of his poetry accompanied by the Chamber Jazz Sextet. Such pairings of “beatnik” writers with jazz artists were popular in those days. Patchen performs, among other poems, “The Murder of Two Men.” You can hear it here.
I hope you’ll give Patchen a read—or a listen. Or both.
The connection between poetry and the mystery, what the Private “I” and the Private Eye have in common, was neatly described by Fred Dannay in his introduction to Poetic Justice, an anthology of crime tales composed by poets from (as the front cover of the 1967 New American Library edition puts it) Chaucer to Dylan Thomas. “Poets,” Dannay observed, “bring order out of chaos. Detectives, in resolving mysteries, also bring order out of chaos. Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Therefore poets are detectives, and detectives are poets. Q.E.D.”
Both poet and detective are searching for the truth. Both, with any luck, find it.
Learn about some of the uncanny similarities between writing mystery fiction and comic books in this fascinating blog post by Gary Phillips, whose story “Dr. Morbilius” appears in our November/December issue, on sale now!
I’ve published a number of crime fiction short stories, and edited several themed anthologies. These include the award-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir and South Central Noir. My efforts have also included writing comics. Most recently was Cold Hard Cash for Comixology Originals. The escapade takes my outlaw cash courier character Martha Chainey from the novels Shooter’s Point and High Hand, and transported her for the first time to comics.
Writing a comics script is different than penning a short story. Yet in both mediums, economy is key. There’s not a lot of real estate to be verbose in a short story, and in comics, the words shouldn’t get in the way of the illustrations. The writer describes the frozen action from panel to panel, page to page, for the artist to render. Additionally, the writer not only has to write slug lines of dialogue, which the letterer realizes in word balloons, but they might also be writing a character’s inner thoughts as well. These used to be lettered as thought balloons, though nowadays are presented in rectangular caption boxes. Then there’s the thrill indicating a special effect which can pop out of a panel. For instance when a character uppercuts the jaw of another.
SFX: BA-DOWW!
Like with a short story, comics scripting requires a certain spareness and efficiency. Now you may have a sub-plot like in long form in a comics story arc, but generally the writer strives for less is more, the words in harmony with the visuals. For the artist is also a storyteller. Sequentials, the panels which usually read from left to right on a given comic book page, flow one to the other as the story unfolds. Comics artist-writer and past collaborator Dale Berry (who produced the first graphic short story “Not a Creature was Stirring” for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) made this pertinent observation in our essay on graphic novels in How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America. “The pictures can show one thing while the captions say another, different—and multiple—levels of narrative can be told at the same time.”
It’s a boon then for the writer working in prose to think visually when considering the prose to describe the characters, their actions, the settings and so on. If it comes alive in your head, this helps in making your depictions vivid. For entertaining references, I recommend the likes of artist-writer Darwyn Cooke’s graphic novel adaptations of some of Donald Westlake’s novels with his amoral professional thief Parker; Calavera, P.I., supernatural noir by Marco Finnegan Magallanes; the Stray Bullets saga by David Lapham and Maria Lapham; and The Good Asian by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi. These are all available in tradepaper collections and E-versions.
“Dr. Morbilius” in the November/December 2025 issue of EQMM is the first short story featuring Gary Phillips’ 1960s L.A. crime photographer Harry Ingram. Previously he’s appeared in the novels One-Shot Harry and Ash Dark as Night. Phillips’ website is: https://gdphillips.com for more of his doings.
From Dr. Watson to Captain Hastings, the iconic “sidekicks” of mystery fiction have always held a special place in fans’ imaginations. In this special post, G.M. Malliet discusses the literary function of these sidekicks in history as well as her own work, including her latest story, “The Get-Well Gift”
“I had of course offended Magdalene and I would spend some time doing penance for it, and the rest of my life avoiding any form of the word “involve,” in any language. Perhaps I would bring some flowers next time I came to her flat.
“‘Do go on,’ I said. ‘I understand she pleaded with you to help her.’ Magdalene gave the sort of magnanimous nod a queen might give a footman opening a door for her.”
These lines from “The Get-Well Gift” (EQMM, September/October 2025) capture something essential about the relationship between amateur sleuth Magdalene Duchateau and her son-in-law, Hewitt: a mix of admiration, exasperation, and deep-seated respect, at least on Hewitt’s part. (For one thing, Hewitt would never make the mistake of calling Magdalene an amateur anything.)
It also reflects a familiar dynamic in mystery fiction—the sleuth and their sidekick.
The sidekick is a foundational figure in detective stories. From Dr. Watson narrating Sherlock Holmes’s exploits to Captain Hastings trailing after Hercule Poirot, the model is consistent: the brilliant, often eccentric detective paired with a less brilliant, but often more relatable companion.
In “The Get-Well Gift,” Hewitt plays the role of the listener, the challenger, the gentle skeptic, and at times, the comic relief. His reactions help to ground the story. Magdalene’s often dramatic pronouncements are tempered by Hewitt’s practicality.
And when Magdalene can’t see the forest for the trees, it is often Hewitt who inadvertently helps her see the forest.
When she makes sweeping statement like, “I, who pride myself on uncovering the truth at any cost,” Hewitt doesn’t contest her grandiosity; he accepts it with a kind of indulgence tempered by long experience of her genius and keen sense of justice. This interplay humanizes both Magdalene and Hewitt, who sees his role as trying to protect his mother-in-law from the worst excesses of her vanity.
Rather than deliver long explanations directly to the reader, Magdalene explains herself to Hewitt, which allows for a more organic delivery of key plot details.
This is part of why sidekicks are so useful to writers. They create a foil for the detective, someone to question, misunderstand, and provide contrast. Hastings is not as brilliant as Poirot, but he gives voice to the reader’s confusion and assumptions. Dr. Watson, though intelligent, can’t always follow Holmes’s leaps in logic, which gives Holmes an opportunity to explain—conveniently, for the bewildered reader.
The sidekick also often serves as a moral compass or emotional touchstone, reminding both detective and audience of the human stakes in any crime.
Writing the several Magdalene Duchateau stories, I found that the relationship between Magdalene and Hewitt gave me room to explore both character and plot. Through their conversations, I could also drop in historical details of 1930s London without resorting to blocks of exposition.
Magdalene’s quip in “The Get-Well Gift” about fox ears (meaning dog-eared pages) not only reveals her less-than-firm grasp on English patois but underscores the generational and cultural differences between her and Hewitt. Their banter helps set the tone of the story.
Magdalene is not always right, at least not initially, but Hewitt’s perspective helps balance her often absurd certainty with thoughtful skepticism.
He becomes the reader’s surrogate, asking the questions they would ask, and voicing doubts they might have.
In the end, the sleuth-sidekick relationship is not just a literary device—it’s an emotional and structural pillar of the mystery story. In writing “The Get-Well Gift,” I found it indispensable.
Through Hewitt’s eyes, we see both the brilliance and the blind spots of Magdalene Duchateau.
And through their bond, we glimpse the human connection at the heart of every mystery.
Agatha Award-winning G.M. Malliet’s sleuth Magdalene Duchateau has appeared in a handful of stories in EQMM and The Strand and been nominated for several awards. “The Get-Well Gift” joins “The Unwanted Guest” (EQMM March/April 2025) in her foray into historical crime. “Something Blue,” the tale of a destination wedding gone wrong, was nominated for a 2023 Derringer and Readers Award. Her 7th DCI St. Just novel (DEATH AND THE FINAL CUT) appears November 4 from Severn House. gmmalliet.com
Anthropologist Sue Parman returns to our blog with a fascinating essay exploring the peculiar relationship between cats in mystery fiction human psychology. Don’t miss Sue’s latest story “The Book of Dead Cats” in our September/October issue, on sale now!
Many years ago, I attended Book Passage’s Mystery Writers Conference in California. My main purpose was to spend time with my daughter, Gigi Pandian, who writes mysteries. As I wandered from one speaker to another, I noticed that cats got a lot of attention. “Save the cat” was shorthand for “make the protagonist do something that makes him/her sympathetic,” such as save a cat. And more than one speaker emphasized that whatever other mistakes the protagonist makes, he/she should NEVER kill a cat.
Which of course made me start thinking of ways in which I (as a writer) might kill a cat. After the conference I wrote three stories about a serial cat killer but was so worried about the American rule, Thou Shallt Not Kill a Cat, that I submitted them to a Swedish journal where they were warmly received and translated into Swedish. It took me another fifteen years to write the short story “The Book of Dead Cats” that was accepted by EQMM.
Writers are contrarian. Tell them not to do something and they immediately start thinking about how to do it. It’s not that writers are particularly antisocial or murderous; it’s that they find satisfaction in reversing expectations, i.e., generating surprise.
Surprise (The Random House Dictionary): “to strike with a sudden feeling of wonder that arrests the thoughts, as through unexpectedness or extraordinariness.” Surprise lies behind every creative spark, whether in poetry (e.g., Kay Ryan’s “Bestiary” about being “best” vs. “good”) or mysteries (who killed Roger Ackroyd?).
Perhaps killing a cat goes to the extremes of surprise. You would never find a dead cat in the cozy cat mysteries of Lilian Jackson Braun and Rita Mae Brown. Only a few American authors have had the courage to kill a cat. In 1843 Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story, “The Black Cat,” thought to be the first to introduce cats to the mystery genre. His protagonist kills his pet cat, Pluto, in an alcoholic rage. Pluto is avenged when the police discover a second cat accidentally walled up with the protagonist’s murdered wife. Stephen King killed a cat in Pet Sematary but brought it back to life (a more surprising and creepier move than letting it stay dead).
Anthropologists have long been interested in the cultural organization of surprise, as when they study holidays that allow people to break rules and reverse normal expectations (commoners insulting kings, women dominating men, children dressed as nightmares demanding treats). As big-brained mammals we not only love surprise, we need it. Despite monetary incentives, subjects in sensory deprivation experiments (in which subjects are suspended in a tank of water or placed in isolation rooms in which sensory input is reduced) experience spatial and temporal disorientation, intensification of visual imagery, hallucinations, and deterioration in intellectual and emotional behavior.
Sensory deprivation derives its effects from a compromise that nervous systems in complex, learning-based organisms have made between the need to respond to information and the need to make the most efficient use of their information-processing capabilities. Neurons fire when appropriately stimulated, but continued response to the same information is inefficient. The process by which sensory receptors cease to respond to old stimulation is called psychological adaptation and is a necessary feature of irritable tissue. It is adaptive to ignore the touch of the bed on which one is lying so as to be able to respond quickly to the spider that lands on one’s face. But in the process of adapting, we set the stage for neurons firing together in increasing synchrony, a condition that if uncontrolled results in epilepsy.
During an epileptic seizure, bursts of synchronous neuronal firing disrupt normal functioning. So varied are the causes of epilepsy (fevers, tumors, blows to the head, hormonal changes at puberty, menopause) that it is reasonable to suggest that we are all susceptible to the pathological state of synchrony, but that some inhibitory process prevents normal neural activity from escalating into cerebral explosions. The extreme discomfort felt by people subjected to conditions of sensory deprivation reveals how seriously the mind takes this reduced stimulation. It appears that our brains require continuously varied activity. As I argue in my book, The Dream in Western Culture, during the night we deal with sensory deprivation (the soft bed, the reduced sounds, the banned input from cell phones and iPads) by dreaming. During the day, when faced with boredom (a symptom of sensory deprivation), we break up synchronous neural firing by orchestrating surprise. In other words, humans play.
The more advanced the species, the more frequent and diverse its activities of play. Whereas play seems to be confined primarily to early years among nonprimates, it extends into adulthood among the primates. Only humans play so frequently and diversely from birth to death, thus leading the Dutch historian and anthropologist Johan Huizinga to label humans not Homo sapiens but Homo ludens, Man the Player.
Play occurs as a form of disjunction with some ongoing activity, as when children are released from some monotonous task or students celebrate the end of university semesters with dances and mind-altering celebrations. Anthropologists have studied cyclical and noncyclical rituals, such as Ramadan and Mardi Gras, as institutionalized forms of play that often occur at junctures in the economic activities of the year. At the psychological level, individuals vary in their experience of monotony and change. The writer Isaac Asimov was able to write prolifically, he said, because when he got bored with one manuscript, he switched to another (one man’s work is another man’s play). Children put away childish games and move on to more challenging forms of altered consciousness. They put away “The Little Engine that Could” and pick up Nancy Drew mysteries.
For adult readers, like John Leonard who writes in his book Reading for My life, it is not baseball, video games, or horror films but reading that provides “transcendence, a zap to the synaptic cleft.”
Consider mysteries to be the perfect medication for your nervous system. Take two surprise endings at night (with or without cats) and call me in the morning.
EQMM regular Twist Phelan returns to our pages with “The Border,” available in our [Sept/Oct issue on sale now!] In this thoughtful essay, Phelan discusses the unique responsibility held by mystery writers to “confront uncomfortable truths about human nature, societal failures, and our own moral boundaries.”
There’s a moment in almost every mystery writer’s career when you conceive a story so dark, so audacious that it freezes your fingers over the keyboard. The premise makes you uncomfortable. The twist feels too devastating. The concept challenges not just genre conventions but human decency itself. Your internal editor whispers: Pull back. This is too much.
Don’t listen.
I’ve written many stories that might be considered on the edge: stories about rape in a nursing home, a parent murdering a psychopathic child, forced marriage as a weapon of war. Each time, I wondered, Is this the story that goes too far?
The answer was always no, because the story was honest.
Mystery fiction has always been society’s dark mirror. We write about murder, the ultimate transgression. Yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves there are gradations of acceptability in depicting human evil. A serial killer who targets strangers? Acceptable. A parent who recognizes the monster in their child’s eyes? Suddenly we’re squeamish.
But our squeamishness is exactly why these stories need to be written.
The best mysteries don’t just entertain; they examine. They force us to confront uncomfortable truths about human nature, societal failures, and our own moral boundaries. When we self-censor, we rob readers of fiction’s unique power to safely explore life’s darkest corners. We become complicit in the very silence that allows these horrors to flourish in reality.
I’ve had an editor hold two stories for months, a third for over a year, while she wrestled with her discomfort. In each case, the editor eventually recognized the story’s power lay precisely in its willingness to go where others wouldn’t. Those three stories went on to win or be nommed for awards. I like to think it wasn’t despite their difficult subjects, but because of them.
The key is craft. Sensationalism comes easily, but honest exploration of difficult subjects requires precision and nuance. Every word must serve the story’s deeper purpose. Shocking elements can’t be gratuitous—they must be essential to the truth you’re revealing. Rather than simply surprising readers, your twist should recontextualize everything that came before, forcing them to question their own assumptions and prejudices.
The best mysteries don’t just entertain; they examine. They force us to confront uncomfortable truths about human nature, societal failures, and our own moral boundaries.
This isn’t about shock value. It’s about value, period. When we write about a nursing home rape, we’re really writing about society’s abandonment of its most vulnerable. When we explore a parent’s unthinkable decision about a dangerous child, we’re examining the limits of love and responsibility. These aren’t just plot devices; they’re invitations to necessary conversations.
Yes, you’ll lose some readers, the ones who want their mysteries sanitized, their moral questions pre-answered. But you’ll gain others, readers hungry for fiction that doesn’t insult their intelligence or coddle their sensibilities. Readers who understand mystery fiction at its best doesn’t just ask whodunit? but how could we let this happen? and what does this say about us?
The stories that haunt me as a reader are never the safe ones. They’re the ones where writers trusted their vision enough to leap into the abyss, where they chose difficult truths over comfortable lies, where they refused to pull back when the story demanded they push forward.
So when you find yourself writing the unwritable, remember: your discomfort is not a stop sign. It’s a signal you’re approaching something real, something necessary, something that needs to be said.
Write it anyway. Write it especially.
The world has enough safe stories. What it needs are writers brave enough to shine lights into the darkest corners, and readers courageous enough to look.
Dennis McFadden gives us an in-depth look at his writing process for his latest mystery,”The Tower at Coffin Rock,” which you can read in our July/August issue, on sale now!
I was sitting around not long ago with some time on my hands and started thinking I should write a story. I’ve written plenty, but take-off is always the hardest part. Some stories taxi down the runway, lift off and soar. Many more sputter and stall, chug, cough, wheeze and barely make it into the air, wings wobbling.
Ignition issues aside, it always starts with two decisions: What type of story? And, who are the main characters? The first decision didn’t take long in this case: I hadn’t written a mystery in a while, a literary mystery; one was due. I like ’em. They’re fun.
Next, I rummaged through the attic in my head and found an abandoned character under a pile of musty old magazines and faded book covers; his name was Jack Slattery, he was a sheriff, and he’d been on the verge of existence when his story-in-progress took a sharp left a couple of years ago and threw him off the wagon. (I’d been considering “Slattery Will Get You Nowhere” for a title. I still am.) Slattery was already gelling in my mind, having had a trial run; he was based on a hybrid of a couple of real acquaintances (coincidentally name Jack and John) and how they might have behaved had they grown up to become sheriffs.
When I started thinking about other characters, my first thought was Slattery needs a partner. A buddy story. A buddy story with a twist: the buddy would be a woman. A strong, smart woman with a good sense of humor who would make an excellent foil for the sheriff. Actually, I don’t know which came first: the traits I wanted, or the model for the character, Bobby Jones. The traits, and an old boss of mine, a wise, strong, funny woman, arrived at the scene of the crime neck and neck.
Then I spent some time panning for peripheral characters, sifting through people I know or knew, people I’ve read about, people I’ve heard about, people who are rumored to exist (yes, most of my characters are based on “real” people; those that are purely inventions usually come along during a story, not at the conception of it). These are the nuggets where Steve and Casey and Annie began:
a long-ago co-worker who woke up one night, still drunk, to find his wife and his brother on the floor in the bathroom shivering their timbers (she left him soon after for his brother);
a former acquaintance, something of a hippie, who, among other quirks, wore sandals year-round, rain, slush or snow notwithstanding;
an ex-friend, a high school teacher, who boasted about the sexual conquest of a student (emphasis on the “ex” before friend);
the falsie: when I was a freshman in college, I took a shy coed on a hayride and, much to our mutual embarrassment, encountered her falsie—which I did not pull out, nor wave about. Now I started thinking, what if I had? How might this shy little coed have reacted? What might she have done? Annie Reed was being born.
I left plot for last, where it belongs. After you know what kind of story you’re writing, characters should come first. Always.
I’d read a Donna Tartt novel featuring a water tower scene that stuck with me. I started to think about towers and their perilous heights, their inherent danger, my thoughts drifting toward towers of another sort, a sort more familiar to me. Around western Pennsylvania where I grew up, there are quite a few fire towers, from which lookouts keep watch for early, tell-tale smoke of wildfires; best of all (for my plot purposes) some of these towers are abandoned. In my youth we climbed one or two. (Fortunately, this was long before the day of risky, stupid selfies.)
Bingo. Down the runway, lifting off.
I invented much of the rest of the story. Not all of it. From my memory archives:
the time when I was about six and tried, unsuccessfully, to fashion a loincloth out of washcloths and string; when it failed, my sister’s hysterical laughing and pointing added a nice, piquant flavor to my naked humiliation;
my same sister, sixty or so years later, when we were possibly a little more mature, telling me about helping her elderly friend plan her own (the friend’s) funeral;
another friend whose beloved dog he named Shuvee;
my own dog, Bud, who was so dumb he caught rocks in his mouth, no matter how high in the air I tossed them (yes, I was just as young and dumb as he was);
another friend telling me about her and her husband arguing over which way a rabbit in their yard was pointing—toward them, or away from them (she doesn’t remember telling me about this, has, in fact, completely forgotten the incident; I wrote it down);
Casper the Ghost’s last name is really McFadden. I had the good sense not to use this, however.
Now the story, for better or worse, was in the air.
I called this piece “Building The Tower at Coffin Rock”; not “Creating” or “Inventing” or “Conceiving.” It makes you wonder (made me wonder, anyhow): How much of the making of a story involves actual creation? How much is invented from whole cloth? Conversely, how much is merely mined, excavated? Selected from among objects already lying around, waiting to be plucked up and put into place like a craftsman constructing a, say, tower?
Is there a difference? In the end, does it really matter?
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 TheBest 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.
SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN 