“If It Weren’t for Ellery Queen” (by Hal Charles)

Posted on June 9, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet have been writing together for more than forty-five years. Together, as Hal Charles, they are the authors of more than 200 short stories, one of which is “Nothing Good Happens After Midnight,” in our current issue. Here, they talk about breaking into the mystery-writing market and the influence of our magazine’s founding, eponymous editor.—Janet Hutchings

In the late 1970s, the two of us were struggling mystery writers who still subscribed to many mystery magazines as well as Erskine Caldwell’s pronouncement that “Publication of early work is what a writer needs most in life.”  And a little cash for our prose efforts wouldn’t have hurt.  After receiving five or ten dollars for a story from Skullduggery and Black Cat Mystery Magazine, we realized the truth that “Crime writing doesn’t pay . . . enough.”  Desperate to break into the higher-paying markets like EQMM, we couldn’t figure out how.

As teachers of literature and creative writing, we knew we wrote well, and we had long passed the so-called Hemingway Limit of first writing a million words. Taking our cue from the first writer of detective stories, Edgar Allan Poe, we decided to try his approach to getting published as demonstrated in his famous parodic essay “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was famous for its tales of sensation).

Poe’s effort is actually an excellent example of the market analysis, a technique we taught our creative-writing classes.  Like its business counterpart, literary market analysis examines character, plot, method of narration, and theme in detail. We decided to examine EQMM and found in the year of our study, for instance, that though 80% of the magazine’s readers were feminine, 85% of the stories’ major characters were male, and 10% were private investigators (as an aside, these figures are time-specific and no longer accurate).

We wrote up our study in a Poesque parodic manner, and under the title of “Ask Mr. Mystery,” we submitted it as a presentation at an annual conference held in Sarasota to honor John D. MacDonald.  The presentation was accepted, and afterward two people talked to us.  One was Mike Nevins, a frequent contributor to EQMM, whom we had met previously at a pop-culture convention in St. Louis. Mike encouraged us to submit “Ask Mr. Mystery” to the editor at EQMM, Fred Dannay.  John D. MacDonald chimed in, agreeing with Mike’s direction (aside #2:  “Ask Mr. Mystery” was subsequently published in JDM Bibliophile27 [January 1981, pp. 12-15]). 

Should we send it to Mr. Dannay? One of our guiding lights was a quote we saw attributed to Robert Frost (aside #3: when the Internet occurred, we could never substantiate the claim):  “It’s hard to hate someone up close.” Once, while attending a conference in Nashville, we walked to the office of a popular magazine, and interestingly, because it was the lunch hour, the editor was the only one there. He talked to us for an hour about the type of fiction he was looking for, invited us to submit, and helped us sell several stories to his publication.

So we sent “Ask Mr. Mystery” to Fred Dannay, not expecting much but realizing we had nothing to lose but our poverty.  Unbelievably, we received a letter from Fred that we framed and hung in our offices for 39 years:

  •                                                                         May 17, 1979
  • Dear Hal and Charlie,
  •                                   I’m glad Mike persuaded you to send
  •                         me a copy of your John D. MacD. paper—
  •                         I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.  It is
  •                         humorous and clever (although I wouldn’t
  •                         vouch for the statistics!).
  •                                   Now—
  •                                   Why don’t you two write a short story
  •                         and submit it to EQMM?—crime, detective,
  •                         mystery and/or suspense (detective preferred).
  •                         You could sign it
  •                                   Hal Sweet or
  •                                   Charlie Blythe or
  •                                   Blythe Sweet (thus seeming to
  •                                             increase the percentage of
  •                                            women writers) or
  •                                   Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet
  •                                           (thus increasing the number
  •                                           Of collaboration).
  •                                   Send your story to the magazine office—
  •                         so I’ll have the benefit of readers’ reports—
  •                         but be sure to mention my name—so
  •                         I’ll be sure to learn of its submission.
  •                                  I look forward to hearing
  •                         from you.
  •                                                             Sincerely,
  •                                                             Fred Dannay
  •                                                             (“Ellery Queen”)

Previously, we had been used to receiving with our stories (and letters to editors) simple, small, white rejection slips that all played on the theme of “This does not suit our needs.”  We received so many we actually started papering our office walls with them, so you can imagine our surprise at opening an envelope from EQMM with an actual letter.  Moreover, the letter wasn’t from some anonymous slush-pile reader, but the editor-in-chief of the magazine himself, Fred Dannay.

Look at all the actual aid he provided:

  • – Psychological encouragement for us to persist
  • – Praise for our article (though with his usual humor he added he wouldn’t “vouch for the statistics”)
  • – An RSVP invitation to submit a mystery story
  • – A clue to a successful EQMM tale “detective preferred”
  • – The range of stories EQMM favors: “crime, detection, mystery and/or suspense”
  • – Advice on a nom de plume.  Clearly Fred was showing that the industry preferred one writer rather than a team, so drawing on his own experience with Manny Lee, he suggested various reductive names that would imply a single author (Hal Sweet, Charlie Blythe, Blythe Sweet).  Ultimately, we used his advice to come up with Hal Charles.
  • – The mechanics for increasing the chances for a successful submission (“send your story to the magazine office,” “be sure to mention my name”)
  • – Final encouragement (“I look forward to hearing from you”).

In seven years of “collabowriting,” we had performed market analysis, read and taught hundreds of mysteries, and submitted dozens of stories, but we had never received such help.  Of course, we took Fred’s advice and set to work on crafting a new mystery tailored to EQMM’s specs. That product, “Sudden Death,” was submitted, revised by Fred Dannay himself, and finally appeared in EQMM’s Department of First Stories, its 547th “first story” the blurb on p. 75 of the April 7, 1980 issue noted.  The prestory blurb also labeled our effort “a dying-message story (oh, Ellery, what hath thou wrought?).” 

As Fred/Ellery had suggested to us, “Sudden Death” focused on a detective sports agent trying to fathom the significance of the dying clue BLITZ left by a dying quarterback. The mystery followed the familiar pattern of showing how the dying clue might point to a number of suspects, but in the end indicated only one. And the story was submitted under our combo-pseudonym, Hal Charles.

The blurb also iterated another mystery, one we never solved.  According to the editorial blurb, our “first submission to EQMM was the most unusual we have ever received. The story was acted out as a drama and sent to us on a cassette.” Here’s the problem. We had sent Fred a paper version of our MacDonald conference presentation, not a taped version. We always guessed it was either John D. himself or, more likely, old friend Mike Nevins who had gone to the trouble to help us (aside #4:  Mike offered to read several of our early mysteries and provided excellent critiques of our fiction).

Our next EQMM publication was “The Talk-Show Murder” (July 23, 1980), then ”Human Interest Angle” (December 1, 1980), which was followed by a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, “The Adventure of the Hare Apparent” (January 1981).

“Sudden Death” provided us with an important springboard.  From that point on, whenever we submitted a mystery, we always pointed out in paragraph two that key credential:  we had published in “The World’s Leading Mystery Magazine” (to quote EQMM’s masthead).  

One publication in particular started accepting a lot of our stories, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. At first we received encouraging notes on rejections from then assistant editor Chuck Fritch, but when we started following his advice, our stories were accepted. Once we mailed him five manuscripts in a single envelope, and Chuck took three of the stories. And when the previous Brett Halliday ghost writer (Davis Dresser had long since stopped writing Shayne) stepped down to cowrite romances with his wife, we were offered the chief ghost position. At first Chuck demanded we send him outlines of our stories for pre-approval. No sooner did he begin to trust our ability so that outlines were no longer de rigeur than Chuck had a new condition.  He sent us Polaroids of covers commissioned for the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. magazine but not used, and we were supposed to write stories and submit them with the appropriate cover photo.  Unfortunately, Noel Harrison, the girl from U.N.C.L.E.’s partner, was blond and Mike Shayne was always “the raw-boned redhead,” but no one seemed to care about this discrepancy.

Over the years as its editors changed, we have continued to publish in EQMM, but usually in spurts when we are not doing novels. Around the turn of the century, we published with Janet Hutching’s expert guidance (she literally had us cut “Ghost Cat” in half) some of our more literary mysteries—“Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth” (June 1999), “Slave Wall” (July 2000), “Moody’s Blues” (November 2002), “Draw Play” (May 2003), and “The Death of Doc Virgo” (September/October 2004).  Then, after writing ten novels in our Clement County Saga, we returned to our own paracosm, Clement County, with “Ghost Cat” (March/April 2020), “Nothing Good Happens after Midnight” (May/June 2021), “The Reawakening” (TBA), and “Sound Moral Character” (TBA).

If it weren’t for the gracious intervention of Fred Dannay, our writing would probably have been mostly marked by academic books and articles—in other words, oblivion.

Posted in Ellery Queen, Guest, History, Magazine, Publishing, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

“The Secret of Las Vegas” (by Melissa Yi)

Posted on June 2, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Melissa Yi is a Canadian ER doctor who writes medical thriller novels starring doctor-sleuth Hope Sze. One of the books in the series, Stockholm Syndrome, was named one of the best crime novels of its season by CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter. Melissa is also the author of many short stories, for which she has received Arthur Ellis and Derringer nominations. Her story in EQMM’s current issue (May/June 2021), entitled “Flamingo Flamenco,” features series sleuth Hope Sze, but takes a step back in time, to before Hope had qualified as a doctor. Location is a critical element in the crafting of a short story and in this post we get a detailed look at how a colorful location inspired a plot. —Janet Hutchings

Melissa Yi in Las Vegas (courtesy of the author)
A Las Vegas Elvis impersonator (photo courtesy of Melissa Yi)

When I landed at the Las Vegas airport in September 2019, I expected the slot machines flashing at me.

I also expected the all-you-can-eat buffet and the Elvis impersonator checking his phone outside the in-hotel chapel.

But one aspect blew me away.

I’d come to Las Vegas for a romance-writing workshop with Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Halfway through, she brought us to the Springs Preserve and told us to write a short story that had to be inspired by the setting. She said that writing is “150 percent” about setting.

I wandered through the area, and what really struck me was the original Big Spring. Did you know that Las Vegas was originally the site of sacred springs? Me neither.

I considered Las Vegas a desert town with gambling and crooners. But for more than 15,000 years, springs bubbled through the desert floor, providing water to the people, animals, and vegetation. Grassy meadows formed, and Mexican explorers later called the meadows “las vegas.”

I stood quietly at the site where Native Americans had once made annual pilgrimages. They would swim in the springs. It was considered a holy place. Even now, I could see the remains of the waterhouse that once shielded the spring, while the birds tweeted above me. I hadn’t noticed nature anywhere else in the city, but here, I could feel it. It still felt spiritual to me.

The “settlers” came, drove out the indigenous people, and drilled. They’d leave the water exploding into the air, laughing at the water spurting out of the desert.

Of course the giant spring ran dry. Water conservation became a serious issue. They’ve had to drill a lower channel into the aquifer, and the whole region is at risk of future drought.

What should I write for my workshop story? I wanted to know more about the indigenous people—the Pueblo Peoples, the Nuwuvi (Southern Paiutes), and Patayan (ancestors fo the Yuman tribes), but I couldn’t find much information on them.

Okay. Refocus. My story had to be inspired by the Springs Preserve. What about my character?

I wanted to centre around Dr. Hope Sze, my main crime series’ protagonist. But when would Hope go to Las Vegas? She doesn’t have time to sleep properly during her family-medicine residency, let alone party in Vegas.

And how could she fall in love while solving a mystery inspired by the Springs Preserve?

I researched the water supply in Vegas and around the world. There is ample opportunity for crime. “Water is the new oil,” as one of my travel companions pointed out as we travelled together in Egypt.

However, governments and private water companies don’t exactly advertise vulnerabilities in their systems. It’s not something they want to encourage terrorists to target. Plus, I only had a few precious days to write the story while also attending lectures and reading other people’s work. I couldn’t spend all my time on research.

How was I going to make sure everything was entertaining, as well as geographically, legally, and scientifically accurate, solve a crime in 3,000 to 7,000 words, and get Hope a man?

Easy!

I spun Hope back in time. High-school graduation, to be precise, although I later ended up having to advance that another 2 years to be consistent with her universe.

Hope makes me laugh. Just the way she thinks and talks, and her mother’s fanny pack and father’s chitchat. As writer Kari Kilgore pointed out after reading my story, it’s so hard to be cool when your family is UNcool. So writing Hope was tremendous fun, as well as the romance (Sigh. Love.) and the humour.

Everything was grist for the mill. I wore a black dress to the preserve and was feeling cute, but my friend and author Sean Young greeted me by saying, “I can see sunscreen, especially there.” He pointed at my hairline.

Well, that’s the sort of thing that happens to me. I’m perpetually in a rush, and I mostly make sure that I eat, write, and exercise on top of working as a doctor and trying not to neglect my family . . . but that means I don’t look in the mirror much. Once, I ran out of the ER to eat lunch and bolted back, and a nurse told me I had cheese on my mouth.

Again, no problem! I gave Hope some potential blobs of sunscreen near her hairline too.

But what crime would she solve?

I switched from researching water to the twittering birds in Las Vegas. They exist. I saw and heard them. Someone else must love birds here.

First I found “the hummingbird lady,” Marion Brady-Hamilton. I liked hummingbirds, but no crime story formed in my mind. Her only conflict seemed to be with wildlife regulations. 

Then I discovered the story of Turk, a fourteen-year-old helmeted guinea fowl in the wildlife preserve at a resort-casino on the Strip. Three drunken law students were captured on security camera chasing Turk around a corner. I won’t describe what they did to him, but there were witnesses.

Wow. I’d just found my bad guys. I hate people who abuse defenceless creatures.

Writing at a feverish pitch, I also penned the title. “Flamingo Flamenco” popped in my head, so I had to slide in a dance reference between Hope and her love interest, Ryan.

I’m so happy that “Flamingo Flamenco” appears in EQMM. During the pandemic, I’ve reread it a few times, partly to cheer myself up and remind myself of brighter times. We all need love and justice and peace right now.

In real life, I can’t control what happened to Turk, or the minimal repercussions for the law students. I can’t bring back the sacred springs and the grassy meadows.

However, my fiction is my safe zone. Drunken law students may enter, but they will never win.

In “Flamingo Flamenco,” justice prevails. Buck, my fictional helmeted guinea fowl—and Hope and Rya—receive a much happier ending.

After I finished writing, I celebrated by taking the hotel water slide through the shark tank. I’m so myopic, I could barely see the fish and sharks without my glasses.

I slid through the shark tank anyway. Six times.

Viva Las Vegas.

Posted in Fiction, Guest, History, romance, Setting, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

“You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” (by Mike MacInnes)

Posted on May 26, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Mike MacInnes trained as a lawyer in Canada before deciding to go to work for a publishing company, and to pursue his interest in writing. He currently writes summaries of legal cases by day, and as he explains in this post, the cases often provide inspiration for crime fiction. While an undergraduate at the University of Toronto Mike won an award for creative writing, but his first paid fiction publication, “The Unlocked Car,” appears in our current issue (May/June 2021). —Janet Hutchings

Perhaps my favourite sentence in all of crime reading is “. . . Andrew Boutilier knew Ronnie Boutilier was up to no good when he set off for the Legion carrying an axe.” In twenty words, the reader knows an important incident is about to happen. A dangerous weapon is introduced, one likely to be used for an unwholesome purpose. Hints are dropped from two identical last names, and the connotations drawn from referencing the local Legion could build a scaffolding to streamline and support what’s to come next, or create immediate expectations to be torn down just as easily. We don’t know exactly where we are going yet, but we know it will be exciting, and that we will get there soon.

I use the vague term crime reading deliberately. The above passage is taken from the reasons for judgment of a trial in the Nova Scotia Provincial Court, deciding charges of assault with a weapon and uttering threats. In the course of my job summarizing legal decisions, I’ve had the opportunity to read perhaps 20,000 cases over the course of years, from bankruptcy directions to tax disputes to divorce settlements to personal injury actions. While many (most?) have been run of the mill adjudications of mundane squabbles, others have provided useful insight into worlds I wouldn’t have otherwise had a chance to learn about.

There are many benefits to using legal judgments as a starting point for writing crime and mystery fiction. News reports must be condensed to fit column size, and often the most engaging details, the ones that would breathe life into a fictionalized account, get left out. A full-length book might contain more information than a court case, but one can read dozens of cases in the time it takes to finish the average story. Furthermore, newspapers, TV shows, and podcasts are designed to be seen by as many people as possible. A writer looking for inspiration has to share an item from the media with every other interested individual, while someone searching through legal decisions could be the only person outside of the courtroom ever to see it. 

The opportunity for regular readers to get their hands on trial records is also increasing. At one time the reasons the bench delivered could be found only in dusty courthouse basements, with only a select few making their way into the print collections held in law libraries. Today, almost every tribunal, board, or courthouse has a website, searchable by keyword for anything the curious might wish to investigate. I’ve had the advantage of combing through cases for forty hours a week for well over ten years, and can wait for an interesting judgment to just cross my desk. But with the aid of court websites and search engines, anyone with some time to spend can peruse tens of thousands of cases with just a few keystrokes. 

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that one of the times I enjoy reading most is when I feel like I’ve learned something interesting that I wasn’t expecting to. Ask a fan of Michael Crichton’s work what they remember the most about Jurassic Park, and the first thing they will say is “Giant dinosaurs! That kill people!” But the second is probably the mostly accurate account of the branch of the mathematical school of chaos theory, which a scientist uses to predict that a park creating dinosaurs might run into unforeseen problems. And in a world where true crime had suddenly gained new popularity, what could be “truer” than the findings of a judge who has just spent days listening to extensive cross-examination of the accused, the police, and the witnesses? This is where legal judgments, based solely on the facts of the case and the arguments of counsel, have fiction beat. 

It might seem that criminal cases are the most likely place to look for an interesting legal case that also makes an exciting tale. But conflict is at the heart of every story, and you can’t have any trial without a justiciable conflict between the parties. Parents in family-law proceedings escape with their children to foreign countries or hide income from their spouses to lower support payments. Corporations try to cover up industrial accidents. One of my all-time favourite cases involves the CFO of a gold mine whose company’s shares rose steadily on reports of a huge new gold deposit in Indonesia. Soon it became apparent that the field tests indicating a huge vein of precious metal had been somehow faked. Then, as an internal investigation began, the employee best placed to provide answers died in a suspicious helicopter accident. It’s an 800-page regulatory decision from the Ontario Securities Commission. The morning I wrote this post I learned what taxi drivers consider legitimate business deductions; the day before that a court ripped apart the poor methodology of an oft-cited study about the length of wait times in Canadian hospitals. The week before that I found out how coroners decide whether a dead body may be exhumed. There are details to the official rules for commercial apple harvesting on the East Coast that I hope to someday turn into the basis of a novel.

Judges are professionals, of course, who deal with serious matters. They would be remiss if their writing didn’t convey a certain gravitas. But life mirrors art, and most judges are likely readers themselves. The trappings of fiction will find their way into the writings of the judiciary (Canada’s former Chief Justice, Beverly McLachlin, for instance, published the whodunit Full Disclosure shortly after retiring from the bench). Many writing techniques would be inappropriate in a legal judgment—a red herring would be out of place, a twist ending unheard of. On the whole, the writing style of judges might be thought of as a detached, one-note noir, necessary for reciting the facts of ghastly crimes, to make it clear to the parties and society why a final verdict has been reached. And judges are prone to the same poor impulses as any writer. The overwrought passage here, from a sentencing hearing in Ontario, shows that judges can be no better than some authors at reining in questionable impulses: “The purpose of the party was to celebrate the birthday of Ms. Woldemariam. Rather than the party ending with fire on the birthday cake candles, it ended with the fire coming out of the barrel of a gun.” Taken in all, for the reader or the writer, judgments from trials make for an interesting supplement to the diet of mystery and crime fiction. 

Posted in Characters, Courtroom Mysteries, crime, Fiction, mystery fiction, Readers, Real Crime | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Summer Reading: Intro to Shakespeare and Agatha Christie” (by Roger Vaccaro)

Posted on May 19, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Roger Vaccaro’s professional fiction debut, the story “Satan’s Circle,” appears in EQMM’s current issue (May/June 2021). The author is a professor of English at St. Johns River State College in St. Augustine, Florida, where, as he mentions in the following post, his teaching includes courses on Shakespeare and nineteenth-century American literature. But it isn’t all about the classics for this teacher and writer; he’s been a fan of mystery fiction since childhood, and his novel-in-progress is a mystery. We think you’ll be interested in what he has to say about the intersections of literature and popular fiction.—Janet Hutchings

“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

—Mark Twain

One advantage of never leaving school is that I’ve always been able to associate summer with freedom, relaxing, and taking a good book to the beach. My reading list this summer is dominated by the two all-time best-selling authors in the English language—one I’ll be teaching for the next seven weeks and the other I will be studying.

I sympathize with my students who, similar to Twain, dread the “classics,” and I long secretly shared their resistance to assigned reading. My usual answer as to why we never read “fun” books is that popular fiction doesn’t need to be studied. I profess my love of mystery novels but concede that once I find out whodunit I feel little need to read them again. (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was a definite exception!)

One of the happiest moments in my life occurred in ninth-grade English when I realized how much I enjoyed reading Romeo and Juliet, but it still took me a long time to consciously link reading for pleasure and the classroom.

I eventually found that I could actually make a living (including health insurance and a pension!) talking about make-believe stories, plays, poetry, and even movies. Until recently, however, I always kept a wall between school and my lifetime love.

I discovered my passion for mysteries lying on the living room floor Saturday mornings watching Scooby-Doo and the gang conquer their and my fears as they revealed a logical explanation for even the most bizarre crimes.

I moved from the Mystery Machine to the Hardy Boys, my older sisters’ Nancy Drew books, and especially Jupiter Jones. The wonderful introductions by “Alfred Hitchcock” soon had me staying up late watching reruns of his TV show on Channel 5.  

In high school my mom bought me subscriptions to EQMM, AHMM, and eventually a mystery book club that introduced me to so many of the classic detective series. In eleventh grade, I wrote a paper about Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” I remember the teacher being impressed that I combined two Aristotle quotes, defining humans as “rational animals with a desire to know.” (There was no Google back then, so my best guess is that I had recently been reading Dorothy Sayers!) My thesis was about how Poe’s tale of ratiocination both invented and mocked the locked room mystery. The brilliant Dupin had matched wits not with a Professor Moriarty but rather an angry “Ourang-Outang.”   

My voracious appetite for reading impressed my family and friends and no doubt enhanced my scores on the verbal section of the SAT, but when I became an English major I quickly discovered that I had massive black holes of ignorance when it came to serious literature. Other than a few Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics on my dad’s bookshelves, I had read little but mysteries, Shakespeare (luckily!), and The Lord of the Rings. 

I sat nervously day after day as professors and classmates name-dropped classics that I silently added to my ever-lengthening must-read list. For many summers I stopped bringing as many mysteries with me to the beach.

Graduate school was better for me because the University of Florida English Department was obsessed with Theory at the time, and everyone seemed to share my confusion. I did get to write about Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” but my paper was based on a critical dispute between Derrida and Lacan. I had fun playing with deconstruction and psychoanalysis, but that was definitely not how and why I wanted to read detective stories. 

One reason I enjoy teaching nineteenth-century literature is that I now truly appreciate many of the “classics” I had once neglected, and I like the challenge of trying to inspire a similar pleasure in initially reluctant readers. I prefer Hawthorne and Melville, but Poe is the clear favorite among my students, who, unfortunately, are drawn to offering psychological assessments of the famous author based on his popular tales of madness.

I continually stress not confusing fiction writers with their narrators and selfishly try to steer students toward Poe’s detective stories, but I inevitably receive papers that diagnose Poe as “insane” based on “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.”  

Despite the above complaints, I often learn a great deal from my students. One of the many papers that impressed me last month involved an analysis of Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” a wonderful allegory about a famous scientist who becomes obsessed with removing the one flaw in his otherwise ideal wife. Unlike many readers, I think Aylmer deeply loves Georgiana but is terrified by her mortality. I teach the story as a warning about hubris and a reminder to humbly appreciate and cherish what we love, even more so because time is inevitably too short. One student surprised me by seeing it as a murder story and suggesting that Aylmer was going to have a difficult time explaining to homicide detectives why he had poisoned his perfectly healthy wife.

Last week as I planned my Shakespeare course for Summer A, I also worked on writing my first novel. I have an abundance of notes, scenes, and ideas but want to make sure I have a strong plot.  I decided to reread Agatha Christie for the first time in years, not to find out what happens but to focus on how she tells her stories. Since I was still commuting to work, I cheated by checking out an audiobook on Hoopla.

I started with Death on the Nile because I heard Branagh was adapting it for a movie, and although I was a bit disappointed by his previous portrayal of Poirot, I am a big fan of his work in general. I loved him as Hamlet, Benedick, and Professor Gilderoy Lockhart.

Years ago, I read an article where the author suggested that one of the few benefits of growing old was that he could again enjoy the great mystery classics because he had forgotten the solutions. I thought he was joking at the time. However, I became so immersed in my return to Death, I totally neglected to “take notes” concerning structure.

Christie is sometimes dismissed as a clever writer with tricky plots, but I found myself repeatedly impressed by telling details and profound insights. As I drove down I-95 each day, I started mentally dog-earing pages and underlining quotations:

POIROT: “Do not open your heart to evil . . . because if you do—if you do—evil will come. . . Yes, very surely evil will come. It will enter in and make its home within you, and after a little while it will no longer be possible to drive it out.”                                                                                            

POIROT, warning against pursuing revenge: “I speak as a friend. Bury your dead! . . . Give up the past! . . . What is done is done. Bitterness will not undo it . . . I am not thinking of her at the moment. I am thinking of you. You have suffered—yes—but what you are doing will only prolong the suffering.”

The KILLER, understanding why Poirot insists on exacting justice despite feeling tempted to show mercy: “It’s so dreadfully easy—killing people . . . and you begin to feel that it doesn’t matter . . . that it’s only you that matters! It’s dangerous—that.” 

Christie’s take on murder and retribution seems influenced by Shakespeare and definitely enriches my understanding of his plays. Poirot is typically more concerned with clearing the innocent than punishing the guilty; he says in Death that people often forget that “life and death are the affair of the good God.”  

Based partly on my recent return visit with Poirot, I revised one of my prompts for the final essay in Introduction to Shakespeare:

“Life isn’t fair” is a lesson every child must learn. Revenge stories have long been popular at least partly because they address a common human hunger for justice. Shakespeare deepens the complexity of this familiar plot by making his avenging hero in Hamlet both a Christian and a deep thinker who rigorously scrutinizes his own reluctance to act. In one of Hamlet’s many great quotations, he offers sound advice that unfortunately he doesn’t follow himself: “Use every man after his desert and who should ‘scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit in your bounty.” Prospero, in The Tempest, battles against his fury aimed at his evil brother and seems content with his realization: “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.”  Compare / contrast Hamlet and Prospero in regards to their coming to terms with their righteous anger. 

The next book (I have an actual paperback this time) on my summer reading list is And Then There Were None. I can remember where I was when I first read it (on the black and white checkered couch in the basement of my childhood home in Maryland), but I forget how the story goes. I seem to recall that, similar to The Tempest, the setting is an island where a powerful man has lured several guilty people in need of judgment. Even if reading it doesn’t directly help me write my book, I feel confident it will bring me pleasure this summer and improve the way I read and teach Shakespeare in the future.

Posted in Books, Characters, Classic Mystery, Readers | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“Keep the Door Open, Check the Bathroom” (by Linda Stansberry)

Posted on May 12, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Eureka, California resident Linda Stansberry is an award-winning journalist who has recently been devoting more of her time to fiction writing. Her EQMM debut, “The Hidden Places,” appears in our current issue (May/June 2021). She’s had one previous professional fiction publication, in The Saturday Evening Post, and is currently at work polishing two novels for submission. In this moving post, she talks about what got her hooked on reading and mysteries—and about a remarkable person from whom she learned so much. —Janet Hutchings

I learned about murder from Mom. She always kept a stack of creased paperbacks with lurid cover illustrations on her nightstand, and at the tender age of eight I began sneaking them into the back pocket of my jeans to read under the covers with a flashlight. By the time I was thirteen I knew all about crimes of passion, crimes of greed, lone assassins, double jeopardy, triple homicides, arsenic, formaldehyde, chloroform, ballistics, forensics, rigor mortis, and murderous clowns. I credit my desire to write fiction to the joy we got as a family from reading and any success I’ve had as a writer to the lessons absorbed from reading lots of good books. Paramount among them is this rule: A well-written mystery is one that’s fair in a way that life is not. 

Mom liked to recount the story of the only book she’s ever burned, the story of a Wyoming frontiersman who searches for his kidnapped family for the entire novel, only to remember at the end that he’d once told them to hide in the cellar if their cabin were attacked. In the final chapter he moves a heavy chest off of the cellar door and finds their skeletons below. 

“I was so mad,” Mom said, “I threw that book in the fireplace. That’s the only time I’ve ever done that.”

No fictional murder has ever shocked me the way the image of my mom throwing a novel away did; books were respected in our household. But her point was made. It may be clever to take your reader on an odyssey across nineteenth-century Wyoming only to reveal at the end that the thing they were searching for was never really missing, but is it fair? No, I don’t think so. 

A good mystery is like a good chess game. The reader should be able to see all the pieces and know the rules, to perhaps spot some strategies that could result in a checkmate. This doesn’t make the game less challenging; it just makes it fair. In chess, you don’t move a bishop and reveal a cellar door no one knew was part of the game. A friend once lent me a book in which it turned out the murderer was the narrator, suffering from amnesia. I was left wondering what I’d done to offend her. 

I’m thinking about all of this as I leave Mom’s hospital room and drive, nerves jangling, to my motel. No author would write a story this quotidian and cruel—weeks of increasing, mysterious pain, a CT scan that shows gathering shadows on the lungs, a midnight flight to a city four hours away to be treated for a pulmonary embolism, all in the midst of a global pandemic. When I leave her side, Mom is sleeping, her fine brown hair stuck to her salty forehead. If this was a movie the doctor would be at our side with a diagnosis, a lifespan, a solution. But this is life, and it will be weeks before we know precisely what is wrong, weeks in which the tumors will grow quickly and persistently, the way bruise-colored storm clouds tumble and swell to cover the sky.

I have never not had a mom.  Now I see the thousand tiny corrections, lessons, stories, examples that have left their design on my life. She is the reason I tenderize venison with the back of a knife; the reason I know how to write in cursive and play poker. She is the reason I write about murder.

The motel is dirty, loud. A child’s tricycle sits tipped on its side in the courtyard. I get my key from the indifferent clerk and carry Mom’s walker to my room. I leave the door open, walk inside and look in the closet, pull the shower curtain aside and make sure I’m alone. When this is done I can close the door, sit down on the bed and rub my eyes, waiting for the storm to break.

This is something she taught me—leave the door open, check the bathroom. A woman traveling alone can’t be too safe. Always carry cab fare in your purse. When you go out to eat with a man, watch how he treats the waitress. Someday you, too, might be the last thing on his mind. 

My mom endured an oversized amount of tragedy over her lifetime, stuff that would send some people to the bottle or the grave, stuff I won’t betray her privacy by discussing. She came out the other side a tough, witty, shrewd woman who found escape in fictional murder. I think about this often, how she and I and so many others can only fully relax when reading about hacksaws and blue-tinged fingernails. You would think that with everything we have to fear from real life, whether it’s cancer or divorce or the very real possibility that a stranger will attack us in a cheap hotel room, we would want something with softer edges. But we want murder, and I think it’s because murder mysteries have all of the truth, and none of the unfairness, of real life. The truth is that life is dangerous, and we’re all going to die someday. The unfairness is that more often than not there’s no beauty or justice in how we go. 

For most of my life, my mom tried to equip me with the tools I needed to survive, knowing even as she did so that it was all a crapshoot, that it was never going to work out clean the way it does in the books we read. But she did a good job, and that’s what I told her as I pushed the hair back from her forehead and said goodnight.

“It’s not like I’m dying tomorrow,” she replied, a half-smile on her lips.

“No, of course not,” I replied. “I just wanted to let you know, as soon as I could.”

She smiled and went back to sleep. 

Valerie Stansberry was born on January 24, 1948. She died on May 5, 2021. She fought until the very end. 

Posted in Books, crime, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Memorial, Novels, Readers, Story | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Puerto Rican Mystery: Steven Torres Interviews Cina Pelayo and Richie Narvaez

Posted on May 5, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Once in a while we have the privilege of bringing readers an interview on this blog. In this one, Steven Torres talks to Cina Pelayo and Richie Narvaez. Currently a resident of Connecticut, Steven Torres is a Derringer Award winning short-story writer and the author of the Precinct Puerto Rico novels. He makes his EQMM debut in our current issue (May/June 2021) with “The Case of the Strangled Man”—a locked-room mystery! Cynthia (Cina) Pelayo is a novelist and poet and a nominee for the International Latino Book Award, multiple Bram Stoker Awards, and an Elgin Award. Richie Narvaez is the author of the collection Roachkiller and Other Stories, which received the 2013 Spinetingler Award for Best Anthology/Short Story Collection and the 2013 International Latino Book Award for Best eBook Fiction. His debut novel, Hipster Death Rattle, appeared in 2019. —Janet Hutchings

Scottish writers like Ian Rankin and Russel McLean have staked out a territory in the mystery world that some call Tartan Noir. There’s also an Icelandic Noir. I know Puerto Rican writers who write mysteries. I’m one of them. I asked Richie Narvaez, author of Hipster Death Rattle and Cina Pelayo, author of Children of Chicago to consider whether “The Puerto Rican Mystery” is a thing. 

ST: Do you write Puerto Rican mysteries? Puerto Rican-American mysteries? Or just mysteries? Or maybe the multiple voices allowed/required lead to writing in one voice for one story and a different voice for another?

CP: I’m a Puerto Rican–born writer. I write genre-bending works that typically have some grounding in the mystery genre. My protagonist for my most recent novel, Children of Chicago, is Puerto Rican. 

RN: I write mysteries with Puerto Rican characters, and I am Puerto Rican, or, if I have to label myself, I am more accurately Nuyorican, that is, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent. It’s an important distinction because my culture and my concerns are different than those of someone born on the island.

CP: Right. I think Puerto Ricans in Chicago are different from Puerto Ricans on the island or Puerto Ricans in New York or any other community. I have been shaped by Chicago’s history and cultural backgrounds. I was born in Puerto Rico but raised in Chicago where I still live. My identity is very much connected to being both Puerto Rican and a Chicagoan, and really a Midwesterner. 

The Puerto Rican story, or a Puerto Rican living on the mainland story, for me will always involve the cultural identity of being Puerto Rican, and of being a Chicagoan because that is what I am and that is what I enjoy writing about. 

ST: So, you have a “double identity” – Puerto Rican and Chicagoan.

CP: Ultimately, my stories are Puerto Rican stories, because I am a Puerto Rican and I am a Chicagoan, and I identify with both, and this Midwestern identity. I’m a city person and an island person and a person from the Midwestern region. 

RN: It’s also important to note that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, so when Puerto Ricans come here, they are migrants, not immigrants, although the struggles are often similar. 

ST: Do you focus on those struggles?

RN: I generally start a story with characters before plot, and so I’ll consciously make someone Puerto Rican or not. And that can add deeper meaning to the plot, an engagement with issues relevant to the community maybe, or sometimes it’s just interesting window dressing—although it’s window dressing with unavoidable subtext.

ST: Your first novel, Hipster Death Rattle, had the issue of gentrification—important to Puerto Ricans in the States and on the island.

ST: What is distinctive about the Puerto Rican mystery? How is it different from any other novel or story set in Chicago or Brooklyn?

CP: It’s complicated. I love Puerto Rican food and music, for example, but I also love a hot dog and beer at Wrigley Field or Sox Park while watching a baseball game. Puerto Rican history is also important to me, just as the history of Chicago and understanding how the histories of both locations have shaped their places and people.

RN: Let me put it this way: If I write about a Puerto Rican named Diaz in Brooklyn solving a crime, certainly that is different than if I wrote about a guy named Blonski or Jackson or Romano in Brooklyn solving a crime. Even if the mystery plot is schematically the same, the flourishes would be different. One story might feature empanadas, the other pierogis. And the subtext changes: Each character, while he might act similarly or even the same as the other, would bring different lingo, histories, perspectives, and class and skin-color issues to the story. Certainly, if I make Diaz darker skinned or a woman, that changes things. If I move Diaz to Chicago, geography and local politics add their own subtexts. I could try to make Diaz a generic character in a generic city, but his name would still resonate things that are not on the page.

ST: Do you ever write lines that you know are basically for the uninitiated? I mean, if you say “mofongo” that would seem to need a gloss, no? Not just what it is, but how it could be thought of as a delicacy or a comfort food.

RN: All the time.I don’t mind writing for the uninitiated, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the flow of the story. The people who don’t understand a reference may wrinkle their brows or frown, but the tiny audience who does understand will smile widely. Listen, if T.S. Eliot can throw in French, German, Latin, and Greek, I can throw in a reference to cuchifritos and not have to explain it. Readers can Google if they really want to know. And anyway, if you give something good context, a conscious reader should be able get the idea, if not the exact meaning, of any non-English word or phrase. If I write that “cuchifritos” are delicious and greasy and crunchy and comforting, I don’t need to add a food history and a full recipe. There’s a murder mystery we have to get back to. 

CP: Speaking of comfort food, I write a lot about coffee. I’m from Adjuntas, a mountain town in Puerto Rico, and coffee and coffee production are important to that community’s history. Coffee production was impacted greatly by Hurricane Maria, and even going back, the influence of US investment—or disinvestment—in farm communities in Puerto Rico impacted coffee production. My grandfather was a coffee farmer, so you will see the mention of coffee highlighted throughout my work, not because of what we think of it as today, a drink dominated by American consumerism, but because it is a drink that is important to Puerto Rican culture and my identity. 


ST: If we were looking for another Puerto Rican author of crime/mystery, who would you recommend?

RN: I recommend Edwin Torres, who gets forgotten today. He wrote the two Carlito’s Way books and also Q&A, all of which evoke the realism and brutality of ’70s and ’80s New York City. I also always mention Jerry Rodriguez, who wrote two crime fiction novels, The Devil’s Mambo and Revenge Tango, before he passed away too young. Had he lived and continued writing, he would have found the huge audience he deserved today. I also recommend the legal thrillers with prosecutor Melanie Vargas that Michele Martinez wrote early in her career. Her new books, written as Michele Campbell, are non-series thrillers, and they’re pretty good, too.

CP:I would recommend:Angel Luis Colón, author of Hell Chose Me; Ann Dávila Cardinal who wrote Five Midnights, and Gabino Iglesias who wrote Coyote Songs.

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DELL MYSTERY MAGAZINES SPRING 2021 AWARDS CELEBRATION

Posted on April 28, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

In the spring of most of the years we’ve had this blog, we’ve done photo posts about the Dell Magazines Edgars/Readers Awards party, the Edgars banquet, and the Malice Domestic Convention. This is the second year in which we’ve had to hold our annual Readers Award party virtually, so we will have no photos to show. Instead, you can watch our 2021 awards video above or on YouTube.

The past year has, obviously, taken a toll on everyone, but it has reinforced for me something I learned many years ago when I went to give blood and the nurse doing the draw, on learning that I worked in publishing, starting talking about her addiction to romance novels and how they’d helped her through some terrible times. Romance has never been my genre, but after talking to that reader, I never again denigrated “bodice busters.” I saw that if the writers this reader followed really had the power to transport an audience from a sometimes cruel reality to another sphere entirely, then no matter what the genre, they were doing something both remarkable and useful.

During the worst months of COVID, I did not want to see submissions in which the virus played a role. COVID, and the need it has created for masking, is surely tempting subject matter for crime writers. Even so, the majority of our authors must have felt as I did about mining the subject for entertainment while in the thick of it; we saw very few submissions that mentioned the virus at all. It’s only now, when the worst appears to be past, that writers submitting to us are beginning to venture into this territory. 

Some of the comments we received on this year’s Readers Award ballots expressed appreciation for the solace the stories in our issues provided during a troubled time. Although we (the editors) were thanked for it, credit really goes to the writers who soldiered on and continued to submit stories—in the instance of one of our most popular authors while also battling COVID. There are many people in other departments of Dell Magazines who also played heroic roles in keeping the whole enterprise going—none more so than our warehouse staff, who could not do their work remotely, and without whose courage we would not have been able to ship issues and fulfill subscriptions. Although this has been a hard year, it’s been one in which our company—and, I think, the mystery community generally—displayed unparalleled cooperation and concern for the greater good. 

Normally, this yearly awards post includes the titles of nominated stories and their authors. This time, rather than name them, I’m going to ask you to join our party on YouTube, where you’ll not only hear the names of the winners and nominees, you’ll see some of them! 

We appear to be coming out of this crisis and we believe we won’t have to party virtually next year, but until then, be careful and keep well.—Janet Hutchings

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“What Does the Word Genre Mean Anyway?” (by Chris Knopf)

Posted on April 21, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

A winner of the Benjamin Franklin and Nero awards and a nominee for a Derringer Award, Chris Knopf is the author of seventeen mystery and thriller novels. His work has been widely reviewed, in newspapers such as the New York Times and the Boston Globe and in journals such as PW and Booklist, where he’s received starred reviews. His first story for EQMM, “The Best Is Yet to Come,” appears in our March/April 2021 issue. In this post, he takes up a topic I think may claim the interest of many of our writers. Readers too. —Janet Hutchings

Reed Farrel Coleman, a friend of mine in the mystery-writing business, once answered a question from a conference attendee, “How would you define literary fiction?”  He said, “Books without plots.”

He’s a very funny man, but also very literate, so I took his point.  Mystery writers have a sacred obligation above all else to write books and stories that have plots.  This is not an easy task, as most literary writers know, even though they, and their editors, often hide behind virtuosic prose, eccentric characters and angst-ridden descriptions of consuming a latte in a Brooklyn coffee shop to justify the absence of a satisfying narrative arc.

My goal here isn’t to belittle literary works, being a devoted English student, but rather to address the artificiality of genre classifications.  I once wrote a fictionalized memoir that leaned dangerously into the realm of general fiction, but being known as a mystery/thriller writer, my publishers didn’t know how to market it.  So I asked a mystery/thriller reviewer if she’d take a look.  

“Does it have a gun?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Does somebody get shot?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s a thriller.”

By this definition, The Great Gatsby is a thriller, and I’m fine with that.  

I also think Presumed Innocent, Mystic River, and Gone Girl are brilliant works of literature.  They just happen to have crimes at the center of the story, and are infused with teeth-grinding suspense, but also some of the most beautiful, lyrical and trenchant prose you’ll find anywhere in the literary canon. 

It’s been explained to me that genre classifications are very important to the marketing and sales of books, and I get that.  Physical bookstores have to label their shelves, and cater to shoppers’ particular enthusiasms. What’s unfortunate to me are readers who will only read books, or magazines, that fit within their genre preferences.  I think that’s a shame, because they’re missing out on works they’d surely enjoy if they only gave them a chance.  

The mystery genre is my neighborhood, and I’d never want to live anywhere else.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t like taking a spin into other locales.  The best mystery writers I know feel the same way. And if you ever sit down with any of them to talk about writing, you won’t know you aren’t in a postgraduate English lit discussion group. Sometimes French, Spanish, Russian and Asian lit thrown in as a bargain.  

I’ve read at least as much science fiction as mystery, and I can assure you there are many dazzling works of art contained within those genre walls.  Although the novella that inspired the movie Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, bears little resemblance to the film, it demonstrated the potential of mashing up sci-fi with hard-boiled/noir. 

I think Edgar Allan Poe would be interested to learn that some of his greatest stories would today be slotted into the mystery genre.  Or more precisely, detective fiction.  He might concede that his stories made good use of suspense to propel the narrative. But so did those of Charles Dickens. Acceding to the demands of serializations, he knew his readers would buy the next edition of the periodical only if they had to know what happens next.   Did he see this as being trapped by commercial exigencies, or was it simply good storytelling that any respectable author should aspire to?

Jazz began life in the African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.  In no way would any music connoisseur of the time have considered it a respectable form.  The accomplishments of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Wynton Marsalis tells us where that ended up.  By the same token, the earliest pulp magazines were unabashedly meant to be popular entertainments, with no pretense toward literary achievement, except perhaps by the writers themselves, mostly in secret.  

Of these, the exemplar was Dashiell Hammett. As with Dickens, his stock in trade were periodicals, in particular the pulp magazine Black Mask, where he published dozens of stories, some as serialized novels.  As Raymond Chandler pointed out in “The Simple Art of Murder,” Hammett was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway.  Though I also agree with Chandler that Hemingway was fully aware of Hammett’s contributions to twentieth-century literature, from which he took his own inspiration.  Hemingway might have explored the revolutionary concept, at the time, of the American antihero, though the sensibilities of a character like Jake Barnes, manly and cynical for sure, was also drenched in existential confusion of the sort you can only acquire through an exhaustive and eclectic reading list and lots of time in stuffy parlors with people like Gertrude Stein.  

What Hammett wrought was the pure form.  Sam Spade was a man of seemingly moral ambivalence, coldly pessimistic about human nature, yet at the end of the book, clear-eyed about the distinctions between right and wrong, villainy and virtue.

Jake Barnes and Sam Spade endure inside nearly every subsequent American hero spawned by genre and literary fiction alike, but I feel that Spade ultimately had the upper hand.  With this sort of influence on letters as a whole, what makes the distinctions of genre important?

Since genres are inevitable, maybe we should celebrate the mystery thriller world for being positively bursting with subgenres. Private eye, hardboiled, noir, police procedural, amateur sleuth (where the amateur could be anything from a chef to an antiques dealer to a bipolar circus clown with a drinking problem), cozy (with cats/without cats), historic, erotic, espionage, occult, cyberspace, young adult, etc., etc.  With such a proliferation of forms,  do we need to define the overall phylum as being merely different from some other major genres, say Romance? (Oh yeah, I forgot about romantic mysteries.)

Despite the seeming polemics, I’m not advocating for the abolition of genre classifications.  In fact, there are manifold reasons to have guideposts for book buyers trying to navigate all the possibilities.  I’d hate to crack open what I thought was a beach-read thriller only to find an anthology of fourteenth-century epic poetry.  What I resist are all the biases that accompanying people’s devotion to particular types of reading.  

What I say is to read everything.  To delight in how each reinforces the other and builds a larger universe of creativity and craft.  

There is no hierarchy.  Thriller snobs are no better than literary snobs, and vice versa. They both have closed their minds to the dazzling wealth of the written word, and the endlessly involving paths to satisfying storytelling.  To say nothing of the sheer joy of well-crafted prose, in any form.

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“Chaos and Community at a Family Seder” (by Elizabeth Zelvin)

Posted on April 14, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Several weeks ago, I contacted Elizabeth Zelvin, one of our genre’s most celebrated short-story writers, and asked for a post in time for Passover. The timing seemed important, because Liz’s story in our current issue (March/April 2021) is set at a Passover Seder. How wonderful, I thought, if readers could learn what inspired the story during the period in which the holiday was actually being celebrated. Liz sent the post right away, a week before Passover began, and I postponed it for a week so that it would fall during the holiday. As to what happened next, I can only plead “pandemic brain” (which scientists say is real!). When the 31st rolled around, I had it in mind that I’d already sent Liz’s piece in for posting, and went on to the next post on the schedule. It was only when Liz reminded me last week that she hadn’t yet seen her post that I scrolled back and realized that it had never been posted. So here it is: some terrific reflections on the background to a great story. And the issue in which it appears is still on sale, so you can still read and enjoy it. Liz’s latest book is one she edited: the anthology Me Too Short Stories. She is best known as a novelist for her Bruce Kohler mysteries.  —Janet Hutchings

When I wrote “Who Stole the Afikomen?” (EQMM March/April 2021), I was “writing what I know” in a spirit of love and nostalgia for the Passover celebrations of my childhood in a family of secular Ashkenazic Jewish Americans in New York. The family in my story differs in some ways from my own. We were less numerous, more intellectual, and not a jeweler or king’s mistress in the lot. While I still host a Seder every year, its traditions have attenuated and evolved over the years, adapting to the loss of family members who read Hebrew, the impatience of the guests for dinner to be served, and the composition of my family itself from all Jewish to multicultural, with Jewish DNA in the minority.

I wanted the story to convey my kind of Jewishness, which is very important to me but is not what comes to most people’s minds when I say I’m Jewish. It’s not about dietary laws or religion or Israel. It’s about belonging to a people—a smart, argumentative, indomitable people who have managed to hang onto our ethnic identity, culture, and remarkable ethical principles, along with  our sense of humor, for 5,781 years in the face of persistent, repeated persecution.  

That’s the story we tell at Passover every spring, the season of renewal. Jewish families all over the world come together to feast, sing, and read the Haggadah, the traditional manual for the festival. We were slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. Then a leader, Moses, arose to speak for us. Let my people go! he told Pharaoh. You know the story. We need to tell it every year because we can’t afford to forget. It keeps happening. The Inquisition. The Holocaust. Bombs in synagogues in today’s America. But we’re going to eat gefilte fish and pot roast and celebrate life while we remember.

Readers of “Who Stole the Afikomen?” who have attended Seders tell me they felt a spark of recognition, even if they’re not Jewish. It’s not just the food. It’s the sense of family, of community. The warmth, the liveliness. The sheer noise. Ashkenazic, ie Eastern European Jews, all talk at once. It’s a cultural trait. Like my fictional protagonist Andy, my non-Jewish husband was overwhelmed by the cacophony at his first family Seder forty years ago. I explained we interrupt out of enthusiasm, because we’re so interested in what’s being said. 

Secular Jewish families like mine have always been unruly and irreverent. We always took liberties with the ritual. When my son was little, we deleted what he called “the boring part”—all the rabbinical exigesis—from the text and gradually made other revisions. Since the enslaved Jews were unpaid workers, we sing, “Bread and Roses,” the anthem of the 1912 Massachusetts mill strike. When we explain the sacrificial shank bone on the Seder plate, we add a paragraph for vegetarians. We display the orange that symbolizes the full participation of the previously marginalized in Jewish life, ie women and LGBTQ Jews. So it’s not so very out of line that in my story, Uncle Jules decides to add a little sparkle to the hunt for the afikomen by hiding a diamond with the ritual piece of matzoh.

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“I Thought Up This Title in the Bath” (by Mat Coward)

Posted on April 7, 2021 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Mat Coward’s latest short story for EQMM, “Yeah, I Meant to Do That,” appears in our current issue (March/April 2021). The British author’s novels span the genres of crime, fantasy, and science fiction, but he’s particularly distinguished in the mystery field for his short stories, which have twice earned Edgar nominations. He has a unique voice—but not in the way he laments here! If you haven’t tried his fiction yet, do. You’ll find it compelling. —Janet Hutchings

If you want an illustration of the unfairness of it all, just think how insomnia makes an exception for nightmares. 

When I first started writing short stories, I used to produce two kinds—funny and not-funny—and it was a while before I realised that I was the only one who knew there was a difference.

The writer doesn’t decide what a story’s about. Readers decide what a story’s about, and it follows that they’re also the ones who decide whether it’s funny or serious. And if it has jokes in it, they will decide that it’s funny, which is well-known to be the opposite of serious.

The important thing is to remember that it doesn’t matter. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, because it really does, I’m saying the important thing is to remember that it doesn’t matter. 

Other writers have a much easier life than me. I know this, as every writer knows it; as every writer who’s ever been has known it. I picture all the other writers in their smart, clean, tidy offices, writing rooms, their writing spaces, fragrant and organised, everything in its place, where they can lay their hands on anything in a minute as opposed to, say, a month or a lifetime. 

Their plots mirror their working lives: neat, unholed, flowing. In fact, in point of fact, I happen to know they use flowcharts to marshal the smooth blossoming of their plots. I don’t know what a flowchart is but I do know that it wouldn’t work for me, in the sense of cooperate with me, even if I knew what it was. Actually, I might be thinking of spreadsheets, but since I don’t know what those are either it’s not important. 

Other writers don’t constantly get their timing wrong, always, every time they write anything. This is true of all other writers, as all other writers know. A decade ago I wrote a near-future police procedural novel in which people avoid shaking hands for fear of infection with epidemic germs. Imagine if that had come out a month before the COVID? I’d be a millionaire by now. I’d be retired. They’d ask me to write a blog post for Ellery Queen and I’d say, “I’m sorry I can’t I’m going to be spending the next three weeks choosing a pair of carpet slippers.” My uniquely bad timing cost me that. 

(That wasn’t the whole plot by the way, the not shaking hands, that was just an incidental detail. Because that would have been a bit low-concept even by my standards.)

Other writers, all other writers, are able to write in their heads. I’ve heard them boasting about it, about how they get stuck on a story and how they go for a walk—or they go for a jog, the really boasty ones—and by the time they get home they’ve solved the problem. I’ve never been able to do that. The other day I had a twenty-minute walk to the doctor’s and I determined to use it fruitfully, working out how the detective inspector knew that the giant sausage was hollow. Because from the outside it looked solid. In the event, I spent the whole trip to the surgery trying to remember the name of a guy who played for Middlesex County Cricket Club in the mid-1980s. Then I spent the whole trip back trying to remember why I’d been trying to remember his name. Middlesex isn’t even my team! I never did remember his name, anyway, so at least there’s that.

I can’t write except by writing, unlike all other writers. I never have been able to. And when I say writing, I mean typing: a pen and paper are no help, I have to be sat at the keyboard for every single word. The way I plot is by brute force. Brutish force. “He was a leading, and the sole, practitioner of what came to be known as the British Brutish style, due to the sheer inelegance of its construction.”

I type “Maybe the husband killed the wife because she wouldn’t agree to a divorce.” But that’s too obvious, so I actually, physically, type on the next line “But that’s too obvious.” Then I go down a line and type “OK so perhaps he killed her because she would give him a divorce. For some reason yet to be established that meant he had to kill her.” On the next line I’ll type “But that’s only one degree of twist; think we need two degrees here—three, if no twist in final paragraph.” Then I go for a walk, which doesn’t help at all, and when I come back I go down another line and type “Possibly he didn’t kill her, possibly the burglar killed her, because she wouldn’t give the burglar a divorce,” and then under that I type “Is that too ridiculous though?” and under that I put “Yes, obviously it is.” And this’ll go on for weeks, while all the other writers are picking their kids up from school and returning home with entire trilogies in their mental notebooks.

I have a real, legitimate phobia about starting story titles with “A” or “The” and I have no idea why, except possibly it’s because I used to work in a public library where one of my jobs was typing up index cards for new stock and you’d write the title as “Case of the hairy heiress, The,” and I developed a horror of seeing my own as-yet unwritten titles ruined by inversion. Whatever the cause, I really envy other writers because none of them suffer from irrationality in their writing habits. 

All other writers, their fingers nimbler or at least more easily reprogrammed than mine, can type the word “them” without it coming out as “therm,” which is just my luck because it’s a real word, so the spellcheck doesn’t highlight it. If I could only train myself to type “threm” instead there’d be no problem. All the other writers in the world type threm, I just know they do. 

What I don’t know, and what I often find myself wondering about, especially when I’m taking a walk, is whether all the other writers in the world realise how lucky they are. 

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