SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

A Shamus, Derringer, and ITW Thriller award-nominated fiction writer, Andrew Welsh-Huggins has produced eight novels in a series starring P.I. Andy Hayes. The latest, Sick to Death, releases this month. The Ohio author’s three dozen-plus short stories have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including EQMM and AHMM. His latest EQMM story, “Through Thick and Thin,” is featured in our current issue (September/October 2024). In this post the author talks about a switch from the series’s usual point of view that he used to create a darker mood for the new story.     —Janet Hutchings

When I first began mapping out my Columbus, Ohio-set private eye series, the one thing I knew with certainty was my chosen point of view. In keeping with the classics of the genre, I would tell the story in first person, with all action seen through the eyes of my protagonist, ex-Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator Andy Hayes. I fell in love with private eye fiction reading novels told in first person by everyone from Sue Grafton and Robert B. Parker to Loren Estleman and Sara Paretsky, and saw no reason to tinker with the trope.

Then came the day, while reading one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, that I realized with a bit of surprise that Child occasionally changed things up. Though I reveled in the terse, third-person narrative of most of Child’s books—epitomized by that iconic line, “Reacher said nothing”—I soon discovered that some of the best books in the series were told by Reacher himself, including Persuader and Gone Tomorrow. Intrigued, I researched this phenomenon and found that Child is hardly alone in occasionally switching from third-person to first or vice versa.

Michael Connelly, for example, wrote most of his Harry Bosch novels in third person but put the narration in Bosch’s voice when the character took a detour as a private eye in Lost Light and The Narrows. After Connelly has Bosch quit the force mid-series, he explained, “I thought I’d write about him as a private eye. And since the great private eye novels are largely first-person, I thought that would be a challenge,” according to a 2015 Los Angeles Review of Books profile. He later acknowledged that he’d made a mistake taking Bosch out of the LAPD and returned him to the force, and to third person. (By contrast, Connelly writes his Mickey Haller novels all in first-person.)

Patricia Cornwell began her long-running Kay Scarpetta series with a first-person narrative in Postmortem in 1990, switched to third-person for most of the following novels, and eventually returned to first-person. “I went to third person because I wanted the ability to take on all these other personas and show the reader things that Scarpetta doesn’t experience herself,” Cornwell told The Washington Post in 2011. Ultimately, she returned to first-person out of discomfort at inhabiting the minds of criminals.

“When I shifted back to first person, it was like returning to someone I hadn’t visited in years,” she told the Post. “It was much more comfortable, for me and for the readers. In the first person, the readers feel smart, like it’s them solving the case. And because they’re holding her hand, so to speak, they feel safe, even when bad things are happening in the story.”

For his part, Ed McBain wrote most of the volumes in his 13-book series about defense attorney Matthew Hope in the first person, including the 1976 opener, Goldilocks. But he too made the switch, writing the last volume, The Last Best Hope, in the third-person. Similarly, Archer Mayor began his novels about Vermont detective Joe Gunther in the first person, then changed to third-person because it provided more creative latitude and gave other characters a voice, according to a 2013 profile.

Mayor told me in an email that he “sweated bullets” before making the switch but was rewarded when not a single reader commented.

“I felt enormously liberated, in that I could now use my new ‘God’s eye view’ position to hover over all the characters,” Mayor told me. “I never wanted to return to First Person, as a result.” He cited the new POV freedom he experienced writing 2002’s The Sniper’s Wife, told mostly from the perspective of Gunther sidekick Willy Kunkle.

As it turns out, even Sara Paretsky tried the switch, including a six-chapter third-person narrative in Total Recall in 2001, and in the short story: “The Pietro Andromache,” which appeared in 1995’s Windy City Blues, a collection of V.I. Warshawski stories. “When I wrote that story – which was relatively early in V I’s life – I wanted to explore what she looked like to people outside her head,” Paretsky shared with me in an email. “To them she seemed confident and upbeat; they didn’t see the self-doubts that often torment her.”

Emboldened by the experimentation of writers whose work I admire, I decided to try my own hand at switching POV. The first attempt, an Andy Hayes short story titled “The Whole Story,” appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine in the fall of 2020. I noticed right away that the switch darkened the tone of the tale and took the edge off my character’s normally waggish narration. Despite the change, the tone felt perfect for the story, about a prison inmate whose drunken driving caused an accident that killed his daughter, but who has enough questions about that day that he hires Hayes to dig into his case.

I wrote other Andy Hayes books and stories afterward in the first-person but decided to try again in “Through Thick and Thin,” which appears in the September/October issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Once again, shifting to the third-person guided the story—about a client with a violent past he’s desperate to keep hidden—down a marginally darker path that felt perfect for the subject matter.

Here are three things I learned switching from my customary first-person to third-person:

At its most basic, the change was an enjoyable way to freshen up a long-running series and main character, not to mention a lesson in learning new things about my character by examining him from a different angle.

As I’ve already suggested, the switch subtly darkened the mood of the stories, which forced me to keep the elements of my character that readers enjoy—his sarcasm, wit, and skepticism—while sending him down slightly meaner streets.

The switch gave me newfound confidence in the character and the series, by discovering that Hayes’ story—stories—can be successfully told in a variety of ways.

And with that, Welsh-Huggins saved his work, closed the file, and shut off his computer for the day.

Jim Allyn doesn’t write a lot of fiction, but what he does write is always worth reading. Three of his last four stories for EQMM made best-of-the-year collections: see Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (“Princess Anne”) and 2017 (“The Master of Negwegon”) and Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 (“Things That Follow”). He has a new story, entitled “Everybody Pays,” coming up in our November/December 2024 issue (on sale October 15). In this post Jim takes up a topic that has proved controversial in our culture, but he has a unique perspective on it. Fiction writers should be especially interested, since the piece touches on the effects that entertainment (including fiction) can have on society.   —Janet Hutchings

When I began working on this piece, I intended to explore the short-story collaboration my son and I have undertaken, our first. My son is a federal agent currently working in Europe. He’s a walking trove of experience and information. Brodie was a four-year Marine, a city cop in Michigan, and has served as a federal agent in California, Washington DC, Florida, and South Korea, and his current assignment is in Brussels, Belgium. He’s led SWAT team raids in San Francisco and Miami.

We’ve been aware of our symbiotic possibilities for a long time. We have kicked some ideas around, and are now finally taking a serious crack at it. Which means actually writing something. I thought the give and take and the learning curve involved with our new venture might be interesting. Fantasy man says hello to the real deal. How will that work? Can we come up with a workable process? Will it be any good? Will we ever get it done? Who’s in charge here?

We had an excellent way to jump-start our project. Brodie had written an article that was published in The University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Magazine. (We’re both Michigan grads). It was entitled “A Day in the Life: Field Notes from a Federal Agent.” I’d been aware of the article for a long time but had never thought of it as fodder. But why not? It wasn’t proprietary. It was “ours,” perfect for this deal, about his reflections upon a particularly hazardous raid on a known meth house.

The key incident in the meth house is a showdown and a twelve-gauge, sawed- off shotgun. Brodie confronts a shirtless, tatted gang member in a back hall. Between the two are several open doors, each a potential ambush. The gang member’s hands are behind his back.

“Show me your hands,” Brodie shouts, leveling his 9mm Sig Sauer at the man’s chest. The man ignores him. He writes, “His head slowly swivels back and forth as he sizes up his options. Sweat is pouring down my back underneath the accumulated weight of my bulletproof vest, equipment, and terror…Time slows. A beat passes. Two beats…” Later on he reports: “My work is mostly paperwork and procedure punctuated by moments of abject terror where a criminal’s choice can eliminate my own.”

Through long discussions, we began massaging and expanding and dramatizing that event. We were making progress. It was hard work. We added a key character and, of course, a killing. The story was taking shape and I was confident it would be an exciting, realistic tale.

But then something incredible happened. Armed with an AR 15-type semi-automatic rifle, twenty-year-old Thomas Crooks was inexplicably able to climb up on a roof and in just six seconds get eight shots off at Donald Trump. Crooks came within an inch or two of killing the former President before being killed by a single head shot from a Secret Service counter-sniper.

That event shook me a bit. It got me thinking about the omnipresence of guns in my writing, in my life, and in the marrow of America. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that I might be a bit of a one trick pony in that I’ve never written a story that didn’t involve a gun. In at least two stories, “The Tree Hugger” and “The Ozone Layer,” guns are pivotal well beyond their usual role of being used to shoot somebody.

The attempt by Crooks to assassinate a former President also brought back powerful memories of Dallas.

I was eighteen When President Kennedy was killed. It was deer season in Northern Michigan. I heard the news on the AM radio while I was driving into town in a Jeep loaded with a seven-point buck I had killed with a Model 1894 Winchester 30-30. When I rushed into the house and told my mother about the assassination, she got cross and told me not to joke about such things. It’s not funny, she said. Then she turned on the television and burst into tears. A young president dead. My mother crying in the living room.

I and my Edgar-winning, crime-fiction-superstar brother Doug, my senior by two years, grew up in the gun country of remote Northeastern Michigan on the shores of Lake Huron about 250 miles North of Detroit. It was and is hunting country… whitetail deer, black bear, a wide variety of wildfowl and small game. We lived in and around Alpena, a town of 14,000. To find a bigger town you have to drive one hundred miles. We grew up in the North Woods.

In our very early years, we were not around guns. We never saw my father with a gun. He didn’t hunt or fish or partake in the outdoor life generally. He was not a military man or a sportsman of any kind. My mother, a splendid, auburn-haired dynamo, divorced him. Doug and I lived with him for a while in a yellow New Moon trailer in a trailer park after she went on her way and we were wild kids always on the edge of trouble because he was a traveling salesman who left us alone for weeks at a time. We did what unsupervised kids are wont to do: anything we wanted.

In her second pass at life my mother won the heart of a local physician who was a different breed of cat: a deer hunter, a fly fisherman, a Jewish WWII vet who had marched through Europe. A successful man with money who wanted to live life. Living life was something my mother knew how to do but hadn’t had the chance. Together, they purchased a 200-acre hunting camp bisected by Black River, a trout stream, and, after relieving my father of his pair of juvenile delinquents, allowed the deep woods and open fields of “Camp” to become the Allyn Brothers playground for the rest of our lives. Under the occasionally watchful eyes of our new parental pair, we raised horses and hunting dogs and roses, fished the Black River, cleared forest roads, hunted deer and birds hard, and used the hell out of our own personal shooting range. In town, we lived in a modest ranch on the shores of Lake Huron’s Thunder Bay.

We went from living almost poor to living comfortably as fast as you can say “I do.” What we added to our new household was most decidedly a mixed bag.

I try not to treat guns casually in my writing because they have not been casual in my life. I try to give them their moment. Guns are not, and should not be treated as, casual things. Guns are momentous things gifted and damned with dangerous power. Beautiful. Life changing. Life ending. Life saving. Merciful. Savage. The scourge of a nation; the savior of a nation and everything in between.

My attraction to guns had a very early start. I loved and coveted toy rifles and pistols. Pored over pictures in magazines and gun catalogs. Maybe cowboys and soldiers portrayed in various media pounded something into me. Who knows? I have a feeling of nostalgia for guns that is poorly rooted, if at all, in fact. I know that, but the feeling remains nonetheless. It is a kind of longing and possessiveness that may well be typical of anybody who collects anything. I don’t fantasize about using guns but I do appreciate their function as an “equalizer.” Their defensive capability at a physical, personal level is very real. I think powerless kids are attracted to it.

My interest in guns of a unique variety certainly feeds my writing. I have no interest in assault rifles or the “black rifles” and semi-automatic pistols so common today. And neither does my brother. We have always liked guns of the past, guns with a history, guns of well-traveled wood and steel, not black polymer machines. Probably our favorite deer rifle is the 30-40 Krag that was carried up San Juan Hill by the Rough Riders in 1898. The Krag’s tenure as the official U.S. military rifle was very brief, being replaced by the M1903 Springfield, the rifle of Sergeant York, but it is an unmistakable and fine firearm.

Doug and I shot our first gun when we were around eight and six respectively. It was a compact Browning .25 semi-automatic about the size of a pack of cigarettes. My mother took us to a little-used open dump and we plinked at bottles and cans with the solid black Belgian pistol. Shooting the little Browning was a thrill; it had quite a pop. My mother wasn’t promoting guns or pushing them at us. She just believed that a boy should learn to shoot a gun as an important part of growing up.

Once, when we visited our mother’s relatives in Missouri, we found an old, rusty double barrel shotgun in the family barn. It was just lying in a corner half-buried in the dirt floor. My mother grew up in a place where guns sprouted from the earth.

As a teenager I was involved in two incidents of potential gun violence towards men, one involving a handgun and one involving a shotgun, one involving a teenage friend and one involving an adult asshole. I had the gun. Looking back, both incidents seem impossible, unimaginable. All participants had been drinking except the cops. Teenagers, alcohol, and guns. We all just squeaked by.

When you step into what became the Allyn Camp in the Michigan north woods, there is a vertical gun rack on your immediate left. It is a foundational part of the white pine entryway, built from floor to ceiling. It was expected that people would enter and exit the cabin carrying rifles and shotguns. Back in the day, it was always full.

Once upon a time, Doug stepped into that doorway. He removed my stepfather’s scoped Winchester .270 from the rack, drew the bolt back, looked down into the chamber, saw that it was empty, pushed the bolt home, shouldered the rifle and with an ear-shattering “BANG” blew out the entire glass storm door.

“What the hell are you doing?” his wife Eve cried.

“But it was empty,” Doug shouted back, bewildered.

“Obviously not,” Eve yelled.

Someone had loaded the rifle with the wrong caliber cartridge and the cartridge was jammed. It didn’t eject when Doug worked the bolt. When Doug looked down into the open chamber and didn’t see a shell, the Winchester should have been safe.

When Doug took the gun to our family gunsmith to have the stuck shell removed, he received a colorful, royal dressing down that only this particular, meticulous gunsmith could deliver. The man had a very theatrical voice and memorable mannerisms. The whole thing was comical (to us). Could it have been tragic? Not likely. We were taught to never point guns at people. Never. If someone had been standing outside the storm door, Doug wouldn’t have pointed the gun in that direction.

When you step into that Camp doorway these days, the gun rack stands empty. It is a catch-all for hats, gloves, bug spray, dog leashes, and the like. It was full when we were hunters. We’re not hunters any more. We’re part of a trend. There are 250,000 fewer Michigan deer hunters today than twenty-five years ago. A new survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows that only about five percent of Americans sixteen years old and older actually hunt. That’s half of what it was fifty years ago when I was an active hunter, and the decline is expected to accelerate over the next decade.

I joined the Naval Air Force Reserve while in high school and one teenage summer wound up in boot camp at the Naval Air Station in Grosse Ile, Michigan. We had only one shooting drill. Everyone in my group—mostly city boys from the Detroit area—lined up at the range, was given a Colt 1911 .45 semi-automatic, and instructed how to use it. After the instruction, we were all given live ammo and told to shoot in unison upon command at our own individual big paper targets pinned to easels in the sand trap before us.

The Drill Instructor gave the command and everybody in my squad began shooting except me. My gun didn’t work. After the shooting concluded, the DI came over. I was so nervous and self-conscious in that kind of rigid, formal, truly panoramic situation totally alien to my casual North Woods settings that I had neglected to insert the clip. With an unnecessary amount of loud ridicule, the DI loaded my Colt, handed it to me, and told me to shoot as required…all by my lonesome with everyone watching. A few were snickering. I was embarrassed and spooked all right. But a gun in my hand…That I was used to. A Colt 1911 semi-automatic holds eight shots. My first shot visibly loosened the paper target and it slipped to an odd angle. My second shot knocked it off its easel and it fell to the sand. My next six shots, rapidly and evenly spaced, danced that target around. Everyone could see the target jump and the sand splash. It was the first time I ever heard spontaneous applause for something I alone had done. The DI chuckled and slapped me on the back. The military is a gun country.

America isn’t gun country. It’s lots of gun countries. A tapestry. There’s one for the paramilitary types who dress up and play at war, one for the shadowy homicidal berserk, one for the single-gun home-defense people, one for the competition shooter, one for the cop, one for the hunter, one for the waiting-for-dystopia apocalyptic type. The criminal, the collector, the gunsmith, and likely many more. Although these states of being can be like Venn Circles, they can also be totally separate with extremely different individuals, mindsets, and intentions. To control the relatively few dangerous categories, we cast a legal net over all. That creates resistance and resentment, particularly because horrific mass killings are increasing even though the rate of overall gun violence has been decreasing. Nevertheless, the laws we have work to a degree but they are clearly not enough.

Laws with teeth requiring that guns in the home be secured have an excellent chance to reduce gun violence. Gun safes, gun locks, locked cabinets would have prevented my stupid gun tricks as a boozed-up teenager. I would never have risked my mother’s wrath and my stepfather’s wrath to, in effect, “break in,” to obtain a family gun. They were just handy, and I grabbed them. Reducing such “casual handling” will also help instill the appropriate caution and respect firearms deserve.

Red flag laws will also work if actively applied and aggressively enforced. Even a cursory review of mass shootings reveals a variety of cases where an intervention based on previous behavior was apparent and called for and could have prevented the act. They were seen coming, but nothing was done. Manpower and will and legal justification are critical.

In 2019, deaths from gun violence in the U.S. was eight times higher than the rate in Canada, just 100 miles away from our Camp on the other side of Lake Huron. It was 100 times higher than the rate in the United Kingdom.

I never threw a baseball or a football or a frisbee around with my dad or my stepdad and I love to do all three. Never played tennis with them. Never went swimming in the sweetwater sea together or shot baskets. Never played poker or horseshoes.

But with my stepfather I did carry a shotgun and hunt partridge and woodcock over wonderful German Shorthair Pointers. We walked the woods and fields of autumn together. Golden Octobers. We took target practice at clay pigeons in the fields of Camp. My stepfather saw me yearning for a used Winchester at our favorite gun shop and bought it for me. He gave me his Browning Sweet Sixteen shotgun because I could shoot better with it than he could. He bought my wife Suzanne a 20-gauge Browning shotgun. She hunted with us sometimes and he liked her. A beautiful little person carrying a shotgun that was almost as big as she was.

At Camp we hunted deer as a family, crowding together in the cabin on the night before opening day and fanning out through the woods half-asleep in the freezing November predawn. We’d sit all day, often seeing nothing. In the evening we talked about the day’s hunt over a big supper, fire roaring in the fieldstone fireplace, dogs lounging on the couch, sleeping in the chairs, begging under the table, and lying about the floor like casually tossed blankets. A small herd of German shorthair pointers and one black labrador retriever. It was all warm and lively and comfortable and peaceful and filled with tobacco smoke.

There weren’t just “guns” standing in the rack and hanging on the wall. They were all rifles. Sue’s Ruger .44 mag, Doug’s 30-40 Krag, Jac’s .270 Winchester, Eve’s 30-30 Winchester, Brodie’s 45-70 Springfield, Jim’s Sako .308. Couldn’t have had that particular ritual without them. Some of those rifles had been carried long ago by hunters we never knew in forests we had never seen. We understood that about those rifles. Liked that about them. They were history, memories, partners.

Any discussion of factors that might affect violent tendencies in America always includes violence in the entertainment media and that must necessarily include crime fiction in all its wildly different iterations. Some have called much of today’s entertainment “propaganda for violence.” It is hard to argue that it is “propaganda for peace.”

I used to live and work in Oxford, Michigan. Brodie graduated from Oxford High School during that time. In 2021 fifteen-year-old Ethan Crumbley walked those same halls of Oxford High School armed with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He shot and killed four of his fellow classmates and injured seven others. He was sentenced to life in prison.

His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were the first parents ever to be charged and convicted in their child’s mass shooting at a U.S. School. They were found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the students Ethan killed. They were sentenced to ten to fifteen years in prison. The judge said the two repeatedly ignored signs that would make a “reasonable person feel the hair on the back of their neck stand up.”

The era of parents with guns as innocent bystanders is over.

Twenty-one of the thirty deadliest shootings occurred in this our new century. It is the first century of the third millennium. New heights. In 2022 the ATF reported that the annual number of firearms manufactured has almost tripled since 2000. The report revealed that since 2009, Glock-type semi-automatic handguns bought for personal protection have been outselling rifles typically used for hunting. In the last five years alone, Americans have purchased nearly 70 million firearms, 13 million more than the entire first decade of the new century.

There’s an armed populace out there that’s unlike anything that’s ever been seen before. The mass shootings are unlike anything that’s ever been seen before. They are getting closer to all of us.

We’re pouring more and more guns into our growing melting pot and some people are demanding that we do…nothing. Except arm every adult with a Glock.

Think that approach is going to help things? More guns in more hands? Really?

Every single gun is important because of the damage a single gun can do. We should support red flag laws for high-risk individuals, an assault weapons ban, gun buy-backs, safe and secure gun storage in the home, and any other practical, reasonable measure.

One evening in the 1960’s my mother was sitting at our classically rustic hunting camp table feeding a cute little mouse with bits of cheese. Tiny mice are exceedingly precious, like pixies. Sometimes you could see them basking in the sunlight on the leaves of our houseplants. Little harmless creatures. My stepfather came up behind my mother and whacked the little mouse with a heavy green Coke bottle of that era. He objected to vermin being fed at the table. Perhaps it was his medical-school training. My mother was so upset her neck turned red. My stepfather retreated to his favorite chair, lit up a Camel, and resumed reading his newspaper. I struggled with my philosophical interpretation of that incident. Initially I was in full agreement with the actions of both parties. A true conundrum. I finally decided that the mouse was being fed as an invited guest of my mother’s and therefore was entitled to protective status and so should not have been struck with a Coke bottle by a cardiologist. My stepfather should simply have asked the tiny mouse to please leave. The little mouse scampers back inside the wall and everybody lives.

If only the world could work that way.

U.K. crime writer Sarah Hilary makes her EQMM debut in our current issue, September/October 2024, with the unforgettable story “Knock-Knock.” She is, of course, no newcomer to the crime scene. Her debut novel, Someone Else’s Skin, won the 2015 Theakston Crime Novel of the Year Award and was a Silver Falchion and Macavity Award finalist in the U.S. She’s the author of eight novels to date. The latest, Black Thorn, was described by The Guardian as “A creepy and atmospheric tale, beautifully and sensitively written.” Speaking of creepy and atmospheric, in this post the author takes up the question of whether mystery should be blended with the occult. Once you’ve read her EQMM story, or this post, I think you’ll welcome more such genre blending.    —Janet Hutchings 

Should you ever find yourself lost for words when among crime writers, simply utter the statement, ‘Dracula is a great detective novel,’ and wait for the conversation to become heated.

There are those who will feel compelled to tell you Dracula is not a detective novel, great or otherwise, for the simple reason it concerns itself with the supernatural and the supernatural has no place in mystery novels. But there will usually be at least one crime writer willing to put up a spirited (you’ll see what I did there) defence of the idea Dracula is, at its heart, a detective novel. Its  many clues take the form of documents and mapped locations, there is a protracted chase, hunters and prey – all the classic ingredients. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest Bram Stoker originally intended it as a mystery, with his earliest notes citing a detective called Cotford and an investigator called Singleton.

Should the heated conversation require extra fuel, you can usefully throw out a few references to Arthur Conan Doyle’s abiding belief in the supernatural (most famously fairies), Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (widely accepted as an early example of crime fiction) and perhaps most compelling of all, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories about C. Auguste Dupin, his reclusive detective who modelled pipes for Sherlock Holmes and poems for Adam Dalgliesh.

Poe is often credited with being the father of the detective novel, but is of course far more famous for his tales of mystery and imagination involving hearts that beat under floorboards and live cats bricked inside walls (a trick few crime writers would dare attempt, since the harming of animals is all too often the portent of a doomed career). Poe even inspired a Japanese writer who adopted the pen name Edogawa Ranpo (a Japanese rendering of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’). Ranpo created a detective of his own, Akechi Kogorō, inspired by Sherlock Holmes. Like Poe, Ranpo is best-remembered for his tales of ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsensical), the most disturbing of which, “The Human Chair,” would give even his hero Edgar Allan a sleepless night.

Assuming the conversation gathers pace, you might like to mention that in Ireland in 1872, Sheridan Le Fanu published a short story collection, In a Glass Darkly, featuring his occult detective, Dr. Hesselius. Back then, no one was greatly concerned with staking out forbidden ground between mystery and occult. Great detectives could believe in what they liked, as long as they got the job done.

Scintillating conversation aside, why should any of this matter? Well, it doesn’t. Unless you feel strongly that the mysteries at the heart of mystery novels should never stray across the line between the natural and supernatural worlds. But isn’t it the job of the crime writer to unsettle, intrigue, baffle and disturb our readers? In which case it seems a shame to cut ourselves off from the many excellent ways in which the supernatural can aid us in that quest.

John Connelly has written in praise of just such a quest while the French writer, Fred Vargas, offers an excellent contemporary lesson in how blending elements of the occult with a rational denouement can deliver a richly satisfying read. One of my favourite short stories of recent years is “All the Livelong Day” by Mick Herron (you can read it in his Dolphin Junction collection). The story positively vibrates with brooding menace, and has more corvids than even Edgar Allan Poe could shake a stick at.

All the signs are that ‘blended genre’ is about to be big in crime fiction. My advice this fall is to let a little darkness into your mystery reading. Embrace the night, switch off the lights and listen for those heartbeats under the floor.

Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, and other novels. She lives in Chicago, where she co-chairs the crime fiction readers’ event Midwest Mystery Conference and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. Her latest story for EQMM, “[The Applause Dies],” appears in our current issue, September/October 2024. In this post she takes up an important topic that doesn’t get covered much on this site.  —Janet Hutchings 

I hate instruction manuals. I hate the make-ready work ahead of just about anything. I would rather leap into the center of something new and figure it out. That’s how I wrote, too—until a book project forced me into a new role—triumphant researcher!—and paid me back with some of the best experiences of my writing life.

Writing Up to the Unknown
As a writer, I’ve always gone the “organic” route, writing myself into a character and story, then digging myself back out again. As a road map, I used my inner sense of how a story moves—gained from being a voracious reader, of course—and my own preference for how information is unveiled. When I hit roadblocks that required research, I learned to type in “XXX” and keep moving. Those XXXs were the purview of some future Lori, who would surely figure out a workaround.

This was bad news for the Lori who later discovered, upon typing “The End” into the draft of her first novel, that she still had some XXXs to see to.

The answer to that series of Xs I’d typed into my first novel, The Black Hour, was found by reading a chapter in a sociology textbook about violence. My old friend reading! Books are always the first research step, because if someone has already gathered resources, culled the information, and distilled it all into a few hundred pages, that’s a rich vein. A good place to start, anyway, and in fact for my third novel, The Day I Died, the entire idea for the book came from spotting a book on the shelf I hadn’t been looking for: Sex, Lies, and Handwriting: A Top Expert Reveals the Secrets Hidden in Your Handwriting by Michelle Dressbold.

But sometimes it’d just not possible to find what you need to know by visiting the library.

Some writers don’t worry about research, of course. Make it up! It’s fiction! And of course we do make up a good deal.

When we’re “making things up,” though, we’re pulling from our own experience, even if we have to extrapolate a bit. If our experience doesn’t help us with a character or situation, the next best thing is to solicit the help of someone whose life experience or earned knowledge parallels the character’s life better. An expert. Imagination is great, but confirmation is better. And while I usually write about places I know really well, I learned that I can make myself a bit of an expert on the world of my story with on-the-ground research. Are you keeping track? All those XXXs of unimaginable, unfudgeable unknown can only be replaced by some combination of Experience, Experts, and X-marks-the-spot. When we want to make sure our stories don’t make us numbskulls to the readers who know, we work harder to get it right.

Getting It Wrong
On-site research is essential but I didn’t understand that at first. Up until my fourth novel, I had been borrowing story settings from places I knew: the university campus where I worked, a hotel in my hometown, a chain of lakes in Wisconsin I’d been to many times on vacation. When I decided to write about a dark sky park for what would become Under a Dark Sky, I wanted to visit a place where artificial light had been controlled for the experience, but none of the official dark sky places designated (at the time) by the International Dark-Sky Association were within six hours of Chicago. I chose as my model the nearest of these properties, the Headlands Dark Sky Park, way up in the fingertips of the Michigan mitten—and then winter set in. I was forced to write a draft of the book without getting to the park myself.

The next year, while the book was still in draft, I was finally able to drive through Michigan all the way to the furthest reach of the lower peninsula and visit all the landmarks of my book—and thank goodness I did.

I’d left in two artifacts of writing without a net that definitely would have lost all Michigan readers. The first is that I had my Chicago-residing protagonist driving through . . . Lansing.

You may not understand why that’s not right, but everyone in Michigan did, when I told this story to a gathering of four hundred people at a library fundraiser in Grand Rapids. As a body, the entire room leaned back and gasped.

 “I changed it!” I yelled. “I swear! I changed it!”

(It’s Grand Rapids one would drive through to get between Chicago and northern Michigan.)

The other artifact was that I’d placed my protagonist in this far-north park without mentioning that she would have seen the Mackinac Bridge on her way into town. The Mighty Mac connects the tip of the lower peninsula of Michigan, the mitten, to the upper peninsula. The bridge is visible ten miles out, a beacon that no first-time visitor would ever miss.

I swear I changed it.

Getting Close to War
When I decided to attempt my first historical novel, then, I knew I would have to dig in. The inspiration for the novel was a little-known historical fact: During World War II, when millions of children were evacuated out of London and other metro areas into the countryside and away from what would be called the Blitz, ten children were quietly placed at Agatha Christie’s beloved summer home, Greenway.

Is it any wonder I had to try?

For research, I turned first to books, tracking down the only handful of published references to this episode, including the two or three sentences Christie offered in her own autobiography. Part of my research was reading the books Christie published right before, during, and right after the war, and the titles where she had fictionalized Greenway herself. 

Then I moved onto the dusty records, thankfully less dusty in digital form within Ancestry.com, tracking down the names and any details I could learn about the people in Christie’s household, on the estate, and in the community. I enjoyed some true research victories doing this work, returning the names of Christie’s butler and cook, a married couple the Christie estate couldn’t confirm, and proving once and for all the names of the couple who chaperoned the group of children to Greenway—and sending that proof back to estate, so they would have it for their records.

I traveled to Greenway in 2017 as a tourist, seeing what there was to see that connected the house to that group of evacuees. There was little, except one cupboard kept behind a locked door. Inside the cupboard, the shelves were still marked with the names of five of the children: Doreen, Maureen, Pamela, Beryl, and Tina.

I had had a lot of doubts that I could tackle this story. I was American. I was not a historian. And research . . . well, we’ve covered that. But in that moment when I spied those names on the cubbies that had held their shoes, clothes, and photo albums so they wouldn’t forget their mums and dads, this story became mine. This history wasn’t ancient history, those names on the cubbies told me. This history was within reach, and it was human. And it had never truly been told. I couldn’t make it up. In the same moment the story became real to me, I also realized I would have to do my best to gather the facts.

I wrote a (bad) draft, and then went back to Greenway in 2019, knowing now what research I needed to finish the story. I needed to live at Greenway, to breathe its air and walk its grounds and poke around in its hidden spots. To stand on the hill as Agatha would have done. To know what its night sounds were, how dark it got, to understand how it would have felt to be isolated there, away from family, while bombs dropped on the river, and on the too near Channel. How close the war would really have been.

Writing Death at Greenway was a wild swing for me, but if I was going to try, then I had to put myself in that house. I had to know what the children had experienced. On this one piece of history, they were the only eye witnesses who might still be alive. They were the true experts—

Which leads me to Doreen.

Finding the Human in History
In the course of my research, the staff of the National Trust, who now own the house and operate it as a tourist site, turned over a copy of a letter written to them by one of the children—Doreen, from the names on the cubbies. Her letter recounted everything she remembered about being evacuated to Greenway during the war. With a little Facebook sleuthing, I located her son and got in touch. She’s eighty-six in November, and we still write letters. Her friendship is the sort of charmed result that I couldn’t have even known to hope for when I set out on this project. She also made clear to me that though this was a story about war, her time at Greenway had isolated her from it. She had felt safe there, and loved. That’s not the typical war evacuee story. If I had never talked to Doreen, I might have got that one very important detail wrong.

We say that writing must be its own reward. Publishing is punishing, but writing can be the thing that keeps you connected to your best self and to the world around you, to gratitude, to human experience.

Research is the same way. Where it had always seemed to me that research was homework I never asked for, drudgery, now I understand it to be honest work, rewarding, and connecting. It’s a chance to learn, experience, and to live lives beyond our own, which is exactly why we read novels in the first place.

History is human, just like stories. Sure, we could make it all up. But what would be the fun in that?

Sue Parman is an anthropologist by profession and her studies include a Gaelic-speaking community in the Scottish Outer Hebrides. She’s also an award-winning poet, short story writer, memoirist, and artist. Recently, she won the Travelers Tales’ Grand Prize for Best Travel Tale of 2024. She makes her EQMM debut in our current issue, September/October 2024, with the story “Gannets and Ghouls,” an eerie tale just right for the fall season. Readers may be surprised to learn that the story is Sue’s first real venture into the mystery genre; it was her daughter, mystery writer Gigi Pandian, an award-winning contributor to EQMM, who suggested she send the story our way.  In this fascinating post we get a glimpse of the tale’s underpinnings.  —Janet Hutchings

The anthropologist, like the detective, specializes in the decoding of secrets.

A secret is defined by the boundary system that it protects. In Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, the mystery hinges on the boundaries of family, whereas in Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers spy stories, the boundary systems are nation-states in which secrets are those that enable one nation to win a war against another.

The boundary system whose secrets I’ve spent a lifetime trying to decode is that of a tightly knit village community. In the 1970s I spent a year and a half in a Gaelic-speaking crofting community on the island of Lewis in the Scottish Outer Hebrides. Crofting was created in the nineteenth century to preserve and invigorate rural communities in the Highlands and Islands by ensuring low rent and security of tenure for small plots of land. Crofters don’t own their crofts so they can’t sell them, and the crofts are too small to provide a living through agriculture alone. They supplement their income through various means, particularly the weaving of Harris Tweed, which itself is confined to the boundaries of the Hebrides, defined as cloth made from wool that has been dyed, spun, and woven by crofters in their own homes in the Outer Hebrides. All of these factors create a tightly bounded village community crawling with secrets hidden from outsiders, including the anthropological detective.

Two mystery writers who have been especially good at spinning the secrets of a tightly bounded village community similar to mine are Peter May and Tana French. In Peter May’s Blackhouse trilogy, Edinburgh detective Fin MacLeod returns to his childhood home on the island of Lewis in the Scottish Outer Hebrides. To whom does he owe loyalty, the state in which he functions as a detective, or the community that forged his early friendships and loves? Tana French does the same thing for the Irish countryside in her books The Searcher and The Hunter. When an American detective, Cal Hooper, settles in a small rural village in Ireland, his love for Trey, a half-wild child, draws him past the community’s boundaries and into its secret heart.

A murder case introduced me to the structure of secrets in Hebridean communities. After I’d chosen the village I wished to study, I was informed by outsiders that it was home to the first murder to have occurred in the Outer Hebrides in a hundred years. It took months before the villagers themselves would tell me about it, and any discussion was prefaced with the insistence that the local man accused of the murder had been found innocent. As time passed, I learned the bare bones of the story. An old woman was killed. A neighbor was put on trial and acquitted, not by the verdict “Innocent” but by the third verdict peculiar to Scotland, “Not Proven,” a verdict that essentially means “we think you’re guilty, but we can’t prove it.” Gradually I heard more rumors. The murdered woman came from family considered “gentry” because they had a shop, and although she was old and blind, it was rumored that she kept money hidden in her house. And then, in late-night ceilidhs when grievances were aired and stories told, I began to hear damning details. Although the accused lived only a few houses away from the murdered woman and sometimes did chores for her, he claimed he never saw her much. He who never had much money was now spending a lot, and a one-pound note in his possession had a corner ripped off that matched a piece found in the bureau of the murdered woman. There were other rumors—a blood-stained shirt, a claim that he had confessed the crime to his drinking mates—rumors that were torn apart and debated, denied or confirmed. It became clear that everyone in the village knew about the murder (even the children gave me their version of it); and although they might argue about the details, they were convinced he was guilty. And yet, at the trial, not a single person in the village ratted him out.

The community kept its boundary tight, its secrets intact to outsiders, but they meted out their own form of punishment. After the trial, the accused was shunned by his neighbors, and when he tried to buy a house in another part of the island, the owners refused to sell it to him. He eventually emigrated to Australia.

Toward the end of my stay in the Hebrides, I attended a County Council meeting in Inverness, and a social scientist based on the mainland asked if I’d heard about the murder. I mumbled a few platitudes about Scotland’s “Not Proven” verdict and then changed the subject. Like Cal Hooper in Tana French’s books, I’d been sucked into the network of secrets inside the community’s boundaries and was trusted to keep them. Sometimes you solve mysteries only by agreeing to keep your mouth shut.

My new story in EQMM, “Gannets and Ghouls,” is set in the Faroe Islands in a community similar to the one I studied. Both communities keep their secrets, handling them in their own way, administering their own justice.

There are secrets that I haven’t managed to decode, such as a young man whispering to his sweetheart the Gaelic term of endearment, “Mo run.”

My secret.

What does it mean? That their bond is stronger than the bond with their respective families or the village community? That the love between them is more important than any other tie? Or is it the universal expression of lovers everywhere, an attempt to give voice to the unfathomable inexpressibility of love?

It’s a mystery.

Tom Andes has had stories in a variety of literary journals and crime-fiction publications, including Best American Mystery Stories 2012. He also won the 2019 Gold Medal for Best Novel-in-Progress from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society. A musician as well as an author, he’s released two well-received EPs. His most recent fiction is a story for EQMM entitled “Hell-Bent for Leather,” which appears in our current issue (September/October 2024), and a soon-to-be-published novel, Wait There Till You Hear From Me (Crescent City Books, 2025). In this post Tom talks about a mystery writer who moved him from an early age and whose work continues to be impactful for him on rereading. —Janet Hutchings

Not all our adolescent loves hold up over the long run. Play me the music I loved in junior high, and odds are I’ll cringe. My first rock concert at age 13 was David Lee Roth’s Skyscraper tour, with Steve Vai playing the heart-shaped guitar with three fretboards (eat your heart out, Jimmy Page). I can’t tell you the last time I listened to that record, or for that matter, anything Roth did without Van Halen. Metallica’s Master of Puppets? I haven’t put that on in decades—though late in the pandemic, I did find myself listening to a lot of Judas Priest, which inspired my story, “Hell Bent for Leather.”

More interesting for me is what survives. I don’t know how many hundreds of hours I’ve spent listening to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street since I discovered it on vinyl in my parents’ record collection when I was 15. I still love that album. Ditto The Pogues’ Rum Sodomy and the Lash. For months, in ninth grade, I felt asleep with REM’s Green in my headphones. Every few years, I find myself doing a deep dive on that, Document, and the band’s other records from the same era.

I’ve returned to certain books and found myself disappointed. I’ve returned to other books and felt like I was reading completely different novels. That’s how it was with The Catcher in the Rye. First time through, I identified with Holden. The second time through—only a few years later—I thought, “man, this kid’s a jerk.”

Again and again, I’ve gone back to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory. Though I suppose both are literary novels, Greene maintained he learned how to write novels by writing what he called “potboilers,” which seems as good a way as any to transition to what we’re talking about today, which is mystery fiction.

A few years ago, I found myself arguing with a friend. I made the innocuous (so I thought) statement that mystery and crime fiction moved me more profoundly and gave me a deeper, richer, more resonant emotional experience than most literary fiction. This person had spent their life writing literary fiction, and they felt invalidated by what I was saying, as if I were dismissing their life’s work.

Of course, I hadn’t meant it personally, and I hadn’t meant to slag this person’s writing off, either. Whatever genre we’re writing in, the rewards seem so small, the payoff so negligible, I understand why they felt that way: especially writing literary fiction, the edification that comes from the sense we’ve written something of enduring artistic value is often the best payoff we’re going to get. And this person is a brilliant writer. Still, here I am all these years later defending myself—or perhaps I’d just like to return to this point because it’s still the truth.

I don’t care whether literary or mystery fiction is “better,” mind you. Most hierarchical ideas about quality in writing are a moving target, based on a contingent set of standards that have more to do with what a given audience wants to believe about itself than with any eternal verities of storytelling. Just look at a list of Pulitzer winners from 100 years ago if you don’t believe me. I’m interested in what keeps me up at night. And it’s still the truth: mystery and crime fiction move me more profoundly and give me a deeper, richer, more resonant emotional experience than most literary fiction.

At the time I was having this argument, I was halfway through rereading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. I was trying to explain to this friend how I could be moved to tears by Spenser’s relationship with Hawk, despite the obvious artifice of a detective novel, and despite the fact Spenser and Hawk are both tropes, the Detective Hero—descended from the Cowboy Hero and the Rugged Individualist—and his Black sidekick.

I’d approached rereading the Spenser novels with trepidation, to be honest. I loved those novels when I was a teenager. They’re part of the reason I wanted to write. Picking them up again, I was hoping for an injection of straight storytelling magic, a shot in the arm I could carry into my own work. What if with hindsight, they sucked? What if the magic was gone, or anyway, worn off? What if they’d aged less like Exile on Main Street than Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet?

To be sure, they’re a product of their era. In the first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser is a swinging single, and he hooks up with his client and later, her college-aged daughter. Hey, it was the seventies.

Over the course of those first few books, though, something happens. Susan Silverman enters the picture, and she becomes Spenser’s romantic partner. Susan’s a psychiatrist, and she often ends up explaining Spenser to himself, and by extension to the reader. She gives voice to the code he lives by, which is a code he doesn’t often articulate, though he does understand it. For all that he’s a tough guy, Spenser has an interior life; he can be brutal, but he’s not a brute. To be sure, aspects of their relationship are idealized. Sometimes Susan is, too. Yet over the course of the series, Spenser and Susan have an ongoing conversation about the paradoxes of long-term partnership, marriage, and monogamy, and that deep, heartfelt examination of romantic love is part of what forms the subtext of the series and makes rereading it so rich and rewarding.

I suspect the subject of long-term romantic partnership was close to Parker’s heart. He and his wife Joan separated for a time. When they got back together, they moved into a house in Boston with three floors, one for Parker, one for Joan, and one in the middle, which they shared.

Aspects of Spenser’s relationship with Hawk might strike contemporary audiences as being “problematic.” Yet literary fiction in the 1980s was lily white, and if Parker’s ideas about race sometimes seem ham-handed—he insists that it’s okay for Spenser to use the n-word, for instance, because he’s pals with Hawk—the Spenser novels nevertheless acknowledge the reality of racism in the United States, and the fact that race is an organizing principle in our culture. By and large, Parker’s white literary contemporaries elided the subject of race altogether.

Not that Parker was highfalutin. The Spenser novels are action-adventure stories like Mickey Spillane’s books or like The A-Team, something else I loved when I was younger, though I haven’t tuned in to see how it holds up. Like Shakespeare, Parker wasn’t writing for posterity. He told an interviewer he was writing to put food on the table.

None of this is to say that you should agree with me about Parker’s books. What keeps me up at night might put you to sleep. Not that I don’t believe in verities of storytelling, either, because I do—deeply and profoundly, as an article of faith.

I was fortunate enough to take a few workshops with the great short story writer Lee K. Abbott before he died. Lee was a literary writer, but he had a soft spot for crime fiction. He loved Tana French’s novels, and his eyes would light up when he talked about James Lee Burke. After Lee died, I read an interview where he gave this piece of advice to apprentice writers: read what moves you and try to figure out what about it speaks to you, so you can emulate it in your own work. Read what moves you—not necessarily what’s “good,” and certainly not what’s “literary.” I’m still trying to figure out what it is about Parker’s novels that I find so moving. All I know is that when I reread them, I feel like I’m sitting down with a group of old friends. And that’s still the ultimate test of a book for me: above and beyond genre or what’s “good,” it has to be something that engages me, that keeps me up at night.

Robin Kirman is a pychoanalyst as well as a writer and she weaves her interest in psychology into her fiction. Her books include The End of Getting Lost, which Booklist called “… a beautifully written novel.” Her first story for EQMM, “Not All Hauntings Are by Ghosts,” appears in our September/October 2024 issue (on sale 8/13). In this post she explores some questions that underlie her very original (and chilling!) EQMM story.  —Janet Hutchings

The idea of possession by a ghost or spirit has always had a firm hold in the gothic literary tradition, and features heavily in supernatural mysteries as well.  Authors as celebrated as Edgar Allen Poe, Toni Morrison, Hillary Mantel, and Henry James have been drawn to explore the link between trauma and “hauntings” to create powerful psychological portraits and raise questions about the permeability of troubled minds.

Recently I also wrote a story for EQMM involving a psychologist who treats a man claiming to be possessed by the ghost of his kidnapper and abuser. At the heart of the mystery lies the question of whether or not this man is truly at the mercy of some supernatural force, or merely profoundly identified with his abuser—call it a case of Stockholm Syndrome taken to the extreme.

As a psychoanalyst as well as a writer, I took this story as an opportunity to consider what, psychologically speaking, it means to be haunted by another, and why this idea has such power over our imaginations. What interests me most isn’t the abnormality of such a condition, but rather, what it reveals about all of us, and the very nature of the self.

In what ways are all of us possessed by the important figures in our lives?

And what does psychoanalytic theory have to say on the subject?

Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was already theorizing about the lingering presence—and internalization—of dead loved ones in his groundbreaking paper on depression: Mourning and Melancholia. In that paper, he draws a distinction between healthy mourning, in which a person grieves the lost loved one and moves on, and what he calls melancholia, in which the bereaved remains stuck in a state of prolonged devastation and, significantly, suffers a profound loss of self-esteem.

“In mourning the world has become impoverished and empty, during melancholia, it is the ego itself.” (p 246)

For Freud, the explanation for such depletion of self is that the mourner unconsciously identifies with the deceased person, who in such cases, is a source of disappointment or pain, and is hated as well as loved. The hatred that should be directed at this other becomes directed at the self, while the dead person takes up a kind of secret residence in the mourner’s unconscious—put another way, the dead now haunts the soul of the living.

In this pathological scenario, Freud suggests a linkage between such hauntings and the already tormented relationship with the deceased figure—an insight that fits well with later ideas introduced by Sandor Ferenczi, regarding identification with abusers. More generally though, Freud’s overall psychic framework introduces a mind that is always penetrated by others, in which what he terms “introjection” is at work in the perfectly healthy formation of the ego and, especially, the superego.

 Freud’s superego, the part of the psyche that contains our aspirations and our judgments, is an internalization of the values and prohibitions embodied by our parents. Introjection is an unconscious process for Freud, in which qualities of another become part of our own psychic structure, without our awareness.  In other words, whether we know it or not, it’s the voices of others that we hear when we feel either pride or self-reproach, a sort of ghostly echo that we carry with us always.

Following Freud, the Object Relations School (Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott) took these ideas still further and developed a persuasive picture of the self as a series of internalized relationships. In pathological cases, the internalized objects (or people, or voices, however we think of them) rule with a kind of rigidity and force that can prevent the person from seeing others as they are, or developing any relationship that doesn’t resemble the original internalized one. In effect, such people live in a world of ghosts who deform reality and keep the person bound to historical attachments, unable to fully live in the present.

Contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers have added their own deconstructionist take on the matter, and offer a vision of the self as a collection of internalized relations with no center, a sort of kaleidoscope of dissociated identities that can never be separated from others, and can never be whole. Arguably, then, there isn’t even a self to be haunted, and the actual specter, the shadowy thing that won’t let go, is our vision of ourselves as something solid and real.

Anna Stolley Persky is a lawyer, journalist, and essayist who recently turned fiction writer. Her first published fiction, “The Jews on Elm Street,” will appear in EQMM’s September/October 2024 issue (on sale August 13 ), in the Department of First Stories. Her story came to us through Art Taylor, a longtime, award-winning EQMM contributor who was Anna’s teacher when she was working toward an MFA in creative writing at George Mason University. In this post, Anna discusses some of the things that lay behind the enormous popularity of the iconic TV character Columbo and considers what kind of appeal he would have for a modern audience. She shares an EQMM connection with the creators of Columbo, Richard Levinson and William Link: They too got their start in our Department of First Stories.   —Janet Hutchings

Before we had Instagram and Internet accessibility, we had books to distract and teach us. Like many of my Gen X peers, I grew to love mysteries by seeing the world through the eyes of fictional sleuths, from Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown to, eventually, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

But I mostly credit my lifelong obsession with the mystery genre not to books, but to television. I credit one actor, Peter Falk, and one 1970s show beloved by so many of us: Columbo.

I’m far from alone. I have already read probably a dozen essays and blogs about why this one show—with this one character created by the imitable team of Richard Levinson and William Link—is stamped into our collective memory, at least for those of us of a certain age. Lieutenant Columbo, in his wrinkled raincoat, stood out as the antithesis of the hero cop. He didn’t carry a gun. He wasn’t macho. He was awkward, clumsy, and constantly broke. He ate smelly eggs or dipped into a dead man’s caviar and then complained it was too salty. Yet, he was deceptively clever. The villains always underestimated him. We rooted for Columbo as he appeared to stumble his way into solving each murder.

And of course, there was the brilliance of the show’s structure, showing the audience the identity of the killer at the beginning. We weren’t trying to solve the mystery. We were invested in watching for that moment Columbo realized who the murderer was and then, what Columbo did next.

Certainly, Columbo was a character-driven show. But threaded throughout was the looming approach of the computer era and Columbo’s attempts to understand it.

Columbo wasn’t a Luddite—it was more that he was often charmingly ignorant and flummoxed by technology. He generally expressed curiosity, especially if the murderer’s alibi was dependent on a new development, like the latest in DVD recording need for “Fade into Murder.” But on a day-to-day basis, Columbo didn’t use the advancements available to him, even in the 1970s.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Columbo’s love/hate relationship with technology and how he would leverage modern gadgets, electronics, AI, and other innovation were he to return for a new season of sleuthing.

Columbo lived in an era of change, yet he never seemed to catch up to it, and that was okay then. Would it be okay now? Would we respond to a shabby detective who fumbled with modern developments or is that no longer a likeable trait in the mystery genre?

There’s always talk about recreating Columbo for a new generation. Certainly, Natasha Lyonne did a fantastic take on the old mystery show in her recent first season of Poker Face. But still, there are those of us old fans who fantasize about Mark Ruffalo, who may already be too old or too controversial, or Tom Holland as potential Columbo reincarnations.

Would modern developments be woven into the plots? Would the new Columbo fall down a Twitter rabbit hole? Would he solve a mystery by pursuing a social media influencer on TikTok?

The old writers did an expert job in showing how Columbo lagged behind modern times yet needed to catch up. Here’s a perfect example from the 1991 episode “Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health” episode. Columbo is tracking a murderer who deleted from his victim’s computer an article the victim wrote about the murderer’s porn star past. Columbo looks for clues in the computer, but he’s clearly hesitant. He peers at the computer, anguish on his face.

 “Anybody know how to work these things?” Columbo says. “These machines . . . they baffle me.”

Eventually, Columbo uses the computer to help solve the murder, but it’s not without resistance and confusion. In a Season 9 episode that aired in 1990, Columbo is equally mystified by a fax machine.

Columbo’s constant bewilderment when it came to technology was, at the time the shows aired, both frustrating and recognizable because, like his concerns about money, he reflected his audience. Even if we had mastered the fax machine by 1990, we were probably already struggling with another new device.

At 55, I’m always stumbling around new technology. Would a new Columbo trail behind me, discovering with awe this thing called “the cloud” or marveling at a smart watch before using it to somehow track down a killer?

And what about cell phones? Would Columbo hover over his phone, checking the Internet instead of peering into people’s faces and watching their reactions? Columbo could drop his phone on the ground, cracking it, or let it get soaked in the rain and try to frantically rescue it by thrusting it into a bowl of rice. Or would he forget his cell phone like he did his gun, proving to the world that the old skills of reading people still matter, and would the modern audience appreciate him for that?

Any discussion of Columbo, a television show, is to me also a reminder of what makes a better mystery novel or short story. My favorite mystery novels are also character driven. I’ve already preordered the next Louise Penny so I can know what’s going on with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his friendships with the quirky residents of Three Pines. And don’t even get me started on my love of the complicated and secretive Elizabeth Best, ex-spy and main sleuth in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series.

The writers of Columbo deeply understood character.

One my favorite examples of Columbo’s priorities comes in “Try and Catch Me,” which aired in 1977. The murderer is Abigail Mitchell, a mystery writer played by the phenomenal Ruth Gordon. Abigail is irresistibly feisty and can’t stop herself from playing with Columbo. While at a women’s club, she surprises Columbo by announcing that he will be giving a speech about his “special field”: “hyper modern chemical techniques and their application to advanced criminology.” She throws a lob at him where he is weakest.

Of course, Columbo has no idea what she is talking about, so he pivots, speaking to the crowd of women about what he knows, which is people.

He says he likes the people he meets, even some of the murderers.

“I like ’em and even respect ’em, not for what they did, certainly not for that, but for that part of them which is intelligent, or funny, or just nice, because there’s niceness in everyone, a little bit anyhow,” he says.

Do the next generations understand the importance of character? I just spent the last three years in an MFA program for creative writing with mostly Gen Z writers, with maybe a sprinkling of Millennials. I think they mostly understood character development, but I’m not sure how much patience they had for it, and they are the writers of the next generations. Can Millennials and Gen Z, not to mention Gen Alpha, be lured from their Insta reels by a new Columbo character?

Don’t they still need to understand each other’s motives to get through their lives?

Do we still relish in the more subtle art of sleuthing by talking? I hope so.

And yet, technology exists, as it did then, and continues moving forward. And, since this is an essay about the possible modernization of Columbo, I thought it might be best to embrace the latest developments myself. With this goal in mind, I grudgingly asked Chat GPT to write a storyline for a Columbo episode set in 2024.

I’ll start with a brief aside. Chat GPT may be good at writing thank you notes (not that I would know, of course), but it’s a hot mess when it comes to fiction, which I suppose will keep human writers employed, at least for a little while longer. The storyline it came up with was a convoluted jumble in which Columbo finds the body of a tech mogul with a VR headset. The mystery itself made little sense, but Chat GPT got a few details right, including Columbo referencing his wife and fiddling with equipment he should never touch. And it landed the ending.

Columbo: “I gotta say, the world’s getting too advanced for an old cop like me. But you know, in the end, it’s still about understanding people. Technology changes, but human nature stays the same.”

Then it had Columbo driving off into the sunset, although it failed to mention that he was at the wheel of his crappy 1959 Peugeot, on the verge of a breakdown and in need of a good wash.

Shawn Reilly Simmons is the author of nine mystery novels and more than twenty-five published short stories, two of which have won the Agatha Award for best short story. She is also an Anthony Award-winning anthologist and the president and managing editor of Level Best Books, which she co-owns with Verena Rose. Verena Rose is Level Best’s chief financial officer and acquisitions editor. She has a particular interest in historical mysteries and has had several historical mystery stories of her own published in various anthologies. She’s also an Agatha Award-nominated editor and an Anthony Award-winning anthologist. This dynamic duo started making a mark in the field as publishers in 2015 when they took over and expanded Level Best Books, which was founded in 2003. They deserve a salute for the great work they’re doing; works published by the company have now won the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, Derringer, and Robert L. Fish awards, and they publish everything from short fiction to historical novels to young adult fiction, true crime, and more! One of their releases this week is an anthology of stories from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine entitled Twisted Voices, which I co-edited with EQMM’s senior managing editor, Jackie Sherbow. We’re so pleased to have this post from Shawn telling readers about it!  —Janet Hutchings

As a publisher, some moments stand out as true milestones. For us at Level Best Books, our latest project represents just such a pinnacle—Twisted Voices, an anthology featuring stories from some of the most renowned mystery writers in the field. This collection, born from our partnership with the prestigious Dell Magazines, is not just a book; it’s a celebration of the mystery genre and a testament to the enduring power of short-form crime fiction.

The honor of bringing together these literary luminaries under one cover cannot be overstated. Twisted Voices: Stories from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine pushes the boundaries of perception and storytelling. It features an impressive lineup of award-winning authors, including Gary Phillips, Joyce Carol Oates, Martin Edwards, Ian Rankin, and S.J. Rozan, among others.

What sets this collection apart is its unique focus on narrators who are integral to the mystery itself. From capers to noir tales, each story presents a narrator whose particular way of thinking affects the storytelling in unexpected ways. This approach goes far beyond the simple concept of an unreliable narrator and challenges readers to question their own perceptions and biases as they navigate each tale.

This anthology has been expertly curated by Janet Hutchings and Jackie Sherbow, two highly respected editors in the short fiction writing community. Their involvement adds another layer of prestige to this project, as they bring their deep understanding of the genre and a keen eye for quality storytelling as well as the selection and arrangement of these stories. When Janet and Jackie reached out to us to discuss a potential collaboration, we were over the moon, having been fans of theirs for so long. The wealth of talent they’ve nurtured over the years is on full display in this anthology.

For the team at Level Best Books, bringing this collection to life has been a labor of love. Each story selected represents the best of what mystery fiction can offer: ingenious plots, compelling characters, and that satisfying “aha!” moment that keeps readers coming back for more. The diversity of voices and styles in this anthology spans the full spectrum of the genre, from crooks and kids to private eyes and struggling artists.

But beyond the stories themselves, what makes this project truly special is the opportunity it provides for readers. In a single volume, mystery enthusiasts can experience the work of multiple masters of the craft, each pushing the boundaries of narrative perspective in crime and suspense fiction.

For aspiring writers, this anthology serves as both inspiration and a masterclass in short mystery fiction. Studying how these accomplished authors construct their stories, develop their characters, and build suspense within the confines of the short story format—all while playing with the concept of narrative reliability—is an education in itself.

We hope Twisted Voices will find a cherished place on bookshelves and nightstands, ready to provide thrills and puzzles whenever the mood for a good mystery strikes.

Publishing this anthology is more than just a feather in our cap—it’s a dream realized. It represents what we at Level Best Books strive to achieve: bringing outstanding mystery fiction to eager readers. We’re deeply grateful to Dell Magazines for the collaboration, to the authors for their brilliant contributions, to Janet Hutchings and Jackie Sherbow for their expert editing and support, and to the readers who make projects like this possible.

As this anthology makes its way into the hands of mystery lovers everywhere, we hope it will be received as what it truly is—a love letter to the mystery genre and a tribute to the incredible writers who keep us all guessing, page after thrilling page.

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Shawn Reilly Simmons is the Managing Editor at Level Best Books.

www.LevelBestBooks.us