SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

Andrew McAleer is the author of 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists and coeditor (with Gay Toltl Kinman) of Edgar & Shamus Go Golden. He recently completed two books featuring his father John McAleer’s Golden Age detective Henry von Stray, which will be published in 2025 and 2026: Look for A Casebook of Crime, Volume 1 January 2025 and Volume 2 January 2026, from Level Best Books. Also coming up soon are two more anthologies he’s coedited with Gay Totl Kinman: Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers (Level Best, September 2024) and Agatha & Derringer Get Cozy (Down & Out Books, November 2024).  A frequent contributor of posts to this site, Andrew shares with us this time some excerpts of his father’s May 12, 1981 interview with the first woman to serve as president of the Mystery Writers of America, Helen McCloy.   —Janet Hutchings

Not long ago I decided to tackle the job of sorting through my father John McAleer’s old black cassette tape box. Among its contents I found two cassettes that immediately piqued my interest. Written on their labels in my father’s distinctive handwriting were the words: “Helen McCloy interview 5/12/81.” Born on June 6, 1904, Ms. McCloy would have been nearly 77 at the time. She died on December 1, 1994.

In addition to listening to the fascinating interview while converting the tapes to digital format, I thought it would be interesting to know where the interview took place. After a thorough investigation of my father’s records, I located his “Helen McCloy” file complete with her original correspondence to him. Poring over the documents with extraordinary interest, I quickly deduced the recordings occurred at her Boston residence located on Bowdoin Street.

I had heard my father often talk about his admiration for Ms. McCloy and her literary works. In addition to having a mutual love of crime fiction they served together on the boards of the Boston Authors Club and the New England Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America—a chapter she helped found in 1971. My father held that Ms. McCloy was one of the more important contributors to the modern detective story and he was not alone in his assessment.

When discussing the importance of good writing and proper structure, Ross Macdonald ranked Ms. McCloy among Elizabeth Saxony-Holding and Charlotte Armstrong. (Murderess Ink).  Publishers Crippen & Landru, a publishing house of experts who specialize in preserving the best of classic crime literature—Edward D. Hoch and Ellery Queen among them—credit Ms. McCloy as, “[O]ne of the finest authors of the Golden Age of Detective Stories.”

Moreover, Ms. McCloy was more than a fine author—she was a groundbreaker whose literary influence exists today. In her first book, Dance of Death (1938), she introduced the idea of a psycho-analytic detective in her character Dr. Basil Willing, a psychiatrist. According to her, no such detective of this kind existed in America. A series character, Willing appears in thirteen novels and ten short stories. As part of Crippen and Landru’s  Lost Classics series, all ten Dr. Willing short stories now appear in one volume, The Pleasant Assassin.

Through Dr. Willing, Ms. McCloy introduced a new crime-fighting proposition: “Every criminal leaves psychic fingerprints. And he can’t wear gloves to hide them.” A noteworthy and innovative corollary to Locard’s principle: Contact between physical items results in an exchange of material.

Ms. McCloy’s literary contributions to the genre didn’t go unrecognized during her lifetime. In 1950, she became the first woman to serve as president of the Mystery Writers of America.  In 1954, she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Outstanding Mystery Criticism. In 1980, her suspense novel Burn This (her final Willing novel) won the Nero Wolfe Award. In 1982, she was the guest of honor at Bouchercon and, in 1990, she received the MWA’s highest honor, its Grand Master Award. 

To hear Helen McCloy’s voice—a literary legend of the classic, fairplay puzzle mystery, who made her debut during the Golden Age of Detection, discuss her craft and life with my father seemed surreal. Miraculous, really, when you consider the fragile cassettes survived more than four-decades of abandonment.

So miraculous, in fact, that it’s worthy of sharing interview excerpts for the first time anywhere exclusively with Ellery Queen’s Something is Going to Happen followers.       

* * *

McAleer: Where was your birthplace, New York City?

McCloy: Yes, but actually I was born in Ditmas Park, which was part of Brooklyn.

McAleer: When you were still in school, did you look forward to a career as a writer?

McCloy: Yes, I can’t remember when I didn’t want to write.

McAleer: You were about 34 years old when you published your first book, Dance of Death in 1938, but had you been writing before then?

McCloy: Oh, yes all during the 1920s and 1930s in Paris. I had written a book, but I hadn’t got it published, I was such an amateur at the time. I have a copy of it some place if I can ever find it. I sent it to every publisher in New York and London and they all rejected it. And every time it came back I rewrote it because I thought there must be something wrong with it, so I must have rewritten it about forty times. It still didn’t get published.

McAleer: What was the title of it?

McCloy: Largent’s Luck.

McAleer: Did you ever study psychology or psychiatry formally?

McCloy: No, but I did a great deal of reading while I was in Paris and I belonged to the Institute of Metapsychique, which was like a society of psychologists and I would attend lectures.

McAleer: R. Austin Freeman created a medico-legal detective Dr. John Thorndyke, had you read much of Freeman and, if so, did you like the Dr. Thorndyke character?

McCloy: I read a lot of Dr. Thorndyke in the 1930s. I read everything—all the detective stories I could in the 30s.

McAleer: Did Freeman influence your creation of psycho-analytic detective Dr. Basil Willing?

McCloy: No. Basil Willing is a psychiatrist because at that time, I don’t think there was a psychiatrist detective. There was one English psychiatrist detective that wasn’t published much in this country. I wanted a detective who was different. There had been no psycho-analytic detective. Willing is eclectic and was new at the time. (1938). What really made psychiatry respectable is when returning soldiers from World War I came home and were helped by psychiatry—this is what really made Freud’s reputation. (Compiler’s note: English physician and author Anthony Wynne introduced amateur detective Eustace Hailey, a doctor of mental diseases in 1925, but McCloy borrowed nothing. [JJM notes].) 

McAleer: Are there any writers whom you admire through the years—other detective writers whom you look upon as influences on your work?

McCloy: Well, there is just one I greatly admire and who is unfashionable today even with the French people…but he’ll come back one of these days…that’s [Honoré de] Balzac. He was not always unfashionable because Henry James said he was the matrix of modern literature. Actually there is not a trend in modern literature—except maybe in [James] Joyce’s works—that is not anticipated in Balzac—even the detective story.

McAleer: Rex Stout and Theodore Dreiser were influenced by Balzac. What are your thoughts about Jane Austen?

McCloy: Oh, I love Jane Austen and among mystery writers there is one American woman I particularly enjoy and that’s Elizabeth Daly. My favorite.

McAleer: I have all her novels. Daly didn’t start publishing until she was in her 60s, writing all her novels during a period in life when most people think they’ve had it!

McCloy: Daly has a great literary style and taste and understanding of New York City.

McAleer: Do you gravitate more toward the British mystery than American?

McCloy: I do. They’re the type I like to read because I find them more traditional. Today there’s so much more violence than detection.

McAleer: What do you consider to be your best book?

McCloy: Through Glass, Darkly. Two-Thirds a Ghost I consider my second best.

(Compiler’s Notes: Both novels are part of the Willing series. McCloy chose her favorites wisely! In a recent email from Level Best Books publisher and editor Verena Rose, she shared with me her joy in recently discovering Helen McCloy. “It’s always lovely to discover a new author, but it’s doubly wonderful to discover an author such as Helen McCloy. Two-Thirds a Ghost was my introduction to her crisp writing and interesting plots. I look forward to many more reading hours in her capable hands.”

McAleer: Have you ever written any story that you might consider gothic?

McCloy: I hope not. I wrote two books, A Change of Heart and A Question of Time—which an enemy of mine might describe as gothic—because the editor at Dell said they wanted stories revolving around young girls. I don’t like to write stories around young girls—I don’t like to be told what to write. However, that was a period where gothic stories were selling a lot. (Compiler’s Note: A Question of Time was released in 1971 and A Change of Heart in 1973.)

* * *

In Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, biographer Nancy C. Joyner observed, “Surprisingly and regrettably, critics have tended to neglect Helen McCloy’s work, perhaps because it sometimes is unfashionably solemn. Yet the variety and the urbane erudition demonstrated in her short stories and novels make them an undisputed and valuable contribution to American detective fiction.”

Critics have neglected McCloy and they oughtn’t to have. Especially when we consider her novel form of  “psychological-suspense approach” in her works. (Encyclopedia Mysteriosa).

Fortunately, Helen McCloy’s literary fingerprints are still on the crime scene for all to observe . . . with extraordinary interest. 

Essayist and short story writer Kevin Mims has contributed posts to this site on a number of different topics. This time he offers some thoughts about a classic, but sometimes overlooked,  TV crime drama. You may want to revisit the series after reading this if you saw it years ago—or tune in for the first time if you’re too young to have watched it when it aired.   —Janet Hutchings

When people discuss the prestige TV crime dramas of the 1970s, they tend to mention Columbo, The Rockford Files, Kojak, The Streets of San Francisco, Police Story, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife. Sometimes they also throw in Starsky and Hutch, Baretta, and Angie Dickinson’s groundbreaking Police Woman. One show that doesn’t get enough attention from genre aficionados is Barnaby Jones, a Quinn Martin production that starred Buddy Ebsen and Lee Meriwether and ran on CBS TV from 1973 to 1980, for a total of 178 episodes. The Rockford Files, one of the most highly regarded TV detective shows of all time, notched a total of 123 episodes (later augmented by 8 TV movies scattered over five years in the 1990s). Likewise, Peter Falk’s iconic Columbo character appeared in only 45 canonical episodes of that program between 1971 and 1978. After a decade-long hiatus the character was resurrected, less successfully, for an additional 24 episodes, which aired on ABC TV between 1989 and 2003. Even among Quinn Martin productions, Barnaby Jones was exceptional. The Streets of San Francisco and Cannon, both Quinn Martin productions of the 1970s, ran for a total of 121 and 122 episodes respectively.

Of course, longevity alone isn’t always a sign of a high-quality TV series. Some mediocre programs seem to last forever. And some very good programs get cancelled far too prematurely. Crime novelist Max Allen Collins has called City of Angels, starring Wayne Rogers, “the best private eye series ever.” It debuted in February of 1976 and was cancelled in May, after a run of just 13 episodes. The fact that Barnaby Jones ran for eight seasons tells us that it was popular but not that it was necessarily a good show.

The series came along at a time when network television was focused on a 1970s version of what we nowadays call “inclusion.” These days, inclusion, when applied to television, generally refers to an effort to highlight stories featuring racial minorities, LGBTQ people, women, and others whose stories tended, in the past, to be overshadowed by the stories of heroic white, heterosexual males. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, TV networks made an effort to give their viewers heroes who weren’t necessarily ideal physical specimens (though they were all still very much white, heterosexual, and male). Thus, we got Ironside (starring Raymond Burr), a show about a San Francisco police chief who is confined to a wheelchair. We also got Longstreet (starring James Franciscus), about a blind New Orleans insurance investigator. We got Baretta (starring 5’ 4” Robert Blake) about a short detective. We got Cannon (starring William Conrad), which featured an obese private detective. And we got Barnaby Jones, which was about a senior-citizen detective. Buddy Ebsen was a few months shy of 65 when the program debuted in January of 1973. The final episode aired on April 3, 1980, one day after Ebsen’s 72^nd birthday.

The series began with a crossover episode that also featured William Conrad’s Cannon character. In the opening episode, Barnaby Jones is a retired private eye (and a one-time college science teacher). He comes out of retirement to investigate the murder of his son, Hal, who was also a private eye and a colleague of Frank Cannon’s. Together, Barnaby and Cannon bring Hal’s killer to justice. At the end of the episode, Barnaby decides that he wants to become a full-time detective again. He hires his widowed daughter-in-law, Betty (played by Lee Meriwether), to run his office.

Many of the most successful TV crime series of the 1970s employed a gimmick or two that set them apart from the rest. Columbo, for instance, had numerous such gimmicks. Foremost among these was the format. Each episode began with a murder being committed. The viewer always knew who the killer was. Columbo wasn’t a whodunit. The pleasure came from watching Columbo develop a rapport with his chief suspect as he slowly reeled him in. What set The Rockford Files apart from other detective shows was its humor. Columbo contained plenty of humor, but it was light on violence and action, so the humor didn’t seem out of place. The Rockford Files, on the other hand, had plenty of car chases, shootouts, fistfights, and other hallmarks of the violent TV detective show. The humor in Rockford seemed more subversive than the humor in Columbo, because Rockford often employed it just as he was about to be beaten to a pulp by some thug, or as he was being led off in handcuffs by some overzealous police officer. Police Woman was distinguished by the fact that its tough-guy cop was actually a female police detective. Kojak tried to distinguish itself from the pack by bringing gritty, realistic detail to its stories of crime on the streets of New York City. By comparison with these programs Barnaby Jones was fairly conventional. The writers of the show didn’t emphasize the character’s age much, and Barnaby regularly engaged in the kind of action-hero antics—car chases, shoot-outs, even karate chops—that were commonplace on TV crime dramas of the era. One thing that did distinguished Barnaby from the other detectives was his interest in forensics. His office was equipped with a laboratory where he regularly examined things—blood, dirt, fabrics, paint, etc.—under a microscope. He also had a darkroom, where he could develop his own photographs. He was ahead of the curve here. By the end of the twentieth century, forensics would be all the rage in crime dramas, not just on television but also on the big screen and in many a series of crime novels. But when Barnaby Jones debuted back in 1973, forensics generally took a back seat to shoot-outs and fisticuffs.

Columbo was noteworthy for the high quality of its guest stars. But many of Columbo’s most memorable guest stars also guest starred on Barnaby Jones, including Jack Cassidy, Ross Martin, Susan Clark, Roddy McDowell, Patrick O’Neal, Ida Lupino, and William Shatner. What’s more, the writers of Barnaby Jones weren’t required to employ any specific storytelling formula. Sometimes you knew from the first act who the killer was and how he did it. Sometimes these things were not revealed until the final act. Thus, when they wanted to, the writers of Barnaby Jones were free to employ the Columbo formula. Many Barnaby Jones episodes begin by showing us exactly who the killer is and how he committed the crime. Then, like Columbo, Barnaby shows up and begins slowly unraveling the villain’s perfect crime. By the time Barnaby Jones debuted, Columbo was the most highly-regarded crime show on TV, so it makes sense that Quinn Martin and company might have wanted to borrow a few pages from the Columbo playbook now and then.

It is a tribute to Ebsen’s acting skills that he was able to make a success of Barnaby Jones. From 1962 to 1971, he starred as Jed Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most commercially successful TV shows of its era. Jed Clampett was a hick from Tennessee who somehow managed to make a fortune, which allowed him to move to Beverly Hills, California, where he thrived as a fish-out-of-water among his much more sophisticated and refined neighbors. Very few TV actors of the era were able to escape being typecast after portraying an iconic character in a sitcom. None of the actors in Gilligan’s Island went on to break out of their comic mold. Don Adams, Barbara Felton, and Ed Platt, who starred in Get Smart, all saw their careers peter out after the show went off the air. Things got so bad for Ed Platt that he committed suicide in 1974 at the age of 58, having failed to resume the film career that he left in order to take on a role in a sitcom. Shrewdly, the creators of Barnaby Jones had Ebsen’s character often pretending to be just another down-home country boy like Jed Clampett. Ebsen’s Jones liked to assume an “aw shucks” manner in order to lull his prey into a false sense of intellectual superiority over him. Barnaby Jones claims (believably) to have been born and raised in North Carolina, and Ebsen gives the character a comfortably folksy geniality most of the time.

It must be conceded that the mysteries on Barnaby Jones are generally not all that clever or absorbing. The killers and victims generally have very little in the way of back-story. This was true of most of the crime dramas of the era. But among the things that set the show apart from most of its competitors were the homespun pieces of wit and wisdom that Barnaby was forever spouting to his listeners. Those alone make the program worth watching. Some of these possessed the mysterious quality of a Zen koan. Some of them feel like they might have come out of Poor Richard’s Almanac. And others feel like something your grandfather might have told you when you were just young’un yourself. Here are just a few examples of the wit and wisdom of Barnaby Jones.

 “When one egg gets broken you blame the chicken. When they’re all broken you get the feeling there has been a fox in the hen house.”

“It takes more than age to make an antique.”

“When you don’t know what you’re looking for, it doesn’t hurt to look everywhere.”

“Sometimes a man has to gamble with what he hasn’t got.”

“Even a young possum knows enough to tell when it’s been treed.”

“It doesn’t take courage to commit murder, just a particular kind of cowardice.”

“The great thing about each day is that nobody has ever used it before. It’s fresh and you can do what you want with it.”

“Never try to bury the truth. It has a sneaky way of coming back to haunt you.”

“The only thing that’s a cinch is the strap on a saddle.”

“Love is the most misused four-letter word around.”

“Bananas and grapes may come in bunches but not coincidences.” All eight seasons of Barnaby Jones are currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime. My wife and I have been bingeing them for a month or so now. When the show debuted in 1973 I was fourteen years old and Barnaby Jones struck me as sort of a dull old fuddy-duddy. I couldn’t understand the program’s popularity. I preferred rugged tough guys like Mannix, and Rockford, and Baretta. Now the character seems filled with hard-won intelligence and amazing insights into human foibles and frailties. I suspect those qualities were always there in Ebsen’s performance. They’ve just been waiting for me to grow wise enough to appreciate them.

Jay Randall is the fiction-writing pseudonym of a freelance author who lived in Asia for many years. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Newsweek, among many other publications, but his first work of fiction, the story “Midnight Caller,” has only just come out this week. It appears in our current issue (July/August 2024), in the Department of First Stories. The story centers around a student of crime fiction. Its author is obviously very well read in the genre, and in this post he talks about the most essential but most mysterious element behind compelling fiction.  —Janet Hutchings

Many years ago, I ran across a jacket blurb that was unexpectedly rich in meaning. I can’t remember the author of the book or the blurb, but the statement has stuck with me: “[the author] emerges as a second Dreiser—but a Dreiser who can write.”

What a revelation! Theodore Dreiser was an unquestioned giant of American literature, but here was confirmation of my experience of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy—forced upon me when I ran out of reading material in the backwaters of China. Dreiser told a good story, and he understood people, but his sentences were terrible. (I remember that the fat, facing-pages translation of David Copperfield I acquired next came as a colossal relief.)

Since then, I’ve often reflected on what I’ll call the mystery of mastery. I’m guessing most readers of this blog are familiar with the feeling. You start a new book or story and it’s immediately obvious whether or not you’re in capable hands. Sometimes you think you can see why. The guttural, Anglo-saxon verbs that Wallace Stroby, with an unerring sense of rhythm, employs to build the vivid action sequences of The Barbed Wire Kiss, for example. Or the high-octane, rage-fueled brio that Newton Thornburg—a mostly forgotten author I like so well I gave him a cameo in “The Midnight Caller”—brings to Cutter and Bone. Then you see the same thing somewhere else and it just feels clumsy or hackneyed. Maybe it’s your mood.

The greatest mystery, to me, is the mastery of Michael Connelly. Like everyone else, I love his books, whether it’s Harry Bosch or Mickey Haller or Renée Ballard, for their razor-sharp plotting. But his sentences also give me that same feeling of surety I experienced when I cracked open David Copperfield after slogging through Sister Carrie, and I’ve never been able to pinpoint why. For the most part, Connelly purposely eschews “style,” or even its more workmanlike cousin, “voice.” His sentences are the kind you read in a news magazine—albeit a good one, from the days when everybody still read magazines—and yet they’re somehow better than that.

It’s authority, I used to think, his background on the police beat. That and the fact that he never puts a foot wrong. (You’ll never find a clanger of a sentence in one of Connelly’s books.) But then I delved into a few novels by other folks with even stronger claims to their subject, district attorneys and FBI agents turned author and so forth, and it was immediately obvious that real life expertise is good marketing but unconnected to mastery.

Write what you know must be the most misleading and unnecessarily discouraging bit of “craft” advice ever conceived, as well as the hoariest, I’ve decided. Sure, there are masters who have experience—everybody knows that Ian Fleming and John Le Carré were spies, and George V. Higgins was an Assistant U.S. Attorney. They’re the exceptions. Most of the time, when I pick up a novel by a moonlighter or second-careerer, I find the same mistake-free, magazine prose that Connelly uses, but there’s no magic. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s nothing right about it, either.

I can’t lay any claim to mastery myself, of course. Too often, I find the same, frustrating lifelessness in my own efforts, and my many failures have given me a true respect for anyone who finishes a book, let alone manages to get one published. How is it that I know it when I see it, yet can’t replicate it, or, dare I hope, am only able to replicate it in tantalizing spurts?

Maybe that’s why those of us who can see it love it so much. We all know somebody who can’t tell the difference between Kem Nunn and—you’ll have to fill in the blank. I promised myself I wouldn’t call anybody out as an unredeemable Dreiser. Surely those poor souls can’t love books the way we do. Or, hell, maybe they can. Maybe they read the way I used to as a kid, when the idea of “craft” had never crossed my mind, with an innocent joy.

I hope that’s true. I’ll never know. It’s a mystery.

In 1991, John J. McKeon’s first novel, The Serpent’s Crown, was called “powerful, riveting and timely” by the New York Times Book Review. But shortly thereafter he became engrossed in a quarter-century career as a freelance business journalist. He’s recently started focusing exclusively on fiction again and has a story entitled “The Great Wolf” in EQMM’s next issue, July/August 2024 (on sale June 11). The story turns around a writer and his career, so the following post, in which the author reflects on the current state of the fiction marketplace, ties right in.   —Janet Hutchings

I belong to a small writers’ group that has been meeting for monthly dinners at Chinese restaurants for thirty-plus years now. My personal marker: After one of our first meetings we lingered to watch O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco lead a police armada along the L.A. freeways. An early example of “you can’t make this stuff up.”

We also share a large beach house every fall for a week of writing and bickering. We don’t “workshop” stories or even swap manuscripts much. We’ve all published (in some cases published a lot), and our interests are pretty diverse.

What we don’t talk about, much, is writing. We’ve all done it and will do it again. Besides, we’re really not good at much else.

The one thing, though, that we do blabber on about is the evergreen topic of who’s publishing what, and where, and for how much.

That, and who/what we should read next. However stressed the publishing industry can sometimes appear, it definitely keeps readers supplied with new tales. 

I’ve often had the experience of stumbling on a mystery or thriller that I’ve enjoyed, only to find it’s number nine in a seventeen-book series . . . and counting. The number of ongoing mystery series is truly daunting, as a visit to the bookstore at almost any writers’ conference will demonstrate.

Add in the increasing ease and quality of self-publishing options, and the result can only be described as a boom.

Readers can choose among an impressive cast of detectives to find the sleuth of their dreams.

Some are good with their fists and know exactly where to get an untraceable gun. Others whip up a peerless martini and sling quips with suave abandon. Still others figure out the whole befuddling puzzle without leaving their fireside armchair.

Then there are the amateurs who solve crimes with sheer persistence and common sense, generally impeded by a dense police detective.

A would-be mystery writer could easily conclude that we live in a golden age. Online submission engines generate dozens of pubs open to our work, and it seems that new mystery magazines are springing up all the time, especially when we consider the web-only publications. Facebook regularly fills my timeline with calls for submissions and recommendations that I join groups dedicated to matching writers with outlets.

It might seem that mystery writers today have more places to publish than ever before, and anyone who isn’t getting stuff out there regularly just isn’t trying.

This outpouring of published mystery fiction is good for writers, of course.

Or is it? Raymond Chandler, as long ago as 1944, wrote in The Atlantic[i] about the “production of detective stories on so large a scale, and by writers whose immediate reward is small and whose need of critical praise is almost nil.”

He added: “The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average — or only slightly above average — detective story does.”

Except that today, the average novel does get published, thanks to self-publishing. The old, idealized model of selling a work to a “name” commercial publisher, having it come out in hardcover and appear on bookstore shelves, being reviewed in prominent places, and so forth . . . for the vast majority of aspiring authors, that’s just gone. In its place we have self-publishing.

Depending on what source you consult, millions of self-published books appear annually. All aimed at a public whose average member, according to recent surveys, might or might not read one book a year.

Most editors, when asked, will describe themselves as overwhelmed by their submission queues, and underwhelmed by the quality of what they’re seeing.

With so very, very much out there, why do we keep trying to add to it? In part, I suppose, we see this tsunami of the humdrum as a chance to shine by comparison. The secret is to figure out how.

As the pubs always advise, I read a lot of mystery mags, novels, and online stories, to see what kinds of things are being bought and published. And I’ve been noticing something interesting.

A striking number of the stories I have most enjoyed—the most engaging and satisfying stories—don’t really hinge at all on what we would conventionally think of as “detective work.”

In one story, a guy hides under a bed while someone is murdered in the next room. After a period of cowering, he gets up, looks around, gathers his own stuff and goes on with his day. 

In another, the narrator has a date with a woman who tells him she thinks she’s being followed by a hitman. They talk about it, they walk home, he kisses her good night. Next day it’s in the news that someone broke into the woman’s apartment and murdered her.

I found numerous other examples: Stories in which suspects, interviews, stakeouts, red herrings and other conventions of the gumshoe trade are conspicuously absent.

Yet I could not stop reading. In the first example, I felt every bit of the narrator’s dread as he “ear-witnessed” a murder. In the second, the narrator’s retrospective anguish over what he could have/should have done made for a lot of emotional impact.

Maybe all these examples show is a further blurring of the line between “mystery stories” and “stories.” Tales whose protagonists are passive recipients of information from others are hardly new. That’s how Oedipus was undone, after all, and that story has held up pretty well.

It may be true that there are only six basic plots (or seven, or nine, or 36, depending on who’s counting.) It may indeed be impossible to come up with anything really new.

So in our quest to stand out, perhaps we should concentrate on characters for a while, or setting, or writing style, or . . .

Or perhaps something completely otherworldly, ridiculous, impossible will play out on our TV screens while we sip our favorite beverage . . .

Or something. One way or the other, we’ll keep writing, largely because we can’t imagine not writing.

It’s what we do.

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[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1944/12/the-simple-art-of-murder/656179/

This week we have a post from an author who will make his fiction debut in the Department of First Stories of our July/August 2024 issue (on sale June 11) with the moving story “Letters From Tokyo.”  Yoshinori Todo is a Japanese citizen, but he was born in Vienna and has also lived in Munich and London. He speaks four languages fluently—English, Japanese, German, and Russian—and although he currently lives in Tokyo, he writes fiction only in English. In this post, he talks about what is, for him, the most essential element of fiction.   —Janet Hutchings

It is my long-held belief that good fiction—whether we’re talking mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, horror, or plain “literary”—should make the reader feel strongly in some way. The level of success a piece of fiction will enjoy correlates, at least in my view, directly with how deeply and intensely it makes the reader experience these raw and elementary human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and/or disgust. (There are no doubt more emotions, like desire, amusement, awe, and contempt, but the above six might be considered the “basic emotions” on which all others are based.)

Everything else seems secondary. Characterization, mood, theme, setting, even plot itself—they are all necessary and important for good storytelling, no question, but it seems to me that they are necessary and important only insofar as they serve as “tools” that enable the writer to achieve that one difficult and elusive main goal, to wit: to leave the reader overcome and breathless with emotion.

A story can be told in a unique voice with a distinctive vocabulary, it can boast fantastic character developments, beautiful descriptions, and mind-bending plots and sub-plots . . . and yet, if the author fails to make the reader feel passionately about at least some aspect of the story, if the author fails to establish that emotional connection with the reader so crucial to the reading experience, then it won’t leave much of an impression regardless. Something will be missing, and the reader will instinctively pick up on it, finish the story feeling unsatisfied or even indifferent. After all, if a story leaves you emotionally cold, then what’s the point of having read it at all? Surely your time would have been better spent elsewhere.

These emotions are so basic and universal that they transcend age, nationality, ethnicity, culture, even gender and class barriers, and what have you. When they resonate within our hearts, they not only unite and bind us together in our shared experience, they are what make us human (yes, many animals feel them too, but that’s a topic for another day). All living human beings, except maybe for a negligible minority that are emotionally dead inside for whatever reason, experience them to some degree or another. Not everybody may be able to express or understand their emotions well, but they feel them, all right.

I mean, what’s more universally understood than these often-cited examples? You feel sadness if you lose a friend or a beloved family member to violent crime, to an illness, to an accident, to war. You feel sadness and/or anger if you find out that your partner has been carrying on behind your back (and maybe with your best friend to boot!). You feel happiness if the object of your desire gazes deeply into your eyes and assures you with calm sincerity that she or he loves you back. You feel surprise if you discover that the vicious killer that has left a trail of victims in his wake turns out to be your own best friend whom you trusted, and not the butler whom everyone suspected (because, let’s face it, butlers are an especially homicidal breed). You feel disgust when an innocent man, proclaiming his innocence until his last dying breath, becomes a victim of miscarriage of justice and is executed. And so on.

And here it doesn’t matter a hill of beans whether you’re male or female, whether you’re thirteen years old or thirteen years old times six (seventy-eight), whether you’re a high school dropout or a graduate of higher education, whether you’re Japanese or American or Russian or German or Brazilian or Mauritian or whatever, whether you’re a millionaire CEO reading by the swimming pool with an ice-cold glass of piña colada clutched in one hand or a dirt-poor peasant crouching in a tumbledown hut in the middle of nowhere and reading by the uncertain light of a single candle.

These emotions speak to all of us, and it is the fiction writer’s job and responsibility to create characters and scenarios so lifelike, memorable, and achingly relatable that the reader cannot help but feel them, that the reader is . . . yes, manipulated and even tricked into feeling them. Accordingly, in my opinion, how successful a fiction writer is going to be can, almost without exception, be answered with this one simple question: How strongly can the fiction writer make the reader feel?

And when it comes to fiction that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

I cannot help but feel contempt (that’s just me, though; feel free to disagree) for works of fiction that leave their audience … well, for want of a better expression, “emotionally confused.” I’ve found that many works of so-called literary fiction tend to have this rather annoying characteristic, although not only.

In such stories, a character might ponder long and hard about what they have done or what they are about to do (maybe), and then something completely unrelated and/or out of the character’s control might happen to shake things up a bit, but before we can learn more, the story might end abruptly with neither a clear resolution nor an identifiable moral lesson, almost as if the writer has run out of ideas or steam or most likely both. Or the character might move from one scene or encounter to the next seemingly without purpose, logic, or reason—leaving the reader, upon finishing the story, to scratch his or her head and wonder: What am I supposed to feel now … except maybe confusion? The story might have been slightly sad but also slightly optimistic, maybe slightly suspenseful but also slightly boring, because in the end nothing much of interest happened. Or did it? And anyway, if the character (often uninteresting, if not downright unlikable) doesn’t seem to feel or care all that much, why should the reader?

I don’t know about you, but I always feel cheated reading such a story! I’m not talking about ambiguous endings, though, let me be clear on that; ambiguous endings, if done properly, possess their own special charm that can leave the reader deeply affected. I’m talking about stories with ambiguous emotions, where it is left to the reader to decide what emotion(s), if any, he or she is supposed to take away from them, as if the author was undecided himself or maybe just trying to be particularly clever. Whenever I come across such fiction, I feel an urge to send off an exasperated message to its author: I don’t want to figure out ANYTHING, this isn’t school and this isn’t a psychotherapy session, it’s YOUR job to make ME feel something!

Except I never do, of course. See, I don’t care enough for such works to bother one way or another. In my book, this type of story is a loser, though, plain and simple (maybe a bit harsh, but that’s how I feel). It might be well written—and since it was published, chances are it is—but I for one will put it out of my mind by roughly the speed of sound and move on to the next, hopefully more emotionally satisfying story. A story should be told clearly and concisely, with a clear goal of what emotion(s) it is meant to arouse in the reader. That’s not too much to ask for, is it?

Now take, for example, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. Two of the most famous, successful, and enduring short stories ever written. Much ink has been spilled analyzing and dissecting them, but to me, it seems crystal clear why they work so well. In a masterful way, they manage to evoke in the reader these universally understood and elementary human emotions, and they aren’t dallying around getting down to business, either: fear, sadness, and surprise (and in the case of “The Lottery” you can probably throw in disgust, as well). Both stories pack a wallop in the emotional department, leaving the reader completely overwhelmed and breathless with emotion. That’s why they work, and that’s why they continue to be read and loved and studied and discussed to this day. Plain and simple.

Some people may argue that fiction can also make you think and be successful, and I have no argument there . . . except to say that stories that engage your mind in all likelihood engaged your heart first. After all, if you are not emotionally invested in a fictional story, would you invest yourself mentally in it? If you are looking for cut-and-dried, objective information, go read nonfiction! There are thousands of fine books in this category written and published each year, on subjects as diverse as wildlife, space exploration, world wars, nutrition, human sexuality, international travel, computer programming, you name it. Nothing wrong with any of them. But if you are looking to experience those elementary, raw emotions that make us human, look for good fiction!

In my story “Letters From Tokyo” (so grateful to editor Janet Hutchings for accepting it for publication in EQMM; talk about happiness!) I strove to evoke in the reader the following emotions: love and pride for one’s child (happiness), longing for said child that hasn’t returned home in ages (sadness), worry about losing said child forever (fear), loneliness and slowly dawning realization of one’s own approaching demise (sadness and fear), and hope that everything will turn out all right in the end (desire for happiness). The story incorporates elements of mystery, suspense, and crime, but more than anything else, it tries to capture the depth of these genuine, heartfelt emotions. I hope you like it, dear reader.

In conclusion, let me reiterate once again how essential and all-important to us those emotions are in our experience and journey as human beings. So much so that we come back looking for them again and again and again … like a junkie looking for his next fix, almost. And whenever readers—irrespective of age, gender, class, wealth, cultural or ethnic background—pick up a new novel or a collection of short stories, I have an idea that they do it precisely with this hope. They want to be taken away and think new thoughts, gain new insights, and vicariously experience new things, but above all, they want to be made to feel those elementary and powerful human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and/or disgust. And it is the fiction writer’s job—if he or she is to be successful—to not leave them disappointed . . . or worse, indifferent.

Art Taylor has won the Edgar and Anthony and multiple Agatha, Macavity, and Derringer awards for his short fiction. He is one of a very rare breed of writer these days: one who devotes most of his time to the short story.  His novel-in-stories entitled On the Road With Del and Louise won the Agatha Award for best first novel. His other books are short story collections: The Boy Detective and the Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense and The Adventure of the Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions. Art has managed to produce such a large number of top-notch stories while also serving as an associate professor of English at George Mason University. He made his own fiction debut in EQMM’s Department of First Stories and through his teaching he has directed to EQMM other authors who have also gotten their start in our pages. In this post he has some interesting thoughts to share about structure as it pertains to the short story, and he’s brought in examples of fiction written by his students to illustrate the points.  Don’t miss Art’s latest story,  “Dark Thread, Loose Strands,” which appears in our current issue (May/June 2024). It’s a powerful one!—Janet Hutchings

My latest story for Ellery Queen is “Dark Thread, Loose Strands,” and it’s the last word of the story’s title that I want to focus on here today. Specifically, I want to explore how the interweaving of additional narrative strands—other perspectives or other timelines, for example—might enhance a piece of short fiction.

“Dark Thread, Loose Strands” has four sections, told from the perspectives of three people: Lyman, a janitor in a large office building; Tyler, a young boy being bullied in his first year of junior high school; and Tyler’s new friend, Robbie, struggling with his own feelings of weakness and insecurity. Their stories intersect in a schoolyard—an incident that Lyman catches sight of from his car as he’s passing the school. Lyman gets two sections of the story; his perspectives and his subsequent actions begin and end the tale.

In several of my classes at George Mason University—two levels of fiction workshop (regular and advanced) and then in my special topics class “Writing Suspense”—I spend a fair bit of time talking about modular storytelling, relying heavily on Madison Smartt Bell’s terrific craft guide Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form. As I explain to students, while a linear narrative might follow one character/perspective through a series of events in a chronological way, a modular narrative expands a story by adding different elements in concert with or opposition to the single storyline—a layering of what Bell calls “vectors.”

That layering might involve shuttling between different character’s perspectives on the same series of events (each perspective its own vector of the story) or interweaving a character’s experiences from many years before with their current situation and struggles (each timeline a vector) or perhaps shifting narrative distance (omniscient, intimate) or tones (humorous, somber) or even genres (story, essay) from one section to the next. Each series of vectors forms its own strand of the story, and each strand has its own weight—a fabric or a mosaic, depending on your metaphor, whose design only becomes clear when you step back and view the whole thing.

“In modular narrative design,” Bell explains, “narrative elements are balanced in symmetry as shapes are balanced in a symmetrical geometric figure, or as weights are balanced on a scale . . . At the page-by-page level, the modular unit will most probably look like a text block, separated from its fellows by space breaks.”

Many of my students jump at the opportunities here. In the semester that’s just ended, for example, several students in my Advanced Fiction Workshop submitted stories with complex structures. One story charted the tensions between an elementary school teacher and her new class—a downward spiral, deftly navigated by the writer—but that primary storyline alternated with short essayistic sections about pedagogical practices and, um, cows, and then … well, it would be a spoiler to say what else those sections contained, but the interweaving (and then intersecting) of the narrative and the essayistic was extraordinary. Another story focused on a young pianist undergoing finger surgery, but the author shuttled between the day of the operation and a second vector of past scenes that underscored the reasons why she was pursuing such a drastic procedure—offering up as well some ominous foreshadowing. A third story—coincidentally also about a pianist and perhaps the most elaborately structured—orchestrated five different strands covering the woman’s development as a pianist and her lifelong struggles with relationships: one beginning with piano lessons and following through early life toward a traumatic event; a second in the present as the protagonist battled artistic blocks and navigated a new relationship; the third and fourth about evolving relationships with her college roommate and her mother, respectively; and a final strand centering on sessions with her therapist. In each story, the students navigated the shifts skillfully and used the vectors to dramatically expand the scope and emotional weight of their stories. 

The advantages of such structures might be obvious, but they’re worth emphasizing. Learning about a protagonist at different stages of her life not only provides opportunities for developing greater depths of character but might also allow a reader to see how the past impacts present choices. Several perspectives on a single incident might lead us to question what really happened (Rashomon-styled) or else provide a richer understanding, greater context, greater complexity, possibly greater emotional weight. And from a suspense angle… well, it’s a tried-but-true tactic to cut to another scene or perspective at a cliffhanger moment, but let me also stress the benefit of dramatic irony. If the reader realizes how the arc of character A’s story will intersect with character B’s story and character C’s story—knowledge that none of the characters themselves have about one another—then that reader gets a god’s-eye view of where things are coming together and might end up on the edge of their seat waiting for the collision ahead.

That’s one of the main things I love about modular storytelling—the role of the reader in putting the pieces together and the elements of the story that rise up between the vectors, between the layers, implicit and hopefully more impactful because they’re not overexplained. As much as a writer carefully builds character and plot and setting, the reader plays an equally integral role in constructing the final and full experience of the story, and modular structures provide a clear way of inviting the reader formally into that role.

That’s kind of what I was aiming for “Dark Thread, Loose Strands,” and I hope that those loose strands—Lyman’s, Tyler’s, Robbie’s—join together into some meaningful design, the whole more than the sum of the parts. I hope that the story—in the collisions and the gaps and what’s left unsaid—delivers a multi-dimensional, immersive, and ultimately emotional experience. 

In recent years writer, editor, and translator Josh Pachter, whose career in mystery fiction began with a story in EQMM when he was still in high school, added another role in which he contributes to our field: organizer of mystery events—something he talks about in this post. Josh manages to keep writing fiction in the midst of all his other mystery-related activities. He has a new story, “Texas Kinda Attitude,” in our current issue, May/June 2024, and his first novel, Dutch Threat, appeared in 2023 to stellar reviews and nominations for the Lefty and Agatha Awards.  Hats off to one of our genre’s most versatile contributors.  —Janet Hutchings

“Noir at the Bar” is a concept that, like Topsy, has growed and growed.

It began in Philadelphia in 2008, organized and hosted by Peter Rozovsky. “I like to tell people I am the father of Noir at the Bar,” he says, “but the sort of father who did not always pay child support.” Rozovsky’s first events featured only one author each and consisted of a reading followed by a Q&A. Jed Ayres and Scott Phillips soon brought N@tB to St. Louis, adding multiple writers and cutting the Q&A, and the concept spread to New York, Los Angeles, and eventually many other cities in and not in the U.S.

My own first exposure to Noir at the Bar came in 2015, when I attended one of author Ed Aymar’s events at the Wonderland Ballroom in Washington, D.C. Two years later, in October 2017, I read my story “Selfie” (which originally appeared in the February 2016 issue of EQMM) at another of Ed’s Noirs and was gratified to be voted the audience’s favorite, for which I was presented with an engraved sword I felt very nervous carrying home on the Metro.

In 2019, I asked Ed if he’d mind my putting together a Northern Virginia edition of Noir at the Bar. He told me that he didn’t own the concept—in fact, no one owned the concept—so I should feel free to go ahead. The Shirlington (VA) Busboys & Poets—a combination bar, restaurant, and bookstore—agreed to provide us with a venue, and on August 25 a gratifyingly large crowd gathered to hear readings by Ed, John Copenhaver, regular EQMM contributor David Dean, Angie Kim, Jehane Sharah (who’d recently been featured in EQMM’s “Department of First Stories”), and Stacy Woodson (who’d just won EQMM’s Reader Award for 2018). Our pre-event promotion listed Shawn Cosby and Dana King as also reading, but Shawn wound up unable to attend and Dana was feeling ill and unfortunately had to leave before his turn to read.

Every N@tB host does things differently. Ed Aymar, for example, allows “his” readers to read either complete short stories or excerpts from longer works, and in the early days of his hosting he awarded a prize (such as my sword) to each event’s audience favorite. I decided to restrict “my” readers to reading complete short stories, and instead of giving one prize to one reader I gave every member of the audience a free raffle ticket and, after each reading, have the reader pull a number from a hat so I can give prizes to multiple lucky attendees. Each reader contributes a book or magazine to be used as a raffle prize, EQMM and AHMM chip in copies of their latest issues, and several publishers I’ve worked with (Down and Out Books, Crippen & Landru, Untreed Reads, Genius Book Publishing, Misti Media, Destination Murders) have also donated prizes.

In November 2019, I did a “Special Ho-Ho-Homicide for the Holidays!” edition of Noir at the Bar, and in February 2020 a “Special Hearts and Daggers!” edition, both at Busboys & Poets, whose management was happy to continue to host us, since most of our attendees and readers ordered dinner and drinks before and during our events and tipped their servers generously.

I scheduled a fourth Northern Virginia N@tB for June 2020, but COVID put the kibosh on that plan … and I probably would have had to cancel it, anyway, since my wife Laurie and I moved down to Richmond at the beginning of the pandemic.

Actually, our new house is in Midlothian, a suburb about twenty minutes west of Richmond—more specifically in Brandermill, a lovely 1970s planned community ringed around the southern and western shores of the Swift Creek Reservoir.

Brandermill is also home to a restaurant, the Boathouse at Sunday Park, which overlooks the water, and I think it was Laurie who first suggested that it would be a perfect venue to host a “Noir at the ’Voir” series. I loved the pun, wished I’d thought of it myself, and when it began to be safe to gather in public again I met with Anne Roy, the Boathouse’s events manager, who agreed to let us use their Swift Creek Room for free.

We held our first Noir at the ’Voir at the end of April 2022, with readings by local authors Frances Aylor, Kristin Kisska, Mary Miley, K.L. Murphy, and Heather Weidner, plus Mark Bergin and Adam Meyer from Northern Virginia. It was a hit—we came very close to filling the sixty-some seats in the Swift Creek Room—and the Boathouse invited us to come back quarterly. Our July event was again a mix of local and Northern Virginia readers, and we added the Lifelong Learning Institute in Chesterfield to our list of co-sponsors. (LLI loaned us a speaker and microphone and donated two gift certificates, each good for a semester of free courses.)

Our October 2023 Noir was different in a couple of ways. First, we cut the number of readers from eight to six, partly so that we could wrap things up a little earlier in the evening but mostly because there aren’t nearly as many crime writers in the Richmond area as there are in Northern Virginia, and I didn’t want to ask people who’d already had a chance to read to come back and read again. Second, this was the first time I didn’t host my own Noir: from September through December of 2022, I was teaching two courses in short crime fiction at the University of Ghent in Belgium (see “Passport to Crime Fiction” in the 12/08/22 edition of Something Is Going to Happen), so I was almost four thousand miles from Richmond on the night of the event. My wife volunteered to take over the hosting duties for me, and by all accounts acquitted herself admirably. (Thanks, Laurie!)

I was back on duty for the February 2023 event, for which my daughter, Rebecca K. Jones, flew in from Arizona to read. (Becca has had two courtroom novels and several short stories published. One of the stories, “History on the Bedroom Wall,” was in EQMM’s September/October 2009 issue; we wrote it collaboratively, and its placement made me the only person who’s ever appeared twice in the “Department of First Stories”!)

After three more quarterly Noirs (May, August, and November 2023), I regretfully acknowledged that I was just about out of first-time readers. So I skipped an early-2024 event and scheduled one final Noir at the ’Voir for May 7, 2024. For that one, regular EQMM contributor (and three-time Readers Award winner) David Dean drove down from New Jersey, John DeDakis (author of the Lark Chadwick series) came from Baltimore, and Matt Iden (author of the Marty Singer mysteries) and Kristopher Zgorski (who writes EQMM’s BlogBytes column and with his collaborator Dru Ann Love just won the Agatha Award for Best Short Story for “Ticket to Ride,” from my Happiness Is a Warm Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Beatles anthology) came from Northern Virginia. The other two readers—K.L. Murphy (author of the Detective Cancini series) and LynDee Walker (author of the Nichelle Clarke and Faith McClellan series) live close by in the Richmond suburbs.

A couple of noteworthy things happened at this final ’Voir. Although Kristopher Zgorski wrote a new story especially for the event, he didn’t feel comfortable reading it himself, so he introduced it and his husband, Michael Mueller, read it. And Kellie Murphy, who’d read at the first Noir at the ’Voir, circled back around and read a different story at this last one. Once again, the event was a success. The stories were excellent, the readings were smooth and compelling, the winners of our prize packages (which as usual included copies of both EQMM and AHMM) were delighted to receive them, and several of the regular attendees told me afterward that this was the best Noir at the ’Voir yet.

I have mixed feelings about bringing the series to a close. I’ve enjoyed putting the events together and hosting them, and it’s been a pleasure giving dozens of crime writers the opportunity to read their stories to appreciative audiences. But now it feels like time to move on. I’m not saying that I’ll never host a Noir event again—but I think the series overlooking the beautiful Swift Creek Reservoir may well have run its course. Unless, of course, some new crime writers move into the Richmond area, or some people who already live here start writing crime fiction. If either or both of those things happen, well, who knows?!

It’s time for our annual photo blog about the Dell Mystery Magazines’ cocktail party that immediately precedes each year’s Edgar Allan Poe Awards banquet. I’ll let the photos do most of the talking, with just a few clarifying remarks. Spring is a big season for awards in our field. Not only the Edgars but the Agathas (given at the Malice Domestic Convention in Maryland) and the Derringers  (whose winners were announced on the very day of the Edgars this year) have members of the mystery community in a state of excitement and suspense in late April/early May. Often, I include photos from the Malice Domestic Convention, including its Agatha Award winners, in this annual photo post, but this year, no one from either of the Dell mystery magazines attended that convention, so our pictures reveal only New York’s contribution to the season.

The big day—May 1—started for me with a meeting with author Twist Phelan at the Algonquin Hotel Bar, home of the famous Algonquin Round Table, a coterie of literary figures that included Dorothy Parker—who just happens to have been an early and passionate fan of EQMM! Twist and I were a little too early for drinks, but we did manage to get a photo in front of what the waiter assured us was the round table.

As in several past years, the Dell Mystery Magazines party was just down the block from the Algonquin, at the Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, the second oldest library in New York City. This year circumstances prevented our fabulous senior managing editor, Jackie Sherbow, from attending the party, but her hand was in all the preparations and we have her to thank for another glitch-free event.

We had the pleasure of meeting a number of our new authors at the party this year, and that was partly due to a change the Mystery Writers of America made to the Robert L. Fish Award for best short story by a new American author. In all of the previous forty years in which the award was given, a winner was announced well in advance of the Edgar Awards banquet at which the presentation of the award was made, and no nominees were ever named. This year, MWA decided to create some suspense around the award by singling out five nominees, withholding the winner’s name until the banquet. EQMM writers claimed all five nominations, and it turned out that no one wanted to miss the festivities. Even those who live outside of New York made the trip in; you’ll find their photos below. Look for Bill Bassman, Kate Hohl, Sean McCluskey, Meghan Leigh Paulk, and Gabriela Stiteler. Not only were they drawn to the Big Apple, one of this year’s EQMM Readers Award winners, Paul Ryan O’Connor, also a Department of First Stories newcomer—and a nominee for this year’s Derringer Award in the flash-fiction category—made the journey all the way from California.

Of course, there were also many old friends at this year’s gathering. The party began, decades ago, as a venue for presenting the EQMM Readers Awards, and although it has grown into a more general celebration of the awards season, it will always be our purpose to honor the Readers Award winners and present their plaques and scrolls at the event. In addition to Paul Ryan O’Connor, who came in third in this year’s Readers Award voting, we had the pleasure of hosting Richard Helms, a longtime EQMM contributor whose stories for us have won Macavity, Shamus, and Thriller awards. This year he took second place in the Readers Award poll—which drew him out of what he described as J. D. Salinger-like  isolation to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances at our party. And then there is David Dean, who earned our readers’ first-place spot this year, as he has done twice before! Even if you’ve never come to New York during Edgars week, David’s face will be familiar to you if you follow this blog.

Once our party was over, most of our guests made their way to the Marriott Marquis Times Square, where my colleague Linda Landrigan (editor of AHMM) and I hosted two tables for the Edgars. There I had the pleasure of catching up with Rob Osler, EQMM’s nominee for the best short story Edgar and a past Robert L. Fish Award winner. He’s someone to watch, with only two years separating his Fish win and his Edgar nomination—and an award-nominated novel came in between! A final highlight of the evening was seeing Katherine Hall Page (pictured below at the Dell party) receive the MWA’s highest honor, the Grand Master Award.

Thanks to our photographer, Ché Ryback, for capturing so many memorable moments with his camera. And a big thanks too to Kevin Wheeler, who manned the drinks table and helped us in many other ways.

                                                                             —Janet Hutchings

Jiro Kimura is involved in almost everything related to mysteries as an English-into-Japanese translator, fiction writer, columnist/essayist, book reviewer, current managing editor of The Maltese Falcon Flyer (the official newsletter of The Maltese Falcon Society, Japan), and the webmaster of one of the most important mystery-fiction sites on the Internet. He has translated Edward D. Hoch, Donald E. Westlake, and Joe Gores among others.  He presently lives  in Japan. The address for his marvelous website, The Gumshoe Site, is: <http://www.nsknet.or.jp/~jkimura/>. The Edgar Allan Poe Awards were given in New York on Wednesday evening and you will be able to find full results soon on Jiro’s site. It’s a resource for all who are interested in mysteries.  —Janet Hutchings

I have been dubbed “one of the longest-running mystery bloggers, who started his blog before the word ‘blog’ was coined.” Yes, I am talking about The Gumshoe Site. I, as its webmaster, call it the best mystery website on my short block. I will tell you the shortest version of how easy it is to launch a mystery website but how hard it is to keep it up to date.

In the 1980s, I was an editorial advisor for EQ, the Japanese edition (1978-1999) of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, while writing a monthly mystery column and translating mystery short stories for Hayakawa’s Mystery Magazine, EQ’s rival magazine. I was contentedly using an old-fashioned word processor for writing these columns and translating mystery fiction, without any interest in computer technology.

In the 1990s, there was some kind of a new fad called the Internet. At my wife’s urging, I decided to sign up a local Internet provider and join a local Internet club as a newbie to learn this mysterious monster baby. As a result, I got very curious about a few mystery-oriented websites on the Net, such as The Mysterious HomePage (now defunct) and ClueLass HomePage (now closed). I was fascinated with their work and bought a book about how to open a website. Those days, you connected your computers to slow-speed phone lines, and if you had surfed from website to website for a long time everyday, your monthly phone bills would be surprisingly high.

Anyway, in January 1996, I finally opened my own ad-free website named The Gumshoe Site, which consisted of a few webpages about its webmaster (that’s me), mystery news, award nominees and winners, mystery links, obituaries and other subjects I got interested in. These days, you can easily create webpages with some applications but in those days you had to write up webpages in “html” language manually. But even a computer-illiterate like me could launch a website. I decided to write my site’s webpages mostly in English, since the Internet is international and I thought my English-written webpages would attract visitors from all over the world. I also subscribed to several mailing lists such as DorothyL (specializing in the whole mystery genre, and still running) and sent them a post of the launching of The Gumshoe Site.

At first, I tried to update my site every month. And in November of the same year, I wrote a book titled The Mystery of the Internet English (not about the mystery of Internet English, as the title suggests, but about how to browse and use English-language mystery websites and sometimes shop at them. This publisher’s title was meant to grab attention from would-be Japanese readers). I also started a regular column about mystery websites for Hayakawa’s Mystery Magazine. I attended several mystery gatherings in the United States, took many photos of writers and uploaded them (photos, not writers) onto my site. I received a number of e-mails from mystery writers I had not met. By then the webmastering had become kind of a fun hobby.

As my professional life changed, my schedule changed. Every time my residential address changes, my priorities change. In the 2010s, I updated my site less frequently—maybe bimonthly. Now I am about to start updating the site quarterly. Since I have been managing the site for more than a quarter century, I can find justifiable excuses to be “lazy.”

As many people say, to launch a website is fairly easy, but to keep updating it is pretty hard. Almost everybody’s life has ups and downs, and so does any website’s life. In the future, I might make over The Gumshoe Site or take a hiatus or fold it for good. I myself don’t know what my future will bring. Nobody knows.

Well, that’s life, isn’t it?

Andrew McAleer is the author of 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists and co-editor (with Gay Toltl Kinman) of the mystery anthology Edgar & Shamus Go Golden. He tells us that he recently completed two books featuring his father John McAleer’s Golden Age detective Henry von Stray. See A Casebook of Crime (Volumes 1 and 2), forthcoming from Level Best Books. He is also at work with Gay Toltl Kinman on two mystery anthologies: Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers (Level Best Books) and Agatha & Derringer Get Cozy (Down & Out Books).  Previously Andrew has contributed posts to this site about Edward D. Hoch (May 2023), Rex Stout (July 2023),  James M. Cain (September 2023), and tips from a variety of famous mystery writers (January 2024). Here he shares his interview and some of his correspondence with Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and Columbo cocreator William Link. William Link and his longtime coauthor Richard Levinson made their fiction debut in EQMM when they were still teenagers, so we’re sure EQMM readers will be interested in William Link’s reflections on a stellar writing career.—Janet Hutchings

The Ellery Queen Award-winning writing duo of William “Bill” Link and Richard “Dick” Levinson remains perhaps the most successful television and crime- writing team of all time. As crime fiction scholar William L. DeAndrea noted in his Edgar-winning Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, “Levinson and Link parlayed mutual passions for mysteries, magic, and writing into the most honored and productive collaboration in TV history.”

A few of the Levinson-Link blockbuster television creations include: Murder, She Wrote, Columbo, and Ellery Queen. Okay I better mention their eight-season running private eye series, Mannix and their script writing for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Honey West, and The Fugitive. Major literary awards include multiple Edgars, Emmys, Golden Globes, and Peabody awards.  

After Levinson’s death in 1987, Link showed no signs of slowing down. He continued to produce, write, attend Malice Domestic and International Thriller Writers events, produce plays, serve as president of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), and still found time to grow tomatoes with his wife Margery. In 2010, he received Malice Domestic’s Agatha Christie Poirot Award and, in 2018, he was honored by the MWA with its prestigious Grand Master title along with fellow mystery writing greats Jane Langton and Peter Lovesey.  

In 2007, I wrote Link and asked if he would consent to an interview; he graciously agreed. The interview was released in the Fall 2007, Volume 9, No. 2 issue of Crimestalker Casebook and appeared under the title “Ten Questions for William Link.” Here, the future Grand Master of Mystery discussed, among other things, his early days with friend Dick Levinson, a luncheon with the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, and novel writing versus screenwriting.

Only a handful of issues containing the William Link interview were printed and fewer distributed. His responses are too good and important to hide from history. Now, thanks to EQMM’s “Something is Going to Happen,” its readers get a rare glimpse into the brilliant mind and career of one of crime fiction’s most ingenious and kindest creators.

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McAleer:  You were friends with fellow writing companion and Columbo co-creator Dick Levinson since junior high school.  Do you recall your first writing idea with Dick?

Link:  Dick and I met in 1946 and started collaborating almost immediately.  Much sand has gone through the hourglass since then, but I believe our first writing project was a parody of the then quite popular radio show, “Dragnet.”

McAleer:  I read in a biography of Columbo star Peter Falk in the 1963 Celebrity Register, where Falk says that he failed out of Hamilton College because he did most of his studying in the poolroom.  I noted in some of the Columbo films how Falk shoots a nice game of pool.  Was this Falk taking some license here or did you and Dick give Columbo this talent?

Link:  Peter is an excellent pool player.  He and John Cassavetes had their own Rat Pack, playing pool around town at night.  We never had to fake Peter’s playing on the show.  He’s also an excellent charcoal artist. (Author’s Notes: Falk’s right eye was surgically removed when he was three. Cassavetes guest starred in the Columbo episode “Étude in Black,” 1972.)

McAleer:  What do you imagine Dick might think of modern mystery novels that seem to contain more romance than mystery?

Link:  I don’t think Dick would have condemned mixing romance with mystery if it was done with style, good writing, and cleverness.  Romance overwhelming the mystery element is another matter. 

McAleer:  Dick and yourself also worked on the Ellery Queen TV series staring Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen, and one of the more interesting contributors to the show was a great actor named David Wayne (who, among many other roles, played the Mad Hatter villain on Batman).  Did you ever get a chance to meet Wayne?

Link:  Dick and I produced the Ellery Queen series, so we knew David Wayne in our working relationship.  He was lovely, charming guy, a total pro.

McAleer:  When you and Dick brought Mannix to the scene did you have Mike Connors in mind for the role of Joe Mannix?

Link:  We sold the Mannix concept to Desilu, wrote the pilot, and didn’t hang around.  Paramount TV cast Mike Connors.  Never met him on the show, but bumped into him years later at Chasens.  (Then an excellent L.A. restaurant).  We were mutually complimentary. (Author’s Note: In a 2013 email from Bill he told me Mannix was his and Dick’s first big hit and occupies a special place in his heart.)

McAleer:  Your new play “Columbo Takes a Rap” stars Chicago-based actor Norm Boucher and the New York Post tells us that it is already playing to sold-out houses.  Can we expect to see Columbo on Broadway or perhaps even abroad?

Link:  My new Columbo play was a hit at the International Mystery Festival in June.  At the present time the producer is thinking of opening it in London or possibly here in L.A.

McAleer:  Do you create differently when writing a novel as opposed to a screenplay?

Link:  Writing a novel is a totally different experience than writing a screenplay.  In movies, we have directors, music composers, editors, etc. to flesh out our vision.  The really difficult thing in writing screenplays is that everything has to be externalized, unlike novels where you can get inside people’s heads, especially in your protagonist’s if you are writing a first-person narrative.  Usually novelists are lousy screenwriters because it requires a different set of muscles.  You cannot stretch out in a screenplay; everything needs a careful and creative concision.

McAleer:  You once had lunch with Alfred Hitchcock.  Can you scoop us on any details here like who picked up the tab?

Link:  We once had a three-hour lunch with the Master of Suspense in his bungalow at Universal.  He was then approaching eighty and so obese it was hard for him to get up from the sofa.  Writing-wise, he said that when you use coincidence it must occur early in the script and never again.  Always go for the big, important scenes even if they defy logic.  That was the basis for his “Refrigerator” theory.  While the movie-goer is making a sandwich at midnight after having seen his new thriller, he realizes the big wheat field scene with Cary Grant in “North by Northwest” makes absolutely no sense.  Doesn’t matter, Hitch told us—by then I have the man’s money!  The lunch was ordered by Hitchcock, the same for him and us:  salad, steak, ice cream, black coffee.  If you were a smoker you had one of his favorite cigars, a Cuban H. Upmann.  Whether you smoked or not, you couldn’t refuse Mr. Hitchcock.  Of course, no check. 

McAleer:  What is your assessment of Georges Simenon’s Maigret stories?

Link:  Simenon is one of my favorite authors and I have read over two hundred of his books in translation.  I enjoy the Maigrets, but much prefer his stand-alone, psychological novels.  Simenon described the Maigrets as pencil drawings and the other as oil paintings.  Very accurate analogy.  Gide and Sartre considered Simenon France’s greatest existentialist.  I concur.  For new readers I recommend “Dirty Snow,” which is out in a new translation in paperback.  In my opinion this is maybe his best novel.  He wrote over five hundred books in a half-century of intense writing.  A typical Maigret was written in a three-day stint! 

McAleer:  What do you have cooking on the literary burner now?

Link:  I just sold three short stories to the Hitchcock and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines and have finished my fourteenth stage play, “Candidate for Murder.”  The later is a very subversive whodunit set in Washington.  It doesn’t play politics, but hopefully dances on the nerves and the deductive acumen of its audiences.

Post Script

Bill ended the interview this way, “Andy—I hope this suffices. I could go on and on, especially about Hitchcock and how we found the novel for his last movie, “Family Plot,” but that’s another story.” (Author’s Note: Why I never took out a page from Columbo’s book with “Just one more question” on what promised to be an amazing behind-the-scenes look into Hitchcock’s last film remains a mystery.)

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William Link passed away on December 27, 2020 at the age of 87. When learning of Bill’s death his friend Steven Spielberg, who directed the first Columbo episode “Murder by the Book,” paid tribute to “Bill’s good nature” and for Dick and Bill giving him a “huge break” as a “young and inexperienced director.” (Variety)

Bill’s kindness didn’t end with season one of Columbo; it was a constant in my book. When I told him I was coediting my first crime-fiction anthology Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea with my own literary partner Paul D. Marks, Bill readily agreed to contribute a short story, “Murder Medium Rare”—one of his favorite EQMM contributions, he told me. And when I asked him to contribute writing tips to my book the 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists, he agreed without hesitation. I even received a nice note from Bill (who also served in the Army) while I was deployed in Afghanistan wishing me safe passage. I received another welcoming note after my return.  

On Sunday nights while Columbo aired across the nation Bill and I would occasionally exchange emails about this week’s exciting Hollywood-legend guest star such as: Jack Cassidy, James Gregory, Richard Anderson, or Dick van Dyke. I’d always receive a fun response from him or even a, “We are watching it now!” (With wife Margery.)

Looking back, the notion that I could email back and forth with a cocreator of Columbo while episodes of the iconic detective aired prime-time seems surreal. Considering Bill’s thoroughly good nature, however, it really shouldn’t. If he were here today, I’d like to tell him just one more thing, “We’re all still watching prime-time, Bill. . . .”