SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

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 recently completed a short story collection featuring his father John McAleer’s Golden Age detective, entitled Henry von Stray: A Casebook of Crime (forthcoming from Level Best Books), and he is now 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 he’s contributed posts to this site about Edward D. Hoch, Rex Stout, and James M. Cain. Here he gives us a look at a few of the interviews included in 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists.  —Janet Hutchings

While writing the 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists: Insider Secrets from Top Writers, I had the honor of interviewing some of crime fiction’s most successful authors. These industry giants generously shared their writing tips and secrets in order to help a new generation of mystery and suspense authors fulfill their own writing dreams. The following selected tips from Mary Higgins Clark, Bill Pronzini (MWA Grand Master), Hank Phillippi Ryan (The House Guest), William G. Tappy (Brady Coyne mysteries), Gregory Mcdonald (Fletch), Rhys Bowen (The Molly Murphy mysteries), Thomas B. Sawyer (Murder, She Wrote; A Major Production!), Peter Lovesey (Diamond Dagger winner), Michael Bracken (Black Cat Magazine [editor]; The Eyes of Texas), and William Link (Columbo) make their first online appearance anywhere—as does this vintage Polaroid of Gregory Mcdonald and Mary Higgins Clark—exclusively for EQMM’s “Something is Going to Happen” followers.

Mary Higgins Clark: Where to get the idea? Easy. Pick up your local newspaper. The odds are that on the first page or two it contains news of at least one homicide, an aggravated assault, a bank robbery, a mugging, a jailbreak. There also may be a recap on a criminal trial that merits national attention, an update on a series of unsolved murders, and an item about a child who has been missing. In other words, you’ll find material for a dozen short stories or novels.

Bill Pronzini: Always do your own work. Never try to imitate favorite or bestselling authors. Never follow current trends; what is a hot topic today may well be ice cold by the time a novel is written and submitted for publication. Imitators are seldom successful. An individual’s unique style and vision are what editors are looking for.

Hank Phillippi Ryan: During my thirty years as a television reporter, I got used to writing news stories on wet notebooks in the middle of hurricanes, with mittened hands as the snow swirled, and jouncing in the backseat of a news van on the way to make a deadline. Of course, it’s easier at my desk, and writing novels is much more civilized at your own computer or under a tree with a yellow pad or wherever your favorite spot is. Writing a novel is all about getting it done, but it’s very easy to put it off. You say, I’m at Mom’s, on vacation, too hot, too hungry, or at an unfamiliar computer, and then the time goes by, and your book is unfinished. A hundred little delays have added up to blank pages. When I’m on the trail of my own plot and the lives of my characters, nothing can keep me from writing, wherever and whenever. The thrill of having a good idea and getting it down means some chapters get written on the backs of envelopes while riding the subway or in the blank back pages of someone else’s paperback. Transcribe your ideas later. Get them down now.

William G. Tapply: Don’t be afraid to sprinkle “he said” and “she said” liberally through dialogue exchanges. Don’t let more than three dialogue exchanges happen without adding an attribution. You do not want your readers to lose track of who’s speaking, but attention-getting tags such as “he exclaimed” or “she expostulated” are cumbersome and
distracting. Write “he said” directly after the first natural pause in the spoken statement, and it will be virtually invisible to the reader while still signifying who’s speaking.

Gregory Mcdonald: People ask me how to write a book. That’s the wrong question. The question ought to be, how does one write this book? I don’t know. Only the person who conceives of a book, short story, poem, painting, or piece of music really has the ability to bear it and birth it . . . fulfill it, in accordance with itself.

Rhys Bowen: The best tip I was ever given was: If you want to be a writer, write. If you wanted to play a concerto at Carnegie Hall, you’d practice and practice, wouldn’t you? But I can’t tell you how many people have said, “oh, I plan to write a book some day’ and yet they are not writing now. Like any craftsperson, you practice until you become comfortable in the medium.

Tom Sawyer: The next time you watch your favorite sitcom or drama, observe that all of the scenes are arguments. If they aren’t, you’ll be changing channels in a hurry. Once you begin thinking of your characters in this manner—the ways in which they disagree and don’t get along with each other—you’ll quickly find that they will talk to you.

Peter Lovesey: Beware of the cliché. By this I mean not only the cliché phrase (“It’s an old trick, major, but it might just work.”), but the cliché plot (the murderer turns out to be the narrator) and the cliché style. Don’t try to be a second Raymond Chandler or J.K. Rowling. By all means learn from successful writers, but be yourself, and say it freshly.

William Link: When I lecture, I tell the mystery writers if they’re interested in clever clues and unique surprises that they should read old masters such as John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and Erle Stanley Gardner. The contemporary people to study are Ross MacDonald, Michael Connelly, and P.D. James. They are experts at credible characters part and parcel of beautiful, intricate structures.

Peter Lovesey: F. Scott Fitzgerald once said “Action is character.” Make sure things are happening, and the way the characters react or speak will make them live.

Michael Bracken: Writing is an art. Publishing is a business. Once I learned to separate the two, to wear my “artist” hat while writing and my “businessman” hat the rest of the time, it became easier to deal with rejection, rewrite requests, and editorial changes.

Mary Higgins Clark: The plot, like the foundation of a house, is the structure on which all else is built. No matter how glib the writing, how enchanting the characters, if the plot doesn’t work, or if it works only because of flagrant coincidence or seven-page explanations at the climax, the book is a failure.

101 Habits also includes insider secrets from romance, western, fantasy, and science-fiction New York Times and USA Today best-selling authors. While working with these authors from many different genres and getting to know them, they had at least one universal personality trait—no matter how tough the writing world treated them they never quit. 

The author of nearly a dozen acclaimed novels, Sheila Kohler is also a distinguished short-story writer; among the honors she’s received for her short fiction are two O. Henry Prizes and inclusion in several volumes of the yearly Best American Short Stories. A contributor to EQMM for many years, Sheila’s next story for us, “Turnabout,” is in our March/April 2024 issue, on sale toward the end of February. When she’s not writing fiction, the Johannesburg-born author teaches at Princeton University. She has contributed several essays on literary classics to this site. We think you’ll enjoy this one. I had never before thought of Middlemarch as a mystery, but I see that Sheila is right—contemporary ideas of the broad scope of crime fiction could place the novel within our genre.  —Janet Hutchings

George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published in 1871/2 is generally considered a masterpiece. It has all the elements: a wise and witty narrator, many mysterious strangers who come to Middlemarch, a vividly described though imaginary town based on the Coventry of George Eliot’s childhood at a time of change, 1829-1832, all reflected through the interlocking (almost everyone is related to everyone else) and changing lives of complex and original characters. There is much romance, attempts at reform, and searches for the true religion; there is humor and almost a happy ending, and, what interests me here, a many-page-turning plot. Why do we turn these pages with such pleasure?

Much of our interest depends on our concern for the two main characters, two attractive young people put in danger of various kinds because of their idealism: Dorothea Brooke, who is impossibly and implausibly in love with learning in the form of the moribund Casaubon, and Tertius Lydgate, a European-educated doctor who is bent on medical reform. These two characters are rendered vulnerable chiefly because of their worthy aims and their unworldly and trusting interactions with conniving partners and other devious characters, which endears our heroes to us but also puts them in increasingly dangerous situations. From the first page to the last, the seeds of betrayal, dangers of impoverishment—money plays a great role here, and even violent death are cleverly and subtly planted in the very soil of the place and grow and spread and threaten the characters’ existence at times.

Middlemarch was published in serial form with a cliff hanger at the end of each section: book three of the eight books is called “Waiting for Death” and book five “ The Dead Hand,” followed by “The Widow and the Wife,” surely good murder-mystery titles. There are two important testament tales: both Featherstone and Casaubon use their wills to punish the living from the grave, the former in the form of a bequest to a love child and the latter with a codicil that attempts to separate the lovers for many pages.

All of this violence cleverly echoes the situation in the country at the time with the increasing public clamor for democratic reform: reform of the penal code, reform of the murderous medical practices, the suspicion of the coming railways, the new machines, the hostility to all these changes and even the objects themselves.

Amongst the objects sold at auction, for example, which are praised for their utility is a sharp-edged fender. Here is how the auctioneer, Borthrop Trumbull, sells it:

“and most uncommonly useful to have a fender at hand that will cut, if you have a leather shoe-tie or a bit of string that wants cutting and no knife at hand: many a man has been left hanging because there was no knife to cut him down. Gentlemen, here’s a fender that if you had the misfortune to hang yourselves would cut you down in no time—with astonishing celerity—four-and-sixpence…”

Death, murder, or anyway a hanging appears early on in the book’s many pages: Dorothea, our principal heroine asks her guardian, Uncle Arthur Brooke:

“What news have you brought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?”

“What, poor Bunch?—well, it seems we can’t get him off—he is to be hanged.”

Dorothea’s brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.

“Hanged, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod. “Poor Romilly [ Sir Samuel Romilly, an English statesman who worked for criminal law reform] he would have helped us. I knew Romilly [ of course he did—Arthur Brooke is a name dropper and knows everyone including Wordsworth]. Casaubon [who Dorothea is set on marrying] didn’t know Romilly. He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is.”

Casaubon is almost entirely buried in books and seems intent on burying Dorothea with him even after his death.

Casaubon’s motivation for marrying the beautiful, idealistic, and twenty year old Dorothea from the first seems almost murderous. He seems to feel she will be less critical of his magnum opus than would be a secretary.

Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s young cousin, puts it this way speaking of Casaubon: “If he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business luring a girl into his companionship. It is the most horrible of virgin sacrifices.”

Our Casaubon, who is 27 years older than Dorothea, tells her himself that he lives with the dead. What he says exactly explaining his motivation is:

“The fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, [Dorothea, though she is not musical, has a beautiful voice] and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader. It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight.”

What dear Dorothea—for we cannot help loving her—sees in Casaubon is “a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.”

We fear for poor Dorothea, who is in reality in love with learning, which she erroneously believes Casaubon, despite his moles and his blinking eyes and the slurping he makes while eating his soup, possesses. “It would be like marrying Pascal, ” the unfortunate girl thinks, rapturously. George Eliot is nothing if not wonderfully funny.

Lady Chettam and Mrs. Cadwallader, two aristocratic women of the town, describe Casaubon thus:

“The bridegroom—Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster since his engagement.”

“I should think he is far from having a good constitution, ” said Lady Chettam.

“Next to Sir James he looks like a death’s head skinned over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will hate him. She looks up at him as an oracle now and by and by she will be at the other extreme.”

We are not quite sure who will kill whom!

Again and again the narrator uses the tomb as a metaphor to describe their marriage:

“She longed for work which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and rain and now it appeared she would have to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light.”

This becomes exacerbated once she has incurred the delight of meeting the young, fresh Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s cousin, with all his blond curls. “Today she had stood at the door of the tomb and seen Will Ladislaw receding into the distant world of warm activity and fellowship.”

It turns out, though, that the women in the book do quite well, though Dorothea suffers bravely.

Mr. Casaubon has a delicate heart which is easily shocked by the ardent flash of Dorothea’s bright eyes, her frank words. Not many months after their wedding there is an argument at Lowick Manor.

“You speak to me as if I were something to contend with. Wait at least until I appear to consult my own pleasure apart from you,” she says.

“You are hasty,” Casaubon says.

“It is you who are hasty,” Dorothea dares to reply, after which Mr. Casaubon’s pen trembles while Dorothea’s does not shake. Indeed the Latin she is learning seems clearer to her until she hears the bang of a book and the butler announces that “Mr. Casaubon has had a fit.” Though he recovers and Dorothea tries desperately not to upset him again she is obliged to refuse his final demand. In the middle of the night he asks her to promise to carry out what he wishes even after his death, without telling her what it is. She is afraid he will demand of her the work on his unfinished and obviously unworthy book. “You refuse?” Mr. Casaubon asks her when she does not respond immediately and demands at least until the morning to make her decision. She keeps silent until late the next morning, when she finally decides to give the answer he requests: “I am come Edward; I am ready,” she says, but finds him already dead in the summer house (and I am afraid we are not sorry) and it is Lydgate to whom she explains her motivation in a sort of delirium.

In Lydgate’s case, the young doctor, the nearest character to a hero in the book, who has recently arrived in Middlemarch, though he makes two successive attempts at love, commits the same mistake twice, choosing first a literal and then a metaphorical killer. Lydgate, the attractive stranger with the European education and the aristocratic connections, even before he arrives in Middlemarch, has fallen in love with Laure, an actress who stabs her lover in a play night after night while Lydgate watches, admiring the actress’s dark eyes and Greek profile. The lover she stabs on the stage is actually played by her husband, until one night she veritably stabs him and he falls to his death. Lydgate rushes onto the stage and helps the fainting Laure, making her acquaintance and finding a contusion on her head. He lifts her gently in his arms and carries her off.

He firmly believes it is an innocent accident, a slip that has caused the man’s death, and that the notion of murder is absurd until later, having tracked the actress down and proposing marriage to her, she tells him she meant to do it, that her husband wearied her, he was too fond of her. “I do not like husbands,” the woman said.

This sets up Lydgate’s marriage in Middlemarch ominously. He comes to town interested in reforming the murderous medical profession of those years. Bloodletting and leeches are common practices as well as the administration of medicines which seem to poison rather than cure even if they enable the doctors and apothecaries/surgeons to remain solvent.

Apparently Lydgate does not learn much from this first love affair. Instead he marries the beauty of Middlemarch, moved by the joy he gives her, not understanding that Rosamund Vincy is at heart a superficial snob who is attracted to the doctor only because of his aristocratic relations. She leads him into increasing debt so that the reforms he had planned can never be performed. She becomes what he calls his “ Basil plant, and when she asked for an explanation said that basil was a plant which flourished wonderfully well on a murdered man’s brains,” referring not just to his own brilliant mind and projects but to Boccaccio’s story from the Decameron, about the murder by her brothers of a girl’s lover who comes to her in a dream and tells her where his body is buried. She buries his head in a pot of basil and weeps on it until the brothers take it away and she dies.

Lydgate’s life in Middlemarch becomes even more dangerously compromised by his links with the man who may be seen as the main murderer in the plot. This is the rich banker, Bulstrode, with a dark past. Slowly, imperceptibly, and subtly the information is trickled into the novel, and a murder unfolds, seeds of which are cleverly planted from the first chapters of the book. This is an act or lack of action committed by Bulstrode, who is gradually and plausibly led to the possibility of murder by the insufferable, swaggering, red-faced man with his false bonhomie and swinging leg called Raffles, who has information about the banker’s past that he uses to blackmail Bulstrode. Bulstrode has offered to finance many of the medical reforms and a new hospital where Lydgate is to be employed. Lydgate, who is spurned by the other medical men of the town, turns increasingly to Bulstrode unaware of his past. Bulstrode professes to be a deeply religious Evangelical Christian, but he has made his fortune as a pawnbroker selling stolen goods. He has also married Will Ladislaw’s grandmother. Will is our other golden-haired hero, who falls desperately in love with Dorothea. After the grandmother’s first husband dies, leaving her his fortune, she marries the young Bulstrode, who works for the family. Raffles knows that Bulstrode has inherited his money from his wife and that this money has come from an illegal source and also through the lie Bulstrode tells his wife, that her daughter, Sarah, has disappeared when he knows where she is, so that the wealthy woman will marry him and leave him her money when she dies. Raffles comes to Bulstrode again and again with his desire to torment, insinuating himself into his household and demanding money and making himself increasingly obnoxious so that Bulstrode can only hope he will die. Finally, ill with alcoholism, he comes to Bulstrode’s house, and Lydgate is called in. Bulstrode, who was willing to see Lydgate in a debtor’s prison, now gives him a large cheque, thus involving Lydgate seemingly in Raffles’s death. For Bulstrode ignores Lydgate’s advice in the care of his patient and leaves Raffles with the housekeeper, who gives him opium and alcohol which probably kills him.

Lydgate is thus associated with the scandal that results when the townspeople hear of Raffles’s story and Raffles’s suspicious death. This causes Lydgate’s downfall, as he loses his medical and financial independence. Thanks to Dorothea, in perhaps one of the most touching scenes of the book, Lydgate is able to clear his name at least in his own wife’s eyes. Dorothea tells Rosamund he knew nothing about Raffles except his illness, and had accepted the money thinking it came from the goodness of Bulstrode’s heart. Rosamund then tells Dorothea that Will loves only her and has never loved anyone else, despite the appearances of a moment Dorothea has glimpsed of Ladislaw leaning toward her and holding Rosamund’s hands while she stares tearfully up at him. Lydgate then leaves Middlemarch with his Rosamund and becomes a successful doctor for the rich, though his ambition is destroyed. Dorothea is finally able to marry Will Ladislaw, who becomes an ardent public man whom she helps and loves despite having to relinquish the fortune she should have inherited from Mr. Casaubon, who has left a codicil in his will to this effect.

Thus the two characters we care the most about in the book escape at least with their lives if not all their ambitions intact. Lydgate dies in his fifties— providing if not a completely happy ending, at least a realistic and believable one. They live out unsung lives and are buried in unvisited tombs and yet hold our attention to the last word as the best of murder mysteries do through the almost 800 pages of this wonderful book.

Charley Marsh is the pseudonym of a writer who has authored novels in several genres, mostly science fiction and mystery. Her first story for EQMM, “Streets of Joy,” appears in our current issue, January/February 2024. She told EQMM that she never set out to be a storyteller, but that looking back on the elaborate lies she made up as a troubled teen, it’s obvious to her that she always had the makings. Now she puts that skill set to a more acceptable use—writing stories for entertainment. This post, however, deals with a subject that is terrifyingly real, even if it often finds its way into dark comedy. And despite the topic seeming to be inherently one that would interest mystery writers, it hasn’t been addressed before on this site.  —Janet Hutchings

No, it’s not a Wanted Poster. It’s a disturbing, legitimate question. At what point should a body be declared without-a-doubt-dead?

I came across an article this past November in the MIT Technology Review, titled,The Biggest Questions: What is Death? by Rachel Nuwer. She says, “Dying is in fact a process—one with no clear point demarcating the threshold across which someone cannot come back.”

Seriously? I thought dead was dead. The heart stops beating. The lungs stop expanding. The person has become a dearly departed.

Apparently not.

In a nutshell, the brain can survive without oxygen much longer than previously thought. Likewise, our organs. This is great news for organ recipients and family members who aren’t ready to let go of a loved one, but it then begs the question: When do you declare a person deceased?

Rachel Nuwer’s MIT article sent me down a twisted rabbit hole of humankind’s relationship with death. I discovered no clear answers, but came across some interesting—and in some cases, cringe-worthy—facts.

When the first person was mistakenly buried alive is lost in the mists of time, but archaeologists know that mankind has been burying its dead for at least 100,000 years (possibly as long as 300,000 years, but that time frame is currently in dispute, so I’ll go with the safer, for-sure number). I suspect the fear of being buried alive showed up soon after not-dead bodies were covered with dirt.

Who hasn’t seen the “Bring Out Your Dead” plague scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

Crying. Wooden cart wheels creak. A triangle clangs.

“Bring out your dead!”

“Here’s one.”

“Ninepence.”

“I’m not dead.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Here’s your ninepence.”

“I’m not dead.”

“Here. He says he’s not dead.”

“Yes, he is.”

“I’m not.”

“He isn’t?”

“Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.”

“I’m not dead yet,” has become a modern catchphrase. A joke we chuckle over. But in not-that-long-ago times, it was often true. Plague epidemics often resulted in premature burials due to the population’s fear of contagion. Careful scrutiny of the presumed dead was ignored and bodies tossed into mass graves, only to have a few crawl back out.

Mystery writers spend a lot of time thinking about death. You could even say we are obsessed with it. It’s our bread and butter. I’m always looking for new and interesting ways to bump off a character, or coming up with characters deserving of being bumped off in nasty ways. In mysteries, there’s never any question that the victim is dead. In real life, that hasn’t always been the case.

In general, death is viewed as an event signifying the end of an organism. Until around 1960, if the heart stopped, it was assumed the person was dead. Then along came CPR, and suddenly the dead could be brought back to life. Mechanical ventilators began to pump air into lungs to keep brain-damaged people alive for extended periods, in some cases, years, even decades.

Taphophobia (or taphephobia), the fear of being buried alive, is as old as the folk tales told about it and all manner of methods have been used to avoid it. Holding a mirror under a person’t nose to see if they were breathing no longer sufficed.

According to D. P. Lyle. M.D, in his book, Murder and Mayhem, as recently as three hundred years ago, a variety of unusual and mostly painful means were employed to verify that a body had truly deceased. Tobacco smoke enemas, nipple pinching with pliers, hot pokers shoved into—I can’t even write it. You’ll have to use your imagination.

Another popular method of checking for life involved a device that clamped onto the tongue and yanked it in and out for several hours. If the victim didn’t complain about any of these, they were pronounced dead.

Fortunately these methods faded in popularity, but the fear of being buried alive did not. Patents proliferated for Safety or Security coffins coffins fitted with devices that allowed the occupant to signal they weren’t dead. “Saved by the bell,” a term used when we are saved from a perceived catastrophe at the last minute, rose from the use of a bell to alert those above ground that the corpse was not a corpse. As dead bodies often jerk and move—even flipping over in their caskets—many were hastily dug up, only to be reburied.

Putrefaction was the only certain way to tell that a body was truly dead, but most people don’t go for rotting corpses lying around their homes. One answer was to send the recently deceased to a Vitae Dubiae Asylum, or the Asylum of Doubtful Life, the brainchild of German physician Dr. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland.

The Waiting Mortuaries, as the asylums were commonly called, were kept well-heated to hasten the rotting of the flesh. The first asylum opened in 1792 and they soon popped up all over Germany and Austria. The last one closed in Brussels in the 1870s. The smell of liquifying bodies in an enclosed space must have been unbearable. I can only imagine how difficult it was to hold on to employees.

Although rare, there are still cases when a person is declared dead only to come to life again. Consider Beck Weathers, who was left for dead—twice!—on Mt. Everest in 1996, only to awaken and stumble down to a low-level camp where he was airlifted to a hospital and survived to write a book about his ordeal.

As recently as this past October in the UK, the BBC News reported on an ambulance service that declared a patient dead only to have him wake up in the hospital morgue. The key to avoiding premature burial is to avoid being taken for dead when you are still very much alive. If you suffer from a neurological disease that gives the appearance that you have died, consider getting a prominent tattoo that warns paramedics you might not be dead. And then there’s always the security coffin.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Risk-Free Burial”: “In Italy, Tuscan watchmaker Fabrizio Caselli introduced a special coffin for people who fear they’ll be buried prematurely. The $4,500 casket is equipped with a two-way microphone-speaker, a flashlight, a small oxygen tank, a heart stimulator, and a beeper to alert an above-ground monitoring station.”

The price has probably gone up, but if you truly fear being buried alive, this could be the ticket.

Erica Obey makes her EQMM debut with “The Problem of the Vanishing Sopranos,” in our current issue (January/February 2024). The story is a centerpiece of our annual Sherlockian tribute, for it features series character Mary Watson, a librarian who has coded an AI program named Doyle to write mysteries. The adventures of Mary Watson and Doyle take place in the Hudson Valley, which is also the setting for some of Erica’s novels, including the well-received The Curse of the Braddock Brides. In this post, the Fordham University professor gives us a look at how readily the historic stately homes of the Hudson Valley can be made to serve as settings for mysteries. —Janet Hutchings

From Henry Hudson’s lost men playing at ninepins with the Catskill gnomes to the Pine Bush UFO sightings, the Hudson Valley has long had a reputation for being a place where the bounds between realities are thinner. The Headless Horseman rides long after Halloween. White ladies roam the cliff tops, while black submarines plow the great river beneath.

The curtain between past and present is always twitching against the specter of yesteryear. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny still dust off their ancient costumes to make their appearances at fire department pancake breakfasts. The churches still run craft fairs and penny socials. What’s a penny social, you might ask? It is a kind of silent auction, where you buy quantities of raffle tickets, rather than bidding on items directly, and bid by placing your tickets in bowls for the items you are interested in. The more tickets you place in a bowl, the more likely you are to win.

The most eloquent witnesses of the Hudson Valley’s past are the buildings that still dot the landscape, from the churches that have been repurposed as everything from yoga studios to the home of a radio station to the Odd Fellows’ Hall in Bearsville, outside of Woodstock. Further north, in Cairo, one can still view the giraffe house in the remains of the Catskill Game Farm.  Then there’s the neo-Victorian Doll House on Route 28, which has spawned the dreams of a thousand toy collectors (as well as several unfounded rumors of a strip club). Further down the road, the ersatz totem poles of the Brunel Sculpture Park peek over the trees. Most of the great Borscht Belt resorts, such as the Nevele and Grossinger’s, are just shuttered remains, but a few have found new life as casinos. All of them bear witness to the years when the Catskills provided a respite from New York City for both day trippers taking steamboats up the Hudson and the millionaires who summered in the grand mountain hotels.

The first time I ever hiked in the Catskills, I went up Overlook Mountain and discovered the imposing ruins of the (final) Overlook Hotel. I was immediately hooked on the Catskills—as are so many other hikers. The Overlook Hotel has one of the most checkered histories of all the Catskill grand hotels. It could boast of welcoming President Ulysses S. Grant, but it was never particularly successful and burned to the ground at least twice. When its last proprietors finally gave up hope of making a profit on it, it was leased to the Unity Club, which eventually helped to create the Communist Party of America, putting Woodstock on J. Edgar Hoover’s radar long before the beatniks showed up.

The legend of the Overlook Hotel was also burnished by two books of folklore: The first is the beautifully produced The Land of Rip van Winkle, by the redoubtable Mrs. A.E.P. Searing, who intended it to attract visitors to the hotel, which her husband then owned. The second is a privately published (and very scarce) The Traditions of the Overlook Mountain, edited by Dexter Hawkins, a lawyer and champion of free and independent public education. It is thus ironic that this collection, penned by idle guests on a rainy evening, features such tone-deaf “traditions” as a rock that served as a sacrificial altar and a beautiful Native American oracle who delivered her prophecies from a yellow birch that grew above a cave. You can still see both the rock and the birch if you hike up there today. You can also see more than a few rattlesnakes, so keep an eye out.

The stately homes that line the opposite bank of the river echo the grand hotels on only a slightly lesser scale. But even far more modest buildings have a tale to tell, bearing testament to the lives lived within their walls long after the people have gone. Enclaves such as the town of Jewett and the glassmakers’ houses that gave Glasco Turnpike its name remind us of the industries that thrived alongside the tourism that has always been the Catskills’ life blood. Gingerbread Victorians, hand-hewn log cabins, and the arts and crafts cottages in Byrdcliffe, the historic artists’ colony where I live, all echo with the untold stories that are catnip to any mystery writer. After all, as Jo Walton has said, “The gothic is at heart a romance between a girl and a house.”

Like any mystery lover, I cut my teeth on Agatha Christie. But even before Mrs. Christie came Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, and Phyllis A. Whitney, complete with their heroines in flimsy dresses fleeing the looming present of . . . A House.  From Ann Radcliffe’s Castle Udolpho to Wuthering Heights, Northanger Abbey and Manderley, the house is often one of the most vivid characters in a Gothic novel.

I write mysteries rather than Gothics, primarily because I agree with Whitney’s laughing assertion that she would never marry one of her brooding, complicated heroes. But it’s no coincidence that Whitney was also an MWA Grandmaster. Mysteries have a lot in common with Gothics – especially houses and the stories they guard. The hand-drawn map of the various exits, staircases, and guest bedrooms is a staple of any Golden Age country house whodunnit. And the list of Christie’s fictional houses alone is almost as long as that in Gothic novels: Styles, End House, the Vicarage, Chimneys and Crooked House, not to mention her own Greenway, which has in turn become the setting of several recent mysteries. Phyllis Richardson has put it aptly: “If du Maurier re-invigorated the Gothic house[…,] Agatha Christie turned it into something of a three-dimensional game-board in which to[…]act out the varied plots of her [stories].” And those stories are as important as the houses themselves. As Tsvetan Todorov argues, the Golden Age mystery novel is first and foremost a story about reading and writing stories, in which the reader and detective join wits against the writer and murderer to unravel the story of the murder itself.  

For those who would prefer to think in less abstruse terms (and really, who wouldn’t?), let just say it’s no surprise that when I moved to the Hudson Valley, my first and enduring love was the buildings that provide a tangible link to the stories of a vanished past. Resorts, tourist traps, stately homes, and abandoned Grange Halls: what they all have in common is that they beckon you, saying “Something happened here. Aren’t you dying to find out what it was?”

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Works Cited

Hawkins, Dexter, The Traditions of Overlook Mountain, Herald Power Press Print, 1873

Richardson, Phyllis. “The ‘Three-Dimensional Game-Board’ of Agatha Christie’s Country Houses.” CrimeReads.com. 11 May 2021

Searing, Mrs. A.E.P., The Land of Rip van Winkle. Putnam, 1884

Todorov, Tsvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” The Poetics of Prose. Cornell UP, 1977

Walton, Jo. “A Girl and a House: The Gothic Novel,” Tor.com. 24 Sept 2009

James D.F. Hannah makes his EQMM debut in the Black Mask department of our January/February 2024 issue, which goes on sale this coming Monday. He is the Shamus Award-winning author of the Henry Malone P.I. series, which includes the novels Behind the Wall of Sleep and She Talks to Angels. His short fiction has previously been published in anthologies edited by Lawrence Block and S.A. Cosby, and in The Anthology of Appalachian Writers. From this post we can tell that he is a longtime, dedicated reader of EQMM, for his topic is the work of Clark Howard, one of our most prolific and popular contributors until shortly before his death in 2016. Nearly all of Clark’s short stories first appeared in EQMM, and he was primarily a short story writer. He was also a valued friend to me and others at EQMM—including a number of our other contributors. It’s great to see his work brought back into the conversation!  —Janet Hutchings

I first read Clark Howard in an Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock anthology from my local library. This was before I had money to buy the magazines, but precocious thirteen-year-old me knew already he planned to become a rich and famous writer someday, so he wanted to learn from the best, right?

And while I read these volumes cover to cover, discovering an endless variety of writers, the one who caught my attention the most was Clark Howard. He wasn’t focused on the literary hocus-pocus of puzzles with neat solutions, of being cleverer than the reader. He just had a story to tell. Stories about working-class individuals trying to find a way through the world, and the terrible choices they sometimes made, and the terrible outcomes they often faced.

Thirteen-year-old me didn’t know he was reading hard-boiled or noir fiction. He didn’t know he was studying foundational text that would influence his writing more than thirty years later.

What I did know was, when I started buying monthly issues of EQMM, and Howard had a story in it, I read it first.

I always read his stories first.

Clark Howard’s early life was more befitting one of his protagonists than it did the author of eighteen novels and roughly 200 short stories.

You hear that about writers—the lives they lived before they put pen to paper, how they shaped their careers. But Howard’s was one where you could put pins on a map and chart how it would steer him eventually.

He was born in Ripley Tennessee in 1932 and grew up on the lower west side of Chicago. A ward of Cook County by the time he was twelve, he was frequently homeless as a teenager and fell into juvenile delinquency and a brief stint at a reformatory before going to live with his maternal grandmother near Memphis, Tennessee. These early years infused Howard with passions that later became hallmarks of his work: jazz, boxing, shooting craps.

He enlisted in the Marine Corps at seventeen and served in the Korean War. He was discharged at twenty and awarded the Korean Service Medal and two combat stars.

His writing career would have ended before it began if he’d listened to the professor at Northwestern University who said his work was “undisciplined and of no commercial value.” (Howard later told his friend and fellow writer Jan Grape that he walked out of the professor’s class without letting him know he’d already sold two stories for five hundred dollars. He never returned to the class. “I decided it wouldn’t do me any good and it wasn’t going to get me a good grade in that class. That maybe I knew as much about story writing as he did.”)

Howard earned his start in the waning day of pulps, and his work carries the weight of the legends in the field, except he lacked the fever-dream intensity of a Jim Thompson (The Killer, Pop. 1280) or the aggressive weirdness of a Charles Willeford (Miami Blues, The Burnt Orange Heresy). Rather, Howard wrote with the soaked-to-the-skin humanity of David Goodis, author of classics such as Dark Passage and The Blonde on the Street Corner. Howard himself wrote David Goodis “had an enormous impact on my life as a writer.”

About Goodis, the editor and writer Molly Odintz said, “His characters are broken down shadows of their former selves, worried more about damaging those they love than worrying about damage to themselves.” You feel this influence in how Howard crafted characters reflective of his hard-scrabble roots. Characters extraordinary for their ordinariness, their willingness to fight to survive by working twice as hard to keep hold of half as much as anyone else. Howard understood life was hard and sloppy and unfair, and sometimes it takes so little to change everything. The lives of his characters could be altered by a few hundred dollars, and they’ll risk everything for a small-time second chance.

He talked about the common characteristic connecting his work in the introduction to the collection Challenge the Widow-Maker: And Other Stories of People in Peril:

That characteristic is the quality of pride that often surfaces in the people who populate these stories—be those people ex-convicts, professional boxers, gang members, prostitutes, waitresses, bootleggers, oil field workers, the very old and the very young, the good, the evil, and the ordinary.

Roy Britt, in Howard’s story “Split Decisions,” is a professional boxer catching odd jobs and still dreaming of a shot at the title. New Orleans crime boss Jack Kono offers Roy the break he’s looking for, and all he has to do is tune up the boss’s sister’s boyfriend and convince him to leave the sister alone.

“I want his jaw broken. And his nose,” Kono specified. “Work on his kidneys, too, so’s he’ll pass blood for a while. That’ll give him something to think about.”

Five hundred bucks and a shot to fight again—that’s all Roy wants. It’s more than that, though, because then maybe Roy and his girlfriend and her daughter can get out of the French Quarter and buy a little tract house at the airport and start over. What, then, is the price of a second chance?

But like every good noir writer and French existentialist, Howard understood there oftentimes is no escape—that we may be trapped by our circumstances, and our best intentions rarely offer hope. Our only option might be the faintest form of redemption before a violent end.

When Roy discovers dark secrets about Kono, he can’t let Kono get away. This decision leaves Roy at the same ends as many a classic noir protagonist: White knuckling the edge of the world, knowing he doesn’t have many sunrises left.

Sometimes the characters didn’t know what to do with their second chance. Consider Dix, in the Edgar Award-winning “Horn Man,” fresh from a sixteen-year prison stint and looking for the ex-lover he took the fall for. Set again against a New Orleans backdrop, “Horn Man” takes what could have been a standard tale of revenge and instead transforms into a journey through New Orleans and jazz history and the machinations of those behind the scenes who refuse to let Dix—a brilliant jazz trumpet player—throw away his talent. By the last page you see Dix is essentially a secondary character to his own story, manipulated by an array of colorful characters to find a new home playing jazz.

While Howard’s work always remained well-crafted and effective, it could suffer from sentimentality, sometimes exotifying characters, such as the Native American George Wolf Tooth in “Scalplock,” or situations, like the fictional Lasher County of “All the Heroes Are Dead,” run by benevolent moonshiner Billy Roy Latham. Non-white characters are unmistakably written by a white writer, and even though they are treated with the respect and understanding he offered all of his characters, Howard leaned upon cliches that would never pass muster today, and his happy endings could feel simplistic and forced.

Howard’s best work steered toward a fatalism that emphasized both the tenacity and the hopelessness of his characters. This is embodied by one of his final stories, “The Street Ends at the Cemetery”—which is also one of the greatest titles ever.

As Cory Evans walked toward his car in the staff parking lot of the state prison, he had to pass the visitors’ parking lot, and that was where the woman was sitting, on a cast-iron bench bolted to the ground, under a punch-press metal sign from the prison machine shop that read BUS STOP. It was cloudy and overcast, the first threatening sprinkles of rain beginning.

About a prison guard—Cory—and a convict’s girlfriend—Billie Sue—and multiple characters looking for the stash from a bank heist, “Cemetery” packs a novel’s worth of twists and turns into its pages, as well as a tragic romance with an ending as heartbreaking and inevitable as you’ll find anywhere. It was included in Best American Mystery Stories 2013, edited by Lisa Scottoline and Otto Penzler.

Clark Howard died in 2016. In the course of his nearly sixty-year career, he won an Edgar, a Derringer, and five Ellery Queen Readers Awards, and was further nominated for Anthony, Barry, Shamus, and Spur awards. His books and many of his short stories remain in print, and if you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll explore his work.

Unfortunately, he has fallen out of conversation with both writers and many fans. If you Google him, you’ll mostly get results for the financial advice guy of the same name. He’s a writer who I hope is not forgotten.

And yet, I suppose this is the way the world spins. It’s the ephemeral nature of everything. Nothing’s ever truly made to last. Howard’s work reflects this, and his characters know it. They make their choices and stand their ground and accept their fates even as the world swallows them whole. Pride demands they hold their heads high and embrace the ultimate darkness, as the racer Sheffield does in the conclusion of “The Dakar Run,” facing the gangsters he has betrayed. Sheffield’s final words echo Body and Soul, the film noir classic he watched at the story’s opening.

Sheffield merely shrugged. “What are you going to do, Marcel, kill me?” He cocked his head in the best John Garfield tradition. “Everybody dies,” he said arrogantly.

Pushing through the doors, he walked painfully out into the Senegalese night.

Arthur Vidro has posted on this site a half dozen times over the years. Most often, his pieces have something to do with EQMM, for he is a longtime reader and fan—something we greatly appreciate! He is also the author of several mystery short stories and publishes the thrice-yearly journal Old-Time Detection, which explores mystery fiction of the past. In the summer of 2023, he began reprinting in Old-Time Detection interviews that appeared in EQMM in the seventies and eighties. In this post, he gives us a glimpse of what you’ll find in those interviews.  —Janet Hutchings

I started buying Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine as a kid in 1976.  That was also the year the magazine began publishing interviews of authors.

The interviews were not in every issue.  But they ran sporadically for eight glorious years.  The first one ran in the February 1976 issue, and the last one in its May 1984 issue, when I was a young adult of 21.  You might say I grew up with those interviews.

EQMM still has those issues in its files, but the changing of the guard over the decades has resulted in the magazine no longer knowing anything about the story behind the interviews.

The issues themselves provided no clues.  There were no bylines on the interviews.  Nor a copyright notice.  They were downplayed, not even making it into any issue’s table of contents.  The questioner was identified merely as “EQMM.”

EQMM editor Janet Hutchings graciously gave me permission to reprint any and all of those interviews in a print journal I publish called Old-Time Detection.  But I wanted to know more about the interviews.  Such as whose idea were they?  What person or group of persons had conducted the interviews?  How were the authors chosen?  Why no bylines?  And why had the interviews stopped running?

Janet, who was hired long after the interviews had ended, understandably didn’t know.

So I went ahead and published one of the earlier interviews—of Robert Bloch, from the March 1976 issue.  Bloch is best known today as the author of the novel Psycho, which was adapted and filmed by Alfred Hitchcock.

But the interview tells us Bloch left a much larger imprint in the mystery world.  The interviewer pointedly asked him, “Does it bother you to have that one-book label pinned on you, when in fact you’ve written so much?”

Bloch replied, “I don’t worry about it too much.  Before Psycho I was known as the author of ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,’ which had been dramatized and put on radio and anthologized to death.  That didn’t bother me either.”

Asked if the main character and some of the events in Psycho had a basis in fact, Bloch explained that yes, he “was living in a small town in central Wisconsin and one day I picked up the weekly newspaper and read about a middle-aged man who had been discovered with a woman hanging in his shed, dressed out like a deer.”  Bloch provided some more gruesome details and even the name of the man who had committed a series of crimes and would become the role model for Norman Bates.

Bloch said that actor Boris Karloff had once pointed out the parallel in their respective careers.  Bloch recalled Karloff telling him, “I had been a member of my profession for 25 years, without obtaining any particular prominence.  Then, suddenly, overnight, I was known because I was identified with Frankenstein’s monster.  I’ll always be grateful to the poor old monster.”

Bloch added, “And I’ll always be grateful to poor old Norman Bates.”

I also told my readers that I have only a fraction of the interview issues, and if they had any, I’d love to read and eventually reprint them. 

So with the help of some readers who have vast or even complete collections of the magazine, more of the interviews have been arriving.

EQMM’s interview of Robert Bloch ran in the Summer 2023 issue of Old-Time Detection.  The Autumn 2023 issue contains EQMM’s interview of Isaac Asimov, who dabbled in mystery although he’ll always be more famous for his science fiction.  Asimov’s interview focused on his 1976 novel Murder at the ABA.

Our next issue will contain an interview of Stanley Ellin, still regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in our genre (whose first fiction sale, by the way, was to EQMM).  Ellin was asked which of his stories does he consider his favorite – and Ellin’s answer will surprise nearly all of us.

As for learning about the interviews, I struck pay dirt when I spoke on the telephone with one of the interviewed authors—Jon L. Breen.  He recalled that in his case the interviewer was Otto Penzler, the famed publisher and founder of The Mysterious Bookshop.

So I tracked down Otto Penzler, who graciously answered my questions.

Yes, Otto had conducted all the interviews.  He also chose the interview subjects.  As for the lack of a byline, Otto recalls, “I had another column in EQMM at the same time which did have a byline, so I assume Fred thought one was enough.  The idea was Fred’s and I had carte blanche about who I could interview.”

Fred, of course, was Fred Dannay, at the time the surviving half of the Ellery Queen writing team.

There were roughly 65 authors interviewed over those eight years.  Think about it—65!  What a valuable resource these interviews are, four or more decades later.  Some of the more familiar names of interviewed authors:  Eric Ambler, Isaac Asimov, John Ball, Lawrence Block, Christianna Brand, Jon L. Breen, Mary Higgins Clark, Stanley Ellin, Robert L. Fish, Dick Francis, Michael Gilbert, Patricia Highsmith, Edward D. Hoch, P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Patricia Moyes, Robert B. Parker, Ruth Rendell, Donald Westlake, and even Ellery Queen himself (or at least the Dannay half).

To my surprise, all the interviews were conducted in person.  Penzler explained: “Non-New Yorkers came to the city for one reason or another, including the Edgars banquet, or I tracked them down at Bouchercon, or the International Crime Writers Association triennial meetings, or at the London Book Fair, or on a lecture tour, or whatever.”

Penzler today downplays the significance of those interviews.  “They were pretty short and had the depth of spray paint but I loved having the chance to spend time with those writers, especially Eric Ambler and Ross Macdonald.  It was at that interview that I asked him if I could publish his complete Lew Archer short stories and he agreed.”

There is some truth to the “lack-of-depth” label Penzler affixes to the interviews.  On the other hand, a good many of those 65 interviews were spread out over two issues, thus allowing twice as much space to each of those lucky authors.

The bylined column Penzler referred to was called “Crime Dossier,” which covered news in the mystery fiction world (usually from the world of publishing).  It was one feature of the non-fiction section of EQMM.  That section itself was called “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Newsletter,” which included Penzler’s “Crime Dossier,” “Bloody Visions” (on crime films, radio and television fare, stage plays, and even board games) by Chris Steinbrunner, an uncredited “Interview” (such as of Robert Bloch),  and “The Jury Box” (book reviews).

The “Interview” was the only section of the newsletter without a byline or without a copyright notice.  At some point in 1980 the “Crime Dossier” was replaced with “Crime Beat” by R.E. Porter (“reporter,” get it?), a pseudonym used by Edward D. Hoch (though the copyright was in Porter’s name).  Like the column it replaced, “Crime Beat” covered news in the world of publishing.

When the interviews began, John Dickson Carr was the book reviewer for “The Jury Box.”  But his final column ran in late 1976.  Jon L. Breen then took up the column, giving way in 1983 to Allen J. Hubin, who penned the column into 1988, when Breen returned and held the post for an incredibly long and productive span, passing the torch at the start of 2011 to current reviewer Steve Steinbock, with Breen cutting back to two “The Jury Box” columns per year from 2012 through 2016 (May and November) and one a year from 2017 through 2021 (July/August).

Back to “The Mystery Newsletter” that so entranced me in my growing-up years.  After a nine-year run (February 1976 to March 1985), it simply disappeared, along with all its components except for “The Jury Box,” which remained as a standalone feature.

I was disappointed when the interviews stopped.  I’ve always missed them.

Most readers buy Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for its wonderful detective fiction.  But some of us also want to read about the stories and about the authors and their writing processes.

That’s what the interviews provided.

And now, thanks to EQMM, most of those author interviews will be reprinted in Old-Time Detection.

“I’m happy to see,” Penzler told me, “that they will have a second life.”

Best wishes and gratitude to our readers, contributors, and friends.

Pip Thompson’s first paid fiction publication, “The Ring,” appears in EQMM’s current issue, November/December 2023, in the Department of First Stories. The Virginia author has also completed a novel which is currently on submission to publishers. Her literary career is off to a good start. As you’ll see from this post, she has another long-standing career as an anthropologist.  —Janet Hutchings

In her book Write Away, Elizabeth George promotes the importance of place in mysteries. For George, a book’s setting is a character like any other, because the protagonist’s journey through it reveals her worldview, character, and values. Mystery writers who privilege place thus act as participant observers, keen-eyed outsiders in adopted landscapes.

George lives in Southern California but sets her novels in England. Why? As a Shakespearean scholar and a fan of 1970s British pop culture, she immersed herself in the language and place as a young woman and never looked back. Like George, some authors set their novels in a place where their heart resides. We readers feel that connection profoundly.  To borrow a phrase from anthropologist Mary Douglas, these spaces resonate with purity and danger, which makes for a good mystery. 

Think of Tony Hillerman’s beloved Four Corners. Amid sandy canyons, endless potholed roads, and towering buttes, the abject poverty of the Navajo people contrasts with their rich culture. The startling beauty of the landscape stands for balance and serenity. Outsiders—white people with their strange beliefs and habits—bring discord. The desert light captivated Hillerman, and he used it to reveal both the spiritual and the dangerous: the hush of an abandoned ghost hogan, the dark cave where a rattlesnake hides. Between shadow and sky, peril waits. 

Next, consider Louise Penny’s Three Pines, where Inspector Gamache and a motley crew of friends and colleagues converge on a village redolent of wood smoke and fondue, where children ice skate on a frozen pond. We find a bookstore and bakery but no bank or used car lot. The setting lulls us, trusting as Hansel and Gretel, with offerings of French onion soup and hot chocolate after we’ve trudged through the snow to Gabriel’s bistro. Yet evil slithers in, as unexpected as a copperhead in a picnic basket.  But the we readers come to embrace Three Pines, and we return, ready for a welcome and a shiver.  

So, how did I come to set my mystery series in Italy? In college, my friend returned from her Italian semester transformed: She wore a brown mohair sweater to the thigh, a swinging wool skirt, and a pair of supple leather boots with a pointed toe. I took one look at her and decided I had to go, too. In Rome, I got my own pair of boots and a Bedouin dress and somehow befriended a group of poets.   One of their number, a member of the Roman nobility, stole books for the others. At the Hotel Paradiso, two harridans ran the front desk and glared at us when we came home late. I taught English to businesspeople and modeled for a dowdy fashion house on the Piazza di Spagna. I was neither safe nor sorry.

That winter, I switched schools and became an anthropologist. My professor and I followed an Easter Monday festival, where villagers hoisted their town’s life-size statue of the Madonna onto their shoulders and carried her up a mountainside at dawn. At the summit, the statue met her sister Madonna, who’d come from the village on the other side of the mountain. Pinned-on Lira bills festooned their silk robes, one blue, one red.  I carried the bags and interviewed an old woman who made an olive oil cake to honor my visit. She told me that when no rain fell, they’d parade their statue of Saint Anthony through the streets and upend him into the well in the town square, headfirst. They’d walk by, shouting insults and asking, “How do you like it being wet all the time?”  I became a collector of stories.

Some years later, I traveled to Sicily to join an excavation in the countryside, where I met my archaeologist husband. One day, we went to the farrier, known as a dangerous man. My husband asked, “Would it be possible for you to sharpen this trowel?” The man answered, “It is possible to kill a man in the street in broad daylight,” then sharpened the trowel. The town drunk sat on a bench in the main piazza, stuffing his mouth with peanuts and spitting out the shells. He told rude jokes to anyone who would listen. At the small museum where we cleaned and sorted artifacts, the guards consulted our permit, often interpreting it in ways that stopped the work. Sicilians are great philosophers, and the elegance of one’s argument may trump fairness and even logic. We’d debate them over cups of coffee and biscotti, and mostly kept the work going. I sharpened my Italian and learned the power of things left unsaid.

My first mystery took shape in Venice, at the museum where I worked.  I don’t pretend to rise of the heights of the masters named above.  But my setting is every bit as heartfelt.  That summer, the overseas staff arrived for the Biennale and quickly ran up astronomical bills at the Cipriani. We interns waited at battle stations for their onslaught. I’d splurged on a tuna and artichoke sandwich and placed it on my desk. Before I could eat it, the visiting director barged in, demanding my office and my phone. When I returned, he’d put his cigar out in my sandwich. I vowed revenge. In Blood Oranges, said director steals paintings off his museum walls, replacing them with forgeries and cashing in on the originals. My sleuth, a noble art restorer from outside Catania, solves the crime and punishes the guilty in true Sicilian style.

I write about Italy because I love the people as much as the history, the landscapes, and the food. I love their eloquent and hilarious curses, like “l’anima dei mortacci tua,” damn the souls of your ancestors (go to hell).  “Muso di sorcio,” rat face, is just as good.  Italian proverbs sound earthy and often refer to food, such as: “O mangiare questa minestra, o saltare da questa finestra,” either eat this soup or jump out of the window (take it or leave it). Others draw on farming life: “Chi va al mulino si infarina,” who goes to the miller will be covered in flour (do bad things and you’ll always get caught). “Tanti pampini e poca uva,” lots of leaves but few grapes (someone who promises a lot but has little substance). 

So why set my first mystery short story in Point Loma, my childhood home? I even used my family nickname, Pip, drawn from a favorite book, as my pen name. For years, I came infrequently to San Diego. Having spent my adult life in the South, I find the forced informality of Californians a bit grating. I’m not too fond of the freeways and strip malls and houses built right down to the water. Yet lately, I feel I’d like to reclaim the place: the tide pools and pickleweed, native sage, and waves crashing at night. There is something a little salty about shoes without socks or swimming in the ocean in the middle of the workday. My mother and I walk along a beaten dirt path to the Heron Tree.  Writing The Ring, which I’m now turning into a novel, feels vulnerable and satisfying, like ripping off a scab. Will I find a bloody mess underneath or new skin? It’s just one of life’s many mysteries—you’ll have to see for yourself.