SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN

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.

A.F. Bhuyan has been writing short stories for a number of years. His work appeared in Best New Writing in 2008 and was an Editor’s Choice Award selection. He has also had stories in Gargoyle and in our sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His first story for EQMM, “Moldova, 1992,” appears in our current issue, November/December 2023. In this post, he talks about a childhood experience that helped trigger his need to write fiction.  —Janet Hutchings

In the photograph, a young man hangs by the neck from a tree. He is dressed in a long beige shirt and pants. Next to him hangs another, although facing away from the camera, so it is this first man, with his head bent down at an odd angle, who holds my attention.

The hanged man’s features droop. His eyes are closed. Pants ride up from his ankles as his feet dangle above the ground.

I recall seeing this picture and being unable to look away from it. The finality of the image shocked me. At the age of eight or nine, I couldn’t make sense of it. I knew that I had stumbled on something significant and mysterious, and that, aside from the shock and the revulsion, the photograph had provoked other reactions inside me. What they were, I couldn’t then understand.

The photograph was in a book in my grandparents’ library. The book mostly dealt with World War II. It was an old tome, with yellowed pages and a tattered grey cover. Written by a former Field Marshal, it recounted various campaigns, interspersed with photographs and maps. Red attack arrows on those maps were the only splashes of color. I was grateful for that. The scenes of carnage in the photograph inserts shocked me even in black and white.

It was the only book in my grandparents’ library that left such a mark. Across four bookcases, with each row packed two-deep, there were gothic tales, classics, tales of adventure, crime and even early science fiction. People died in those other works. Heads were parted from bodies. Joints and sinews snapped as some poor folk were drawn and quartered. Characters made decisions that led to destruction and murder. But those happenings didn’t faze me. Why was that? Perhaps, I like to think now, it was because I had understood their intent.

Having read through a chunk of my grandparents’ library, it was apparent to me that those stories were designed to entertain. Violence and death, in those books, were easily explicable. It was part of the plot. A death in a story like that only made me turn the pages faster, so that I could find out more of what the book held. It didn’t make me stop and stare at the page. The images didn’t linger.

Death was present in those other books, but it was part of the bigger story and made to make sense. It therefore seemed all right.

Some years later, once in a while, a random snippet of news would startle me. I’d read in the paper of a man in his forties beaten to death at a bus stop for no reason. A cat horrendously mutilated. A child whose innocence had been taken. These stories would haunt me long after I had turned the page or flicked the screen.

The reactions from when I was younger and that I had almost forgotten returned. By then, I was better at discerning something of their nature. There was still shock. There was anger, also. And bewilderment: how could anyone do that?

The books that I had read shed no light on this point. If they did, the explanations they offered didn’t resonate. Perhaps I wasn’t reading the right books, or not reading them in the right way, if such a way exists. But I thought it more likely that the novels I read simply couldn’t get to the place where those reactions lived.

The photograph in that old grey tome and the violence and the cruelty in it belonged to the real world. That was the distinction. It wasn’t fiction, and could never be reconciled with it. While not especially illuminating, this line of thinking was enough for me to move on.

My viewpoint began to shift around the time that I had come across the works by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. His works played a part in reconciling, for me, the fictional and the real. One of Simenon’s novels specifically comes to mind.

In The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, Inspector Maigret investigates the suicide of a shabbily-dressed man who, despite his apparent poverty, mails to himself significant sums of cash. As he delves into the man’s past, Maigret faces increasing danger. The resolution is both elegant, tying together the various strands of the investigation, but also unexpected. At the same time, the emotional climax of the story doesn’t lie in finding out the man’s secret.

The emotional resolution, as it often is for Simenon, lies deeper. While Maigret is portrayed as solid and staid, with eyes “as still and dull as a cow’s,” his visage “blank-faced” and his overall aspect containing “something implacable and inhuman”, this facade belies the depth of his emotional engagement. There is Maigret’s “sense of anguish” over his involvement in the suicide. The recurrent theme of windows, through which characters gaze seeking something beyond–something, with which they are unable to connect. And then there are Maigret’s persistent observations of the characters’ worlds, seemingly tangential to the investigation, like the passing glimpse of a young woman and her “little boy of four . . . having breakfast at a nicely laid table”.

And it is on these tangential moments that the final twist in the story rests, where the private sphere illuminates and pushes forward the decision that Maigret ultimately takes—one that is both at odds with the formal resolution of his investigation and yet, in view of his concerns, the only decision that can be right for Maigret.

Not only a suspenseful page-turner, this and many other Simenon’s novels explore—in action—the motivations, thoughts and feelings of the victims and the perpetrators, as well as those who bring them to justice.

As I read Simenon’s works, I got to explore, alongside the author, some of the same reactions I had first felt when I chanced upon the photograph of the hanged man.

What were those reactions?

I now could name them: the wish to set things right, where possible. A sense of the inexplicable, chaotic cruelty of life. And the paradoxical desire for the world to make sense once more.

Travis Richardson makes his EQMM debut in our current issue (November/December 2023) with the story “Texas-Sized Vanity.” He has previously won a Derringer Award for flash fiction and is a past nominee for the Anthony and Macavity awards for best short story. An L.A. resident, he’s the author of Bloodshot and Bruised: Crime Stories from the South and West. Authors often reflect on novels that have shaped their lives and inspired their fiction on this site; in Travis’s post, he describes how an infamous true crime case affected his life.   —Janet Hutchings

Many people remember where they were during a significant historical event. For my grandparents it was the attack on Pearl Harbor, for my parents it was the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing. For me, some of the historical events include the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and . . . OJ Simpson driving down the 405 freeway. On June 17, 1994, I was working at my father’s summertime business, cleaning swimming pool covers with a crew of college students in a Tulsa, Oklahoma suburb. While scrubbing 8-months of gunk off vinyl covers with deck brushes and high-power carwash hoses under a 100-degree sun, a DJ on an alternative rock radio station let us know that OJ had failed to turn himself in to the police and was a wanted man. Our minds were blown.  

After my shift was over, I delivered cleaned and boxed pool covers back to their owners. The radio stations—all stations—kept giving updates on the OJ situation. Where was he? Did he write suicide letters? Was the man beloved by so many really a killer?  

By the time I was delivering my final covers, the then-Hertz spokesman had been spotted in a white Bronco that was cruising down the 405. The chase was long enough for me to finish the deliveries and come home to watch Al Cowlings pull into OJ’s Brentwood mansion with the police, media, and Angelenos out on the streets in full force.  

Fast forwarding to the trial a year later, I was a student at the University of Oklahoma and I had a dentist appointment in Tulsa the morning before classes. With clean teeth, I drove 2 hours down to Norman for my first class. As I was pulling into the school’s parking lot, the verdict was announced over the radio. These were the pre-cell phone and wireless internet days. When I showed up to my class, nobody knew the outcome. During a discussion, somebody mentioned the trial and I let the class know about the verdict to several surprised gasps. 

I thought that would be it for OJ exposure, but as fate would have it, I moved to Los Angeles a year later hoping to sell a screenplay and it seemed like everybody had an OJ story/connection out there. One of my first jobs was working as a production assistant on a show called “Home and Family” on the Universal lot. Candace Garvey was a bubbly segment host who was known for making multiple arts and crafts with her trusted glue gun. She was also a friend of Nicole Brown Simpson who had spent time with her on the night of the murder and had been a witness at the trial. At one point the show dedicated a segment to Candace discussing her friendship with Nicole, dealing with the tragedy of the murders, and the trial itself. I had a friend in the production office who believed in OJ’s innocence. This was a revelation for me. We debated a few times, but ultimately, we decided that it would be best for us not to discuss the issue.    

My next job in television was on the sitcom Cybill at the CBS Radford Studios. There was a car with a license plate that read “MSNG RON” that I saw every day when I walked between the studio and the Carsey-Werner production office. I was told that Ron Goldman’s sister worked on the lot. 

The wildest OJ connection however was from my job with Korbel Champagne. I worked on a commercial for the California champagne company during a summer hiatus from a UPN show called “Wild Things”. I had planned to return to that show with a promise from the producer that I could use an editing suite on the weekends to edit a short movie I had directed. This was back when digital editing software like Avid cost $100k and an array of hard drives were necessary to store media. After the commercial was finished, the director who happened to be the president of marketing and heir to the Korbel fortune asked if I could work for him full-time. He also had an editing suite and said that I could use it anytime. I jumped at the opportunity.  

My new boss’s fiancée was Faye Resnick. She had gained notoriety for co-writing a tell-all book about her relationship with Nicole just as the trial was revving up and OJ’s dream team had a defense strategy that tried to blame the murders on Faye by saying that she owed drug dealers money and they killed Nicole and Ron to scare her. In the 2ish years that I worked for Korbel, I ended up spending a lot of time with her. The job morphed from an assistant editor position to an executive assistant to something like a personal assistant. (I even had a brief VP of Marketing title.) Often when I traveled with my boss (whose name I am keeping out of this article), she would join us. This included various wineries in Sonoma County, Vegas, and even the Cannes Film Festival among other places. As an interior decorator, she was remodeling my boss’s house and often made suggestions for the Beverly Hills office. Occasionally she would mention Nicole and how the first book was exhausting to write. As I remember from her telling of writing that book, she had traveled to the Hamptons where she sat in a room and told stories about her adventures with Nicole and friends to a team of transcribers for two days straight. The stories were then woven into a narrative within a couple of days and the book (Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted) was published within a month or two.  

At the time, my friends thought I had one of the best jobs in LA (flights on a private plane, meals at fancy restaurants, parties, unlimited access to alcohol, etc.), but the job wore on me. There was constant drama between Faye and my boss that could only happen with either the idle rich or in reality-television plots. Boundaries between work and friendship intertwined, but I was always an employee first. I should note that Faye was never rude to me and even had acts of kindness, like cooking dinner for me and my friends on my birthday. Regardless, I knew I had to leave and even gave something like a five-month notice. I left the job and moved up to Berkeley where nobody cared about OJ and people read books! I also stopped writing screenplays and started writing prose.   

Years later, when I moved back to Los Angeles it seemed like people had forgotten about the OJ trial or at least stashed it away. Faye never married my former boss, but she managed to come back to the public spotlight with appearances on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.  

When looking back at my first foray in Los Angeles, I get bittersweet feelings of nostalgia. The late 90s seem like such an innocent time compared to today’s environment. I learned a lot and had fun, but I also missed out on some opportunities I wish I had taken. I also should have appreciated things a little more—something that I hope I’m doing today.  

A winner of the Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing as well as two Mary Higgins Clark awards, Carol Goodman is the author of more than two dozen novels. Her debut story for EQMM,  “A Woman in Miniature,” appears in our current issue (November/December 2023).  It stars World War II-era sleuth Peggy Quinn, who also appears in the completed but as-yet-unpublished novel Midnight at the Half Moon. In this post, the author gives us a fascinating look at the predecessors (or lack thereof) in noir fiction to the type of character she’s created in Peggy Quinn.   —Janet Hutchings

When I began writing the character Peggy Quinn, who appears first in my (unpublished) novel Midnight at the Half Moon and now in my story “A Woman in Miniature,” I knew that she would be loosely based on my mother, who was 18 in 1942 and whose life always sounded to me as if it could have been a film noir.  The older sister of four brothers, she quit high school to take care of them when her mother died.  She looked like a forties movie star, had the tough-but-plucky hard knocks girlhood of a Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and had brushed shoulders with Murder Inc’s “Kiss of Death Girl” and Abe Reles in Coney Island.  I wanted Peggy’s story to have the feel of a noir film, so naturally I turned to the hard-boiled books, pulp magazines, and movies of the era looking for her role models.  What I encountered very quickly, though, was the dilemma of creating a female noir hero.  Women in noir are more often the femme fatale bad girl or the sidekick-sister-good girl—not the hero. 

When I looked to the hardboiled novels that would later become the basis for the first noir films, I found the good girl/bad girl dichotomy on full display.  In The Maltese Falcon (book 1930; film 1941) Sam Spade’s secretary Effie Perine is capable and fast-talking but she’s not the primary investigator.  Brigid O’Shaughnessy is alluring and dynamic but ultimately double-crosses Sam Spade and is revealed to be a murderer.  She’s the quintessentially self-aware bad girl spelling it out for us when she admits to Sam “I haven’t lived a good life—I’ve been bad, worse than you could know.”  In Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (book 1939; film 1946) there’s plenty of suggestive banter between Philip Marlowe and the older Rutledge sister Vivien, but even if she’s not as deranged as her younger sister Carmen, she hardly provides a role model for a young woman who might want to solve her own mysteries.  Finding a contemporary role model for Peggy would require more detecting.

Looking at the 1930’s, the Depression era my mother grew up in, the obvious female detectives plying their trade, Nancy Drew and Miss Marple, are both worthy archetypes and ones my mother might have encountered.  In fact, it was my mother’s lifelong love of Agatha Christie that probably inspired me to write mystery.  Neither the teenaged sleuth nor the elderly Miss Marple, though, fit my picture of Peggy Quinn.  For one thing, they were both far better off financially than my Peggy Quinn.    

Better suited as a model, was Torchy Blane, girl reporter.  As Philippa Gates points out in her Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective, Torchy Blane came out of a plethora of girl reporters in 1930’s films who “were generally presented as ‘hardboiled’ by their experiences in the Depression-era city . . .”  Played by Glenda Farrell in seven of the nine Torchy Blane movies, Torchy is fast-talking, daring (in one film she chases a train and vaults onto the last car), and she always outwits her male rivals to solve the case.  According to Jessica Pickens in her article “Female Detectives” (Pickens) it was the actress Glenda Farrell who gave the role its dynamic quality.  Farrell said of the other reporters she’d played that “They were caricatures of newspaper women as I knew them. So before I undertook to do the first Torchy, I determined to create a real human being—not an exaggerated comedy type.  I met those newswomen who visited Hollywood and watched them work on visits in New York City. They were generally young, intelligent, refined and attractive . . . By making Torchy true to life, I tried to create a character practically unique in movies.”

Torchy Blane, then, provided a good model for my Peggy Quinn (and I imagined that my mother must have watched at least some of those movies) but the atmosphere of the Torchy Blane films (and many of the films that featured girl reporters in the 1930s) was more comic and antic than what I wanted for Peggy Quinn.  I wanted my story to feel more like a film noir.  Still on the case, one of the models I discovered was in the 1940 film Stranger on the Third Floor directed by Boris Ingster, starring Peter Lorre, John McGuire, and Margaret Tallichet.  As Philippa Gates points out in her book Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective, it was one of the first films to be identified by critics as film noir and “offers a shift in tone from the mysteries-comedies of the 1930’s . . .” (Gates, 121).  From the beginning of the film, Jane suspects that something is wrong when her fiancée, newspaper reporter Mike McGuire, testifies as the lead witness in a murder trial.  Jane feels sure that the accused is not guilty but Mike dismisses her hunch as an emotional response.  Only later when Mike witnesses another murder and is then charged with it does he realize that she was right and Jane is left to investigate and clear Mike’s name. 

The woman who is forced into the role of amateur detective to clear a loved one’s name was not uncommon in films and stories, but she’s sometimes dismissed as not qualifying as a true noir hero since her motivation is love.  Philippa Gates disagrees “that such a motivation should negate the agency that such female detectives demonstrate as investigators since several male detectives in noir films—most famously Laura (Preminger, 1944)—are also motivated to investigate out of love/desire.” (Gates, 122).   I agree.  In her first outing, my Peggy becomes involved in a murder investigation when her brother is suspected; in “A Woman in Miniature” she can’t stand by and watch an innocent woman be accused of a theft.  Here, at last, I felt like I had found the combination that could serve as a model for Peggy—the fast-talking girl reporter of the 1930s and the more nuanced justice-seeker of early film noir. 

This combination took me back to the pulps—to another sister proving her brother innocent in the short story “Angel Face” by Cornell Woolrich.  In her introduction to “The Dames” section of The Black Lizard Big Book Pulps, Laura Lippman calls the heroine “an avenging angel” and the “most dynamic female in these stories” (Lippman).   Jerry Wheeler, a smart-talking dame who’s earned her hard-boiled credentials working in a tinseled G-string to keep her brother Chick out of the orphanage and reformatory, tries to save him from the clutches of a mobster’s moll (Woolrich). When the mobster’s moll winds up dead and Chick is tried and convicted for her murder,  Jerry has to prove his innocence by going undercover as the singer “Angel Face” at the mobster’s club.  While she requires a little last-minute saving from a hunky detective, she’s proved her bravery, intelligence, and heart ten times over.  I felt a special connection between her and my mother since my mother had quit high school to keep her brothers out of the orphanage, was a frequent visitor to the police station to talk them out of trouble, and eventually testified for one of her brothers in a murder trial.    

When I recently went back to read “Angel Face,” I noticed that while the story first appeared as “Murder in Wax” in Dime Detective in 1935 it later appeared as “Angel Face” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in December 1946.  That Peggy is now making her first appearance in the pages of Ellery Queen,where my mother might have found her own role models in sleuthing, feels like the completion of a circle and the kind of poetic justice any noir heroine could want.

---

Sources
Gates, Philippa.  Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective.  State University of New York Press, 2011.

Lippman, Laura.  Introduction to “The Dames” in The Black Lizard Big Book Pulps (ed. Otto Penzler), Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; Reprint edition, 2007.   

Pickens, Jessica.  “Female Detectives” https://www.tcm.com/articles/Programming%20Article/021713/female-detectives/

Woolrich, Cornell. “Angel Face” in The Black Lizard Big Book Pulps (ed. Otto Penzler), Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; Reprint edition, 2007.  

A professor of history and the author of several nonfiction books, David Krugler has also written two World War II spy thrillers (Pegasus Crime 2016 and 2018): The Dead Don’t Bleed and Rip the Angels from Heaven. Both received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly. The Illinois author’s first short story for EQMM, “Kit’s Pad,” appears in our current issue (November/December 2023), but he has had a number of other stories published, including “Two Sharks Walk Into a Bar,” chosen for Best American Mystery Stories of the Year 2023. In this post, he gives us a historian’s view of how history lends itself to mystery.  —Janet Hutchings

September 1995. I was hours into a long day of research in the reading room at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I was writing a dissertation about U.S. radio propaganda during the Cold War and parked next to my desk was a metal cart loaded with grey boxes crammed with historical documents. I needed to get through a few more boxes before I took a break, but my mind was wandering. Instead of finding documents that supported my dissertation’s argument, I was thinking about the memorably named individuals mentioned in memoranda from these State Department files from the late 1940s. Foy Kohler. Haldore Hanson. Howland Sargeant. They sounded like characters from a novel. Although Wikipedia didn’t yet exist, I’d somehow learned Howland Sargeant was married to actress Myrna Loy, star of the Thin Man movies based on the novels of Dashiell Hammett (another fabulous name). What was it like to be married to a movie star? I wondered. What was it like to be in Europe right after World War II, as many of these men were for their work? I was certain they had stories to tell. But I wasn’t there to write their biographies or relate their personal experiences. Their “roles” in my dissertation had to be limited to explaining, well, U.S. radio propaganda during the Cold War. I banished my idle musings and dragged my attention back to the documents.

Eventually, I finished the dissertation and got a job as a history professor, but that curiosity about the personal lives of figures from the past didn’t ebb. If anything, it grew stronger. I thought the curiosity might lead me to write a biography or two, but I just couldn’t get inspired or interested, despite picking some fascinating, real-life subjects in need of full-length biographies. The hesitancy both puzzled and unsettled me. I’m a historian, I reminded myself. Why was I reluctant to get started?

A decade or so ago, I figured out the problem. I didn’t want to write historical biography—I wanted to write historical fiction. Rather than make a return trip to the National Archives to page through dusty old documents, I wanted to create a past that didn’t require citations and populate it with characters from my own imagination. And I wanted my fiction to be mysteries.

Apostasy? I thought so at first. (For a long time I didn’t tell colleagues or professional peers I was writing fiction for fear of ridicule, or worse, bemused indifference.) But the more I wrote fiction, the more I realized history and the mystery genre have a lot more in common than I originally believed.

The past is a rich field for mystery, thrillers, and suspense writers. Just about any subgenre—procedural, noir, cozy, caper—can be transplanted to a historical time and place. For me, writing historicals also means I get to start with a background I already know, which is why a lot of my fiction is set in World War II or the 1970s. I’m familiar with the lay of the land, so to speak, and also many of the elements that make any story, whether set in the past, present, or future, engrossing and believable. How characters talk, what they do for a living, the fads and fashions of the day.

But the allure of writing historicals is much greater than already knowing some facts about a particular era. I find the people of the past more interesting than those of us who call the current times our own. Don’t get me wrong—we live in interesting times, to put it mildly, chockful of colorful characters and plenty of drama. But unlike we the living, the people of the past don’t get second chances, except through what we write about them. The historical writer, in both nonfiction and fiction, gives voice to the dead, just like the homicide detective does. As the character Harry Bosch said to his creator Michael Connelly in a 2002 “interview”: “You speak for the dead, man, because nobody else does.”

For the historian, speaking for the dead must follow strict rules. The facts must be accurate, the claims backed by evidence, the evidence recorded through citations. That means spending countless hours in archives and libraries, paging through reams of records or poring over books. (Or, as is becoming more common, reading scans of said documents on the screen of your choice.) Even after completing their research, historians can rarely tell readers what their subjects were thinking unless they happened to leave behind a diary or some written proof of their interior lives.

Writers of historicals may gleefully discard most of these rules. Maintaining a semblance of factual accuracy is still a good idea (no M-16s for Civil War infantry, please), but imagination, not the documentary record, is the limit of what characters can say, think, and do. An author also doesn’t need an archive or a library to get started. Inspiration for a recent story I wrote came from a single photograph from the 1970s. It depicts an elderly man standing proudly outside his tiny television and radio repair shop located beneath a Chicago elevated rail station. I often walk down this block—there’s a parking lot there now. What happened to that shop and to that nameless man? What were his days like, bent over his workbench, tools in hand, the guts of a television or radio spread out before him, trains rattling overhead every ten minutes? That musing led to a scenario. What if business wasn’t so good? What if he needed to borrow money from a loan shark? What might happen next? Spinning a story from these What-ifs is no attempt to explain what actually happened to that man. Rather, it’s an effort to describe what could have happened and to use a snippet of the past to handle a durable trope in the mystery genre: What happens to decent people when they’re forced to cut deals with the bad guys? Historicals offer writers and readers a way to see anew the familiar.

Another reason I find historicals alluring is because they challenge us to appreciate that the people of the past were complex and conflicted, struggling to live in a world of promise and peril, just as we do today. From the perch of the present, it’s easy to survey the past, especially its abundant instances of wars, exploitation, and violence, and ask, What were they thinking? How could they do these things to other people, and themselves? Philosophers pose a similar question: Why do good people do bad things? The obvious answer to all three questions is that, like us, the people of the past were contradictory human beings, capable of kindness and cruelty, of order and mayhem. It’s a cliché to say those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. But how often do we pause to consider how the people of the past learned from their mistakes—and their accomplishments—as they progressed through their lives? Historicals offer authors and readers a vantage to observe characters from another era evolving and wrestling with the consequences of their actions as well as the hazards of their environment. Take Bernie Gunther, Philip Kerr’s indefatigable detective and the ultimate survivor. (Across numerous novels, Gunther outlasts the trench warfare of World War I, the Nazis, and a prisoner-of-war camp in the Soviet Union.) It’s a testament to the late Kerr’s talent as a novelist that he was able to create such a compelling protagonist in the figure of Gunther, who continually compromises with evil without surrendering his morals.

Now I have a confession. Having enthused about the allure of historicals, I must admit my story appearing in EQMM was not written as a historical. The plot of “Kit’s Pad” intertwines two contemporary issues we don’t often, if ever, think about at the same time: homelessness and bitcoin. After years of writing historicals, the challenge of immersing myself in the present was a welcome change. Putting myself in today’s world, plot-wise, was like coming out of a dim archive into a bright summer day. After submitting the story, I wondered if I should take a break from historicals.

Then we went to press. In the time between the story’s acceptance and the publication date, the “present” had changed, as it always will. Janet Hutchings, EQMM’s editor, caught a problem: the value of bitcoin had dropped substantially since I wrote the story. To keep the plot intact, she recommended I revise the value of the bitcoin downward or . . . set the story in the near past.

My choice? All I’ll say is, I don’t think you’ll be surprised.  

J.D. Frain earned a degree in journalism before opening a small marketing company in St. Louis, Missouri. For a few years now he’s been writing and selling short stories, but his first paid publication at professional rates, “Two Thousand Miles From Vegas,” appears in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s November/December issue (on sale next week!). In this post he encourages not just writers but everyone to uncover the many mysteries in the world around them. —Janet Hutchings

Kai, at four years old, recently taught me a lesson about mysteries. I know, I know, as the adult here, perhaps I should be teaching him. But remember the guy who walks around with a hammer, and everything looks like a nail? Similarly, when a person opens their mind to the mysteries of life, everything becomes a lesson.

It comes down to perspective. Mystery isn’t an objective reality. It’s a subjective interpretation of reality. Mystery depends on how you relate to the world around you. What is mysterious to one person may not be to the next.

What was a mystery to my grandson was old news to me. We stood by a backyard pond as several toads (mere tadpoles a week ago!) emerged and hopped across the patio. “How do they learn to live on land?” he wanted to know.

The pond is mine, so I knew that answer. “They lose their gills that allow them to breathe in the water and develop lungs so they can breathe on land.” They also grow limbs and absorb their tail, but one lesson at a time.

He quickly spit out a staccato of questions: “Where will they live now . . . How long can they swim . . . How far can they hop . . . Have you ever run over one with your lawnmower?” I tried to keep up, but while trying to supply answers, this is where I learned the lesson from Kai: Mystery is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore, when you adopt the viewpoint of someone else’s eyes, you can enjoy your own mystery. A fun discovery. Now I had to put it to the test.

There’s a requirement for this process of discovery to work. You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable, the same way a four-year-old does when peppering an adult with questions. A kid isn’t embarrassed about the questions they ask; they’re curious about everything and, perhaps without knowing it, they’re willing to accept the burden of vulnerability.

For an adult, there’s a risk involved. You have to expose yourself. Admit that you might not know something, even if it was something taught in fifth grade science. The good news is, to balance the risk, there’s a reward involved as well. You get to solve some mysteries and meet some people. Make a game of it! Here’s how it works.

Every field of human endeavor has experts. Many of them don’t hang out on the internet. And experts love to talk about their expertise. The hard part for many humans is allowing someone else to share their expertise without interrupting to boast about their own alleged knowledge. Rumor has it you learn a lot more by listening than you do by talking. You knew this as a four-year-old. If you’ve forgotten, let this post be your reminder.

So, pick a day to lose yourself. Leave your phone behind. Visit where you’ve never been. You’ll be amazed at what people are willing to teach you about their field of expertise. Ask a truck driver about the worst time to drive. Talk to a cop about her busiest shift. What’s an unbelievable part about being a nurse? When does a third-shift worker sleep? What’s the funniest thing your cashier has witnessed at work?

When you ask the question, when you show some curiosity (and overcome your vulnerability), you can get answers you’d never find doing typical research. Try it yourself. Decide on the mysteries that make you curious. Pretty soon, you’re going to start getting amazing answers.

I used the examples above because I’ve done them all and enjoyed interesting answers. (Surprise from Truck Driver: “The worst time to drive is in the evening after I get home. I have no interest in getting in my car.” Realization from Cop: “Night shift. Soon as that moon comes out, people change. That’s why I work days now. I get to help people instead of arrest people.” Brutal honesty from Nurse: “I hold a sandwich in one hand and catch vomit with the other. Some people find that hard to digest, but it’s second nature to me now.” Thoughtfulness from Third Shifter: “I love being awake when the rest of the world is sleeping.” Humor from Cashier: “Today’s my second day. Nothing has been funny.”)

Notice how they don’t always answer the question you asked. That’s okay. In fact, that’s favorable. So what are you curious about? What mystery would you like to solve? There’s a good chance you can find an expert with a fascinating answer.

For mystery writers, here’s an added benefit. You’ll often receive an anecdote to help immerse yourself in an unfamiliar world. We’ve all heard the old (and sometimes incorrect) adage to “write what you know.” In some cases it’s better to research what you don’t know. Next time you want to observe the world through someone else’s eyes, adopt their perspective. You’ll see things you’d never witness through your own eyes.

By the way, as we were leaving the pond, Kai wanted to know if he would get warts from a toad. His older sister had told him it could happen. I said, “A witch can turn you into a toad and then you’d have warts like every other toad out there. Just avoid witches and you’ll be safe.” Gotta keep some mystery in the eye of this young beholder, right?