Richard Estes and the Art of Seeing

I’m delighted Derringer award-nominee, Tom Milani, is joining us today to talk about how Richard Estes' paintings inspired him to look at his characters in a different way—a technique he applies both to his novels and short fiction. Here’s more from Tom:

Richard Estes and the Art of Seeing

by Tom Milani

In the late 1970s I was a student at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. The main campus had five buildings, one of which was the Fenwick Library. The library had a mezzanine that housed art shows.

My first year there, I wandered into an exhibit featuring silkscreen prints by Richard Estes. The one that struck me first—and stuck with me the longest—was of a bus windshield. Initially, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a photograph. But later, I marveled at the reflections, which seemed to reveal a once-hidden reality to me. Estes’s work would go on to play a role in my fiction. More on that later.

Before I saw those prints, my conception of a city’s appearance was at a remove: cities had skylines, unique to be sure, but two-dimensional from a distance. After seeing the Estes prints, I began looking for the reflections he painted. Glass-front buildings I once might have dismissed as having no character now were literal mirrors for their surroundings. Imagine looking through a microscope at a few drops of pond water for the first time and viewing the hidden life there. In a way, that’s what I was seeing.

Estes works from multiple photographs as references when he paints. The result is a perspective that can’t be actually seen from one location but is somehow nonetheless “real” in the sense that every building and reflection exists.

In the 1990s, when I was in Ann Arbor for work, I visited the original Borders bookstore, something of a paradise for my English major soul. There, I found Photo-Realism by Louis K. Meisel, a 500-plus-page book featuring thirteen photorealist painters and another fifteen photorealism-related artists. I think the book cost $65, something out of my reach at the time. When I was on the phone with my mom and she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I mentioned the book, reluctantly mentioning the price. She sent me $100 because that’s what moms do for their lonely sons.

I pored over the text and reproductions of each artist’s works, never less than awed by the technical ability displayed. Even though his art wasn’t the most photorealistic of the group, Estes still stood out to me, for he’d been the one who changed the way I see.

A few years later, newly single and living in a condo furnished with lawn chairs, I went to the frame shop in the local strip mall to buy some art for my bedroom wall. Leafing through catalogs (pre-Internet), I found a poster for the Estes painting Telephone Booths, in the H. H. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The guys who worked in the shop seemed to think it was cool, which meant something, and hanging it on my wall was a stamp of my personality on the place.

Last year, Places That Are Gone, my debut novel, came out. (It’s currently out of print but in the process of being reissued by a new publisher.) Bennett Wilder, my protagonist, also liked Richard Estes: 

In the bedroom he’d hung a reproduction of a Richard Estes painting of a bus windshield, the surrounding buildings reflected in it like a funhouse mirror. The city scene was devoid of people and impossibly clean. He liked to imagine himself in that streetscape, bathed in its pure light.

Bennett’s feelings represent a kind of Platonic ideal of what he thinks his life could be, despite all evidence to the contrary. Shelley, his wife, views the print very differently: “The painting seemed so cold to her, a world without emotion or any kind of humanity, despite the urban scene.” The collision of their diametric world views will prove catastrophic by the book’s end.

A few years ago, we bought an Estes silkscreen featuring a car hood and windshield in the foreground, reflections of the surrounding buildings spilling across the surfaces like melted wax. It sits above a corner of my desk, and when I stare at it, I’m reminded to look anew at the world and the characters I’m writing about.

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Tom Milani’s short fiction has appeared online and in several anthologies, including In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Genesis and Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties. Derringer finalist “Barracuda Backfire” was published in 2024 as Book 4 of Michael Bracken’s Chop Shop series of novellas. “Barstow,” originally published in Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir volume 5, was named an honorable mention in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025. “No Road Back,” which originally appeared in Black Cat Weekly, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. His first novel, Places That Are Gone, was published in May 2025.

You can find Tom’s Derringer award-nominated story, “A Sign of the Times,” in Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties.

 

Repost: Three Tips For Organizing Your Novel Writing

I'm on vacation this week and still at work on the second part of my multi-part series, "The Ever-Shifting Face of Plagiarism. So (with my wife's consent) I am reposting a helpful organizational post we co-authored a few years back.

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For today's blog entry, I am pleased to be joined by my better half, Robyn Thornton–a seasoned professional at the practice of time-management.

In one of my previous blog posts, I mentioned how incredibly organized my wife Robyn is, and how she has helped me to organize my own writing projects. In the Comments section of that post, my blogging partner Eve Fisher asked whether Robyn was willing to work with other writers.

Well, I asked Robyn whether she'd be willing to team with me on this post and pass along some organizational tips to our readers (BOTH of them!). And because she's the best, she agreed.

And so here we are!

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Everyone has struggled to set goals and stay on track toward them. Momentum is a dicey proposition. Once lost it can be hell to get back.

This is especially true of writing in general and fiction in particular.

One way to ensure your progress doesn't flag is to conceptualize your writing project holistically, get the idea down on paper, and then "chunk it out," as Robyn says: break it down into manageable component parts, progress toward which is easily tracked, depending which system you choose to use to do the tracking.

Below are three tips to help you better organize your writing project:

ONE: Whether you're a pantser or a planner, set daily and weekly goals for yourself. Whether it's word count, page count, chapter count, number of Roman numerals/bullet points in your outline, number of character analyses completed, etc. It's important that these goals are realistic and attainable.

TWO: Once you've set your goals, WRITE THEM DOWN. This is one way to help solidify them in your thoughts, and get you to commit to them in a conscious and intentional manner.

There are as many ways to chart your progress as there are writers doing the charting. The whole point of the maneuver though is to have a process which allows you to chart your progress through your project, and show measurable results as you go.

While there are many organizational formats out there, we're going to focus on one called a Kanban Board. Kanban has an interesting backstory: originally developed by engineers at Toyota in the late 1940s, it was inspired by how groceries order stock. Its highly visual style and easy-use communication made it incredibly effective for managing projects.

An example of a Kanban Board

In the decades since its use has grown outside of the auto industry, Kanban boards are industry standard project management and team delegation throughout the corporate world, especially in America.

Another example of a Kanban board.

Robyn helped me make up my first Kanban board this summer for a writing project which has since wrapped. As if the simple, clean, easy-to understand visual style weren't enough of an incentive to try out a Kanban board, I have to say, it's inexpensive to boot!

While there are plenty of electronic versions out there, the physical ones only require a piece of posterboard, markers, and post-it notes.

That's it.

The resulting organizational system is so intuitive it's like Eli Whitney's cotton gin: once someone came up with it, it was ridiculously easy to replicate!

Which leads us to our final point:

THREE: Now that you've given yourself the tools to help you both chart and stay your course, don't beat yourself up if you miss a day here or there. The beauty of the Kanban board is that you can be agile and creative in moving around the sticky notes representing your goals, ideas, etc., and therefore it's simple thing to regroup, reassess, and reprioritize.

It's also incredibly rewarding to move a sticky note into the "DONE" column, and be able to take momentary stock of how far you've come, and what is left before you. At times I've found it outright inspiring.

And that's it for this installment! Thanks Honey! That was fun! And for my loyal readers (BOTH of you) I'll be back in my regular slot in a couple of weeks!

Arctic Noir

Landscape is character.  I had a new subscriber to my Substack column tell me one of the things he really liked about my Cold War spy novel Black Traffic was the evocation of Berlin, which took him back to the time when he was a kid, growing up in the city.  I was very flattered.  I certainly wanted Berlin to be an active presence, not just a backdrop.  I think this is true of the bounty hunter stories, too, the physicality of the country, between the desert and the sown, and the people taking on the character of the unforgiving terrain. 

I’ve been watching some foreign-language policiers on the cable channel MHz.  They carry a wide selection, but the quality isn’t consistent.  You wind up kissing a lot of frogs, on your way to finding a prince.  Tatort, the German show, is reliable.  Here are three more.

Arctic Circle is Finnish, specifically Lapland.  I like the lead actress a lot; the tropes, less so.  She’s chosen to work in her hometown, her mom has cancer, her daughter has Down syndrome, her sister’s a hot mess who makes bad choices in men, and so forth – there’s a little too much of this.  The plot, in the first season, involves Russian girls in the sex trade, trafficked by the mob in Murmansk, but crossing the border into Finland, and carrying an infectious virus that mimics Ebola, which piggy-backs on herpes simplex, possibly the rogue mutation of an old Nazi germ warfare program come back to life, reinvigorated by an unscrupulous pharmaceutical baron.  Whew.  And that ain’t the half of it.  What the show has, in spades, is location.  You’re way up North, maybe 70 degrees latitude, above the Arctic Circle (natch), and it’s winter, with only a couple of hours of daylight, and everything’s snowed in.  It would appear the Finns do a lot of drinking.  Oh, and it’s less than twenty miles from the Russian border, so you’ve got drugs and so forth, coming in from the Kola Peninsula.  The whole atmosphere is bracingly chilly.

Next up, we have Freezing Embrace, also from Finland, but down south, near Helsinki.  This is a more conventional cop shop series, but again, everybody’s squeaking around on packed snow, and boy, they sure do feature pulling a cork.  I don’t know whether this is a recommendation for booze tourism, or what.  Unhappily, the show jumped the shark in Episode 5, or thereabouts, and didn’t quite recover.  The cast is really good, though.  And the same thing, about the environs.  There’s something about being iced in.

The show I liked the best of my recent explorations, though, was Piste Noire.  French, as you might imagine.  On the border with Switzerland, in ski country.  The pistes, in fact, are in both France and Switzerland, the area called the Portes du Soleil, with lifts and gondolas taking you up to crests where you can ski down into the next-door country.  Snow, snowy mountain roads, and snow-covered forests.  Blindingly picturesque.  Some similarly aggravating tropes.  The heroine, yet again, gets pulled back to her hometown, and into family drama, an old flame the murder suspect, yadda-yadda.  The local cop a dry drunk, grumpy, morally compromised, chain-smoker – you get tired of the same-old, and the dynamics.  The two leads, as the odd-couple cops, are actually quite endearing, though, and they save it.  And there’s a very good meet-cute, early on, when the out-of-town cop falls for a local environmental activist, if not the big reveal you might think - lesbians, quel horreur – but very sweet.  There’s not that much of a mystery, in all honesty; it’s telegraphed early on.  What kept me watching was the cast, genuinely charming, and all those aerial shots of the snowy woods. 

So there it is.  It might seem odd, or superficial, to be drawn in by the locations, beautiful or forbidding or exotic, but in these three instances, the sense of place is very much a part of the story.  The characters would be other people - if they inhabited a different physical environment, they’d behave differently.  Maybe this is self-evident, but I think seeing your breath in the frigid air, or feeling yourself draw inward, trying to conserve body heat, say, gives you a stronger imagined connection to where these people live, and who they are. 

Oh, What a Tangled Web(site) We Weave

Though I’m unable to pinpoint the exact date, I created my first personal website sometime around the turn of the century as hidden pages on the website of a prepress company I managed, and I printed the URL on promotional material for books published in 2000 and 2001. You had to know the pages were there because there were no links to them from any page on the company’s website.

A printing company purchased the prepress company in January 2002 and eliminated the prepress company’s website, leaving me without a website. Shortly after that, I registered CrimeFictionWriter.com and created a slightly more sophisticated personal website.

I created and updated both versions of my website—the hidden one and the official one—using HTML, and I later redesigned it using Adobe’s Muse. A few years ago, Adobe stopped supporting Muse and I was no longer able to update my site. Luckily, I had been working with my website host—a designer I worked with on several company websites for almost three decades—took over site maintenance.

Last year, I decided my site needed a complete refresh and it needed to be mobile friendly. Unfortunately, my need to redo my site coincided with his desire to retire from website design and hosting.

Stacy Woodson recommended Xuni, Alan Orloff seconded the recommendation, and I saw that Xuni had designed sites for several other writers I knew.

Shortly after I settled on Xuni, my existing host set a deadline for transferring everything from his system. He was shutting down mid-2026.

So, in January, work began in earnest with Maderia James and Riley Mack of Xuni. Luckily, we weren’t reinventing the wheel. I already had a website, and my goal was to duplicate the basic structure and make the site more attractive, easier to navigate, and mobile-friendly.

I revised much of the text, collected new graphics (book covers, mostly), and uploaded everything to a shared Dropbox folder. Before long, Xuni presented a draft of the new site and we worked through some small tweaks (correcting my typos, adding new text, rearranging a few things).

Done. Simple as that.

Unfortunately, what wasn’t simple was transferring my email to a new host. I had been spoiled: For almost three decades, my website host had also been my email host, and I did not realize that was not the norm. Changing email hosts and migrating all my email to the new host was a headache of immense proportion.

But it’s done.

And I think everything turned out great.

So, check it out: www.CrimeFictionWriter.com.

* * *

“Wealth of Knowledge,” Kings River Life, March 14, 2026. 

“Death of an April Fool,” Black Cat Weekly 239, March 29, 2026.

“Hit or Miss,” KissMet Quarterly Spring 2026: Tiptoe Through the Tulips with Me 

The Derringer Award winning “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’” is reprinted in Hot Shots: Celebrating Thirty Years of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, which releases today, April 7, 2026.

Later this month, Temple and I will be at Malice Domestic. If you see us, say howdy!

Murder, She Barked

            A recent post here on SleuthSayers was a paean to the significance of cars in mystery writing.  I admit the connection was a bit thin, but I’m on much firmer ground with this topic, the importance of dogs. 

            When I was trying to get my first novel published, I struggled with a few key plot points, until I got an actual dog of my own, and all was solved.  I simply wrote him into the book and everything fell into place.     

            When my son was a little kid he had an imaginary friend named Eddie Van Halen. 

Samuel Beckett and what's his name

This is inscrutable, I know, but it seemed right to give my fictitious dog the same name.  Eddie became the most popular character in the books, to which I owe his inspiration, the aforementioned actual dog we named Samuel Beckett.  Sam was a Wheaton Terrier, and everyone who knew him claimed he wasn’t a real dog, but some other version of cognitive being.  One of my wife’s friends said we shouldn’t worry about leaving him home alone.

“He’s busy working on a screenplay.”

Dog people know what I mean by this.  Every once in a while, an exceptional one trots into view.  Aware, but peripherally involved.  More perceptive than their human companions, yet challenged in conveying their thoughts and feelings.  Thus they become perfect foils in crime stories.  And even if they’re just amusing side characters, or comic relief, like Myrna Loy and William Powell’s Asta, worth the price of entry.  There are so many examples in the genre of sidekick dogs, heroic dogs, villainous dogs (The Hound of the Baskervilles comes to mind), dogs solving crimes, etc., that there’s no point in mentioning any here (this is what Google is for).  We all have our favorites. 

For a writer, dogs have limitless utility.  Sam kept me company when I wrote on the front porch, on the ferry, or in the cockpit of a sailboat, at any number of household workstations and never once asked to review the work.  He defended me from intruders ringing the doorbell, squirrels, waterfowl, and other passing dogs, took me on walks when the writing seemed to stall, followed me on coffee and pee breaks, waiting patiently for me to get my ass back in the chair. 

Robert B. Parker and Pearl

I often point out that you don’t have to invent characters, you just have to hang around the Village of Southampton and talk to people.  That’s where virtually all mine were born.  This task is immensely facilitated by having a dog, especially one as handsome and engaging as the existentialist Beckett.  By the same token, his fictional counterpart Eddie Van Halen was merely a close description of Sam himself. 

Sam liked his routines, Lord knows. But he also loved to mix things up, in a way far more reminiscent of a practical joker than a habituated, monotony-loving house pet.  I’d heard him howl exactly twice, both times on a corner in Southampton as a fire truck passed by with its siren blaring. He stuck his head out the window of a moving car exactly once, for reasons we both tried to figure out.  A dog who’d shown nothing but distain for conventional chew toys, suddenly became enamored with a polyester possum and spent the greater part of Christmas morning eviscerating the poor thing. 

Sometimes, very infrequently, he’d walk up to me, look me in the eye, and issue one, loud, imperious bark.  I’d say, “What!?”  He’d bark again, and then walk away, disgusted.  I know these exchanges meant something to him, but I’ll be damned if I knew what they were.

However, I was way ahead on the deal.  I got to have a character I could switch over to whenever imaginative flagged, who was simply the transposition of my day-to-day experience, whose only compensation was a concentrated scratching around the ears, a walk into town and an occasional cigar.

Asta

Security Alert

Today's post is short, but important if you own an older Linksys router. The unusual element in this story is the warning comes from the FBI. (PDF)

A fair amount of tech literature drops in my box, keeping me fairly up to date about cyberattacks and vulnerabilities. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t recall a previous FBI interventions. Without reverting to field literature, I hazard affected models have a known weakness that, because the manufacturer has discontinued said models, are especially susceptible to exploitation.

Affected models can be used for Man in the Middle attacks, Evil Twins, data theft, and weaponizing your machine as a zombie bot to attack others.

What do we do?

If you have an older Linksys device, compare it to the following list, which also contains one Cisco unit. If the model doesn’t show on the front or back, it will be identified with a label on the bottom.

Don’t confuse routers with modems. The modem will be fed by a cable coming in from the outside. Next in line, the router will be attached to the modem. Wi-fi modems will have one, two, or three antennae. Linksys gadgets will be either near-black or more traditionally, a vivid ‘IBM blue and grey’.

Is my obsolete model useless?

• In theory if you can disable your machine's remote admin, you could continue using it.
• You could probably convert it into a wired ‘switch’, but if your internal network is that extensive, you’ll likely want newer, faster, safer equipment.
• Otherwise, donate it to your local recycler.

The Dirty Dozen

Here’re the dangerously obsolete models. Stay safe.

Compromised Routers

Linksys E1000	Linksys E2500	Cisco M10
Linksys E1200	Linksys E3000	Linksys WRT310N
Linksys E1500	Linksys E3200	Linksys WRT320N
Linksys E1550	Linksys E4200	Linksys WRT610N

5Socks

The Old Genre Switcheroo

One of the main topics of interest lately, at least for short-story writers, has been the sad decrease in the number of markets for short mystery fiction. To put it more simply, we no longer have as many places to sell our stories.

I'm still writing those mystery stories--I probably couldn't stop if I wanted to--and I'm still submitting them pretty regularly to those half-dozen good publications still available. But I also have, for the first time in a long time, a pile of completed mystery-story manuscripts sitting around waiting to be submitted. (The only other choice is to overload the submission queues of the few remaining markets, and I try not to do that.) Back in the old days, I never had to do that kind of stockpiling. I always sent those kids out into the world as soon as they graduated, to try to make something of themselves. Now my sad little story pages are hanging around home, aging like tobacco leaves.

So I'm making a few changes. One is, I'm writing some of my stories in other genres.

That kind of writing, especially SF/fantasy and Western, isn't new to me--I've always come up with those stories now and then, and so far I've managed to sell them all to places I like and respect. But I never took them very seriously. After each of those little joyrides, I've always found myself coming back to my greatest love, which will always be mystery/suspense. It's what I read most so it's what I write most.

Even so, I am now writing more SF/fantasy stories than ever before. I recently wrote and sold one within a few days, and I just finished another, a 12,000-word fantasy/horror story that was great fun to plot and put together. I also wrote two more Westerns last month, one shorter and one longer, and thanks to recent streaming series like The English, Godless, American Primeval, 1883, Bass Reeves, and The Abandons (I watched 'em all), I think there might now be more Western fans out there than was the case several years ago. A bonus, there, is that my Western short stories always include crimes, so they can rightly be considered cross-genre, and thus appeal to wider range of publications. More on cross-genre in a minute.

My point is, fiction is fiction, and all of us know there are a ton of science fiction fans out there in the world--far more of them than mystery fans. I'm one of them. As for fans of SF shorts--yes, I realize those fans are fewer in number, but there are still plenty of them as well. I think it's safe to say that anyone who likes those old episodes of Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond and Outer Limits will also like short stories in that genre. And who doesn't like Twilight Zone?

Think about it: While we mystery writers love to talk about the legacies of Ed Hoch, Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Agatha Christie, etc. (as we should), there were also some great SF-fantasy writers who write short: Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Isaac Asimov, Fredric Brown, and so on. My bookshelves are full of them.

On the subject of mixed- or cross-genre writers, I'll refer again (as I did two weeks ago, here) to Joe R. Lansdale. He writes wonderful mystery.fantasy novels and short stories, and I can think of a few of his that could be called mystery/fantasy/Western/horror. As for mystery/Western, just look at the recent success of the series Dark Winds.

Sometimes changing things up a bit can't hurt.

What about you? How do you feel about all this? If you're a writer, how often do you write in genres other than mystery/crime/suspense? Have you even tried writing SF, or fantasy, or Western, or romance, or horror? How about mixing them up?--cross-genre stories can be great fun to write. And even though I've probably mentioned this before, some mystery markets, few though they are, will surprise you: I've occasionally sold Westerns and SF stories to AHMM and to so-called crime anthologies as well. Just stick a crime in there and you're on solid ground.

More questions: What's your strategy/solution, on weathering this current downturn in the number of short mystery markets? Take a rest and wait for more anthology calls for crime stories? Write and stockpile your mystery stories as I mentioned earlier, so that when/if more markets emerge, you'll be ready? Self-publish your stories? Find publishers for story collections? Switch completely to other genres? Write cross-genre stories as a way to ease into that? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Meanwhile, whatever it is that you write, whatever your approach is, keep at it. And good luck!