Treasure Island

  

A few days ago my fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken posted a column about two stories he'd recently had published that drew heavily on his own life experiences. I suspect all of us have occasionally used our  personal experiences to provide story material--and I seem to be doing it more often in recent years. Maybe because I'm getting older, and spending more time with my own memories. (Notice I didn't say daydreaming.)

Seriously, though, sometimes it does pay to write what you know--and what we know best are things that have happened to us.

One example of that was my story "Ship Island," which appeared this past Sunday in Issue #252 of Black Cat Weekly, and which, coincidentally, was Michael's pick-of-the-week.

Ship Island

My first idea for that story came from a booksigning I did long ago in the town of Biloxi, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I met a lady there whose family had for many years run a passenger ferry back and forth to Ship Island, one of the barrier islands several miles offshore. I talked with her a long time, and found her tales interesting and delightful. I've always loved the Coast anyway, and had once lived down there for seven months, in an apartment on the beach, during my stay in the Air Force. I'd even been to Ship Island myself, on several occasions.

Anyhow, when I returned home from this signing, I did some research on the island and its history, and decided it'd be fun to write a mystery story about it, and specifically about Fort Massachusetts, a 19th-century brick fort that's still standing, on the west end of the island. It's a fascinating place to visit.

Fort Massachusetts

I was already thinking, at that time, of doing some kind of story about a pair of lifelong rough-around-the-edges friends who reminded me a bit of Texas author Joe Lansdale's wonderful characters Hap and Leonard--and, as sometimes happens, these two guys I had created in my head wound up being the heroes of my newly-conceived Ship Island story. The plot is more than a little weird: They find, tucked away in a recently-deceased relative's possessions, a rough map pointing to a fortune in Spanish gold, supposedly buried long ago inside a Civil War-era fort on one end of an island off the Mississippi coast, and decide to secretly sail to the island, dig up the hidden gold, and become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Their grand adventure, however, turns out to be harder and more dangerous than they'd figured, since they soon discover they aren't the only ones with a map to the treasure.

Writing the story itself turned out to be not hard but easy--in fact, it was one of the easiest and most enjoyable stories I've ever written, and I think much of that was because of my own still-vivid memories of the island and the fort and the trip there and back. Also, I was comforted by the fact that most of the things I was describing were real and accurate because I had seen them firsthand. I wrote the whole story in one long sitting.

Fast-forwarding a while, I eventually sold that story to Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and when that magazine gasped its last breath and put all four feet in the air before "Ship Island" could be published, editor Michael Bracken suggested it for a future issue of Black Cat Weekly. (Thank you, old friend.)

Other stories that have relied a great deal on my own past were "Calculus 1" (The Saturday Evening Post), based on a cool but ill-advised college prank; "Jackpot Mode" (Strand Magazine) about an ATM system I worked with during my years at IBM; "The Winslow Tunnel" (Amazon Shorts), based on one of our family vacations; "Knight Music" (Woman's World), from my memories as part of an amateur band; "Cargo" (Black Cat Weekly), about a particularly strange night during my Air Force years; "The Jumper" (Crimestalker Casebook), based on yet another misguided college experience; and many others.

Now, my questions for today. Have any of you, my fellow writers, incorporated your own memories in your short stories or novels? If so, did you find it hard to fictionalize those incidents, and maybe make the events more interesting than they were in real life? Did you have fun doing it? How often do you seem to use your past experiences as story fodder? I know some of you have responded to similar questions asked in Michael's column the other day, but I'd love to hear more examples.

Meanwhile, if you see this issue of Black Cat Weekly, I hope you'll like my buried-treasure story.

And--before I forget--HAPPY 250th BIRTHDAY, US of A!

On Rereading

My guest today is Tom Milani. He's been generously filling in for me while I've juggled several deadlines. I always enjoy his thoughtful pieces, much like his today on rereading. He has me reflecting on the books I return to and why. I suspect you will, too. Here's more from Tom.

On Rereading

by Tom Milani

I like to reread books from certain authors. Knowing the plot and characters allows me to focus on things 

I may have missed the first time through, and I get something new each time I reread. There’s also comfort in the familiar. As I told another writer, it’s like watching a favorite movie (e.g., Collateral) a second or third time: it never disappoints.

Here I want to talk about two of the authors I regularly reread, what attracts me to their writing, and what I think they do particularly well.

George Pelecanos

For any crime writers in the DC metropolitan area, George Pelecanos needs no introduction. Author of over twenty novels, screenwriter on numerous shows (most famously The Wire), he’s firmly established in the crime fiction community. Pelecanos writes about the working class, people living in neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park and often east of the Anacostia River, markers of economic and racial divides. He also peppers his books with local music references and venues, which adds a bit of nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the area. For me, his principal themes are what being a man means and the value of blue-collar work and public service. He does all this while telling fast-paced, compelling stories.

Several of his novels have recurring characters—Derek Strange, Dimitri Karras, Marcus Clay—so reading those books is like being among friends, or at least people you know well. One of my favorites of Pelecanos’s books is probably one of his lesser-known works. A Firing Offence and Nick’s Trip, his first two novels, are first-person PI stories featuring Nick Stefanos. Shoedog, his third novel, is a multiple-POV standalone. Then came Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, his last first-person PI novel (though not his last PI novel). For me, it’s his best title and also one of his darkest books.

It begins, “Like most of the trouble that’s happened in my life or that I’ve caused to happen, the trouble that happened that night started with a drink.” 

Nick Stefanos wakes up after having driven blackout drunk to the banks of the Anacostia River, only to find a murdered teenager. By the end of the novel, some justice has been served, but it’s the roughest kind, and Nick is back where he began: “Inside, the room was silent, bathed in blue neon. I went behind the bar. I poured myself a bourbon and pulled a bottle of beer from the ice.”

Elizabeth Hand

A multi-genre, multi-award-winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written four mysteries featuring anti-hero Cass Neary. In these four novels, Elizabeth Hand balances deep dives into photography, mythology, and history with Cass Neary’s dissolution and longing, her addiction and trauma, all while telling compelling stories. Cass’s fifteen minutes of fame began with Dead Girls, her book of photography published after she gained notoriety from her art show of the same name. 

Cass describes how she chooses her subjects: “I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they’ve been, what’s destroyed them, even after they’re dead.” Cass herself is also damaged, perhaps from the death of her mother, perhaps from the benign neglect of her father, but comes unglued after a sexual assault.

All this backstory, found in Generation Loss, plays a role in the three succeeding books in the series: Available Dark, Hard Light, and The Book of Lamps and Banners, but it’s the last one in the series that I want to focus on. The first few sentences establish the mood for the novel and provide enough detail so that even readers who haven’t read the previous books can form a solid picture of Cass’s character: Much of the tube was still shut down. Another car had plowed through a Go Happy London! tour group the day before, this time near Tower Bridge. I’d taken the night train from Penzance, nodding off between shots of Jack Daniel’s before trying to resurrect my amphetamine jag with one of the Vyvanse I’d stolen a few days earlier.

The novel’s title is a reference to an ancient text of the same name, “rumored to have been written by Aristotle for his student Alexander the Great. Aristotle supposedly illustrated it, and there were handwritten notes to Alexander as well, and references to other people Aristotle knew. Eudemus. Plato.” The physical text has power, people around it die, and people who want to own it will kill.

But there’s more. Tindra Bergstrand, a gifted programmer, is developing Ludus Mentis, an app to heal. As she tells Cass, “But once I get the bugs worked out, the app can be used for all sorts of things. Trauma, insomnia, ADHD. Regulating mood disorders without drugs. Addiction. Libido. Everything.” The bugs are the problem, bringing trauma to the surface, rather than healing it, but the code embedded within the ancient text is the solution: 

Whoever wrote it had figured out how a combination of lights and symbols can change the way we think. Their book drew on knowledge that had already been around for thousands of years, things the ancient Egyptians knew, and the Sumerians, the Minoans. So “lamps and banners” is just shorthand for what we call code.

Cass’s skepticism informs her actions at the end of the novel. I hope Elizabeth Hand writes another Cass Neary mystery; the last lines suggest she might: 

Gryffin watched me as I stood, his expression almost wistful. 

He raised his glass to me and nodded. “Stay out of trouble.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said, and headed for the door.

What books do you like to reread, and why? Let me know in the comments.

***

Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and online. His stories have been shortlisted twice for a Derringer, been an honorable mention for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025 and selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and for The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, will be reissued by Open Road Media this fall.

I’m Not Just A Crime Writer, I’m Also A Victim!

 Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. In fact, I know you’ve heard it before. Because I’ve told this one before. More than once.

I hate true crime. Writing. TV. Podcasts. All of it. (I've written about it here. And here. Aaaaand also here.)

I hate the genre. I hate the stories. I hate the style. I hate how it uses the genuine pain of actual human beings as fodder for content.

And as of last Thursday morning, I have another reason to hate it. You see, once again, I am a victim of crime.

Have you seen me anywhere?

That's right.

After FOUR different break-ins, lucky number five was successful.

My wife and I were coming home from a quick getaway (no pun intended), waiting for a taxi to the airport, when we got the news that my 2021 GMC Sierra XLT had been stolen. My mother had borrowed the truck while we were out of town to haul some things, gone out that morning to do some more hauling before picking us up at the airport, and found my truck gone.

My truck had been stolen from the parking lot of Mom's senior living complex. She checked with her complex's security office and made sure the truck hadn't been towed.

Nope.

She checked with maintenance, which had been resurfacing the parking lot, on the odd chance they moved it for some reason.

Un-uh.

So she called us right away, then called the local constabulary to report the truck stolen. For our part, we logged onto our insurance account to report the truck stolen there as well.

Then the adjuster called right as we were about to board our flight home.

Nothing like trying to wrap that sort of call AT THE GATE, and then spend the two-plus hours of the flight home trying NOT to think about what's waiting for you once you land.

Once we landed, we talked with the police officer assigned to write up the police report. And this is what we immediately learned:

1. Thanks to current key fob technology, the thieves who made off with my truck likely needed less than a minute to replicate the frequency of the fob where it hung on a hook in my parents' place and break into/start my truck.

Gee, turns out it's harder to steal a vehicle that still uses an actual ignition/door key.

And so our education on how technology levels the playing field in favor of car thieves began. 

2. If your vehicle has Onstar (ours did), the second thing most thieves do when stealing vehicles like ours is to disable the Onstar/onboard GPS.

Time to do so?

Another minute.

3. We live in Washington State, and had a "Good to Go" pass that allowed us to pay to use HOV/HOT lanes on the freeway. My brilliant wife had the idea to our passion line annd see if there had been any activity on our pass, and sure enough, there was. From the same day we reported the truck stolen came two auto-photos taken of our truck on one of our local freeways. 

We forwarded those photos to the police and then spoke to the reporting officer again when she called us to inform us that because of the way the legislation creating the Good to Go system was written, law enforcement was not allowed to use photo evidence such as what we collected from the system to help identify/apprehend the person(s) who were driving our stolen truck on a public thoroughfare supported by OUR TAX DOLLARS.

Ahhh remember how stealable these bad boys were?

I was reminded by the above information (not for the first time, like I said, this isn't my first crime victim rodeo) of the old saying that "a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged."

(Yeah, STILL a liberal, thanks.)

4. It turns out the GMC Sierra/Chevy Silverado (Same truck, different branding) is the Honda Accord of the 2020s.

For those of you too young to get the reference, throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, year in, year out, the most frequently stolen vehicle in the United States was the Honda Accord.

This fact becomes far less surprising once you know another interesting fact about Hondas of the period: the manufacturer only made about five different keys for them. 

That's right: many Accord keys were interchangeable.

In retrospect it's amazing that more Accords weren't stolen!

Both of my babies looked like this one.

I didn't actually own an Accord (my brother did, and there's a story there, but I am doing my best to not digress with this particular post, so another time, another post.).

I did, however, own two Jeep Cherokees: first a 1996 Jeep Cherokee Sport, and then I followed it up with a 2001 Jeep Cherokee Sport.

Is it surprising that these popular SUVs were the most stolen/broken into vehicles of the 1990s and early 00s? It shouldn't be.

Would it surprise you to know that each of my Cherokees was broken into twice? I lost four stereos and the same number of driver side back seat windows. The first two times any CDs I had in the Jeep were stolen as well.

One of the stolen stereos even had a detachable faceplate (remember those?), and I always made a point of
removing the faceplate and taking it with me. 

Always.

In fact, I was carrying my expensive stereo's expensive faceplate with me when I  got back to my Jeep and found my window smashed and my expensive stereo gone.

My deductible was high enough for replacing that stereo and window that I believe my insurance company at the time gave me a whopping $75.00 for my trouble.

Needless to say, the replacement for my expensive stereo with the detachable faceplate did NOT have a detachable face.

The thieves must have been getting younger. This time they didn't bother stealing my CD visor sleeve
(remember those?)

The last time my 2001 Cherokee was broken into it was clearly done by someone who had been watching too many action movies.

I say this because I came out to go to work and found my Jeep had once again been broken into. No smashed window this time. Instead, they had used some sort of pry bar to pop the driver door lock (that was an expensive fix), and then had stripped the housing from the steering column in an apparent attempt to hotwire my Jeep.

Had they only looked up from where they sat trying to get my Jeep to start, they might well have seen the window sticker prominently placed to announce the presence of the anti-theft kill switch that year make and model of Cherokee came equipped with, and realized they were wasting their time.

And yet they weren't done. They also used a big bladed screwdriver to try and punch into my ignition (like I said: someone had been watching waaaaaaay too many action movies!). 

How do I know this?

Because the genius(es?) who tried to make off with my Cherokee left the screwdriver behind. Craftsman. Go figure.

One of these. I still have it somewhere out in my garage.

My deductible for this little adventure was $1,000, and we're talking 2008 dollars, and I wasn't senior enough to be making all that much as a teacher, so to pay for the repairs I took one of the most soul-killing ghost-writing gigs imaginable (This, too is a story for another time.).

During the intervening eighteen years I have been waiting for someone to try to tell me that property crimes are practically victimless. 

So far, no takers.

The notion that someone might profit from my own run-ins with the local criminal element, to the tune of mining my experiences for the details for a podcast, a book, or even an article of course makes my blood boil.

As I noted previously in one of my earlier posts about true crime while addressing the collective pain of other victims:

These are real stories. This is literally "True Crime." I find it in no way entertaining. There's a human cost here that is painful to recall. And for me there's no escaping it.

And that's why I neither read nor write True Crime.

True then. True now.

See you in two weeks.

Steal this truck (back)!

Popcorn Proverbs 7

For the seventh time, here is a collection of quotations from some crime movies.  Answers are at the bottom.  The quotes are in alphabetical order by title.  Oh, and four are from the same director, and two of those have quotes from the same actor.  None of these flicks have appeared in my previous collections.  Good luck!

“What's on the menu?”
“Fun and games.”
“Will it be a mess to clean up?
“With any luck.” 

 

“Get some cops to protect our policemen!” 

 

“Where do you live?”

“I live where the land meets the sky. Where the eagle and the raven fly free. I live under the sun and the moon.”

“Where do you live?”

“I'm his neighbour.”

 

“Why didn’t you get a job?”

“They don’t grow on trees.”

“Why didn’t you starve first?”

“Why didn’t you?”

"I'm just gonna assume you're all criminals." 

“People don't commit murder on credit.” 

“Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?”

“What a dramatic airport.”

“Chivalry may be dead but I didn’t kill it.”

 “I would make a great mother, don't you think?”

“Oh, my God. A child would be so lucky to have you as its host.”
“Thank you. It must be your powerful asexuality that makes you such a good listener.”

 

“The Pharisees were macaroni.” 

 

“I'm going to tell the truth.”

“Oh, it’s a work of fiction!”

 

“I've heard of the habitual criminal, of course. But I never dreamed I'd become involved with the habitual crime.”

 

“I’m from Quincy. Hot-wiring cars is part of the public school curriculum.” 

 

“I'm not chasing any parrot! I don't care if he's a field marshal!” 

 

“Tell her they may soon be leaving us. Leaving us for a long, long journey. How is it that Shakespeare says? ‘From which no traveler returns.’ Great poet.” 

 

“I write true crime novels based on fictional stories that I make up.”  

 

 

“Did you hurt yourself?”
“No, kneeling on glass is my favorite pastime. It keeps me from slouching.”   

  
 “You give out my number again and I'll retire you with flowers.” 

“Which would be worse - to live as a monster? Or to die as a good man?”

“What do you think of me by contrast to your horse?”
“If I ever got the bit between your teeth, I'd have no trouble in handling you at all.” 

“The pastries are light as air.”

 “Germaine has very sensitive hands and an exceedingly light touch. She strangled a German general - without a sound.”

"God, I hope i live to regret this."

 

“My dear, I’m not a gangster. But I was in real estate for 20 years. I stop at nothing.”  

“Sell me this pen.” 

Ready?  Here are the answers...

“What's on the menu?”

“Fun and games.”

“Will it be a mess to clean up?

“With any luck.” -Kathryn St. Jean / George Woodhouse (Cate Blanchett/Michael Fassbender) Black Bag

 

“Get some cops to protect our policemen!” – Police Chief (Joe Miller) Cops

 

“Where do you live?”

“I live where the land meets the sky. Where the eagle and the raven fly free. I live under the sun and the moon.”

“Where do you live?”

“I'm his neighbour.”

-Cop (Bruno Bryniarski) / Frank Fencepost (Adam Beach) / Silas Crow (Ryan Rajendra Black) Dance Me Outside

  

“Why didn’t you get a job?”

“They don’t grow on trees.”

“Why didn’t you starve first?”

“Why didn’t you?”

-Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart) / Francey (Claire Trevor) Dead End

"I'm just gonna assume you're all criminals." -- Krause Will Poulter) Detroit

 “People don't commit murder on credit.” – Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) Dial M For Murder

 
“Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money - and a woman - and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?” – Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) Double Indemnity

 “What a dramatic airport.” -Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke (Mel Brooks) High Anxiety\

“Chivalry may be dead but I didn’t kill it.” --        Gary Johnson (Glen Powell) Hit Man

 “I would make a great mother, don't you think?”
“Oh, my God. A child would be so lucky to have you as its host.”
“Thank you. It must be your powerful asexuality that makes you such a good listener.”
-Sonia Kincaid (Salma Hayek) / Michale Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard

 

“The Pharisees were macaroni.” – Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans) Honey Don’t

 

“I'm going to tell the truth.”

“Oh, it’s a work of fiction!”

-Kendig (Walter Matthau) / Isobel (Glenda Jackson) Hopscotch

 

“I've heard of the habitual criminal, of course. But I never dreamed I'd become involved with the habitual crime.” -Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn) The Hot Rock

 

“I’m from Quincy. Hot-wiring cars is part of the public school curriculum.” – Cobby (Casey Affleck) The Instigators

 

“I'm not chasing any parrot! I don't care if he's a field marshal!” – Louis (Herbert Lom) The Lady Killers (1955)

 

“Tell her they may soon be leaving us. Leaving us for a long, long journey. How is it that Shakespeare says? ‘From which no traveler returns.’ Great poet.” – Abbott (Peter Lorre) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

 

“I write true crime novels based on fictional stories that I make up.” – Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) The Naked Gun (2025)

 

“Did you hurt yourself?”
“No, kneeling on glass is my favorite pastime. It keeps me from slouching.”  Henrietta Lowell/Henry Graham (Elaine May/Walter Matthau) A New Leaf

 “God, I hope I live to regret this.” – Mincy (Betty Gabriel) Novocaine

 “You give out my number again and I'll retire you with flowers.” – Mailer (Robert Ryan) The Outfit

 “Which would be worse - to live as a monster? Or to die as a good man?” – Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) Shutter Island

 “What do you think of me by contrast to your horse?”

“If I ever got the bit between your teeth, I'd have no trouble in handling you at all.” – Johnny/Lina (Cary Grant/Joan Fontaine) Suspicion

“The pastries are light as air.”
 “Germaine has very sensitive hands and an exceedingly light touch. She strangled a German general - without a sound.” – H.H. Hughson / John Robie (John Williams/ Cary Grant) To Catch a Thief

 “My dear, I’m not a gangster. But I was in real estate for 20 years. I stop at nothing.” – Ferguson (Rupert Everett) Wild Target

 “Sell me this pen.” – Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) The Wolf of Wall Street

Using Real Life in Fiction

As writers, we often mine our lives for bits and pieces we can incorporate into our stories, from setting them in places where we have lived to basing murder victims on despised employers. Sometimes, though, our lives provide much more than incidental inspiration.

I’ve had two stories published this year that draw heavily on events and experiences from my youth, and both were written in response to convention anthology calls for submission.

“GLASS BEACH”

Work on the first story—“Glass Beach,” published in the January/February 2026 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine—began when I read Bouchercon 2020’s call for submissions for California Schemin’, in which each story has a California theme.

I spent a great deal of my childhood and teen years in California and, when no story ideas sprang immediately to mind, my wife suggested I write about my childhood. So, I wrote a paragraph about how my stepfather spent his free time:

Glass Beach, abutting MacKerricher State Park near Fort Bragg, California, is a tourist attraction visited by tens of thousands of people each year, but it wasn’t always. It started life more than a century ago as the town dump, and, in the early 1970s, not long after the dump officially closed, my stepfather played a key role in transforming it into the attraction it became. He spent weekends combing the beach for scrap metal and sorting what he found into cardboard boxes kept in the trunk of his 1966 Chrysler New Yorker.

This is true, and this paragraph became the opening paragraph of the story. Later, I added the second paragraph, and this is where a true story about my teen years starts being fictionalized:

The extra money my stepfather earned selling the scrap metal allowed us to eat a little better and dress a little better as he struggled to pay off my mother’s medical and funeral bills. I was a teenager then, plodding my way through high school, and I had no appreciation for all that he did. A stocky ex-Marine thirteen years older than my mother—thirty-three years older than me—he belonged to a generation I neither comprehended nor respected, and it was clear he felt the same about mine.

Though my mother died during my senior year of high school and I lived with my stepfather for several months after her death, “Glass Beach” begins the summer before the protagonist’s senior year, his mother having passed away during his junior year. But the relative ages of the characters match that of me, my mother, and my stepfather, and my stepfather was a “stocky ex-Marine.”

And there the story sat until well past the deadline for California Schemin’. I had a beginning, but I had no story until one day I decided the protagonist and his stepfather uncover something at the dump that ties into a long-ago crime. The two of them—along with the protagonist’s best friend and his best friend’s widowed mother—must deal with the consequences of that discovery.

Throughout the rest of the story, I write about Fort Bragg, California, and my high school years as filtered both through a memory that may have grown foggy with age and the need to create a compelling piece of fiction.

When I finally finished the story, I had missed the anthology deadline by more than a year. I ultimately placed “Glass Beach”—after revising the end based on suggestions from Linda Landrigan—with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

“UNDER THE PROCTOR STREET BRIDGE”

Work on the second story—“Under the Proctor Street Bridge,” published in Time After Time (Thalia Press), March 2026—began after I read the call for submissions for Left Coast Crime’s 2024 anthology A Killing Rain, which was to include stories set in and around Puget Sound.

I lived in Tacoma, Washington, beginning the summer before sixth grade and continuing until part way through ninth grade. I returned after my mother’s death to live with my grandparents for a year before moving to Illinois.

So, I again wrote about my childhood. Similar to how I began “Glass Beach,” I placed the events in a historical perspective:

There is so much I know now that I didn’t understand during the summer of 1971. I was thirteen then, soon to start ninth grade at Mason Junior High School, and I spent most days with Tommy O’Connor, the third of seven children—and the only boy—living in a three-bedroom house across the street from the home I shared with my widowed father. The Vietnam War was winding down, Richard Nixon was running for re-election, and many teenaged veterans were more than a year away from voting in their first presidential election following the July passage of the 26th Amendment.

I didn’t pay much attention to the news, and Tommy’s mother wouldn’t let him and his sisters watch it for fear they might learn what their father was doing halfway around the world and why people spit on him and other soldiers when they returned home.

Like the protagonist narrating the story, I was thirteen in 1971 and soon to start ninth grade at Mason Junior High School. One of my friends lived across the street with six siblings (though not all girls as in the story), and his father served in Vietnam.

So, the first two paragraphs are mostly true and truth is mixed with fiction throughout the rest of the story. For example, I often found bicycle parts under the Proctor Street Bridge, and I built Frankenstein bicycles from them. But bicycle parts aren’t the only things the protagonist and his friend find under the bridge.

(Only years later did I realize that the parts I found likely came from stolen bicycles, which helped inform “Under the Proctor Street Bridge.”)

This time, I finished the story before the anthology’s submission deadline, but it didn’t make the cut. It did, however, meet the needs of Time After Time, an anthology of mysterious tales inspired by history.

OTHER EXPERIENCES

Other stories mine my experiences—the Morris Ronald Boyette private eye stories, for example, take place in Waco, and many of the settings are real or fictionalized versions of real places—but no stories draw as much from my life as do “Glass Beach” and “Under the Proctor Street Bridge.”

* * *

Boots, BBQ, and Bloodshed, which I edited for Sisters in Crime North Dallas, releases July 1.

Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked gets new life in a July 1 rerelease by Audecyn Books.

Immortality Writ Small

          In 1978, my late father-in-law gave my wife a dehumidifier for the old house she bought in Hartford, Connecticut.  At issue was the damp basement, an environment well suited for growing mildew, colossal spiderwebs, or even some varieties of edible fungi.  The dehumidifier was a well-used appliance even then, so conservatively, already about ten years old. 

        Last week, after giving us years of continuous service (I’d let it rest for maybe four months during the cold weather) it gave up the ghost, and I think the ghost itself has probably died of old age.

        I have a bench grinder that I often use to clean metal parts and sharpen tools.  I inherited it from my grandfather, who told me when I was a little kid that the motor was over a hundred years old.  I’m now 75, so do the math.

 

        They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. 

        As much as I appreciate this kind of durability, an important act of mental hygiene when you hit 75 is to avoid fetishizing monuments of the past.  Not completely, of course, but one should heed Springsteen’s cautionary tale, Glory Days, and not be left “with nothing, mister, but boring stories.”

        Speaking of stories, they can also take up residence in the same quadrant of the brain that stores superannuated pop songs, appliances, cars and amber-tinted memories of that first slow dance (in my case, to Don’t Worry, Baby. Not forgetting that.) 

        It’s common sense that impressions of any art form are more fixed when exposed to fresh, unsullied brain cells.  It’s more of a jolt, unregulated by accumulated experience, conscious evaluation and creeping cynicism.  This is why I think of stories by Hemingway, JD Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Thurber, Edgar Allen Poe and Guy De Maupassant as STORIES, and everything that came after simply earnest efforts at achieving that transcendant perfection.

        

M. Maumpassant

        This isn’t good.  In fact, it’s a type of psychological hardening of the arteries.  But once again, the mystery genre stands ready to provide an artery-cleansing antidote.  It’s possible you could read every story published annually by Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery Journal, hundreds of short story blogs and countless anthologies, but you’d have to forgo all other pursuits.  I’ve never come close to this, but what I have read are uniformly excellent renditions of the form.  You certainly don’t have to restrict yourself to short-listed Derringer entries, though doing so would likely knock you into Barb Goffman and Art Tayor, brilliant purveyors of both the brief and startlingly fresh.  I assume they’re nagged by the same electronic nuisances as the rest of us yet somehow find a way to conjure the mental state that embraced Chekov, Mansfield and Jorge Luis Borges. 

        When I was an advertising copywriter the assignment I most dreaded was Bumper Sticker, quickly followed by Billboard.  Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s freaking near impossible to get right.  We’d often have pages of input, with various supporting documents, and were asked to distill it all down to a tiny little chain of compelling words.  I wanted to say, oh no, please, how about that 12-page brochure with lots of captions and ant type?  (I used to force junior copywriters to study haiku – no better way to pack a lot of meaning into very compact quarters.)

All-time bumper sticker champion.

        Starting a novel feels so much better.  All those pages of story development stretching out before you.  A thousand-word limit?  Not so inviting.  This is why my admiration for you serious short story writers is, well, limitless.  You set yourself a much more difficult task requiring tremendous discipline and control over all the elements of plot, description and character development.  As with haiku, every phrase has to contribute to the whole, its extraction leaving the structure teetering, like knocking out a lolly column. 

        As with ancient bench grinders and short stories, only time will determine ultimate durability.  I can’t know, but I choose to believe that the best of the mystery writers we’re enjoying now will find their work set in all caps in the minds of future septuagenarians. 

The Beat of the Drums, Loud and Bold

During my daily walks, plus drives in my car, I've long been in the practice of listening to either audiobooks or podcasts. I've talked before in this column about my audiobook preferences. In terms of podcasts, I lean toward comedy (How Did This Get Made?), true crime (My Favorite Murder), or film (Team Deakins). Generally, I'll listen to a few episodes of something, get a little restless, and move on to something else.

(As an aside: Apple stopped making iPods in 2022, years after phone apps had made them redundant and functionally obsolete. The term "podcast," though, clearly isn't going away anytime soon, and will long outlive the device the format was originally named for. Language is weird.)

For the last several months I've been bingeing a podcast starting from its very first episode, and for once I haven't been tempted to switch to something else, even briefly. The podcast is A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and it's exactly what it sounds like: a history of rock, with each episode centered on a specific song. It's researched, written and narrated by a British man named Andrew Hickey, and I've found it so enjoyable, admirable and educational that I wanted to use this column to recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in the topic.

I'd advise starting from the very first episode, which concerns the 1939 recording "Flying Home" by the Benny Goodman Sextet--a choice which should give you some indication of the wide-ranging scope of Hickey's project. While individual episodes can certainly be listened to with pleasure, Hickey is telling a single, overarching story here, and it's worth listening from the beginning in order to fully appreciate all the threads he's weaving together in complex and ambitious ways. In Hickey's telling (punctuated in each episode by carefully selected snippets of the dozens of songs he discusses), the history of rock is much more richly layered than the simplistic, conventional idea that "the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll." Indeed, he argues that the influence of the blues has been greatly overstated, for reasons having to do with reductive notions about race, and that rock's more important roots are in jazz, swing, gospel, country, western (not the same thing as "country," as Hickey carefully explains), and r&b.

The sheer depth of Hickey's research and storytelling is staggering (especially considering that, in addition to the regular installments on the "official" list of 500, he's produced hundreds of bonus episodes for Patreon backers about additional songs). Every episode integrates detailed biographical information about the people who made the music, extensive analysis of the influences and ideas that went into the song itself, and commentary on the historical and cultural moment, with special attention to the racial tensions that are so important to the story. Hickey is going way beyond Wikipedia here--in fact, he frequently points out places where Wikipedia has something flatly wrong. I'll confess that the music theory sometimes goes over my head (I can barely tell a major key from a minor one, and when Hickey starts talking about things like chromatic scales or the mixolydian mode I'm simply lost), but I've never once been bored.

Hickey has a gift for illuminating his vast cast of characters and their nuanced, shifting identities and relationships. I've learned about Little Richard's struggles to reconcile his sexuality with his deeply felt religious faith; that the Everly Brothers, despite their gorgeous harmonies, loathed each other for much of their lives; that the young Aretha Franklin was so painfully shy that she had difficulty making eye contact with anyone outside her family. Perhaps not surprisingly, I've learned that many of the most influential people in rock history--especially the men--were essentially monsters in their personal lives, treating women, children and associates in abominable ways. Once in a while Hickey discusses a figure who, he notes with some surprise, nobody has anything bad to say about (Fats Domino and Cass Elliot, for example), but, unfortunately, abusers like Ike Turner, exploitative opportunists like Alan Freed, out-of-control drunks and addicts like Gene Vincent, and raging egomaniacs like Jan Berry (of Jan & Dean) are far more common.

Really, there's no end to the fascinating tidbits Hickey includes. Sam Phillips, of Sun Records, was such an idealist that he tried to place a phone call to Fidel Castro during the Cuban missile crisis, convinced that a reasonable discussion between two rational men could resolve the whole silly misunderstanding (he ended up talking to Raul Castro for an hour). The OPEC oil crisis led record companies to make LPs thinner to save on material, which in turn made it more likely that the needle would skip, which in turn led to less use of bass and an untick in lighter tones--hello, yacht rock. There are endless examples of how seemingly dry topics like musicians' union rules and copyright law have completely changed the course of popular music. And if you're looking for crime connections, you'll find no shortage of murder, extortion, assault, robbery, financial fraud and drugs--to say nothing of the huge role the Mafia played in the music industry for decades.

With so much to cover, the episodes have ballooned considerably. They started out being around thirty or forty minutes, but I've just listened to episode 150, on "All You Need is Love," which weighed in at some four hours and covered, among other things, the creation and social impact of satellite communications, the growing influence of Indian music in the West, the development of the avant-garde London art scene, the nearly fatal consequences of the Beatles snubbing Ferdinand Marcos, John Lennon's lifelong struggle with depression and why he switched from contacts to glasses, the many studio innovations of George Martin, the tragic and somewhat mysterious death of Brian Epstein, the television show The Prisoner, and the first signs of the tensions that would ultimately see the Fab Four break up. I loved every minute.

Sadly, Hickey has been experiencing health problems which have greatly slowed the pace of releases. The series was weekly when it began, in 2018, but the most recent episode--#183, on "Pinball Wizard"--came out in March, and it's not clear when the next one will be released. Even if no more are ever made, though, what Hickey has already produced is an astounding work of popular history well worth your time. And as a bonus, because he relies on Patreon backers, the podcast itself is ad-free. Those of you who have wearied of podcast hosts looking for elegant ways to start talking about mattresses or online therapy services will understand how welcome that is.

I think part of what I find fascinating about the series is how it makes the familiar new again. You've heard "Johnny B. Goode" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Louie Louie" and "The Twist" hundreds of times, maybe thousands. They seem etched in stone, their forms so fixed as to appear inevitable--of course that's what they sound like. Hickey's stories demonstrate just how easily they might have sounded completely different, or never have happened at all. He lets you listen to the songs with fresh ears and discover them all over again.

Maybe somebody should put together A History of Crime Fiction in 500 Stories. Cain and Abel would make a great first episode.

So what are your favorite podcasts?  What's your favorite rock song? The best concert you've ever been to? And what's a topic you'd like to see treated in this kind of detail?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Speaking of crime stories, just a quick mention of two new publications. The July/August issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine includes my story "Hunters," a wicked little tale of family bonding, birdwatching--and MURDER! Given the recent printing problems with the magazine, I'm not sure when physical copies will be out, but the digital issue is available now.

Over the last couple of years, my fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman has invited me to write some holiday-themed stories for Black Cat Weekly, including yarns about Christmas and Talk Like A Pirate Day. The latest, "It's Flag Day on Fairview," came out in issue #249. I had a lot of fun with this one, about a neighborhood rivalry that gets way out of hand.

And finally, I wanted to express my gratitude to Jon Larsen at Thrilling Detective and Vicki Weisfeld at Crime Fiction Lover for their recent thoughtful reviews of my collection Crime Scenes. It's not easy getting attention for short story collections these days, so I'm very appreciative for their time and insightful comments. It's always gratifying to know somebody enjoyed your work!