Emily's Ghost — A Classic Spectral Story

Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Onions, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde … Paranormal fans will recognize names of classic horror writers. One other should appear on this list, an author better known for her cosy Callie Parrish novels. That writer crafted one of the finest stories of ectoplasmic– or any other– genre. SleuthSayers is proud to bring you the first US publication of a modern gothic tale from our friend and colleague, Fran Rizer.

— Leigh

Emily’s Ghost
by Fran Rizer
(12 Dec 1944 – 24 Dec 2019)

I sit silently as Drew drives our red Porsche along the rutted dirt road. It’s been three days since he spoke to me this time. Seventy-two hours of quiet. An eternity of longing to hear him say my name – “Emily.” I hated that word until I met Drew. The people in South Carolina’s low country drop the “i” and it comes out Emm-lee.

The first time I ever saw Drew, I’d gone to put flowers on Grandma’s grave. He was in the Beaufort churchyard sketching moss-covered trees and magnolias. I stood behind him and watched as he created a whole world out of just a few pencil strokes. After several moments, he turned and looked at me with unwavering blue eyes. The man took my breath.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Sometimes I’m flippant, downright sarcastic. Got an attitude. It’s a wonder I didn’t answer, “What’s it to you?” Instead I replied, “I’m Emily.”

“Emily as in Emily Dickinson?” he asked, and I laughed with pure pleasure. He’d pronounced my name with three delicate syllables. It sounded positively delicious when Drew said it.

“Yes,” I answered, “but I don’t make up poetry. I try to write stories.”

“Why try? Why don’t you just write them?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m not too good at it yet.”

“You can be if you want to be,” Drew said, and I believed him.

***

Andrew Wyeth, Sea Fog

That’s how it began. Before long, we were spending most of our time together. Lots of days sitting side by side in churchyards or marshes. Me writing my little tales on a yellow legal pad while Drew sketched or painted.

“What are you writing?” Drew asked.

“A story to send to a magazine. I need to see my words in print. I want people to read what I write.”

“Where did you get the idea?”

“I made it up. It’s about a boy and girl falling in love and seeing a ghost.”

“Oh,” Drew said and went back to drawing.

When it rained hard and we couldn’t sit outside, we escaped into Drew’s battered old van. He kept a collection of Andrew Wyeth prints there. During bad weather and at night, Drew showed them to me.

“I want to paint like Wyeth!” he exclaimed. His eyes lit up like he was on fire inside. “When Wyeth paints fog and wind, you can feel them! Just look at this print. It’s called ‘Sea Fog.’ You can see the mist beginning to drift, to wisp away. You can feel the breeze tease your shirt in ‘Wind from the Sea.’ That’s how I’m going to paint!”

I didn’t have any books of my own, just the ones I checked out from the library. I’d hold up my favorite collections of short stories – ‘Skeleton Crew’ by Stephen King or one of Edgar Allan Poe’s and say, “Someday I’m going to write like this – mysteries and about ghosts and spooky things.”

“But, Emily, you’ve never been through any of that. Write about the life you’ve lived, people like the ones you know.”

I tossed my head to swing my hair back. “Don’t tell me what to do!” I snapped at him.

Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World

Drew turned away from me and looked at his Wyeth prints again. He loved them all, but his favorite painting was “Christina’s World.” Everyone’s seen the picture of a young woman in a field of grass looking up toward a clapboard house and barn on top of a knoll. The girl’s wearing a pink dress, and her position looks strange. It’s as though she’s crawling, but her body seems twisted.

“That’s Christina Olson,” Drew explained. “She was crippled from childhood. Wyeth painted her and that farm for almost thirty years.” The picture has a haunting quality. Drew said, “It merges a feeling of loss and a sense of fulfillment at the same time.” At first, I thought that was ridiculously impossible, but now it makes sense.

When Drew decided we should live together, I told him that wasn’t how my Mama raised me, so we got married. Drew started selling paintings, and I mailed some of my stories off to magazines. I cried a lot the first year. Every time the mailman delivered a rejection letter, I sobbed. Mama always scolded me, “Don’t carry on so!” and I’d wail even louder.

My husband comforted me. He held me in his arms and gently brushed the hair away from my eyes. He kept telling me, “Quit worrying about writing proper by some teacher’s rules and making up supernatural stories about vampires and witches. Your stories about ghosts and murders sound too manufactured, too made up. Keep your stories real. Write those funny things you’ve told me about your relatives and low-country people, and put them on paper the same way you tell them.” I sniffled when he added, “And you can stop studying the dictionary to learn bigger words. Convey those yarns in your own vocabulary.”

I argued with him. “No magazine or book is gonna publish those stories,” I whined. “I want to write about the paranormal.”

Usually I go on and do things my own way when people try to tell me what to do, but I got turned down every time I sent out a manuscript. I finally decided to try Drew’s suggestions. I wrote an old family anecdote of how my grandparents always killed a couple of chickens for Thanksgiving because they didn’t raise turkeys and couldn’t afford to buy one. Finally the year came when they bought a big bird from the store – a Tom, the biggest frozen turkey available. Grandma put it on the back porch to thaw. When she went back to check on the bird, she found their big ole cat named Tom chowin’ down on that Tom turkey. Grandma used to say, “If Grandpa’d had his way, we’d of had roasted Tom cat for Thanksgiving that year.” I mailed the story off to a regional magazine.

You could’ve heard me hollering in the next county when the mail man brought an envelope with a check inside. When I followed Drew’s advice and wrote the stories like I told them, checks and contracts kept coming instead of rejections. Drew told me what to write and sometimes tried to tell me how to write. He’d brush my bangs out of my eyes and say, “Don’t you think it’s time you started writing on a computer instead of with a pencil?” I didn’t switch to writing on the computer, but I did use the Dell he bought me to type up my stories after I wrote them on the yellow pads.

My work was even reviewed in newspapers and a couple of magazines. That was good. The bad thing was that they called me “folksy” and referred to me as a young literary Grandma Moses – like writing and painting are comparable!

Drew refused to see why that made me mad. He said, “You should be happy and proud,” but I tried to explain that all I’d done was follow his directions. I felt like it was his accomplishment, not mine. He was an artist! Where’d he get off telling me how to write?

Paintings kept selling, too. We were as excited as kids on the last day of school when he had his first show at an art gallery in Charleston. Drew said, “I can’t wear paint-splattered jeans, and bought himself a new outfit with a sports jacket.

He gave me money for a dress, but he didn’t like anything I picked out. Finally, Drew bought a dress and brought it home. I tried it on, and Drew said it was “perfect.” I couldn’t see wearing black anywhere except to a funeral, but he just laughed and said, “It’s a classic, your first little black dress.” He gave me a necklace to wear with it. Not dime store beads, jewelry store pearls!

We moved out of my Mama’s house and rented a place of our own. Most of that time was happy for me and I think for Drew, too. I still liked to go with him when he went out sketching, and even then, he listened when I talked about stories I wanted to write.

Sometimes I’d take along a book like Ghosts of South Carolina and read instead of writing. I learned about dozens of apparitions in our state, and when I told Drew about the phantom hitchhiker on the Sumter Highway or the Gray Ghost on the coast who warns of hurricanes, he listened. We even went together to Edisto Island and visited a crypt that was said to be haunted and a tree that is rumored to have a pirate specter guarding treasure buried beneath it. Drew was the most patient man I’d ever known and never complained about me babbling on or wanting to sit and wait to see if a spirit would appear.

Before long, we started making real money selling his pictures and my stories. I have to confess my ghost stories didn’t sell, but the simple low- country ones did. That’s when Drew decided he wanted to move back to Maine. “There’s nothing wrong with painting swamps and marshes!” I screamed, but he ignored me.

Drew told folks I won that skirmish because we moved upstate, which was a lot closer to my home place than Maine. So far as I was concerned, I’d lost anyway. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to move to Maine. I didn’t want to move anywhere away from the coast of South Carolina!

The Greenville Museum of Art is home of an impressive permanent collection of Andrew Wyeth’s work. When CNN told us Wyeth had died at age ninety-two, Drew insisted we make a road trip from Beaufort to see the exhibit. He stood in awe before each piece. “Why are you staring like that?” I asked. “I don’t see one bit of difference between this stuff and your prints.”

“These are the real thing. It’s like being in the presence of a lifelong hero.” Tears welled in his eyes. “I always planned to travel to meet the man someday, but I waited too long. All I can do is visit his work.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s past lunchtime,” I said. “Let’s go find a restaurant.”

Drew shook his head and looked at me with disbelief, but I kept complaining about how hungry I was, so we finally left. In my opinion, it was a long ride for nothing. I had no idea that useless day trip would be a major part of deciding where we’d live. A week later, Drew disappeared for several days. When he came back, he said “we’d” bought a three-story clapboard house on a hill a little north of Greenville. I screamed and hollered, but we moved there anyway.

The studio he contracted to have built looked like a farm shed. The new garage in the back was a fake barn, and Drew scolded me when I didn’t park in it. By the time I’d followed around the road that circled our hill to the one driveway that led up to the house, I wasn’t in the mood to continue around our home to park in the barn.

“Always park inside and close the doors,” he said. “New vans and sports cars around our home don’t fit the picture!”

Andrew Wyeth, Witching Hour

Drew cut down the beautiful old trees around the house and had wheat planted in the stark, bare fields. Our farmhouse was exactly like a picture postcard of “Christina’s World” without Christina. Sometimes I thought Drew would be happy if I were crippled like she was. Maybe then he’d paint me. In all our years together, he’d never drawn or painted my likeness. He claimed he didn’t do portraits, and I never saw people in his work, but it still made me mad. He always told me what to do – write this way, stand that way. I told him, “If I was good enough for you when you met me, I’m good enough for you now, because I’m not gonna change!”

His answer was usually a muttered, “Most folks grow up eventually.”

***

Then the quiet times came. I call them quiet times, but the silence is one-sided. Drew stops talking to me, but I continue speaking to him. When I wake up in the morning and hear the birds singing outside and see the sunshine kaleidoscoping patterns on the walls through the lace curtains, I always lean over to kiss Drew and tell him about whatever I plan to write that day. Most times, he listens and then kisses me, too, but when he’s having a quiet time, he turns his back to me.

Drew doesn’t answer when I call him for breakfast during a quiet time. He comes into the kitchen and sits down at the big, round oak table. He eats whatever I’ve cooked for him with no comments about whether he likes it or not. Doesn’t seem to matter if it’s chicken-fried steak, eggs with cheese and scratch biscuits or simply grits with bologna gravy. Never says a word to me during quiet times. Just eats, then gets up and goes to his studio or climbs in his shiny new van and drives away for the day.

I wonder if he’s out sketching and painting or if he’s gone to the museum to “visit” his beloved Andrew Wyeth paintings.

Water colors of dilapidated, falling down barns have been selling like McDonald’s quarter-pounders. Drew’s even painted some old crypts and graveyards around Greenville, and those pictures have been pulling in big money, too. I don’t think it’s fair that he tells me not to write about ghosts or graves and things like that, but he does those cemetery paintings. When I stomp my feet and tell him how I feel, he ignores me.

Lately, it seems we’re having quiet times more than ever. I’d think he’d be happy that he’s successful, but who can tell? He never complains about anything, so how do I know whether he’s angry, disappointed, or just sad? He looks at me different, too. He narrows his eyes, and the intensity of his art is in those blue slits. Those cold, blue eyes freeze me so bad I just shiver.

***

Now we’re riding in the Porsche with the top down. He hasn’t said a word all the way back from an art show at some high-falutin’ gallery in Atlanta. Actually, it’s been three days since Drew spoke to me. The longest quiet time was almost two weeks. I wonder how many days and nights this one will last. What caused it? Most times he doesn’t seem to notice me at all anymore, but the night of the opening reception, he kept glaring at me. During the first hour, he told me to stand up straight so many times that I got mad and left. I went out and sat in the car.

Thank heaven we’re almost home. I look ahead and see our lonely house sitting atop the bare hill surrounded by fields of wheat that look like dried grass. A delicate breeze whispers a warning through the wheat, but I ignore it.

“A lot of your work at that show was those cemetery pictures,” I say, “but you always tell me that my mystery and ghost stories aren’t as good as the stories about my family and folks living on the coast. I don’t think that’s fair.” He stays silent. “Why don’t you paint people?” I demand.

Drew doesn’t say anything, just keeps driving.

“It’s taking forever to get there,” I say. “You should have a drive cut from the house down to the road on this side instead of having to ride all around the hill before we get to the turn-off. I’m so tired of everything having to look like the Olson farm.”

Drew keeps driving, his white-knuckled fingers clenched tight against the steering wheel. His eyes stare straight ahead, and his jaw works – flex and release, flex and release.

“Hurry up!” I say, “I need to use the bathroom!”

Unexpectedly, Drew turns off the road before we reach our long driveway. We’re hurtling across the field, headed toward the house.

“Stop!” I yell at him. “You’re going too fast!”

Drew slams his foot on the accelerator. The low undercarriage of the Porsche drags against the plowed furrows of the field shearing off wheat and flinging it into the air. The car lurches to a stop. Drew stomps the accelerator even harder. Tires spin, and dust flies up all around us. Slowly, he turns in his seat and faces me. For the first time in my whole life, I know real fear. My heart thunders in my chest. A scream rises in my throat, but I choke it down, and no sound escapes me. Drew stares at my face with a fixed expression. His features are unfathomable. Insanity or evil? I can’t distinguish. His eyes squint, and I recognize the emotion.

Only one word describes his look: loathing. The man I love despises me. Suddenly, I know this. I don’t have to think about it. There’s no doubt. The man I love hates me! I fling my car door open, get out, and run toward the house.

Drew jumps from the Porsche and follows me. I stumble over a rock and gasp as the breath whooshes out of me. Just as I hit the ground in a sprawl, he grabs me.

***

Do you know what a space break is? It’s one of those double spaces to show that time has passed in a story. I have a space break in my life. One minute I’m tumbling to the ground with Drew clutching me. The next thing I know, I’m standing on the little front porch of our house. I have no idea how I got to the steps, no memory of climbing the hill.

Drew is right in front of me. He goes in and leaves the door wide open. I’m standing on the small stoop. I lean against the doorframe for a moment before following him into the front hall. He paces around inside the house, from room to room, up the stairs, down the stairs, pausing to gaze at each framed Andrew Wyeth print on the walls. He stops and pats his favorite chair just like Grandpa used to pet his favorite hound dog.

Drew walks toward me, and I shout, “Talk to me! Stop this foolish silence! I’m tired of being ignored.”

The look on Drew’s face chills me, and I shiver. His sad eyes seem to see right past me. There’s no expression at all. Suddenly I realize that I’m screaming. “Drew,” I lower my voice almost to a whisper, “We have to do something to save our marriage.” He ignores me. “I’m not putting up with any more of this!” The words leap from my mouth, growing louder and louder. Before I know it, I’m yelling again. “I said I can’t go on this way!” When Drew reaches the door, I move directly in front of him, blocking his way. Drew steps right through me!

Now I know. I finally comprehend. An epiphany. Lights flash on abruptly in my mind. Drew murdered me! Killed me right out there in the field of wheat on the slope of the Christina’s World we live in, though I don’t guess I really live here anymore. I’m experiencing a real murder and ghost, but what good will that do me since I’m the ghost myself?

For the rest of Drew’s life, I will haunt him. I loved him. I loved him more than any woman ought to care about a man. That’s how low-country females are. Why am I using past tense? I still love Drew. I love the way he used to hold me and whisper, “I died for Beauty—but was scarce adjusted in the Tomb when one who died for Truth was lain in an adjoining room.” That’s from Emily Dickinson. I know the words don’t sound romantic, but when Drew said it very softly with his lips barely brushing against my ear, it was incredibly sweet and sexy. He hasn’t done that in a long time.

Drew exits through the open front door. I shadow right on his heels, but he doesn’t see me; I’m dead. I follow him as he crosses the porch and starts down the hill to the field. Is he going for the car? I don’t think he’s planning to bury me – he didn’t get the shovel. Why did he go around gazing at everything in such a final, sorrowful way like he was saying goodbye? Will he drive away to Maine before my body is discovered?

Now we’re near where it happened. I can see the wheat flattened in a spot about thirty feet from the Porsche. Drew reaches the area before I do. He stands there, solemnly looking down. What’s he feeling? Is he overwhelmed with grief, or is he glad to be rid of me?

As I plod the final few feet to stand by Drew, horror greater than I’ve ever known floods over me. I’m scared to see my body. Terrified to stand beside the man I love as he stares at my corpse on the ground. I tremble. I’m afraid to see myself in death. Will I look like a bloody, twisted Christina? Even now, I want to be attractive for Drew, so pretty that he’ll regret what he did. I want him to cry for me, miss me, love me! I wish he would say something, but then, he doesn’t know my ghost is standing right by him. Besides, he’s not talking to me these days, anyway.

I look down. The body lies motionless. The head is bloodied, and a wet, crimson-stained rock, the weapon of destruction, lies close by. This simple stone has ended all chances of saving our marriage.

The corpse is not me.

My beloved Drew lies dead at my feet. I look at my hands and see his blood. Then I scream and scream as the phantasm standing beside me drifts away like fog in a fine Andrew Wyeth painting.

≡ 30 ≡

More about Fran…

The Bouchercon Anthologies

A few days ago, a flock of writers (and readers) attended the 2026 Bouchercon mystery conference, held this year in Calgary. I did not make the trip, but from my conversations with some of those who did, I'm told the conference was well attended and well done.

I did, however, have a story in the 2026 Bouchercon anthology--a B'con feature that wasn't even around when I attended my first Bouchercon, in Baltimore. It was at that 2008 B'con that I met fellow Criminal Brief blogger Leigh Lundin, along with CBers James Lincoln Warren, Steve Steinbock, Angela Zeman, and Melodie Johnson Howe. Little did Leigh or I know that three years later Criminal Brief would end its run and we two gluttons-for-punishment would jump from that blog to a new one, one that we decided to call SleuthSayers. But that's another story.

About three years after that, someone--I never knew who--came up with the idea of doing an annual Bouchercon anthology, to be launched each year during the conference. It was a good decision, embraced by readers as well as writers, and if I'm not mistaken, all of those books have done well. Most have a "theme" stated in their submission guidelines, like travel, music, conference setting, etc.

For those of you who don't remember them (I didn't), here's a list of all the anthologies so far:

2014 - Murder at the Beach - the conference location was Long Beach, California; the editor was Dana Cameron; the publisher was Down & Out Books

2015 - Murder Under the Oaks - Raleigh, Art Taylor, Down & Out Books

2016 - Blood on the Bayou - New Orleans, Greg Herren, Down & Out Books

2017 - Passport to Murder - Toronto, John McFetridge, Down & Out Books

2018 - Florida Happens - St. Petersburg, Greg Herren, Three Rooms Press

2019 - Denim, Diamonds, and Death -- Dallas, Rick Ollerman, Down & Out Books

2020 - California Schemin' - Sacramento, Art Taylor, Wildside Press

2021 - This Time for Sure - New Orleans virtual event, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Down & Out Books

2022 - Land of 10,000 Thrills - Minneapolis, Greg Herren, Down & Out Books

2023 - Killin' Time in San Diego -- San Diego, Holly West, Down & Out Books

2024 - Tales of Music, Murder, and Mayhem - Nashville, Heather Graham, Down & Out Books

2025 - Blood on the Bayou: Case Closed - New Orleans, Don Bruns, Down & Out Books

2026 - The Lines We Cross - Calgary, Olyn Fleming Ozbick, Level Best Books

NOTE 1: This year's anthology theme was "borders," which might've had something to do with the fact that the conference was held not far north of the U.S,/Canada line. I have a story in that anthology, and I regret that I was not present for the signing, which is always an event in itself. 

NOTE 2: The 2027 anthology will be titled Mystery Most Monumental, and its theme will be "power"--probably because the 2027 Bouchercon location will be Washington, D.C. I believe they're taking story submissions now for that anthology; I've already sent mine in.

For what it's worth, I've been fortunate enough to have stories in several of the B'con anthologies. My stories, in order, were:

"The Blue Delta" - An escaped murderer terrorizes a rural family in South Louisiana. - Bouchercon 2016

"Life Is Good" - A tale of motherly and brotherly love--and deceit--that reaches from one Coast to another. - 2017

"Frontier Justice" - A local hitman's assassination of a district attorney in Tallahassee fails to go as planned. - 2018

"The Midnight Child" - The story of a grand heist by a team of Southern bank robbers, told backward. - 2019

"Windows" - A young woman alone in a house at night knows an intruder is there also--but can't find him. - 2022

"Plymouth West" - A restaurateur sits down to Thanksgiving dinner with a man who's there for one reason only: to kill her. - 2023

"Garden Path" - To con-man Brian Woodson, blackmailing a U.S. Senator and his wife sounded not only easy but foolproof. At first. - 2026

My questions for today: 

Which Bouchercons have you attended? Which, in your opinion, were the best? (I've heard from many which one was the worst, but I won't reveal that.) Did you have stories included in any of the anthologies, and if so, which ones? Are you planning to go in 2027? Have you submitted a story yet, for the '27 anthology? Do you plan to?

If you do make the trip to Washington next year, have a good time, and if you don't go, well, get lots of writing done. And even more important (and timely):

Happy Halloween!

 

The Explosive Danny Greene

Danny Greene

 Last time out, I talked about Newport, Kentucky as the epicenter of Cincinnati's organized crime. I also mentioned the local mob was beholden to both Chicago's Outfit and the Cleveland Mafia. While Newport had been a prototype for Las Vegas, benefiting from the backing of the likes of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, Ohio's main Mafia operated out of Cleveland. And like New York City, Cleveland not only had more than one crime family, it had an Irish mob.

Or rather, a man named Danny Greene built an Irish mob from scratch. Greene, as Irish as it gets in the mid-century Irish immigrant communities. He was a second-generation American who grew up in the city's rough-and-tumble Collinwood neighborhood, where he tangled with Italian kids. Hence both his association with La Cosa Nostra and his rivalry with it.

Greene was one of the city's more colorful characters in a town that included a mayor whose hair caught fire not long after the Cuyahoga River did in 1969. As a youth, Greene ran loan-sharking operations, much to the annoyance of the two crime families. He joined the Marines for a time before returning to Cleveland to work at the port. There, he rose to become head of the longshoreman's union. Already, Greene was branding. Everything about him was Celtic. He even wore green suits and painted his office green. (The name Greene didn't hurt, either.) Unions were rife with mob involvement. Future Teamsters president and mob turncoat Jackie Presser operated out of Cleveland, and Greene became friends with the most infamous mob union leader, Detroit's Jimmy Hoffa. While Greene was never tied to Hoffa's disappearance, it's a sure bet he knew what happened.

After leaving the union, Greene returned to what he knew best: loan sharking, adding numbers rackets to his list of services. He soon built a mob from Irish toughs, Blacks shut out of organized crime, and disaffected Mafiosi. Soon, Danny Greene rivaled the two Cosa Nostra families in Cleveland. And one of them invited him to take sides in their turf war.

And why wouldn't they. Greene supplied muscle for the Mafia even as they plotted to undermine him. As the turf wars of the early 1970s heated up, he developed a specialty: Car bombs. Actually, just bombs. But cars were his most frequent means of spreading targets' presence...and body parts...over a given city block.

Yet Greene used his campaign of terror to expand his own territory. Mayfield Road and Little Italy might have been off-limits, but if Greene saw a territory elsewhere in the city or beyond, he helped himself, muscling out whatever crew held that neighborhood. As one can imagine, that did not go over well. Greene was no fool, though. He often changed cars and his schedule to throw of would-be assassins. However, Greene would be done in by a visit to a dentist in the suburb of Lyndhurst. 

One of the mob families found out Greene had an appointment. So did they rig his car to explode? No. Instead, they rigged the car next to his to blow up by remote control. Greene came out of his appointment and headed for his car. As he passed the other car, it and Danny exploded. I recall coming home from school that day and sitting down to watch Eyewitness News that evening in 1977 when Ted Henry led off with Greene's murder. You'd have thought Elvis had died (and he did that year. Also huge news that summer.) 

Over the years, I ran into people who knew Greene and did business with him, some who probably would not care for me writing this. But I'm not naming names. I forgot half of them anyway. One old gent I did know had met Greene in the longshoreman's union. He said Greene always bugged him to go to another bar with him, which he refused to do. The fatal bomb was not the first time someone tried to blow up Danny Greene, and my friend, an old codger who hung out at my uncle's gas station, did not want to get into any car driven by Greene. He recalled turning down one such invitation only for Greene to die by car blast the next day. You never know.

The Cleveland Mafia ceased to be in the 1990s. Between RICO and the loss of support from their patrons, the Genovese of New York, they were no longer sustainable. The remnants moved to the dead city of Youngstown, where they huddled with refugees of Pittsburgh's mob. What's there is a shell of the mob from the 1930s through the 1990s. One scion of one of the crime families made an attempt to revive it, but like Vegas, they've been squeezed out by corporations and major league sports. The last vestiges operated in the village of Brook Park near the former Ford Engine Plant. That neighborhood is about to become home to the Cleveland Browns' new domed stadium.

Odd Combinations

One of the depressing truths about the lit biz is that there are only so many plots, so many narratives. To keep these venerable stories of star crossed love, revenge, redemption, and quest alive, the working writer struggles with style and ingenuity, building a brand in the contemporary phrase. Something different, something new – but not too new or too different: it's a delicate balance and a matter of taste.

Paz Pardo

I recently read two novels that approach the problem with interesting combinations. The Shamshine Blind, a debut novel by Paz Pardo, takes a standard sort of mystery – malfeasance in high places – but sets it in a truly imaginative dystopian California.

International best seller Ragnar Jonasson's The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer is a second outing for Helgi Reykdal, a young Icelandic detective passionate about Golden Age mystery novels. Helgi's a nice chap and a sensible detective, even if he sometimes consults Agatha Christie as well as his crime scene notes. The resulting novel is a Christie type mystery gradually darkened by Scandinavian noir.

The Shamshine Blind features the most imaginative weaponry in many years. The premise of the story is that Argentina, far from losing the Falklands War, triumphed over both the UK and NATO and now controls big hunks of North America, including California. How was this possible? Through the development of psychopigments, colored powders and liquids which work directly on the emotions.

The Gauchos, as they are known in the book, succeeded in producing mass states of panic, rage, and depression by bombing major cities with the powerful pigments. The campaign rendered big swaths of urban landscape uninhabitable. Even years after the attacks, signs warn travelers of dangerous areas where "your emotions are not your own" and everyone knows that too much exposure to pigments produces terminal brain damage. 

On top of the war time destruction is the havoc caused by careless medicinal or recreational use of positive pigments like Sunshine Yellow and the illicit manufacture of potent new colors or of adulterated medicinal pigments. This is where agent Kay Curtida and her trainee Tommy come in. Both are depressives – neurodivergent people are believed to have a better tolerance for pigment exposure – and they are part of an underfunded police force that specializes in pigment offenses.

The scenery is great and the whole business of the pigments is nicely and elaborately worked out, but a clearer mystery plot would have been desirable. I suspect that the effort of making Daly City (outside ruined San Francisco) plausible and clarifying the politics and the weaponry of the story rather shortchanged the plot. Still, it would be interesting to see if Pardo returns with another Daly City outing for Agent Curtida.

No problems with plot for Ragnar Jonasson, who has written several well- received mystery series, and who serves up an intricately constructed missing persons story via a tape recording transcript and intercut scenes from 1976, 2005, and 2012. It is all very skillful and the characters, by and large, are at once reasonably sympathetic and slightly dodgy. Dame Agatha would approve.

But maybe there is something in the frozen north that did not afflict the tidy market towns, fine country houses, and elegant London flats of many Golden Age stories. A plot set to wrap up with a neat resolution is shattered by an outbreak of a hatred that has simmered around the edges of the narrative. In a curious way, it appears that the characters mistook the genre they were in. They minimized a real danger until it explodes for an ending that is distinctly not Golden Age but which sets up future dramas for Helgi Reykdal. 

Ragnar Jonassan

Ending aside, Jonassan joins Anthony Horowitz, creator of the Tony and Hawthorne mysteries, and Arturo Perez-Reverte, whose recent The Final Problem employs a Sherlock lookalike, in flirting with Golden Age type plots and detectives.

---

Anno 1790

  

Here’s another example of something I wrote about, two weeks ago.  First, a period mystery, and secondly, a story that breaks off in mid-stride.  This is no reason not to invest your heart, but be warned.  It proves faithless, and you’re abandoned. 

The year, you may guess, is 1790.  Sweden a commercial and military power in the Baltic, an inconclusive war with Russia ended, the Swedish parliament brought to heel by the king, Gustav III.  He himself will be assassinated, two years later, and this political ferment, between monarchy and parliament, the old aristocracy, the rising merchant estates, and a resentful peasantry and urban underclass, is the engine of discontent: the French Revolution is both an inspiration and cautionary tale.  The storyline, though, is a police procedural, set in a time of unease.

A military surgeon, Johan Daadh, a veteran of the Russian war, is enlisted as a police commissioner by Stockholm’s chief constable.  The tension is political, for one, Daadh being a progressive and a rebel sympathizer (I use rebel advisedly), and his boss a royalist, and then he falls for the guy’s wife.  She, too, has a mind of her own – a midwife, she performs an abortion on her niece – but has to operate under social constraints.  The chief constable isn’t by any means unsympathetic, either.  He’s hemmed in by convention, and the law, and a patronage system that saddles him with malicious opportunists.  This is one of the reasons he recruits Daadh.  Neither the doc nor the chief’s wife, however, are anachronistic characters.  Daadh is a rationalist, but he’s still a product of the late 18^th century, and he doesn’t harbor impossibly modern ideas about disease vectors, say.  That would make the whole show impossibly dumb.

(You might not agree with me, but that’s exactly why The Name of the Rose is so insufferable, both the novel and the movie.  Nobody thought that way, in the 14^th century.)

Anno 1790 is a Swedish production, and beautifully produced it is.  The cinematography alone, shot in digital, is breathtaking; the art direction and locations are terrific; even the hair, the wigs, the rouge, appear candlelit.  We suspect these people probably smell a little ripe, and they slather on the powder and scent.  It’s all very wintry and halfway medieval, much of which is probably CGI, but that didn’t bother me.  The mysteries themselves could be sharper, and the longeurs are a little frustrating.  There could be more politics - some sedition, some conspiracy – and there should definitely be more bodice-ripping, but for the most part, it remains amiable and decorous.  The leads are charming and convincing.  I’m especially taken with Linda Zilliacus, a Finnish actress who plays the troubled wife.  Each episode is self-contained, backgrounded by the longer story arc.  My only complaint is that there isn’t more of it.  Why, with the production values and historical appeal, it didn’t get a second season, is beyond me. 

This is just one of those abiding curiosities.  How come Duster only got eight episodes?  Who pulled the plug on Island at War, or Three Pines?  We’re never going to learn if Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes is comatose moonshine, or a boat ride on the Styx.  Perhaps it’s better we don’t.

File Purging

Many members of the crime fiction writing community spent this past weekend at Bouchercon in Calgary. I spent it cleaning out my files.

The recycle bin is full, and I still have a
three-foot-tall stack of paper to shred.

In my file room are six five-drawer filing cabinets containing folders for every article, essay, poem, or story I’ve ever written. Each folder contains a hardcopy of the final draft, copies of contracts and editorial correspondence, and other related material such as original calls for submission and research materials. Most also contain a copy of the anthology or periodical containing the published piece.

That’s more than 1,300 published short stories, dozens of articles and essays, and a handful of poems. One drawer contains almost 150 manuscripts that never sold and will likely never again be submitted. (In my writing office, and not subject to this weekend’s cleaning, are another 50 or so manuscripts that are either currently under submission or will be once I find suitable markets.)

Additionally, one drawer contains every rejection I’ve ever received.

Because my files fill so much space, two years ago I upgraded from six four-drawer filing cabinets to six five-drawer cabinets, and even the extra six drawers ultimately proved inadequate to contain everything. So, I’ve spent the weekend doing a deep dive into the content of all those files.

It turns out, not everything was worth saving. In some folders I had three and four drafts rather than just final drafts. In some, I found research material—copies of articles about Viking swords, menopause, muscle cars, handguns, anatomy, clothing, history, and much more—that I no longer need. So, much of the extraneous material—once it is shredded—is headed for the recycling bin.

While I have gained the equivalent of, maybe, three drawers worth of space, I’m uncertain how much longer it will be until that space is filled and I’ll need to either purge more files or find a place for yet another filing cabinet.

WHAT ABOUT A HIGH-TECH SOLUTION?

When I mention my cram-packed filing cabinets to other (usually much younger) writers, I’m often advised to scan everything so I only have to keep electronic files.

That’s a nice idea but imagine the cost in time (if I do it myself) or money (if I hire sometime to do it for me).

Also, consider the speed at which technology changes.

When I first became a writer, I used a typewriter. Since making the switch to writing on computers, I’ve saved files on 5.25” floppy disks that I can no longer read, 3.5” diskettes that I can no longer read, and Zip drives that I can no longer read. And many files on the CDs I can still read were created with programs that are either defunct or which I no longer have access to, or they were compressed to save disk space and will no longer decompress.

What can I still read?

Paper.

Short of a house fire, my paper records will be readable long after my demise.

And, I still have too much paper, even after this weekend’s purge.

Safe Harbors, Uncharted Waters, and Adventurous Writing

Growing up in the Caribbean, I spent plenty of time at the beach. At least once a week, we’d unwind on one of St. Thomas’s many bays, ready for a day of sand and sun. Although I loved spending time in the water, I was never as adventurous as my cousins and friends who swam way out past the safety buoys marking uncharted waters. Rather than swim around peninsulas or snorkel far out where aquamarine shallows turned into sapphire depths, I preferred to stay in my safe harbors, where I could see everything swimming around my toes. I liked the predictability of a bay I knew and understood.

The advice to write what you know felt a lot like that to me at first. We’ve all read books set in places the author had clearly never visited (or even researched), or featured characters that felt more like caricatures, or included enough bungled details to make a knowledgeable reader want to pitch the book across the room! It seems like a wise recommendation to make sure one’s work feels authentic and believable by sticking to what’s safe. At first glance, I appear to be the poster child for this piece of writerly advice. After years of trying to write the kind of book I saw making headlines—stories about big cities and women with lifestyles (and wardrobes!) wildly different than my own, I finally found success when I embraced writing about my Virgin Islands culture and upbringing. My short stories and debut novel-in-stories all lean heavily on that link to the place I write fluently, like a comfortable language. My safe little bay was working for me beautifully. Why wouldn’t I want to stay in a space I knew intimately and navigated with ease? Well…

… if we’re sticking with the metaphor, I guess, I got caught in an undertow and pulled out to sea when I found myself interested in calls for short stories, invited to submit to anthologies, or dragged by my characters to places that were very much unlike the topics and characters I understood. How could I explore these interesting new horizons while still writing stories that felt authentic? This was when I realized that write what you know didn’t have to be a command to stay in one’s lane. Instead, it could be an invitation to learn more so I could know more…and therefore, write more.

So how exactly does a writer who likes the familiar feel of safety learn to stray from her comfortable harbors? Here are some ways that I did.

I hit the library.

Internet research is convenient, but it can often yield results that are just plain wrong…and while short articles are helpful, sometimes a whole book about an unfamiliar subject offers perspectives and details that an author might not have even considered. How did I submit a story to an anthology about poker when my own poker skills were miserable at best? I started by reading several books about the game before I started writing…and I found them all at the library. Librarians have helped me to find books with diverse child narrators, about diving equipment, and about different weather patterns of the south. With a deeper knowledge of the subject, I felt empowered to write stronger stories.

I asked the hive.

We’re part of a vast community of writers, each of whom has their own wealth of knowledge. When I wanted to know more about tarot readings, cigars, and the organization of the National Guard, I skipped Google and went straight to my message boards. I’m a member of many different groups (the Short Mystery Fiction Society, Crime Writers of Color, the SinC Guppies, etc.), which meant that the writers I could ask were varied and diverse. They didn’t disappoint. I got detailed answers from other crime writers who were eager to share their expertise on these subjects, which helped me to make my story details realistic and believable to those in the know.

Reaching out to individual writers with a specific area of expertise yields helpful results as well. When writing a story set in Dallas-Fort Worth, I asked writers from the area about targeted details like the names of wealthy neighborhoods, iconic fast food places, and fastest routes between certain places. The details may be small ones, but knowing I was “getting them right” helped me feel more confident as a storyteller.

(Of course, be ready to share your own expertise generously if you’re ever in the position to do so!)

I talked to experts.

Two years ago, I needed details on a subject that couldn’t be answered quickly by my immediate network of writers—the architectural history of downtown Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. My grandmother’s collection included a few books on the subject, but I’d never written fiction with historical details before, and I was struggling with the sheer amount of research I needed to do. Talking with an expert—in this case, my cousin Sean, who is the director of the Virgin Islands State Office of Historic Preservation—for the morning was exactly what I needed. Sean was able to direct me to resources as far back as Danish colonial records. He also took me on a quick architectural tour and clarified a ton of my very specific questions. I was able to use the historical details in a variety of stories, not just the one I’d come to talk about. Suddenly, a style of writing that previously felt inaccessible now felt like something I could manage.

I jumped right in!

Of course, reading widely and speaking to writers can do wonders for increasing what you know. Sometimes, though, experience is the best teacher—and this is exactly what happened to me a couple of years ago, when my characters took a detour from the story I’d planned and decided to interview a suspect at a shooting range.

One of the first pieces of advice I received about writing mysteries was to get the guns right, and since I knew next to nothing about guns, I decided I’d simply never write about them. That decision worked out wonderfully until I found myself writing a scene about my sleuth and her best friend heading off for a shooting lesson with one of the main suspects. I knew how important it was to get the details in this scene correct, so I skipped the books, the hive, and the experts and took a lesson at a local range for the afternoon.

Away from my comfortable harbor? You bet. More like being out in the middle of the open ocean! As a teacher and mom, I’ve always had conflicted feelings about guns, and wasn’t sure what to expect at the range. It turned out to be a great afternoon of focused education and respectful support, and I learned plenty that I was able to use in my writing even beyond the scenes I’d been planning.

Jumping right in has helped me to learn how to make mango ice cream and saltfish fritters, play Texas Hold ‘Em poker, shoot several types of guns, and learn about many new genres of music. It infuses my work with a level of authenticity that only experience can bring.

This doesn’t mean that I’ve left behind the subjects I love best. Each of my stories still has some link to St. Thomas and the characters and settings I understand intimately. But by adding to what I know so that I could write about it, I’ve been able to explore new depths and other harbors while keeping my comfortable bay in mind.

I am planning a story that takes place on a cruise ship, though—and I’m already thinking about the rich research I should be doing to make the story as realistic as possible. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I browse itineraries and eye my suitcase closet.

What about you, fellow writers? What was the most interesting subject you’ve learned about for a novel or short story, and how did you go about your research?

Publishing Malpractice

I've written here before about the murder mystery book club I joined a little over a year ago at my local independent bookstore. They tend to pick books outside my usually noirish taste--lots of cozy-adjacent recent novels heavily featuring cats, recipes, or sometimes both--but they're a fun group, and many months I get exposed to a solid read I wouldn't otherwise have encountered.

Then there are the other months.

This month we read a novel that I won't specifically identify, because I'm not here to call out a particular author by name for things that are not entirely their fault. I will say that it was published within the last five years; that it's the first in what is currently a three-book series; and that the author's professional background is heavily emphasized in the promotional materials as contributing to the subject matter in the book. It was also published by an imprint of one of the major publishing houses. Let's call it, oh, Bimon and Booster.

Toward the end of the book, we encounter something like the following paragraph. I've changed the character names and some of the details here to avoid identifying the book specifically, but the structure of the paragraph was exactly this:

Velma said, "We know Shaggy is supposed to have left the manor house at three in the morning, and that Fred and Daphne claimed to see him on the ocean road at four. But we also know that can't be true, because the fog that night would have prevented them from being able to identify the Mystery Machine," Velma said.

For those of you keeping score at home, that's two instances of the same dialogue tag identifying the speaker in a single paragraph. Not to get too technical with my lingo, but this is what we in the biz call Bad Writing. And in terms of my patience with the book, it's what we call the Final Straw. 

Now, of course, any writer might produce a paragraph like this, in the heat of composing a rough draft. That's what rough drafts are for, and heaven knows mine are full of stupid errors. What's astonishing to me is that this survived not only the writer's own revision process (assuming there was one), but also the entire editorial system at a major publishing house. You would assume a book like this went through, at a minimum, a developmental edit and a line edit, to say nothing of any input there might have been from the writer's agent. And yet there that ugly second tag sits, something everyone in that chain should be ashamed of.

I think of the great editors I've worked with--folks like Barb Goffman, Michael Bracken, Rusty Barnes, and Josh Pachter. Not one of them would have missed that second tag. So what the hell is going on with the editors at Bimon and Booster? I can think of some explanations. Probably the editorial budget has been slashed in recent years, and the remaining editors are simply overworked to the point of missing things. Possibly they're relying on AI to do some (most?) of the work, with predictably embarrassing results. Or, maybe, they just don't care. "They" here should be understood to be the number crunchers at the publishers. After all, their algorithms had no doubt already told them the book would sell, based on title, subgenre, cover design, the author's background, and comparable books--meaning recent bestsellers the novel, in places, shamelessly apes. With financial success more or less guaranteed, why bother making it good?

If it was just this one mistake, I wouldn't be writing about it. By the time I hit this paragraph, though, I was already seething. The entire book is rife with this kind of clumsy prose; there's not a scrap of dialogue that sounds like the way people actually talk. The characters are all paper-thin. The central heroine is annoying (though not as annoying as her obligatory "wacky" sidekick), and, despite repeated claims that she's brilliant, doesn't actually do a single thing that contributes to solving the mystery (not that the solution, when revealed, makes any sense). The plot doesn't hold up to the barest scrutiny in terms of logic or causality. Characters move around randomly, having the same conversations over and over again every time they encounter each other. The author either ignores or doesn't understand one of the most fundamental pieces of writing wisdom: to show, not tell. Even the much-vaunted professional background that's supposed to distinguish the book because of the author's specialized knowledge is employed only very briefly, and in a completely unconvincing way.

If you've ever seen Tommy Wiseau's movie The Room, which has become an object of cult obsession as possibly the least competent piece of filmmaking ever threaded into a projector, you have a pretty good idea of the level of narrative ability I'm talking about here.

Reading the book, I was repeatedly reminded of Gun in Cheek, the hilarious 1982 volume in which Bill Pronzini (himself a first-rank writer and superb stylist) dissects some of the worst mystery fiction of the Golden Age (highly recommended reading, by the way). Pronzini, though, was talking about decades-old novels and stories that were largely recognized as disposable trash when they were published, mostly being churned out by pulp writers desperately trying to produce enough work to feed themselves at (if they were lucky) a penny a word. By contrast, this is a brand-new book from a top-of-the-line publisher, heavily promoted, accompanied by bafflingly positive reviews, and successful enough to justify at least two sequels (I wouldn't be shocked to hear there's going to be a Netflix adaptation). None of that prevents it from being every bit as bad as Pronzini's targets.

Pronzini's book made me laugh out loud, a lot (again, it's worth seeking out, as is the sequel, Son of Gun in Cheek, and Six Gun in Cheek, which similarly savages terrible Westerns). This book made me actively angry. I know a lot of great writers who will likely never have the opportunity to be published by a major house or get this kind of promotion. You could argue that's because they write primarily short stories, and the market today doesn't value short fiction. But that market was, to a large degree, created by the major publishers, and by the readers they've trained to have such a narrow, impoverished understanding of what crime fiction is and can be.

The fact that bad books get published is nothing new, of course. But am I alone in thinking there seem to be an awful lot of them these days?

So I'm angry on behalf of the skilled writers who are shunted aside in favor of books like this. I'm angry on behalf of readers who get mediocre work shoved down their throats. But I'm also angry on behalf of the writer of this book, because they do, on some level, have potential. I can imagine a world where an agent or developmental editor reads this book and gives it back with a detailed explanation of the many problems, encouraging the writer to start over and gradually helping them produce polished, readable work. We all start out writing badly; there's no way around this. If you get lucky, work hard, and have the right people helping you, you get better before your work ever appears before the public.

This writer wasn't lucky, and certainly didn't have the right people helping. Because of that, it's all too easy to imagine some future heir of Pronzini, in a couple of decades, absolutely eviscerating this novel as an example of all the worst elements of crime fiction in the first half of this century.

So--are you noticing anything like this in the new books you're reading?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Having spent several paragraphs bemoaning the output of another writer, it might seem the height of hubris for me to now promote a little of my own work, but here we go with a handful of new publications.

The new issue of the excellent online zine Yellow Mama includes my story "Things That Never Happened in a Place that Doesn't Exist." Any resemblance between this story and recent news items about powerful men committing terrible acts with no consequences is not entirely coincidental.

Recent days brought the welcome news that a new owner is reviving Down & Out Books, and I hope that venture will prove successful. In the meantime, other publishers continue to bring back some of the anthologies D&O published, under snazzy new covers. If you missed any of these, don't let them get past you again--every one of them is filled with powerhouse authors richly deserving of your time and attention.

Crimson Gate Books has the new edition of PROHIBITION PEEPERS: PRIVATE EYES DURING THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT, edited by Michael Bracken. In my story, "Getting Away Clean," the junior partner in a PI firm takes on his first big case, tracking down a crew of blackmailers working in the orbit of one of the country's most powerful bootleggers.

Open Road Media is publishing the revived HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE BEATLES, from editor Josh Pachter. My contribution is "Baby, You're a Rich Man," in which a powerful family's fixer sets out to deliver a huge ransom and uncovers a devious plot.

Also from Open Road and editor Josh Pachter is the reanimated FRIEND OF THE DEVIL: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD. For this one, I came up with "The Music Never Stopped," about a pair of drug dealers who come to a serious misunderstanding while attending a music festival.

And on one final note, my collection CRIME SCENES just celebrated six months in the world. While it hasn't leapt to the top of the NYT bestseller lists, I have gotten a lot of gratifying reactions from readers, and positive reviews in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Thrilling Detective, and Crime Fiction Lover. Doesn't it sound like it would make a swell holiday gift for the two or three dozen people closest to your heart?

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

As this column goes up, the US is a little over a week away from what might reasonably be described as the most important midterm election in our history. Polls are predicting massive wins for the Democrats--but, as is often observed, polls don't vote. You can count on Donald Trump and his pathetic gang of lickspittle grifters to do everything they can, legal or not, to suppress the vote, challenge and deny the results, and ultimately fail to abide by them, possibly even refusing to seat the new Congress. The more overwhelming their defeat, the more difficult it will be for them to make such attempts. Every vote is important, even if you live in a place where the local outcome is not in doubt. This may be our last opportunity to turn back the hatred, division, greed and stupidity which have made the last decade of American life so miserable. In short--GET OUT THERE AND VOTE!

Some Stats on Willingness to Commit a Crime

Some readers know that for several years, this mystery writer was disguised as a bank manager.  (Ha!  Do I look like one in this recent photo?)

Yes, I managed a branch in one of the biggest metropolitan areas (8 million) in the Western World.  This involved meeting a lot of interesting people who would not regularly come into your social circle - people like bank robbers and con artists.

And just as I was disguised as a bank manager, these criminals were disguised as average, everyday people.  Yes, I got pretty good at determining who might be less than honest in their business dealings.

Lots of stories there.  However, today I want to talk about something specific - that being the stats on how many of the population have the potential to join this minority population. (Note this research is approximately 20 years old. I fear it may be too optimistic for today.)

Here they are, as per my training and later teaching in college:

75% of people will be honest on a handshake.

20% of people may try to cheat you if they think they can get away with it.  (In banking terms, we say you need their signature to hold them to their word.) 

And 5% of people will try to cheat you, even if you have their signature.

I've always found this fascinating.  Like many people in that 75%, honour - integrity - is important to me, and I was taught that cheating is dishonorable.  (That's how I see it.  Others may see it differently.) I don't cheat, even when there is little to no chance of being caught. I would find it hard to live with myself.

This is the ultimate test, of course.  Do you cheat if you think there is little chance of being caught? 

The 5% of people - often sociopaths - are something I take for granted now, after years in banking.  They will do what they like if it is in their favour, without much care as to how it hurts other people.  They are perhaps the least interesting of the criminal class, from the point of view of this writer.  Our laws and prison penalties are necessary to manage their behaviour.  The stick as opposed to the carrot, so to speak.

What I find fascinating is the 20%.  On a mild level, I can use the example of people who will park in handicap spots when they aren't handicapped, because they think they can get away with it.  Also, people who might cheat on exams or essays.  I have heard someone who might fit into this category say, "I like to see if I can beat the system."   

It's this 20% that I find most interesting to write about.  People who would normally not take the risk of doing something against the law, but - occasionally if they think they could get away with it - might, if the gain is great.  Again - speaking as a mystery author - this category is where the most interesting murders take place.

I am fascinated by motivation.  What would convince someone to murder another person, when I wouldn't, given the same situation?  What would push them over the edge?

Now, there are always exceptions.  I expect a parent - even one basically honest and in the 75% - would be compelled to act against someone who threatened their children.  These situations could push most anyone over the edge.

But murder for monetary gain?  That is a very interesting motivation for a mystery writer, and I'm no exception.

Um...caveat here.  I murder people regularly in my books for monetary gain (thank you for that nice publisher advance!) But only in books.  Honest.

Melodie Campbell can honestly say she's never murdered anyone, except on paper.  After 22 books and 60 short stories, that's a lot of crime!  Pizza Wars is her latest madcap comedy, available on Amazon from Gemma Books (Boston.)