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.

September 15, 1963. A Mysterious Well. And Dioramas of Death.

Headline this weekend after Charlie Kirk's assassination:

"America Enters a New Age of Political Violence!"

No. You can call it sad, tragic, traumatic, etc., but not new. I'm writing this on September 15, 2025, and 62 years ago on September 15, 1963, at 10:22 on Sunday, a bomb ripped through the all black 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing 4 young girls and wounding anywhere from 14-22 people as they were getting ready for Sunday Service. According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".

Four white men, Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry, from the Cahaba River Group, which had splintered off from another Ku Klux Klan group because they thought the KKK was too restrained, not violent enough, in the fight against integration, were the bombers. It being Alabama in the 1960s, the original FBI investigation ended without indictments, and it wasn't until 2001, after President Clinton appointed Doug Jones as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, that ALL the bombers (except Cash who had died of old age) were finally indicted, tried, and convicted.

Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949),

Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951),

Carole Rosamond Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and

Cynthia Dionne Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949)

And then came November 22, 1964 – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, and in 1965 they started televising the Vietnam War… and we all sat, eating our dinners and watching the war every single freaking night - including the little girl running naked and screaming because she'd been covered in napalm, the MyLai massacre, the Vietcong man being shot in the head, his brains blowing out, and then dropping dead on his side - until it ended in the early 1970s when we got to watch everyone in South Vietnam trying to get on the helicopters as they left. And August 1, 1966, when Marine veteran Charles Whitman went up the Main Building Tower at the University of Texas, onto the observation deck, and started shooting people down below. In the next hour and a half he killed 15 people (one a pregnant woman), and injured 31 others before he was finally shot and killed by 2 Austin police officers. And in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated, followed by the bloody 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

And it's never stopped. I am sick to death of endless violence, pundits, politicians, splinter groups, condolences, sorrows, and horrors.

I have decided that the real problem is that we humans don't like humans very much.

But enough of that.

Let's talk instead about the little mysteries of life.

I've been having some work done on our yard, including ripping out five large - 2' x 4' - uneven flagstones in the back that were simply a health hazard to me and my husband as we potter around living our Beatrix Potter lives with the bunnies, the ever chattering squirrels, the sparrows, and the cawing crows. Especially in winter when the flagstones were slick with ice and/or snow.

Anyway, my guy (everyone needs a "my guy") came and was working away. One flagstone, two flagstone, three flagstone, four flagstone - and he was at the door saying, "You've got to come see this!"

So I came out, and this is what I saw:

That's a well, with carefully built brick walls, and some kind of concrete thingy in the middle. Now, our house was built in 1919, and there was no sign of a well on the survey map that came with the house when we bought it. We never dreamed there was a well under that flagstone, and I will say to its credit that we, and probably a lot of folks, have walked across that flagstone many a time and it never shifted an inch.

But my curiosity was aroused (most odd things arouse my curiosity, and since life has a tendency to be full of them, I spend most of my life curious and investigating), so this week I've been calling around, trying to find out:

1. how far the city limits were in 1920 (in 1880, the east-west city limit of Sioux Falls was 14th street, which is REALLY small);
2. was there running water out this way in 1920? (there was a private water company which set up shop in the 1890s but then closed down, and the city took over some time in the very early 1900s)
3. where was the outhouse?

I've talked to a lot of people at the City this morning, and basically, everyone had a well throughout the 1800s, and into much of the 1900s. And by much of the 1900s, I mean that as late as the 1970s, when with a population of 72,000, the city decided to put in another reservoir up in North Sioux Falls somewhere. That would cost money, so there was a referendum, and a number of people in the neighborhood voted against it. The reason? Because if they got a reservoir, then the neighborhood would have to get indoor plumbing. Strangest hill to die on I've ever heard of.

I was also assured that probably the outhouse area has long disappeared, being filled in, and then... decades passing. Which is a shame in some ways, because it might have been interesting to excavate that. People used to throw all kinds of trash in the outhouse because where better?

And I'm still debating whether to get the well cleaned up and pumping again... But then we'd have to lift off that damn flagstone again. Decisions, decisions.

***

Meanwhile, who here has heard of Frances Glesner Lee (1878-1962)? She was a Chicago heiress to the International Harvester fortune, who wanted to go into medicine, but was told ladies didn't do that. So she hand crafted (including knitting and sewing the various fabrics, making miniature cigarette butts, etc.) "the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, composite crime scene models recreated on a one-inch-to-one-foot scale. These macabre dioramas were purpose-built to be used as police training tools to help crime scene investigators learn the art and science of detailed forensics-based detection." Miss Marple would have LOVED her.

"Red Bedroom"

Go here (LINK) and (HERE) to learn more about her and see more of the dioramas. Or watch the video below:

I wonder if any of them show a murder in or near a well? BTW, our well had no bad smells coming up, just cool earthy air.

Deadly Tropics

The search goes on, for something watchable.  Ghosts, on CBS, streaming on Prime, is terrifically charming (and very light), and I’m not the only one to think so.  A wide circle of my friends, a group with widely divergent tastes, are smitten with it.  I’m also much taken with The Musketeers, although I aired some of my grievances in a Substack column a couple of weeks ago.  But more narrowly, looking in the genre of criminal enterprise, I’ve been toggling back and forth between BritBox, Acorn, and MHz – I only allow myself one subscription at a time.

Shetland is back, Season 9.  Blue Lights kind of lost me, in the second season, I don’t quite know why.  Scott & Bailey ran five years, and I wish there were more: I could watch Amelia Bullmore in damn near anything.  Troppo left me cold, even with Thomas Jane.  I took a flyer on The Jetty, because Jenna Coleman, how could you not?  (I was a huge fan of Victoria, which is admittedly a royal soap, but I thought it was more engaging than The Crown.)  The Jetty collapses of its own weight, as it telegraphs every beat of its glaringly familiar reveals.  Sorry. 

I’m pleased, therefore, to give you Deadly Tropics.  (Not a great title, and the original, Tropiques Criminels, isn’t any better; you wonder why imagination failed.  They could have called it Martinique Heat – almost anything would be better, to draw an initial audience.)  What the series very definitely is not, is a French knock-off of Death in Paradise, to which it’s been compared.  Just for openers, Tropics is nowhere near as annoying.  Paradise, which I’ve continued to watch faithfully (even through the ghastly Kris Marshall years), depends on a repetitive trope, and let’s be honest, fatigue sets in.  Deadly Tropics is much more of a policier, and strains credulity a lot less.  I could do without the exasperated male superior, mopping his brow and fretting that les femmes will embarrass him, but nothing’s perfect.  Baseline.  New commanding officer sent to Martinique from Paris to take over the homicide squad.  (Her former husband’s a bent cop, and she shouldn’t be tarred with his brush, but she is.)  Resistance from her ranking junior officer, also a woman, with radically different approach to policing.  Blah-blah.  New girl actually born on the island, but left as a child; has lots of family there, but doesn’t speak Creole, doesn’t really know the culture, although she herself is black.  The local woman cop - who, as it happens, is white - is a lot less structured in her methods, as relate to work, and her personal life.  This is mostly window-dressing, because the team manages fine, after some early missteps.

In other words, the show starts with a concept, and then essentially discards it.  There’s a genuine chemistry between the leads, Sonia Rolland and Béatrice de la Boulaye, and the scripts are spry and tight.  The scenery is lush, the locations feel authentic, the politics and so on seem to fit.  I don’t know from sex tourism, or the music scene, say, but it all has a gloss of reality.  As with Candice Renoir, the police procedures may or may not be exact, but you get a strong sense of the Caribbean, just as Candice gives you the Mediterranean influence.

The mysteries themselves aren’t taxing, but they’re not formula.  About half the time, you can guess it’s the dad, or the ex, or the plastic surgeon.  The storylines play fair, and they aren’t gimmicked.  I’ll settle for plain old GBH, and a garden-variety blunt instrument.

Joyeux Noël!

Murder and Mayhem, Canadian Style! The 13th Letter

with Lisa de Nikolits

Some readers here might know that we Canadians burned down The White House during the War of 1812. Now, I'm pretty sure we won't do that again, but I mention this to support my premise that while sporting a somewhat quirky sense of humour, we Canucks can be rather fiendish. My friend and colleague Lisa de Nikolits is here to introduce proof to that.

When I was asked to contribute to The 13^th Letter, something spooky happened. Gina Gallo and her wacky cousin Nico, who had been impatiently waiting for their next appearance in The Goddaughter series, decided to horn in and take over. So in my case, this post title could also be "When Novel Characters Go Short Story."

Lisa de Nicolits

Take it away, Lisa!

Thank you Mel!

My printed copy of The 13^th Letter landed in my hot little hands just over a week ago at our fabulous launch at the Sleuth of Baker Street, and I can't wait to read the stories again in print. One of my favourite treats is to snuggle up on the sofa with a lovely paperback. The fragrance of ink and paper, the rustle of turning pages, and the feel of holding a book really makes stories come alive for me. All the troubles of the world fall away as I get caught up in the magic of someone else's imagination.

Authors are magicians, movie directors, make-up artists, hustlers, wrestlers, casting directors, comedians, satirists, historians, spies and sociologists. We dabble in horror, cozy, literary fiction and police procedurals. We follow the trails of fraud and fantasy with wry irony, hardboiled noir and side-splitting comedy. We tap into jealousy, rage, fear, envy, obsession, lust and greed, but there's also true love, a dash of kindness, and a satisfying sense of justice.

And that's what make an anthology by the Mesdames and Messieurs of Mayhem so very special. Because our promise to you, Dear Reader, is to deliver all of the above, in each of our anthologies.

Founded by Donna Carrick and Madeleine Harris-Callway in 2013, our collective goes from strength to strength. The 13^th Letter is our sixth anthology. "M" is the 13^th letter of the alphabet (and also our lucky number!) We used "M" to stand for mayhem, maple syrup, mischief, mystery, Marilyn Monroe, murder, and of course, moolah, but we've also come up with all kinds of other creative ways to work with thirteen messages and letters.

Instead of giving you a synopsis of each story, we thought we'd give you a taste of the fun to come, with a few one-liners to showcase the variety and creativity. Enjoy!

The Midnight Boat to Palermo by Rosemary Aubert (to whom our anthology is dedicated.)

The unforgettable story about a sugar factory in Palermo where no one is permitted to taste the sweet wares, and how a deadly family secret finally comes to light.

The Lifted Letter by J.E. Barnard

An ancient, illuminated letter M goes missing from a bootlegger's library, and only Gloria Gamm, Girl Gumshoe, can get it back before there's a bloodshed.

M is for Memory by M.H. Callway

Memory is an unreliable trickster, as the hero of The Boy in the Picture learns when she find a mysterious photograph.

M is for Moolah by Melodie Campbell

Someone has trashed great-uncle Tony's crappy house in The Hammer, and who but family could know he still worked as a bookie, stashing moolah in all the wrong places?

If You Should Fall by Donna Carrick

M is for maple syrup in this uniquely Canadian thriller, as sugarbush tapper Marlene MacDougal scrambles for her life, proving that justice can be both swift and sweet.

The Curse Scroll by Cheryl Freedman

Half-ogre/half-human private investigator Goslin and her partner Marlow, a bipedal, talking, fedora-wearing ferret, are tasked by Goslin's fairy godmother to find the hidden scroll cursing Goslin's cousin, the king of Carcassone, with impotence.

In a Cold Country by Lisa de Nikolits (a sonnet of sorts!)

There was a little girl
from a land far away
not a very nice little girl
she always got her way

and now that little girl
is so, so alone
in a cold country
like a dog without a bone

old dog, old dog
one day I’ll make you pay
you won’t see me coming
but you can't get out of the way

(The 13^th line concludes with a location, date and time for the deadly meet-up.)

27 by Blair Keetch

The body of a prestigious entrepreneur is found in a warehouse in the middle of the night, leading to more suspects than there are letters in the alphabet. Can a clue scrawled in blood point to the killer?

One Helluva Lady by Rosemary McCracken

"When two Toronto police officers took chairs across from my desk, I wondered what trouble I was in." Pat Tierney returns in this riveting tale of murder.

Where are you, Marilyn? by Sylvia Multarsh Warsh

In 1962, plain teenager Sophie moves next door to glamorous Marsha and tried to help her find her mother, a Marilyn Monroe Lookalike, who abandoned her family years earlier, hoping to be discovered in Hollywood.

Scamming Granny by Lynne Murphy

This clever title can be interpreted two ways. Charlotte is almost the victim of a 'granny scammer' but her friend decide to rally round and try to defeat his nasty scheme.

A Hollywood Tale by Ed Piwowarczyk

In Hollywood in the 1930s, a gossip columnist becomes entangled in the murders of a film producer and two young actresses.

On Moon Mountain by Lorna Poplak

On the mountain, in the moonlight, a vengeful bully prepares to push an unconscious enemy over a cliff. Can the unexpected appearance of an eyewitness prevent him from carrying out this dastardly crime?

Murder and Marilla by Madona Skaff

The Bell Tolls Once Again is the third installment of the continuing adventures of ex-conman, Lennie, who solves murders...with the help of the victim. This time it's murder on board the ghost ship, Marilla.

Cardiopulmonary Arrest by Melissa Yi

Do you want to know how you're going to die? For Rainier Hetherington, M stands for a machine that will predict his manner of death, as an inheritance from his ghastly father.

CHRISTMAS IS COMING!

Where to buy the book: https://tinyurl.com/w9h7vhp2 and amazon.ca and amazon.com for print copies.

For more information about us: visit https://mesdamesofmayhem.com

There's a documentary about us which reveals our deepest and darkest secrets: https://gem.cbc.ca/the-mesdames-of-mayhem/s01e01

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Henry VanderSpek is the photographer of the group photo. He was also the official photographer of the documentary, The Mesdames of Mayhem, by director Cat Mills and producer, Felicity Justrabo.

There’s no solving the mystery of great mysteries.

Our benevolent overlords here at SleuthSayers, Robert Lopresti and Leigh Lundin, give us wide latitude over the topics we want to focus on. For which I’m very grateful.  But since this is a mystery writing blog, I thought, why not write about mysteries?

I’ve argued long and loudly that mysteries and thrillers are really no different from any other form of literary expression.  And vice versa.  I once asked a reviewer if a general fiction book I was working on could be considered a thriller.  She asked, “Does it have a gun?”  I said yes. “Does it kill somebody?” Yes, a mafia thug.  “Then it’s a thriller.”

And she reviewed it. 

Though to be fair, there are a few guidelines to follow if you want to write within the genre.  First off, you need a mystery.  A puzzle to be solved.  And a protagonist who is launched into solving it - unwillingly, eagerly or professionally.  The book ends with the solution revealed, though it doesn’t have to be clear cut or definitive.  That’s about it.  Everything else is up for grabs. 

Mysteries are also quest stories.  Beginning with the Odyssey, quests are probably the most frequently employed plot convention.  If you’re going to solve a mystery, you have to venture into the world to find clues, analyze evidence, and doggedly canvas the likely participants.  I think it was Ross MacDonald who said mysteries are about detectives driving around in cars and interviewing people.  Essentially, there’s something that needs to be learned, and someone on a mission to discover what it is. 

There are elements of danger for the protagonists – wicked characters who don’t want the mystery solved, or malign bureaucracies who’d rather just let things be.  You don’t have to be Mickey Spillane to clothe your story in a mood of menace and imminent peril.  Usually the challenges are made of misdirection, dishonesty and obfuscation.  So it’s not just a matter of being quicker on the draw, the hero has to have a good analytical mind to navigate through the murky waters and overcome obstacles constantly thrown up by the opposition.

So by definition, mysteries are solved by smart, determined and resourceful people, who have the ability to perceive the psychology of criminal minds, without having to be criminals themselves (though sometimes they are). 

Often the protagonist is the reader herself.  The puzzle is laid out in the unfolding story, and the thrill is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. 

I think Gone Girl is among the most brilliant mysteries of all time, though there’s no intrepid detective central to the story.  You may argue that it’s more a thriller, and thrillers can have no mystery involved at all, the suspense derived from other plot details (the bomb beneath Grand Central is going to blow on New Years Eve!), but those are pure thrillers.  Mystery thrillers need at least the skeleton of a mystery at its core (I’ll refer you to Lee Child). 

What sets mysteries apart is there’s an intellectual component.  A figuring out.  A puzzle, a literary crossword, acrostic, jigsaw, Rubik’s Cube. 

I don’t see these things as restrictions.  In fact, I believe they make for better books, because the writer is forced to have a well-formed plot.  Usually characters are the most engaging features of a good mystery, so the plot doesn’t have to be an intricate brainteaser, but it has to be there, and believable and satisfying once resolved.     

As a genre that encompasses the psychological, historical, hard boiled, sci-fi, romantic, fantastical, Western, closed-room Victorian, and on and on, there’s plenty there to suit everyone’s tastes. 

One of the most appealing features of good mysteries are what I call mini mysteries.  Those ancillary stories embedded in the plot where the protagonist has to solve something that is necessary to move along his/her quest.  (Whose DNA was also there at the murder scene?  The name Joey was on a slip of paper in the victim’s pocket.  Who the hell is Joey?) The reader gets almost the same charge out of solving these incremental steps as the story overall, and they help keep the pace ripping along.  Sometimes these mini mysteries are red herrings, misleading trails.  Sometimes a red herring consumes most of the plot, which is fine.  Near the end of a book, you’re thinking, oh no, if it wasn’t that evil steel-foundry plutocrat who killed the Swedish biology professor, who was it?!

I still maintain that great mysteries are great literature.  And some recognized literary fictions are in fact gripping crime novels (I refer you to The Great Gatsby and The Name of the Rose).  

It really doesn’t matter at the end of the day.  A wonderful book is a wonderful book no matter how it fits into literary taxonomy. 

           

BSP: Paperbacks 7 - 8 & 9

I spent this summer bundling some of my short stories into collections. The result is that three more paperbacks are now in print. Most of these stories were previously published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine or various other magazines or anthologies.

Paperback #7

9 Tales from the Golden Triangle consists of nine stories set in the mountain jungles and opium fields of Southeast Asia in the years after Mao's Red Army had pushed the White Nationalist Army under Chang Kai-Shek out of China during their civil war. Part of the White Army went to Taiwan while other divisions found refuge in the mountain jungles of Burma, Laos and Thailand. And, since an army must eat, as the common wisdom went, those latter army divisions soon became involved in the opium trade.

In these stories, two half-brothers contend to inherit their warlord father's opium empire. The elder half-brother was born of a hill tribe mother and raised in the jungle camps. The younger is full-blood Chinese and was raised in the British education system of Hong Kong. Existence means living with treachery and deceit while trying to live up to their father's expectations. Only one brother can win.

Paperback #8

9 Historical Mysteries Vol 2  is a continuation of the Volume 1 collection. The first five stories are set in the 1660s Paris Underworld during the reign of the Sun King, Louis the Fourteenth, on the throne of France. A young, orphan pickpocket, incompetent at his trade, grows up in a criminal enclave outside the gates of Paris. His fellow criminals tend to take advantage of his youthful ignorance and inexperience in order to draw him into their schemes.

The next four stories are in The Armenian series set in 1850s Chechnya ranging from the Cossack cordon along the Terek River and south into the hill tribes of the Wild Country in the shadows of the Caucasus Mountains. In this land, trust is an unmarked grave in the rolling steppes where The Armenian must survive dangerous encounters by his wits.

Paperback #9

9 Tales of a Criminal Mind are stories ranging from power to greed, from excitement to vengeance, where the criminal rationalizes his actions in order to justify the crime. Inside are nine tales of a criminal mind. Some humorous. Some desperate. Some done out of family loyalty. Yet all are against the law.

The last story collection includes the 2022 Macavity Nominated and Edgar Award winner in the Best Short Story category, "The Road to Hana."

All nine books, now on Amazon, are part of my endeavor to keep my stories out there in the market place for readers.

Thank you for your time.

Three Best

Over the years, SleuthSayers have been well represented in The Best American Mystery Stories, as John M. Floyd pointed out when he reviewed the first “Twenty Years of B.A.M.S.” back in 2016. One-time BAMS Series Editor Otto Penzler has launched a new best-of-year series—The Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mystery Stories of the Year—and SleuthSayers are again well represented, with stories from three members—Janice Law, John, and me—included within the inaugural annual’s pages.

We thought about sharing trade secrets, such as the value of bribery and blackmail when dealing with best-of-year editors, but it turns out I’m the only one of us with low moral values. Instead, Janice and John have joined me to tell you a bit about each of our stories.

“The Client”

Janice Law

I always find the genesis of a story mysterious, but in the case of “The Client,” I can point to two houses, both in an old mill town near where we live. The great water-powered textile and thread mills of eastern Connecticut created prosperity well into the twentieth century. Their loss brought hard times to the area and to Ray Wilde, the first professional detective I have written about since I ended the Anna Peters series.

Ray was actually devised for an anthology edited by our SleuthSayers colleague Paul D. Marks, and a little story-and-a-half house behind our bank’s parking lot provided, not only a venue for my half-formed plot, but suggested a weary ex-cop sitting through a boring surveillance.

The resulting story was about mostly decent people caught in small crimes, and I figured one and done for Ray. Still, I liked his style and his turn of phrase. Another house, an imposing home gently going downhill, provided a home for his client and a use for an item in my notebook: a photo of an old New England Crime boss and his long-time companion.

Edith Wing, courteous and eccentric, a pillar of the library board and the local church, is an unlikely person to lead Ray into deep water. He likes her and I like her, too. Although the mystery genre is maybe kinder to older females than it used to be, women of a certain age are still usually victims or accessories. But elderly Edith Wing gave me an opportunity to create an intelligent, morally ambiguous character, who, as she puts it to Ray, knows that sometimes there are few good choices.

“The Client” appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (May/June 2020).

“Biloxi Bound”

John M. Floyd

One of my favorite subjects as a suspense writer has been the ordinary guy with an ordinary job who suddenly finds himself in a desperate situation. In the case of “Biloxi Bound,” my protagonist is one of two brothers who own and operate a small diner in an unnamed northeastern city. When their neighborhood becomes a hotbed of violent crime and their cafe begins struggling, they decide they should move to the slower-paced (and warmer) Mississippi Gulf Coast. That’s an area familiar to me because I once lived on the beach there during my Air Force years and have spent most of my life not too far away.

To this scenario I added a retired mobster, a friendly cop, a young employee at the cafe, a mysterious regular customer, and several plot reversals. The crime and violence that the brothers hope to avoid does of course arrive at the diner before they can relocate, and the result is nothing either of them could’ve foreseen. All this made the story great fun to write, and when I finished it I sent it to The Strand Magazine, which has always been receptive to tales with multiple plot twists and surprises.

I’m glad I did.

“Biloxi Bound” appeared in The Strand Magazine (February-May 2020)

“Blest Be the Tie That Binds”

Michael Bracken

Temple and I married the day after Thanksgiving about seven months before I began writing “Best Be the Tie That Binds,” and we spent our honeymoon—brief as it was—in a cabin in Brownwood, Texas. Saturday afternoon, during a brief respite from the rain, we took a leisurely walk through the woods, and a large dog of indeterminate breed came charging at us. I’m no hero, but I stepped in front of my new bride and shouted at the dog until it finally turned and ran back the way it had come. That’s when I began pondering how far a man might go to protect his wife.

“In Blest Be the Tie That Binds,” Robert Connelly, pastor of the Union Revival Baptist Church, faces this decision when his new bride is threatened—via a whisper in his ear—during their wedding reception. When the threat takes physical form, and when he later learns his wife isn’t the only one being threatened, Connelly must reach deep into his past—a past he doesn’t readily acknowledge—to the incident that led to his life as a man of God to seek help from a friend whose life went in an entirely different direction.

Though this story was published in a magazine I now edit, it was accepted for publication by Carla Coupe and John Betancourt well before my tenure as editor.

“Blest Be the Tie That Binds” appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine #6.

CONCLUSION

John and I often compare notes about the best-of annuals, and between us we identified almost every writer included in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year and The Best Mystery and Suspense long before their editors/publishers made official announcements. So, it was no surprise when John noted that he, Janice and I have been represented eighteen times—either by having stories included or by having stories named among the Other Distinguished Stories—in each of the Penzler-edited best-ofs, and one of us also made the Other Distinguished list in Steph Cha’s inaugural outing as editor of The Best American Mystery and Suspense.

But we aren’t the only SleuthSayers honored this year. Steve Hockensmith made the Honor Roll in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and Art Taylor (with co-author Tara Laskowsi) and the late Paul D. Marks made the Other Distinguished list in The Best American Mystery and Suspense.

So, if there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this, it isn’t the value of bribery and blackmail, it’s the value of being a SleuthSayer.

I Write Therefore I Am

Walking the dogs. Buster above.
 Pepper (left) and Buster below.

Sometimes—often—I get tired of the writing grind. A lot of blood, sweat, tears and toil for very little reward, or so it seems. I’ll complain to my wife that I want to quit. I’ll think about doing just that. But then I think about what I would do with all that extra time. Garden? Watch TV? Read? Do hobbies? Spend even more time walking the dog.

Who would I be? My whole identity is wrapped up in being a writer and has been almost my whole adult life. I don’t think I’d recognize myself anymore if I wasn’t writing. One hears about people who retire and have these great expectations of playing golf all the time or doing whatever their fancy is and then getting bored awfully damn quick. But also losing their identity because so much of it was wrapped up in their work.

Writing is more than a job. It’s a calling. I’ve sacrificed a lot over the years to work at being a writer, so obviously it was something that was worth making sacrifices for.

And I like the process of creating something out of nothing, yet it’s too late for me to be a molecular physicist, if that’s the right terminology. Writing fiction is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle (something I don’t have the patience for). But like a jigsaw puzzle in writing you have to find all the right pieces and put them in all the right places or it just doesn’t fit.

I write, therefore I am. With my assistant, Curley.

Red Smith famously said: "There's nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."  Even when you open a vein for the Red Cross and donate blood they give you juice and cookies.

Most people don't have an appreciation for what we go through as writers.  The hours spent alone, no one to talk to over the water cooler (though that's changed somewhat with the internet, which is a surrogate water cooler).  The opening of our veins to get to the good stuff.

Like I said, it’s a calling. And it called me very young. When I was a kid I used to set up my army men on the bedroom floor.  But often, instead of moving them around pretending they were on a real battlefield I would pretend that they were on a movie set. I was lucky enough to have one little plastic figure of a cameraman and I'd even set up my TinkerToys in such a way to mimic Klieg lights. I'd move the men around the floor, putting words in their mouths, the good guys and the bad. Making sounds of gunfire and other sound effects. That, coupled with having been born in Hollywood, literally, made me want to do something in the movies. So today when I write something I figure I'm just doing on paper what I used to do on the floor of my room, moving around letters and sentences the way I used to move "armies" across the floor. And it really all amounts to the same thing. On the other hand, I am really still playing with (and collecting) toy soldiers. See pic.

Still playing with toy soldiers.

And, when I started out as a writer I had romantic notions of what being a writer meant. Images of Hemingway sipping absinthe on the Left Bank. And though Hollywood ain't no left bank it did have Joe Allen's at the time, so I went there for drinks. Or I'd sip some whiskey while writing in my little office. But I found that if I drank while writing—or trying to write—I didn't want to write. I wanted to play. So those romantic visions of the drinking writer (at least while writing) vanished quickly as did the bottle. I also thought writers should hang out at bars and dives and soak up atmosphere or thrown beer. My first adventure out was to a well-known sleazy eatery. I sat at the counter listening for tidbits of dialogue, insights into lives. What I got was a shirt full of beer when two guys playing pool a few feet away got into a fight. Free beer, who could ask for more?  If a cop had stopped me on the way home my shirt-alcohol level would surely have been over the legal limit.  Would they have arrested me or just my shirt?

Cafétafel met absint by Vincent Van Gogh

So, though it can get tedious, though the rewards might not always come, I don’t think I could or would ever give up on writing. Ultimately, we write because we have to. We open those veins because we have no choice. And anything’s better than sitting around watching TV all day, even that vein opening.

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

"I hate saying a book transcends the genre and I honestly usually don't like books that do. This one however does and might win some awards because of it."
                                                                          —Jochem Vandersteen, Sons of Spade
                           

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Let's Get Cozy

Welcoming Kate Fellowes…

I'm pleased today to welcome my friend Kate Fellowes as a guest blogger. Kate is the author of six mysteries, most recently A Menacing Brew. Her short stories and essays have appeared in several anthologies, as well as Victoria, Woman's World, Brides, Romantic Homes, and other periodicals. She recently won the San Diego Public Library's Matchbook Short Story contest, meeting the challenge to craft a story only 50 words long. (I mentioned this in my column Super-Short Stories a couple of months ago.) A member of the national organization Sisters in Crime, Kate is a founding member of the Wisconsin Chapter. Her working life has revolved around words--editor of the student newspaper, reporter for the local press, cataloger in her hometown library. A graduate of Alverno College in Milwaukee, she blogs about work and life here and shares her home with a variety of companion animals. Kate, it's great to have you here at SleuthSayers!

— John M. Floyd

Let's Get Cozy

by Kate Fellowes

Working in a public library is the best day job for a writer, if you ask me. Every hour of every day, I'm surrounded by inspiration, in the form of successful authors, past and present. Each writer offers me a lesson on craft, character, and structure, and I'm an eager student.

When our book deliveries arrive and I slit the tape on each box, I wonder what new treasures I'll find to add to my to-be-read list. What have our patrons requested? What's on the bestseller list? Or the Book Club's?

Only one thing is guaranteed.

Every fiction order will contain a host of cozy mysteries.

Time was these were usually paperbacks but more and more authors are being published in hardcover now, a permanent commitment to life on the public library shelves. And almost always the books are part of a series. Indeed, publisher and distributor catalogs sometimes have multiple pages filled with nothing but listings for the newest installments in cozy series. I've dried up more than one yellow highlighter circling selections, especially wanting to try the entries that say "first in a series."

What was it, I wonder, about the manuscript that made an agent take on the author? What made a publisher extend a contract? What brought the book to the marketplace?

And will it be a hit with readers?

From my years at the Reference Desk, I know mystery readers are a loyal bunch when they find a favorite author. Thanks to authors' newsletters, patrons frequently know the next title and release date before I do. Their requests help us determine what to purchase, and their desire to read series books in chronological order helps point out holes in our collection.

A year ago, my library won the Sisters in Crime "We Love Libraries" contest and received $1,000 to put toward the purchase of books. We bought cozy mysteries and plenty of them, including many new-to-us authors and firsts in series. They made a dazzling display with their colorful spines and intriguing covers. It was an interesting exercise to see which authors took off and which languished on the shelf. Some authors who might write multiple series had one series prove popular while another did not. This phenomenon especially interested me.

Cozies have specific hooks related to the story's geographical location, main character's occupation or hobby, presence of cats and/or dogs. Which of these most influence readers? I will always reach for the book with a cat or dog. If it's set on an island or seashore, even better. Add a bookstore or a library to the mix and that title goes to the top of my stack. Every reader has a similar list of requirements, I'm sure.

I can only hope I manage to tick off a few of their boxes when my own first cozy mystery joins the new bookshelf in May. There's a library, but no bookstore, a river but no island, and the cat won't show up until Book #2.

A Menacing Brew (Fire Star Press, May 2020) introduces Barbara York and her daughter Amy, the most amateur of sleuths. If Barbara hadn't found her old friend from college dead when she and Amy arrive at his house upstate for a visit, these two women as different as chalk-and-cheese would never have relied on or trusted one another. But knowing the police think the death is murder and that Barbara, the heir to the estate, is in the picture as prime suspect, they set aside their differences and work together to solve the mystery.

During their investigation, they meet many residents of the small town, Kirkwood. (Small towns are a cozy staple, of course.) Some of the citizens are happy to talk, while others remain tight-lipped.

Does the mysterious death of a student decades ago factor in to this latest crime? Does another death a century ago also play a part? And will Amy's parents, divorced for years, reunite in their grief over their lost friend?

Eventually, all these questions have answers, and finding my way to those answers was a joy.

I have sometimes read irritating articles about authors who have had plots spring to them complete, in a dream. Why does this never happen to me? I always think.

It still hasn't, but with A Menacing Brew, I can honestly say both Barbara and Amy showed up fully formed. They are so different from each other and so different from me that every writing session was an entertaining revelation. Having finally overcome my pantser instincts, I had actually made an outline. Even so, we were soon off track, and I was reduced to watching the action unfold while I took dictation.

Does writing get any better than that? Those magical, aha moments when some incidental little something added on a whim is revealed thousands of words later as a linchpin. The twists in a plot I swear my conscious mind never produced. The spark of life created by characters interacting in genuine ways, like real people I know. This is why I write, and why I always will.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of Barbara and Amy as I give them a second puzzle to solve. It will be fun to see who joins them, there on the shores of Pulaski Lake, and how their lives unfold in their new hometown.

When I began my job at the library, newly graduated from college with a degree in English and several failed novels in a box under my bed, I dreamt of the day the library shelves would hold my own work.

A Menacing Brew is my sixth novel, following five romantic suspense titles, so my books have actually been in our stacks for a while now. But to me, every book feels like the first one. In a way, this one really is. My first cozy will be there beside those of my own favorite authors on the new book display!

Then, before we know it, the publishers' catalogs will arrive, full of fall releases, ready for librarians to order and patrons to read. I'll wear out another highlighter circling titles of cozy adventures, wishing I had time to read them all. Could there ever be such a thing?