Trace Evidence

A story which appeared in the January/February 2020 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine had a profound emotional impact on me. “The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74” by Art Taylor. I guess I wasn’t alone. It was named a finalist for the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards. It won the Derringer Award and became the title story for a fabulous collection of Art’s stories. A puzzling mystery, a heart-felt tale of lost innocence, a period piece, and a clear-eyed commentary on social injustice, the story weaved together more beautifully crafted elements than I had previously believed possible in short crime fiction.

I loved the way Art firmly anchored the action in time and place, somehow rendering the themes more universal in the process. Of course, I wanted to emulate his work in that way and many others, but for a couple of years, I couldn’t discover any germ of a story that carried sufficient gravitas.

Then, in 2022, an old friend and veteran of The US Marine Corps described how he experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis at age eight, stocking up on peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate milk, crawling under his family’s front porch with the girl from down the street, waiting for the flash. I knew that I had to build a story around that moment.

Weaving in a crime element and finding unifying themes took a while, and my first efforts were a hot mess.

“You don’t want to be too precious with your work.” That’s how one respected short crime fiction author responded when I told her about my story in progress, two years and thirty major drafts later. One excellent author-editor gave me some disbelieving side-eye.

They both meant well. We’ve all met that aspiring author, the one trapped in the hamster wheel of unending revision, their debut and magnum opus never complete.

As a modern author, you must embrace deadlines. You must relish the opportunity to write with a gun to your head. The Amazon halo effect following a successful book release grows shorter in duration with each passing year. Short story authors need to crank out more titles to make up for the ever-dwindling returns in the sea of financially challenged online and print markets.

But how precious is too precious? The question is not new to our time. A hundred and eighty years ago, a relatively unknown author by the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne penned a short story called “The Artist of the Beautiful” that wrestled with the same idea. His protagonist, Owen Warland, a craftsman, pursues an all-consuming passion to create something of extraordinary beauty, even as his youth and the love of his life slowly drift away. Hawthorne’s keen observations on the intersection between art and mortality are every bit as valid today as they were in his century.

 “. . . he was incited to toil the more diligently by an anxiety lest death should surprise him in the midst of his labors.”

“So long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty of its texture.”

Hawthorne values passionate devotion to a single creative vision, even in the absence of any material reward, even if it takes a lifetime to fulfill.

Of course, not every vision requires a lifetime. Art Taylor took twenty-five years to complete “The Boy Detective,” started in 1995, but he’s also completed stories in a single evening.

When I told him that I was revising a piece inspired by his own work, he graciously agreed to read “The Bank Heist Before Armageddon.” He offered encouragement and his own invaluable insights. A few revisions later, I was delighted to receive an acceptance from Linda Landrigan, editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She said the story was beautiful. I fervently hope that readers agree.

My father is a firefighter. His origin story is well-known and well-told in our family. As a toddler, young Bruce was riveted by television news coverage of a certain historic fire in Hartford, Connecticut, captivated by the shining trucks on display and the helmeted army deployed to battle the blaze. Attending elementary school, he anxiously awaited each Fire Safety Day and the chance to meet his heroes. And on the day that he turned eighteen-years-old, he returned home from high school to be greeted by the local volunteer fire chief, who was waiting with a membership application in his hand.

Ever since, my father has been responding to emergencies and putting out fires, racing toward the danger rather than away. He’s dedicated his life to protecting the people of his community and the things they hold most precious. Today, in the very hometown he grew up in, he is the department chief who hands out the new member applications, and in his white helmet he leads a proud team of dedicated volunteers who put themselves at risk day after day, year after year.

I never felt the calling to follow in my father’s footsteps—my own passions led me into a world of books, to academia and publishing—but the fire service has been a constant in my life, too. To this day, my father keeps a simple crayon drawing of a firetruck that I scribbled one evening at the scene of a call when I was just a boy, as I watched him don his turnout gear and roll out hoses. I have borne witness to his sacrifice and to the fellowship shared by all firefighters. It has instilled in me a deep understanding of the heroism of the first responder.

Truly, these are heroes every bit as awe-inspiring as the legends who have captivated me in detective stories throughout the years—in print, the likes of Holmes and Marple and Brown; and on television, everyone from Columbo to Magnum to Briscoe to Frank Black.

When my abiding love of detective fiction inevitably inspired me to write my own mystery tales, I was bound and determined to make these stories about firefighters. Here was a dangerous and thrilling arena of heroes and monsters to rival that found in the police procedural! Here was an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the unparalleled heroism of the firefighter and those in the emergency medical services. I found my detective hero in retired fire marshal Richard “Dick” Byrne, an arson investigator who works with the Metropolitan Police in the District of Columbia, not so far from the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg.

I hasten to add that, in personality, Byrne is nothing like my father. A chain-smoking Scottish expat with a lifetime of experience fighting fires, Byrne is also irascible, as uncouth as he is uncompromising. He’s possessed of a fiery spirit that often gets him into all sorts of entertaining trouble during his investigations. His methodology, however, and that unwavering commitment to protecting the innocent and safeguarding his city, that was something familiar.

I’ve had no shortage of inspiration. Over the years, I’ve put together a battered notebook bulging with scraps of paper bearing all sorts of ideas for Dick Byrne mysteries, many of them suggested by my father and his work. There are more arson cases hinted at in those pages than I will ever be able to write. Slowly but surely, however, the best of them have made their way to the page.

Dick Byrne makes his Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine debut in “The Black Box.” This is a short story that you won’t find referenced in my notebook of ideas. Instead, I was presented with a writing prompt to craft a mystery that focused on “a black box.” Like most writing prompts I’ve been handed over the years, the creative challenge of it drew me in. What sort of arson investigation might center on a black box? The answer, as you will soon read, lies within a literal black box—a fire safe made of steel and vermiculite, designed and manufactured for heat endurance, shock absorbance, and water resistance. A strongbox made to ensure that the most precious of secrets will survive any disaster.

I knew the concept could be pushed further, however, to the study of behaviorism, to stimuli inputs and output reactions—to the black box of the human mind. Dick Byrne is a brilliant detective, but here was a dramatic opportunity to explore his most pronounced shortcomings. For though Byrne possesses an expert knowledge of chemistry, thermodynamics, and pyrolysis, like so many of us, he often struggles to understand what goes on in the minds of his fellow human beings. The result of that writing prompt became a spiraling story of boxes within boxes, mysteries within mysteries.

The spirit of the investigation—and of the characters who take part it—remains the most essential part of the formula for Dick Byrne. At the heart of “The Black Box,” you’ll witness police, firefighters, and emergency personnel working together to resolve a crisis. As in each installment of this series, you’ll find the District of Columbia Fire Department doing what they do best. And for all his flawed humanity, the selfless and steadfast spirit of the firefighter endures in the heart of the detective.

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Brian A. Dixon’s short fiction has appeared in the pages of publications such as Connecticut Review, Zahir, A Thousand Faces, and Honeyguide. He has also edited anthologies including Columbia & Britannia: An Alternate History (2009), nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. His most recent book, Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast (2025), is available from Fourth Horseman Press.

Not long ago, on the Short Mystery Fiction Society blog, several writers weighed in on a simple question: Do you base fictional characters on real people?

“Second Chance,” which appeared in the Nov.-Dec. 2025 issue of AHMM, is my 20th story set in the New York County Courthouse. The courthouse is a real place occupied by real people, and for 30 years I was one of those real people, working as a judge’s law clerk and, later, as an administrator. Which, I suppose, begs the question: are any of the many characters who inhabit these 20 stories (and, by the way, three novels) based on real people?

The short answer is No. None of the characters are based on real people. The long answer requires some explanation.

As a workplace and as a social structure, the courthouse is a stratified environment. In simplest terms, the judges are at the top, while everyone else mucks in down below. Who makes up the everyone else? The answer is several hundred people who occupy different levels of responsibility and authority based on their job titles. First, there are the chambers staffs, consisting of the 40 or so judges, their law clerks, and their confidential secretaries. Next there is the administrative staff, consisting of the chief clerk, a deputy chief clerk, and several department heads who manage the daily activities of courtroom clerks, back-office clerks, court reporters, and stenographic secretaries. There a legal staff, consisting of court attorneys not assigned to any particular judge but whose cumulative bank of legal knowledge is impressive. There are court aides, messengers, custodians, and the engineers who attend to the building’s physical plant. Finally, there are the court officers—the men and women in blue uniforms who provide security and protection. And beyond these 400 or so employees, there are the thousands of people who visit the courthouse every day: lawyers, litigants, prospective jurors, delivery people, and plain old sightseers. Quite a daily population for drawing inspiration or stimulating the imagination.

The continuing character in these stories is a court officer named Foxx, whose back story is deliberately vague. He began his career as a court officer in Bronx Criminal Court, where he was charged with dereliction of duty for “losing” a juror during an overnight sequestration. His union lawyer, a woman named Bev Caruso, settled the disciplinary proceeding for an unpaid two-month suspension and a transfer from Bronx Criminal Court to the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Years later, when the stories are set, Bev is now the Inspector General of the courts, while Foxx, is a seasoned court officer who doubles as her undercover agent.

In several of the stories, Foxx “looks into things” at the behest of Bev. Most of these “things” involve corruption or ham-handed attempts at corruption. In other stories, Foxx discovers wrongs he feels compelled to right.

What generates these stories? Where do I search out the ideas that I can spin into fiction? Rarely do these stories involve the cases I observed during my tenure as law clerk or the tabloid headlines a courthouse often generates. Instead, I focus my attention on representative characters within the courthouse hierarchy. What might their issues be? What might they want most, or least? Ultimately, what bubbles into my consciouness is a clash between characters, either from different strata or within a single stratum. So far the stories have focused on: a judge’s spouse [“A Small Circle”]; chambers staff [“Midnight”]; a courtroom clerk [“Black Hole Devotion” ]; a confidential secretary [“Work Lovers” ]; a custodian [“Reconciliation”]; a retired judge [“Term Life”]; a court aide [“The Heist”]; a dying court officer [“The Book of Judges”]; a coffee shop employee [“The Movie Lover”]; a corrupt law clerk [“The Courthouse Paperboy”]; a self-represented litigant [“The Harbinger”]; and a lovesick court officer [“Buds”].

In “Second Chance,” I turned to a pair of long-time friends and law school classmates. One is a well-respected judge; the other is a legal department staff attorney. The story begins when the staff attorney, Richard Heiser, fails to show up for his monthly lunch with Hon. Edmund Greenstreet. The judge becomes concerned—and because a judge is now concerned, Bev becomes involved. Her solution is to dispatch Foxx to find the missing man.     

Foxx begins his investigation by questioning the judge and his law clerk. The judge’s reaction to his friend’s disappearance strikes Foxx as odd; he seems more annoyed than concerned that Heiser has gone missing and insulted that the IG has sent a lowly court officer rather than a polished investigator. The law clerk remains conspicuously silent during this brief meeting. Foxx then interviews Heiser’s department head, who suspects that Heiser has been spiraling into a depression because the court system’s adoption of AI technology has rendered his particular skills—he is considered to be an amazingly creative wordsmith of legal writing—obsolete. Foxx, still troubled by his conversation with Judge Greenstreet, circles back to the law clerk. He knows that a chambers is a high-stress working environment and that the law clerk’s silence during the interview could mask a simmering antipathy. His intuition proves correct. Meeting with the law clerk alone, he quickly gets her to dish about the judge’s unhappy marriage and greedy adult children. She also provides a significant clue: Heiser owns no cell phone and routinely calls the chambers land-line on the same day of the week to confirm the monthly lunch date. Foxx, lurking after hours, finds the call on the chambers voice-mail log. This call becomes the strand that unravels the mystery of Heiser’s disappearance. And, without giving anything away, what Heiser wants most is what Judge Greenstreet wants least.

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Kevin Egan is the author of 50 short stories, including 23 that have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. He is also the author of eight novels, including the noir-ish legal thriller Midnight, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013.

“Circumstantial Evidence” came about from two personal experiences of mine.  In 1992, I bicycled solo across the United States.  On August 12, 1992, I happened to cycle through Vega, Texas on their “Round Up” day.  Vega was a small town of maybe 1000 people.  But they put on quite a show what with the softball tournament, invitation Rodeo, the parade down Main Street and a bar-b-cue out in front of the town’s courthouse.  The other incident was a murder investigation I covered as a newspaper reporter for a small paper in Connecticut.  It seemed like a good idea to combine the two stories.  West Texas and the characters I met gave me the perfect stereotypes to play off of.  And as far as the murderer goes, he made only one mistake by overlooking the obvious.

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“Circumstantial Evidence” marks Eric B. Ruark’s third appearance in AHMM.  Currently he is supposed to be retired but is working on a series of sci-fi/mystery novels called Conquest of the Stars.  For your listening pleasure, he has recorded several of his other mysteries which can be found on Audible and over 50 other audiobook sites.

There’s no getting away from it. Writing a novel or a short story is a strange thing to do. 

You spend long periods of time inside your head, but that’s not claustrophobic, because inside your head there are entire worlds, complete living and breathing people, conflicts and dramas that nobody else will ever feel as fully as the writer does. If we’re good, we’ll manage to capture some of that in words that will allow other people to share those worlds and characters and dramas—at least to some extent—but it’s never the same. 

Unless you’ve written stories, it’s hard to convey that. The closest I can get is when you compare watching a film to reading the book it was based on. The film has its own aspects that you can’t capture in a written story, but generally, losing yourself in a story brings more depth and detail, more power of emotions. The difference between reading a novel and writing one is comparable: a similar stepping up in intensity and verisimilitude. Writing a book is so much more real than reading one.

But there’s another category that fits into this spectrum somewhere: the books we will never write.

One of the most commonly asked questions of a writer is “Where do you get your ideas?” And if there’s one real trade secret in the writing world it is that coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part. Writers have ideas spilling out of their ears. We have notebooks crammed with them; or nowadays, lots of us have files on our computers and phones and other devices that are just as crammed as those old notebooks were. Most of our ideas never get developed into stories, because we simply don’t have the time.

Out of that pool of ideas, there are the initial sparks of the ones we go on to write, and there are the ones we will never write; but also, there are the ones that will very nearly get written. We can spend, weeks, months, even years in odd moments here and there, coming back to a particular idea and adding notes, expanding that idea until we have bloated files full of the things we need to know, or find out, if we ever get to turn that idea into a fully fledged story. 

Sometimes that’s just an early stage in eventually sitting down and writing the story itself, but often it stalls. The idea doesn’t quite come to life. Or we realise that it’s too similar to an existing story. Or another idea jumps the queue and demands to be written. Or we get sidetracked by working with a publisher on something else we’ve already written that needs editing and polishing for publication. There can be any number of reasons why an idea a writer has put a lot of work into might miss that moment of peak excitement when it simply has to be written, and slides off into the long twilight of wouldn’t it have been nice to write that one?

Those books don’t cease to exist, though. They vie for space in my head, alongside all the stories I’ve actually written: like memories of holidays and old friends, these stories and nearly-stories are about people I know intimately, set in places I know inside out; they’re part of who I am. (A writer never stops being a writer, because even if you’re no longer putting words down on paper the act of having been a writer has created the mental structures of who that person is.)

Those books, the stalled, incomplete worlds and characters that have possessed my thoughts for long periods of time, might not be as fully formed as something I’ve gone on to spend months and years actually writing, but they’re there. They’re part of who I am. In my head as I write this—the thing that prompted this little essay—is a mystery trilogy set during the Blitz. I’ve written a short story that, with a lot of hacking about, would serve as the opening of a novel. In my head, I know where that novel goes, I know the characters that leap to life from that initial short story, and the ones who we will later learn to distrust and even despise. I know where a follow-up novel will go, albeit in less fleshed-out detail, and, most importantly, I know how this second book will bring to the fore elements of back story touched on in the first book. And I know how all these threads come together in a third novel, that will bring that back story out front-of-stage, and big issues will be confronted and, to varying degrees, resolved.

All of this is in my head and in some files on my computer, and along with a million other things I’ve been working on it for three or four years. 

It won’t get written though. In doing all this work to explore and build up the stories and characters, I’ve realised that too many elements of it have been done before by others. Maybe one day I’ll work out how to twist it away from those other stories, but there are so many other ideas to explore, I know that’s becoming increasingly unlikely. 

In all likelihood, that trilogy will never get written. 

But it exists. In my head, in those files of notes. In the three or four years that I’ve kept coming back to it. I know the characters, I know the settings, more vivid than many people and places I’ve actually known. It’s more real to me than a film, more real to me than a story I might have read, but less real than if I’d actually written it. But it’s there, and my life has been much richer for knowing it, and experiencing it. 

So yes, there’s no getting away from it. Writing a story or a novel is a strange process. But not writing one can be just as weird.

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Nick Guthrie is a crime writer based in East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, and his short fiction has sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other magazines and anthologies. Under other writing names, he is the author of more than twenty books, and his work has been shortlisted for various awards and optioned for the movies. You can find out more about Nick and his work at www.nickguthrie.co.uk and at Bluesky and Instagram.

My mother was not much of a disciplinarian. Most of my childhood memories are of her seated in an easy chair with a cigarette and a cup of coffee, reading her newest find from the public library.

Maybe seeing her consume all those murder mysteries was enough of a threat to keep us kids in line. Mom surely knew things about hiding bodies.

After working my way through Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series, and being profoundly influenced by Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, I was running thin on reading materials. 

What was so fascinating that Mom had to be torn away from her novel by clamoring, hungry kids?

First and foremost, Mom was an avid fan of Erma Bombeck, author of The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank (1976). Bombeck wrote non-fiction about suburban life with a wry sense of humor matching my mother’s.

Second in the lineup was the Dorothy Gilman Mrs. Pollifax series. There are fourteen books in the series, and I’m certain Mom read every one. Multiple times.

Emily Pollifax is a depressed empty-nester widow who desperately needs to find a purpose in her golden years. In a totally unlikely series of events, she ends up going on a courier mission for the CIA. Emily quickly proves her worth, and becomes an agent.

I realize the appeal now. Mom spent her twenties through forties saddled with a pack of unruly children (despite the implied threat of the tutorial from all those murder mysteries). I can’t say she ever had grand expectations for a life of adventure. Or even the desire. She seemed perfectly content to travel with Mrs. Pollifax to exotic locations from the comfort of her armchair. 

I had to understand the mystique. So I picked up book one, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. And I was hooked. I’m not the only fan. Blogger and reviewer Mark Baker named his website Carstairs Considers after Mrs. Pollifax’s boss.

Blame Dorothy Gilman. I slowly delved into the world of mystery. Surprisingly, not spy novels. Mrs. Pollifax was my gateway drug to the cozy mystery world.

During a college literature class, I had the revelation that I did not want to make my life’s work studying and writing about other authors. I wanted to BE an author like Dorothy Gilman. I wanted to write cozy-flavored adventures. 

The decision to not enter academia lead me down a path of blue-collar jobs. But some of that drudgery inspired future short stories (my Charles Jerome Harrison and Marlin Hammerbach factory-based stories appear in AHMM). I eventually had a nice career in environmental compliance. A regulatory paperwork sort of drudgery, but better paying than factory floor labor.

My brother took the Gilman influence in a different direction. He decided he wanted to be a spy. But the CIA wanted him to experience military service first. By this time, he was married and starting a family. Apparently, walking into CIA headquarters and offering your services didn’t work like it had for Mrs. Pollifax. He changed directions to become a lawyer.

Mom never did attempt to become a spy. Or an author. She was content to read about adventure, not pursue it. And that may be the greatest impact Dorothy Gilman had on me.

There is a world of readers who want to be entertained. Romance author Nancy Naigle describes that her writing career “all started with a desire to write one book to help one busy gal through one bad day.” 

There is nobility and purpose in quietly living your life. I’m an author, but I take the same relief from life’s pressures in the enjoyment of other writers’ good tales. It doesn’t have to be deep. It doesn’t have to be long. Just take me on an adventure.

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Catherine Dilts debuted in 2013 with the short story The Jolly Fat Man, set in a factory. Since then, ten of her stories have appeared in AHMM. Number eleven, Real Cowgirls Like It Hot, takes place during a farmers’ market hot sauce contest. Catherine writes the Rose Creek cozy mystery series, and a YA science fiction series co-authored with her daughter under the pen name Ann Belice, The Tapestry Tales. https://www.catherinedilts.com/ 

I love dogs.

I love my first dog, Olo, who would wait up at 1 a.m. to greet me when I came home from my ER shift.

I love my now-dog Roxy, whom I adored from the first moment she lick-lick-licked my hand in the shelter.

Yet it didn’t occur to me to write short dog mysteries until author Kristine Kathryn Rusch asked me to create a story from a canine perspective. I penned “My Two-Legs,” where Star, a yellow lab/golden retriever, inspired by Olo, rescues her human. It was published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and won the Derringer Award, was shortlisted for the Macavity Award, and longlisted for the Staunch Prize. Cool!

For some reason, probably because I’m dense, I didn’t write a related tale until Hitchcock’s Editor in Chief, Linda Landrigan, mentioned that she’d enjoy another doggy detective story from me.

Huh!

How could a second dog solve a mystery? And why?

I researched dogs and crimes and was astonished to learn that, since 2022, the most popular breed in the United States, overtaking the Labrador retriever, is the French bulldog. No wonder people stole Lady Gaga’s two “Frenchies” in 2021.

Should I focus on a doggy kidnapping?

I imagined a French bulldog named Claude. Claude began to grow on me, with his snuffly breathing, his stubby little legs, and his penchant for sleeping.

I also felt for his human, Mrs. Lee, who doted on Claude in her Montreal apartment.

How would the villains separate Claude from Mrs. Lee?

How could Claude save himself and foil the villains? My family has never adopted anything but big, active, loving rescue dogs. I’m not familiar with purebreds with built-in health problems like respiratory disorders and skin fold dermatitis.

But I loved the idea of a tiny canine hero who might fight the odds in order to save the day, reunite with his human, and nibble on a treat.

Then I turned my pen to a third dog, inspired by our rescue mountain cur, Bell. When we adopted her, she was so thin that her ribs were showing, and she would watch us scoop up her food like it was a magic show. But that’s literally another story.

I hope you enjoy “For Love and Bacon,” in Alfred Hitchcock’s September/October issue.

In the meantime, please hug your dogs. Treasure their soft ears and huge hearts. I will never get over their unconditional love and loyalty. Dogs and books for the win!

Write what you know, they say. So, I did. I wrote about a schoolboy who rides his bicycle across town for his weekly piano lessons (as I did for several years in the early 1970s). One afternoon, en route to a lesson, the schoolboy discovers the dead body of one of his schoolteachers—the man has been murdered. And there begins my new mystery short story: “Murder in F-Sharp.”

Write what you don’t know. Just to clarify, I’ve never discovered a dead body. Although I once thought I had, and it was on a bike ride to a piano lesson—it was just a drunk guy lying in the weeds in a narrow alleyway between streets.

In my story, Thomas Phipps is a high school student in 1950s Henderson, New Zealand (my hometown). Henderson is a suburb in the western district of Auckland city. Thomas is taking piano lessons, but he doesn’t like them. My piano teacher twice asked me if I would prefer to switch to learning “modern”—I was learning classical. I was 12, and I didn’t appreciate the difference. Thomas Phipps, 16, is learning classical, but he really wants to play jazz.

Jazz was the thing in New Zealand in the 1950s. Contrary to popular misconception (the filter of nostalgia), 1950s Auckland wasn’t rock and roll, Presley, Haley, et al. Had you hung out in an Auckland city milk bar or coffee shop, you would have heard the cool people listening to jazz on the jukebox. Rock and roll didn’t land until well into the ’60s.

And naturally, anything young people like (be it jazz or rock and roll) is immediately hated by their parents. This counter-culture clash—for want of better words, this generation gap—is the central conflict in my story that runs underneath the mystery of the murder.  

“Is this a YA story?”

This was asked by someone who read a draft before I submitted the story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. You could make a case that “Murder in F-Sharp” a Young Adult story—a teenage boy wants something that’s antithetical to his father and his piano teacher. But I didn’t write it with any intention to be YA fiction. And it’s not the first time I’ve been asked the question. Ten of my published short stories have featured protagonists in the 12–20 age range. Except for two (written for Mystery Writers of America YA anthologies) the rest were written for anyone to read—young or old. Honestly, aside from wanting to make a story readable and exciting, I don’t give much thought to the reader’s age.

Which brings me to my book.

After twenty years of writing short stories, I’m pleased to report that my first mystery novel, THE BRIDE MUST BE STOPPED! goes to print at the end of this year.

Thornton Thacker—a Philip Marlowe-esque teenage detective—his sister, and their two best friends follow a trail of Egyptian hieroglyphics and a missing mummy, and find themselves up against ancient supernatural forces, with Thacker’s girlfriend’s life at stake. 

Set in the 1950s in the US, The Bride Must Be Stopped! is the first novel in my Mean City Mysteries series.

My pitch for the series was: Imagine if the Famous Five novels had been written by Raymond Chandler. (The Famous Five was a series of British adventure/mystery novels written in the 1940s and ’50s. Of comparison in the US would be the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mysteries.)

The protagonist of my book is a high school student, and again it’s not a YA story; I wrote it for anyone to enjoy—anyone who likes a mystery/thriller with a tall serving of noir. Also again, the protagonist is a musician. He plays upright bass in a jazz quartet. Hey, I’m a musician (piano and electric guitar). I write what I know.

Readers of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine over the last 16 years are likely already aware of Julius Katz, but I’d like to introduce my Boston-based detective to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine readers who are encountering Julius for the first time in Julius Katz Draws a Straight Flush. Julius Katz, as the name implies, is a homage of sorts to Nero Wolfe, as is the name of his erstwhile assistant, Archie. So are the slightly twisted names of the three PIs Julius often makes use of: Tom Durkin, Saul Penzer, and Willie Cather, and the homicide detective Julius frequently butts heads with: Detective Mark Cramer. There are other similarities, such as Julius being brilliant but innately lazy, and frequently needing to be pestered by his assistant, Archie, to take jobs so he can continue to enjoy his desired lifestyle. Both men like fine food—although Julius frequently dines out at Boston’s finest restaurants, while Nero enjoys food prepared by either himself, Fritz, or the two of them in collaboration. Both are avid readers. There are also countless differences. Julius owns a townhouse in Boston’s Beacon Hill district, Nero Wolfe a brownstone in Manhattan. Julius is handsome, physically fit, holds a fifth-degree black belt in Kung fu, and spends two hours each morning engaged in an intensive martial arts workout, Nero Wolfe is famously one-seventh of a ton and tends to avoid all exercise except for potting orchids. Julius, at least until he meets Lily Rosten and is smitten by her, is a womanizer, Nero Wolfe is not. Nero has a staff including Fritz (his chef) and Theodore (his orchid nurse) living in his brownstone, Julius lives alone. Julius preferred activities (excluding women): poker (and occasionally horse races when he’s given a tip about a fixed race) and collecting expensive wine; Nero Wolfe: orchids, fine cuisine, and drinking beer.

About Julius and his wine—I’m more like Nero Wolfe on that regard. I prefer beer, although I prefer bourbon to either of those. When I occasionally order a glass of wine with dinner, I know just enough about wine to know that I like Malbec. The reasons I made Julius an oenophile (and, yes, I needed to look that up!) were (1) to draw yet another distinction between Julius and Nero Wolfe, (2) to give Julius an expensive hobby to provide impetus for him taking on a job. I wrote the first Julius Katz story in 2008, and if I realized then how expensive single-barrel bourbon could be (if it was that expensive in 2008??) I would have made Julius a bourbon drinker/collector. But I didn’t, and hence I’ve been needing to do a fair amount of wine research with most of my Julius Katz stories.

Where Julius Katz mysteries are most like Nero Wolfe’s are in the structure of the mysteries. A murder is committed, a group of suspects are interrogated, Archie gathers evidence, occasionally Julius hires one or more of his preferred PIs to perform a task of some sort, frequently Julius will butt heads with Cramer, and all the suspects will be gathered into Julius’s office where he’ll point out the guilty party. And of course, Julius will always be two or three steps ahead of Archie. Where they’re next most alike is that they’re both narrated by an Archie, and that’s also where they’re most different. Nero Wolfe’s Archie is Archie Goodwin, a wisecracking detective with the heart and soul of a hard-boiled PI. Julius’s Archie is a piece of AI that Julius wears as a tie clasp, although also with the heart and soul of a hard-boiled PI.

Below is how Archie describes himself in the first Julius Katz mystery titled aptly “Julius Katz”:

My name isn’t really “Archie”. During my time with Julius I’ve grown to think of myself as Archie, the same as I’ve grown to imagine myself as a five-foot-tall, heavyset man with thinning hair, but in reality I’m not five feet tall, nor do I have the bulk that I imagine myself having, and I certainly don’t have any hair, thinning or otherwise. I also don’t have a name, only a serial identification number. Julius calls me Archie, and for whatever reason it seems right; besides, it’s quicker to say than the eighty-four-digit serial identification number that has been burnt into me. You’ve probably already guessed that I’m not human, and certainly not anything organic. What I am is a one- by two-inch rectangular-shaped piece of space-aged computer technology that’s twenty years more advanced than what’s currently considered theoretically possible—at least aside from whatever lab created me. How Julius acquired me, I have no clue. Whenever I’ve tried asking him, he jokes around, telling me he won me in a poker game. It could be true—I wouldn’t know since I have no memory of my time before Julius.

Are my Julius Katz stories a Nero Wolfe pastiche? Merriam-Webster defines pastiche as:

“a literary, artistic, musical, or architectural work that imitates the style of previous work,” and given that definition I’d say no. Julius Katz has clearly been inspired by Nero Wolfe, and is more of a nod to those great mysteries, but there has been no attempt on my part to imitate Rex Stout’s style. Are they a Nero Wolfe parody? Again, going to Merriam-Webster, we have the definition: “a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule,” and given that, I’d say definitely no. Again, there’s no imitation, and each story is as well-crafted a mystery story as I’m capable of writing. While I’ve heard from a number of Nero Wolfe fans about how much they enjoy these stories, I think it’s not because of any familiarity with the names, but that there’s a comfort in the world I’ve created for Julius and Archie, as well as in the interplay between the two of them, and ultimately in watching a genius detective solve a nearly impossible case.

Julius Katz Draws a Straight Flush is what I’m calling the first of the “early” stories. After 19 Julius Katz mystery stories and one novel, the series reached a natural conclusion. But after a short break from Julius and Archie, I realized I missed spending time with the two of them and decided to write stories that take place before the first one (“Julius Katz”). In these stories, Julius hasn’t met Lily yet, and so there’s a slightly different Julius than what readers have so far experienced. While I recognize that this might blur the line between Julius and Nero Wolfe somewhat, especially after writing an article attempting to unblur that line, to try to make these early stories more fun for Nero Wolfe fans, each of them have a connection of some sort to a Nero Wolfe novel. In any case, this has made it more fun (and challenging) for me to write. It shouldn’t be too hard for Nero Wolfe fans to figure out the connection for this first one, but they do get harder to spot!

Many fiction writers find they need to hold down some other job to pay the bills. Writers are advised to make it as different as possible, such as waiting on tables, or as related as possible, working at some other kind of writing, perhaps business manuals or advertising copy. 

My own 15-year adventure in computer programming—mainframes, big business computers in the years before widespread use of personal computers—proved to be a poor choice as a companion job. It was all-consuming time wise, and also scratched a certain creative itch, not completely, but enough so that writing fell by the wayside.

But when we moved to the northwestern Catskills in the nineties I landed in a perfect situation for me—a part-time job that would also serve as classroom and that intensified the itch that needed to be scratched.

Just seven miles from my house, on a road with two houses on it, pretty much qualifying it as “in the middle of nowhere,” a small Mom and Pop type business specialized in book layout for university presses—UPNE, SUNY, and several others. Do not assume size and location indicate a lack of sophistication or experience. Both partners had spent years at McGraw Hill and the wife had spent further years at Oxford University Press, New York. These were people who knew books. 

Initially I was tasked with inputting manuscript corrections, allowing me to see the changes the editor wanted. Lesson number one very quickly became obvious: about 75% of the occurrences of the word “which’ should have been “that”; the reverse is also true. Another thing that seeing hundreds of edited manuscripts teaches you is to be careful to avoid the incomplete change. An author decides to change something in a sentence, but doesn’t notice the effect that change has on some other part of the sentence or a related sentence. Another word should have been deleted or its tense or number should have changed for consistency. It became a game to try to determine what the sentence had said before the change. 

Not all of the books were great, but all presented opportunities to read or at least skim through material I might not have otherwise chosen. Some were so great I’ll remember them forever.

The manuscript for one job of correction inputting was so funny I would read bits aloud to my two coworkers, who would almost fall off their chairs laughing while I, choking back laughter, struggled to say the words. A bit over twenty years later, that book, Percival Everett’s Erasure became the movie American Fiction. And while the film stayed fairly close to the book, some of its funniest parts could only exist on the page—little philosophical asides on the nature of language and communication presented as puns and jokes.

Most books came as electronic files, on floppy disks during the first few years, with the corrections marked on a paper copy. But a few books had to be typed. I input hundreds of poems from tear sheets for a collection by an author whose name I didn’t recognize. About halfway through the project I found myself thinking, “This guy can write!” The “About the Author” section at the end of Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 confirmed my assessment—Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa can indeed write.

Eventually I learned how to do layout. That little company is no more, but I still do layout for a few friends and private clients who self-publish. For someone who loves books, the ability to make one is a treasured skill, a gift from lovely people. Considering the depth of their knowledge, I doubt they taught me everything they knew, but they surely taught me everything I know about making a book.