SleuthSayers

The Unique Art of Wifredo Lam

2026-05-25T00:01:00.152-04:00

Wifredo Lam Self-Portrait

Last fall, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced a retrospective exhibition of the work of Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. (His mother was Congolese and Spanish, his father Chinese.) But what caught my attention was an article in the newsletter of the Archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALBA), which detailed Lam's participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, when idealistic )social democrats and Communists banded together in a doomed attempt to stop a takeover by General Franco and his allies, Hitler and Mussolini.

The Civil War

From this perspective, "it was Republican Spain, where Lam frequented left-wing circles and read Marxist literature, which first politicized the painter. Lam rejected the Eurocentric primitivism of much modernist art, which he denounced for commodifying non-European cultures as objects of curiosity. In Lam’s paintings, Afro-Cuban culture speaks back. Toward the end of his life, he described his work as 'an act of decolonization.'” In Paris, Lam had close ties with Picasso and other European artists and writers. His painting, The Civil War, conveys the same anguish and chaos as Picasso's Guernica. Lam's, like many of his later works, was painted on brown wrapping paper, because canvas was expensive.

Lam and Picasso

On his return to Cuba in 1941, Lam became involved in Afro-Cuban culture and spirituality, both the Négritude movement of poet and theoretician Aimé Césaire and the spiritual practice of Lucumi. He said, “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but fully expressing the black spirit, the beauty of black [visual] art.” (wifredolam.org/biography) His magnificent painting, The Jungle, the centerpiece of the 2025-26 MoMA show, created a scandal at one of its first showings at a gallery in New York. When the Museum first acquired it in 1945, they hung it inconspicuously next to the coat check. Lam said, “I could have been a good painter from the School of Paris, but I felt like a snail out of its shell. What really broadened my painting is the presence of African poetry.”

Enough words. The paintings speak for themselves. I'm sorry if you missed the MoMA exhibition, which ended on April 11. I don't always have a visceral experience at the art museum, but I found Lam's work thrilling and unique.

The Jungle

Oggue Orissa

Body and Soul

Song of Osmoses (Bombing of Hiroshima)

Malembo, God of Crossroads

Grief of Spain references both the Civil War and images of African masks that influenced the Cubists in Paris. Lam would later criticize them for appropriating African motifs.

I fell in love with the colors and complexities of The Jungle. Here are some details of the larger painting.

The Urge to Kill

2026-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

My ancestry is Scottish. I was born in New Zealand, but my family line (on both sides) is only a couple of steps out from Scottish soil. So, it wasn't random that I set a large chunk of my latest short story, Alan Duncan Did This, in Edinburgh (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2026). My story is about a Scotsman, Alan Duncan, who travels down to London on Guy Fawkes night (1949) to commit a murder. A murder he's quite proud of. A murder he ranks as a work of art.

Fletcher's murder had been a work of magnificence. Alan almost wished he could have signed it. With a bold, florid flourish, like Salvador Dali. Alan Duncan did this.

Vanity? Yep. A villain's vanity was a common theme in Agatha Christie's mysteries; it was often her villain's downfall. Anyway, in this post, I don't want to chat about Scotland or a murderer's vanity, but about motive. Alan Duncan had a good, cogent reason to commit his murder. Killers in fiction should.

Detectives are always looking for means, motive, and opportunity. But in real life, motive is the lessor of these in criminal investigations. It's not required for establishing guilt or gaining a conviction. It's nice for the prosecutor to have one in their basket going into a courtroom, but it's unnecessary to prove. For writers of mysteries, however, motive is the central key to a character's actions. It's the engine on which a story is propelled.

People don't commit murders for weak reasons in fiction. Without a strong, compelling motive, a character's actions reek of implausibility. Yes, in the real world, killers can and do commit murders for no reason, but that doesn't really fly in fiction (there are exceptions, so I'm speaking in general). Spoiler: Imagine if the killers in Murder on the Orient Express had meticulously plotted and killed Ratchett/Cassetti because he stole Princess Dragomiroff's polo mallet. Weak sauce.

Strong and clear motives engage the reader. And audience. Shakespeare was a master of this.

Macbeth (back to Scotland) murders King Duncan through ambition; he wants the crown, and to allay the doubts of his wife and demonstrate his power. His motives are ambition and ego.
Richard (Richard III) needs nought from a wife to spur him to action; his ambition has no hesitation when he orders the murder of, or personally dispatches, a succession of nobility to the hereafter. His motivation is also revenge against the world. He is a man bitter with resentment.
Iago (Othello) is also motivated by resentment (Othello's promoting of Cassio rather than himself), and sex (the suspicion that Othello has slept with his wife). “I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leaped into my seat.” Envy is Iago's principal motivation. He envies everything about Othello. And it's true that Iago doesn't actually murder Othello, but he does systematically destroy Othello and lead him to kill his own wife. Revenge writ large.

These are all strong motivators because they are plausible in their contexts and thoroughly human. We might not condone a character's actions, but we instinctively understand their reasoning.

It's often remarked that sex or money are the most common motives for murder in crime fiction. Cherchez la femme. Cherchez la dollar. Here's my stab (see what I did there?) at a start of a murder motive taxonomy based on these two headings:

SEX	MONEY
Jealousy Betrayal Humiliation Obsession Eliminating a rival	Inheritance Insurance payout Freedom from a debt Property acquisition Career advancement

To sex and money, as per Shakespeare above, I would add revenge.

Revenge is often egged on by sex or money. Alan Duncan's motive is revenge by way of sex – jealousy and obsession. He focuses his whole life on seeking revenge because of his jealousy. Murder is his only release from his idée fixe.

Revenge can also stand alone. Spoilers: Murder on the Orient Express is a murder of plain and simple revenge. The actions of the killers are not invoked because of sex or money (however, what they are avenging was a crime involving money (a ransom)).

This is only the tip of the iceberg of murder motives. Do you have a favourite when you write, maybe one that isn't in this list?

Why would ANYONE want to write a Novel? (a humorous post)

2026-05-23T00:30:00.186-04:00

Wacky thoughts as my 21st novel hits bookstores across the continent...

I actually wrote my first novel on a dare. This is not a particularly good reason to embark on such an endeavor, and probably illustrates exactly why my kids think I shouldn’t be allowed outside of the condo without a leash.

But true, it is. Some years ago, I was having a good time at the bar of the Toronto Press Club, and a local columnist (an older guy) said to me, “You’ve written comedy, you’re a syndicated columnist, and you’ve got a slew of short story publications to your name. Why haven’t you written a novel?”

Upshot, he dared me. Since then, I have sworn off scotch and older men.

That doesn’t tell the whole story though.

I love writing fiction. I wrote my first story at eight, and won my first award at eighteen.

It started even before that. At four, I was making up stories. My parents called it lying. I figure that was short-sighted of them.

Still, after 21 books, I have to ask myself, Why would ANYONE want to write a novel? Truly, I don't understand why so many people do.

Writing a short story is FUN!

Writing a novel is HARD.

It takes me a year to write a 70,000 word novel. Tons of research and 1000 hours of slumping over a keyboard. This is a peculiar way to spend your time. Wouldn’t it be more fun to be out on the golf course? Or meeting friends for lunch?

Speaking of friends...my pal and colleague Lisa de Nikolits puts it so well:

"I keep telling myself it's an honour and a privilege to still be on the playing field while so many others aren't and that's true, but still - more work rewarded by more work!"

(Lisa joins us in June for a guest column.)

I suspect new novelists like to think they will achieve fame with a novel, that they couldn’t achieve with a collection of published short stories in respectable magazines. I don’t know about that. That hasn't been my experience. You can have ten awards, and continual contracts and still not be a household name.

Not to mention, everybody who can sit at a keyboard feels they have the right to criticize your year's work.

So why do I do it? I really have to wonder. I'm not sure the answer below will satisfy even me.

I seem to have this mental illness that involves characters in my head demanding that I write their stories. If I try to ignore them, it gets awfully noisy in there, and I can’t think.

Or put another way, writing novels is cheaper than a therapist.

Melodie Campbell fights with her characters while thumping out their stories on the shore of Lake Ontario. Her 21^st book, The Pharaoh’s Curse Murders, is now available at B&N, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo and all the usual suspects.. If you like the humour in The Goddaughter series, look for Pizza Wars, first in a new novella-length series!

The Unintended Benefits of Reading Nonfiction, Pt. Deux

2026-05-22T01:45:07.016-04:00

Last time around I talked about nonfiction books that had helped make me a better writer, influenced my style, made me think, etc. And when I asked some writer friends about nonfiction that influenced their own writing.

Several of my friends wrote about writing craft books that helped them, and I posted examples of both in my last blog post which you can find here.

This go-round I'm back with more examples of both types of recommendations. I hope you find something interesting and useful here.

* * *

Writer, Editor, Publisher & Communication Guru David Schlosser had quite a bit to say on the subject:

If I had only one book, it would be The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. For all the chatter and
conventional wisdom we hear about "narrative" and how humans are genetically wired to respond to stories more than facts, this book explains the actual mechanisms of action:

If I had more than one book, it would be two series of three books that I often tell colleagues, "If you read these books, you will learn everything you need to know about being a professional communicator of any kind - from PR and marketing to writing novels."

Series One

The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr explains how stories affect humans at a cellular level:

Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story by John Yorke explains how patterns of storytelling affect the audience and, IMHO, the right approach to what conventional wisdom frequently and inaccurately refers to as "the three-act structure."

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee translates Storr's and Yorke's strategic insights into tactics that put storytelling meat on structural bones. For all the good sport made of McKee's formulaic approach, this book is a classic for a reason.

Series Two

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman explains through research and study findings the cognitive
biases created by the human affinity for telling stories. Kahneman explains Storr's sources of the evolutionary biology that tunes humans to ignore facts and follow emotions.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini is the refence bible for anyone and everyone in the industry of motivating people to action. Cialdini wrote this book as a manual for people to resist the strategies and tactics of snake-oil salesmen and related hucksters. No consumer advocate ever sought his advice, but now he's among the highest-paid speakers at sales conferences around the world.

Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense by Rory Sutherland explains how and why irrationality is the path to success in storytelling. This book is a breezy, entertaining flight over the terrain mapped by Kahneman and Cialdini.

* * *

Edgar-Nominated Author Sam Wiebe was much more succinct:

(Literary Critic Harold) Bloom is a great choice!

(For obvious reasons, I quite agree! - again see my last post here.)

Book: Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

Why: Goldman's no-bullshit discussion of the film industry and his screenwriting projects is funny and fascinating.

* * *

Mary Higgins Clark Award-Winning Author Lina Chern had a great pick:

Book: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Why: We forget sometimes that this book is nonfiction, because the story it tells is so impeccably told. It’s a stunning reminder that all life has the potential to be art, in the hands of the right storyteller.

* * *

Horror Writer Scotti Andrews picked one of the most acclaimed nonfiction authors of the past two decades:

I don't read a lot of nonfiction but I have read Jon Krakauer and really appreciate how he weaves facts into a storytelling arc. Especially Under the Banner of Heaven and Three Cups of Deceit.

* * *

Agatha Award-Winning Author Kate B. Jackson cited a classic of the writing craft genre:

Book: The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface by Donald Maass

So the reason I like Donald Maass' book is he takes an interesting approach to having an emotional impact. He talks a lot of how each reader is bringing their own stuff to what they read. How you don't necessarily want to the reader to take the journey with your character but you want to provide space for them to take their own journey.

He also talks about how your character's experience doesn't usually translate to the reader unless you give opportunities for the reader to have their own experiences.

Show don't tell but also don't try to control what you want someone to feel.

* * *

And that's it for now. Hope you saw something that inspired you or at least made you think!

See you in two weeks!

Literary Influences: Nelson Algren

2026-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00

I'm delighted Tom Milani is joining us today to talk about literary influences. Here's more from Tom:

Literary Influences: Nelson Algren

by Tom Milani

Tom Milani

I first read about Nelson Algren in an editorial in the old Washington Star shortly after his death on May 9, 1981. The editorial included a quote by Hemmingway on the power of Algren’s writing: “Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around, and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.” [1] It ended by noting that Algren had died alone. I wanted to know more.

I was in college at the time, and one of my English professors picked up a used hardback copy of The Man with the Golden Arm for me at Second Story Books in Georgetown (I think it cost $3). Hemmingway’s endorsement suggested lean, muscular prose. But Algren had produced something entirely different.

Frankie Machine, the novel’s protagonist, a card dealer, sometime drummer, and morphine addict, is one of the underclass, barely getting by. Algren doesn’t portray Frankie and his friends as noble because they are poor, but he expounds at length on what their poverty means in a capitalistic society:

The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own. … With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last… [2]

I read those lines over forty years ago and am still struck by how Algren dignified his subjects by writing about them lyrically. For him, the poor weren’t props, stand-ins for the evils of capitalism; instead, they were characters in their own right, for better or worse. And Algren didn’t shy away from the worse—he’d experienced his share of poverty and had been in jail for a petty crime—his descriptions not the product of a fervid imagination but rather lived experience.

The Man with the Golden Arm was Algren’s most famous work, winning him the first National Book Award, but Never Come Morning, published five years earlier, in 1942, put him on the literary map. The cover of my Avon paperback edition is pure pulp: Two sneering young men on a stairwell look down at a teenage girl sitting on a box spring; between them a muscular young man tries unsuccessfully to stare down the boys. The cover screams: TEEN-AGE TRAGEDY! The Great Novel of JUVENILE DELINQUENCY. The story is tragic, but that tragedy is the result of characters who can’t escape their circumstances:

The world of Never Come Morning is a finely rendered, gray-hued, fatalistic place populated by angry, hungry young people whose lives are governed by rules that are clear, though impossible to abide by. Not one of them is innocent. They prey foremost upon each other, but also upon the wider world, and they acknowledge responsibility for their actions and pay for them. The reader might empathize with or fear them, but they are above pity, victimhood, or stereotype. [3]

Years later, H.E.F. Donohue asked Algren why he’d written the books he’d written. Algren answered that he’d “tried to catch the emotional ebb and flow and something of the fear and terror and the dangers and the kind of life that multitudes of people have been forced into with no recognition that such a world existed.” [4]

Algren wrote other books, both fiction and nonfiction, and for a while was famous.

But The Devil’s Stocking, his novel about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, was first published in Germany and not with an American publisher until after his death.

I’ve written at CrimeReads about how James M. Cain was my gateway drug into writing crime fiction, but I think Algren’s empathy for his characters and his ability to dignify them with lyrical prose were foundational in my development as a writer.

Who were your literary influences, and what did you take from them? Please let me know in the comments.

Notes:

[1] Bettina Drew, Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), p. 210.

[2] Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1949), p. 17.

[3] Colin Asher, “But Never a Lovely So Real,” The Believer 95 (June 1, 2013), https://www.thebeliever.net/but-never-a-lovely-so-real/.

[4] H.E.F. Donohue, Conversations with Nelson Algren (New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1964), p. 86.

***

Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and online. His stories have been shortlisted twice for a Derringer, and “Barstow,” which originally appeared in Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir vol. 5, was an honorable mention for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025. “Mill Mountain,” which originally appeared in Black Cat Weekly, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. “A Sign of the Times,” which initially appeared in Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, will be reissued by Open Road Media this fall.

The Second Time Around

2026-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

I came to a crucial decision recently. The second draft of a story is my favorite.

I go through a lot of drafts. I agree with Gore Vidal who said "I have nothing to say, only to add." The novella I plan to send to a magazine this month is on its eleventh draft. But Numero Dos is my darling.

The first draft, well, that's hard work. Sometimes the words flow like a waterfall but on other days it feels like pushing a marble uphill with your nose. Just trying to get something down on paper.

But the second draft, ah...

You see, it's the first time I actually get to read my story. It exists from beginning to end. I see it with all its gifts and flaws. I usually find pieces that need to move to different parts of the story, and realize that whole paragraphs or even scenes didn't make it from my teeming brain to the computer screen. This is the part of writing I like best.

After that each draft shifts more from the building process to the polishing process. There is a danger, of course, in polishing too much, to the point where you lose the excitement that you started the story with.

To be honest, if there were more markets available for my stories I would probably do fewer drafts. Hey, I can only send so many stories per year to the three or four pro mags.

But also, being honest, on that eleventh draft I still find a few improvements to make...

Con Me!

2026-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Attending crime fiction conferences and conventions is often part of the writing life and can sometimes play a role in propelling a writing career forward. So, the decision to attend or not attend them is important, and it’s important to understand the difference between them and to be prepared for some of the things that make a conference or convention more or less successful.

Michael and Temple,
dressed for the
Malice Domestic awards banquet

Each conference and convention has a different vibe, and, if you are a writer, the vibe you feel may depend on where you are in your writing career, whether you are at a craft-based event (a conference) or a fan-based event (a convention), how appropriate the facilities are for the event, and how the event is organized.

FAN-BASED CONVENTIONS

At fan-based conventions, the superstars may be fêted, make presentations, and participate in panels. Their time off stage may be spent with agents, editors, and publishers, and fans will seek them out for autographs, conversation, and occasional fawning.

A mid-career writer will participate in a panel or two, might meet with an agent, editor or publisher, and may have a fan or two seek them out.

An early-career writer—someone with a single book from a small press or a few published short stories—will be lucky to snag a seat on a panel and will likely be among the fans seeking autographs and conversations with the superstars and mid-career writers.

A beginning writer—a writer who has yet to see publication in any form—is unlikely to participate in any panels or presentations unless they have specialized knowledge to share (medical examiners discussing autopsies, for example). Beginning writers attending a convention are, essentially, fans.

CRAFT-BASED CONFERENCES

The vibe is different at craft-based conferences. Everyone in attendance is there to teach others how be better writers or is there to learn how to be better writers. The implied student-teacher relationships reduce the differences between writers and increases the interactions between writers at all levels, especially at smaller conferences.

These are excellent opportunities to improve one’s writing skills and make connections with agents, editors, publishers, and other writers.

COMBINATION EVENTS

Some conventions offer writer-centric sessions in addition to fan-centric sessions. Even so, because the fan experience takes priority, opportunities for writers to improve their craft are limited.

At a conference with multiple sessions on craft and business, a new or beginning writer may spend much time attending sessions and learning. A superstar writer may present one or more sessions and will engage with numerous new and beginning writers interested in learning at the feet of the masters. A mid-career writer straddles the mid-point between the two ends of the spectrum. They may have little interest in attending the presentations, not because they think they know it all, but because chances are they’ve heard it all. At the same time, they have the potential for engaging conversations with writers at all levels of experience.

FACILITIES

Facilities play a significant role in how writers experience a conference or convention. If the meeting rooms are too large for the audience, if the rooms are a significant distance from restaurants and bars, if the hallways are too wide, and if it is easy to be anywhere but at the event (for example, returning to one’s room or leaving the hotel to sightsee), opportunities to meet and interact with other participants is minimized. This puts shy and socially awkward writers at a disadvantage.

ORGANIZATION

An event with one or two presentation tracks keeps attendees confined to a small area, potentially increasing interaction among attendees. While a large event with multiple tracks has attendees frequently shifting from room to room, which increases opportunities for impromptu hallway meetings, a large event spread over multiple rooms and multiple tracks decreases the odds of unplanned meetings with specific people.

VALUE

Few writers have the time and money to attend multiple conferences and conventions each year. So, how might writers make decisions about where to spend their time and money?

If the goal is to sell one’s books or to meet and interact with fans and/or potential fans, a convention is likely the best use of time and money.

If the goal is to share knowledge or to gain knowledge about the business and craft of writing, a conference is likely the best choice.

There are conventions that try to appeal to the entirely of the mystery reading and writing community, such as Bouchercon, and others that appeal to specific subgenres, such as Malice Domestic and ThrillerFest.

There are conferences that try to cover the entirety of crime writing, and others that concentrate on novel writing or short story writing, such as ShortCon.

There are both conferences and conventions that appeal to writers in specific geographic regions, attended primarily by local fans and/or writers.

COST

And then there is the cost—not just the registration fee, but hotel, travel, and meals, as well as time away from family and the day job.

Some of us earn enough from our writing to pay for the (tax-deductible!) expenses of attending conferences and conventions, but most of us do not, and the choice between attending Bouchercon and taking the family to Disneyland is a real-world dilemma.

Attending mystery conferences and conventions can have a significant impact on one’s writing career. Attending might mean meeting an agent, editor, or publisher you later work with. Equally important, attending will put you in an environment that—unlike your day job and daily life—surrounds you with people who do what you do, read what you read, and enjoy what you enjoy. That alone may motivate you and inspire you.

VALUE

So how do you determine the cost/benefit ratio when applied to your writing career?

Attending conferences and conventions has led to numerous opportunities I would never otherwise have had. I’ve created and/or pitched anthologies at Bouchercon and SleuthFest; I’ve co-authored stories with writers I met at Bouchercon and Malice Domestic; I’ve co-edited anthologies with writers I met at Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. I’ve worked in various other ways with editors, writers, and publishers I’ve met at these and other conferences and conventions.

And though I highly value these opportunities, I must be honest: The cost of attending these events is greater than the dollar value of all the projects that have come my way because of my attendance.

Ultimately, writers must weigh the costs vs benefits themselves to determine if and which conferences and conventions they should attend, if they attend at all.

So, how about you? What opportunities have you had that you likely would not have had if you had not attended conferences and conventions? What factors do you include in your personal cost/benefit analysis when considering future attendance at such events? And what makes a conference or convention more enjoyable or less enjoyable?

Just one more click for the road

2026-05-18T00:00:00.012-04:00

For an infomaniac like me, access to the Internet is a little like an alcoholic getting a free, all-you-can-drink pass at the local bar. Only good on weekends and during happy hour. I’ve mostly found this to be a good thing, since I’ve been hoovering up random bits of haphazard knowledge, facts, commentary (some benighted) and all the other flotsam and jetsam floating around the cultural soup since I learned how to read.

As you know, however, the online world makes all this lubriciously easy, which can easily result in addiction (not that I wasn’t hooked already.) Worse, a lot of very serious people are now warning that this spew of digital effluent is rotting our brains, destroying social bonds and reducing our ability to concentrate down to a few nanoseconds. Naturally, I don't think any of this applies to me, since I am far too disciplined and self-possessed, utterly immune to cyberspace con jobs. You're not gonna get me, buddy.

Though I wonder. Somehow early on I developed my own version of speed reading, swallowing up whole chucks of material at a time. My wife challenged me over comprehension, and after I proved my case, I think she’d sign an affidavit stating that I can, in fact, retain a lot in a short amount of time. When information only existed on the printed page, this might have been a helpful trick, but with the speed and profusion of digital content, perhaps I’ve let the cart get too far in front of the horse.

I used to spend all Sunday reading at least three print newspapers cover-to-cover. Now I can travel the same terrain, plus a bunch of blogs, emails and message chats, a few magazines and a number of newsletters, some of which you might find a little obscure (Construction Physics anyone?) before dragging my ass out of bed to start the day.

This is not Deep Reading. More like skipping stones across a still pond. To be fair to myself, I usually down shift when stumbling onto something I really want to learn about and try to stay attentive long enough to actually absorb the information. I’ll also give deference to the excellent writers out there, which are plentiful despite what you might hear, since style can be just as enriching as content.

There’s no doubt that having such abundance of information is a real service to fiction writing. I actually enjoy clicking off into Wikipedia to fill in some detail, or fact check as I go. As a research tool, the Internet is a Ferrari compared to the horse and buggy approach we used in the past. (Though as a rule of thumb, I trust but verify.) Three point corroboration is a reliable standard, though sometimes I’ll let it go at two.)

But does all this vast abundance make one a better writer? I honestly don’t know. I suspect not, since the best writers I can identify accomplished the task way before Steve Jobs got that digital twinkle in his eye. More likely, it’s given some very good writers a chance to crank out a lot more work in a shorter time. It’s given them a far bigger universe to examine and draw from. It’s made the pursuit less lonely, since with a single click they can connect with their true friends and colleagues, find a little encouragement or respite before diving back in again. Though perhaps this ease of communications has created more distractions than benefits, more excuses to avoid rather than compose. And worst of all, a degradation of their ability to concentrate on their own private, quiet thoughts, from whence derives their actual brilliance.

Nevertheless, whatever the pros and cons, this is the world in which we’re living. There’s no going back. The only thing a person can do is make the best use of the situation.

Try to extract the benefits without being corrupted by all the destructive clamor.

Z particles†

2026-05-17T00:00:10.933-04:00

I’ve been following often humorous interactions between Gen Z members versus Gen X and occasionally (great)grandparents, the Boomers. Most of the jabs and jibes have been light-hearted, not overly unkind, although teachers and parents have begun to worry about Gen Zs finding their way in the world.

In the midst of these philosophical and practical concerns, I’ve become a more personal observer of the scene. Although I’ve witnessed essentials in the following vignettes, they represents a melding of characters, a Gen X composite rather than any one person. Further, no animals were harmed in the making of this scene. With that in mind…

Gen Z v Dad

“Hey, dude, I need…”

“The pronunciation is ‘dad’ not ‘dude’.”

“Whatever. I need…”

“Need is not the same as want. Neither do you need nor do you want. Consider the lilies of the field…”

“What? Lilies? What does that even mean? Dad, lemme have $6k.”

“Neither do they toil… You need $6000 maybe for heart surgery?”

“New rig for my gaming career. It’s fire. A professional needs professional gear. I’m getting my butt kicked on my old system.”

“Last year’s model, right? As I recall, it ran $2200.”

“Exacto. My cheapass loadout can’t compete, no cap.”

“Son, what did I teach you about work?”

“You told me never ever work a day in my life.”

“My full statement was, ‘Find a job you love, you’ll never ever work a day in your life.’”

“Job? Job? Please shoot me.”

“A good job brings income and food and shelter. How much guap has your gaming earned?”

“You can’t calculate petty capitalist concepts. This is my career.”

“What about your bank account?”

“Bruh! That thing you set up when I was twelve? Nobody uses banks anymore. It’s all Venmo, Kurv, Apple Cash app. Listen man, slide me a new card without a loser $500 limit like before.”

“That very limit allowed the family to eat that month.”

“Never mind. I’ll hit up Mom.”

“Good luck with that.”

Gen Z v Mom

“Mom…”

“No.”

“I haven’t asked anything yet.”

“No, my child.”

“Mom, give me a chance.”

“You asked your father? What did he say?”

“Uh… He said ask you.”

“Are your clothes still strewn on the floor?”

“Mommm. I can’t excel in a socialist society when swamped with minor issues like laundry. Anyway…”

“Hard working boys smell pretty bad without fresh clothes, no matter who they’re going out with.”

“What? Listen, I need six thou…”

“Isn’t that a lot to spend on a date? Are you matching on Boo?”

“Eww. Mom, I’m not dating. At all. It’s for…”

“Susan Deprez says her daughter thinks you’re cute. Clueless but cute.”

“No, the money’s…”

“And Eboni Browne’s been phoning a lot. Who are you inviting to the dance?”

“Ugh. I have no time for primitive mating rituals.”

“Well, if you like boys…”

“Seriously? C’mon, I’m into major gaming.”

“Oh, before I forget, the comic book store posted a hiring notice. You could sell Superman, deal Deadpool, push Punisher, hawk the Hulk, market Marvel.”

“No way. Labor is for losers. Look…”

“So about the primitive rite of washing clothes, rendering lye, wading into the stream, scrubbing musty shirts with stones. Son, feed the washing machine and you’ll finish in time for dinner. Now, out of my kitchen. Shoo! Move along, my child. Hustle. Consider the lilies of the field…”

^† Z particles | zēˈpärdəkəls |
noun, from physics
An uncharged elementary particle considered to transmit weak interaction between other elementary particles.

It's Still a Mystery

2026-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

At a signing in a bookstore years ago, a lady (a.k.a. potential buyer) stopped at my table, picked up one of my books, pointed to the word STORIES on the cover, and asked me, "How many?"

"Forty," I said.

"Are all of them mysteries?"

"Well – they're all crime stories."

Which, thank goodness, turned out to be what she considered a satisfactory answer. But I realized later that I could have just said– and been truthful in saying– "Yes, they're all mysteries." Why? According to most of the editors I know, certainly those of the bigger mystery magazines and the best-of-the-year mystery anthologies, any story that contains a crime can be labeled a mystery. Which makes sense. After all, both Columbo and Poker Face are considered mystery series even though not a single episode involves a whodunit, and crime novels like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Mr. Mercedes, Get Shorty, A Simple Plan, The Day of the Jackal, etc., are always found in the "mystery" section of the bookstore even though they're not traditional mysteries. I re-read Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight recently, which reminded me that Leonard, who was named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America, once said – and I'm paraphrasing – that he had never in his life written anything in which the identity of the villain was concealed until the end.

My point is, we who write crime stories, whether they involve a murder or not and whether they're whodunits or not (most of mine are howcatchems or howtheygotawaywithits) can safely call ourselves mystery writers.

Now, having said that … the mystery genre has a number of subgenres:

Cozy

These stories usually feature a protagonist who has no professional experience but is drawn into the plot by chance. The setting is limited – a bakery, an antique store, a coffeeshop, a small town, etc. – and there's no graphic violence, sex, strong language, or controversial topics. The murder, robbery, or whatever crime it is, takes place off-screen, the title is punny and/or catchy, and the tales are often "series" stories or novels featuring recurring characters. I've had almost 150 of those lighthearted mysteries (mine are probably more "amateur sleuth" than "cozy") published in Woman's World magazine.

Example (novel): The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Hard-boiled

These gritty stores feature tough but good-hearted detectives with a strong personal code of honor and justice, who happily bend the rules and reject authority while fighting to do the right thing in a corrupt system. This subgenre is sometimes combined with the noir or PI subgenres and – unlike cozies – usually include plenty of violence, sex, and profanity.

Example: LA Confidential by James Ellroy

Police Procedurals

The protagonists here are official law enforcement folks who investigate a case and use technology, legal procedures, and forensic evidence to track down criminals. These stories are sometimes whodunits and – like hard-boiled stories – feature violence, drugs, street language, etc. They focus more on the investigation than on the criminal, and creating them usually requires a familiarity with, or a great deal of research into, the daily workings of a police department. A possible hint, here: In the procedural short stories I've written, I've attempted to hide my ignorance by setting them in fictional cities, since fictional cities have fictional police departments whose rules might differ a bit from the real world.

Example: The Black Echo by Michael Connelly

Locked-room Mysteries

These feature "impossible" crimes committed in an enclosed space with no obvious solution. Sometimes they're murder mysteries, but they might also be robberies in which there's apparently no way the robber could accomplish the theft. The fun for the reader is in the puzzle, in trying to figure it all out before the big "reveal" at the end.

Example: The Three Coffins/The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr

Private Eye

The protagonist here is a professional private investigator, not a police detective, though he or she is often an ex-cop or ex-military. This subgenre frequently overlaps with noir and hard-boiled. I've written a few of these, beginning in 2020, in response to a submission call by Michael Bracken for a special PI issue of Black Cat Mystery Magazine. I was fortunate (and amazed) to later have that story win the 2021 Shamus Award (thanks, Michael!), and it introduced me to a new and fun kind of mystery writing. Not that it matters, but my favorite PI writer is probably the late Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser novels.

Example: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Noir

Noir stories and novels have protagonists who are usually deeply flawed in some way, and easily manipulated. I've heard it said that a noir story just means a dumb guy's smart girlfriend talks him into committing a crime, and that's probably a pretty good description. I've said myself that it's any crime story that includes a dark room crisscrossed with the shadows of Venetian blinds. (If you've seen those movies, you know what I mean.) I also like neo-noir, as in the movie Body Heat.

Example: Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

Caper

Caper stories are usually told from the POV of the crooks, and describe the planning and execution of a crime, like a kidnapping or a bank heist. I've written lots of these, and I love 'em. Sometimes the bad guys win, sometimes the good guys, and little attention is given to the solution to the crime. My story that was included in the recent SMFS anthology of Derringer-winners was sort of a humorous caper story, and I can tell you they're great fun to write.

Example: The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake

Traditional

Traditional mysteries feature a crime committed in a closed setting by an unknown antagonist, several possible suspects, and a detective (either police or private) who figures out and reveals the identity of the villain. I've heard these described as fair-play mysteries because enough clues are provided for the reader to try to identify the villain before the protagonist does.

Example: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

Mystery/Thriller

I've seen this listed as a subgenre but I think it's also sort of a catch-all to describe suspenseful mysteries that don't fit easily into other categories. They're crime stories with more action and tension and anticipation than some mysteries offer, and they also have faster-moving plots with lots of twists and reversals. In fact, this kind of story is mostly what I write: tales of ordinary folks, not necessarily cops or PIs, who wind up in dire situations and have to find/fight/shoot their way out.

Example: Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

Paranormal

Paranormal mysteries involve otherworldly or supernatural elements. My favorites of these – as a lifetime Twilight Zone fan I have written many of these stories – often feature some kind of time travel or fantasy/telepathy/magic element. An interesting point: If a crime is involved, there are usually a few mystery magazines and mystery anthologies around that might be receptive to them, and – like humor or caper stories – they're truly fun to write.

Example: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Historical

Historical mysteries are generally set at least fifty years in the past. That of course includes the fascinating (to me) years of gangsters, prohibition, organized crime, etc., in the mid-20th Century, an era which has served as the backdrop for many of my stories. (It also includes the Old West – I've written a lot of Westerns, some of them featuring a San Francisco-based private detective – but for some reason I don't think most editors consider Westerns to be historical fiction; the Western is a genre of its own.) One thing I've heard about historical fiction that I consider interesting: Historical mysteries must be written by authors who are not contemporaries of the time in which the stories are set. In other words, the Sherlock Homes stories are not considered to be historical fiction because they're set during the time in which they were written.

Example: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

As mentioned earlier, there can be considerable overlap between these subgenres: the dividing lines get blurry pretty fast. Also, there are more subgenres that I didn't list because they're self-explanatory: courtroom, mystery/romance, humorous, whodunits, solve-it-yourself mysteries, etc.

My questions for you are:

If you're a mystery/crime writer, what kinds of subgenres do you write? Which give you the greatest pleasure to write? – have you specialized in those? Which do you like most when it comes to your reading? Have you intentionally mixed any of these subgenres? Can you think of others I've missed? Which do you think are the easiest to write, and the easiest to sell to an editor/publisher?

One final hint. If you've written a mainstream story that you can't seem to sell, insert a crime someplace within it and send it to one of the remaining mystery magazines, or a crime anthology. I've done that, and it works. Well, sometimes it works.

Mr. Steely Dan

2026-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

A while back, I wrote about Quantum Criminals, a book describing the recurring characters, or rather archetypes, in the music of Steely Dan. Hmm... I think we're overdue for a new pair of anthologies built around the Dan. Crimson Gate, take a memo...

Lately, I'm reading The Nightfly by Peter Jones, his biography of Donald Fagen. And once again, the "character" of Steely Dan emerges. Only he's directly identified this time as both Fagen and partner, the late Walter Becker. "Mr. Steely Dan" is a frequent name for the unnamed narrator in Fagen and Becker's tunes. He's the survivor of an apocalypse in "King of the World" and a ghost in "Deacon Blues" and a man with a midlife crisis trying to pick up a a couple of young women in "Babylon Sisters."

Who is Mr. Steely Dan? Like all Steely Dan characters, he's a loser, one of the ramblers and gamblers that inhabit the band's catalog. Sometimes, he's in a bad relationship with a woman, sometimes an other woman, sometimes a woman whose betraying him. Mr. Steely Dan is looking for the next score. Perhaps most disturbing, yet usually unsuccessfully, Mr. Steely Dan likes young girls. Not Lolita young, though Becker and Fagen were fans of Nabakov.

But when it appears in their lyrics, Mr. Steely Dan becomes that most noir of all characters, one who has almost no self-awareness. One might say what about the duo behind Steely Dan? Having just read Fagen's biography, Fagen and Becker had long-term relationships with either someone they knew from Bard College (despite never going back to their old school) or fellow musicians or artists. Post #metoo, they likely would have toned down that aspect a bit, but even with so many of the lyrics being autobiographical ("Ricki Don't Lose My Number" anyone?), they were still works of fiction. I seriously doubt George Lucas considered choking an underling or wanted to slice Francis Ford Coppola with a sword, laser or otherwise. Neither do I believe Donald Fagen was showing films in the den like Mr. LaPage.

All About the Atmosphere

2026-05-14T00:05:00.001-04:00

We read and we write mysteries here at SleuthSayers (as well as other genres) for a variety of reasons, for the skill, the plots, the dialog, the puzzle, but sometimes what we're really interested in is the atmosphere. That fits our mood. Some of my favorites:

Maigret (Georges Simenon) - Paris; places like the Gai Moulon or the Liberty Bar, where no one who isn't a criminal or a policeman should dream of going; Mme. Maigret with her excellent cuisine; the team, detectives Lucas, Janvier, Lapointe, and Torrence; Maigret's pipe, his taste for beer and cognac, his intuition, and his occasional mercy to criminals... Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful...

NOTE: The 1960s British series Maigret, starring Rupert Davies, is available on YouTube. "Davies' portrayal won two of the highest accolades: his versions were dubbed into French and played across the Channel; and Simenon himself said of Davies "At last, I have found the perfect Maigret!" (LINK)

Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout) - The household, of course. The voice of Archie Goodwin, the strict schedule, the orchids upstairs, the gourmet meals of Fritz (although I must confess I have the Nero Wolfe Cookbook, and I didn't like most of the recipes. I fear they're better on the page than off it. I for one do not want apricot preserves in my omelet.). Also the supporting team, especially Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin. Orrie Cather can stuff himself.

Bernie Gunther (Philip Kerr) - Dark, atmospheric, scary, but... depending on the day and the mood...

Mma Ramotswe (Andrew McCall Smith) - It's the rhythm of the voice, the feel of the heat of the day, the smell of cows, the preciousness of rain, the customs, the courtesies, the myths, the secrets, the witchcraft, the traditions. And the supporting team, her secretary and later assistant Mma Makutsi, her husband Mr JLB Matekoni, Mma Silvia Potokwani of the orphan farm, her stepchildren Motholeli and Puso, and Gabarone, Botswana itself. As it says at the end of the first book,

Africa Africa Africa Africa Africa

Africa Africa Africa Africa

Africa Africa Africa

Africa Africa

Africa

Spenser (Robert Parker) - To be honest, mostly for Hawk and the banter between the two of them. What drives me crazy is Susan and her perpetual wonder at the Hawk/Spenser friendship and total trust. Honey, I have girlfriends who if one of us called the other in the middle of the night, would drop everything to help, no matter what, and bring anything / everything needed, whether it's money, a bottle, a shovel or all three and more... Why Parker wrote a woman who apparently has no women friends I don't know.

Dame Frevisse (Margaret Frazer) - First of all, it's the real Middle Ages. Second, I really like Dame Frevisse, who is prickly, dedicated, and knows her stuff. She also sometimes gets fed up with her fellow sisters, and who wouldn't get fed up with Dame Alys? Related to Chaucer, her cousin is Alice Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, which gives Dame Frevisse her access to the nobility, and often gets her mixed up in their problems, mysteries, and murders. And, as I've said many a time, the motive in The Servant's Tale - well, I only wish I'd thought of it first.

Cadfael (Ellis Peters) - My second favorite medieval religious. My favorite of the books is An Excellent Mystery.

Brunetti (Donna Leon) - Venice. Venice. Venice. Venice. Venice. I went to Venice and I fell in love with it the way a teenager falls in love with that sexy guy who is the LAST person she should ever be with and yes, she knows it, but she can't stop, can't stop, she's in madly, deeply, hopelessly, recklessly... Brunetti gives me access from afar, full of its scents and sounds, especially the water lapping everywhere...

Venice, by Eve Fisher:

Miss Marple (Agatha Christie) – I love her. Period. I hope to be her in my increasing old age, only with more profanity and sarcasm.

Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle) – Straight back to my childhood.

And thank you, Janice Law, for the amazing Francis Bacon series!

Fires of London (2012)
The Prisoner of the Riviera (2013)
Moon Over Tangier (2014)
Nights in Berlin (2016)
Afternoons in Paris (2017)
Mornings in London (2017)

Somedays, there's just nothing like a seedy, louche adventurer with a nanny and a lot of bad habits to get you through the day...

Other notes:

Marion Halcome (Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White), who is the real sleuth, the real heroine. And she's up against Count Fosco, an Italian of uncertain past, huge girth, strong personality, and incredibly dangerous. "This in two words: He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes, as his wife does—I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as she holds hers." (Don't worry, he never manages to tame Marion. In fact, he falls in love with her, but that doesn't stop him from being excessively dangerous.) Plus I love the different voices that Collins uses to tell the tale, such as the most useless person ever to take fictional breath, Frederick Fairlie:

"It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone. Why—I ask everybody—why worry me? Nobody answers that question, and nobody lets me alone. Relatives, friends, and strangers all combine to annoy me. What have I done? I ask myself, I ask my servant, Louis, fifty times a day—what have I done? Neither of us can tell. Most extraordinary!"

I consider this the best of Collins, and I have reread it many times, with great pleasure.

Also, thank you, Elizabeth Zelvin for clueing me in to Abbi Waxman's One Death at a Time! The most truly Hollywood novel I've ever read. (Let's face facts, Chandler romanticized L.A. even if it was a dark romanticism.)

Which reminds me, I also want to see Lodge 49 again.

The Class of Viet Nam

2026-05-13T00:15:00.000-04:00

Phil Caputo died this week past. The obituaries all led with A Rumor of War, which is fine, it’s a very good book, but he wrote a dozen more. My personal favorite of his novels is the first, Horn of Africa, and of his combat journalism, Means of Escape. He was, of course, a Marine veteran of Viet Nam, and he went back ten years later to cover the fall of Saigon. I think it was Bogdanovich who said John Ford was the laureate of lost causes and last stands, but Phil Caputo knew the vanities of command and the fatigue of the battlefield as well as anybody, and over the years, he went to war in our place many times.

There are, at last count, something like thirty thousand books written about the

U.S.

war in

Viet Nam

. If you study it with any attention, you’re going to read Bernard Fall, and Frances Fitzgerald, and Neil Sheehan, for strategy and the political stakes, but I was thinking, when I learned Phil Caputo was dead, that there are in fact an essential few books that were written by guys who were there. A Rumor of War is one; Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July; and the indispensable Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, If I Die in a Combat Zone, The Things They Carried. Michael Herr’s Dispatches – although he was a reporter, not a combat soldier - and Frank Snepp’s Decent Interval, Snepp not uniformed military either, but CIA counterintelligence, stationed in Saigon.

We might call them the Class of Viet Nam. They were roughly of an age, and roughly my age, Caputo a couple of years older, Tim O’Brien a year younger. They were shaped by the common experience. If you read their stories, you catch a glimpse of something seen at right angles, not just the loss of innocence, or adrenaline and endorphins, their immediate reaction to the threat environment, but something inward and unspoken. These are kids, or not far removed, trying to understand their own natures, but they’re not at football practice, or working a summer job at the DQ, or trying to get bare tit in the back of a ‘60 Chevy. This is a different ordering of the world. And what they found there, what they weren’t equipped to reason with, was the random math, the arbitrary cost-benefit ratio, the fact that it didn’t make any difference to the plot who lived or who died, because it wasn’t their storyline.

The other thing being, that each of these people – every one of whom wrote about it later, whether or not they recognized at the time that it would later become necessary to write about it - were engaged emotionally, and perhaps not entirely consciously, with the consequences of how they each individually managed their own lived experience. I’m not going to pretend to their self-knowledge; they can speak perfectly well for themselves. The point of Caputo’s book, or any of the others, though, is that they’re trying to articulate that experience to themselves. The reader is bearing witness.

Caputo suggests some men are drawn to war. Not all, of course, and not all of them men, either. Martha Gellhorn comes to mind, Christiane Amanpour. But for himself, Caputo admits to a fascination with the mechanics of war, the psychological disconnect, the cautious formalities, the price of a man’s ears. He’s in a place of heightened awareness, but he seems at the same time detached. We suspect he’s come too close, that he needs to regard war as theater, that if he invests his feelings, he’ll weaken.

I may be full of baloney. We can’t truly imagine ourselves into another man’s Furies, but perhaps he can try and tell us. Caputo and those other guys who wrote about Viet Nam came back from the dead, and they did their best to tell us how it was on the far side of the curtain.

Things I Heard at Malice Domestic

2026-05-12T00:00:00.002-04:00

This year's Malice Domestic mystery convention was held a few weeks ago, and it was a good time, as always. I usually jot down interesting quotes I hear during panels, then share them here. This year is no exception.

Thanks to Rob Lopresti for first putting this idea in my head years ago when he shared quotes from, I think, Bouchercon. And thanks to this year's Malice panelists for their words of wisdom.

And away we go!

"When I read suspense and thrillers, I think: At least my life isn't that messed up." - Jennifer van der Kleut

"It's not necessarily the terrible thing happening--it's the threat of the terrible thing happening that propels the story forward." - LynDee Walker

"Good things can come out of rejection." - Kate Hohl

"The most important thing you can do to be asked to submit again to an editor is be willing to be edited." - Josh Pachter

"Learn to use Microsoft Word and learn to use track changes. Your editor will love you." - Carla Coupe

"Work with your editor. Your editor is trying to make your work the best it can be." - Michael Bracken

"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a eunuch." - Smita Harish Jain

"After you castrate a few people, you get a reputation." - also Smita Harish Jain

"I don't want to kill people in a real small town because I thought people might take offense to that." - Annie McEwen

"When reading suspense, I think most people like to be mostly right but a little bit wrong. The thrill of not knowing what's going to happen is what pulls us along to keep turning the pages." - LynDee Walker

"You don't wait for your muse. You say: Muse, c'mon, sit down." - Korina Moss

"I do not like unreliable narrators. I just want to punch them." - Jule Selbo

"A short story is not a novel. It's not a love note. It's not a poem. They have their own rhythm." - Smita Harish Jain

Sherlock Holmes Actors

2026-05-11T00:00:00.026-04:00

Recently I have been thinking about immortality, not the human and aspirational kind, typified by one of our billionaires who apparently wants to sleep his way to eternity, but the curious immortality of certain literary creations. What mysterious secret ingredients has kept folks like Oedipus and Antigone, David and his rival Goliath, Medea, and Orpheus, and the notables of the Hindu epics evergreen and ever present?

New Young Holmes series

Sure, a strong connection to an historic religion is a big help, but not essential, considering the continuing presence of our genre's Sherlock Holmes. Not content with retelling his adventures in every medium except dance and opera, we have retired him, married him, gifted him with a daughter and saddled him with multiple bee hives.

He's been treated for addiction – by Sigmund Freud, no less; brought into the 21st century with Sherlock, and just recently restored to callow youth by Young Sherlock, wherein he works as domestic help in Oxford, crashes parties with a louche undergrad named Moriarty, and gets acquainted with a Chinese princess who is a master of both armed and unarmed combat.

Is anything new possible? Well, yes. In The Final Problem, Arturo Perez-Reverte has come up with an angle that I confess I exploited nearly a decade ago: a mystery employing not the great man himself, but one of his impersonating actors. Together, The Final Problem and my own Holmes Impersonator stories provide two more ways to exploit the great detective.

I did not have ambitions to enlarge Sherlock's already expansive realm when I ventured into Holmes territory. I had hopes of breaking into a lucrative weekly supermarket tabloid, and I had come up with what I thought was a clever plot. In the service of this idea, I needed a detective and for reasons unknown, the Holmes Impersonator arrived.

A journeyman actor, employed by regional theaters and the dinner circuit with occasional voice- over or advertising work, my detective makes some extra cash with a regular gig at The Sherlock Holmes Museum, a small private Connecticut outfit with a slim budget and a constant need for donors. I thought he was ideal; the tabloid editors thought differently.

But the Impersonator was resilient. He found a home at Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine where he proved to be a clever guy, a useful narrator for six outings, and surprisingly observant. His flaw is his appearance. As child visitors to The Sherlock Holmes Museum invariably observe, he doesn't look like Sherlock. Indeed, tapped for a PBS revival of Sherlock Holmes, the famous play that made star William Gillette rich enough to build Connecticut's one and only castle, he gets cast as Watson.

The Profile

No such troubles for Perez- Reverte's Basil Osmond, who has the hawk nose and elegant physique of the famous Sidney Paget illustrations. Basil has instant credibility, because he not only looks the part but has played it in over a dozen immensely popular films.

Clearly based on Basil Rathbone, the famous 20th century Sherlock, Perez- Reverte's detective comes with an encyclopedic knowledge of Conan Doyle stories, an almost instant recall of Holmes' famous lines, and the savoir faire of having temporarily been rich and famous and on intimate terms with both London's West End and Hollywood royalty.

Such a character clearly deserves a mystery, and The Final Problem soon sets one for him. Basil has been sailing with a producer who may cast him in an upcoming television series. A storm strands them on a Greek island, one conveniently equipped with a luxury hotel inhabited by other temporarily stranded visitors.

Long time mystery fans will recognize that this setup is far from the atmospheric fogs of Baker Street. We are, in fact, in Agatha Christie territory with nine visitors, the hotel proprietor and three in staff, and very soon we have a corpse, a lot of questions, and no way to get help from the police.

Granted the authority to conduct an investigation, Basil, at first reluctantly and then with considerable flair and enthusiasm, sets to work, assisted by a fawning Spanish mystery writer and fellow Holmes buff.

The plotting, more clever than plausible, gives Basil scope, even if the somewhat awkward epilogue makes clear why Agatha Christie favored dramatic revelations before the assembled suspects.

So, here are our two alternative performers. The low- budget Holmes Impersonator, modest but effective in the compass of short fiction and a small locale, and a famous Sherlock in a luxury setting and the Christie- type plot suitable for a full length novel. Are there room for more such characters? I suspect so.

And what of the secret ingredient, the source of such characters' longevity? I am still far from a solution, but part must be the presence of what the great Scottish philosopher David Hume declared essential to knowledge: a clear and distinct idea.

Sherlock provides that in spades: the pithy phrases, the investigative dictums, and, of course, the instantly identifiable costume. Put a dog or a cat in a deer stalker and an Ulster, hand them a meerschaum pipe and either is instantly recognizable as a detective of this very special type. With a brand like this, no wonder other writers are tempted to enlist him in their literary ventures.

When AI Dunnit.

2026-05-10T00:00:00.015-04:00

AI is being promoted as a tool to reduce human error in criminal investigations and healthcare but, I assert AI creates a serious harm by its very nature; AI cannot be held accountable and accountability is how we mere humans fix mistakes for fear that we will be humiliated, be disciplined, lose our jobs - none of this applies to AI who merrily trots along even when people are harmed. Further, the real benefit of accountability is not punishment but, rather, preventing the same mistakes in the future and how do we do that with AI?

Angela Lipps, a grandmother from Tennessee, was falsely identified by the facial recognition software (FRT) Clearview AI, as part of a bank fraud scheme in Fargo, North Dakota. Angela was living a quiet life, caring for her family when she was arrested, jailed first in Tennessee and then in Fargo for almost six months until she was released. By then she was traumatized and had lost her home. The Fargo police chief Zibolski said, “We’re happy to acknowledge when we make errors, and we’ve made a few in this case, for sure.” His happiness is unlikely to be shared by Angela, and the promise of an an 'overhaul' of its AI policy shouldn't hide the fact that no one was held responsible for the harm to Angela - a vague wave at AI is not the same as true accountability.

Angela's false arrest is not unique; there have been many documented false arrests. Harm from errors of false positive FRT, like in the case of Angela are one problem, but what about false negatives when a true criminal is let go - who knows how many times that has happened unless the are finally apprehended and an analysis is done showing FRT was inaccurate. Research also shows that AI is "more prone to false positive errors when applied to people of color."

Police officers are trusting algorithms that they did not create and, quite frankly, don't understand. When reasons for false positives come to light, such as low image resolution, officers can use this as a warning but, how low is too low and what about people who aren't white, when is FRT reliable? I obviously have no answers, only questions and a discomfort with people being harmed only to have people in power vaguely wave at an algorithm rather than holding someone responsible but, who can they hold responsible?

The use of facial recognition is growing not just because it *may* help correct errors (while certainly engaging in errors) but because it's a big money maker, so the answers of accountability matter:

"The global face recognition market was almost nine billion dollars in 2025, with projected growth to over 30 billion by 2034. Over a third of this market is in the U.S., but there is wide adoption of FRT around the world... Ten percent of U.S. police departments use FRT. The NYPD made 2,878 arrests resulting from FRT in the first five years of its use. The Metropolitan Police in London report 100 arrests using FRT in conjunction with mounted security cameras, including a suspect accused of kidnapping. Police in New Delhi used FRT to identify almost 3,000 missing children, and FRT has been used to identify refugee children who have been separated from their family. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has used a tool called Spotlight, which makes use of FRT, to identify children who are victims of sex trafficking. In 2023, the FBI worked with NCMEC to identify or arrest 68 suspects of trafficking."

AI in healthcare is also big business, according to a 2025 report by Research Insights: "The global AI In Healthcare Market size is projected to be valued at USD 26.6 Billion in 2024 and reach USD 187.7 billion by 2030."

AI is used in many clinical tools and embedded in medical devices - it's the latter situation that gives rise to this story:

"In June 2022, a surgeon inserted a small balloon into Erin Ralph’s sinus cavity at a hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. According to a lawsuit filed by Ralph, Dr. Marc Dean was employing the TruDi Navigation System, which uses AI, to confirm the position of his instruments inside her head.

The procedure, known as a sinuplasty, is a minimally invasive technique to treat chronic sinusitis. A balloon is inflated to enlarge the sinus cavity opening, to allow better drainage and relieve inflammation.

But the TruDi system “misled and misdirected” Dean,.. A carotid artery – which supplies blood to the brain, face and neck – allegedly was injured, leading to a blood clot...After Ralph left the hospital, it became apparent that she had suffered a stroke. The mother of four returned and spent five days in intensive care [and] a section of her skull was removed “to allow her brain room to swell.” She finds it, "hard to walk without a brace and to get my left arm back working, again.”

Who is to blame?

Matt Baxter, Director, Professional Liability, states, “From an insurance standpoint, AI is not really changing the exposure, because the liability still stands with the healthcare professional,” Baxter said. “They still have the same responsibility, whether they are using AI or not, to make sure the information is correct.”

One group of researchers cited the concern that puts who is responsible in question, because AI is a “black box”, "with no way to understand the AI's algorithm. This is problematic because patients, physicians, and even designers, do not understand why or how a treatment recommendation is produced by AI technologies. … Due to the black box feature, medical AI systems might make incomprehensible mistakes."

So, the doctor who does not understand the algorithm is held responsible for AI mistakes and, worse, holding him/her liable does nothing to protect the next patient from this algorithm.

Mistakes are common so the question of responsibility is crucial: "A new study from researchers at Stanford and Harvard found that even today’s best artificial intelligence (AI) models make serious errors in a significant portion of medical cases … with the top-performing AI models producing 12 to 15 errors per 100 cases and the worst-performing models making mistakes in 40 out of 100 cases."

Would suing the AI company responsible make things safer? Maybe the loss of money would make them revisit their tech and pull those that aren't safe.

Whatever the answer, the question must be asked: when, not if, AI makes a mistake, how are the right people held accountable and what is being done to ensure the mistake doesn't happen again?

There is a reason that AI in law enforcement and healthcare are big business: they are two of the largest institutions we have because civil society, in the Aristotelian sense, has been organized around collective survival where individuals can fulfill their potential. Derived from our empathy and ethics, our laws are designed to protect us as a society and healthcare is designed to protect us as individuals, so no wonder they are fodder for making big bucks. Do we want AI - that's devoid of empathy and ethics, causing harm without an ounce of remorse - seeping into the two institutions that we created to keep us safe or do we want a way to use our ethics, our humanity, to keep AI in check?

A Bold Preposition(al Phrase)

2026-05-09T00:05:00.001-04:00

If sentence construction is a story's tactics, then grammar is the rules of engagement. I'm no grammarian, mind you. I just want my words to count. That brings me to this particular sound-off and sometimes my almighty struggle: the prepositional phrase.

For the grammatical record, a prepositional phrase is:

The preposition (about, before, down, except, for, in, near, on, off, under, with, etc.);
Its object -- a noun, pronoun, or something functioning as such;
Any modifiers to the object.

No prepositional phrase exists in a vacuum. They modify something higher up the grammatical food chain, either a noun or a verb. Preferably, an important one. This is nerdy but essential. Too often, no small amount of my editing dwells on fixing my prepositional phrases--including whether I needed them at all.

But I'm also talking about more than grammar. When I'm moving those prepositions around, I'm calculating punch, timing, mood, and sentence variety. I'm fine-tuning the action and thus the characters. Not surprisingly, I've developed a few guidelines to help minimize editing blood pressure spikes.

Guideline: Stay Active

"The sound of laughter" is a complete grammatical phrase. "Sound" is the subject, "laughter" the modifying prepositional object. A complete thought, but indirect enough to invite the passive voice. "Was heard by all" feels almost inevitable to follow.

What's more important here? The "sound" or the "laughter?" It could be either. "Laughter" is more specific and more powerful than "sound." If laughter is the key action and heaviest hitter, then it should be the sentence subject with an equally powerful verb. "Sound of" seems unnecessary.

Guideline: Drunk and Disorderly

If you read a fair few legal documents, it's not uncommon to encounter mass pile-ups of prepositional phrases. A lawyer on a roll can chain four, five, eight prepositional phrases together in a single, sprawling clause. Boring, but it's doing its job. Those prepositions stack needed qualifiers to the core provision.

Well, we're not writing legal documents here. A traffic jam of prepositions makes things blocky and turns reading comprehension into a slog. An example:

Conversation ground to a halt when McGillicuddy shot me the stink-eye that he usually did before breaking tough news in his office on the penthouse floor with the full view of the city behind him.

To avoid things getting out of hand, I self-imposed a cap of two in a row max. Two keeps me focused on key actors and actions. Any further details can be worked into a later sentence.

Conversation ground to a halt. McGillicuddy shot me the stink-eye that he usually did before breaking tough news. We were drinking Old Sasquatch in his penthouse office, the city below spreading to the horizon.

Not great, but at least these sentences behave. Once I cap the pile-up, the next problem is ordering the survivors.

Guideline: First Things First

The English language has developed many ordering rules for modifiers--except for prepositional phrases. We writers are largely left to our wits. But there are two north stars to guide us.

A phrase functioning as an adjective follows the noun (sentence subject). Think: Her photo on the wall stood watch over the parlor.

A phrase functioning as an adverb follows the verb. Same sentence: Her photo on the wall stood watch over the parlor.

Easy enough. My headache comes with ordering my chains of two or (shudder) three. Flipping them--and maybe flipping them back--bites me more often than I care to admit.

WRONG: Dave shoved the evidence in the drawer ahead of the cops under his socks.

RIGHT: Dave shoved the evidence in his sock drawer ahead of the cops.

The first example fails its adverbial duty. The cops are not under the socks. Also, shoving is the important action, so the modifier belongs where the socks were shoved. The second example lands the sentence on that small matter of the cops.

Let's get more complicated.

WRONG: The pirates debated their heading in the galley for raiding Port Arghh with the captain.

RIGHT: The pirates debated the Port Arghh raid over rum with the captain.

The first example is all over the place. Is the captain connected to Port Arghh or the pirate crew? The second example won't win any awards, but it keeps the thought line straight. The construction immediately cuts to the central rum-soaked debate and Port Arghh, giving both more primacy. Ending on "with the captain" sets the blackguard up to decide the next move.

Guideline: Proper Introductions

In fiction, some sentences just work better with an opening preposition. Take that last sentence. The opening "In fiction" grounds the reader, and there isn't a better fit later on. This is a flow thing, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence. I know it when it works--and I pick up on it when reading a manuscript aloud.

I default to opening sentences with the subject. English is designed that way, and I'm not going to fight that. But guidelines are just that.. Inverting prepositional phrases to open things can change the feel in critical ways:

Traditional: "The truth looked a lot different under the streetlamps." That's effective in showing the narrator shifting as they have time to think, with "streetlamps" as a stark and atmospheric closer.

Inverted: "Under the streetlamps, the truth looked a lot different." This time, we get the mood before we get the truth. Ending on "different" sets up an emotional or revealing next sentence.

Done judiciously and well, the humble prepositional phrase is powerful, flexible--or ruinous fluff leading to blood pressure checks.

A Library of One's Own

2026-05-08T00:00:00.081-04:00

Books I have not read.

In the beginning they were all library books, and they were manageable. At the library across the street from the public school, a kid could borrow up to five books, max, which was good, because those early selections were short picture books that I breezed through quickly, often in the car on the way home. Typically, I chose books our teacher had read to us in class. Now I wanted to turn the pages myself and take as much time as possible to digest them.

After I absorbed the story, I’d start over again, this time studying every single image and imagining how the illustrators had done their work. Think about the crosshatching in books by Maurice Sendak. You could get lost in those lines.

One of the books from those days—Stupid Marco by Jay Williams, about a moronic prince who cannot tell his right hand from his left—was beautifully illustrated by a Dutch illustrator named Friso Henstra. Scritchy-scratchy lines galore. Can you imagine anyone permitting a kid to read a book today whose protagonist is labeled stupid on the front cover?

Eventually, I’d bring the books back and get a whole new stack. I could do this as many times as I wanted, and no one ever gave me guff about it. It cost nothing, and in the end the books went back where they belonged.

Neat. Tidy.

When I started buying paperbacks at the local bookstore, I bought to fill in the gaps in the library’s collection. But I still followed the same logical process: buy, read, buy another.

Neat. Tidy.

In other words, books were borrowed or purchased in order to be read now. They never came home and stayed untouched. This was the greatest of all rules. I read what I bought, and I read what I borrowed.

There was no such thing as unread books.

I continued this practice well into college and slightly beyond. Then, for some reason, the Neat-Tidy system broke down. Books entered my apartment and stayed unread for a good long time. They stacked up on the bookshelf. Or in piles near the couch. On my bedside table. On my desk. I rationalized their acquisition because I knew I would get to them in time, because I always had.

Soon books entered the dwelling unread and stayed that way for years. For some reason, I was okay with this. I did what anyone in my position would do: I blamed Otto Penzler.

When I was fresh out of college, somehow I learned of the Crime Collector’s Club (CCC) that Penzler operated out of his Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, the location with the charming spiral staircase. You signed up, you sent him money, and every month he mailed you a new hardcover book.

These were special. They were autographed by the author. I had never heard of such a thing. It was the most marvelous thing ever. When I finally got around to reading the book, it didn’t matter that there were no pictures; I could ogle the writer’s handwriting on the title page as I read. Wow.

Sometimes you could opt for a second book on Otto’s monthly offer! Holy smokes. More books to paw over and stack up for future reading.

Thank you, authors. Thank you, publishers. Thank you, Otto.

A friend once asked about Otto’s CCC and marveled that I was willing to spend a princely $17.95 a month on hardcover books. “That’s expensive!” she spluttered. She was right. We were journalists living on crappy incomes. In my defense, I wasn’t yet married, nor did I have the mouths of babes to feed. What was I going to do with my meager earnings anyway? Eat? Pay rent?

The Japanese have a word for this bookish behavior: tsundoku. It means piling up reading materials that go unread. Apparently no judgment is implied when a case of tsundoku is diagnosed. The situation just is.

I have developed coping mechanisms over the years. I had to. I am not an animal. Pound for pound, unless you have taken up a side hobby like blacksmithing, welding, or the letterpress arts, books are apt to be the heaviest things you will ever own. A single move will impart a critical lesson: you are, in effect, paying twice for all the books you have and haven’t read. From time to time, I painfully pick my way through the stacks and decide: Am I ever really going to read this? If the answer is no, out the door it goes.

I have given away books, lent them, donated them. The piles still grow. Nowadays, when I pick them up, they come with stories their makers never intended. This copy of Irish short stories is the one I bought for my Irish lit class in college. I remember how charming the professor was when he read Yeats aloud in a pleasing Irish brogue. By chance is he still alive, I wonder? Here, also, are countless copies of signed books by friends. Looking back, I should not have been so impressed by the signed books Mr. Penzler sold. If you write, in time you amass friends who also write. You amass their books as well. Now, fully a third of my living room bookshelves are devoted to signed copies. And yes, I have to admit, many of those are unread too.

Once, while walking the dog, I happened upon one of those Little Free Libraries, and discovered a first edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and nearly wept. Ages ago, while living in Hoboken, I once had my own first of that book. I’d bought it when it first came out. (Tom and I go way back. In journalism school, we were taught that he was a god, and for a while I subscribed to this notion.) I had enjoyed the book the first time around, but I had donated it after some years and always regretted it. Here it was, in North Carolina, in a perfectly fine dust jacket. What was I supposed to do, not take it home and stick it on a pile?

For a while there, my wife and I eagerly consumed Marie Kondo’s classic, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and dutifully followed its prescribed steps. We decluttered our kitchen! We decluttered our clothing closets, our garage, the outdoor shed. Kondo’s system was brilliant. Pick up an item and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If the answer is no, you know what to do.

She instructed you to carefully purge your way from objects of little sentimental value to the most. (Family heirlooms and photographs are the last thing you purge.) We never applied her principle to books. My wife refused to. She insisted that Kondo, a Japanese author who had once worked at a shinto shrine before becoming a professional organizer, didn’t actually understand books. It seemed as if tsundoku, in her personal cosmology, came loaded with judgment. At that stage in our process, we donated Kondo’s book and never looked back.

I have learned over time to not gratuitously add to the pile. I feel a helpful wave of shame when I attend bookstore events. Such lovely authors! (But I simply cannot buy another book, can I? No! You have too many! More than you will ever read in the time remaining!) Then comes the other voice: You can’t support another writer? What kind of writer are you?

I used to be appalled when I saw how many people departed bookstores, empty-handed, after a reading. Now I understand.

In 2022, when my father died in California, my brother asked if I wanted Dad’s multi-volume set of Popular Mechanics guides for the practical handyman. If I Venmoed him some money, my brother would pack all sixteen volumes in a box—

“Absolutely not!” I shouted into the phone.

I was outvoted by my wife, who thought it might be hilarious to have such books.

Great. I squeezed them in among the cookbooks in the den, and flip through them when I need to repair a faucet or refurbish a crappy cabinet, as I did last weekend. Why would I use the internet to research how to remove decrepit hardware, and to sand, buff and carefully pound in finishing nails when I had a perfectly good book on my shelf—which predated the internet and possibly the invention of television—that demonstrated the precise steps necessary to turn another inherited piece of crap into an exquisite, eye-catching piece upon which to store more piles of unread books?

There is a moment in many of those country house mysteries where the inspector interviews an insomniac suspect who says he came downstairs in his bathrobe at 3 a.m. to get a book out of his host’s library, and encountered another suspect who was descending the servant’s staircase to fetch a sandwich.

Bull, I used to think, when I encountered such characters. Who wakes up at 3 a.m.? And who goes into someone else’s private library to borrow a book? And while we’re at it, Inspector, do you not find it at all odd that Lord Squidgecombe packed a bathrobe to visit someone’s country house for the weekend? How convenient! Almost as if he were expecting to need an alibi!

But you know what? Decades later, I get it. Not the bathrobe part, but the reading of new, enticing, strange books in the middle of the night. It certainly beats tossing and turning. If you have a sandwich handy, so much the better.

Five decades after I entered my first library, the one across the street from the public school, I have built my own. Amid the occasional duds and tripe, it’s filled with wonders, most of them forgotten or unappreciated by me. When I happen upon one of these, I’m a kid again and feel as if I’ve just picked out another gem. Please say you understand.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Unintended Benefits of Reading Nonfiction

2026-05-07T03:20:00.005-04:00

As readers of this blog may recall, my recent posts here at Sleuthsayers have carried a heaviness to them: my recent discussion of my father’s experience of Alzheimer’s, and how it is impacting his loved ones, and the one about plagiarism down through the centuries, fine, fine times, for sure.

So I felt the need to change things up this go-round, and here’s what I did. I queried several writer friends and posed them the following question:

"I’m writing a blog post about 'How It’s the Non-Fiction You Wouldn’t Expect to Help Make You a Better Fiction Writer That Does In Fact Make You a Better Fiction Writer,' and so would LOVE your input. So maybe your pen name, title of the book and why it so helped your fiction writing?"

First, here are a few of my own favorites:

1. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The gold standard. Shirer served as CBS Radio’s “Man in Berlin” during the 1930s, getting out of town one step ahead of an SS arrest warrant in December of 1940. And after the war he pointed out who did what, where the bodies were buried, and brought receipts. And he did it all in a way that spoke directly to an American audience predisposed to disregard “just more European politics.”

2. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

Bloom, a well-respected literary critic, was a master prose stylist in his own right. Reading this slim volume helped remind me that language can be so much fun to play with.

3. Barbara W. Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China

Much better known for her two Pulitzer Prize winning works (The Guns of August, about World War I, and A Distant Mirror, about “the Calamitous Fourteenth Century,” Tuchman cut her teeth working for the Associated Press in Japan before World War II. As such she was deeply steeped in the goings on in China, and the perspective she brought to the conflict there was decades ahead of its time.

4. Diana Cooper, Darling Monster: the Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to Her Son John Julius Norwich (1939-1952)

Lady Diana Cooper knew everyone from the Mitford sisters to the most respected clerics in the nation, to Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Her candid, incisive, funny character sketches addressed to her son, historian J.J. Norwich (see below) are not to be missed.

5. John Julius Norwich, Byzantium (3 vols.)

Three volumes, eleven hundred years. Norwich is a master of the narrative voice. Each volume is a graduate course in writing compelling narrative while not losing sight of the larger stories

6. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

Once called a cross between James Bond, Indiana Jones and Graham Greene, Fermor lived a restless, adventurous life, and documented it entertainingly. At 18 he trekked from Dover to Constantinople. It was 1933, and A Time of Gifts documents the first one-third of that trip through a world that was already beginning to vanish under the pressures of Nazism, modernism, socialism, etc.

7. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

I picked this one about the role romance played in the cultural syncretism ongoing during the early years of the British Raj, but honestly, anything by Dalrymple, the greatest travel writer of this or any age, is worth your time.

8. Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

Tey was a terrific novelist. And she was also a passionate defender of the reputation of King Richard III. As such, her panegyric raising the question of whether or Richard Crouchback bore any culpability in the disappearance of his nephew the so-called “Princes in the Tower.” She says no. The historical record is far more damning. Tey is so good she almost convinced me!

9. Ross King, Brunelleschi's Dome

Turns out the greatest Renaissance genius might not have been a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, but rather an irascible builder who studied the interior dome of Rome’s Pantheon to unlock the secret of constructing an apparently unsupported dome. Short, quick and riveting.

10. Steven Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

The ancient Roman poet Lucretius theorized the existence of the atom in a poem written two thousand years ago. But that’s only half the story. How Lucretius’ poem was lost for centuries and then found again, and preserved for modern audiences, now THAT is quite a story!

And on that note, on to the thoughts of my writer friends!

Writer and Editor Extraordinaire Jim Thomsen:

Top of mind is Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser, the recent true-crime Edgar winner, about the possible links between serial killers and being raised in the shadow of lead smelters (like the one in Tacoma). While I’m not sure I buy all her arguments, and I might have wished for less Ted Bundy and BTK rehash, I find myself rereading this book over and over because of the audacity of its originality — a wild mashup of science, true crime and memoir. Fraser, who was raised on Mercer Island, plays with the rules and breaks them all in dizzying but energizing fashion, veering page to page from wonky exposition to irreverent editorializing, and not being afraid to sound silly or sophomoric. Consider this quote: “During his five years on McNeil Island, virtually everything Charles Manson eats and drinks comes out of the earth, where particulates from the Ruston plume have been drifting down to the ground since 1890. He’ll live on McNeil Island longer than he’s lived in any place in his life. Later studies on McNeil find lead in soil ranging from a low of 19 parts per million (ppm) to a high of 190. Helter smelter.”

Murderland is such a wild original that I found myself pleasantly helter-skelter with the possibilities of widening the aperture of narrative in ways I’d never imagined. And with the idea that it’s OK to look a little silly in doing so in the service of a strong writing voice.

Fellow Sleuthsayer Eve Fisher:

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century - impeccable research, amazing stories (truth really is stranger than fiction), and a prose style to die for.

Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange - The book that made me see ecosystems in a whole new way. And how they affect(ed) our daily lives today. Very important. And very applicable to us on the micro as well as macrosystem.

Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC. - Humans are humans, no matter how far you go back. The emotional / mental / spiritual ideas are always there. But it sure is interesting what we do with them!

I guess what I'm saying is that all of these showed me the important fact that no matter where you are, or what time you're in, the styles will change, but the stories remain the same.

As far as the language - oooh, I grew up reading Shakespeare, all kinds of poetry, and I discovered Bruce Chatwin (supposedly non-fiction but he did make some stuff up) and Peter Matthiessen and Henry Thoreau, who could describe a place and a feel and a spiritual experience with such beauty...

So yeah, reading non-fiction has great rewards!

Kat Richardson:

I started out as a journalist, so non-fiction has had a big impact on my fiction writing. There were a lot of books and lectures within that study and my early career that made an impact, not to mention the journalists dictum "write tight." Prof. Lawrence Meyer, my Course Advisor at CSULB, compiled a collection of historically significant journalism, from 17th century British authors Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, to the "new journalists" of the 1970s, including Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Dunn, and Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem. For copyright reasons it was never published, but we used it as our primary study text in his "Journalism as Literature" course. I learned a lot about writing with style and impact while keeping fact intact and prose tight

I also read a lot of narrative non-fiction, and the work of writers like Erik Larson (whom I do not care for, but owe respect for his ground-breaking approach), Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook, and Mary Roach's book Stiff. While these authors' narrative style is occasionally flawed in terms of absolute fact and completeness, they taught me a lot about drawing the reader into a longer, realistic story while maintaining an accessible and engaging tone. They also reminded me to check my sources and not rely on the veracity of any one source or author, if I'm writing about anything outside of my personal experience, be it fiction or non-fiction.

* * *

What about you, dear readers? Let us know what you think, or add your own favorites in the comments. And on that note, that’s it for this go-round.

See you in two weeks!

Emptying Pockets

2026-05-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

My MMPB mysteries

The news may have slipped past you but last year the media was announcing the death of a familiar part of publishing. It isn't exactly that the mass-market paperback is dead but that ReaderLink, the major distributor of paperbacks, has decided to stop dealing with them. Which is not so much a killing blow as a recognition that the format is fading away.

The mass-market paperback (MMPB) has been a staple since the 1930s. I am putting up pictures of the oldest ones I own. One of the major publishers of them was Pocket Books, which tells you exactly what they were designed for: to fit into a man's pocket. (Women were very lucky if their clothes had any suitable spaces.) These were the books GIs took to the front. (My copy of Pocket Mystery Reader belonged to Sergeant Lawrence E. Hough in 1943.)

By the way, you may notice that three of the books I include here say Complete and/or Unabridged on the cover because in those early days an MMPB often was a shortened version. When I worked at a public library in the 1970s I had a hard time convincing an older patron that the paperback I had found her was complete.

MMPBs were so-called because they were sold in mass markets: grocery stores, drug stores, and so on. Their competition was the trade paperback, typically the same size as a hardback, and only found in the trade, that is to say, bookstores. Trade books are still around although ebooks continue to eat into their sales.

I have a special fondness for MMPBs, and here's why.

When I want to buy a new book, hardcover or trade, I go to my favorite independent bookstore. But when I am going on a trip I go to my favorite used bookstore which has an amazing selection of thousands of MMPB mysteries.

So when I went to Egypt and Greece in January I headed to used-book-land with a special list of authors in my hand. Take a look at the picture below and I am sure you can see the factor that connected them. And the beauty was, when I finished one I could leave it in a hotel or train and not worry about the cost.

I suspect the used book store will have old MMPBs long enough to last me out, but you young whippersnappers may not be as lucky.

Change of Direction

2026-05-05T00:05:00.183-04:00

My turn to blog has circled around again. Originally, I had planned to use this space to talk about Malice Domestic. I'd rhapsodize about the forums I attended, impart the things I'd learned, congratulate the award winners, and, naturally, laud the high-level conversation conducted at the panel in which I participated.

The rough draft turned out to be a pretty boring read. Consequently, I've switched directions.

The longer I work at writing, the harder it is to find value in the planned events at a conference. Occasionally, I glean a nugget. And I still believe there is merit to an occasional refresher course on the lessons I should already know. But the thunderclaps of insight are becoming increasingly rare.

That's not to say that I didn't benefit from attending Malice Domestic. Rather, at this stage, the value I gained was subtle and harder to articulate. I renewed many old friendships, established several new ones, and plotted some future opportunities. None of the details fit well to a column like this.

Some months back, Michael Bracken modestly proposed in a SleuthSayers blog post that writing conferences should schedule less time for panels and more time for standing in the hall. The hallway, outside the meeting rooms, he noted, was where the real business got done.

More than ever, I found that I concur. But it is hard to talk about afterward.

And perhaps, it should be so.

The word "hall," according to Etymology Online, comes from the Old English heall, meaning a large space covered by a roof--think Beowulf's great hall or a market hall. The word later morphed into a term for a passageway as a castle's private rooms became separated from the common areas by doors.

National Archives College Park Public Domain

The heart of the word heall seems to be the roof. It protected the space from the elements. In some explanations, the roof concealed or shielded the room's occupants. The hall, in its oldest form, was a place of cover, protection, and concealment; it's only fitting that what happens in the hall, therefore, stays in the hall.

Fully geeking on the etymology of conference words, I spent a little time researching "panel."

Seamstresses and fans of craft cozies shouldn't be surprised to learn that the word panel comes from a French term meaning a piece of cloth, generally a rectangular one. The same root word is used for a glass pane.

Sometime around the 15th Century, panel made the jump to refer to those summoned by French authorities to serve as jurors. Once called, jurors' names were inscribed upon a rectangular piece of parchment (cloth). By the late 16th Century, this notion of panel had been diluted to include any group of people who gathered together to advise and consider.

And now, a distinguished foursome sitting on a dais behind a cloth-covered table holding forth and sharing their insights has become a panel. But the word remains particularly apt for Malice Domestic, Bouchercon, or any of the other mystery conferences.

Remember the original meaning of panel as a rectangular square of cloth? Heavy fabric made a great wall covering. The word panels also developed in that direction. Panels became the term for specific wall or door sections. And it's here that things started to take a dark and nefarious turn.

Bordellos and other disreputable places would be outfitted with panels. In these seedy establishments, at least one could be slid back and allow for customers to be robbed, beaten, or possibly killed. By the 19th Century, a panel-house had become slang for a bordello.

Panel, therefore, has the twin traditions of an erudite gathering combined with a dash of thievery and bodily harm.

Halls and Panels--two words with suggestions of secrecy. Perfect words for a mystery conference.

Until next time.

BSP: Panels do provide a great time to tout new works. Thanks to all who helped me release The Firefall by attending one of the launch events. I appreciate your support.

Straight-laced hobgoblins.

2026-05-04T00:00:00.057-04:00

I’ve been tying my own shoes for about 70 years, give or take. In that time, I’ve always preferred to include a double knot following the basic bow for added security. When my son was a little boy, he called this extra precaution a “daddy knot”. I’d do the honors, since it took a while for him to master it.

In all that time untying my laces, I’ve pulled a loose end, which released the whole knot, quickly and simply. Though it often didn’t, instead, tightening the knot further. This led me to use fingernails and grit to complete the task, in a much more laborious operation. I frequently wondered why sometimes the free lace untied the knot, and sometimes it didn’t. I began to believe that I must have been tying the laces in different ways at different times, and in the back of my mind, promised myself to delve more deeply into this mystery when I had a ridiculous amount of spare time.

Then the other day, on my 75^th birthday, I pulled at one of the loose ends, which tightened the knot, then chose to pull the other one, which released it. I thought, huh. Is that the answer? I realized I’ve tied my laces exactly the same way since early childhood. The difference is that one end works great at freeing the knot when you pull it, and the other works at cross purposes. It only took most of my years on earth to figure this out. Discounting a few occasions when I went barefoot or wore flip flops, or loafers, I’ve probably had the opportunity to discover this simple truth about 24 thousand times (rough estimate by a non-mathematician.)

This was sobering. I wondered what other solutions to common problems have been lurking there, staring me in the face for my entire life. What else did I miss?

I’ve written a lot of stuff since I learned how to do it. I feel in some ways, I’ve gotten better at it, and in other ways, continue to fall short. I’ve read masterful writers and think, how do they do it? What do they know that I don’t? Do I need to learn how to pull the right shoelace instead of the wrong one I’ve been pulling for my entire life?

I like to study brain science, because who doesn’t? One of the things I’ve learned is that the brain prefers to follow pathways that it’s already established when assembling a thought or initiating a behavior. This is because the brain consumes a disproportionate percentage of the resources we require to exist, so it’s always looking for more efficient ways to accomplish day-to-day responsibilities. Carving out new routes is harder than trekking along familiar highways, thus more energy conserving. They call it habituation, and there’s no shame in it. It’s just how we’re wired.

When you’re 75 years old, simple activities take on greater significance, since there are fewer important enterprises to focus on. As a good German/Anglo-Saxon, I strive to make each of these more efficient, or less onerous, or more engaging, depending on the task. Nobody but me cares about this, and neither should they.

One of my favorite books from my early reading years was John Barth’s The Floating Opera. He published it when he was in his early twenties, remarkable enough. One of the protagonist’s practices was to intentionally make or break a habit as a matter of regular pratice. This is the sort of wisdom that should be reserved for people far older than 20-something Barth. He proposed that we should stop every once in a while and ask ourselves if we’re thinking something or doing something because it’s a good idea, or because our neural pathways are forcing us into lazy mental processing.

Keeping an open mind is a whole lot harder than it sounds. It’s almost impossible, no matter how much we revere the disposition. Aside from the tyranny of our brain’s energy conservation there are social pressures to conform to certain established norms. We like keeping the goodwill of our friends and family, so adventurous deviations, just for the hell of it, have their costs.

Family members in particular are threatened by sudden changes in course. Their first thought is, “Uh-oh, Dad is getting wifty.” But unless these loved ones are also your editors, changing up your approach to writing shouldn’t fire up any alarms. Your family hasn’t paid enough attention along the way to notice anyway. You’re just the granddad, or grandmother, huddled over the keyboard in your little corner of the house like you always do.

Following John Barth’s advice, I’ve been dabbling in habit making and breaking. One of the most salubrious outcomes is realizing that some habits are very valuable and hard won. You get a chance to recommit to certain things, because you’ve given them a fair appraisal. You feel more secure in certain beliefs after they’ve been stress-tested and found to be worthy.

You begin to realize that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, but so is a promiscuous sampling of all the less beneficial options available.

Spam and Scam • part 2

2026-05-03T00:00:00.007-04:00

Last time, we shared real life scam stories. In the interem, an acquaintance was conned out of $38,000 as part of a marriage scam. Fortunately, once he discovered his mistake, he acted quickly and was able to recover all but $2000. He was lucky.

This month, I’ll offer basic suggestions to protect yourself.

Red Flags

Unsolicited contact (call, text, email, or social media) demanding action right now.
Unwarranted sense of urgency: Your bank won’t collapse. Super amazing investment deals can wait. The Nigerian prince is dead or he isn't. The IRS doesn’t keep local police on speed-dial. They also don’t phone you at home.
Pressure to pay with untraceable methods: wire transfers, gift cards, payment apps, or that dark mystery of cryptocurrency.
Requests for personal or financial information.
Requests for you to help catch a bank swindler.
Offers that sound too good to be true.
Stories that tug hard at your emotions.
Poor grammar in ‘official’ messages.
Discouragement toward verifying their story with a trusted source.
URL links that may or may not look slightly off. For example,

YoürBank.com instead of YourBank.com or
YourBankHelp.com instead of YourBank.com.
Be aware that emails and web pages may display a web site name with a clickable link that hides a sinister URL within the HTML. In other words, text on the web page may display YourBank.com, while the hidden web address might be www.NastyScams.com.

Practical Protection

Pause and verify. If someone claims to be calling from your bank or the government, hang up and call back using the number on your bank statement or official web site, never one scammers provide.
Think before you click. Hover over links to check the real address. Better yet, type in your bank’s address. Don’t trust conveniently provided URLs.
Block and filter. Use your phone’s built-in tools to enable spam-text filtering and silence unknown callers.
Register with the national Do Not Call list. It’s imperfect, but it helps.
Secure your accounts. Use strong, unique passwords and monitor statements weekly.
Better yet, use lengthy passphrases. For example: ‘Judges12:5-6SayNowShibboleth’ is much, much stronger than Shibboleth42k (or Sibboleth).
Do not provide real answers to so-called security questions. I may be the only consultant who argues against security questions, but I’m convinced it’s critical. Never ever select your favorite color question. Lie to protect yourself. Make up a nonsense alternative:

Favorite pet name? “Forget it, buddy.”
Your first car? “Forget it, buddy.”
Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb? “Forget it, buddy.”

Most experts recommend using multi-factor authentication everywhere possible. I confess reluctance, having witnessed users losing access because of a forgotten passphrase. Nevertheless, pros urge using 2FA until something better comes along. You decide.
Never urgently send money to ‘help’ a ‘family member’ without independent confirmation. Call them on a known number first. For example:

You receive a call from a Mexican jail claiming your grandchild is locked up but needs bail money. That can seem funny when your young relative is safely sitting on the sofa beside you, but it’s not funny in the middle of night when the caller sounds and acts exactly like your young relative and you have no idea where they are.

Consider creating a family ‘safe word’ for emergencies.
Do not download attachments from unknown sources.
Be very cautious before downloading programs outside your app store.
Help protect your family, especially trusting older relatives who are frequent targets.
Don’t be concerned you'll hurt suspect callers’ feelings. They’ll survive. Scammers have screamed and cursed me. I survived.
Know that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issues monthly advisories and alerts.

What to Do If You Suspect a Scam

Act fast, but don’t be stampeded into recklessness before you can verify a caller’s story.
Contact your bank or credit-card issuer immediately to freeze or reverse transactions.
Report incidents at ReportFraud.ftc.gov . The FTC uses reports to track patterns and pursue criminals.
If you shared personal data, place a fraud alert with credit bureaus and monitor your credit report.
For tech-support or investment scams, additional help is available through the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (www.IC3.gov).

Scammers count on fear, greed, kindness, and time crunches to cloud judgment. They operate by script, intent of fooling a profitable percentage of ‘suckers’. Don’t be a sucker. Slowing down, asking questions, and trusting instincts breaks their playbook. Every report you file helps shut down operations and protects others. Stay vigilant, talk openly about scams with friends and family, and remember: legitimate organizations will never rush you into sending money or sharing sensitive information.

For more resources, visit consumer.ftc.gov or consumer.gov. Awareness is the best defense. Spread the word and stay safe.

April Stories

2026-05-02T00:00:00.129-04:00

First, sincere congratulations to all the 2026 Derringer Award winners, especially to Adam Meyer, Alan Orloff, and Michael Bracken--and special congrats to Golden Derringer recipient David Dean. I'm also thrilled that Dave Zeltserman has won the Edgar for Best Short Story. Well done and well deserved, my friends!

Now, to less important matters . . .

I'm a couple of days past April, here, but this is a quick look at the stories I published last month. And I should begin by saying, yes, these are mystery/crime stories even though I mentioned a few weeks ago that I've started producing stories in other genres lately. I'm hoping that in several months some of the science fiction/fantasy stories I've been writing since then will pop up someplace. We'll see.

Anyhow, here are my three stories that popped up in April.

"Creativity," published on April 3 at Curated by Costuic, a market I discovered via one of my friends on the Short Mystery Fiction Society list. This 1100-word story consists almost entirely of dialogue between two characters, both of them businesswomen who meet on a flight from Lost Angeles to Dallas. As I've said before at this blog, stories that are heavy on dialogue are always among the easiest and the most fun for me to write, and I remember this one coming together pretty fast. It was published many years ago and was lucky enough to be a Pushcart Prize nominee. If anyone feels the urge to read a quick little crime story, it's posted here. Many thanks once again to editor Nikita Costuic.

Speaking of SMFS, the second one of my April stories was "On the Road with Mary Jo," published April 7 in the anthology Hot Shots: Celebrating Thirty Years of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. For those of you who don't already know, this anthology features 28 stories that won the Derringer Award--one story for each year between 1998 and 2025--and editor Josh Pachter did a great job of putting it together. My story in the book was a winner for Best Short Story in 2020, and had previously appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's Jan/Feb 2019 issue. Like "Creativity," this story is mostly dialogue but is quite a bit longer, at 2700 words. As I said this past Thursday night in the Zoom meeting about the anthology, I was surprised when "On the Road with Mary Jo" was accepted at EQMM because it's mainly humor, and therefore different from any of my other EQ stories. Quick summary: It's a weird story about two nitwits who carjack a self-driving vehicle and use it as a getaway car in a bank heist. Yes, I said it was weird . . .

The last of these three stories was "Lewis and Clark," first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's May 2012 issue and reprinted on April 16 in The Ranger's Almanac, Vol 1. As the publication's title suggests, this market wants forest/park-based stories; mine was a 2200-word tale of two young Boy Scouts who get lost on a hike in the woods and stumble upon a couple of bank robbers on the run. It's more a YA adventure story than anything else, and marks one of those times when a previously published story that's sitting around doing nothing happened to exactly fit the submission guidelines of a new (to me, at least) publication. Before I forget, I owe a big thank-you to Ranger's Almanac editors Andrew Akers and Adam Geer. Check this market out here.

I think the only unusual thing about these April stories is that none of them were in publications that I'd been in before (one, of course, was a one-time anniversary anthology) and that two out of the three were sold to paying markets I didn't even know about until fairly recently. The editors of both of those were great, and were prompt in their responses to my submissions. "Creativity" wa submitted to Curated by Costuic on 11/4/25 and accepted later that same day, and "Lewis and Clark" was submitted to The Ranger's Almanac on 1/14/26 and accepted on 1/18/26. (These were breaths of fresh air in a world where we writers often wait for many months to hear back from a submission.)

So, here are my questions for the week, to any fellow short-fiction writers out there. Are you, in answer to our recent downturn in the number of available mystery markets, finding new places to send your work? Where are you looking, in order to do that? The Internet? The SMFS market list? (You can find it under "files" at the SMFS forum site.) Are you sending any stories to existing markets that you haven't tried in a while? Are you continuing to submit to those who have regularly published you in the past? Do any of you have, as I do, submissions queued up at those markets? Are any of them already accepted and waiting to be published? Are you, like me, writing and submitting some non-mystery or cross-genre stories, and getting any relief from that corner? Please update me in the comments.

And then get back to writing.

See you in two weeks.

Boo Hoo, Tee Hee, She Chortled

2026-05-01T00:58:00.073-04:00

As a writing teacher, I spend an inordinate amount of time urging other writers to eschew clichés. This is more easily said than done (see what I did there?) as sometimes a cliché expresses one's thoughts perfectly. Nonetheless, I'm ruthless with my students, who are mostly published writers - all talented - and can take it. No nights as black as pitch, no thinking outside the box, no being sly as a fox or brave as a lion. And for the love of God, no smiles that light up a room.

So it was with some chagrin that I found myself recently "laughing through my tears."

Yep. This is an action I've read in a thousand sophomoric short stories and novels, and even in a few poems, yet one I didn't even know could actually be done. If you keep track of happenings in the mystery world, you're no doubt aware that Down&Out Books closed recently, and my newly-released collection of stories, It's Not Even Past, died along with them, just when the reviews (and orders) were starting to roll in. Now, I've published before, but this is truly the book of my heart. Most of the stories were originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and the main character, Lori Yarborough, is a librarian-on-the-run in Federal WITSEC. Lori is a mostly-better version of myself - like me, sort of, but smarter, braver, stronger, better-educated, and more resilient. She's shorter and skinnier than I am, though, and a good deal younger. In fact, the version of her that lives in my head looks an awful lot like my daughter.

There's a picture of said daughter, taken by the talented Robert Tate, in which she's striding down Mulholland Boulevard in an evening gown, strong, powerful, and stern. I call that picture "Don't Tell Me to Smile," and I keep it pinned over my desk to remind me of the tenacity and potency at my character's core.

Lori Yarborough would never laugh through her tears. In fact, she brags in a couple of stories that she never cries at all. But I do, and what drove me to enact that oxymoronic stock phrase was receiving yet another order for my DOA book. When the publisher closed, I'd hastily ordered a couple of boxes of resale copies, but more fans than expected had tracked me down to order. I was saving one copy for the coffee table and one for my grandson - and that was it. So there I was, laughing ruefully but snuffling back tears, too, as I checked the author's copy carton in my closet (still empty), thinking what a fool I'd been to order so few, to choose the wrong publisher, hell, to write a book at all.

(As it turns out, a white knight publisher rushed in - yes, inspired by one of those author's copies I sent out - and It's Not Even Past will be released anew later this year, along with a volume of short stories not from the librarian-on-the-run series. My cup runneth over! But more on that when I can share all the details.)

Meanwhile, Lori's life post-collection continues. In Traveller from an Antique Land, published in EQ in May/June 2025, she hit rock bottom, living in a tent on the streets of Los Angeles. In When Bright Angels Beckon, coming in the September/October issue, she's on her feet and back to amateur sleuthing. (Cliché count: two in this paragraph, two in the graph above. I think I owe my students a mea culpa.)

Writing a returning, evolving character is tough - as plenty of folks here on SleuthSayers can attest. There are lots of details to keep track of, of course, but there's also the simple recurring question where do we go next? I gain inspiration from the world around me, particularly from photographs.

Here's a photo I found helpful in writing about Lori's days on the street. The image of makeshift shelters over the 405 in California - a freeway that runs by Disneyland and Hollywood along the sparkling Pacific Ocean, through BelAir and into the opulent valley - while small, tragic lives play out unseen above, is particularly evocative. But there are real meat-and-potato details in the photo, too. That blue tarp - who hasn't seen them on roofs and hillsides after a heavy rain? The piles of trash heaped around something that may be the form of a sleeping person, and there, heartbreakingly, a bag of food clipped out of reach of rats, as if the unhoused were camping in the Angeles National Forest guarding their food from bears.

I'm not alone in looking to visual images for inspiration. Photographer Horace Bristol's collaboration with Steinbeck inspired the immortal Grapes of Wrath. (Though many associate that book with Dorothea Lange's iconic photo Migrant Mother, there's not actually a linear connection between Steinbeck and Lange.)

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje was inspired by a rare photo of jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden and his band.

The epigraph to Clarence Major's gorgeous poem, Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving, reads "based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999." Who would not be transported by the poet's lines, "You remember your own meadow/…your grandmother’s church-folk/ gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness."

In my series, Lori's friends Tony and Marta Morales have three kids, the youngest of whom is Camilla, named after one of Lori's alter egos. In some of the stories, the Morales family barely surfaces, while in others they play an integral role. But it's been years since I was part of a big, loud, active family, and I need my work to be up to date. I don't want to show the oldest boy bragging about his razor scooter, only to find dirt bikes are the current thing. Do people still cook out on tripod Weber grills? Are bougie toddlers wearing spaceships this year, or jungle animals, or clowns, or dinosaurs? Google can tell you a lot, sure, but to see how people really live, go onto facebook or instagram and start scrolling. Like many parents and grandparents, I don't post pictures of children or teens online. There are too many freaks out there, manipulating photos with AI. But plenty of people do post pics of little Shiloh learning to ride a bike, of Jaden's birthday party and Olivia's sixth-grade graduation, and those photos will give you a wealth of detail to work with.

You'll find that razors are still popular (along with dirt bikes, offroad bikes, and skateboards). Yes, people still burn burgers on Weber grills, and while spaceships and jungle animals are perennially popular, dinosaurs are really back - and for girls, as well as boys. But you're not going to find much by way of clowns in your local Carter's shop. Cool Millennial and Gen Z couples are tearing out carpeting, throwing down hardwood, and painting the interiors of their homes muddy browns and greys and mauvish-pinks. For the outsides, "Millennial charcoal" is still a thing, but white, grey, and pale blue are coming back strong.

You can also get story ideas from those pictures of anonymous strangers - remember the photo of little Olivia's sixth-grade graduation noted above? Perfumes of Arabia, the first story in It's Not Even Past, was inspired by just such a photo. In a shot posted on Insta by a proud mom, Olivia is beaming, her dad's arm around her on one side, Mom beside her on the other. But who's that off to the side? Could it be Olivia's younger sister, looking up at her with narrowed eyes that seem more envious than admiring?

And to see where that went, you'll have to grab a copy of the book and read the story. I'll keep you posted about our upcoming pub date.

And yes, "I'll keep you posted" is absolutely a cliché.