SleuthSayers

How does my garden grow?

2026-08-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

I think often these days of the famous closing line of Voltaire’s 1759 novella Candide: Il faut cultiver notre jardin. (“We have to cultivate our garden.”) Candide is a satire better known to modern Americans from Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 operetta of the same name. Its protagonist, a naive young optimist, learns through horrific life experience that he can do nothing about war, famine, plague, rape, slavery, torture, earthquakes, religious persecution, financial ruin, betrayal, hypocrisy, and a host of other ills. The survivor he becomes concludes that he must accept the futility of trying to sway these uncontrollable forces. He must also stop wasting his time theorizing about philosophies that claim to have answers that will vanquish suffering and evil. All he can do is make his garden grow.

We’re living through times when all the ills that Candide and his sweetheart Cunegonde experienced are still at large in the world. Of those most likely to touch me personally, natural disasters are on the rise, and global anti-Semitism is at a higher level than at any time since the Holocaust, which was still going during my infancy. In July, there was a tornado watch in New York, and we had three days of Hazardous air quality (500 AQI at its worst) in the Hamptons due to Canadian wildfires. Voltaire, who died in 1778 (during America’s revolution, before that of France), did not mention the collapse of systems of government, but that’s another force that’s spinning out of control.

So here’s my garden, twenty-five square feet in pots on my deck at the modest end of East Hampton. It’s given me enormous pleasure and peace of mind this summer. I go out first thing in the morning to talk to the flowers and deadhead a few spent blooms. In late afternoon or early evening, I give them some water if they look thirsty and feed them every couple of weeks if they aren’t as floriferous as I’d like. It sure beats watching the news.

The Power of Prepositions

2026-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

The Power of Prepositions

by Leigh Lundin

Aladdin, getting along in years, found he was unable to pitch a tent as he had done in his youth. Smart as well as lucky, Aladdin still kept his magic lamp and, frugal with his wishes, one remained.

He rubbed his lamp. When the genie appeared, he begged him. “My camel can no longer thread the needle. Can you cure my erectile impotence?”

Genie said, “I can whisk away your problem.” With that, he rubbed his hands, evoking a puff of billowing blue smoke. Genie said, “I’ve dealt you a powerful spell, but at your age, you’ll be able to invoke it only once a year.”

“How do I use it?” asked Aladdin.

“All you have to do is say ‘one two three’ and it shall rise for as long as you wish, but only once a year.”

Aladdin asked, “What happens when we’re exhausted and no longer want to continue?”

Genie replied, “All you or your woman has to say is ‘one two three four,’ and it will go down. But be warned: the spell will not work again for another year.”

Aladdin galloped home, eager to try his new powers of the flesh. That evening, Aladdin bathed and scented himself with oil of exotic myrrh. He climbed into bed where his wife lay on her side.

Aladdin took a deep breath and said, “One two three.” Instantly, he became more aroused than he ever had in youth, a magnificent happenstance of tree-trunk proportions.

His wife, hearing Aladdin’s words, rolled toward him and said, “What did you say ‘One two three’ for?”

And that, dear readers, is why you should not end a sentence with a preposition.

Whoa, Look at THAT!

2026-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

So far this summer, I've spent a lot of time on the computer, especially when it's hot as blazes outside, and at least some of it's been productive. I've written and submitted a lot of stories and SleuthSayers posts, I've done some research for future stories, I've read and sent a bazillion emails, etc. But I have also wasted a lot of time. I'm good at wasting time.

My most recent time-waster is watching (believe it or not) movie reactions on YouTube. Yep, you heard me right: movie reactions. Google calls it "feature creators recording themselves watching and responding to films for the first time." There are many sites dedicated to this, like Cinebinge, Totally Whatever, Cinepals, The Reel Rejects, etc.--I think my favorite might be Popcorn in Bed--and, depending on the movie they're covering, they can be a lot of fun. Instead of choosing from a list of what movies each site offers, I usually search for phrases like "Jurassic Park reactions," "Godfather reactions," "Galaxy Quest reactions," and so forth.

The way it works is, you watch parts of a movie alongside one or two viewers, whose faces are shown as the movie plays, and you can see the reactions they have to certain things in the film. Often, and especially if they're filmmakers themselves, they'll make comments about what they're seeing, and that can be interesting too.

I need to explain something, here. I'm one of those people who has always enjoyed going again with others--friends, family, whoever--to see a movie that I myself have already seen and liked. I remember going to the theater for Forrest Gump four times in the months after it was first realeased in the mid-'90s--once by myself, and the next three times with each of our kids--all of them were teenagers then. I got a real kick out of watching their reactions and finding out what they thought of it. Same thing if I'm streaming a film at home on TV or playing it on DVD with, say, one of our children or grandchildren. I get almost as much fun out of watching their faces as I do from watching the movie. I've probably shown the grandkids all of my favorites, at least those that are child-friendly, and I have many favorites.

So why am I telling you all this, in a mystery-blog post? Here's the thing. I have discovered that these viewer-reaction videos on YouTube aren't just fun: they can be informative to me as a storyteller. I won't say they teach me a lot that I don't already know, but they do confirm for me which parts of the story are the most important and interesting and moving to the viewer. And believe me, the viewers' reactions cover the whole gamut--surprise, concentration, fear, sorrow, suspense, delight, sometimes even tears or cheering out loud. And, again, you can see exactly what it is in the story that's making them feel that way. Plus, it's entertaining.

I'm sure this is obvious, but the things that create the biggest reactions are the sad scenes, funny scenes, dangerous or intense scenes, twists, reveals, etc. You can also tell, immediately, at what point the viewer begins to like the hero/heroine, or dislike the villain. You can see the value of a gripping opening, a sympathetic character, an action scene, a mid-story reversal, a slam-bang ending, a satisfying end to a character arc. The kinds of things that might be instructive and helpful to a writer.

I've always felt that the one most important thing a story must do is make the reader feel something--whatever emotion it is--and the more intense these feelings are, the better your story/movie/novel is going to be. And, even though I know I'm belaboring the point, these YouTube videos allow you to see it firsthand, in the viewers' faces, along with the reasons for those reactions.

So that's my pitch. Have you ever bothered to watch one of those videos? (I didn't even know, until a few weeks ago, that they existed.) If you haven't seen them and want to give it try, just think of a movie you enjoyed, search for it in YouTube along with the word "reactions," and take a look. They're silly but they're addictive.

As for justification, I'll tell you the same thing I say to my wife when she walks in with frowns and eyerolls and says Good grief, what are you watching in here? I tell her it's research. I'm learning something.

Hey, it sounds good to me.

The Gingerbread Man

2026-08-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

In June, Level Short released Wish Upon a Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales, an anthology I edited with Michael Bracken. The stories range from light-hearted to noir. Fellow SleuthSayers, Joe Walker, Barb Goffman, and Michael Bracken, share insights about their amazing stories in previous posts and are worth checking out.

Deb Goldstein, Tom Milani, and Andrew Welsh- Huggins discuss the first two pages of their fabulous contributions at Art Taylor’s First Two Pages, also great reads.

Today, I am delighted to talk about my story, “The Gingerbread Man.”

THE GINGERBREAD MAN

Imagine The Princess Bride meets The Sopranos inside a bowling alley in the 1960’s—that’s my Hollywood-style pitch for this story. It is inspired by the fairy tale and the lost world of action bowling.

The story opens with Jack O’Conner and his grandson. Jack tells him a bedtime story, his version of the fairy tale, “The Gingerbread Man.”

Jack flashes back to the 1960’s in New York City, the center of “action bowling,” games that involve small-time gangsters who make high-stakes bets on players.

Jack “Crazy-like-a-Fox” O’Connor was one of those bowlers. He’s leveraged by the police to become an informant to keep his wayward brother out of jail. His task, to find action bowler Francesco “The Gingerbread Man” Romano, the getaway driver for the Barnyard Gang that is linked to a series of convenience store robberies.

Action bowlers had monikers, a clue about how they “ticked.” I used these nicknames as a vehicle to retell this iconic fairy tale.

Jack’s version of “The Gingerbread Man” takes readers into the unique world of action bowling. It’s filled with quirky characters and a twist that I hope readers will enjoy.

THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

“Hansel and Gretel” by Joseph S. Walker
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by John M. Floyd
“Rapunzel” by Adam Meyer
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Laura Oles
“Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Michael Bracken
“Beauty and the Beast” by James A. Hearn
“The Bremen Musicians” by Debra H. Goldstein
“Jack and the Beanstalk” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
“Cinderella” by Donna Andrews
“The Frog Prince” by Josh Pachter
“Little Red Riding Hood” by Barb Goffman
“The Briar Patch” by Tom Milani
“King o’ the Cats” by David Dean
“The Gingerbread Man” by Stacy Woodson

If you want to learn more about action bowling, check out PIN ACTION by Gianmarc Manzione. It’s a fun read and offers insights into the history and unique subculture of action bowling.

***

My latest story, "She Loves You," appears in Black Cat Weekly, Issue 255. "She Loves You" follows a lovesick country music singer who receives an unsolicited reading from a geriatric psychic and gets more than he bargained for in this twisted tale about loyalty, trust, and inevitable consequences.

When Writing Historical Fiction: It's Better to Travel

2026-08-13T00:01:07.001-04:00

(It's mid-August and I am enblow deep in end-of-summer projects. Haven't forgotten my promised follow up installment on celluloid Hammett. Will have that for your next go-round. In the interim this is a repost from a while back. Still useful. Hope you enjoy! - B.T.)

[Elmore] Leonard was originally no more a man of the West than was the Ohio-born dentist Zane Grey. While a kid in Detroit, Westerns enthralled him as they did most people in the 1930s and 40s. When he grew interested in writing during college Western fiction seemed a promising genre he could work in part-time. Unlike many writers then selling Western tales to pulps, though, Leonard insisted on accuracy, and kept a ledger of his research over the years, later crediting his longtime subscription to Arizona Highways Magazine for many of his authentic descriptions. All had to be genuinei: the guns, Apache terms and clothing; the frontier knives, card games, liquor, and especially the horses.

— Nathan Ward, from "Elmore Leonard's Gritty Westerns," in Crime Reads

It's certainly never a bad idea to follow the writing advice of the great Elmore Leonard. His Ten Rules For Writing are rightly famous as terrific advice for any writer of fiction.

The Great Elmore Leonard

In those instances where Leonard's advice isn't readily available, it never hurts to follow his example, if at all possible. Take the one in the quote above from Nathan Ward's Crime Reads article on Leonard. For years Leonard apparently leaned heavily on the content of Arizona Highways magazine.

It's a fine notion. Now, don't get me wrong: it's always better to travel. There is no substitute for actually going to and spending time in the place you're writing about. But, if you're writing about someplace and you can't afford to go, read travel writers. For that matter, even if you can afford the investment in both time and treasure to visit the region where your work is set, read travel writers. No one can help you get a feel for a certain place like people who make their livings helping their readers get a feel for a certain place.

Take William Dalrymple. The British-born-and-raised son of a Scottish baronet, Dalrymple these days is best known for his recent run of riveting books on the history of the subcontinent: India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Dalrymple is a terrific writer and a first-rate historian who splits his time between a farm just outside Delhi, in India and a summer home in London.

William Dalrymple

But before he began to make a name for himself with books such as White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842, and The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of An Empire, Dalrymple began his writing career as a travel writer, taking readers on a tour through the Eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Land (From the Holy Mountain: a Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East), and of course, chronicling the early days of his life-long love affair with India. With his first book In Xanadu: a Quest, published in 1989, Dalrymple chronicles his modern retracing of the journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem in the summer palace of Kublai Khan in China. But it was with his second book, 1994's City of Djinns: a Year in Delhi, a memoir of his first visit to the city which has had such a tremendous impact on his adult life, that Dalrymple really began to make his mark.

And there is so much to this memoir which can be of use to the writer reading about the city. Here's an early excerpt laying out his introduction to Delhi and to India:

I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices. Moreover the city—so I soon discovered—possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. Friends would moan about the touts on Janpath and head off to the beaches in Goa, but for me Delhi always exerted a stronger spell. I lingered on, and soon found a job in a home for destitutes in the far north of the city. The nuns gave me a room overlooking a municipal rubbish dump. In the morning I would look out to see the sad regiment of rag-pickers trawling the stinking berms of refuse; overhead, under a copper sky, vultures circled the thermals forming patterns like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. In the afternoons, after I had swept the compound and the inmates were safely asleep, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me.

Now, I ask you. Can this guy set a scene, or what? Really helpful for drinking in the flavors, colors, scents and sounds of what on the face of it comes across as a truly unforgettable place. Really not a bad guide if you're interested in writing about modern-day India.

But what if, like me, you're a writer of historical fiction?

In Leonard's case, as stated above, he exploited a modern magazine to help give him local flavor not just for another region of the country, but for that region in another era. No mean feat. It's a testament to Leonard's talent, coupled with his singular vision that he was able to "world build" (to borrow a phrase from our friends who write speculative fiction) using these building blocks for his foundation.

So sure, you can (and should) definitely use your imagination to fill in the cracks. There is certainly no substitute for imagination in the fiction writer's tool kit. That said, you need more than one tool in order to get the job of writing fiction done. I've often felt like our "tool kit" as fiction writers should be more aptly called a "tool warehouse." And of course, another way to use travel writing as one of those tools, to help get the feel for a city or street, or region or state or county or what-have-you during a bygone time is to go and find travel writing from the time in which your work-in-progress is set.

I have a writer friend whose current work-in-progress is set during World War II. One of his major characters has a back-story in which he lived in Germany during the 1930s, in the run-up to the war. I referred him to A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, the first volume in a superb three-volume memoir of a trip on foot across Europe, from Holland all the way to Turkey by travel writer, war-time British commando (the account of his part in a successful kidnapping of a German general in Crete is not to be missed), bon vivant, and (some say) one of Ian Fleming's models for his literary creation James Bond, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Leigh Fermor set out for Constantinople (Istanbul) in December of 1933, less than a year after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had come to power. His narrative is replete with rich details about German life during that period, laying out how the Nazis had both a heavy and in some ways, a negligible impact on the country they would eventually drive to absolute ruin. Here is Leigh Fermor's initial impression of Cologne, the first major German city he visited:

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest’s initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it. Tinsel and stars flashed in all the shops and banners saying Fröhliche Weihnacht! were suspended across the streets. Clogged villagers and women in fleece-lined rubber boots slipped about the icy pavements with exclamatory greetings and small screams, spilling their armfuls of parcels. The snow heaped up wherever it could and the sharp air and the lights gave the town an authentic Christmas card feeling. It was the real thing at last! Christmas was only five days away. Renaissance doors pierced walls of ancient brick, upper storeys jutted in salients of carved timber and glass, triangles of crow-steps outlined the steep gables, and eagles and lions and swans swung from convoluted iron brackets along a maze of lanes. As each quarter struck, the saint-encrusted towers challenged each other through the snow and the rivalry of those heavy bells left the air shaking. Beyond the Cathedral and directly beneath the flying-buttresses of the apse, a street dropped sharply to the quays. Tramp steamers and tugs and barges and fair-sized ships lay at anchor under the spans of the bridges, and cafés and bars were raucous with music. I had been toying with the idea, if I could make the right friends, of cadging a lift on a barge and sailing upstream in style for a bit.

Again, this is quite a scene the writer is setting! So much good material, such a solid feel for the place. Leigh Fermor wrote the memoir some forty years after the trip, based on large part on the deep and thorough entries he made in his journal as an eighteen year-old looking for adventure in a rapidly changing world. And then he goes on to talk about his attempt to "make friends" in that timeless way young people have from time immemorial: he went to a bar:

I made friends all right. It was impossible not to. The first place was a haunt of seamen and bargees shod in tall sea-boots rolled down to the knee, with felt linings and thick wooden soles. They were throwing schnapps down their throats at a brisk rate. Each swig was followed by a chaser of beer, and I started doing the same. The girls who drifted in and out were pretty but a rough lot and there was one bulky terror, bursting out of a sailor’s jersey and wearing a bargeman’s cap askew on a nest of candy-floss hair, called Maggi—which was short for Magda—who greeted every newcomer with a cry of “Hallo, Bubi!” and a sharp, cunningly twisted and very painful pinch on the cheek. I liked the place, especially after several schnapps, and I was soon firm friends with two beaming bargemen whose Low German speech, even sober, would have been blurred beyond the most expert linguist’s grasp. They were called Uli and Peter. “Don’t keep on saying Sie,” Uli insisted, with a troubled brow and an unsteadily admonishing forefinger: “Say Du.” This advance from the plural to the greater intimacy of the singular was then celebrated by drinking Brüderschaft. Glasses in hand, with our right arms crooked through the other two with the complexity of the three Graces on a Parisian public fountain, we drank in unison. Then we reversed the process with our left arms, preparatory to ending with a triune embrace on both cheeks, a manoeuvre as elaborate as being knighted or invested with the Golden Fleece. The first half of the ceremony went without a hitch, but a loss of balance in the second, while our forearms were still interlocked, landed the three of us in the sawdust in a sottish heap. Later, in the fickle fashion of the very drunk, they lurched away into the night, leaving their newly-created brother dancing with a girl who had joined our unsteady group: my hobnail boots could do no more damage to her shiny dancing shoes, I thought, than the seaboots that were clumping all round us. She was very pretty except for two missing front teeth. They had been knocked out in a brawl the week before, she told me.

And that's just a taste. Leigh Fermor's three volumes here truly form a treasure trove: a window into a long-vanished world, and a feel for both the time itself and the timeless humanity of its cast of thousands. Well worth a read whether you're writing something set in Middle Europe during the 1930s, are a student of human nature, history, great writing, or (most likely) some combination of all of the above.

Patrick Leigh Fermor (Right) in Crete, 1943

And that's all for now. Tune in next time when I I wrap up our tour through Cinema’s many adaptations of the work of Dashiell Hallett.

See you in two weeks!

John Crowley

2026-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve been reading Gibbon’s history, Decline and Fall, at bedtime, and I was going to write a SleuthSayers column about it, but over the weekend, John Crowley died. He would have found it entertaining, to hear about the Gibbon. He would have thought it appropriate.

[CROWLEY’S HAND & MANUSCRIPT]

I met John in Lenox, Massachusetts – introduced by our mutual friend, the bookseller Matt Tannenbaum – and we fell into a kind of pipe-and-slippers habit pattern. He was working on Little, Big at the time, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what a talisman it would turn out to be. He told me he’d written a science fiction novel loosely based on the War of the Roses, and I read The Deep with great enthusiasm. Beasts, his second novel, was chewier, but I thought it was very accessible, and I was surprised to find out people thought his stuff was difficult. (I wasn’t surprised to learn he admired Nabokov.) This would have been the winter of 1978-79, and to my knowledge, John hadn’t shown many people the book he was writing. His agent, his editor at Bantam, and his old pal Lance Bird, the filmmaker. So when he asked me if I’d be interested in looking at it, I was of course flattered, and said yes.

Little, Big was about two-thirds of the way done. He was actually further along than that, but the manuscript he gave me was as much of the finished rough as he felt confident in. It was mostly typescript, but with a lot of handwritten interpolations, and the last hundred pages were entirely in his hand. He wrote with a fountain pen, and a calligraphic nib, so the downstrokes were heavy, and the horizontals more delicate. I found his handwriting in and of itself hypnotic, but it was also very sure.

That year, the third novel, Engine Summer, was published. He told me it was in fact his first book, which he’d written in all innocence, not knowing about Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “By the Waters of Babylon,” or Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz – in other words, he wrote a post-apocalyptic story not realizing there was already an established library.

It’s an over-simplification to call Little, Big a fantasy novel. It is, of course, but it plays very little with the conventions. Reading the rough draft, I was struck dumb. I couldn’t believe I actually knew the guy who was writing this. (A couple of years later, when the book was published, and I was pressed for a description, I called it a cross between The Wind and the Willows and A Hundred Years of Solitude.) At the time, I wasn’t comparing it to anything; it seemed as if he’d invented a new fiction. You were invested in the idea of story.

I believe one of the reasons so many people are charmed by Little, Big is that you feel a sense of ownership. As if he were writing to you. John spoke sometimes of the ideal reader, as opposed, I think, to the generic reader. What he meant was, that as a writer, you write to that person – to the ideal reader. The many, many readers of Little, Big imagine themselves to be in on the secret, and they are.

John was a lapsed Catholic. This explains, among other things, his fascination with forgotten rituals, and lost brotherhoods, and secret signs. Much of this comes out in the Ægypt quartet, the Rosicrucians, John Dee, alchemical mysteries, transmutation and transubstantiation. You don’t have to believe conspiracy theories, but the faith in them of people who do is a kind of mystery. The world is not how it’s always been, or it’s no longer the way it was, but once upon a time, these things were true.

Crowley had a distinctive voice, and an enormous curiosity. He could take a familiar thing, and hold it up to the light, turning it back to front, and show you something entirely different. There’s a fantastic metaphor he uses in Little, Big – the Art of Memory, which I remember him explaining to me, one night, when we were half in our cups, which goes like this:

You take an object, a leaf, a rose, a glass half-full, and it represents a memory, of childhood, of courtship, or mourning, and you place that object on a shelf, or in a niche, in an imaginary room, in your mind. And you people that room with memories. And over time, you build many rooms, and turn those rooms into a house of memory, that you enter at will, to bring back your own history. And it may happen, that you wander in this house, and you come into one of your many rooms by a different door, and you see all the memories in that room from behind, as if their masks have slipped, and your orderly arrangement is no more than a fiction, a story told by the firelight.

I’ll miss that curiosity. His appetite for wonder, his intelligence, his kindness. He was deeply thoughtful, and deeply thoughtful of others. He was a sweet, decent man. And for all of that, he wrote an immortal book. He changed people’s lives. He certainly changed mine. God rest him.

Finding Markets

2026-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

Where, oh where, can I submit
all these stories?

This past Saturday, Josh Pachter, fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman, and I were panelists for “The Keys to Writing and Editing Outstanding Short Stories!” hosted by the Sisters in Crime Grand Canyon Writers, moderated by Yvonne Corrigan-Carr, and attended by approximately 120 people. We had quite a robust discussion and answered several questions from the audience after we wrapped up the pre-planned portion of the presentation. The event was recorded. If you missed it, someone at Grand Canyon Writers (https://grandcanyonwriters.com/) should be able to direct you to the recording.

Rather than attempt to sum up everything we discussed (what, you missed the parts about the secret handshake and how to blackmail editors for fun and publication?), I’m going to focus on one topic that is raised every time I lead a presentation or participate in a panel discussion focused on short fiction, a topic about which there is never enough time to provide a detailed answer: how to find markets for your short stories.

THE USUAL SOURCES

The usual sources of market information were mentioned: The Short Mystery Fiction Society (in general and specifically the regularly updated market list), Duotrope, and The Submission Grinder.

There are other, similar resources as well, including Chill Subs, Poets & Writers, and Horror Tree.

FACEBOOK

There are Facebooks groups, such as:

Open Call: Speculative Markets - Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy

Open Call: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Pulp Markets

Open Call: Horror Markets

Open Call: Crime, Thriller, Mystery Markets

Call For Submissions: Quiltbag

Open Call: For The Love Of Horror

For Authors! Calls for Submissions

Open Submission Calls for Horror/Paranormal/Mystery/SciFi Writers

Open Submission Calls for Short Story Writers

And these aren't the only ones.

SOCIAL MEDIA

I follow many writers and publishers on Social Media—Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, and Threads—and I regularly see posts about new markets and open calls, and I click on the links to see the full guidelines.

OTHER WRITERS

I share market information with other writers. If I see a market call for a type of story that I think fits within the range of stories one of friends writes, I send a link. They do the same in reverse.

SEARCH ENGINES

But here’s what I use more than any of the other sources: Google.

And how I use Google to find markets will probably work on other search engines as well.

In the address bar or search bar, I type:

“call for submissions” AND “short stories” -ai

“call for submissions” AND mystery -ai

“call for submissions” AND “crime fiction” -ai

“submission guidelines” AND “short stories” -ai

“submission guidelines” AND mystery -ai

“submission guidelines” AND “crime fiction” -ai

And other variations of the above. (Note: -ai tells Google not to provide an AI-generated response.)

Then I go to the drop-down Tools menu and restrict the search to the previous week or previous month so I don’t see outdated submission calls.

GOOD LUCK

I do an intentional search approximately once a week so that I know what the new markets are well before submission deadlines.

Sometimes I have an existing story that fits a call, so I submit it. Sometimes a call generates an idea and I am able to write a story before the deadline, so I submit it. And sometimes a call generates an idea but I don’t finish the story in time, or I do and it gets rejected. Well, then I start searching for an alternative market.

If you use all of the suggestions I’ve presented, and use them consistently, you will find more opportunities than you will ever be able to take advantage of. But if doing this gets you to write a story you might not otherwise have written, or it leads to a sale to a publication you might never have otherwise known about, it’ll be worth your time and effort.

Good luck!

* * *

“Satan’s Wings,” my latest story featuring Nathaniel Rose, a PI working out of St. Louis, Missouri, appeared in Black Cat Weekly #256.

It’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools

2026-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

I mostly concur with this proverb, though I have had tools come apart in the middle of a cut, all on their own, resulting in marred work and much cursing, mostly directed at the tool’s manufacturer. Though the villain is nearly always the operator, in whose charge proper tool maintenance justly resides.

I started trying to write in a time when the only available tools involved ballpoint pens and mechanical typewriters. For me, the typewriters were non-starters. Too clunky and hard to use, the travel distance from key to paper amounting to several inches of quarrelsome

springs and levers. The pen, in this case, was mightier, though the handwriting was abysmal, assuring that my works in progress were basically unreadable by anyone but myself until I succumbed to a typewriter for the final draft.

Word processors saved my life and finger joints and I’ve never looked back. Only now there's a new tool widely available, artificial intelligence, though I submit that this isn’t a handy assistant, but rather a fraud, pure and simple, and unworthy of any other designation.

When I wanted to buy my first electric guitar, my father asked me if it played the music for you. It took me a moment to figure out what he was saying, but quaintly, he actually thought that maybe the electronics industry had leaped ahead about sixty years and invented a device that rescued the musician from the inconvenience of learning to play music. This would have been quite a technical achievement for the time, but I doubt it would have resulted in creating The Beatles’ oeuvre, much less anything else people would be interested in listening to.

So why would you hire a robot to do your writing for you? Well, I guess if you don’t know how to write, and have no interest in doing so, AI is some sort of blessing. It’s no accident that Kurt Vonnegut called his anti-automation novel Player Piano. There’s nothing wrong about having an upright piano in the living room to entertain guests with Scott Joplin and Gilbert and Sullivan before acquiring the luxury of vinyl and cherry-veneered stereo consoles. But no one but the fully deranged or duplicitous ever claimed to be performing the works themselves.

The promise of AI is that you can have your exposition scored and performed by someone else, and then easily foist it off as your own composition. In my old-fashioned brain, this is merely deception, forgery, plagiarism, theft of intellectual property and the kind of plain old cheating that used to get you heaved out of whatever legitimate pursuit you’d be engaged in.

I don’t think the subject is even worthy of debate, though I’ll try anyway.

The Luddites famously got all out of sorts when machinery began to replace manual craft. I’d like to get one of these guys in my wood shop, show him a table saw, drill press, dove tail jig, plunge router and a stack of raw wood and tell him to whip up a Federal-style highboy. I bet, like my father, he’d learn that these modern machines don’t do any of the work without human intervention. My son is an expert with the type of hand tools favored by the Luddites, but can also make mind-blowingly intricate wooden objects with laser cutters and CNC milling machines. The designs still come out of his head, and the computer applications only know how to do what he’s programmed them to do. They are tools, and if you think they make the art easy, just give it a try.

I imagine someone could enlist AI to render work in his style, but the product would be akin to the slop anyone could crank out by asking Chat GPT to write a Hemingway short story.

There’s a gigantic qualitative difference between using a machine to make something and having the machine make it all by itself. I have great admiration for anyone who can make a perfect dove tail joint by hand, but I just don’t see the point in spending a month doing something I can do pull off in an afternoon with a jig and a couple routers. One could also spend a few years designing and manufacturing a machine that can make a thousand dove tail joints in that same afternoon. But unless I have a furniture factory, why bother?

Before straining the analogy past the breaking point, it’s important to note that writing isn’t manufacturing. It’s a craft and an art, and in its fullest realization, it’s creation. You can’t hand this over to a robot and expect to come out of the experience whole. Even if no one notices, you’ve sold a crucial part of yourself down the river.

The Mills of the Gods.

2026-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

"Thus, I do not see what use there is in those mills of the gods said to grind so late as to render punishment hard to be recognized, and to make wickedness fearless."

— Plutarch (c.50-c.120 AD)

Same Plutarch. Same.

I often shake my head (and sometimes my fist) at the slow grind of justice. Last month, to capture my impatience I began my article with a very long title: Changes in the Canadian Criminal Code: About time, I didn't know that wasn’t illegal before and Thank goodness, finally. This month's title is far shorter because my impatience for justice has been somewhat satiated by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Bill C-16 (the Protecting Victims Act) received Royal Assent on June 18, 2026, but the specific criminal code provisions outlawing coercive control will legally come into effect no later than June 2028. This begs the question: what happens between now and June 2028? Enter the Supreme Court of Canada and its May, 2026 tort decision in the case of Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia.

A tort is a civil wrong, allowing the person harmed to sue the wrongdoer for monetary damages, separate and apart from any criminal charge.

In 2022, a trial judge first recognized a tort of “family violence” in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia and awarded damages of $150,000 in keeping with the damages of domestic violence cases ranging from $100,000 to $200,000 in Ontario. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling, recognizing a new tort:

"The distinguishing feature of the new tort is coercive control, which is a pattern of domination that causes distinct harm by stripping an intimate partner of their dignity, autonomy and equality within the relationship. Hallmarks include financial control, isolation, intimidation and threats. While assault and battery focus on discrete incidents, the new tort is designed to capture the entirety of an abusive relationship and the pattern of behaviour, and its impact, over the course of the relationship."

The new damages awarded?

A whopping $400,000.

One form of coercive control abusers use is to withhold money from their victims and there is a uniquely satisfying justice in making abusers pay larger sums of money, giving their victims the autonomy that their abusers tried to strip from them.

While we wait for criminal charges to take effect, we can look forward to larger damages paid to victims in the future.

Back to what our old friend Plutarch said, there's no point in rendering punishment too late to be useful and making the wicked fearless because, truly, abusers of women have had a long run of fearlessness. Domestic abusers use money as power so, taking their money seems fitting. If this sounds a tad vindictive; you betcha. If this sounds like an eye-for-an-eye justice; not even close. The cruelty of coercive control should never be replicated by a just society but it must be severely punished.

The coercive control used in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia:

"the husband repeatedly punched, slapped and choked his wife over the course of the marriage, struck her with a hatchet or hammer on two occasions and broke her front teeth with a glass ketchup bottle. He kept a house full of over 500 firearms ranging from handguns to machine guns. In addition to taking out a gun when he was enraged with the wife, he told her he had the “25 cent or ten cent solution for her” — a statement the wife understood to refer to the cost of making a bullet and as a threat to kill her...(She) was trapped in the marriage, always trying to behave in a manner that would not trigger one of (the husband’s) bouts of rage and the ensuing violence.”

Travel Notes from the Maybe Someday Pile

2026-08-08T00:01:42.711-04:00

Whenever I travel somewhere new, this writer's reflex kicks in, and I can't possibly be alone in this. I look around at the place and the people. I listen harder. I take a deep breath and try to sense the vibe, the history, the stuff that isn't likely in the travel guides. Then I think: What kind of story could be set here?

And sometimes, I write one. That question has inspired a good number of my stories, whether the place was utterly new to me or newly strange because I was seeing it from a new angle. "Queen and Country" (Mystery Magazine) was an immersion into a world alien to me: the badlands swamps of southern France. The funeral home in "Star of Zoe" and the small town in "On Loan from the Artist" (both AHMM) are places I'd been before, but it took a new life experience to spark their ideas.

For vacation season, here are a few literary-feeling places that stuck with me. Plot twist: I've never set a story in any of these locations.

Edinburgh

I read somewhere that Edinburgh feels like it has always been there, seeping up era by era from its volcanic slopes. That rang true for me. Each neighborhood and new architectural style could be just more flow from the same ancient source.

Around it, the mood. The place really has that old Scottish tension: part refined, part rough, part rational, part random--and everywhere wet. It's a place of welcome but also shadows. And maybe Edinburgh Castle sits atop that old underground source. The castle looms over the town, and as night comes on, the air takes on another charge. You're not sure what's being guarded, or from whom.

No wonder the town inspired The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You wouldn't be at all surprised to come across the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Why I've never tried a story there: Probably timing, and probably intimidation. We visited Edinburgh for less than a week, years before I wrote my first short story, and more recent travels claimed that brain space. Also, Edinburgh is a singular stage. It's not enough to stroll around some and think you know the place. The words would hit with all the power of a Target fog machine.

Monterey

For my money, California is the most beautiful state in the U.S., with everything from rugged mountains to farmland to dramatic shorelines. You get all that along the drive to Monterey, but as you arrive, you get my favorite California: that cloudy, kelpy, salted-over harbor town. Monterey hasn't been an industrial fishing hub since the Steinbeck days, but they keep up appearances.

These days, tourism is the big deal, but you might not notice it. The foot traffic is roughly comparable to Savannah, but the Savannah Waterfront crowds press together in stately close quarters. In Monterey, the crowds fan out over the region and one aquarium. The result is an unusual quiet for such a well-traveled place.

A writer knows that quiet isn't emptiness. Often, it's anything but. It's Monterey's quiet that stays with me.

Why I've never tried a story there: Being a landlubber, seaside town settings aren't a first reflex. And you can't recreate this kind of atmosphere from photos and Google Earth. I'd have to write the piece experientially from Monterey itself. Which is an artistic burden I would courageously bear, if anyone wants to fund that.

Winslow

There is a whole lot of nothing in this part of Arizona, but a whole lot of people have passed this way. Route 66 is mostly I-40 these days, but you still find the roadside diners, the sleep-in-a-wigwam motels, and the roadside grifts to check out dinosaur footprints. Like really small footprints. The main attraction is Arizona itself. This is the Painted Desert, and it stretches out in dreamlike reds and purples.

I could've selected almost anywhere on Arizona's stretch of Route 66. I chose Winslow since that was our home base. It's a fine town, proud of its heyday and a particular corner, dusty, as if scratched out of the desert and fighting not to be reclaimed. We stayed at the Mission Revival La Posada, a restored Fred Harvey-era gem. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe doesn't stop there anymore (Amtrak does, daily), but the freight trains rumble past your windows all day long.

I should point out that I'm a light sleeper.

Why I've never tried a story there: We were driving through the desert, probably fifty miles from any kind of settlement, and here came the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. I'm not topping that.

Tromsø

You can't get to Tromsø by train. The flight is two hours and 1100 kilometers northbound from Oslo. The ferry will get you there in about a day. This is north of north, above the Arctic Circle. Tromsø is gorgeous, an overgrown village set against fjords and mountains, and still with the feel of a last outpost. It's a gritty place, but only partly by choice. The Arctic conditions take their toll. As for the rest, it's a college town, and the Norwegians love their death metal.

We stayed there for several days and got out into the fjords. This was during the midnight sun. I watched one of those stubborn midnights from a campfire out in the tundra. The light went low, the kind you get with an eclipse, and there it stayed in total dimness for hours. I know all this because I wasn't sleeping. Neither was much of Tromsø. Ferries came and went. Students walked to wherever students walk at 3am. When I did sleep, it was thanks to the tender mercy of blackout curtains.

It was a bleary few days. And I'd go back tomorrow.

Why I've never tried a story there: I sort of did. My "Crossing the Line Twice" in AHMM came from this trip, but the story is set out on a boat. I used the American grandkids of a Norwegian tough guy because that worked for the story--and also I could pull it off without risking a Viking curse.

Wrap-Up

Life is more interesting when you stay curious. It's that curiosity that both draws me to places and when you leave room to learn what the place has to say. Those are the stories I bring home, not used in my stuff but hardly forgotten.

The Abandoned Places

2026-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

Every town has their own Marsten House from The Shining. Every rural place has a Sleepy Hollow nearby where the urban legends about the man with the hook or even cousins to the Headless Horseman lurk. If you've ever driven through Nevada, you've seen whole towns abandoned. Incidentally, my one experience with Beatty, Nevada, which looked like dozens of towns I've driving through in Ohio, minus the scrub desert and wild asses, turned out to be an annex of Area 51. So that speeding ticket went to fund stealth fighter research, according the Annie Jacobsen. But like a certain pundit, I digress.

In Ohio, we have all types of abandoned places. These are the most famous.

The Peters Cartridge Family

I discovered this one by accident while riding the Little Miami Bike Trail. The Peters Cartridge Factory has its own haunted history. Four major explosions took place there, many related to the nearby Little Miami Railroad (now the aforementioned bike trail.) A rail collision in 1890 killed 12 and leveled serveral buildings on site. A machine accident set off the 1922 blast. While no one was killed, eight were injured, including one worker who was blinded. In 1942 and 1943, at the height of the war effort, two more explosions which remain unexplained, the 1942 blast shattering windows thirty miles away. Which means windows in Kentucky sustained damage.

When the plant closed after World War II, the building deteriorated, becoming a ruin not unlike Detroit's Packard Plant. It also became a magnet for ghost stories. A horror movie was filmed there in the 1990s. But ruin explorers have also run afoul of collapsed floors and left over debris.

The site, however, is a retired part of this list. Over the last decade, the hairpin road to the factory was redone with straightened curves and the buildings renovated as loft apartments and a brewery. So instead of being a location for Ghosthunters, it's now a local tourist trap.

Helltown

Once upon a time, there was a town called Boston near Cleveland. Then the Department of Interior created the Cuyahoga Valley National Forest for 1974. The town was abandoned and closed off. Portions remain restricted. But grafitti in the town's former church gave rise to rumors of Satanic cults sacrificing humans in the former city, giving it a Salem's Lot aura. Further, rumors spread that the government bought out the town to cover up a chemical spill that created all manner of mutated monsters, including the Peninsula Python, a monster snake found in a nearby suburb. The best legend was the haunted bus. A schoolbus left behind. Legend has it that cult members attacked and slaughtered a bus full of children. Funny how that never made the news when mobster Danny Green's personal unscheduled rapid disassembly made the national news. (Green was a noted Irish mobster in Cleveland.)

The National Park Service razed most of the town, which is now open as picnic an hiking areas.

The Lockland Incinerator

If you drive south on I-75 through Cincinnati's northern suburbs, you come to a section of the freeway known as the Lockland Split. The northboard lanes veer off to go around the site of the former Stearns & Foster Mattress plant. The southbound lanes go between the walls of the former C&O canal. Before the two sides merge just above Ronald Reagan Highway, there lies a swatch of overgrown vacant land. Vacant, that is, except for a lone brick building seemingly alone in the middle of a wooded area. The smokestack has been covered in grafitti. This is the former Lockland Incinerator.

One intrepid urban explorer dubbed it "The Well of Souls," fancying himself as a modern-day Indiana Jones. After a couple searches on the building, I did find minor legends about the place, namely another blogger who called the place creepy and having a "dark vibe."

In reality, motorists, even residents of Lockland, have been asking what the hell that thing was. The incinerator handled trash, some from a closed landfill at the end of Reading, Ohio's Davis St. and the West Mill Creek. Our intrepid explorer found trash, grafitti, and... A motorboat? There was a motorboat lying along the remains of that section of Davis St. The building began operation in 1936 and shut down roughly when the Big Red Machine peaked in the mid-1970s.

Alas, the building's days are numbered. By 2032, the land will be taken to run I-75's northbound lanes alongside the southbound, closing the Lockland Split and opening up the land east of the former Stearns & Foster site.

I've also written about Chippewa Lake Amusement Park, which has a more storied history about all these except maybe the Peters Cartridge Plant. Whereas Peters is apartments, a brewery, and businesses, Chippewa Lake is an actual park now, its ruins part of a hiking trail.

The Strange Novels of Charles Williams

2026-08-06T09:37:00.000-04:00

by Eve Fisher

A long time ago, there was an informal group of writers, theologians, and intellectuals who collected (mostly) at C. S. Lewis' rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, or The Eagle & Child Pub: The Inklings. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein are the most famous, but in his time, Inkling Charles Williams was highly praised by Lewis, Tolkein, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and others for his amazing studies of Dante (The Figure of Beatrice inspired Dorothy Sayers' translation of The Divine Comedy), unique Arthurian poetry (Taliessin Through Logres), even more unique theology (Descent of the Dove and He Came Down From Heaven) and some almost completely unexplainable supernatural thrillers that I simply adore.

Charles Williams
by Kimberly Ferguson

Williams was a strange duck. A devout Anglican, he was known as the Magician, and was part of a mystical Christian group that practiced occult rituals while refusing to seek occult powers. Friends described Williams as a bundle of nervous, dynamic energy with 'raw charisma'. He was both passionately faithful to his wife, and carrying on a passionate, unconsummated affair with an Oxford University Press librarian. (He had to have influenced certain characters in Susan Howatch's Starbridge series.) And he wrote some of the best villains ever.

NOTE & WARNING: Williams wrote his novels in the 1930s and 1940s, and was a man of his time, so he writes some things which are / can be offensive today: racist, sexist (although often his heroines save the day - and the world), etc. I still enjoy them.

My personal favorites (and I have read them all) are War in Heaven and Descent into Hell:

War in Heaven - Opening line: “The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.” That's one way to keep you reading.

Villains: Sir Giles Tumulty (who also shows up in Many Dimensions) - His book is being published by Persimmon Publishing, where the corpse was found. He's an explorer and antiquarian, with all the charm of a cobra. See how many insults you can find in this meeting between Sir Giles and a police inspector:

"Rackstraw?" Sir Giles had said impatiently, screwing round from his writing-desk a small, brown wrinkled face toward the inspector, "yes, he came to lunch. Why not?"

"No reason at all, sir," the inspector said, "I only wanted to be sure. And when did he leave you—if you remember?"

"About half-past two," Sir Giles said. "Is that what he ought to have done? I'll say two, if you like, if it'll help you catch him. Only, if you do, you must arrange for me to see the hanging."

"If he left at half-past two, that's all I want to know," the inspector said. "Did you happen to mention to anyone that he was coming?"

"Yes," said Sir Giles, "I told the Prime Minister, the Professor of Comparative Etymology at King's College, and the cook downstairs. Why the hell do you ask me these silly questions? Do you suppose I run round telling all my friends that a loathsome little publisher's clerk is going to muck his food about at my table?"

"If you felt like that," the inspector said, holding down his anger, "I wonder you asked him to lunch."

"I asked him to lunch because I'd rather him foul my table than my time," Tumulty answered. "I had to waste an hour over him because he didn't understand a few simple things about my illustrations, and I saved it by working it in with lunch. I expect he charged overtime for it, so that he'd be two shillings to the good, one saved on his food and another extra pay. I should think he could get a woman for that one night. How much do you have to pay, policeman?"

The inspector at the moment felt merely that Sir Giles must be mad; it wasn't till hours afterwards that he became slowly convinced that the question was meant as an insult beyond reach of pardon or vengeance. At the time he stared blankly and said soberly: "I'm a married man, sir."

"You mean you get her for nothing?" Sir Giles asked. "Two can live as cheaply as one, and your extras thrown in? Optimistic, I'm afraid. Well, I'm sorry, but I have to go to the Foreign Office. Come and chat in the taxi; that's what your London taxis are for. When I want a nice long talk with anyone I get in one at Westminster Abbey after lunch and tell him to go to the Nelson Column. We nearly always get there for tea. Oh, good-bye, policeman. Come again some day."

And there's Mr. Gregory Persimmons - Head publisher, fascinated by the occult, domination, control, little children, and the Holy Grail. Sir Giles is fascinated with Persimmons, more as an experiment than anything else:

"You're going mad, you know, Persimmons, and I like watching you."

"Mad?" Gregory said, with another snigger. "You don't go mad this way. People like my wife go mad, and Stephen. But I've got something that doesn't go mad. I'm getting everything so." He stretched out both arms and pressed them downwards with an immense gesture of weight, as if pushing the universe before and below him. "But I want the ointment."

"Better leave it alone," Sir Giles said tantalizingly. "It's tricky stuff, Persimmons. A Jew in Beyrout tried it and didn't get back. Filthy beast he looked, all naked and screaming that he couldn't find his way. That was four years ago, and he's screaming the same thing still, unless he's dead. And there was another fellow in Valparaiso who got too far to be heard screaming; he died pretty soon, because he'd forgotten even how to eat and drink. They tried forcible feeding, I fancy, but it wasn't a success: he was just continually sick. Better leave it alone, Persimmons."

"I tell you I'm perfectly safe," Gregory said. "You promised, Tumulty, you promised."

"My lord God," Sir Giles said, "what does that matter? I don't care whether I promised or not; I don't care whether you want it or not; I only wonder whether I shall get more from—" He broke off. "All right," he said, "I'll give you the address... It'll save you some time and energy if you mention me. He's a Greek of sorts—I've forgotten his name. But he doesn't keep tons of it, you know. Now, look here, Persimmons. This is two things you have got out of me, and I've had nothing in return. You'd better ask me down to wherever you hatch gargoyles."

The Greek Chemist - Unique in all the characters I've ever read, because he's... well, read and see:

"Who sent you here?" the Greek asked.

"Sir Giles Tumulty," said Gregory, "and others. But the others I cannot name. They say"—his voice began to tremble—"that you have an ointment."

"I have many precious things." The answer came out of an entire weariness which seemed to take from the adjective all its meaning. "But some of them are not for sale except to buyers."

"I have bought everything." Gregory leaned forward. "The time has come for me to receive."

Still the other made no movement. "The ointment is rich and scarce and strange," he said. "How do I know that you are worth a gift? And what will my master say if I mistake?"

"I cannot prove myself to you," Gregory answered. "That I know of it —is not that enough?"

"It is not enough," the other said. "But I have a friendship for all who are in the way. And priceless things are without any price. If you are not worth the gift, the gift is worth nothing to you. Have you ever used the ointment?"

"Never," Gregory said; "but it is time, I am sure it is time."

"You think so, do you?" the Greek said slowly. "There comes a time when there is nothing left but time—nothing.* Take it if you like."

*BTW, that line haunted me ever since I first read it. It was the center on which I built my story "For Blood".

Later, when the Grail has been found and taken and taken again, the Greek is even more infintely weary when someone suggests taking and destroying the Grail because it's a stronghold of power, and all such strongholds must be destroyed...

"We can do it if you like," he acquiesced. "If it is worth while."

"It is a stronghold of power, and we can tear it to less than dust. I do not understand you."

"It doesn't matter," he answered. "You will understand one day. There will be nothing else to understand... It is all one; in the end it is all one. You do not believe each other and neither of you will believe me. But in the end there is nothing at all but you and that which goes by. You will be sick at heart because there is nothing, nothing but a passing, and in the midst of the passing a weariness that is you. All things shall grow fainter, all desire cease in that sickness and the void that is about it. And this, even for me, is when I have only looked into the bottomless pit. For my spirit is still held in a place of material things. But when the body is drawn into the spirit, and at last they fall, then you shall know what the end of desire and destruction is."

And another character's reaction to Persimmons' attempt to tempt him with the "delights of worshipping treachery and malice and cruelty and sin":

"Satanism? Satanism is the clerk at the brothel."

There's some words to live by.

Descent Into Hell - Another masterpiece of supernatural thriller, complete with dopplegangers, dancing bears, Lilith, and a man who provides a new definition of Gomorrah; also a hanged man, a hanging man, a succubus, a martyr, a poet, a dying woman, a dead man, and a few rippling graves.

Ere it shall be told. Ere Babylon was dust,

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image

Walking in the garden.

That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

OTHERS:
The Place of the Lion - Platonic Ideals burst through in raw form in a small English village...

Many Dimensions - Sir Giles Tumulty is back, seeking the Stone of Solomon that gives its possesser access to other space, worlds, dimensions, and times...

The Greater Trumps - The original Tarot deck, and a chess set to die for...

All Hallows Eve - Two dead women, walking through London, looking for...

and more...

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!

I happened to find some of my short stories – in fact of most of us SleuthSayers - are appearing on Amazon Kindle for $0.99 with semi-bad AI covers.

Did I miss a contract? Not read the fine print? Should I / we be getting a nickel or a dime each, or is this simply the secondary market?

Inquiring minds want to know.

PS: I call it a semi-bad AI cover because there isn't a robot or android anywhere in "For Blood." I know, details, details... 😉

The Walls of Providence

2026-08-05T00:21:59.078-04:00

Have you ever found yourself wondering: Am I the first to notice this or the last? Does no one mention this because it is so obscure or so obvious? (And why did the Federales let Lefty go so long?)

I mention this because the situation has come up again and I am wondering if I should place a big SPOILER ALERT over this whole column. If you have never read Don Winslow's Danny Ryan trilogy you might want to stop now. Or not. Your choice.

The first book, City on Fire, describes a war between two mob families, one Irish and one Italian, for control of Providence, Rhode Island in the 1980s. The next two novels explain the aftermath of the battle. And they are great. I highly recommend them to anyone who likes fiction about organized crime.

I should say I didn't actually read the novels. I listened to the audiobooks. I like to think that if I had been reading them (and paying more attention to the epigraphs) I would have caught on more quickly to what Winslow was up to.

As it is, I was perhaps a third of the way through City on Fire (the first hospital scene, for those who remember it) and considering the relationship between two of the characters. I remember thinking: "You know, they are like... But that means... Oh my gosh, it's the Trojan War!"

Which it is. Winslow transferred the Illiad to modern New England.

I grabbed a pen and started writing down Winslow's characters next to their Homeric equivalents. Unlike Christopher Nolan's movie, which I wrote about last week, most of the gods are present and accounted for (in human form, of course.)

By the way, City of Dreams and City in Ruins combine the Aeniad, the Odyssey, and the Oresteia. Danny Ryan, the protagonist, is Aeneas.

I was astonished to read one reader on the web complaining that if you know your mythology there are no surprises in the books. I felt exactly the opposite: because I knew the myths I was excited to see how he fit Homer's and Virgil's incidents into his story line. For example: What is the 1980s U.S. equivalent for the Trojan Horse?

Whenever I identified the classical model for one of Winslow's characters I found myself thinking, ooh, I know what's going to happen to you. (Spoiler: it probably won't be good.)

I was reminded of a passage in one of my favorite plays, Antigone, which is Jean Anouilh's take on the tragedy by Sophocles. The Chorus (who in the play is one person) distinguishes between tragedy and melodrama. I wish I could quote his whole speech but, alas, I was the copyright officer for my university for a while and know better. So here is just a taste:

In a tragedy nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. This makes for tranquility... In melodrama you argue and struggle in the hope of escape. That is vulgar; it's practical. But in tragedy, where there is no temptation to try to escape, argument is gratuitous; it's kingly.

Which is how I felt about the characters in Winslow's novels. This was especially true in the last volume as we watch two men who both want peace being dragged into inevitable conflict (with a little help from Winslow's version of Juno).

Anyway, I think you will enjoy the books even if the only Homer you know is Simpson. But if you grew up on d'Auliare's Book of Greek Myths, like me, you'll love them.

And now, a completely different but oddly connected subject.

Rex Stout's eight novel about Nero Wolfe, Where There's A Will (1940) centers on the death of Noel Hawthorne, a wealthy businessman. Among the suspects are his three sisters. June, the eldest, is married to the Secretary of State. May is a college president and Archie jokes that "they are thinking of prosecuting her under the anti-trust laws for her monopoly on brain cells." April is a movie star.

But get this. The two younger sisters nickname the eldest Juno. Juno (Hera) was Jupiter's wife, queen of the gods. Minerva (Athena) was the goddess of wisdom. Venus (Aphrodite) was the goddess of beauty and sex.

So is it a stretch to say we have:

*June (Juno), married to a powerful man

* May (Minerva), dispenser of wisdom

* April (Aphrodite), the beautiful.

But wait there's more. Those three goddesses fought over the Golden Apple of Discord, leading to the Trojan War. And Noel Hawthorne, in his will, left his sisters nothing but, respectively, an apple, a pear, and a peach. The reason for this is never explained in the book except as a "token of his regard."

And that same dead brother? Many years earlier he had accidentally shot his wife with an arrow, leaving her face so scarred that she always wears a veil.

Put this all together and it certainly seems like Stout is trying to connect it all to some myth, but I've never been able to make sense of it.

Next time I am in Delphi I will stop by the Temple of Apollo and ask the Oracle.

Coming Up with a Story Idea to Fit a Prompt

2026-08-04T00:17:00.000-04:00

I enjoy coming up with short story ideas from prompts, such as an anthology's theme. A theme can get my brain cells firing as I try to think of a story idea that will not only work plotwise but will also be different from the other submissions, be fun to write and read, and have some emotional oomph or insight.

It's not often easy.

I experienced the struggle once again when I tried to come up with a story idea for What the World Needs Now: Mystery Stories Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach. This anthology, edited by Martin Edwards, was released last week. When invited to submit, I went through the list of songs (so many songs--Bacharach was incredibly prolific, writing songs for decades that were recorded by others as well as himself in multiple genres). I picked a song that I love, one that was sparking ideas. And I set about to plot out the story. I usually try to have at least a page of notes about what would happen, including what the end would be. Things could--and often do--change during the writing process, but I like knowing I have a workable idea.

Alas, in this case, my story idea ended up being serviceable. It would work, but it wasn't wonderful, and it wasn't fun. It was, in the end, rather blah. And that is not what you want an author to think about their own idea.

I returned to the song list, but by that point, none of them were sparking any good ideas. I had begun psyching myself out. So I decided to approach the problem differently. Rather than try to be inspired by a song, I looked through my story-idea file to see if I already had any that would work with one of Bacharach's songs. (I often get ideas for stories that I don't have time to write, so I take detailed notes and put them in a file for a day I do have time.)

That's when I came across notes for a story about a chat bench. I had read a news article about how, in 2019, a British police officer was concerned about online scammers targeting senior citizens. He came up with the idea of a chat bench--a place where lonely people in need of companionship could safely meet others in real life. It sounds wonderful. But when I read about the growing popularity of these benches, my devious side reared its head. What's to keep a scammer from targeting people in person?

I had a lot of story ideas in the file to choose from, but this was the one I found most exciting at that moment. This would be a story that would be fun to write, and I hoped readers would find it fun to read. Then I went through the list of Bacharach songs still available and found one that could work with my chat bench idea: "All Kinds of People." I asked Martin if I could switch songs, he kindly agreed, and here we are.

So the moral of this tale about coming up with a good story idea is this: if an anthology prompt doesn't give you a great story idea, see if you already have an idea that could fit the prompt. This is why you should never dismiss your ideas. Write them down. Save them. Sometime down the road, they might come in handy.

Difficult Crimes

2026-08-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

There are certain serious crimes that seem resistant to the mystery genre. Environmental crimes, for example, are mighty hard to fit into a conventional pattern. Just how hard I discovered when I attempted a submission to fellow Sleuthsayers Rob Lopresti's ambitious anthology, Crimes Against Nature.

Sure there were candidates going right back to the near extermination of the buffalo, the loss of the once sky-darkening passenger pigeon, the ruination of many mountains in Appalachia, and the decimation of forests from the Pacific northwest to the Amazon. But many hands contributed to all this destruction, and it proved hard to find a plausible single criminal or criminal entity.

By their very size and scope, such crimes seem destined to escape both literature and justice, and it is far easier to pick a smaller crime, preferably with interpersonal violence, for a story. For this reason, I admire Australian novelist Jane Harper's Last One Out, which manages her usual high level of mystery plot while tracing the impact of an open pit coal mine on the environment, the local community, and, eventually, on longstanding ties among the citizens. A real tour de force, Last One Out manages to be gripping despite a minimum of action. No gun battles, no fights, no car chases in this novel. It begins in conventional fashion when Sam Crowley disappears on the evening of his twenty-first birthday, after a visit to several abandoned homes on the edge of the town of Carralon Ridge.

This once idyllic rural community is under threat, both physically and financially. The enormous, unsleeping mine is steadily chewing its way toward outlying homes, but even those living in the center are aware day and night of the rumble of the works and of the fine, omnipresent coal dust drifting onto every surface.

Sam had been doing a college paper on the town, interviewing residents on past and present life in Carralon Ridge and on their reactions to the town's increasingly precarious situation. The easy answer to the mystery would be to connect his disappearance to the mining company, to something incriminating he discovered, but Harper has other ideas in mind, and Sam's disappearance remains unsolved.

Five years later, grief over his loss has dissolved his parents' marriage. Ro Crowley, a medical worker, now lives in the city. Her husband, a fire watcher, remains, but now, instead of working for the town, he does the same work for the all encompassing mine. The Crowleys are only temporarily reunited when Ro returns for the annual commemoration of their son's disappearance.

What she finds is an eerie, half- deserted town. The medical center where she worked is boarded up, various businesses, likewise. Even the pub is only open irregularly. Houses are deserted, there are strange bangs and noises, coal dust is everywhere, and the town feels so strange and foreign that she is relieved when her husband messages her that he can see her through his binoculars from his fire watching post.

The feeling of incipient danger, of strangeness and decay, of a familiar place being out of joint, is really what makes the novel work. Yes, there are suspects, red herrings, promising speculations, but what is gripping is the spectacle of slow moving destruction on every level.

The mine machines are moving ever closer. Outlying houses have already been bought up by the corporation and leveled. Cherished farms, gardens and houses closer to the center are becoming steadily noisier, dustier, and less habitable, even as financial offers drop because who else but the mine would want the properties now.

This creeping devastation infects the human world on a more intimate level, too. All who sell save themselves at the cost of their neighbors, whose homes and life work are made more vulnerable. The devastated natural landscape produces a devastated human landscape with toxic results ranging from feral children to adult despair – to murder.

Last One Out is a good mystery. It is also a picture of the follies of certain types of progress and of in inescapable consequences of environmental destruction.

AIn't Necessarily So, Part 2

2026-08-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Part II — A Rigorous Approach to Identifying AI‑Generated Writing

Last time, we focused on fuzzy ‘soft’ clues in determining AI fingerprints in text, especially identifying common phrases and constructs. Computer people refer to fuzzy methods as heuristics.

We noted triplets.

“He was tall, dark, and handsome.”

We noted parallel negatives.

“It wasn’t black. It wasn’t white. It was charcoal grey.”

We noted common phraseology.

“It’s not just warm, it’s burning.”

Today we slide away from soft dissection to hard facts and more scientific methods. Assertions have been made that combining hard and soft techniques can result in 80-90% accuracy. Google claims it can identify close to 98%.

Note that I used Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot to research and organize this, part 2 of this article. Thus throughout, you’ll notice artifacts as unintended examples.

Objective Linguistic Signals, Statistical Profiles, and Computational Methods

While intuitive reading can reveal stylistic quirks that feel artificial, a scientific approach to AI‑text detection relies on measurable linguistic properties. These properties emerge from how large language models generate text: token by token, guided by probability distributions learned from massive corpora. By analyzing those distributions, we can identify patterns that differ from human writing in consistent, quantifiable ways.

This section outlines the major pillars of a hard, objective approach — the kind that complements your Part I by grounding intuition in data.

➀ Lexical Analysis: Measuring Word‑Level Patterns

Lexical analysis examines the words themselves — their frequency, diversity, and distribution. AI‑generated text tends to exhibit:

Lower lexical diversity — measured via type–token ratio; AI favors mid‑probability vocabulary.
Function‑word overuse — glue words like however, moreover, indeed, additionally.
Uniform vocabulary patterns — humans spike unpredictably into slang, rare words, or idiosyncratic phrasing.
Rare‑word avoidance — models avoid low‑probability tokens unless prompted.

These signals arise because AI models optimize for clarity and coherence, which pushes them toward “safe,” middle‑probability word choices.

➁ Syntax Analysis: Sentence Structure and Rhythm

Syntax analysis examines how sentences are built — clause structure, punctuation, and rhythm. AI text often shows:

Consistent clause length — sentences follow similar patterns and pacing.
Over‑regular grammar — few deviations, few fragments, few stylistic breaks.
Predictable transitions — Moreover, In addition, Ultimately, However.
Low syntactic entropy — humans vary complexity more dramatically.

This uniformity reflects the model’s goal: maximize coherence and minimize confusion.

➂ Punctuation

Perhaps I give less credence to punctuation than I should because the Macintosh option key makes typographical life easy. Instead of two hyphens to simulate an n-dash, option-hyphen plugs in a real dash. Likewise, option-colon drops in a true ellipsis instead of typing three dots.

Even without a Mac, word processors like Microsoft Word performs conversions such as transforming flat quotation marks to curly quotes, thus my reluctance to attach too much attention to perfected punctuation.

That said, AIs sprinkle in more m-dashes than a breathless self-published Mary Sue story. Current AIs throw in a lot of dashes, the really wide ones.

Perfected Punctuation
character	human	proper
ellipsis	...	…
n-dash	--	–
m-dash	--	—
single quote	'	‘’
double quote	"	“”

➃ Semantic Analysis: Meaning, Depth, and Conceptual Structure

Semantic analysis looks at how ideas are organized and expressed. AI text tends to exhibit:

High semantic consistency — few contradictions or digressions.
Topic over‑coverage — AI exhaustively lists subtopics to “cover the space.”
Shallow originality — limited conceptual leaps unless prompted.
Generic framing — broad, universal statements anchoring paragraphs.

Humans, by contrast, often wander, contradict themselves, or introduce unexpected angles.

➄ Perplexity: Statistical Predictability of Text

Perplexity measures how surprising a passage is to a language model.

Low perplexity → predictable → typical of AI
High perplexity → surprising → typical of humans

AI‑generated text tends to have very low perplexity, because it is produced by the same statistical engine used to measure it. Tools that use perplexity include:

GPTZero
OpenAI’s classifier
Cross‑entropy scoring

Edited AI text, however, can raise perplexity — making detection harder.

➅ Burstiness: Variation in Sentence Length and Complexity

Burstiness measures how much sentence structure varies.

Humans show:

Long sentences
Short fragments
Abrupt shifts
Irregular rhythm

AI shows:

Low burstiness
Smooth, even pacing

Burstiness is one of the strongest statistical indicators of human authorship, especially in long‑form writing.

➆ Stylometric Fingerprinting: Author Identity Through Writing Style

Stylometry analyzes the “fingerprint” of an author’s writing style — their idiolect, quirks, and habits. AI text typically lacks:

Idiolect — no personal quirks or signature phrasing.
Stylistic variability — humans shift tone depending on mood, audience, or genre.
Natural digressions — AI rarely meanders.

Stylometric tools include:

JStylo
Writeprints
Signature stylometric analysis

These methods are especially powerful given long samples.

➇ Structural and Metadata Clues

Even when prose looks human, structural patterns can reveal AI origin. Common signals include:

Perfect paragraph symmetry
Overuse of enumerated lists — AIs love lists
Overuse of bulleted lists — Consider this an example
Predictable section ordering
Lack of temporal markers — humans reference time, place, personal context.

These clues often appear in polished AI essays and reports.

➈ Hybrid Detection Tools: Combining Multiple Signals

Modern detectors combine perplexity, burstiness, stylometry, and semantic analysis. Examples of tools include:

GPTZero
DetectGPT
Turnitin AI
Copyleaks
QuillBot AI
Grammarly
HuggingFace detectors

These tools go beyond analyzing basics, they compare text against known AI‑generation patterns.

Conclusion: Hard Detection Complements Soft Deduction

Part I focused on intuition — tone, phrasing, emotional cadence, suspiciously neutral voice. Part II provides the science — statistical regularities, lexical smoothness, syntactic uniformity, semantic predictability.

Together, they form a dual‑system framework:

Soft heuristic detection: “This feels like AI.”
Hard science-based detection: “Here’s measurable evidence.”

This combination is far more reliable than either method alone.

Note: Wikipedia is exceptionally vulnerable to AI contamination. They operate a project to identify and mitigate AI effects. Their article, Signs of AI Writing, is well worth a read.

A Roundup of Favorite Short-Story Writers

2026-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

My post today is piggybacking on last week's column by Joseph S. Walker about several of his favorite authors, all of them writers that he hoped others might find and read.

I figured I'd try to add to that by listing some of my favorite genre short-story writers. I focused on genre for this list because SleuthSayers is a mystery blog usually targeting readers and writers of genre fiction--so I have NOT included some further-reaching favorite "literary" short-story authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, Chekhov, O'Connor, Munro, Carver, Maugham, Welty, Fitzgerald, etc., etc.

The method I used to come up with these was simple: I looked around me here in my home office and counted the number of short-story collections I own from different genre writers. Most of them, it turns out, are by the twelve following authors. And these of course are also (as they should be), the authors whose stories I like to re-read:

Fredric Brown -- A name you might not be familiar with. His genre was mostly SF/fantasy, but he also wrote wonderful mystery/crime stories. Many of his shorts, among them "The Dangerous People" and "The Night the World Ended," were used in the anthology TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He was especially well-known for what used to be called short-short stories (flash fiction), some of those only a page or two in length. My favorite of Brown's stories is still "Voodoo," which is only about 450 words. Others include "Arena," "Nightmare in Yellow," "The Geezenstacks," and "Earthmen Bearing Gifts."

Jack Ritchie -- Another great shorts writer, Ritchie's stories can be found in a huge number of issues of old Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazines--and also the anthology volumes later created from those two magazines. He wrote only one novel, Tiger Island, which might be one of the reasons so few current readers of fiction know his name. I have a lot of Ritchie favorites, including the stories "Shatterproof," "The Absence of Emily," "#8," and "The Green Heart," later adapted into the feature film The New Leaf with Walter Matthau and Elaine May.

Roald Dahl -- Probably better known for his children's books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl also wrote terrific short stories, several of which were, once again, adapted into episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His story "Man from the South" is still one of my all-time favorites because of its plot--and the same can be said of the delightful twist-ending story "Lamb to the Slaughter." Other favorites of mine: "Poison," "The Landlady," and "Champion of the World."

Ray Bradbury -- This writer, whose name IS quickly recognizable, was an author of mostly science fiction stories, and I would argue that one of his collections, a brick-thick volume appropriately called The Stories of Ray Bradbury, is one of the best short-story collections I've ever read. Aside from novels like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury wrote around 600 short stories. I think my favorites are "A Sound of Thunder," "The Veldt," "The Window," "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," and "There Will Come Soft Rains."

Elmore Leonard -- Like many others in this list, Leonard is known mostly for his novels, many of which were also movies: Get Shorty, Hombre, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, etc. That's certainly the way I first heard about him and got to know his work. But I love his short stories just as much. Examples: "Three-Ten to Yuma," "The Tall T," "Karen Makes Out," "The Tonto Woman," and (actually a novella rather than a short story) Fire in the Hole, which served as the basis for the neo-Western TV series Justified. I actually met him once at a booksigning, for about five seconds.

Louis L'Amour -- An American writer who specialized in Westerns, both novels and shorts. His novels are more famous, especially Last of the Breed, The Walking Drum, Haunted Mesa, Shalako, and the seventeen novels in the Sackett series. Many of his novels were made into films, and some of his short stories. One of those stories--my favorite of his--was "The Gift of Cochise," which became the 1953 John Wayne movie Hondo and then became a novel of the same name. Other well-known L'Amour short stories are "Skull and the Arrow," "To Hang Me High," and "Squatters on the Lonetree."

Lawrence Block -- Another household name, Block is the creator of series characters Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, Evan Tanner, the hitman Keller, and others, and has written many, many crime novels and short stories over the years. (Also, he's one of the two writers in this list who are still with us and who still, hopefully, are producing stories.) I own several of his collections, the best of which is probably Enough Rope (almost 900 pages of shorts). The stories I remember most are "A Blow for Freedom," "Sometimes They Bite," "By the Dawn's Early Light," and "Strangers on a Handball Court."

Edward D. Hoch -- One of the few writers who actually made a living from writing short stories. He wrote several novels as well, but is known almost entirely for his short fiction, and specialized in not only mystery/crime stories but traditional, puzzle-based mystery stories. Hoch used many pseudonyms and created many series characters, but one of the most amazing things about him, to me, is that he famously appeared in every single issue of EQMM between 1973 and his death in 2007. My favorite Ed Hoch stories are probably "Murder Offstage," "Captain Leopold's Birthday," and "The Oblong Room."

Shirley Jackson -- Her genres were mostly horror and mystery, and I suspect she's most often remembered for her novels The House on Haunted Hill and We have Always Lived in the Castle. My favorite of her many short stories, and one of the most memorable ever, is "The Lottery," which I taught in my writing classes as a perfect example of not only a surprise ending but the third-person "detached" POV. Other stories of hers that I like are "The Summer People," "The Possibility of Evil," and "The Witch."

Stanley Ellin -- Another relatively lesser-known name, Stanley Ellin was a fine mystery writer who produced more than a dozen novels but seemed more interested in short stories. He won, I believe, two Edgars for his short fiction, and many of his stories, like those of some of the writers listed above, were adapted and used in Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His most famous short story, which appeared first in EQMM, was probably "Specialty of the House," and though I enjoyed it, I think my favorites of his might be "The Blessington Method," "Kindly Dig Your Grave," and "You Can't Be a Little Girl All Your Life."

Richard Matheson -- Matheson's genres were mostly SF/fantasy and horror, and he'll always be close to my heart because of all the stories he wrote for the Twilight Zone TV series--sixteen stores in all, I believe. Though he might be best known for his novella I am Legend, I most remember the movie Somewhere in Time, which was an adaptation of his novel Bid Time Return, and the short story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Other excellent Matheson shorts were "Duel," "Button, Button," "Prey" and "Born of Man and Woman."

Stephen King -- I honestly believe this man is one of the world'd best storytellers. I have every one of his novels on my shelves, and all his short-story and novella collections. King's not much older than I am, and I think one reason I love his fiction is that many of his child protagonists (he uses a lot of those) experienced some of the same things I myself did: I watched the same TV shows, owned the same toys, read the same books. As for my favorites of his short stories, they're probably "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," "Mute," and "The Raft," and my very favorite--one of the best stories I've ever read--is "The Last Rung on the Ladder."

A confession, here: I chose not to include some other favorite genre short-story authors because they're my friends and contemporaries--and if I did list and describe those, this post would become longer than anyone would read. But I must mention here that, seriously, you should search out and read the stories of writers like David Dean, Josh Pachter, Doug Allyn, Barb Goffman, Dave Zeltserman, Michael Bracken, Art Taylor, Stacy Woodson, Adam Meyer, Melodie Campbell, O'Neil De Noux, Joseph S. Walker, Rob Lopresti, Steve Liskow, Elizabeth Zelvin, Ashley-Ruth Bernier, and many others, who are probably writing more stories at this very moment.

Now . . . Who are some of your favorite authors of short fiction--and especially genre shorts? Can you single out any stories of theirs, or anyone's, that are your all-time favorites?

As for me, I'll see you again in two weeks. I have plenty of reading--and re-reading--to do.

Have a great August.

The Case of the Waltese Falcon

2026-07-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

Back in April I bought a bunch of craft books for writers in a StoryBundle charity offering curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The one that left the greatest impression on me was a book by Rusch’s husband, Dean Wesley Smith, entitled Writing Novels with the Waltese Falcon.*

That was the nickname of Walter, one of the couple’s cats at the time. (A pure-bred Red-Point Birman.) Mr. Smith had grown accustomed to writing in his office while the cat napped nearby.

I know the feeling.

My writing partner, who contributes nothing to the word count

but still gets fed. Go figure.

In this book, we watch as Mr. Smith writes three novels. One is a ghostwriting project that he is writing for an unidentified major author. Mr. Smith has already been paid to deliver a 70,000-word book. He budgets ten days of writing, and of course he nails it, writing on average 6,895 words a day. (Day #7 he “only” writes 3,005 words. Day #9 sees his greatest output: 9,373 words.)

In the second third of the book, he writes a book in seven days (a short novel of about 43,050 words), starting with a goal of hitting 3,000 words on Day 1, and adding 1,000 words each day after that. On the 7th day, he must hit 9,000 words. He “only” hits 7,000, but by then the story has neatly concluded.

In the last third of Waltese Falcon, Mr. Smith takes a vacation to hang with his poker buddies in Vegas, and manages to write yet another short novel (37,100 words) in five days. He doesn’t own a laptop, so he humorously seats-belts his giant iMac to the back seat of his Caddy, cushioning it with pillows, and barrels off to Sin City.

You might quibble with the lengths of the last two books, but he explains that he is a devotee of the great writers of the pulp fiction era, whose novels typically clocked in under 50,000 words. He argues that publishers in the modern era began contracting longer books from writers so they could charge more for them.

More significantly, he loves challenging himself to write at speed. He never plots anything in advance—not even the ghostwriting project—choosing to “write into the dark” each time. (During the writing of the ghostwriting project, he laments not knowing where this “stupid” book is going.) But each time he figures out the plot points and wraps each of these stories to his satisfaction.

He’s proud of the seven-day book because he had just turned 65 years old at the time, and was frankly wondering if he was too old to pull off an “add-1,000-words-each-day” challenge. He clearly wasn’t.

What made the biggest impression on me as a reader and writer is how much other work he accomplishes in his regular work days. He takes careful notes of all his activity, and shares his daily schedule with us. He usually wakes at noon, checks in at the offices of his publishing business—then located on the Oregon coast—and does all the things the head of a small firm usually does. Bank runs, dealing with movers, buying office furniture, keeping up with emails and bills. (I believe that during this period he may have also owned and operated other businesses in town, such as a collectibles shop.) So that work also consumes his time. And of course he’s hanging with his wife and pets, enjoying decent lunches and dinners with Rusch and friends, and watching a whole lot of television.

Usually he gets to his writing computer about 6 p.m. and writes in bursts of 50-minute sessions into the wee hours of the morning. He estimates that he required 42 such sessions to write the 43,000-word book. “In other words,” he quips, “I typed at the blazing speed of 20.5 words per minute.”

This impressed me because like everyone on the planet, I feel that I constantly have more on my plate than I can handle. When I am feeling stressed, the first thing to go out the window is my current creative goal.

Not my writing partner, but tasked with the job
of decimating my spinach.

Mr. Smith has a full day of work at the day job(s), but still manages to write prodigiously in his creative work. The delightful conceit of all of this is that while he is writing each of these novels, he is also blogging about and writing the larger nonfiction book that details their creation.

Which of course sent me down memory lane. Back in 2011, Denise and I signed a contract to ghost-write the memoir of a man who was big in the world of pugilism. The manly art, as history so describes it.

At the time we signed, I was busy working on another ghostwriting project. Denise had finished the research and was drafting the book that would become The Girls of Atomic City. We did not have time to write the fight book just yet, but we did have time to schedule regular phone interviews with our client. This we did, once or twice a week, dutifully recording each call using the audio-record function that was a nice feature of old versions of MS Word.

Cut to February 2012. Both Denise and I had sent our manuscripts to our respective editors. Submission usually means that we have about a month to fritter away while the editors read the MS and write their editorial letters.

Great, I thought. Now we can finally put our heads together and write this damn fight book!

Not so fast. At the last minute, our agent poached Denise to ghost-write yet another memoir for a veteran Hollywood actress. The contract had been signed months ago, but the first writer bailed and left behind little copy that was usable. “I’m begging,” the agent said, and how often does that ever happen?

The money was good, and we knew what would happen.

Denise flew to Los Angeles the next day, planning to spend four weeks in the guest cottage behind the actress’s home and conduct daily interviews with her. I would write the fight manuscript, due in a month.

There are two things in the world I know nothing about: music and sports. But I am a Paganini and Gehrig in those domains compared to my knowledge of punching big men repeatedly in the face. Not to worry: Everything I needed was contained in 20 to 25 audio recordings, and my crappy handwritten notes. Or so I hoped.

Every day I stationed myself in front of the computer from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. I took breaks and ate decently, but not as well as I probably should have. The problem with journalistic nonfiction is that you can barely write a paragraph or even a sentence without checking your facts. I sprinkled a ton of TKs in the text as I went, jotting down questions, and researching on the web during my breaks.

At night after I wolfed down dinner, I sat in the living room and listened to our audio recordings. Transcribing them faithfully would take far too much time, so I did the next best thing: I took short notes as I listened, marking the timestamps so I could go back and listen during my writing sessions if I needed to check facts or get the client’s exact phrasing correctly. I nearly wept when I discovered that one of those files was corrupted!

But I pushed on. Those nighttime sessions with the audio files usually took me close to midnight. I crashed into bed each night, and did it all over the next day.

Keeping track along the way.

I do not regard what I’m telling you as something to brag about, by the way. Each time I have told this story, I always say that it was like waiting too long to research a college term paper and then trying to cram it all in one night. Not good.

The thing is, it worked! Averaging 5,700 words a day, I had 40,000 words by the end of the first week. I was frankly astonished that it could be done. I was sure that I’d made mistakes, misspelled the names of the client’s colleagues, or screwed up his family chronology. Nervously, I hit pause on the writing for two days to reread and proof everything. The client was ecstatic to get the first half of his book, and within a few days, responded to all my queries. Those answers added about 4,000 words to the manuscript before the end of the second week.

By the time he was due to fly to Asia on the Thursday of the second week, he had a first draft as it stood, at 70,083 words. (I have no doubt that he told everyone on that flight—in a private jet?—that they really ought to keep the noise down because he was, ahem, busy Reading His Future Upcoming Bestselling Book. Fifty percent of the clients I get are like that.)

After I hit that 70K, I relaxed, for two reasons. One: I knew from past experience that clients always add more to a book when they read. And two, I also know that publishing contracts allow for a variance of 10 percent up or down. The contract asked for an 80,000-word book, but the editors would accept 72,000. The client could cough, and we’d hit 2,000 words more.

I really only had to write that first 70,000 to prime the pump. When the client read the manuscript, he was inspired to riff on topics that we had never touched upon. Before he was back in the states, he was firing off long emails expanding on anecdotes in the book.

When he got back, he overnighted a pencil edit with still more recollections. We easily met the deadline at the end of the month with 78,393 words. The biggest chunk, that 70,000, was largely written over a 14-day period of time, with one day and a morning off to proof.

Still, that’s about 5,800 words a day for me.

The biggest pain point for me were those damn audio files. Call me crazy, folks, but since 2012, has technology changed significantly, or what?

Today you can easily upload an audio file and have an instant transcript. At no time in my journalism career has that been possible until the last couple of years. You either laboriously transcribed audio yourself, or you paid someone else to do it. I could never afford hiring out. The rates were exorbitant because such services were aimed at the physician dictation market.

But you know what’s funny? A dead, lifeless transcript could possibly have meant more work for me. The key to the project was reliving our conversations each night before bed. When the client got stubborn about sharing his vulnerabilities, I could hear one of us—usually Denise—pushing him, saying that if he wanted people to understand what he had gone through in his life, he had to be honest.

I heard his voice crack a few times, but he always came clean. And I swear, I felt that as I wrote it. To this day, the reviews he gets for that book online all reference the sensitive side of his character that so few people knew existed.

That was my only experience with writing at speed. But the Waltese Falcon experiments got me thinking I should try something similar again. I’m 15,000 words into a nonfiction project that I’ve wanted to do for a long while. Currently, my average daily output is only about 3,000 words, but I’m not beating myself up. In summer, after all, I am apparently only a part-time writer yet a full-time farmer. But I want to get this done before I go on the road again for Denise’s book tour.

When the nonfiction speed test is over, I hope to try a fiction project. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I will leave you with one last scene that made me laugh. On one of those nights in a casino in Vegas, Mr. Smith and his buddies encounter two very drunk girls who ask what they do for a living. He responds:

“I sit alone in a room and make shit up.”

* * *

* Writing with the Waltese Falcon has since been revised slightly and re-released as three titles: Writing a Novel in 10 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in 7 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in Five Days 2026 While Traveling.

Two fun pieces of news:

* Since I saw you last, a country western star released a single entitled Girls of Atomic City, inspired by Denise’s book. Did not know this was happening until a friend sent us the press release.

* Denise’s book, Obstinate Daughters, is now a National Bestseller.

Talk to you soon!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Hammett in Celuloid

2026-07-30T03:30:16.722-04:00

Readers of this blog may well recall that, like many of denizen of the SleuthSayers rotation (Eve Fisher, Rob Lopresti, Joseph S. Walker, Art Taylor, just to name a few), I am a long-time member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. And since our writing ideas can come from just about anywhere, it should come as no surprise to the savvy crew who constitute the Sleuthsayers readership that I get some of my best writing ideas from the SMFS email list.

Today's blog entry represents one of those times.

A thread about stories with great final lines begun, I think, by our own Rob Lopresti, morphed into another SMFSer (Bobbi Chukran) weighing in about finding a TV adaptation of Hammett's novel The Dain Curse available on both Amazon Prime TV and in abbreviated form on YouTube.

Yeah, this was NOT good.

As an unapologetic fanboy of the works of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, I am, of course, familiar with The Dain Curse (far and away the consensus choice among Hammett fans as his worst novel. I recently re-read it, and was reminded all over again how inferior it was to the rest of Hammett's canon. Of course, when you're comparing any novel to the likes of Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass Key, odds are it will definitely tend to suffer by comparison.), and with the 1970s James Coburn fronted TV project referred to above.

And it got me thinking.

Linking to any number of existing Hammett adaptations which have made it to the big or small screen might be a helpful guide for our readers who enjoy films based on great (or in the case of The Dain Curse, not-so-great) crime fiction.

I mean, the nameless Continental Op acquires a name, and that name is "Hamilton Nash." Not even a tough guy like James Coburn could do much saddled with a mouthful like that.

Well look no further! Full disclosure, there is a lot to this subject, so I will be breaking my post on it up into two entries.

The Adaptations

Every one of Hammett's five novels has been made into a movie (or in the case of The Dain Curse, a three-hour miniseries, I think? I was twelve the first time I watched it, back in the '70s) at least once. And that makes sense. After all, with every one of his novels, Hammett practically invented a subgenre of the crime fiction milieu:

Red Harvest: The "Town Tamer" novel.

The Dain Curse: The "Psychological Suspense" novel.

The Glass Key: The "Machine Politics/Public Corruption" novel.

The Maltese Falcon: The "First True P.I." novel (Carrol John Daly fans be damned!).

The Thin Man: The "Crime Novel as Comedy of Manners."

But what about Hammett's short stories?

Hammett cut his teeth writing short stories in an age (the 1920s) where periodicals were constantly on the look-out for content and actually paid well (Ah, the Good Old Days!), and he quickly distinguished himself as a master of the form. Stories such as "The Tenth Clew," "The Gutting of Couffignal," "The House in Turk Street," and its sort-of sequel, "The Girl With the Silver Eyes," "The Scorched Face," and "Dead Yellow Women" made both a name and fair amount of money for Hammett before he turned his hand to writing novels full-time.

And one of his absolute best stories, "Flypaper," was actually made into an episode of a SHOWTIME anthology series of noir stories entitled, "Fallen Angels" in 1994. Christopher Lloyd starred as Hammett's famous nameless detective "The Continental Op" (an "operative" for the "Continental Detective Agency," a thinly-veiled fictional version of the Pinkerton Agency Hammett himself had worked for). The supporting cast is great, too: Michael Rooker, Peter Berg (before he gave up acting for directing) and the always wonderful Laura San Giacomo.

The best part? You can watch all 29 minutes of it here, for free, on YouTube. And it is well worth your time!

Okay, now for the novels!

First there's Red Harvest, Hammett's first novel, serialized in Black Mask magazine as four related novelettes before its publication in 1929.

There are several terrific adaptations of this novel, none of them under its actual name, although the incomparable Megan Abbott is reportedly working on a screenplay for a new adaptation with Scott Frank (responsible for a lot of great stuff coming out of Hollywood, not least the script for the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight and the terrific Monsieur Spade). You can read more about their collaboration here.

The first of these is Akira Kurosawa's 1961 masterpiece: Yojimbo. It stars Toshiro Mifune as a masterless samurai in Medieval Japan, and follows the central premise of Hammett's novel (the Continental Op subverting expectations and manipulating competing factions in the town he's just arrived in, setting them up to take each other out). You can watch it here. It is well worth your time!

Up next is Sergio Leone's 1964 spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars, shot in Spain, with a largely Italian cast, it made Clint Eastwood a star (Leone is reported to have said of Eastwood's acting, "He has two expressions: 'hat on,' and 'hat off.'" That tracks.). It's nothing short of a shot-for-shot remake of Yojimbo. So not a direct adaptation of Red Harvest, but rather an outright theft of Kurosawa's adaptation. Kurosawa himself said in a letter to Leone not long after the film's release: ‘I’ve seen your movie. It’s a very good movie. Unfortunately, it’s my movie.'"

Did he really NEED to act?

Still an enjoyable movie. And you can, of course, catch it from any number of streaming services, including here.

Nearly forgotten these days is the great Walter Hill's take on the Hammett novel: 1996's Last Man Standing, starring Bruce Willis. It gives Kurosawa a writing credit, and yet is set in the same period as Hammett's book (the 1920s), with the location is moved from the frontier mining towns of Montana to the Texas Borderlands. Willis does a great job, it's full of action, and features solid performances all around, especially from Christopher Walken as the film's Big Bad. And he is (unsurprisingly) scary. You can find it lots of places, especially here.

It's Walter Hill, and it's Bruce Willis and it's Christopher Walken (And did I mention William Sanderson and Bruce Dern, too?), so it is also well worth your time!

And the final entry for this week's post is an early '80s entry very much in the vein of the aforementioned Monsieur Spade. A fictional take on the life of Hammett during the early years of his writing career, it's titled simply Hammett. Directed by Wim Wenders and the immortal Francis Ford Coppola from a script written in part by mystery writer and Hammett Scholar Joe Gores! Furthermore, it features the always watchable Frederick Forrest (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Hammett) in the title role.

The resemblance really is uncanny.

As if this wasn't enough, this film features the great Peter Boyle as the detective Hammett used as the inspiration for the Continental Op. Boyle is, as always, fantastic. As is Marilu Henner as Hammett's "inspirational" librarian neighbor. Fans of Hammett's work will find all manner of easter eggs in this one.

Definitely worth your time!

And the best part? It's available for free on YouTube. You can watch it here!

That's it for me this go-round. Next time we'll finish walking through the film adaptations of Hammett's work. See you in two weeks!

The Man, The Myth, The Trickster

2026-07-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

The regular readers of my blog entries (both of you) will not be surprised that my wife and I went to see Christopher Nolan's new film The Odyssey the first day it was available. We are achraeology and mythology buffs.

Short review: Not a masterpiece but not an embarrassment. To paraphrase Lincoln's book review, people who enjoy this type of film will definitely enjoy this one.

But what I want to discuss here is how, inevitably, Nolan had to make this 3,000-year-old character more palatable for a modern audience. Because Homer's Odysseus is a long way from what we would call a hero.

The very first sentence of the poem describes him with a word translators have been struggling with ever since. "A man of twists and turns." "A man skilled in all ways of contending." "That ingenious hero." "The crafty man." "The Shifty."

Emily Wilson translates it as "a complicated man," and she is worth noting because her 2012 version is the most popular these days (Nolan mentioned it in interviews) and has sold more than a walloping million copies this year alone. I imagine Christopher Nolan is on her Christmas (or Saturnalia) card list.

So Odysseus is not just smart but tricky. He lies, he cons, he gloats about it, and Homer expects us to admire him for it. This doesn't fit our idea of a hero these days, so Nolan burdened the big O. with a guilty, post-traumatic conscience. Sure, the guy dreamed up ther Trojan horse, leading to the destruction of the city and the slaughter of men, women, and children, but doggone, he feels awful about it. In fact, you could argue that except for the phony horsey his wife Penelope does more tricking in the movie than her husband.

But tricksters were held in high regard in those cultures. I think one of the more interesting examples is Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish general during the Jewish War against the Romans. He was part of a group of seventy soldiers who, trapped by the enemy, decided to commit mass suicide, killing each other, rather than surrender. When only two were left Josephus and the other survivor promptly surrendered.

How do we know about this dastardly deed? Because he bragged about it in his book The Jewish War, written while he was a guest of Vespasian who he had correctly predicted would become emperor. He knew his Roman readers would appreciate his cleverness, rather condemn his treachery.

Folk tales are full of tricksters, especially admiring those who outsmart stronger enemies: Aesops's fox, Anansi, Brer Rabbit, Loki, Puss and Boots, Jacob.

Actual armor from Odysseus's age

I've been trying to think of good examples from mystery fiction. Sherlock Holmes, multiple disguises and all, seems too straight-forward to qualify. Nero Wolfe? Perry Mason? Possibly.

Jackson Lamb? Absotively.

I want to leave you with one anecdote from the Odyssey which didn't make it into the movie, not quite having that heroic vibe.

In Book Nine (where Wilson has Homer describing our guy as "the lord of liars") he talks about his ships arriving in the land of a people called the Cicones. Odysseus and his men sack the city, killing most of the men and taking the women as slaves.

But then, wouldn't you know it? The Cicones called on their allies and attack, killing many of Odysseus's men. "Poor us!" Wilson's O. laments.

Imagine the unfairness of it. You declare an enemy's ability to conduct war has been obliterated and they keep fighting back.

Thank the gods that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.

Dicing a Potato

2026-07-28T00:05:00.000-04:00

The July/August issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine contains my story, "Potatoes Au Rotten." I am always thrilled to learn that one of my tales is appearing in the magazine. Their website says that they've changed print services due to a variety of issues. If you receive a hard copy of the magazine, I hope you get it soon.

I'll gratefully wait. As hinted by the title, the story features a reappearance of a series character. He is a private investigator who moonlights as a marketing rep for the Potato Advisory Board. The details of this employment arrangement were explored in some of the early stories, but the short answer is that, unlike his PI clients, the Board's checks always cash, and the corporate job offers better dental insurance. The principal character is forever known simply as the "Spud Stud." With "Potatoes Au Rotten," the kind folks at Hitchcock have published six Spud Stud stories.

The email from Hitchcock notifying me of publication got me thinking about the elements that make a good mystery series character. Perhaps I should have thought about the question sooner, but it wouldn't be the first time that I was late to the party.

Researching the question proved harder than I thought. I couldn't find a definitive article on the subject, so I compiled the following list gleaned from several sources. As I began the catalog, I immediately started grading my protagonist on a 1-4 scale. (On my phone, I have a potato emoji that looked pretty cool for this analysis. Alas, I couldn't figure out how to move the graphic to the Sleuthsayers blog.)

Minimal Backstory (2)

The sources suggest that a good series character needs an easily explainable premise. The character should be capable of being described in a sentence or two. An abbreviated backstory fits the limited space of a short story.

The PI/Potato Pitchman requires a few sentences to explain. The set-up takes a bit. I've scored him a 2 on this one.

A Flexible Social Circle (4)

For a series to succeed, the sleuth has to encounter a variety of different people presenting an array of problems.

After a slow start, the Spud Stud bounces back. He works with food products. Everyone eats. He can meet anyone in the potato retail business. Over the course of the series, he's dealt with grocery store employees, P-listers on the glamorous potato social circuit, and corporate bigwigs. This category earns him a 4.

A Strong Central Theme (2)

The Spud's investigations bring order to chaos. He seeks to find truth, bringing him into conflict with those who want to keep it hidden. I want to give my Potato Palladin strong marks on this one, except that these elements are hallmarks of mystery fiction. I've settled on a 2.

A Baked-in Reason to Encounter Crime (1)

Successful series characters have a reason why people come to them with their investigative needs. Usually, it's occupation. The Spud Stud is a PI. But the cases in the published stories all arise out of his work as a marketer. Neither the profession nor the location offers a natural locus for crime, so I've scored him a 1. But see the Social Circle thoughts above. Everyone, sooner or later, comes to a grocery store to buy food. Any place people gather, and money is exchanged, offers an opportunity for misdeeds. Perhaps the grocery store as a den of iniquity is under-appreciated.

A Quirk that Advances Plot (2)

We all read them. The characters with eidetic memories or super sensitive noses. They draw us in if only to see how the special skill will resolve the current mystery. The Spud is fully versed in the potato varietals sold on the American market. He knows his way around a grocery store. These tidbits of arcane knowledge come in handy, but maybe they're not as cool as knowing the batting average of every baseball card ever read. The Spud Stud scored a 2 here.

A Distinctive Voice (4)

The unique way a character expresses himself, shaped by his experiences and personality. The character's voice makes them instantly recognizable.

With no false modesty, allow me to state that the Spud Stud may be the leading mystery-solving, potato marketing representative in American short fiction today. The unique position sets him apart from all the world-weary cops and chocolate shop operating librarians who occasionally trip over bodies. His voice is his own. I've given him a 4.

Conclusion

The Spud Stud delivered a mixed score. The categories, though, may be useful not only for evaluating my character, but also for thinking about building your own. Constructing a character to carry across several stories means creating someone easy to explain, quick to place at the scene of a crime, and compelling enough to grab a reader's attention.

Anything else I should have added to the list?

Bonus

Writers often get asked about their sources of inspiration. This story has its roots in an old New Yorker magazine article about Taco Bell's test kitchen. The fast-food chain is not having the best month. This tidbit may help the CEO feel better.

Until next time

Real live Death

2026-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Having just posted an appreciation of Agatha Christie and her flavor of classic cozies, I want to stumble back into the world of the hardboiled, with a five o’clock shadow, a stiff bourbon and a dame in the waiting room.

I’m prompted by death.

I noticed on several re-reads of Agatha Christie and similar authors, that side from all the other signposts of what I’d call classic mysteries, the works have an odd relationship with the matter of death, an event usually at the centerpiece of the action. Often a number of

events, since there’s usually a pretty high body count, with members of the cast dropping like flies throughout the proceedings, closing out chapters and twisting plots into pretzels. What struck me, was that in the standard British model, there’s remarkably little grief and anguish at each passing, even when the departed is a fiancé, brother-in-law or lifelong friend (though never a cat, as we all know).

“I’m sorry to inform you, Lady Cavendish, but your husband has just been discovered with a ceremonial Khurkuri sword protruding from his chest.”

“Oh, dear. And I just served him breakfast not an hour ago.”

Being mostly of British heritage myself, I understand personal restraint, especially in matters of life and death. With the balance of my cultural foundations apparently German with a dash of Scandinavian, I'm used to family members who've married one of us murmuring, "You stoic Knopfs." But I think there's more to it when contemplating the Agatha worldview.

I suppose it's a necessary sanitization meant to maintain a lightness of narrative, minimizing the emotional encumbrances. It provides plenty of room for comic interludes, tours around dilapidated English country estates and brisk, lighthearted dialogue. I like all these things, especially the absence of existential despair. If I want brooding over the inconsequentiality of human life in the face of an indifferent and unforgiving universe, I know where to look. And since my books are firmly in the hardboiled camp, I can write it myself.

But still, it’s hard for me to suspend the belief that violent death is more than an important plot element. I also prefer a certain economy in the number of murders that follow in quick succession, especially when our protagonists are fully engaged in their investigations. Most murderers like to space these things out, or at least pick a nice quiet moment when he or she doesn’t have to shed bloody clothes and navigate various corridors and secret doorways in time for the first toast of an elaborate dinner party.

Holmes, Poirot and Nero Wolf aren’t immune to the human consequences of the deadly puzzles they solve, yet we have little access to their deeper personal examinations. Not so with Spade, Marlow or Lew Archer. These guys are nothing if not tortured by the moral and metaphysical implications of every untimely, tragic demise. They aren’t yapping about it with every piece of dialogue, but you know it’s what’s driving their actions and defining the purpose of their quests. And unlike their classic cousins, they express little in the way of intellectual arrogance, since the puzzle isn’t the point. They have their clever insights, but mostly solve their cases though dogged determination and self-sacrifice, often losing a few teeth and much of the promised compensation in the process.

This is what I think Chandler was mostly getting at in his essay, The Simple Art of Murder. We’ve come a long way since he made his argument, and the culture is well-schooled in the ugly alleys and byways of realism and moral ambiguity. What goes on under flickering streetlights and on dusty, impoverished back roads has become mainstream. Meanwhile, the classic mystery is living in comfortable retirement, well financed by annuities and fresh income from a steady production of successful cozies and less philosophically demanding fare.

What unites the hardboiled and cozy worlds is a satisfactory conclusion. The books open with a disordering of the universe through some wretched, anti-social deed. It’s evil rising from the depths, chaos threatening the fragile equilibrium. The puzzle-solvers and dark angels are called upon to put things back into balance, to cleanse the collective of foul corruption and treacherous instability.

These are satisfying destinations, but how you want to get there is a matter of taste. Sometimes you want Spielberg with a side of Frank Capra, sometimes full-on Scorsese. It’s all fine with me.

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

2026-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

For a little over a year, I've been attending the monthly meetings of a mystery book club at my local independent bookstore. It's been a lot of fun, particularly since they tend to choose books that don't quite match my normal reading tastes, with a strong emphasis on recent cozies and domestic thrillers. It's always good to read outside your comfort zone.

This month, though, the club made one of its periodic forays into classic territory, with Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train. Several members, it turned out, are Christie enthusiasts who have read all her works, often more than once, while others were encountering her for the first time. This led the group to consider an interesting question: what book did the hardcore Christie fans think would make the best introduction to her work for a new reader?

I immediately thought this would make good fodder for a SleuthSayers column. Considering some of my own favorite writers and series characters, what one book would I choose for a new reader, and why? What story would best capture what I loved about that author, and be most likely to bring the newbie back for more?

So here's how I'd answer the question for ten (or nine, depending on how you count) members of my personal pantheon.

REX STOUT: I've written before about my love for Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, and the Manhattan brownstone they call home. This is definitely a series where I wouldn't give a new reader book #1 to start with. Fer-de-Lance is a fine novel, and Wolfe himself is already there almost complete, but I don't think Stout had yet refined Archie's voice. Given how important the brownstone is to what I find most appealing about the books, I'd also eliminate the entries where Wolfe ventures out into the wider world, though some of those (Some Buried Caesar, Too Many Cooks) are excellent. Ultimately, my choice would be And Be A Villain, in which a man is murdered during a live radio broadcast. Wolfe and Archie are at their sharpest, the key supporting characters are present in fine form, and the mystery itself is satisfyingly complex, with a surprising resolution. Some would object to this choice on the basis that the novel is the beginning of the "Zeck trilogy," introducing the only recurring villain in the Wolfe stories, but I think the book stands up fine on its own.

AGATHA CHRISTIE: It means forgoing the pleasures of Poirot, but in my view there's no finer way to meet Dame Agatha than And Then There Were None (hey, are all my choices going to start with "and"?). What's not to love? A fiendishly clever plot with plenty of inventive twists, an incredible setting, a cast of memorably nasty characters--everything great about Christie is on full view here, including the darkly cynical tone that gives her work such lasting depth. The atmosphere in this one is anything but cozy, and there's a reason writers are still ripping this premise off after almost a century. Now, if you must have Poirot and his little gray cells? It may be too easy an answer, but I'd have to go with Murder on the Orient Express. (If you must have Miss Marple, you must ask someone else, as the character's never done much for me.)

ROBERT B. PARKER: I've also written before about how formative the Spenser novels were for me when I began reading adult crime fiction. I still relish them, but there are particular challenges in introducing them to a new reader. The first Spenser, The Godwulf Manuscript, isn't much more than a Chandler pastiche, with little indication of what would later make the character distinctive. The second, God Save the Child, introduces Susan Silverman, but is one of several early books in the series with gender politics that have aged very poorly. The book I've reread most often, A Catskill Eagle, relies heavily on the reader's prior knowledge of Spenser and Susan's relationship. So my recommendation for the reader new to Spenser is The Judas Goat, in which our man goes to Europe to track down a group of terrorists. The case is fast-paced and exciting, and Spenser is formidable without yet being the invincible superman he'd be in the later books. The climatic showdown, at the 1980 Montreal Olympics, is a terrific action sequence. Most importantly, the book has the lively, funny interactions between Spenser and Hawk that are usually the highlights of any Spenser outing.

RICHARD STARK: Once again, I've written before of my devotion to Stark's novels about the coldly efficient professional thief Parker, for my money the best series of crime novels ever written. They're all great, but I think one perfect entry point is The Score, in which Parker joins a gang with a seemingly foolproof plan to rob every business in a small mining town in a single night. As always, things go wrong, and the pleasure comes from watching Parker scramble to deal with the multiple complications and still walk away with the loot. In addition to the novel, the comic book adaptation by the late, great Darwyn Cooke is most definitely worth seeking out.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Stark, of course, was a penname of Westlake's. While Stark's Parker novels are the best straight crime books ever written, Westlake used his own name on the Dortmunder series, about a thief cursed with the worst luck of anyone in the genre, and darned if they're not, by a mile, the best comic crime capers. It's kind of not fair that one guy should be so damn good at both. I think most Dortmunder fans would recommend new readers simply start with the first book, The Hot Rock, but I'd actually go with a much later entry, Drowned Hopes. Here, an ex-con recruits Dortmunder and his regular crew of misfits to help with an unusual problem: the town where he buried his loot is now underwater, thanks to a dam built while he was in prison. Worth the price of admission just for the scene where Dortmunder tries scuba diving. For bonus points, the novel also includes an unusual crossover: in one chapter, the characters from Joe Gores's DKA series make an appearance. Gores and Westlake cowrote the chapter, which also appears in the DKA novel 32 Cadillacs. So this book can actually introduce you to two top-tier crime series!

JOHN D. MACDONALD: Just as Hawk is vital to the best entries in the Spenser series, so the most memorable books about Travis McGee, MacDonald's "salvage consultant" hero, tend to be the ones with the most involvement from Meyer, the philosophically inclined economist who serves as McGee's unlikely best friend. So while it might seem perverse to choose the next-to-last novel in the series as an entry point, I'd still go with Cinnamon Skin, in which Meyer is central to the plot and present in almost every scene. When Meyer's beloved niece and her new husband are killed in a boat explosion, he and McGee set off on a cross-country quest to find and punish the guilty party. There's some great detective work in this one, and a memorably cold-blooded bad guy. Of course, the McGee books are only a fraction of the work put out by the highly prolific MacDonald. For a non-series taste, try The Executioners, which has been the basis of three (increasingly unfaithful) filmed versions under the title Cape Fear.

ED MCBAIN: Choosing a starting point for the 87th Precinct novels is just about impossible, partly because of the sheer scope of the series (55 novels over fifty years!), partly because it features a sprawling ensemble cast instead of a single hero. There are a few plot threads which run through several novels--Detective Steve Carella's relationship with his wife, the recurring villain The Deaf Man--but by and large you can read the series in pretty much any order. It's been persuasively argued that the books really constitute a single long novel, one of the greatest ever written about New York City (thinly fictionalized as Isola in McBain's universe). McBain didn't invent the police procedural, but the 87th Precinct is surely the grandest incarnation of the form in mystery fiction. Forced to choose an introduction, I might go with Eight Black Horses, in which the Deaf Man returns to exact revenge. It's got a clever plot and shows the main characters at their most human--but I might be choosing it just because it's one of the ones I've most recently reread.

LAWRENCE BLOCK: Two of the greatest figures in the history of the American PI were introduced in the 1970s. Robert B. Parker's Spenser is the paragon: well-read, absolutely committed to an admirable code of honor, a superb cook, irresistible to women, and very nearly undefeatable with either a gun or his fists. As much as I love Parker's writing, by the last third or so of the series, Spenser had become essentially superhuman, impervious even to aging, and the endless scenes of him and Susan congratulating each other on the perfection of their relationship had gotten a little old. Spenser's contemporary, Block's Matt Scudder, is a much different, and ultimately much more human and thus more compelling, character. Scudder tries to do the right thing, but he's deeply flawed, most notably by his alcoholism, which remains a central theme of the series even after he joins AA and sobers up. You could start the series from the beginning, but to jump in at a point where Block has fully mastered Scudder's voice and world, go with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a flashback novel set during Scudder's drinking days that features a compelling plot and one of the all-time great titles.

SUE GRAFTON: Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. There's no doubt that Grafton got better with experience, but there's also no doubt that her "alphabet" series about California PI Kinsey Milhone was strong from the start. Watching Milhone's character develop over the course of the series is one of its main pleasures, and best appreciated if you're with her from the start of her journey: "A" is for Alibi. It's not a perfect book (you'll see the end coming a mile away), but it will make you eager to spend more time with the character. It remains a tragedy that the series never reached Z.

STUART M. KAMINSKY: The (IMHO) underappreciated Kaminsky had several series characters, including Florida process server Lew Fonesca, Chicago cop Abe Leiberman, and Moscow inspector Porfiry Rostnikov. I frequently return to them all with pleasure, but my favorite is Toby Peters, a down-on-his luck PI working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. Peters works for a different celebrity in every book, and Kaminsky, an accomplished film scholar in his professional life, fleshes out the stories with rich detail about the period and the biographies of the real-life figures Peters encounters. As in all of Kaminsky's series, there's an expansive and highly entertaining cast of supporting characters and an engaging combination of melancholy and humor. Mostly because it's where I started, I'd direct new readers to the second Peters entry, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.

Agree? Disagree? Who are your favorites, and what do you think would make the most effective starting points for readers new to them?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Edited by Adam Meyer, In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Genesis came out from Down & Out Books last year, shortly before that publisher went, well, down and out. As a result, the book never got the attention it deserved. I'm delighted that, earlier this month, a new edition of the book was published by Audecyn Books, and is now available in both print and electronic editions. It's a great set of crime stories, including contributions from my fellow SleuthSayers Stacy Woodson, Michael Bracken, and Barb Goffman. My story, "Just a Job to Do," is about a bodyguard, assigned to a mobster's wife, who develops her own ideas about what protection really means. Don't miss your second chance at this one!

How to Win the Toughest Game

2026-07-25T00:30:00.000-04:00

Melodie here. In my May post, I quoted good friend and colleague Lisa de Nikolits.
Today, I'm pleased to host Lisa on Sleuthsayers, who wrote this wonderful post - possibly one of the best I've ever read on here (and I rather like my own, so that is some praise!) I particularly like the comparison of writers to elite athletes! How true. Not to mention, ego-inspiring <smile>

How to Win the Toughest Game
Five Ways Not to Lose the Plot—Including Your Own

by Lisa de Nikolits

Writing. Surviving (and thriving) as an author has never been easy. And right now, it feels tougher—and often more bizarre—than ever.

Let’s go back to the iconic opening line of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

I bet Mr. Dickens couldn’t have imagined AI, social media, the price of paper and shipping, or the increased number of players on the field, all jostling for real estate and their name in lights.

Add to that, cuts in government funding to the arts sectors, tariffs and a world that feels chaotic with war and disaster.

How can we cope? Even more importantly, how can we thrive?

My strategies are simple, and I sum them up in Five Ways Not to Lose the Plot—Including Your Own

1. Think Like a Sports Pro

2. Be Judicious with Social Media

3. Have Realistic Expectations

4. Revisit Your Slush Pile

5. Celebrate the Wins

1. Think Like a Sports Pro.

This is one of my favourites. I found these fridge magnets a decade ago and I’ve used them as writing mantras ever since. They sum up the dedication, discipline, relentless hard work, single-minded passion and blinkered focus that’s necessary to be on the field, never mind succeeding on the field. Athletes get injured, grow old, adjust to change, fail on a global stage in front of millions of people, encounter rivals, face scorn and derision from analysts, failed former players and couch potatoes who all think they could do it better. They are vilified on social media or held fleetingly aloft as gods. None of this is dissimilar to writing. So, train your brain to think like an athlete because as an author, you are an athlete. Protect your mental health, improve your stamina, do the rehab (in our case, the rewrites), accept the losses and never lose sight of your end goal.

I’d also like to talk about the idea that writers must produce four to five books a year to succeed. This has become a kind of shorthand in indie publishing and one that I’ve seen at conferences and online. Its origin story comes from a specific ecosystem—rapid-release, series-driven genres where visibility is tied to frequency and algorithmic momentum. But it is not a universal rule of writing, nor is it a guarantee of success.

“Super successes” of indie romance, crime or cozy bestsellers are realistically more likely to be extraordinary outliers, and not typical outcomes, in the same way that Fifty Shades of Grey is still cited to “prove” that self-publishing is the fastest route to commercial success. What it actually represents is something far more rare: a highly unusual trajectory that became visible precisely because it is not typical. Both ideas—high output as a necessity, and viral success as a model—belong to the same category of publishing mythology. They describe what has happened, not what can be reliably reproduced.

I feel it’s important to talk about this because it ties into the sporting analogy. There are phenoms in every sport, but their meteoric rise is theirs, rather than a strategy for most athletes to follow.

So, ask yourself, who are you on the sports field? Where do your specific talents and strengths lie? We’d all like to be phenoms but sometimes we’re just the hopefuls on the bench, training our hearts out, and hoping that our game day will come. One thing’s for sure; the harder you train, the more consistently you show up, the more chance you’ll have of being not only being on the playing field but succeeding in delivering your personal best.

2. Be Judicious with Social Media.

Social media is a series of black holes within black holes. And the big question is always, does social media even sell books? The answer, unanimously, is “indirectly.” In other words, social media rarely sells books directly, but it can create visibility, credibility, and a sense of urgency that might lead to book sales.

Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, Threads, Bluesky, Substack, Goodreads, Wattpad are just a few, some of which are already on their way out.

I recently attended a webinar titled “Promoting Books Without Social Media” by author brand/marketing expert Andréa Guevara. 1,600 authors showed up, proving that I wasn’t alone in wanting to find alternative avenues of book promotion.

My takeaway was that instead of chasing daily visibility across an (unrealistic, unreliable) ever-expanding list of platforms, we need to shift to systems that endure—libraries, book clubs, podcasts, interviews, festivals, and word-of-mouth ecosystems where a single meaningful appearance can generate momentum over months rather than minutes. In this model, marketing isn’t about feeding algorithms; it’s about becoming findable in the right places, at the right time, for the right reader.

However, even in an approach like this which rejects social media dependency, there is a strong caveat: social media still plays a role as a discovery layer. Several irate authors indicated their discontent in the sidebar chat of the webinar: “I thought this was about NOT using social media” and I understood their point. I too was disappointed because the webinar demonstrated that we have to use social media to get off social media. Social media points readers towards alternative avenues such as events, and direct relationships but it’s the unavoidable first step.

Another caveat is that we live in a world where it’s increasingly tough (and expensive) to get invited to festivals as an author or even just attend them. The reasons for this are myriad and would take an entire post in and of itself to delve into. Book tables can be costly at festivals even when shared. The cost of memberships can mount up.

And one could spend 24/7 hours a day and countless dollars on mentorships, coaching, paying for giveaways, book tours, Facebook ads, Google ads or book software programs that promise the world—and the list goes on.

I’ve always likened social media to gardening. I dedicate an hour a day, no more, to posting, liking, commenting, swiping, supporting, and seeing what’s out there. Then I walk away from my garden, knowing there are countless weeds I didn’t get to pull but I did what I could, in my allotted time.

3. Have Realistic Expectations

As authors, we’re not entering a small pool of books. We’re entering a flood.

The scale of publishing today is difficult to overstate. Globally, estimates suggest around 2.2 million new books are published every year, and when self-published titles are included, the number can climb to nearly 4 million new books annually.

Self-published books now make up a substantial share of total annual releases—often estimated at well over 40% of all new titles, and in some datasets, outnumbering traditionally published books by a wide margin.

But volume does not equal reach.

Across both traditional and self-publishing, most books sell very few copies. Industry analyses and sales data consistently suggest that:

· the majority of books sell fewer than a few hundred copies in their lifetime only a small percentage ever break into significant commercial success self-published books tend to have a wider spread of outcomes, from zero sales to occasional high performers, but most cluster at the low end of the scale

Traditional publishing offers distribution, editing, and credibility—but not guaranteed sales. Self-publishing offers control and speed—but not guaranteed quality, discovery or sales.

For small press and debut authors, the reality is even more sobering: most titles receive modest attention unless they benefit from sustained marketing, series momentum, awards recognition, or unexpected and uncontrollable external amplification. In other words, “being published” is not the milestone it once was. Visibility, not publication, is the scarce (and most valuable) resource.

Going back to my sporting analogy, we’re on a very crowded playing field.

The expectation, then, cannot be “success as default.” Publishing is not a finish line; it is a game in motion, played across shifting ground where visibility has to be earned and re-earned.

In the older model of traditional publishing, the contract itself often carried an unspoken identity shift: I am now a success. To be published was to be legitimized. Writing and recognition arrived together, and the role felt, if not secure, at least clearly defined and established.

That equation no longer holds in the same way.

Now, publication is little more than a ticket to entry on the playing field and victories are scarce. The game continues long after the book is released, and the conditions of play have changed: there are more players, more noise, more competition for attention, fewer guarantees of being seen at all. And yet this is not a reason for disillusionment—it’s a reason for clarity.

Because once you understand the nature of the game, you stop mistaking it for something it is not. You stop expecting permanence from limited exposure. You stop equating publication with victory. And you start building strategies that match reality rather than myth.

The question is no longer whether a book is good enough to be published—because these days, almost any book can be published—but whether, once it is in play, it can be found. And from that more grounded place, success becomes not a default assumption, but something you can influence, recognize, and hopefully sustain.

4. Revisit Your Slush Pile

I recently went back to my slush pile, and it was a useful reminder about something important: writing is a long game, and I’m not the same player I was fifteen or twenty years ago.

Back to Think Like a Sports Pro: Athletes get injured, grow old, adjust to change, fail on a global stage in front of millions of people, encounter rivals, face scorn and the derision from analysts, failed former players and couch potatoes who all think they could do it better.

Visiting my slush pile felt like stepping onto an old playing field and immediately being aware of how differently I move now.

I feel more nimble, confident and dexterous. I used to overplay (overwrite) everything, overthink every pass (sentence), and try to hold the entire match (short story/novel) together with terrified caution.

Now I see the patterns more clearly. I trust myself more which means I trust the play more. And a huge difference is that I don’t panic when the ask shifts.

It was interesting to dissect the evolution of my writing—to see what my strengths were at the time, and to notice how clearly my weaknesses are visible to me now. I am, without question, a better writer in terms of dialogue, structure, pacing, and shaping a narrative from beginning to end. I no longer stack literary ideas like a Jenga tower and hope that no one breathes too hard near the table. Back then, I was afraid that if I removed one piece, the whole structure would collapse. I played as if stability mattered more than quality and that challenging the structure would result in complete loss. I don’t have that fear anymore.

And what surprised me was how much value was still there in the earlier work. Concepts, images and fragments of insight—sometimes there’s no more than a line or a few words in a sentence, but those fragments aren’t games I lost, they were unfinished plays that, with my years of training and focus, still have potential. I learned that three or four concepts/sentences/ideas could be welded together and forged with new beginnings and new endings. I could, by experience, diligent studies, faith in my imagination, age and wisdom, create a different formation with a different outcome and end up with a piece of work I’m really proud of.

What I understand now—and I didn’t understand then—is that the slush pile isn’t evidence of failure. It’s my own personal archive.

But what I also realized is this. I used to think that a story was finished when really, it was 8% done. Only 8%. That’s not a lot. Now I know I have to work harder—a lot harder. It takes more time than I thought it would. And not because I’m older and slower but because I recognize all the requisite nuances, and I know how long those nuances can take. I can spend more than an hour on a paragraph and sometimes a paragraph can take an entire day.

Younger me was in such a hurry to get published. Being published was everything. And don’t get me wrong. Nothing beats the thrill of having your story or novel in print or online. But I realize now that there’s much more to it. Once my first draft is complete, I have to go the other 92%. And that’s the hard work. Those are the reps. That’s what sculpts. The rewriting, self-edits, the line edits, the stepping away, the coming back, the asking for input and then trusting myself to deliver.

Now I am not afraid of collapse because it’s part of the game and better players don’t run away from facing their mistakes in the hopes that no one else will see them either and that somehow, the world will embrace the half-finished play as magnificent.

Better players study their plays and pick them apart. Instead of relying on flashy sleights of hand to fake a play, better players get into the mechanics.

5. Celebrate the Wins

Let’s go back to where we started: Writing. Surviving (and thriving) as an author has never been easy. And right now, it feels tougher—and often more bizarre—than ever.

And let’s revisit the iconic opening line of Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities one more time: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

And, given Be Judicious with Social Media as well as Have Realistic Expectations, one might feel discouraged at this point.

Which is when I go back to Think Like a Sports Pro. Have you ever watched the winning locker room after the championship is won? The champagne showers are so crazy the players have to wear goggles.

And it’s never been more important to celebrate our wins. The grass is always greener on the other side and there’s always someone (or a crowd!) doing better than you and winning that accolade you hoped would be yours.

Stay blinkered. Stay in your lane and count your wins. And you’ve got them, or you wouldn’t be here. Sit with them and look at them. Breathe in the moment. Give yourself a pat on the back. And if you didn’t win today, there’s always tomorrow. Someone’s gotta win, right? There’s no reason it can’t be you.

Remember the fridge magnets. I’d love to know which one appeals to you the most. I think I’d go with Billie Jean King. “Champions keep playing until they get it right.”

Thank you for reading this post. If you enjoyed it, please visit my website, lisawriter.com, and order a copy of one of my books, sold wherever books are sold. Or ask your local library for a copy. And if you’d like to go one step further, leave a rating or review. It all counts and it’s all appreciated.

Now available at Amazon, and all the usual suspects! (I've ordered my copy - Melodie)

Zines, Then and Now

2026-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

When the Editor-in-Chief of the newly-launched That Glow invited me to contribute a column way back in 1999, she frowned when I referred to the glossy pregnancy-motherhood-working woman site as a zine.

"On-line magazine," she corrected briskly. I nodded, pretending to understand, as I pretended to understand most things technology-related back in the day. Didn't the "zine" mean magazine? I knew about zines! gurl.com was funny and smart and progressive, decidedly sex-positive, and chickclick was edgy and hip and represented third wave feminism - it even sponsored the first Lilith Fair!

At That Glow, we were also all about women - but we were glossy, not grungy - upscale and sleek. We were going to run ads, pay writers well,

and -

Well. The fact that you probably don't recognize the name - or perhaps mistook it for one of the many sound-alike sites that are now, in 2026, gorgeously thriving, tells the tale. The editor was bright and ambitious and well-connected, but decidedly ahead of her time. I was sorry, but not surprised, when our "online magazine" slipped beneath the surface of the roiling sea of the newly dubbed "world wide web." (Recognize that www, y'all?)

For me, launching a writing career in the mid-nineties, "publishing" on the internet seemed iffy, experimental, kind of cool - but also more than likely a waste of time, sort of like those semi-pro art shows people would throw together in someone's garage. A lot of work, one fun night of hope, pot, and cheap white wine, and then…nothing. Gone. After all, how would anything "posted" on the internet be circulated? How would it be seen? How would it be archived? Yes, people under forty years of age. These were actual questions we asked ourselves. The concept of words, images and (God help us) videos circulating for all eternity on the internet was beyond our feeble ken.

Even with print magazines folding all around us, even with copyeditors and even editors being laid off wholesale, even with writers being pushed from staff to stringer, the money - and the glamour - was still in print publication. I'd been a columnist for Buzz Magazine until it folded abruptly in 1998, but no worries. I had regular gigs writing crime, disease, and celebrity scandal for the Big Seven women's mags - Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, et al. I'd just move on to the next juicy gig!

(That sound you hear is everyone who was actually making a living writing in the nineties spitting coffee all over their computers.)

So - zine, magazine - for me, it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. Zines were an online phenomenon, some new flash in the pan that was cool and fun but probably destined to fail.

But I was late to the party. What I thought was new was just an online version of the do-it-yourself rags that had been around since the thirties, when sci-fi fans put together little "fan magazines" - called zines even then - to discuss their favorite characters. The very first of these may have been Allen Glasser's The Planet (July 1930), distributed to The New York Scienceers, a sci-fi fan club. In an article for Carter ARTicles, Carolyn Croley writes that art and design zines were first created in the early 20th century, focusing on Dada and surrealism. What these journals had in common is that they were small, hand-produced, carefully curated, and often at a variance with the tastes of mainstream culture.

These early works were seminal, but their authors were by no means the first to self-publish. Tristram Shandy was self-published by Laurence Sterne in the late 1700s. A hundred years later, Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. Self-publishing was often undertaken by writers who couldn't connect with a publishing house. This route was quite respectable, and the term "self-published" didn't really have a stink on it until the advent of "vanity publishing" in the early 1900s.

The North American Review was founded in 1815, and is still going strong. NAR was first produced on letterpress, but by the fifties offset printing had taken over. Similar specialized literary journals, often called "lit mags" or "littles," proliferated in the 1960s with the advent of mimeograph machines. Access to photocopiers in the 1980s produced another wave of journals, and by the end of the 20th Century there were thousands of little magazines being produced across North America, some financed independently, some supported by colleges, foundations - and even by the government. My first poetry sale was to a tiny photocopied journal whose name is lost to history but that paid me fifty bucks! In 1988 dollars!

(So…if a poem sold for fifty bucks forty years ago, I guess now they must sell for - what? A thousand? Ten thousand? Hahahhahahahahhhahahahahahha. Sorry, poets. Just know I'm laughing with you, not at you.)

These early lit journals were a bit more polished than hand-produced zines. Zines were more ragged, more amateurish, more raw. Typed by hand, sometimes even hand-written, often mimeographed, then stapled together by hand, zines were integral to pop culture. In the seventies, long before most American households had a computer, amateur mags were spreading the word about street style, fashion, and music, perhaps picking up where those early art and design zines left off. Zines were particularly relevant to the punk scene. Punk - the zine - debuted in New York in 1976 with a caricature of Lou Reed on the cover, and helped popularize the moniker "punk."

Similarly, small self-produced "underground" newspapers rose to prominence in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, mostly associated with the counterculture. As the Vietnam war ended, most of these disappeared. Plus ça change, as Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849. Plus c'est la même chose. Yeah.

What he said.

Print reading matter still outsells digital by a wide margin, and that seems likely to obtain for some time to come, but e-reading has undeniably changed the game. Today, the Substack and Mailchimp platforms distribute what are essentially e-zines, though the lines between magazine, newspaper, newsletter, blog, website and zine have become a bit blurred. Paper zines are still around, too - Paper Pushers Print Shop in Seattle stocks hundreds of tiny, hand-produced zines. Los Angeles has an annual zine festival, as do San Francisco, Toronto and Chicago. Other cities have a big zine component to their comic book festivals. Zines have evolved, but they are still around, online and in print. Why not check a few out?

Anna Scotti is the author of a young adult novel, Big and Bad, that won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People. Though primarily a mystery writer, she has published poetry widely and was awarded numerous awards and honors for her collection, Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, and the poems within. Anna's novel-in-stories, It's Not Even Past, went out of print shortly after publication, but will be re-released in October - details to come! Learn more at www.annakscotti.com.