Where'd THAT Story Come From?

  

I have a couple of new mystery stories out, and after some questions about them the other day from one of my (two) fans, I figured I'd give you the "stories behind the stories."

The first of the two is "The POD Squad," in the current (Sep/Oct) issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. This is the eighth installment of my Sheriff Ray Douglas mystery series--seven of those have appeared in AHMM and one in the now-defunct Down & Out: The Magazine.

I remember deciding, before the writing started, that for this story I wanted to add another protagonist alongside the sheriff and his crimesolving girlfriend Jennifer Parker--and this wound up being a bright high-school student named Billy Osmond, whose last name became necessary when I got around to choosing a title (more about that later). Billy became part of the plot when he attended the annual science fair that served as the setting for the first part of the story, so my hero and heroine could meet him.

Another thing I wanted to include in this story was three different mysteries in three separate locations. I'd done that once before, in a story called "Scavenger Hunt" (AHMM, Jan/Feb 2018) and the multiple cases in multiple places made the plot more fun to write. Also, as before, I wanted to make two of those mysteries-within-the-mystery turn out to be directly connected, late in the story. This time around, all three crimes would be robberies of some kind, one of them minor and the other two more serious--and I wanted the high-school kid to provide some assistance to the grownups in solving them. 

To say more about the plot would probably involve spoilers, but I'll mention something I alluded to earlier: "The POD Squad" was one of those stories that didn't immediately suggest a title to me while I was plotting it. In fact I still didn't have a title when I finished the writing. Well, that's not exactly true: I had several titles in mind, but I thought all of them were pretty anemic. For inspiration I finally went back to an old TV show called The Mod Squad, about three young and mismatched city cops. I liked the clever rhyme of that title and the makeup of the trio (one white guy, one white woman, one Black guy), and since my team of three "detectives" was also diverse (man, woman, boy) I decided to call them The POD Squad. To make that possible, I gave Ray and Jen's helper the last name of Osmond so they could jokingly be the Parker-Osmond-Douglas squad. The only time that's mentioned in the story is in one brief exchange of dialog near the end--but it solved my title problem. 

I should add that I had a great time writing this story, partly because of the constant banter between the two investigators and their new and temporary team member, and also because of the need to put the supposedly separate plots on a collision course and come up with what I hoped would be an unexpected and satisfying ending. (Dialog and plotting have always been my favorite parts of writing, anyway.) The story turned out to be around 5000 words, which is about what I was aiming for in the planning stages.

The second of these two recent stories is called "Cargo," which came out last Sunday in Issue #104 of Black Cat Weekly. This was the fifth "new" story I've written for BCW--most of my stories there have been reprints--and was chosen by co-editor Michael Bracken as his "pick of the week." (Thanks, Michael--and thanks to both you and Barb Goffman for again featuring one of my creations.)

"Cargo" is also around 5000 words, but in almost everything else it's way different from my AHMM story. Specifically, this one is (1) a standalone instead of a series installment, (2) made up of fewer characters, (3) set in the distant past, (4) set in a non-Southern location, (5) more violent, (6) a how-do-I-survive story instead of a whodunit, and (7) a love story in addition to a mystery. Besides all that, it's different because it's based on my own background. "Cargo" is about an incident in the life of a young lieutenant at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma who is assigned as Officer of the Day, one of those usually dull "additional duties" that come around about once a year and sound more important than they are. OD duty basically involves spending the night and some of the day in the control tower and offering any needed assistance to the air-traffic and flight-line folks, including the greeting and hosting of any visiting dignitaries who might be passing through. To make a long story short (pun intended), this tale was based on one of the times I myself served as Officer of the Day, during my years at Tinker in the 1970s. And the fact that I wrote it in first-person POV made it seem even more real to me.

While there are a lot of similarities to my experience that night and the setup is the same--even down to what movie was playing at the base theater--the events of the rest of the story are far different, and certainly more exciting, than what happened in real life. Just as in the story, two colonels flew in that evening in a transport plane carrying the coffins of two soldiers, and I was required to do some things I hadn't done before--but I doubt I would've been brave enough or smart enough to have handled the fictional part of all this as well as my fictional counterpart did. (Isn't it great the way the Clark Kents and Bruce Waynes of the world can become all-powerful when they need to be, in these stories we write?) Even so, because I was there, the telling of the story brought back plenty of memories of that time and place and situation.

I also wanted to make this a "framed" story. I don't do that often, but for this one it seemed to be appropriate: At the beginning, an old man is telling his granddaughter the story, then we switch to the past for the story itself, and at the end we go back to the grandpa and grandchild for the wrapup, and for what I hope might be a final surprise. This approach is nothing new; examples of framed narratives are everywhere. Some that I especially remember are novels/movies like The Princess Bride, The Green Mile, Titanic, etc.--and when they work, they work well.

Anyhow, that's my overview of the kinds of things that inspired these two stories. If you happen to read one or both of them, I hope you enjoy the time spent.

Questions: How often do you, as a writer, write stories with more than one plotline? (Novels often use them, as subplots or even parallel plots--I like to read those and to watch movies that feature them--but I seldom see a lot of that in shorts.) How about stories that draw heavily on your own personal experiences? Finally, do you like "framed" stories that start in the present, go back to the past, and end up in the present again? Have you tried writing them?

Okay, enough of that. If you're still reading this, thanks for sticking with it.

Now get to work on your next story . . .