The Secret to Never Growing Old

My name is Anna Scotti, and I am delighted to present my inaugural blogpost for SleuthSayers (though I did guest post for Liz Zelvin in September). Coincidentally, I was given a debut date close to my birthday, and that got me thinking about characters' ages… and my own.

For millennia, people have searched for a cream, elixir, recipe, spell, or fountain that will grant eternal youth. Literary characters from Peter Pan to Dorian Grey have grappled with the wish to be forever young. Jay-Z, Alphaville, and Bob Dylan sang about it. One of the best kids' books ever written, Tuck Everlasting, deals with a family's discovery of a spring that grants immortality. Snow White's stepmother and Death Becomes Her's Madeline and Helen tried for eternal youth, too.

Few of these tales end happily, but if these pitiable literary figures only knew! The real secret to slow aging is to be the main character of a series that takes place over years, or even decades.

Nancy Drew is a dewy 18 in all of her 175 eponymous adventures, except when she occasionally, inexplicably, becomes 16. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple didn't start young, but aged erratically – and sometimes backward – from their initial late-middle age inceptions.

Sherlock Holmes is in his late twenties – perhaps even early thirties – in A Study in Scarlet, and is sixty in His Last Bow, which takes place in 1914, and finds him already retired to the English countryside to keep bees.

All 58 stories and four novels Doyle wrote about the sleuth take place during that span, which means Holmes is living – and aging – at a different pace from the rest of us. Kinsey Millhone is 32 in A is for Alibi, but just 38 in Y is for Yesterday, although Sue Grafton's series was written over a span of thirty-five years. This kind of sliding timescale, or floating timeline, isn't at all uncommon in fiction. You can probably think of examples of your own.

Mid-thirties may be a sweet spot for female protagonists to linger. When I created my "librarian-on-the-run" character in That Which We Call Patience (Ellery Queen, 2019) I had no idea I'd be writing a series. I made Audrey Smith – who is eventually known as Cam Baker, Sonia Sutton, Dana Kane, Lori Yarborough, and by a handful of other monikers over the course of her fourteen-story saga – "thirty-something," and she'd already been on the run in witness protection for a few years as the story opens.

The age just seemed right to me – I wanted her to be young enough to be fit, active and still fairly naive, someone who could step into an entry-level job without raising eyebrows. But she also had to be old enough to be well-educated and to have a bit of experience under her belt (she's working on a PhD when her life is interrupted by witnessing a crime).

In the fifth story of what became the series, The Longest Pleasure, Lori says she's thirty-two, and in It's Not Even Past, the sixth story, she's thirty-four. When Lori finally comes out of WITSEC, in Traveller from an Antique Land, she says she's thirty-eight, and that she's been on the run for eight or nine years. That would mean she went under in her late twenties, which fits the timeline established in Patience. So the ages add up, sort of, except that there are gaps between stories that must surely equal months or years, and references to other adventures not yet chronicled… and all together, they add up to far more than nine years on the run unless our girl is stumbling over a random corpse every five or six months.

Readers who get hooked on a series know when we're pulling a fast one with a character's age. But what Coleridge identified as a "willing suspension of disbelief" works in our favor as writers of fiction. If a character is engaging enough, and stories are good enough, to compel readers to demand more, time can be manipulated to serve us.

The trick is to make everything else believable. Lori may age at a third the normal rate, and she discovers corpses with alarming frequency, but she is in other regards perfectly ordinary. She's attractive but not a knock-out. She's smart but can be fooled. She drinks Earl Grey Tea, drives a beat-up Honda CRV, enjoys a trashy beach-read, and behaves recklessly – even inappropriately - with more than one man over the course of her adventures. In other words, she's very much like a real person, warts and all. And that's how we pull off the magic trick. Don't ask your readers to believe a dozen strange things – just ask them to believe one. Then make everything else absolutely plausible- even commonplace.

So, yes, if readers keep asking for librarian stories, Lori will eventually grow old – just not at the same, sometimes distressing, rate as her creator. 

Anna Scotti's librarian-on-the-run collection, It's Not Even Past, went out of print when Down&Out Books folded in October. She is hoping a white knight publisher will swoop in soon, but in the meantime, if you'd like to order a copy, go to annakscotti.com. Watch for the next "librarian" installment, When Bright Angels Beckon, early next year. Anna's short fiction appears frequently in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Black Cat Weekly, and her poetry can be found in The New Yorker and other literary magazines.  She's also a young adult author - Big and Bad was awarded the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People in 2021.

Humans are a Puzzlement...

"Never say you know the last word about any human heart"

— Henry James

And as for the human mind… Of course, this is what makes communicating with each other so difficult, whether in person or in writing. And not only do we not know what's going on inside of someone else, we don't even know ourselves, and I'm not talking about repressions or neuroses. I'm talking about how the way we're built literally shuts us off from things about ourselves that are perfectly obvious to everyone else.

We don't know what we really look like. For one thing, all we ever see of ourselves is in a mirror.

(NOTE: This is a plot point in Agatha Christie's Funerals Are Fatal.) And when we do see ourselves in a photograph or a video, we're often shocked, shocked, shocked at what we see! Not to mention how we often carry around an image of ourselves from some time in our past. For example: I hit my current magnificent height of 5'5" when I was in grade school, and one of my best friends did too. We towered over everyone around us. And ever since, I've seen myself as tall. So it came as a shock, back in the late 1990s, to hear someone describe me to someone else as "kinda short". Kinda short? KINDA SHORT??? And then I realized that I had to look up at almost everyone around me. Damn. Still getting over that one.

We don't know what we really sound like. We hear everything we say from our own little skull's castle of flesh and bone and various fluids. Now I have always known that I have a very deep voice for a female (an alto or a baritone, not sure which, but I have been told that it's "sultry") because in grade school I often got cast as a boy in the school plays. I also have an odd combination of a Southern California and Kentucky drawl. (BTW, I can do a dead-on impression of Mitch McConnell.) I never heard a recording of myself until I was in almost 20, and I realized that I sound sarcastic even when I'm saying "So, how's it going?" Sultry and sarcastic: sounds like the subtitle on my future detective's card.

We don't know what we're feeling, and we don't know what to do with whatever we're feeling. Seriously. Ask any toddler, teenager, parent, or boss who is having a complete and utter meltdown. If they can breathe long enough to talk.

Kat Dennings doing a GREAT teenage girl freakout in The 40-Year-Old Virgin

I know I did a lot of Alternatives to Violence Project workshops up at the pen where the inmates couldn't handle most negative emotions, and rather than face boredom, sadness, frustration, anxiety, or fear, they would explode into anger. And of course, you can't just say, "oh, gee, I'm angry" and calm down. As many inmates - and others - told me, "You know how it is. You get disrespected, you gotta react. You can't let anything go, because then somebody's gonna f*** with you, and it's only gonna get worse." BTW, sadness often led to isolating, cutting and/or attempts (or success) at suicide.

Now that might sound like adolescent behavior, but studies have shown that a large number of people are first arrested as juveniles, with over two-thirds of those in state prisons having a first arrest before age 19, and 38% before age 16. So where and how are they supposed to grow up?

But then, I don't think humans do a very good job of teaching emotions. (Lately I don't think much of our skills at teaching reading, writing, history, science, civics, and arithmetic, either, but that's for another blogpost.) You want to see some real unbridled, spit-flecked meltdown rages? – go online, where the ubiquitous Usernames, Gamertags, etc. go after others the way Jack the Ripper went after his victims on the foggy streets of Whitechapel.

We don't know how to share any of this with others, because... We think they see, feel, hear, know what we see, feel, hear, and know, and oh how wrong that is.

Here's an example. I used to teach a community ed writing class back in the Reagan years. And the first thing I started with was talking about words, and what people see when they hear or read a word. So I told them, write down the first image or emotion or memory that comes in your head when I write a word on the board. And the first word was always "Apple".

Answers: red, yellow, green, Apple Music, Apple computers, 1980 Apple IPO, apple tree, apple scent, apple pie, sliced apple, whole apple… all of those were among the answers given.

So, every time we write what we think is a very obvious, simple description... it's not. We know what we see in our mind when read / hear it, but we have no idea what's firing off in other people's minds when they read / hear it. It's a wonder anyone understands anything. But then I'm the person who found the first five chapters of Moby Dick hilarious.

We don't know why we do at least some of the things we do. Because we assume that how we were raised, the food we ate, the way it was cooked, the way the clothes hung in the closet, the way the laundry was done, the way the garden (if any) was planted, the way we dressed to go out (if we went out), that was what was normal. And then you meet people who don't live the way you did... Obviously, they're doing it wrong. Or maybe you finally meet the people who are doing it right, but don't know how to imitate them.

We don't know why we're attracted to certain things, from the colors we prefer in our house (I've always been a big fan of cobalt blue) to people with a certain hair/eye color. Or why certain things repel us. I don't and can't wear jewelry, and never have, because back when my mother first put a little necklace on me (I mean, after all, I was a girl, and girls are supposed to love and wear jewelry), I smelled the most terrible smell... And it happened every time she tried to bejewel me. I have no idea why, and I don't WANT to know why. There's a nightmare there, and I don't want to have it.

We don't know why we annoy other people; nor why we are annoyed by someone else. And that we don't usually analyze. Obviously, they're jerks. See Robert Browning's

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

I	II
Gr-r- r – there go, my heart’s abhorrence! Water your damned flower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God’s blood, would not mine kill you! What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming? Oh, that rose has prior claims – Needs its leaden vase filled brimming? Hell dry you up with its flames!	At the meal we sit together; Salve tibi! I must hear Wise talk of the kind of weather, Sort of season, time of year: Not a plenteous cork crop: scarcely Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt; What’s the Latin name for “parsley”? What’s the Greek name for “swine’s snout”?

To hear the whole poem, listen here:

Don't you wonder why our narrator is so infuriated with / about Brother Lawrence?

We are so strange, and we know so little, about ourselves and others - and that right there is the biggest set up for any mystery, any at all. That's being human.

"Hello, Bookstore"

 

My pal Matt Tannenbaum is about to celebrate 50 years as a bookseller.  He made his bones at the Gotham Book Mart, working for the legendary Frances Steloff.  “Always bring the customer with you back to the shelf when he or she asks for a book which you don’t think you have in stock.  Especially if you know you don’t have it.  Your customer is bound to see something else along the way.”  Frances was enormously grateful for having been led into a trade she so cherished, and Matt clearly is, as well.  He once remarked that when you’re young, you’re unlikely to recognize a life-changing event, because you haven’t lived enough of a life to realize it’s going to change.  But that first day Matt walked into the Gotham, he set his life on a different path. 

                                   Matt Tannenbaum - Photo Credit: Bill Shein/Berkshire Argus

It’s enormously satisfying to see somebody imagine a thing, and make it happen.  Matt moved to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, and bought his own bookstore, on Housatonic St., in Lenox.  He and the store have been an enduring resource since, for both readers and writers.  Matt is very much a bookman, in the sense of loving everything about them, the texts, the smell, the history.  He’s achieved something not everybody gets, which is to make a vocation from his ardor.  This is a guy who breathes the written word.  And as a kind of grace note, in 2022, during COVID, a filmmaker named A.B. Zax made a documentary called Hello, Bookstore, which is in fact how Matt answers the phone.  I can’t recommend this movie enough.  It’s hugely charming, and a terrific surprise.  I was prepared to like it, of course, because it’s somebody I love and respect, but there’s always your dread going in – like a high school production of Oklahoma – that it’s going to be amateurish and squirmy, and you have to trust me on this one, squirmy it ain’t.  It’s without pretense, and I hope I don’t doom your interest by calling it heart-warming.

https://www.hello-bookstore.com/

I was on the phone with Matt, just the other day, and if I sample a piece of the conversation, it gives you an idea of how his mind works.  He mentioned that he’d struck up an acquaintanceship with Otto Penzler – another bookseller, of course – because of their shared enthusiasm for Charles McCarry.  (McCarry hailed from Pittsfield, MA, just up the road from Lenox, and he and Matt had gotten to be pals; Otto, as a publisher, had anthologized McCarry in several collections, Best American Mystery Stories among them.)  My own acquaintance with Otto is very slight, but I’ve been short-listed several times for BAMS, and the first time I got in was the year it was guest-edited by Donald Westlake.  I told Matt that I wrote Westlake a fanboy thank-you, and we had a desultory correspondence over the next half-dozen years, snail mail, because he didn’t do internet, and his letters were written on a manual, because he didn’t like electric typewriters, either.  He didn’t want something humming at him, he said.  I’m thinking Don punched those keys pretty hard, and he must have gone through a whole bunch of Smith-Coronas over time, because the e was always out of alignment, about a sixteenth of an inch above the line of type.  Matt laughed, and said something about technology, and how of course Westlake was allowed his idiosyncracies, and then he said, You realize there are no rough drafts anymore.  On a computer, you don’t mark up a hard copy, you just overwrite what you wrote before.  It took me a minute to think that through.  Word-processing is a huge convenience, and I, for one, like being liberated.  But the consequence is an actual loss.  What we gain in momentum, we lose by having no record of the process.  It’s a thoughtful insight. 

I’ve had a lot of eye-opening conversations with Matt.  He’s always been a very alert reader.  He was the one who pointed out the elegance of the last line of John Crowley’s Little, Big to me – a shared appreciation – but truth to tell, I’d missed it, first time around.  I think, too, that I would have turned a deaf ear to Lawrence Durrell, if not for Matt.  Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.  Patrick Leigh Fermor, maybe.  He can be very attuned to what a reader might not realize they’d been missing.  This is the natural magic of the bookshelf, one thing next to another. 

The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025

The mystery genre’s two best-of-year anthologies—Steph Cha’s The Best American Mystery and Suspense and Otto Penzler’s The Best Mystery Stories of the Year—provide readers with excellent examples of some of the best short mystery fiction published each year. If you write in the genre, you should regularly read both anthologies, not only for the enjoyment of reading some of the best short fiction our genre produces, but also to learn about the wide range of publications where the selected stories were originally published.

However, because the series editors and guest editors of both anthologies select stories from the entire panoply of crime fiction subgenres, some subgenres are unrepresented or underrepresented among their selections. Cozies, for example.

Though private eye stories are neither overlooked nor underrepresented in the two best-ofs, there are many more excellent private eye stories published each year than can be included in anthologies that attempt to cover the entire field. To remedy that situation, I’m now the series editor of The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year, and the inaugural volume, with multiple-award-winning private eye writer Matt Coyle as guest editor, releases soon.

As series editor, I read every private eye short story published in 2024 that I could find. Using the Private Eye Writers of America’s definition of private eye—“a private citizen (not a member of the military, federal agency, or civic or state police force) who is paid to investigate crimes. A Private Investigator can be a traditional private eye, a TV or newspaper reporter, an insurance investigator, an employee of an investigative service or agency (think Pinkertons) or similar character”—I eliminated stories that missed the mark. I then selected what I felt were the thirty best private eye short stories published in 2024.

Just like Cha and Penzler do with their guest editors, I sent my selections to Matt. He selected twenty stories for inclusion in the anthology, with the remaining ten being listed in the back as “Also Walking the Mean Streets.”

The twenty selected stories were written by Tom Andes, Pete Barnstrom, Robert J. Binney, Alec Cizak, Libby Cudmore, O’Neil De Noux, Luke Deckard, BV Lawson, Andrew McAleer, Ron Miller, Bruce W. Most, Marcia Muller, Twist Phelan, Neil S. Plakcy, William Dylan Powell, M.E. Proctor, Mark Thielman, Vicki Weisfeld, Andrew Welsh-Huggins, and Sam Wiebe.

Additionally, Matt wrote the introduction and Kevin Burton Smith, the driving force behind Thrilling Detective, wrote “The Private Eye Year in Review,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

Also Walking the Means Streets includes stories by Ann Aptaker, John M. Floyd, James A. Hearn, R.T. Lawton, Josh Pachter, Michele Bazan Reed, Gary Ross, Jeff Soloway, Bev Vincent, and Dave Zeltserman.

The selected stories and those listed as Also Walking the Mean Streets were originally published in a variety of anthologies, magazines, and websites, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, Cowboy Jamboree: A Case of Kink, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Janie’s Got a Gun, Jerry Jazz Musician, Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, Midsummer Mysteries, Mystery Magazine, New York State of Crime: Murder New York Style, Private Dicks and Disco Balls, Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers, Starlite Pulp Review, Strand Magazine, The Amber Waves of Autumn, The Killing Rain, and Yellow Mama.

So, keep your eyes open for the release of The Best Private Eye Stories of 2025, pick up a copy, and prepare yourself for a walk down the mean streets with some of today’s most interesting private eyes and their creators.

2026

SJ Rozan will be the guest editor for The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. If you had (or will have) a private eye short story published in 2025, follow the directions here to submit a copy of your published story.

And remember, if we don’t see your story, we can’t consider it.

* * *

“All I Ever Wanted” was published today in Dark Yonder 11.

“Home for the Holidays” was published in KissMet Quarterly: The Greatest Holiday Romance Stories Ever Written.

The Old Lady Shows her Mettle

Why is this book different from all other books?

If you're Jewish, you'll get the reference.

"This book" is my new poetry book, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle.

First, let me tell you my numbers. I'm 81 years old. I've been a writer since I was seven. My first book of poetry was published when I was 37. My first short story was published when I was 63. My first novel was published when I was 64. I've published three poetry books, seven novels, and more than 60 short stories. As a novelist, I've had and been dropped by three agents and five publishers. I've had novels in hardcover and poems in journals that folded before some of you were born.

So why is this book different?

1. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is the voice of a vanishing generation. My poems were published widely during the Second Wave of the women's movement. I was a New York Jewish feminist poet. My first book, I Am the Daughter, was about that political sensibility as well as being a young mother and my love life at the time. As I discovered when I looked for old poet friends to ask if they would consider blurbing the book, not many of us are left. In the late 1970s, a group of young mothers traded poetry critique on the Upper West Side. One of us went on to become revered, a household name, a Pulitzer winner. Her assistant wrote she sent best wishes but her health was too poor even to read emails. That's the way it goes when you're over 80.

2. I self-published The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle in print and e-book editions, after shopping it for a year. The poetry world is different from the mystery and crime fiction world I know, so I asked an old friend, a highly regarded award-winning poet, about reading fees. I was surprised when he didn't say he turned up his nose at them. "Not any more,"he said. So I did what I had to and got two offers. The catch was that the contracts were for print books. The publishers insisted on owning the electronic rights but did not intend to issue an e-book.

That made no sense. I turned the contracts down. In the end, I realized that I preferred to do it myself, have all the control, and get exactly what I wanted.

When I started out, it was shameful to self-publish a book. Today, it's one of many options. With poetry especially, the author does all the marketing—the hard part—in either case. Since the book came out a month ago, half its readers have chosen paperbacks, the other half e-books. So it seems I had the right idea about the need for both formats.

3. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is my only poetry book available in print as well as e-book form. Both I Am the Daughter (1981) and Gifts and Secrets (1999), my mid-life book, which was about my work as a therapist, being a mother, and the beginning of losses—the death of friends and eventually of my parents—were originally published before the digital world existed. But I re-issued them as e-books a few years ago, the rights having reverted, with a few editorial tweaks I'd been longing to make for forty years.

4. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is my "Jewish book" in a way that even the Mendoza Family Saga, my Jewish historical adventure series set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is not. For one thing, fiction, as we fiction writers like to say, is "telling lies." Poetry, at least for me, is always about the truth. "All my stories are true," I say at readings. Some of these poems tell stories about the emigration of my family from Hungary and what we then called the Ukraine to New York and what happened to those who stayed, those left behind, and any who got homesick and went back. Others, the most difficult to write, were my way of working through the divisive effect that political and environmental events from 2019 to the present have had on the world and various entities and institutions, including publishing, the American left, and the community of Jewish friends on whom I've depended all my life. All this and the rise of anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world have made me aware of and willing to declare my identity as a Jewish woman in a way that I never have before, certainly not in my poetry.

5. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle includes grandmother and granddaughter poems that are not about a grandma rocking or hugging the grandchildren or feeding them, cooking, or otherwise confined to the kitchen. While I was looking for places to submit my new poetry, I was horrified that I could find no current poetry by men and little by women portraying grandmothers outside traditional gender-based roles. As these poems attest, my granddaughters and I order in, go out, and talk about stuff that matters.

The Louvre Heist: The Somber Rubbing Shoulders With The Absurd

On October 19^th, the news of the Louvre Heist hit. Eight crown jewels were stolen from the room that,  since 1887, has housed what is left of the French crown jewels.. These jewels are symbols of the French state and the history of the country, described as priceless and irreplaceable. It was, like much of the news these days, upsetting to read about, until some of the details came out and then, it became a story juxtaposing the grave with the absurd.

The first hint of this came in the details of how the heist was committed; the four thieves used a ladder and  escaped on scooters after spending less than eight minutes robbing the Louvre. Let's face it, it looks like a few friends wanting to avoid the holiday rush and deciding to pick up a few gifts by robbing the national museum of France that is, by the way, the most visited museum in the world. The ladders and scooters are hardly the stuff of a carefully planned modern heist one would expect. Add to this the comment by Lynda Albertson, chief of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), an organisation that examines and tracks trends in museum security including theft and vandalism, saying the Louvre’s architecture was not built “to address modern security needs, rigorous conservation controls, or the massive crowds it now attracts.”

The problem with that statement is that there were no crowds at the time and ladders are hardly modern security threats. Yes, the internet was abuzz with questions because seriously,  at a minimum one should protect the world's most famous museums and its priceless and precious works from being accessed by a something as simple as a ladder. 

While about 100 high powered detectives investigated the jewelry robbery, the news focused on this man and the internet initially identified as one of the investigators, "This is, by all accounts, genuinely the detective tasked with cracking the Louvre heist. God I love the French," writer David Patrikarakos said. 

It was only later that it was clarified that this gentleman was not a fabulously dressed detective but, rather, a passerby who was at the right place, at the right time and exuded enough je ne sais quoi to capture the imagination of the world. 

Then, Cosmopolitan put out an article discussing the suspects, replete with photos,"It is so French of them to both be this hot," activist and actor Jameela Jamil said in response to the two mugshots, with someone else commenting: "Why do they look like Calvin Klein models?"

However, the article informed the panting hordes that, "Hot as they may be, however, the Louvre heist mugshot men don't actually have anything to do with the jewel heist – as we've discovered..."

Of course, one can't help but picture Parisians following these guys around Paris and not just for being hot. Ditto for the man initially identified as a detective. 

After the modern heist that didn't use modern tools, a detective who only looks like a detective but is not one and suspects who are just two random hot guys who didn't rob the Louvre, surely we should be done with the hilarious part of this sad story.

Yet, we are not.

Even the high tech security of the Louvre is hilarious. Did someone ask a small child to make up a password?  Apparently so because, "one of the museum’s key passwords was simply “LOUVRE.” To add the absurd onto the ridiculous, the French Culture Minister Rachida Dati decided to respond to this with the understatement of the year by finally admitting, “Security failures did indeed occur.”

There is so little news to chuckle about these days. Most of the news has us diving under the covers of our newly made beds, in hopes of ignoring the world for a few moments. Despite the gravity of the theft, for the first time in a long time I found myself enjoying reading the news to follow the unexpected and hilarious twists and turns. That said, this theft is a grave and serious matter. I will continue to follow the story in hopes that the crown jewels are found intact and returned soon. While not so secretly hoping for a new funny twist, most of all, I'm hoping a mystery writer somewhere is inspired by all this and is making this dapper gentleman  the main character of a brilliant new novel. I would buy that book in a heartbeat. 

And on it goes...

Today, November 9th on APNews:

 "When 15-year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux realized an Associated Press photo of him at the Louvre on the day of the crown jewels heist had drawn millions of views, his first instinct was not to rush online and unmask himself. 

Quite the opposite. A fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot who lives with his parents and grandfather in Rambouillet, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Paris, Pedro decided to play along with the world’s suspense.

Pedro began dressing this way less than a year ago, inspired by 20th-century history and black-and-white images of suited statesmen and fictional detectives. 

“I like to be chic,” he said. “I go to school like this.” 

 He loves Poirot — “very elegant” — and likes the idea that an unusual crime calls for someone who looks unusual. “When something unusual happens, you don’t imagine a normal detective,” he said. “You imagine someone different.”

Well played, Pedro. Well played. 

An Unsolicited Analysis of the Louvre Heist

In the late Sixteenth Century, King Henry IV wanted space at the Louvre to flaunt his sweet art collection. Got it, his builders said, and they added a long second-story hall atop the Petite Galerie wing. In 1661, a fire destroyed that gallery, as some fires do. By then, Louis XIV was in charge. Louis had the hall rebuilt to hype his Sun King persona. The lavish hall, dubbed the Galerie d'Apollon, included a grand balcony overlooking the Seine so that royal-type things could happen out there. It was below this balcony where, on Sunday, October 19^th, 2025, at 0930 local time, four guys parked a basket lift.

Seven minutes later, the guys made off with an estimated €88 million chunk of the French Crown Jewels. It could've been more, but mistakes were made.

THE SET-UP

A few days earlier, a few guys arrived at an equipment rental company north of Paris. Their construction gig required a basket lift, or so they said. Très bien, the rental company said, but this being France, the guys had to come by for training and paperwork. The crew jacked the lift right off the lot.

Only two guys rode up that lift and went inside the Louvre. By all reports, they knew what they were after, and they carried what was required. No guns were spotted throughout the crime. Rifles would've slowed them down, and there wasn't going to be a gunfight.

It bears repeating that this was the Louvre. That Louvre, the one that 8.7 million people visited in 2024, more than any other museum. On October 19^th, the Louvre opened at its standard 09h00. Thousands of people streamed inside. Outside, thousands more gawked and wandered. Cars and tour buses rumbled past. Down on the Seine, cruising bateaux would have phone cameras trained on the palace. Being this famous– this observed– lent the Louvre a sense of untouchability.

Which proved a vulnerability. 

THE BUDGET

The Louvre isn't just the most visited museum on Earth. It's also the world's largest museum. The Denon Wing, which includes the Galerie d'Apollon, runs along the river for over a half-kilometre. In all, the Louvre has hundreds of rooms with thousands of entry points to secure.

And the Louvre was already old when Henry IV sought his art collection flex. Today, repairs and refurbishments are never-ending. The Denon Wing façade, for example. Its slow restoration inured any onlookers to what was definitely not two construction guys rising toward that Galerie d'Apollon balcony.

The Louvre was on notice. Forget 1911's theft of the Mona Lisa. In September 2025 alone, robberies hit the Adrien Dubouche Museum in Limoges and Paris' National History Museum. The thing is, security upgrades aren't simple installations when the palace itself is part of the display. The rooms must be retrofitted, and upgrades can't impede visitor flow or buzzkill the palatial vibe. 

Audits showed that the Louvre's security had fallen behind and estimated the price tag to catch up at €800 million. You know, public audits. The shortfalls extended to operating budgets. The Louvre had trimmed security staff to balance the books. Rightly, those guards raised a stink about fewer staff watching mounting crowds. You know, a public stink.

A museum's risk calculus hinges on the bad guy's reality: Art theft doesn't pay. This kind of job costs seed money. If it comes off, and if the manhunt can be eluded, and if the pieces aren't ruined in the process, no viable market exists for one-of-a-kind paintings or sculptures. The only options are to offload the haul for a pittance--with deep, survival-based reasons to suspect any potential buyers--or ransom back the haul. 

The calculus flaw: The Louvre has more than art on display. 

THE LOOT

If you've been an imperial player nation long enough, you've banked coin on trade and accumulated your share of plunder. You've dug up prehistoric artifacts and developed ceremonial accoutrements. Such is France. Housed in the Galerie d'Apollon are Charlemagne's sword, blinged-out crowns, and some of the world's most famous mega-diamonds.

Now, you can't sell a 56-karat renowned diamond any easier than you could the Venus de Milo. But diamonds can be cut. Gold is quickly melted. The result is fast, untraceable currency.

THE STRATEGY

Sunday morning. Traffic is lighter. The world moves a little slower. Less of a museum crowd to complain, probably less security. The timing's brilliance is its understanding, thirty minutes after opening, where that crowd would be. The Louvre is sprawling. It takes a while to check a bag, to ooh and aah, to decide where to start. At 0930, the crowd is still clustered near the entrance. Security clusters accordingly. 

At 0934, the two guys used a disc cutter to defeat the Galerie window glass. An alarm sounded. Security on duty radioed in about the intrusion. Security retreated, correctly, when the guys flashed power tools. Museum security's priority is crowd safety, and this job started out looking like a terrorist attack. While the Louvre moved into evacuation mode, the guys had a free shot. 

THE MISTAKES

Early accounts of the heist were clouded in shock value. These guys had outdone a movie plot, so they must've been a real-life Ocean's Eleven. Brash opportunists, yes. Brilliant in their boldness, yes. Consummate professionals? Consider what went wrong.

Mistake 1: Thinking narrowly.

The guys weren't looking for large objects, so in the interest of speed, they cut small holes in the display glass, so small that they struggled to reach in and grab their targets. They scraped up Empress Eugénie's crown while wriggling it through the tight opening. The crown, it should be mentioned, contains a reputed 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds.

Again, this was the Louvre and the French Crown Jewels. There wouldn't be just a little heat after this job. You can't just lie low. Every asset the French had or any favor they could call in would be deployed out of national pride. Out of political imperative. In retrospect, big thinking by one lens is myopic by another.

Mistake 2: Taking too long. 

Seven minutes. Three inside the Galerie. In jewel heist terms, this is an eternity's eternity. The guys must've understood they had a longer time window with the Louvre's scale. The guys put those extra minutes to use. 

This failed to account for other moving parts. Security knew exactly where the guys entered. While the guys were cutting display cases, guards outside rallied toward the basket lift.

Mistake 3: Dropping stuff. 

Eugénie's crown hadn't suffered its last indignity. By when the guys rode back down, a situation was already developing on Quai du Louvre. In their haste to clean up and bug out, the crown fell onto the street, bedazzled jewelry and all. It lay damaged and abandoned for hours.

Mistake 4: Failing to torch the basket lift. 

What the hell to do with a stolen basket lift was always going to be troublesome. The guys couldn't hightail out anywhere in that thing. By then, this was the most recognizable truck in France. The solution? The guys poured accelerant on the truck and tried to torch it along with their discarded equipment.

Too late. Security was already engaged. Guards stopped the fire while the guys sped off with the eight pieces they hadn't dropped.

This is 2025. Closed-circuit TV is everywhere. Smartphone clips, traffic cameras. Recreating the approach and escape routes would be simple enough. And there is always trace evidence. French authorities found beaucoup at the scene for their forensics gurus, over 150 samples and even more in physical evidence, headgear, cutting tools, the works.

The French have been canny about how much they knew and how quickly. But they knew a lot quickly, enough to arrest suspects as they tried to flee the country.

THE CRIME OF THE CENTURIES

The stolen jewels haven't been recovered. It's a fair wager that the cutting started quickly. If the French do recover anything, that feels almost accidental at this point, another mistake in a crime born and unraveled from mistakes. 

No matter how this ends, a few things will remain clear. Fortune favors the bold, but history tends to even the score.

Quantum Criminals: Why Steely Dan Is The Most Noir Band Ever

steelydan.com

 A few years ago, I got a phone call from our own Brian Thornton. "Hey, man, I got something up your alley. I just agreed to do two anthologies for Down & Out Books based on Steely Dan, and I had two dropouts. Can you help?"

Could I? We went through the list of available songs, me avoiding the much maligned Everything Must Go. We came up with the standalone single "FM," which wasn't a very good story title. But a line from the chorus, "No Static at All," was. I had Brian his story in about a month. 

One of the anthologies, Die Behind the Wheel, is still available after Down & Out called it a run, mostly used copies and stray bookstore inventory. The other, A Beast Without a Name, which my story appears in, might turn up on Thriftbooks.com. Still, it was an obvious prompt, one I may take up myself if I can find an interested publisher, a couple of name writers, and enough stories based on the title. (Cornelia Read, inbox me. You live in Becker and Fagen's old stomping ground!)

More recently, I listened to Alex Papademas's Quantum Criminals on audio. Papademas, a writer for Pitchfork when it was a plucky independent music site run by a bunch of over-caffienated Millennials just pretentious enough to give me a run for my money writing about music. He once was a self-described Steely Dan hater because that's what that generation did back in the early 2000s. Now?

He played Aja one night and realized he actually loved Steely Dan. More importantly, he loved the characters, who are, to a person, noir as hell. A couple would be right at home in a Charles Bukowski story. And why not? Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were two of the grumpiest men in rock. And unlike the scowling Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame, they never aged into a phase where they poked fun at themselves for taking themselves too seriously. Fagen still gets a bit pompous talking about Dan's music. And yet we still love them and their rogues' gallery of gamblers, ramblers, perverts, and losers. 

Right off the bat, Steely Dan gives us Jack, who beats a man to death for stealing his water, but is saved because "the hangman isn't hanging." He then "loves a little wild but she brings you only sorrow." Then ends up in Vegas fighting the cards in a losing battle. Jack is the ultimate loser.

Then there's the poor guy, probably the generic character Papademas calls "Mr. Steely Dan," whom we meet on every album. On Can't Buy a Thrill, Mr. Dan is trapped in an affair with a married woman. He wants to walk away, but as "Dirty Work" tells us, he'll come running "like a thousand times before."

And then there's "Felonious," the "Midnight Cruiser," an obvious reference to Thelonius Monk and his wrongful arrest on heroin charges. Monk, a jazz musician Becker, Fagen, and longtime guitarist Denny Diaz admired, was notoriously surly, known for putting the famously hard-nosed Miles Davis in his place, and, as Papademas describes him, plays the piano like a weapon.

Mr.Steely Dan is the most common and morally ambiguous character in Steely Dan's catalog, showing up on every album -- a nostalgic time traveler with questionable racial views ("I would love to tour the Southland in a traveling minstrel show."), as the last man on Earth reading old newspapers and looking for survivors on an old ham radio, and a hedonistic LA denizen trying to have a drug-fueled threesome. He's even a failure-to-launch novelist on Steely Dan's return album Two Against Nature in "What a Shame About Me."

But there are others. There's Dr. Wu, either a drug dealer or a lover's other boyfriend whom the unknown narrator befriends. Depending on interpretation of "Doctor Wu," the Katy who lied is either a double-dealing woman (from a catalog full of double dealing lovers from "Rose Darling" to "Gaslighting Abby") or drugs. Yes, the Dan had issues "chasing the dragon," even explicitly stated in "Time Out of Mind."

There's Mr. LaPage, content to show "movies" in his den and likely would be in the Epstein Files today. There is "Deacon Blues," the doomed jazz musician prowling the suburbs for married lovers and drinking way too much. That's a James M. Cain novel in the making.

Then we have the real-life acid chef Owsley Stanley in "Kid Charlemagne." The line "Yes, there's gas in the car" is a cultural touchstone. But Stanley is not the only real-life character in Steely Dan's music.

Fagen himself is part of two autobiographical songs: "Rikki, Don't Lose My Number" and "My Old School," both referencing incidents at Becker and Fagen's alma mater, Bard College in Annandale, New York.  The former references a faculty wife named Rikki whom Fagen had grown close to. Papademas is cagey about how close, but he does relate how she went through a dark phase. The song is about how Fagen hoped she'd reach out before it was too late. The latter song involves a raid by that great moral crusader G. Gordon Liddy, then a prosecutor running for college. Liddy, seeking headlines, raided Bard College. Fagen and Becker got caught in the sweep, along with a female friend in for the weekend. Being students, the college got them released. There friend? Ended up "with the working girls in the county jail."

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen either lived enough noir (other than time travel and nuclear war) or knew enough of these characters to fill a dozen more albums had Becker lived long enough. Being perfectionists, they only did nine albums. That's enough darkness for anyone. And, like the great noir writers of old, they left us wanting more.

 

Critias: Leader of the Thirty Athenian Tyrants– Putting the Terror into Tyranny (436–403 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week: Critias the Athenian tyrant!

*    *    *

Let it not be in the power of Critias to strike off either me, or any one of you whom he will. But in my case, in what may be your case, if we are tried, let our trial be in accordance with the law they have made concerning those on the list… [Y]ou must see that the name of every one of you is as easily erased as mine.

 —Athenian politician Theramenes, quoted in Xenophon’s Hellenica 

Playwright, poet, scholar, great-uncle of the famous Athenian philosopher Plato (and contemporary of Plato’s even more famous teacher Socrates), Critias was renowned for much of his life as a writer whose work was in demand. He was even featured as the titular character in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Critias. 

Too bad he ended his life as a blood-soaked traitor to everything his city had once stood for, a classic example of conservative overreaction resulting in the loss of much life and property. 

By 404 B.C., Athens had lost its decades-long war with Sparta. As a result of the humiliating peace treaty, the Athenian city walls were leveled, its navy dismantled, and a collection of thirty oligarchs who favored Sparta were placed in charge of the government. Critias, a follower of fellow Athenian bastard Alcibiades during the war, was named one of these oligarchs (known afterward as “The Thirty Tyrants”). 

Critias, a strong personality with lots of scores to settle and bitterness eating away at his very soul, soon embarked on a vendetta against anyone who had ever wronged him. What followed was a bloodbath, one of the first recorded political purges in history.  

“Day after day,” writes Xenophon, “the list of persons put to death for no just reason grew longer.” For every person he denounced and had put to death, Critias received his confiscated property as a reward. When the Athenian statesman Theramenes protested that The Thirty ought to be careful about killing people so indiscriminately, noting that today’s butcher is tomorrow’s butchered, Critias famously responded with a statement that would be echoed for years afterward by politicians conducting similar purges: “If any member of this council, here seated, imagines that an undue amount of blood has been shed, let me remind him that with changes of constitution such things cannot be avoided.” One of the first times a politician used some variation of the notion, “You can’t make any omelet without breaking a few eggs!” 

Critias went on to denounce his former friend Theramenes, calling him a traitor and enemy of both The Thirty and the Spartan troops who had placed them in power. After heated debate, Theramenes was dragged from the meeting and executed on the spot. 

Emboldened by this silencing of their most vocal critic, The Thirty went on to denounce and execute thousands of Athenian citizens, seizing their property as they went. Within a year, the oligarchs had become such an object of fear and hatred that the people rose against them. Critias was killed in the fighting that followed, and his memory was justly damned in the minds of his countrymen for decades afterwards.

See you in two weeks!

Another Friday Afternoon

Today was beautiful so I went for a bike ride (to be honest I do that every day unless it is seriously nasty).  I was in one of my city's oldest neighborhoods, with most of the houses built a century ago.

I saw two people walking toward me in the middle of the street.  This wasn't a dangerous place to do that; it was a quiet residential area.  

It was a man and a woman, both in their thirties, approximately the same in height and weight. The man had a small dog on a leash.

The woman was screaming -- no, shrieking -- at the top of her lungs.

"Get in the freaking car!  I'm not kidding! Get in the freaking car!"

Except she didn't say freaking, of course.

The man said "I'm not going anywhere with you!"

This discussion continued as a I rode past. I stopped a block away and tried to decide whether this merited a 9-1-1 call. I hadn't seen any physical contact, or heard any true threats.

While I considered an auto drove past me and I realized it was the couple in question.  The man had entered the freaking car.  I knew it was them because the woman was still shrieking, although I couldn't hear what she was saying.

Okay, the man had made his decision.  I rode on. 

A block later I had another thought: What if the genders had been reversed?

People of similar  age, height, and weight, but it was a man demanding that a woman get into a car.  What would I have done then?

I had no doubt: I would have called 9-1-1 and then gone over and asked the woman if she was okay.

Why in that order? Because I haven't been in a fist fight in sixty years, and I lost the last one.  Police backup would have been very useful.

Would I really have done that?  I think so but it is very easy to be brave when the threat is gone.

Will this find its way into my fiction someday?  Probably.

Anyway, that was my afternoon.  How was yours? 

Oh, and you might want to watch this video.  What they show is real, and it has worked.   

 

Use of Memory in Fiction

Last June, USA Today and Amazon best-selling and multi-award-nominated author Connie Berry shared the following essay with her newsletter readers. I immediately wanted to share her thoughts about using memory in a mystery’s plot. (I waited until now because, as you’ll see, Connie talks about June being a nostalgic month, but I find the holiday season to be nostalgic too, with friends and family coming together, remembering times gone by. So as we approach the holiday season, it seems the perfect time to share Connie’s thoughts about memory.) Thank you, Connie, for graciously allowing me to reprint this essay. 

--Barb Goffman 

 

Use of Memory in Fiction

by Connie Berry 

June is a nostalgic month for most people, bringing memories of family gatherings and vacations, high school and college reunions, weddings and anniversaries, and holidays like Fathers’ Day, Flag Day, and Juneteenth.

Last week I had a long phone conversation with my best friend from college. Patty and I haven’t seen each other in more than twenty years—and then only briefly—but she and I were very close during those formative years between 18 and 21.

We knew each other’s high school crushes, and we made up code words no one else understood. We laughed at the same silly jokes, and we pondered some of life’s most important questions.

Once, she stayed up all night with me, typing while I frantically wrote the English paper I had learned about the day before it was due (I'd cut a lot of classes).

We spent almost a year in Europe together, attending classes in Germany and England and driving all over Europe between terms in her little baby blue Karmann Ghia. She taught me to drive a stick shift, and I introduced her to my relatives in Norway.

Long before there was such a thing as the internet, smartphones, or streaming music, we bought a small record player and several albums. We wore those albums out--literally.

It’s fun looking back. It’s also interesting because, as we were sharing our memories (many decades later), we realized that the things we recollected weren’t always the same.

For example, she reminded me of driving in the hills above Monaco. A crazy driver overtook us on a blind curve. If a car had been coming from the opposite direction, we all would have been killed. My response (as she remembered it) was to say, “I refuse to die in Monaco!” I don’t remember that at all.

Then I reminded her that we met an elderly woman in our Monte Carlo pensione who claimed to be of Russian nobility. We thought she was making it up until she escorted us into the inner, private rooms at the famous casino. The attendants bowed to her, and she pointed out other Russian ex-pats— “That’s Count So-and-So.” My friend has no memory of that elderly woman.

Time flies, and memories differ. Writers can use that fact to create complexity and obscure clues in a murder investigation. Police will tell you that eyewitness accounts of a crime differ, even immediately after an event. After years have passed, people may have completely different accounts of something they both witnessed.

Is one of them lying, or is it simply a matter of human psychology? What is it that cements a memory in one person’s mind but not another’s?

Right now, I’m playing with this concept in my WIP. Human brains don’t retain perfect recordings. Instead, they selectively encode information based on individual factors such as emotions, interests, past experiences, and biases.

So how does someone seeking the truth sort through these differences? My protagonist is trying to figure that out. So am I.

Do you have a memory that no one else shares—even those present at the time? I’d love to hear about it!

 ----- 

Connie Berry, unashamed Anglophile and self-confessed history nerd, is the author of the USA Today and Amazon best-selling and multi-award-nominated Kate Hamilton Mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. Connie is a member of the Crime Writers Association (UK), the Authors’ Guild, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Buckeye Crime Writers, Grand Canyon Writers, and Guppies, of which she is the immediate past president. Her fourth book, The Shadow of Memory, was nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award, and her fifth, A Collection of Lies, was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel. Her latest novel, A Grave Deception, will be released in early December 2025. Connie lives in Ohio and northern Wisconsin with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Emmie. You can sign up for her very entertaining monthly newsletter at www.connieberry.com.

You can’t get there from here.

“Ambiguous” is another way of saying, just not sure. After puzzle solving, it’s the most abiding element of crime writing. Our protagonists spend about three quarters of the book or short story feeling very unsure. This isn’t only because the author herself is usually caught between the multiple poles of her story, and is undecided about how it should all turn out. It’s also, more importantly, in the nature of any pursuit of the truth, because truth itself is a very slippery thing.

Most assume there is only one truth, and I’m partial to that idea myself. But people tend to disagree about what constitutes That One Truth, and since there is no objective arbiter to pick among the favorites, the question gets hurled into philosophical tracts, legal briefs, rabbinical debates and mystery stories.

It appears there is an inverse correlation between a person’s general awareness of the world and confidence in their beliefs. That is, the more you know, the less sure you are. And vice versa. When you dive into any subject, you soon learn it’s filled with subtlety, nuance and conflicting conclusions. And ambiguity. It’s a lot easier not to bother with all that stuff, make up your mind and stick with it no matter what. But I think the opposite approach is worth the effort.

According to Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox, reaching any destination is impossible if with every step you halve the distance. Numbers being what they are, the halves are infinite, and thus your goal unreachable. Mathematicians over the years have found ways to disprove Zeno's Paradox, but they shouldn't have bothered. Few were aware of how things work at the quantum level. When your halves start to interact with subatomic particles, they can end up being in a couple places at the same time, which Werner Heisenberg instructed means their location is ambiguous. Nothing in your common experience can fix this, nor can a clever mathematician, not even Albert Einstein. So if you follow Zeno’s methodology, he essentially had it right.

Heisenberg

The upshot is that at the most basic levels of reality, nature’s governing property is uncertainty. So why should a murder mystery be any different?

I spent a lot of my career working in and around public relations. As with most vilified professions, most of what PR people do is pretty mundane and entirely benign. They spend much of their day examining how a person or institution is being described in the media, and where possible, correct misrepresentations. Most people in the press like this, since they are tasked with delivering information to the public that is as close to the truth as they can manage. Assuming the PR person is able to prove their corrections, responsible journalists will be sure to get it right the next time, and will reward reliable sources with greater access and goodwill.

There’s plenty of room for abuse on both sides of this interaction, of course, but overall it works pretty well. Though one thing it taught me is that anything you learn from the media, no matter how honest and sincere everyone’s trying to be, is at best an approximation of the truth.

This frame of mind can engender a fair amount of cynicism, which is likely why hardened journalists, PR flacks and homicide detectives are often portrayed as a pretty jaded bunch. But more often, in my experience, they develop a healthy skepticism about nearly everything. Which I do think is healthy, since there is nothing more suspicious than assertions of absolute truth. Without skepticism, no crimes would be solved, no mysteries ever written.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Close enough for jazz.” It’s a tired old saw that suggests imprecise tuning is okay if your goal is to perform a lot of improvisation. It’s a bit of a slander, since every self-respecting jazz musician cares deeply about their intonation. I think it works better as a broader lesson for truth seekers. Knowing that you’ll never get all the way there doesn’t mean you don’t try. But once you’ve exhausted yourself and every possibility, and arrived at some working hypothesis, it’s okay to say close enough.