Origins of a Character

Way back in the olden days when I came up with the character of Milt Kovak, then deputy sheriff of Prophesy County, Oklahoma, I imbued him with the best features of every man in my life: husband, father, brothers, and even a little bit of my father-in-law. And, yes, there was some of me in there, too. They say we all have a feminine side and a masculine side. My masculine side went wholeheartedly into Milt.

Later came E.J. Pugh and her family, which were basically loosely patterned after my own nuclear family of husband, daughter and myself. So much so that, in the first book, when my husband read it, he asked (he said commanded, I said begged) me to let E.J.'s husband Willis save her at least once, instead of E.J. saving him four times. I reluctantly agreed.

My short-lived Kimmey Kruse series came from watching too much Comedy Central on cable, and the fact that a good friend of mine had moved to California and become a stand-up comic. Kimmey wasn't really based on her, but rather inspired. And, of course, my friend gave me all sorts of inside scoop on the biz.

But have you ever just met someone you'd love to turn into a character? Well, I met that someone last week. I'd known her since I was nineteen years old – we won't say how long ago that was – but only as my best friend's cousin. That older cousin who told her what to do and when to do it and took all the fun away from what we'd been about to get into. We'll call my best friend Kathy, mainly because that's her name. Her cousin, we'll call her Jon, again because that was her name, I'd only known as that mean one who was always making Kathy sad, mad, and very occasionally glad.

Then last week I drove to Houston for Jon's funeral. She'd been fighting cancer valiantly for the last two and a half years, but lost that battle last week. Theirs is a big family and well represented, as was every place Jon had ever worked in a long and varied career of helping people – mostly kids and the elderly.

And then something wonderful happened. Jon's granddaughter, now the mother of two small children, took the podium and began to speak. Her sister came up with her and held her hand as she gave the eulogy. She talked about how many things her grandmother had taught her, how her grandmother and stood by her in thick and thin, and then she asked for a show of hands of the people in the room that Jon had pissed off on a regular basis. Almost every hand was raised. Then she asked for a show of hands of those people who loved her anyway. Again, almost every hand was raised. And I began to discover, listening to her granddaughter and later hearing her friends and other family members speak, that this was a woman who did not suffer fools gladly. She said what she thought and to hell with those who didn't want to hear it. She fought unconditionally for those she loved and those who had no one else to fight for them. And it occurred to me, sitting in that over-crowded chapel, that I could only hope to have a quarter of the amount of people at my funeral, hoping that a lot of daughter's friends would show up. But Kathy and I agreed, on the drive back to her house, that we'd come to each other's funeral. It might be hard to achieve this goal, but we're going to try.

Since then I've been thinking about Jon and the kind of person she was and what a profoundly challenging and awe-inspiring character she would make – if, God willing, I have the talent to do her justice. She laughed loud, fought hard, and loved unconditionally. It's going to be a privilege to attempt to do her justice.

Pricing Your Book

by Leigh Lundin

Shareware and Bookware

You’ve heard or tried or even purchased shareware, programs that independent or amateur developers offer to try before you buy. Prices vary wildly, from a dollar or two on up, sometimes way up. An acquaintance who wrote an application complained he wasn’t making money from his shareware program. Setting aside that no one gets rich writing shareware, he was asked why he charged $45.

“Because it’s worth it,” he said. “I deserve to get $45. If I charge less, it will take longer to make money. Besides, Macrosoft Blotto costs $49 and I undercut them.”

Face Palm

For the hundredth time, I lamented that we aren’t educated in economics. To be sure, it’s not an exciting subject, but it’s essential to living in a modern age. Just as judges should have law degrees, politicians should be required to pass an economics exam. Without an understanding of economics, their decisions about budgets and taxes, fiscal and monetary policy are nothing but guesswork.

Unlike some of our shareware friends, merchants in the Apple and Android stores price much more sensibly, usually charging no more than a dollar or two. Why is charging $1 better than charging $45?

Because the guy with a $1 program is likely to sell thousands, perhaps tens of thousands or more, while the fellow with a $40 application will sell only a few. The lower the price, the more an item will sell.

$9

1

$09

$8

2

$16

$7

4

$28

$6

6

$36

$5

10

$50

$4

15

$60

$3

21

$63

$2

32

$64

$1

72

$72

Making Book

Let’s turn our attention to publishing, particularly ebooks since we won’t have to factor in printing costs. You write a brilliant 200 000 word opus, Gone with the Wind in the Willows. Sadly, traditional publishers, those dastardly gatekeepers, don’t appreciate your Cinderella superheroine and the Trotskyite plot in an 1880s Wild West space setting.

Curse those professionals! What can you do? You publish electronically. And because it’s that good, you price it at $9. Your dismayed financial advisor asks how you arrived at that price. Obviously yours has many pages and $9 seems a lot less than $10, which all the really, really good books cost.

So you go to market and sell… exactly one.

After thanking mom, you wonder what went wrong? Disgusted, you slash a dollar off the price now set at $8. You check back the next month in case one or two sold. And… two it is. You thank your sisters and price the damn thing at $5.

That month, you sell ten for a total of $50. Not great, but better than previous months. Still, you made more money selling those velvet Star Wars paintings at roadside rest stops.

units sold as a function of price

Reality Bites

Realization dawns that a Lamborghini will remain out of reach a while longer. Obviously your financial advisor was right about overpricing, but maybe you can still make a little beer money, the cheap stuff, nothing imported.

In disgust, you price your novel at $1. Looking at the numbers sold in previous months, you should sell a lot if you slash the price to just one American greenback, one Canadian loonie, one New Zealand kiwi, one aussie, one euro, one quid… You don’t care anymore. At a dollar a copy, you won’t see a profit until next Tisha B’Av.^†

Weeks later, you glumly look into the ebook site and a funny thing has happened. Your sales report says your book sold 72 copies. Wow, that’s great. You’ll never grow rich, but you’re excelling and you just finished your second book, Salomé versus Godzilla. If you can get a hundred novels on-line, you might be able to retire from the garden gnome insurance industry you’ve been slaving in.

You become curious about pricing models and wonder what sales might be at different price points. In the following months, you methodically adjust the price and graph the results. You discover that the lower the price, the more money you make.

You’re no John Floyd, but you write hundreds of stories, giving you an opportunity to test market price sensitivity. You carefully map price versus sales of your latest works. In the process, you learn a few surprises. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred and one, the lower the price, the more you make. Except…

$9

1

$09

$8

2

$16

$7

4

$28

$6

6

$36

$5

10

$50

$4

15

$60

$3

21

$63

$2

32

$64

$1

60

$60

Thrown Curve

For the initial eight months of Conan the Badass, sales figures match those of the first. Although projections suggest month nine should return sales of $70-75, that doesn’t happen although the graph still looks positive. For month nine, sales nearly doubled, but you made only $60. What happened?

You need a different graph, one that reflects not just sales, but revenue, the total dollar amount taken in each month.

You’ve learned lowering the price increased demand, increased it so much that customers started buying. To recap, in your first month, you sold one copy at $9 for a total of $9. The second month, you sold 2 at $8 each and made $16. When you lowered the price to $5, you made $50.

But your fickle customers didn’t meet expectations when prices hit the $1 mark. Although consumers bought fewer copies at $2, you made more money. Most interesting, you’ve discovered this without doing any math. Sure, a market professional could derive a y-intercept equation, but you don’t need it. All you require are revenue numbers and a sheet of graph paper.

lowering price increases sales, but…

Sweet Spots

Economics textbooks usually graph in nice, straight lines, but occasionally consumers behave in less predictable ways. This can happen with fads and booms, anti-cyclical products, and a concept called inelasticity.

Coffee tends to be inelastic… consumers will pay almost any price. A parent with a baby must buy milk and diapers; they have no choice. Once identified, patterns can be mathematically followed and foreseen.

Occasionally luxury goods prove inelastic. Packard was a premier motorcar favored by the very rich and desired by ordinary hoi polloi. When Packard priced an automobile like a Chevrolet, sales collapsed. The company had inadvertently devalued their brand. Once anyone could own one, nobody wanted one.

Your model might turn out to be a flat line or inelastic. That can happen in two ways. The bad way is that not even your mom buys your brilliant biography, the one titled Karl, the Sixth Marx Brother. The good way is that your Harry Potter and the 50 Shades of Godawful Grey flies off the shelf no matter how much you charge. One can always hope.

Soft Spots

Contrarily, the volatile nature of fads makes trends difficult to anticipate. In the latter 1990s, Ty Warner’s Beanie Babies mania became an incredible craze, retailing in limited editions for $5 and reselling as much as $5000 on-line with a few going for six figures. At one time Beanie Babies comprised 10% of eBay sales. Like other fads, the bubble burst. Ty Inc. no longer lists Beanie Babies among their toys. Most Beanie collections now sell in bulk for 50¢ apiece.

Some products can be labeled anti-cyclical. The Great Depression brought about textbook examples of movie attendance, ice cream, and women’s hosiery. Grand movie palaces were built and, for the price of a nickel, gave people sanctuary for a few hours and a chance to forget their troubles. A three-penny sundae might be the highlight of a dreadful day standing in unemployment lines. At a time when many things were going wrong, silk hose could make a woman feel more positive about herself. In a down market, sales of these products rose.

revenue as a function of price…
sometimes things go wrong

Meanwhile…

In setting your price point, plotting units sold (books in our case) versus price tells only part of the story. The real key is plotting revenue (price x units) against price. Consider the graph above and then this one.

According to the trend line, the book should have sold 70 or 75 copies, but thanks to quirks of buyers or a softening of the market, the audience didn’t behave as expected.

If you meticulously plotted your sales revenue on a graph, you see the ideal price point isn’t $1, but $2. This isn’t typical, but public tastes and trends can develop quirks. A popular author might publish novels in her mainstream series at $2 a copy and her lesser offshoots and novellas at $1 each. In this case, pricing aids in ‘product differentiation’, helping the customer distinguish merchandise.

The Bottom Line

Your mileage may vary. Generally, the lower the price, the more books you will sell and the more money you will likely make. Graphs help explain what happens behind the scenes. E-publishing provides a huge advantage in that your manufacturing costs are practically nil. If you’re going to take your novel to market, seize that advantage and give your book its best possible chance.

What is your experience?

---

^† “Until next Tisha B’Av” (pronounced “tish-above”) is an expression meaning an indefinite time, like saying “second Tuesday of next week” or the “twelfth of Never”.

Happy Birthday, Hitch!

On August 13, 1899, Alfred Hitchcock was born in London. True, 117 is not generally regarded as a milestone birthday, but if I wait around until one of Hitchcock's true milestone birthdays falls on a date when I'm slated to write a SleuthSayers post--well, I'm not clever enough to figure out when that might happen, but I'm pretty sure I won't still be around when it does. So I'd better celebrate his 117th. I welcome any chance to celebrate Alfred Hitchcock. I admire his movies, I have fond memories of his television programs, and I'm a loyal, grateful Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine author. When the topic for this post first occurred to me, I checked on how many of my stories have made it into the magazine. Thirty-nine. Thirty-nine steps, thirty-nine stories--it felt like a sign. I had to write a post about Hitch.

But although I'm a Hitchcock fan, I'm by no means a Hitchcock expert. I don't have any insights weighty enough to develop into a unified post. So I dipped into a couple of books, looking for any thoughts or scraps of information that might be of interest. I re-watched several favorite Hitchcock movies, watched a few of the less famous ones for the first time. And I got a little help from my friends.

Alfred and Edgar

(or, why short story writers love movies) 

In a 1950 interview for the New York Times Magazine, Hitchcock explains why he sees "the chase" (which he defines broadly) as "the final expression of the motion picture medium." For one thing, as a visual medium, film is ideally suited for showing cars "careening around corners after each other." Perhaps even more important, "the basic film shape is continuous." "Once a movie starts," Hitchcock says, "it goes right on. You don't stop it for scene changes, or to go out and have a cigarette."

That reminded me of a comment Edgar Allan Poe makes in an 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, when he argues that works short enough to be read in one sitting can have a more unified, more powerful effect than longer works. A poem short enough to be read in one hour, or a prose tale short enough to be read in no more than two, can have an "unblemished, because undisturbed" impact: "The soul of the reader is at the writer's control.  There are no external or extrinsic influences resulting from weariness or interruption." If a work is so long that the reader has to put it down before finishing it, though, "worldly interests" intervene to "modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book." Maybe that's one reason that short story writers (or at least the ones who hang around this blog) seem to have such an affinity for movies: The movies we watch, like the stories we write, can be enjoyed without interruption and therefore, if Hitchcock and Poe are right, with an undiminished impact.

Some of Hitchcock's most memorable movies--Rear Window, The Birds--are based on short stories, and I think they do benefit from the sort of concentrated focus Poe describes. But I wouldn't want to argue that Hitchcock movies based on plays or novels are less focused, not if writers and director have done a good job of adapting them to their new medium.

Just the other night, I re-watched one of my all-time favorite Hitchcock movies, 1954's Dial M for Murder, and enjoyed it just as much as I always have. With these thoughts in mind, though, I noticed that Dial M for Murder has an intermission (perhaps partly because it's based on a play, and plays traditionally have intermissions). Lots of movies used to have intermissions, too, but I can't remember the last time I went to a new movie that does. I doubt that's because movies have gotten shorter--plenty still last two hours or more--or because theaters are now less eager to have a second chance to sell popcorn and soft drinks. Maybe it's because movie makers have become more and more convinced that, as Hitchcock puts it, "the basic film shape is continuous." Maybe they've decided an intermission breaks the mood, interrupts the suspense, and dilutes the movie's effect. But I'm just guessing. If anyone has inside information about why movie intermissions are less popular than they used to be, I'd be glad to hear it. (I should mention a relevant SleuthSayers post here, Leigh Lundin's 2015 "Long Shots," which looks at Hitchcock's use of the continuous tracking shot in Rope.)

Columbo's Uncle? 

Speaking of Dial M for Murder, when my husband and I were watching the final scenes, he commented that Chief Inspector Hubbard reminded him of Columbo--the determined police detective who gets a strong hunch about who the murderer is and won't give up until he confirms it. Like Columbo, Hubbard pretends to be sympathetic and self-effacing while setting up a clever trap to catch an arrogant, socially superior villain. And he wears a raincoat (which makes more sense in London than it does in Los Angeles). The thing that really caught my husband's attention, though, was that at one point Hubbard says, "Just one other thing" as he questions the person he rightly suspects to be guilty. That made the similarities too striking to ignore. True, Hubbard is more elegant and fastidious than Columbo. It's hard to imagine Columbo whipping out a tiny comb to smooth his mustache. (For that matter, it's hard to imagine Columbo with a mustache.) But did this supporting character from a 1954 Hitchcock movie inspire one of America's most beloved television detectives?

I have no idea. I wasted a couple of delightful hours Googling about and found many intriguing hints but no definite link (an inside joke for Columbo fans). The information I did find wasn't completely consistent--one site says one thing, another says something slightly different--but apparently the Columbo character first showed up in a 1960 short story written by Richard Levinson and William Link and published in--where else?--Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. The character next appeared on the television program Chevy Mystery Show, in a 1960 episode called "Enough Rope." Levinson and Link later reworked that into a stage play called Prescription: Murder, which eventually became the pilot for the Columbo series. The titles recall Hitchcock titles, and the plot and form of Prescription: Murder bear significant similarities to the plot and form of Dial M for Murder. A suave, nearly emotionless husband schemes to get rid of his wife and get his hands on her money; he underestimates the police detective assigned to the case; the audience knows from the outset that the husband is guilty. Maybe all that is coincidence. Or maybe not. Here's something that's almost certainly coincidence, but I find it charming: John Williams, who played Chief Inspector Hubbard both on stage and in the Hitchcock movie, is featured in the 1972 Columbo episode "Dagger of the Mind," playing murder victim Sir Roger Haversham.

Alfred and Edgar, Part 2

(or, not taking suspense too seriously)

In a 1960 article called "Why I Am Afraid of the Dark," Hitchcock comments on ways in which he and Poe are similar, and also on ways in which they're different. Hitchcock was sixteen, he says, when he read a biography of Poe "at random" and was moved by the sadness of his life: "I felt an immense pity for him because, in spite of his talent, he had always been unhappy." Later, when Hitchcock was working in an office, he'd hurry back to his room to read a cheap edition of Poe's stories. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" got him thoroughly scared, he says, and he thoroughly enjoyed it.

The experience led him to an important discovery: "Fear, you see, is a feeling that people like to feel when they are certain of being in safety." A "gruesome story" can be terrifying, but "as one finds oneself in a familiar surrounding, and when one realizes that it's only imagination which is responsible for the fear, one is invaded by an extraordinary happiness." Hitchcock compares the sensation to the relief we feel when we're very thirsty and then take a drink. It's an interesting idea. When we scream through the shower scene in Psycho, is it the fear itself we enjoy? Or do we enjoy the relief we feel when we stop screaming, look around, and realize we're still in a dark but safe theater (or, these days, when we realize we're still in our well-lit family rooms, with our cats dozing in our laps)?

Hitchcock acknowledges a kinship with Poe. "We are both," he says, "prisoners of a genre: suspense." Further, "I can't help but compare what I try to put in my films with what Poe puts in his stories: a perfectly unbelievable story recounted to readers with such a hallucinatory logic that one has the impression that this same story can happen to you tomorrow." Even so, he says, 

I don't think that there exists a real resemblance between Edgar Allan Poe and myself. Poe is a poete maudit and I am a commercial filmmaker. He liked to make people shiver. Me too. But he didn't really have a sense of humor. And for me, "suspense" doesn't have any value if it's not balanced by humor.

You probably already know what poete maudit means. Despite five years of high-school and college French, I had to look it up. According to the Merriam Webster website, a poete maudit is an "accursed poet," a "writer dogged by misfortune and lack of recognition."

I find these comments fascinating. I don't know enough about either Hitchcock or Poe to speak with any authority--I don't know how honest Hitchcock is being, or how accurate his views of Poe may be--but he seems to present himself as a happy, successful artist who has won the sort of recognition that eluded Poe. He creates terrifying movies but stands at a distance from them, well balanced enough to realize the stories he tells are "perfectly unbelievable." Does Hitchcock imply that Poe lacked such balance, that the nightmares he created reflect his own experience of life? Perhaps. At any rate, Hitchcock presents himself as someone who makes scary movies because he enjoys making people "shiver," not because he shares the sorts of torments he depicts. So no matter how horrifying the visions on the screen become, he can see the humor in the situation.

Many would challenge the idea that Hitchcock was happy and well balanced. His sense of humor seems hard to deny. In a 1963 Redbook interview, Hitchcock comments, "In producing the movies that I do, I find it would be impossible without a sense of humor." And in the New York Times Magazine interview mentioned earlier, he says comic relief can be effective even during a chase, as long as the humor isn't too broad and doesn't make the hero look foolish. We probably all have favorite examples of comic relief in Hitchcock movies, of moments when we laugh out loud even while cringing in fear. For example, there's the climax of Strangers on a Train. (If you haven't seen the movie, please skip the rest of this paragraph, and the next paragraph, too. Then please go see the movie.) Hitchcock cuts from one frightening image to another as hero and villain grapple, as people on the carousel scream, as an old man crawls slowly toward the off switch, in danger of being crushed at any moment. It's terrifying.

But it's funny, too. The old man looks like a comic figure, not a tragic one--he's chewing on something as he inches forward, and at one point he pauses to wipe his nose. And amid all the screaming, scrambling people on the carousel, one little boy sits up straight on his horse, smiling broadly, clearly having the time of his life. Maybe he's unaware of the danger. Or maybe he's enjoying it.

That brings us to "The Enjoyment of Fear," an article Hitchcock published in Good Housekeeping in 1949. (Remember when women's magazines used to include some articles with real substance?) It echoes some ideas I've already mentioned, but I can't resist the temptation to quote a passage that, I think, gives us an additional insight into Hitchcock's technique, and into the nature of literary suspense. He says again that viewers can enjoy the fear of watching a frightening movie because they know they're safe--they're not on that madly careening carousel in Strangers on a Train. Then he takes things one step further:

But the audience must also be aware that the characters in the picture, with whom they strongly identify themselves, are not to pay the price of fear. This awareness must be entirely subconscious; the spectator must know the spy ring will never succeed in pitching Madeleine Carroll off London Bridge, and the spectator must be induced to forget what he knows. If he didn't know, he would be genuinely worried; if he didn't forget, he would be bored.

Over the years, I've gotten addicted to several television dramas that kill off secondary characters at a sometimes alarming rate. Whatever dangers they may face, we know Tony Soprano, Jack Bauer, and Carrie Mathison will survive more or less intact, at least until they reach the final show of the final season. Even then, if there's any chance of a follow-up movie or a reunion show, we know the protagonist is safe. But we also know their friends, co-workers, and lovers are fair game at any moment. That's one way to keep the audience in suspense. Hitchcock describes a more delicate approach: Deep down, we know the protagonist is safe, but the suspense reaches such a height that we forget. That sounds almost impossible, but I think it happens. Think of a moment when a Hitchcock protagonist seems to be in mortal danger. Don't we forget, just for a moment, that Hitchcock wouldn't really kill Jimmy Stewart?

And then, of course, there's the shower scene in Psycho. (If you haven't seen Psycho--but everybody's seen Psycho.) Doesn't that violate the trust between director and audience, the trust that allows us to enjoy being scared? Maybe--maybe that's why many would say Psycho crosses the line between suspense and horror. But I think Hitchcock tries to make sure we don't "strongly identify" with Janet Leigh's character. After all, she's a thief. And the first time we see her, she's in bed with a lover--that might not alienate many viewers today, but I bet it alienated plenty in 1960. Also, before we have time to get deeply attached to her, she's gone. Her violent death shocks us, but I'm not sure it saddens us all that much. If Cary Grant plummeted to the base of Mount Rushmore, I think we'd be more upset.

Last Thoughts

As I said, when I started work on this post, I decided to get a little help from my friends. A birthday tribute should include some sort of biographical perspective, but I didn't feel up to doing the necessary research myself. So I turned to a promising young scholar, Shlomo Mordechai Gershone (a.k.a. my ten-year-old grandson, Moty). He contributed these insights:

I read Who Was Alfred Hitchcock? and learned a lot. Alfred Hitchcock was a very interesting person. He was big, loud, and funny, but also wrote things that were full of suspense and mystery. He told stories about being locked in a jail cell at the age of five. He would say that five minutes felt like five years to the young Hitch. That suspense was expressed in his movies, his television shows, and the stories in his magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. (Where have I heard that before?) He spent his whole life talking and writing about mystery, but passed away peacefully in his sleep. (Anticlimax)

An ability to say a great deal in a short space, a sense of humor, a critical perspective--maybe I'm slightly biased, but I think this young man has a future as a writer.

Also, I thought it would be fun to do a quick survey of my Facebook friends (mostly mystery readers and writers), asking them to name their favorite Hitchcock movies. Obviously, there's nothing scientific about this survey, but perhaps it points to at least some of the Hitchcock movies that are standing the test of time.

Rear Window topped the survey with nine votes. Shawn Reilly Simmons saw it when she was quite young and still remembers "jumping out of my seat at the suspense." (Many other people put Rear Window second or third on their lists, but I decided to count only the first movie each person mentioned.) Vertigo came in second with five votes. Art Taylor admires it for many reasons, "but really what may fascinate me most is the fact that so much of it is told purely through images." Rob Lopresti is also enthusiastic, saying the movie has a "ridiculous plot that I believe completely when I am watching." (That reminded me of Hitchcock's statement that he tells "perfectly unbelievable" stories with such strong "hallucinatory logic" that viewers think "this same story can happen to [them] tomorrow." I think Hitch would love Rob's comment.) Three movies tied for third place, with four votes each--Rebecca, North by Northwest, The Birds. (Diane Vallere, the next president of Sisters in Crime, made Rear Window her top choice but loves The Birds so much she once created a Halloween costume inspired by it.) Several other movies scored one or two votes--Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, The Trouble with Harry, Foreign Correspondent. So even in this tiny sample, there's plenty of disagreement. In my opinion, that points to the vitality and breadth of Hitchcock's achievement: He created many masterpieces that, decades after his death, still have passionate advocates.

Finally, I'll add a couple of personal notes. As I said, thirty-nine of my stories have been fortunate enough to appear in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. One of them, "A Joy Forever," is a Macavity finalist this year. If you'll be voting on the Macavity awards, and even if you won't, perhaps you'd like to read the story. You can find it on my website, at http://www.bkstevensmysteries.com/book/a-joy-forever/.

And two nights ago, when I took a break from working on this post and checked my e-mail, I learned that AHMM has accepted a fortieth story, "Death under Construction." I've been watching my e-mail for some time, hoping for this news. Thank goodness the suspense has ended.

(I won't be able to respond to comments on Saturday, 

but I'll respond to every comment on Sunday. I promise.)

Requiem for a Fedora

By Dixon Hill

A good friend of mine made what will probably be its final passing from my life last week.

It was brown, beaten, dented and scuffed, frayed and holed.  It used to have a small spray of feathers sticking up from the bow round it's band, at the base of its crown.

But, now it lies in state atop a bookshelf, with our two hallowed flags, never to be worn again.

The Presidio of Monterey.

I've owned several hats in my lifetime, but only two fedoras.  One was black with a wide brim, but cheaply made.  The other was brown.

I bought the black one while in high school, and took it with me when I joined the army, wearing it all around Monterey, CA while stationed at the Presidio studying Arabic, then around Texas and Massachusetts while studying for my job in Military Intelligence, and finally around Clarksville TN, the gate town outside Fort Campbell, KY, where I met my wife when we were both part of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)

As some of you know, when I left Ft. Campbell, I had only a couple of days to clear post in order to reach the SF Qualification Course on time. I had to take a plane, in Class A uniform, from Campbell to Ft. Bragg, so my black fedora made the trip to Smoke Bomb Hill crushed in the top of my duffel bag.   And there it stayed, until I finished Phase One out at Camp McKall four weeks later.

To celebrate passing Phase I, I checked into a hotel for the weekend, and bought an expensive fedora at the only shopping mall in Fayetteville, Ft. Bragg's gate town.

That was the brown one.  I liked that hat, but always felt the brim was just a touch too narrow.  However, it was of much higher quality than my cheap black one and better constructed,  It had a silk liner, a leather headband around the interior, a stitched edge around the rim of the brim, and its felt body was thicker and better formed, less brittle-feeling.  Its ribbon was thicker, too, taller that is, than the thin ribbon around the crown of my wide-brimmed black fedora.

I wore both those fedoras for many years.  Nearly every time I donned civilian clothes, while in the army.  They accompanied me on deployments to foreign countries (crushed, once more, into my duffel or ruck), and sometimes on field problems if I thought I could get away with wearing them in place of my patrol cap or boonie hat.

You could get away with a lot if you were in Special Forces back then.  And, if you had developed the requisite SF set of "eyes in the back of your head" when it came to gauging when the brass was about to come visiting.  My buddies were used to seeing me run the demolitions range while wearing a leather jacket under my BDU uniform smock, my fedora perched on my head, on cold nights.

These days, from what I've seen and heard, Special Operations Command has pretty much programmed that sort of "unmilitary behavior" right out of SF soldiers.  Which is a real shame for us all, in my opinion. Pulling off the successful Unconventional Warfare mission usually seems to require not only tactical and technical proficiency, but also more than just a modicum of brazen insanity, tempered by a surprising touch of optimism and whimsy.  If asked why this is so, I'd be at a loss to give you scientific reason, but would probably say, "It's like adding that 'Little Dab'll Do Ya' when working with explosives.  You calculate how many pounds of explosive you need, and where to place your charges, but then you always add that 'Little Dab'll Do Ya' or that bridge you're trying to blow will probably still be staring you in the eye after your charges go off.  Add that little dab, however, and down she comes.  I have no idea why this works; I only know that this is why working with explosives in an ART, not a SCIENCE."  And it's the same with UW operations.

But, enough of that diatribe.  We're here to remember a hat.  A fedora to be exact.  A good hat, if not a great one.  But, hey! who here is perfect?  That hat kept my head warm on cold nights, and shaded on hot days, in more geographic locations than I can properly remember.  My brown and black fedoras went everywhere I did, along with my leather jacket, for as long as I served.

After I popped smoke on the army, they came back home to Arizona with me, down to the blazing desert.  There, I wore them a bit less, but still they served me well.

The black fedora was too cheap to last long in the desert air, literally coming unglued while my oldest son played Indiana Jones one day.  But, the brown one stood the test of time.  In fact, I wore it quite a bit around the conference at Left Coast Crime in Phoenix earlier this year.

It served me as clothing and decor, as well as acting as costume and plaything for all three of my kids (a fedora makes a pretty mean Frisbee when needed).  Thus, I heard a catch in my daughter's voice, last week, when she called, "Patta!" from the laundry room adjoining the patio on our new house.

I found her standing there, before the washing machine, holding what looked like a soggy, thick paper towel spindle in both her petite hands.

It was my brown fedora, crushed into a tube shape. Soaking.  Crumpled.  Shrunken.

Somehow, it had gotten mixed in with the dirty clothes, and my wife had accidentally tossed it into the wash.

I'd seen the hat in bad shape before, so I punched the crown back up, pulled the hat back into shape, and pushed an approximation of the right dent into the top.

But, when I parked it on my head ... felt like I was wearing a yarmulke!

My hat had shrunk beyond recoverability.

And, thus, this post: Requiem for a Fedora.  (Or, drink a beer and call it a wake!)

See you in two weeks!
--Dixon

Crowdsourcing Writer's Block

by Brian Thornton

So if you've spent any time trying to get thoughts down on paper, you eventually run into the bane of productive writers from time immemorial.

I'm talking about "Writer's Block."

Not THIS type of Writer's Block.

Every artist has suffered from creative dry spells. For some, it's because of a lack of inspiration. For others, it's a lack of time. For others, it's a lack of headspace.

I have a four year-old and a mortgage. I recently suffered from a perfect storm of all of the above, running concurrently.

So I set about trying to get around it. After all, this isn't my first rodeo. I finished my first book in 2003. I published my first book (not the same book) in 2005. I've published ten more since.

So obviously, I've dealt with this particular daemon before.

But I've found that a child trumps all previous approaches. After all, he didn't ask to be born. And he didn't ask to be plopped in front of a TV screen by himself for hours at a time. I owe him more of a life than that.

So there's the scheduling part of that. Thank God I have a spouse who has embarked on her own writing career, and is particularly sensitive to the vicissitudes of this particular affliction. So she has really stepped up in the "helping provide time" department as I navigated the shoals of Writer's Block earlier this year. I owe her. Yet another reason this current book project will be dedicated to her when it sees publication.

But then there's the problem of headspace, and clearing out enough of it to allow your book to continue to set up house in there, along with the requirements of your day-gig (assuming you have one), paying bills, your golf game, you know....Life.

So what to do to get around it all, clear the mechanism and get on with it?

I once heard the great G.M. Ford prescribe a cure for writer's block as something along the lines of "Ass in chair. Write. Repeat."

If you're looking for ways around your writer's block that aren't so completely predicated on sheer force of will, I've compiled a brief list below. Please feel free to add your own tried and true methods in the comments section. This is the kind of thing that can use a good crowd-sourcing!

Here's the list:

1. Change it up. If your current W-I-P isn't singing for you, change the singer. Work on a different project, and see whether the fresh scenery doesn't spark something that can bleed over into the one on which you're currently blocked. And if you don't have anything else you're currently working on, then START ONE.

2. Take a walk. Seriously. Exercise is always a great way to get the creative juices going.

3. Take a walk to a coffeeshop. If you're not getting it done in your current venue, change the venue. A literal change of scenery. If you usually write a coffeeshop, try another coffeeshop. If you're too cheap or too agoraphobic to leave the house (I'm only half-kidding), change the room. Stephen King wrote his first three novels at a tiny desk nestled between the washer and dryer of the laundry room in his double-wide trailer. (Come to think of it, the King example might be another instance of G.M. Ford's whole "ass in chair" dictum.).

4. Jump ahead. If you're stuck on a scene, jump ahead to one you're intending to write later. That frequently shakes something loose.

5. Go back to your outline. Rework it, if need be. If you don't outline, consider outlining. If you consider it and reject it, do the following: go back to the beginning of your W-I-P and reread it, writing either scene-by-scene or chapter-by-chapter summaries. It should help you get and keep your head back into the story.

Have something to add? A tried and true method for defeating the writer's block goblin? Please share in the Comments section!

Apologies for the S-18's

More than a few years ago, I was helping my friend Alice move. She was living in the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, and she was headed for Cape Cod. He dad, Joe Pelkey, had a silkscreen print shop in Pittsfield called Editions Ltd., and he shipped product all over the country. He told her to come by and pick up packing materials, and when we got there, Joe said, "What you guys want is a couple of sleeves of S-18's." Corrugated cardboard boxes. They come folded flat, you open them up and tape the seams, ready to go. They get their name because dimensionally, they measure 18 by 18 by 18 inches, which makes them practical for books or record albums, say. Or bricks. They don't weigh that much when they're full.

Like a lot of writers, or probably most, I've got a soft spot for nomenclature. The difference between a reveal and a rabbet, or a

clip and a magazine. Not everybody makes that big a deal out of it, but there are of course those of us who wax wroth over the Oxford comma. We dislike lower standards, cutting corners, getting sloppy. "Use the right word," Twain cautions, "not its second cousin."

Somehow the term S-18 stuck in my head. I relish arcane knowledge, insider lingo. When the subject of shipping cartons came up, S-18 was my mental default, and I'd deploy it like plumage. Over time, it turned into an inside joke, a private shorthand. Alice would read one of my stories, and when I asked her what she thought, she'd say, Well, you lost me in the S-18's. It was generally valid. Writers have a common weakness, and it's showing off. How better than turning over the chosen card, like a magic trick? Yes and no. The trick isn't effective if you call attention to it.

In performing close-up magic, an effect is made up of sleights, or manipulations. You use misdirection, verbal or physical distractions, to establish a false narrative - what people think they're being shown - and the narrative is a construct, a house of cards. Its structural integrity is sustained by the willing suspension of disbelief, an investment on the part of the audience, and we agree not to break the spell.

I heard Mark Billingham make an interesting remark about thriller

writing. He started out as a character actor, and then did stand-up, and he says comedy and thrillers are both about timing your

punchlines. You're at the mike, and you've got thirty seconds to get the laugh.

You don't break the spell. You've shaken hands with the reader, you've agreed to the purchase-and-sale. You don't need to be a know-it-all. Just keep faith. With apologies for the S-18's. You can leave out most of the stuff you know. Hemingway said that, and he was right. Don't be afraid to leave some space. Give yourself room to breathe. You don't have to fill every silence.

Meet Me in St. Louis

Meet me in St. Louie Louie, meet me at the fair…

No, not the St. Louis of the title song, Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien and the cakewalk, but of the darker, more cynical St. Louis of Akashic’s recently released St. Louis Noir.

Fellow SleuthSayer John Floyd and I think alike, or at least we both have stories in one of the new Akashic Noir books that were released on August 2nd and wanted to write about them here on SleuthSayers. And I want to congratulate John on his story Pit Stop in Mississippi Noir, which I’ve ordered and am very much looking forward to reading.

I’d also like to congratulate fellow SleuthSayers Art Taylor (Best First Mystery), Barb Goffman (Best Short Story) and BK Stevens (Best Short Story) on their Macavity noms! Good luck to all of you! — And I hope I haven’t missed anyone.


Now to my noir tale:

Lights. Camera. Action.
Apparently there were lights over the Gateway Arch in St. Louis a few days ago. Everybody’s trying to figure out what they were. Kansas City TV station KMBC says “Mysterious light over Gateway Arch stumps St. Louis.” (http://www.kmbc.com/news/mysterious-light-over-gateway-arch-stumps-st-louis/41052670 ) I have an idea about what it might have been, which I’ll get to later. In the meantime, how’s this for a segue, from mysterious lights over the Arch to Akashic’s new St. Louis Noir anthology, which was just released last Tuesday.

The book is edited by Scott Phillips. Among several other great books, Scott is the author of the terrific The Ice Harvest, which was also made into a movie starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton. I’m honored that my story Deserted Cities of the Heart is included among the many impressive stories in this collection, along with such talented writers as: John Lutz, Scott Phillips, Calvin Wilson, Lavelle Wilkins-Chinn, Colleen J. McElroy, Jason Makansi, S.L. Coney, Michael Castro, Laura Benedict, Jedidiah Ayres, Umar Lee, Chris Barsanti, and L.J. Smith.

In the intro, Scott says, “Amid all this is a rich, multicultural history of art and literature both high and low, stemming from conflict and passions running hot...This collection strives for some of that same energy that the collision of high and low can produce...All these writers come at their work with different perspectives and styles but all with a connection to and a passion for our troubled city and its surroundings.”

The Akashic Noir Series
The Akashic Noir series, begun in 2004, takes one to dark corners all around the world, literally. From Baltimore to Barcelona and Mumbai to Memphis. Even Prison Noir and Wall Street Noir—hmm…is there a connection there?

Like other Akashic noir books set in a certain locale the stories in St. Louis Noir take you on a Magical Mystery—or should I say Noir—Tour of the city and its surrounds, from Dogtown to downtown, from Gaslight Square to Glendale. And everything in between.

Gateway Arch 2001 by Rick Dickeman
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Deserted Cities of the Heart
My story, Deserted Cities of the Heart, is set at the Gateway Arch, or at least begins there. The reason I chose the Arch as my setting is because I see it as aspirational, thrusting into the heavens. The promise of a bright future and bigger and better things. So, when my protagonist, Daniel, meets a hipster girl who shares his love for all things high-tech and geeky, including computer gaming, we think things are looking up for him. Then we start to wonder who’s ‘gaming’ who?

One of the things I like to do in my writing is to capture the mood or feel of a place. And I tried to do that with this story, which moves from the Arch to the Washington Avenue Historic District, the hipster-joint Atomic Cowboy and even Meramec Caverns, said to be one of Jesse James’ hideouts and deep into the core of cyberspace.

Here’s an excerpt:

Daniel looked up, thought he saw a mourning dove flying through the Gateway Arch, heading out in the direction of Route 66. It was gone now. He wasn’t sure if it was even there in the first place. Like Route 66, there but not there at the same time. What was left of that legendary highway passed right through St. Louis. Once America’s Mother Road, much of it now decommissioned, it existed more like a ghost or a shadow on the land. Daniel had always looked on it as an escape route. But escape to where? Besides, escape was nothing more than illusion. Wherever he went he’d take his baggage with him.

He wanted to forget the last three months had ever happened. Yeah, he wanted to shut those memories out. He didn’t want to think about yesterday. Didn’t want to think about today. And he definitely didn’t want to think about tomorrow. He never thought it would turn out like this.

Do you have to be from St. Louis to write about noir there or be in this volume? No, though I have been there. And I like absorbing the local color and history of a place. I hope I’ve expressed that with St. Louis. The fact is, I consider myself an LA writer, but I’ve been here and there, if not everywhere, and enjoy writing about many locales.

We probably all have goals that we’ve set for our writing careers. They might not be the same from one person to another, but we all have things we want to achieve. One of my goals has been to have a story in one of the Akashic Noir anthologies. I think that’s my major point here: that we all have goals and that with hard work and perseverance we will eventually achieve many of them, if not all.
And I’m happy to say that the book has been getting good reviews, and my story as well:

“…[I]t’s no surprise that the most notable tales are the work of three genre veterans…” including “…‘Deserted Cities of the Heart,’ by Paul D. Marks (‘White Heat’), [which] charts the fall of loner Daniel Hayden after he meets femme fatale Amber Loy at the Gateway Arch.” 
—Publishers Weekly

“Joining Seattle, Memphis, Phoenix, and other noir outposts, St. Louis gets a turn to show its dark side in Phillips' collection of 13 dark tales and a poetic interlude...[A] spirited, black-hearted collection.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Among my favorite stories in St. Louis Noir is one called ‘Deserted Cities of the Heart’ (by Paul D. Marks) in which a loner of an IT nerd with a security clearance is convinced to hack into a witness protection data base with disastrous results by the attractive young out-of-towner who suddenly comes into his life. …The bottom line: St. Louis Noir is another worthy addition to what is perhaps already the best series of short story collections to be published in decades.”
—Sam Sattler, Book Chase


Lights over the Arch 
So what were those mysterious lights over the Arch? I think I know: they were the lights for the premier launch of Akashic’s St. Louis Noir!

***

www.PaulDMarks.com

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You'll Wonder Where The Murder Went

If you drive NM Hwy 68 from Sante Fe north towards Taos, there is a small community known as Pilar. There is also a National Recreation Area known as Orilla Verde. The land is owned by the US government and managed by the Bureau of Land Management or BLM as it is usually called. If you make the turn northwest on county rd 570 to enter the recreation area and continue the six and a half mile drive you will soon be in the very bottom of the Rio Grande Gorge and alongside the Rio Grande River. The elevation is 6,100 feet and the canyon rim reaches 800 feet above that.
There are small campgrounds along that route. Three are primitive with no hook-ups for water or electricity and the remainder have RV hook-ups with water and electricity. No sewer. The river launchings offers river rafting through companies who rent the rafts and you can hire a river ranger to guide you. There is a nominal fee for day-camping and overnight camping. For the RV hook-ups its around $15 per night with a 14 day limit. There are also two large group shelters that can be rented for $30 per day and $40 per night: one at Taos Junction and one called Rio Bravo.  There are hike and bike trails along the way. This area has been used for centuries by Ancient Peoples and you can find petroglyphs  on some rocks and sometimes find fossils but it is against  the law to damage or remove any of those. There is trout fishing and if all else failed you could watch beavers swim and build a dam. Of course the BLM Rangers probably have to tear those out.

Because of the diverse geology the wildlife and plant life is most interesting, Raptors and ground squirrels and deer. And the sweeping views offer photographic or painting opportunities all along the way. In fact, Pilar is an art colony and they have an annual show and event. Many artists come out especially to paint canvases of the ever-changing scenery.

The last campground which is at the deepest part of the Gorge is named Taos Junction and that's where my late husband Elmer and I spent 3 summers as camp hosts. Years ago a bridge had been built over the Rio Grande and a hotel built on the northern side, The hotel was later bulldozed but you can explore the ruins. The camp ground is on the south side. A serious gambler, entrepreneur named Long John Dunn had a vision and a dream for years using the bridge as a good way of making money He finally was able to buy the bridge.  People would ride the train up from Sante Fe, and catch a stagecoach from the rail line then cross the river, spend the night in the Taos Junction Hotel and ride the stage on into Taos the next day. Long John charged a toll bridge fee, a hotel overnight fee and a fee to be taken  driven into Taos. Dunn did more to promote the town of Taos than almost anyone. Nowadays there is a steel bridge built in the 50s that has the steel framework up and over the roadway. This steel bridge is still there and the campground's name of Taos Junction is obvious.  And this is the setting for murder and mystery.

Elmer had taken on the overseeing of our little campground and I worked four hours a day, for four days a week at the nice modern Visitor's Center at the highway intersection of HWY 68 and 570 It was a wonderful summer job and I met people from all over the world. You could cross the bridge to our side (camp ground location) and drive up the other side of the gorge rim to hot springs spa area known as Ojo Calente or another route south to Sante Fe or roads west and north.

We were sitting at our table having lunch one day and we noticed there was an ambulance, a police car, a state highway patrol vehicle, a fire and rescue vehicle and also a helicopter flying low along the river bank. The river was about 200 yards away from our RV and there was also an embankment that added another 20 to 30 feet. Elmer said, guess I'd better go see what is going on out there. He came back in a few minutes and said the Incident Captain in charge told him they were looking for a body. Wanted to know if the group shelter could be used for family members. Of course, Elmer said, yes.

Turns out two guys, one a brother-in-law of the other, had been drinking, using drugs and arguing and one pulled out a gun and shot and killed the other. The killer called his brother who came over and they continued with drugs and alcohol trying to decide what to do with the body. One of them remembered there was a bridge at Taos Junction and told lawmen they threw the body off this steel bridge and into the river. They searched for two days but never found a body.

Finally, the killer admitted they had thrown the body into a dump site in Los Alamos. The story went that these guys thought if no body was found, then they couldn't be charged. They didn't know the law very well. I never heard about a trial or exactly what happened to the killer. I assume his brother was only charged with disposal of a body.

I kept saying for two or three years that I wanted to write a story about this murder mystery but never did. Maybe this little blog will inspire me to eventually come up with a good story.

One other little tale of mystery at Taos Junction. On morning, Elmer came inside and his face was white and he looked just about ready to barf. When I asked what was wrong he said, "I think someone was murdered out in the group shelter last night. There is blood everywhere. It looks really bad". I went outside with him and it did look bad. But after searching around we couldn't find any other evidence. I called up to the RGGVC and who and got one of the Rangers to come down and look at our group shelter. By the time our Ranger got to Taos Junction, Elmer and a couple of men who were Game Wardens had been after some poachers who were killing and skinning deer. It was out of season. The three of them had found animal remains close to the river edge. That murder was solved.

Elmer and I were quite relieved. However, you can see why being married to a mystery writer often makes you suspect the worst when you see blood all over a concrete floor. I would love to spend a summer at Taos Junction again. Unfortunately, I sold my RV five years ago.

The Girl on the Train

In a matter of weeks, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train comes to a theatre near you. The novel comprises a compendium of sorts, a compilation of first person accounts by three women. It is, you might correctly infer, an offshoot of chicklit and contains enough internal dialogue to fill two Dr. Phil shows and most of an Oprah season. It’s most definitely not intended or promoted as a manbook.
But, for a guy fascinated by women, this one enjoyed it.

From time to time, I’ve had to make an unlikeable character likeable, but Paula Hawkins has honed that technique to a science. She accomplishes this through the devices mentioned above: internal thoughts and first person narrative.

The author nails showing-not-telling. She doesn’t tell the reader a character is an alcoholic, she lets you see it. But she takes the show-not-tell to another level of abstraction when the main character, Rachel, looks in on lives from a distance, making guesses and assumptions that naturally might or might not be true.

Even if the characters aren’t immediately likeable, we feel varying degrees of sympathy for most, especially the landlady, Cathy, who gets short shrift. We quietly urge Rachel to get her act together and groan at her many slips. The author could have titled the novel Train Wreck and been right on the mark.

Green Garden

I haven’t thought of Hannah Green’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden since required reading in high school, but a few unreliable brain cells brought that novel to mind. Maybe the only comparison is of a troubled young woman and her inner battle, but perhaps distant memory is suggesting something more. Probably it’s the battle with alcoholism and this book is a veritable textbook on the subject. More than most writings on the topic, the reader will feel empathy in the ‘there but for the grace of God’ moments.

The Girl on the Train has been compared with another popular novel, Gone Girl, but except for the word ‘girl’ in the title and the disappearance of one, I don’t see much similarity. I found Gone Girl more unputdownable, but only for a matter of degree and for different reasons. TGOTT isn’t a thriller like Gone Girl; it’s more gothic and personal. I closed the book reluctantly each evening, wondering how Rachel would get out of the mess she found herself in.

Off the Rails

Railways run as a motif throughout the novel; literally the last word in the book is ‘train’. Cleverly or at least amusingly, Amtrak has been offering on-line excerpts through on-board wifi for passengers travelling through America.

The story uses the device of an unreliable narrator, in this case a woman who suffers from alcoholic blackouts. She may have seen something, but if she did, she can’t remember. The author also employs misdirection; one part in particular navigates a minefield of tricky pronouns. The plot strays from that of a traditional mystery; the protagonist has to figure out what’s in her head and the reader must merely observe rather than solve.

The American MPAA rates the upcoming film R for violence, sexual content, language and nudity, most which appear in minute fragments in the novel if at all. Producers sadly decided to stage the story in New York instead of the UK, so anything’s possible.

And Finally…

One last point: Despite the small measure of action in the novel, the third paragraph from the end is one of the most chilling in fiction.

Read it and creep.

Southern Mysteries

This past week, Akashic Books released another anthology in their award-winning series that began in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir and that has since included Boston Noir, Miami Noir, New Orleans Noir, and many others. According to the publisher, "Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the region of the book." This one, Mississippi Noir, contains (insert drumroll, here) one of my stories.

Tom Franklin, the editor of this anthology, did an outstanding job of putting the book together. For those of you who don't know him, Tom--who was a Guest of Honor at last year's Bouchercon--is a great guy, an excellent writer, and a teacher in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. I first heard of him when his short story "Poachers" won an Edgar Award in 1999 and then appeared in that year's Best American Mystery Stories. Since that time, he's had five books published: Poachers (a collection containing the title story); Smonk; Hell at the Breech; Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter; and The Tilted World. He and his wife Beth Ann Fennelly, also an author and also an MFA teacher at Ole Miss, co-wrote the latest novel.

The anthology, which had its launch signing this past Thursday at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, features stories by sixteen writers, including Ace Atkins, Megan Abbott, William Boyle, Michael Kardos, Mary Miller, and Michael Farris Smith. Here's a link to it on Amazon.

NOTE: Also released this week was St. Louis Noir, which contains a story ("Deserted Cities of the Heart") by my friend and fellow SleuthSayer Paul D. Marks.

A pit stop in kudzu country

My story in Mississippi Noir is a bit different from the others. For one thing, it's the longest story in the book--10,000 words and 33 pages; also, it's a little more . . . optimistic, let's say, than some of the other stories. Kirkus Reviews, which spent awhile discussing the despair and poverty and heartache that accompany most of these tales, said, "And every now and again, there's a lucky soul who does manage to triumph over the trouble she gets herself into, like Anna in John M. Floyd's 'Pit Stop.'" Whether that's a good thing, in a book of noir fiction, is another matter--I'll leave that to the reader to decide. But I liked the story, and had great fun writing it. (Not that it matters, I guess, but I liked all the other stories too--and as always, it was fun to meet the other authors, at the launch on Thursday.)

A quick word about my story: Its original title was "Route 25," because the entire piece is set in a section of that highway, between Jackson and the town of Starkville, some 120 miles to the northeast. Later, though, after it was accepted for inclusion in the book, I was told that since each story would reflect a different region, and since State Highway 25 would be listed in the Table of Contents as the area where my story takes place, I was asked if I could come up with another title for the story itself. I decided on "Pit Stop" because it has a double meaning: most of the action takes place near a gas-station/convenience-store on the road trip that the main characters take, and the plot also involves an abandoned well. And yes, somebody winds up in the well. I don't think that's revealing too much; according to Anton Chekhov, "If you show the reader a gun in Act 1, it better go off in Act 3."

A good story is hard to find

My inspiration for this tale, by the way, came from the opening paragraph of one of my favorite shorts, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor. That opening features a man from Atlanta proposing a family road trip to his mother, who tells him they shouldn't be traveling in that direction (Florida) because of a killer that the newspaper says is on the loose there. Immediately after finishing that paragraph, any savvy reader knows that before the end of the story those poor vacationers will almost certainly meet up with the killer. I think it's a great example of the art of foreshadowing. Or maybe of setting expectations.

I try to do the same kind of thing in this story. Here's the situation, in "Pit Stop": a young lady and her date are headed out on a two-hour drive to a college football game, after which they plan to stop and hike awhile in the autumn countryside. They already know that the section of highway they'll be traveling is the site of several recent killings, and that whoever committed the murders is still at large--but they're young and they're invincible, right? Well, as you might imagine, they meet some unexpected folks along the way, and things quickly grow complicated.

The book's first review on Amazon, received a week ago, says "Pit Stop" is a fun and satisfying read, and "is a story that likely would have warmed the heart of Alfred Hitchcock." That extremely kind statement warms my heart as well.

Neither south noir north

I recently spoke with a fellow writer who said one of the items on her Bucket List was to someday appear in Akashic's noir series. I had hoped that one day I would also, and I'm truly grateful for this opportunity.

Strangely enough, I had already sampled a few of the books in the series, including New Jersey Noir and Los Angeles Noir, and I enjoyed them. (Have any of you read some of these?) This one, like the others, seems to have a little something for every taste. Greg Iles, author of The Bone Tree and a native of Natchez, says, in a cover blurb, "So kick back, pour yourself a drink, and find out whether Mississippi Noir may be the darkest of them all."

I hope it's also the most fun to read.




BY THE WAY, two weeks from today, on Saturday, August 20, my old friend and former SleuthSayer Elizabeth Zelvin will post a guest column in this time slot. I assure you that her post will be both shorter and better than this one, and I hope you'll join me in welcoming Liz that day. Meanwhile, best to all of you, in your writing AND your reading.