Randy Nelson makes his AHMM debut in our May/June issue, on sale now! Here, Randy discusses how the Aleutian Island campaign of WWII helped set the backdrop of “The Berg,” and why he found it such a great match to tell the lonely story of his characters Seaman Second Class Briggs and Sub-Lieutenant Fujiwara
Shortly after the beginning of World War II the Japanese Imperial Navy actually did invade the Aleutian Islands. The campaign to re-take that territory off the coast of Alaska was the only combat during the war to occur on North American soil. Attu and Kiska Islands, both mentioned in my story, are real places; and both were overrun by the Japanese in June of 1942. It took almost a year for American and Canadian troops to regain control of the territory because of the harshness of the climate and the remoteness of the region.
That, as far as I know, is the only factual background for “The Berg.” Seaman Second Class Briggs and Sub-Lieutenant Fujiwara are entirely products of my imagination, although it’s probably true that a few Nisei (first generation Japanese-Americans) did fight for imperial forces when they found themselves stranded in Japan itself after the outbreak of hostilities. And, to mention one other detail, there were indeed height restrictions on American draftees that were lowered to five feet in August of 1942. But these facts of course are not the point of the story.
What I wanted to capture was an aura of mystery created by the isolation of both men, the unlikely alliance between them, and the immensity of the berg itself. It gives me the creeps today just to think about crossing that Arctic water in Briggs’ tiny boat. The recklessness of that act speaks to his loneliness, I think; but the sacrificial gesture made by Fugiwara makes the latter man heroic in my mind. I can’t conceive of anyone doing such a thing. Well . . . I guess I can imagine it since I wrote the story, but I find it hard to express my great admiration for this “enemy” of Seaman Briggs. One last note on the composition of this story: Alert readers contemplating a bleak and isolated location, a remote lighthouse, and eerie goings-on above and below water might call to mind another, more famous story than mine. I’m talking about Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” (1951), first published in Tales of Horror. Ray’s story has stayed with me over the years, and I hope I captured some of the same chilling atmosphere with “The Berg.”
RANDY NELSON IS A RETIRED PROFESSOR LIVING IN DAVIDSON, NORTH CAROLINA, WHERE HE GIVES AWAY JAPANESE MAPLES AND CULTIVATES BONSAI. HE HAS PUBLISHED OVER A HUNDRED SHORT STORIES AND RECEIVED MULTIPLE AWARDS FOR HIS WRITING. “THE BERG” REPRESENTS HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN AHMM.
Gilbert M. Stack returns to AHMM with a continuation of his Pandora’s series. In this enlightening post, learn more about Gilbert’s writing process and the questions he considers as he sketches his plots
I have become an inveterate plotter over the past few years. I didn’t use to be this way. When I wrote my first story, “Pandora’s Luck,”for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, I had just the nugget of an idea about a lady gambler, Pandora Parson, with very strange luck who crossed paths with Corey Callaghan, a down-on-his-luck bare-knuckle boxer. Patrick Sullivan, the boxer’s trainer, got thrown in to explain why Corey kept showing up at poker games even though he doesn’t play cards. It took a couple of weeks mostly writing fifty or a hundred words a day to really figure out the details of my story and then several more drafts to get the tale in a form that made me happy.
This system worked great for me for five or six years as I sort of felt out my stories in the same way Corey might size up an opponent with a few test jabs. But the more I wrote, the more ideas I generated. And these moments of inspiration almost always came while I was plodding through the writing of another tale. Originally, I would push the new notion off to the back of my mind convinced that I could never forget something so wonderful and exciting. Except, it’s actually really easy to forget even the best concepts. But how to juggle finishing the story I was already immersed in with preserving the new idea? As you have doubtless guessed, the answer for me was plotting.
In the early days, this consisted of scribbling one or two sentence concepts in files for my different series, but I quickly discovered that writing those few lines sparked further ideas. As sentences became paragraphs became pages, I finally broke down and started writing chapter by chapter plots that often ended up being a third or more of the length of the completed stories. Dialogue, I found, was especially important to jot down when I first conceptualized it. Conversations between characters are critical devices for moving a story forward and imparting important information, and I find it is impossible to reconstruct good dialogue months later if all that I wrote down was a few summary sentences.
So, now I am an obsessive plotter, with sixteen novels and stories currently mapped out in enough detail that I might legitimately call them first drafts. I also have a score or three additional plots which are in some state of in progress. Several of those are just random sentences that I wrote twenty years ago, but many are serious beginnings of stories I hope to one day write. And that is, perhaps, the best thing about plotting. I can come back to write these tales tomorrow or twenty years from now with confidence that I can do them justice. And as new and better ideas for handling a situation in one of the stories occurs to me, I find it to be a lot easier to go back and edit a plot than it is a completed novel.
If you have the basic idea for a story of your own—whether it is a fully developed large golden nugget or just a tiny grain of sand—I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes to write it down today. You never know where it will lead, but once you have preserved it on paper or on your computer hard drive, you can be confident that you will never lose it and can only make it better.
In this enlightening post, Catriona McPherson highlights a few recent examples of angry, passionate women in television and literature, and discusses how her latest story fits right in with this motif
My story in the March/April AHMM—“Something that is not Moving”—is about a yoga class full of menopausal women that—ahem—boils over. The central Salem Community Center beginners’ Hatha yoga class has never seen anything like it.
But there’s a lot of it about if you know where to look.
Riot Women on BBC and Britbox has been called the year’s first “must see” telly. (At time of writing, I’ve watched five episodes and am saving the sixth for Friday night and pizza.) Jess, a pub landlady, Beth, an English teacher, Holly, a retiring policewoman, Yvonne, a midwife, and Kitty . . . chaos in leather jeans, are a loosely-connected handful of middle-aged women living in creator Sally Wainright’s Calderdale Valley in Yorkshire. (If you’ve seen last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley or Scott and Bailey, you’ll know your way around.) They each have good cause to be either despairingly, grindingly, bitterly or righteously angry, but together they’re gloriously angry and the first performance of the punk-inflected rock band they form is a howl of pure hormonal rage. There’s an ice-cold (in every sense) case at the heart of the narrative, as well as sweet family relationships, hilarious dating failures and true warmth running all the way through. If it doesn’t make you punch the air, your air-punching needs some attention.
You’d be looking at a 10th century convent in Norfolk a long time before you thought of a punk band, and yet . . . Mere, the debut supernatural mystery by Danielle Giles, has a community of women just as complex, powerful, flawed and captivating as Wainright’s any day. Abbess Sigeburg is both terrifying and heart-rending as a kind of Lear-like figure scrabbling to hold onto to her place in a system she believes is arranged by God, as a pair of disruptors arrive and begin to chip at the foundations of the institution she has made her life’s work. Meanwhile, Sister Hilda the infirmarian gives us someone to trust. Or does she . . . Oh it’s delicious! Haunting and slippery, like winter’s light on the Fens. Truly unsettling.
Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff, is another debut with another bunch of pissed-off women, but the pace is snappy and the laughs and winces both come at you without letting up. The food is better than in the convent too. Newly single Geeta is innocent but the gossip around her rural village in India is that she’s a “self-made widow” (my new favourite phrase) and it occurs to other village women that she might be able to help them with the problem of sub-par husbands. Farah—who makes Abbess Sigeburg look like a Fairy Godmother, Solani—the fixer (sort of), and the irresistible sister-act of Priya and Preity eventually form an unstoppable dust-devil of bad ideas and even worse outcomes on a downhill ride to [no spoilers]. It’s one of those debuts that would be depressing for a fellow author, if we weren’t readers first. Which we are. Yippee!
Finally, I’m once again pitching Dinnerladies,a turn of the millennium British sitcom, long gone but never forgotten. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love it. It’s so well-written that it takes until one of the final episodes before we realise there’s been a mystery running through it all along. So it belongs here at Trace Evidence on that score and it belongs in this list on account of the women and their . . . you guessed it . . . rage. Jean is angry because her husband left her for a vegetarian dental hygienist, Dolly is angry because of the Blair government (“Put two poems up in a bus shelter and call it a university.”), Brenda is angry because bad things happen to good people (“I’m actually hurting under my bra, I’m so cross.”), and Twinkle? Well, she’s just angry. In one episode she tries to get a job as a stripper. She doesn’t mind having to dance on a table, or having to shove her bits in people’s faces, but when she finds out she has to smile too, she’s raging. Their individual resentments start to chime when their jobs in the factory canteen are threatened by automation and they face unemployment in a struggling economy.
That was twenty-five years ago (hmm), but anger certainly feels like the emotion for this moment too. Kicking over some chairs and going to the bar is a mild response to the state of world right now. If we can find some equally angry people to laugh with along the way, so much the better. Onward! Cx
Learn about the remote costal environment of southeast England that inspired Nick Guthrie’s latest story, “It’s Complicated,” from our March/April issue, on sale now!
Warren Reach was the perfect rural retreat: a thatched cottage nestled in a strip of pine and birch forest a couple of miles from the Suffolk coast, that could only be reached via a mile-long farm track. The nearest neighbour, apart from the pheasants and the brown hares that might explode almost from under your feet at any point along that track, lived in a farmhouse half a mile away across the fields.
Change the name of the house, and this description taken from my story “It’s Complicated” (in the March/April 2026 issue of AHMM) is a pretty good description of the remote cottage we moved to two and a half years ago.
The story opens with a couple hiding out at Warren Reach, the place cut off after a couple of days’ violent storms that have flooded the roads, while the rough farm track, their only physical connection to the outside world, has been trashed by heavy agricultural vehicles harvesting sugar beet just before the storms.
Shortly after we moved to this remote cottage, we were cut off for a couple of days after…
You get the picture. Sometimes inspiration for a story comes very directly from life. In this case, one morning I went down and peered out of the kitchen window at the water and mud flowing down our track through the woods and I realised that this was actually the set-up for a locked-room mystery, my protagonists isolated not by four walls and a locked door, but by their environment.
All I needed was a body.
The body lay face down in a pool formed by the muddy water that flowed down the track through the trees.
Here we go. An isolated cottage, no way in or out, a corpse . . . What’s not to love?
We didn’t move here with any expectation that it would provide me with such obvious material to write about. Usually, I find it very difficult to write about the place where I’m actually living, because we writers like to bend geography to suit our stories. When I’m actually living somewhere, I’m usually too tightly bound to reality. As soon as I move away from a place, though, I’ll start writing about it, because suddenly I have that balance where the detail is fresh enough for a setting to come alive, but also it’s indistinct enough that I feel free to take a few liberties.
Coastal Suffolk, in the east of England, is different, for some reason. For the first time, I found that I wanted to set stories here and now. The villages are crammed full of history and wonderful characters and legends. The forests and heaths are wild and atmospheric, particularly when those low banks of fog settle on the land, shrouding everything in mystery, or when a storm strikes and the water levels start to creep up.
So what is it about this region that demands to be written about?
This is where you expect a neat answer, isn’t it? Where you trust that the storyteller in me has constructed a clever narrative so that my final argument returns to something hinted at in the opening, and the explanation seems as if it should always have been inevitable.
Well the answer is, I don’t know. I haven’t worked it out yet. All I know is that something compels me to find the characters and the puzzles that help me explore this place. And maybe that’s the answer. I write stories set here because I’m still trying to work it out.
Nick Guthrie is a crime writer based in East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, and his short fiction has been published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other magazines and anthologies. Under other writing names, he is the author of more than twenty books, and his work has been shortlisted for various awards and optioned for the movies. You can find out more about Nick and his work at www.nickguthrie.co.uk and at Bluesky and Instagram.
Floyd Sullivan shares how memories of working with his father in construction contracting inspired his latest story, “Murder on the Job,” from our March/April issue, on sale now!
As has often been said, and written about by other writers, many of whom have contributed to this blog, one never knows when the inspiration for a story will present itself. In the case of my most recent mystery published in Alfred Hitchock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM), the idea came in the form of a memory long tucked away in a back corner of my consciousness, something said to me, almost in passing, by a fellow employee as we rode in the front cabin of a battered old truck through the North Side of Chicago over fifty years ago.
During the late 1950s my father worked as an engineer for a construction contractor. He “figured” and supervised projects that included the installation of large underground storage tanks and the piping and pumps those tanks fed. It was a good job, but he wanted to run his own show. An opportunity arose when the owner of a similar company suddenly died and his widow wanted to sell the business rather than run it. A friend loaned my father the capital, and thus was born Sullivan Tank Service.
Summers during my high school years, as soon as I was old enough to use a long-handled shovel without hurting myself, I would help out by digging trenches and spreading sand and pea gravel over buried tanks. It was hard, sometimes brutal, work, but my father paid me well and the intense exercise kept me in shape. Over the years, through college and after, I graduated to simple pipefitting tasks.
My father had moved into the previous owner’s office on the far north side of Chicago, but soon realized he could work from a “home office,” before the term was popular, save on monthly rent, and claim a deduction on his income tax. And because his office was in our house, he had ready help available in the persons of his eight children. I took a typing class in high school, ostensibly to help me more quickly execute term papers, but my new skill also made me a very convenient office resource, my bedroom only a few yards from my father’s desk and typewriter. Thus would I be recruited (a “handcuffed” volunteer, as my father put it) to type invoices and job proposals, usually addressed to general building contractors, or engineers from the major oil companies. Most of our contracts involved installing underground tanks, piping, and pumps for gas stations.
These experiences, and the settings of my father’s office and various job sites, informed the details of my latest Rick Peters story, “Murder on the Job,” published in the March/April 2026 issue of AHMM. The inspiration for the crime itself came one evening when the company’s pipe-fitter, and informal foreman, named Louis, drove me home from a job site. We rode in his truck south on a main thoroughfare toward Oak Park, the Chicago suburb where I lived. I was exhausted, achy, sweaty, and covered with gas station grease, dirt, and caked glops of clay, but grateful to be on my way home. As we waited at a red light about five miles north of my house, Louis gestured to a line of nicely maintained yellow brick homes along a shady, tree-lined street and told me that the former owner of the company lived on that block.
And then he told me how he died.
To relate to you exactly what Louis said that evening would spoil a dramatic (I hope) passage of the story, so please pick up a copy of AHMM March April 2026 and read “Murder on the Job,” as well as the other excellent mysteries in the issue. Another bonus is you’ll learn how a very young Rick Peters got involved in his very first mystery. And you’ll meet his high school girlfriend Maxine, a character I plan to bring back in future Rick Peters stories.
I hope you enjoy my story and its settings, full of pipe wrenches and long-handled shovels and huge storage tanks and heavy earth-moving machinery. In the meantime, I’m digging back into those buried memories from decades ago, hoping to uncover another inspiration.
“Deferred” began, as many of my short stories do, as a situation in search of character (other stories arise as character in search of situation). Originally titled “The Piper,” I realized the plot was a hoary one, in need of much creativity to bring a new spin to outwitting the devil. So often, the protagonist wins, or at least gets a draw, because of their natural homespun wisdom. I knew I had to vary that so I chose an educated protagonist, one used to dealing with the cleverest and most devious opponents. For Andrew, it was time to “pay the piper,” but what if he embraced the challenge rather than the normal cycle of refusal, denial and victory/defeat? The bones of the story were quickly fleshed in early drafts, I asked a lawyer acquaintance to set me right on legal assumptions, revised again, and submitted to my wonderful critique group for their vetting. Another revision, then off to market. And finally, acceptance by AHMM! Right on the heels of an acceptance by its sister magazine, Analog. Good month.
My mystery influences range from hard-boiled Hammett, Chandler, John D. MacDonald; to soft-boiled Harry Palmer, Archy McNally (the inspiration for my own Feet of Clay mystery novels); to British cozies. My expanded reading is mainly in science fiction and heroic fantasy. Five of my SF novels are Noir-ish, combining two favorite genres. My first published fantasy novel, Barnaby’s Luck, is more anti-hero driven, inspired by the concept of how would characters relying on brain and guile survive barbaric times?
My writing process is simple: Write every day. The words and ideas which flow sitting at the desktop or with a notebook and clipboard in our sunroom, are often unexpected and delight me no end. These unbidden creative gems may be the highlight of my labors (the other great reward is seeing my words in print, knowing an editor shares my vision). When I’m not writing, I’m thinking. Or running. Or exploring our corner of Vancouver Island on foot or up on two wheels (powered).
Al Onia’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines including Analog, On Spec, and Mystery Weekly. Al’s latest mystery novel, Have A Nice Trip, was released in April, 2025.
Marcelle Dubé makes her eighth AHMM appearance in our March/April issue, on sale now! In this blog post, learn all about the unique thought process that led to the premise for Marcelle’s latest story, “Fish Bowl”
Usually, I can pinpoint exactly what inspired one of my stories: a single kid’s running shoe in the middle of an empty highway, a song from my youth, a reckless driver on a gravel road . . . inspiration is everywhere, like wild yeast.
What I’ve only recently realized is that, often, my stories are inspired by fear. Or rage.
At first, “Barney’s Diner,” my story in the March/April 2026 Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, didn’t seem inspired by either fear or rage. It appeared fully formed in my mind one day. I didn’t know why, but I knew the characters, and I knew what was going to happen to them.
“Barney’s Diner” is about a lonely waitress in a lonely diner during a snowstorm. Only when the story was down in black and white did I realize what made Julie, the waitress, so very vulnerable: the diner’s picture windows. In the darkness of a snowed-in highway, the diner became a brightly lit fish bowl.
Julie was completely exposed to anyone who happened to be hiding in the dark outside those windows.
It appears I had transferred my own . . . not phobia, really. Let’s call it reluctance. An intense reluctance to be in a lit room with no curtains on the window when it’s dark outside. I always marvel at how many people don’t seem to mind being on display. You can see into their living rooms, see how they are dressed, what they are doing . . .
Anybody could be out there. Waiting. Watching.
So what happens if you place a vulnerable young woman in an environment like that? Alone? At night?
As for the rage, it’s in there, too. It’s a quiet rage, the kind that builds up over years of helplessly watching bad things happen. The kind of rage that finally says, “To hell with it,” and acts.
Much to my delight, “Barney’s Diner” marks my eighth appearance in the pages of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
Marcelle Dubé has published 15 mystery and fantasy novels, including two series and one collection. Her short stories appear in a number of anthologies and magazines, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Saturday Evening Post. She is best known for her Mendenhall Mystery series.
Find out more at www.marcellemdube.com, where you can also sign up for her (very) infrequent newsletter.
“The Electrician’s Helper” was based on a true incident, though we didn’t find a dead body. But having worked in the building trades for decades, I’ve rubbed shoulders with some interesting characters and odd situations. This one was ripe for a murder mystery, though my background as a writer is more science fiction and fantasy.
But I’ve read everything by Raymond Chandler I could get my hands on, and a lot of Elmore Leonard and Robert B. Parker. In my younger days, I’d always watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents . . . and Perry Mason. And Sherlock Holmes was always lurking in the background.
One story in my collection, “The Iron Apples of the Stars,” is a grisly double murder mystery, with horror and alternate history elements, and another is a mock Chandler story set in LA with an SF twist. But there’s something about a pure mystery that appeals to one’s logical sense. In college I majored in math, and a mathematical proof is a lot like a mystery, only presented backwards.
Let me explain: a mathematical proof states what is to be proved, then takes one step at a time, each step easily seen to be true, until one gets there. A mystery, however, starts with an unexplained situation, then takes one back through clues until one arrives at the end with the true explanation. The clues must all be consistent with the conclusion, the explanation, the whodunit, but the art is in making it not obvious until the very end, when the reader goes, “Oh yeah! That’s right, why didn’t I think of that?’
You didn’t think of that because the writer was careful to serve up the truth one tantalizing morsel at a time, working behind the scenes like the Wizard of Oz, until the very end when the curtain is swept aside, the witness breaks down under Perry Mason’s cross-examination, and Sherlock says, “Elementary, my dear Watson . . .”
Ron Ginzler is a Writers of the Future Contest winner and has published a book of mixed-genre short stories, The Iron Apples of the Stars.
Katherine Hall Page discusses the origins of her latest story, “The Lodger,” from our Jan/Feb issue, on sale now!
Much as I take pleasure in writing about Faith Fairchild, amateur sleuth, mother, wife, caterer, over a series now numbering twenty-six books; going in a completely different direction is satisfying. I spend part of each year living in Maine—the same place—but a jaunt to Spain, Norway, Japan and more always brings new perspectives. “The Lodger” is that kind of voyage akin to other nonseries short stories and books I’ve written. My same eyes, but they are trained toward new landscapes.
The idea for the story began with a sentence I overheard on the subway in Boston. (Eavesdropping in restaurants, restrooms, pretty much any public spaces is invariably fruitful.) “You know. One old guy looks like another,” a woman commented to another, who nodded in agreement. Was this true I immediately wondered? I looked around at the people and there weren’t any elderly gentlemen that might have provoked the remark. The two must have been talking about two other men. During the rest of the ride and out on the street, I thought about men I knew or noticed around me. The observation began to ring true. Were there generic “old guys”? Just as supposedly married couples began to look like each other as they aged, did men too?
I tucked the idea away. It jumped out months later when a doctor friend whom I asked about heart disease for one of the books told me about the Lazarus Syndrome, Return of Spontaneous Circulation (ROSC). In one case, death was declared and then fifty minutes later the family noted a subtle eye movement. The deceased wasn’t! Rare, of course, yet a plot device tailor made for a mystery writer—an ending worthy of any of my favorites. My two “old guys” both came to life as the characters. The setting remained somewhat ambiguous except for the location on the East Coast, although the Victorian house is very like my aunt and uncle’s in South Orange, New Jersey, down to the in-law apartment on the former servant’s top floor.
Mary Roberts Rhinehart wrote a small tome, Writing Is Work, where she expands the title, describing the process as “hard work” and it is, but “The Lodger” was not. Putting together what I’d overheard earlier with the fascinating Lazarus Syndrome information into a dark short story, a departure from my usual was, well, fun!
I find short stories more difficult than full-length books agreeing with Henry David Thoreau who wrote to a friend: “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short,” Poe wrote, “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build toward it.” Taken together, these are a fine summation of the challenge posed by short story writing: that paring down process, the examination of each word essential for a satisfactory result. Honing “The Lodger” became a pleasurable task.
Aside from the crime or mystery-fiction writers that have influenced me, notably Agatha Christie and that master of both the novel and short story, Robert Barnard—I have been inspired by the short stories of Poe, O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), and Saki, (H.H.Munro). Reading all three as a young teen, I trembled with fearful delight: “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Last Leaf”, and “The Open Window”. Rereading still invokes the same feeling. Saki is an author I find too often overlooked. He was killed by a sniper during the Battle of the Ancre in WWI at age forty-three. Had he lived longer his legacy would be undoubtably richer.
Occasionally, I’ll meet someone who says they never read short stories. That they are unsatisfying and not to be classed with a “real book”. Something of substance unlike shorter works of fiction—so many bon bons for the less discerning reader—is implied. I’ve never been able to understand this as it shows both a want of taste and certainly imagination. These opinionated readers lack of the ability to expand that “paring down process” into something that may well stay have stayed with them for the rest of their life. Think Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar” ’s last sentence!
This interview with Barbara Peters, Poisoned Pen Press, is one I like very much:
Katherine Hall Page is the author of the Faith Fairchild amateur sleuth mystery series, currently numbering 26 books, and other works. The Body in the Belfry was the 1991 Agatha Award winner for Best First Mystery Novel. Other Agathas include The Body in the Snowdrift (2006) and Best Short Story for “The Would-Be Widower”(2002) She has been nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, Mary Higgins Clark awards, and other Agathas. The Body in the Web (2024) won the 2024 Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Page has also published a collection of short fiction, Small Plates (Morrow), in 2014 and her series cookbook, Have Faith in Your Kitchen (2010). In addition to her adult fiction, Page has published a middle grade mystery series, Christie & Company, and a YA, Club Meds. Katherine Hall Page received Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award in April 2016 and MWPA’s Crime Master Award in 2022. She was awarded MWA’s Grand Master Edgar Award in 2024.
Several years ago, I saw an anthology call for mysteries set in California, and my wife suggested I write about my childhood. Though I have lived in many places and now live in Texas, I spent much of my early life in California, and I graduated high school in Ft. Bragg, a town on the Pacific Coast almost two hundred miles north of San Francisco.
So, at Temple’s urging, I wrote a paragraph about my stepfather collecting scrap metal in the old town dump while I was in high school and about how I believe he played a significant role in transforming the dump into the tourist attraction it later became. Today, the old town dump, now known as Glass Beach, features an abundance of sea glass—broken glass worn smooth by the ocean—and it attracts visitors from far and wide.
That paragraph remained on my computer long past the deadline for the anthology—to which I never did submit—until I stumbled upon it again and asked myself, “What if, while collecting scrap metal, my stepfather had stumbled upon evidence of a crime committed many years earlier?”
While the opening paragraph remains essentially as I first wrote it and remains as true as I believe it to be, the story—with several nods to my teen years in Ft. Bragg—quickly became fiction. The story’s narrator accompanies his stepfather to the old town dump one weekend and is there for the discovery of a strongbox filled with cash, likely the proceeds from a robbery of the lumber company’s payroll office several years earlier.
As in any good piece of crime fiction, discovery of all that money leads to a string of complications. The narrator’s best friend and his best friend’s mother get involved, and the four of them deal with the complications together.
RETURN TO GLASS BEACH
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine is publishing “Glass Beach” only a few months after my high school class’s 50th reunion, and roughly 50 years after the fictional events in the story. My mother died while I was a senior, and mid-way through the last semester I moved to Tacoma, Washington, to live with my grandparents. Fortunately, I was allowed to graduate despite missing the last few months of the school year. Unfortunately, I was not present for the graduation ceremony, and I have never returned to Ft. Bragg.
Temple and I hope to attend the 2026 Left Coast Crime in San Francisco, and we’ve discussed adding a few days to the trip to drive up the coast so I can show her where I spent most of my teen years. I’m certain the town has changed during the past five decades, but maybe a few familiar places remain. Most importantly, though, we can visit Glass Beach, and she can see the town dump that my stepfather, in some small way, help turn into a tourist attraction.
Michael Bracken is the Edgar- and Shamus-nominated author of more than thirteen hundred short stories, including stories published in AHMM, EQMM, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best Mystery Stories of the Year. Additionally, he’s the editor or co-editor of three dozen anthologies, including three Anthony Award nominees.
Trace Evidence 