Trace Evidence

Nick Guthrie muses on the differences between writing short crime fiction and crime novels, and tells us why he’s so drawn to short-format fiction. He also discusses how and why his native coastal Suffolk, England continues to inspire his work, including his latest story in our Sept/Oct issue!

It’s always bad to generalise, isn’t it (he says, not generalising at all)? But in my experience, there are two types of crime fiction writer, and they can be separated by a simple question.

Whenever I meet up with other writers the conversation inevitably turns to short fiction, and I find myself asking, “So, do you write short stories?” The answer I always expect to hear, goes along the lines of, Yes, of course I do, why would I not?

Often, that’s exactly the answer I get, but then there are all the rest. Sometimes it’s just a look, as if I’ve suddenly started speaking in tongues. Sometimes there’s a vague, Oh, I think they used to do that in the olden days, didn’t they? Sometimes it’s just a shudder, accompanied by a, Why would you ever want to do that?

And me, you ask? Well, of course I do. For one thing, I’m writing about short fiction on the blog of one of the world’s leading short fiction magazines, so it’d be strange if I didn’t. But beyond that . . . Why would I not?

I do write novels, too: I love writing a piece of fiction that can take three or four hundred pages to conclude, and I’m in a really lucky position because my wonderful publisher has committed to publishing two of my novels over a period of six months or so to launch a new series. That’s rare, though; for most writers, a novel a year is about the fastest the market allows.

With short fiction, on the other hand, you can bounce about all over the place—different characters, different settings, different genres, and there are still enough markets out there that you can have several stories published over quite a short period. I’m having a good year, and I’ll have had at least eight stories published by the end of 2026, including two in AHMM.

I love the opportunities the short form gives me for trying out different things. When an idea strikes, I can write a short standalone story very quickly, and it can be quite different from other stories I’ve written—the freedom is exhilarating. But also I can use short fiction to circle around places and ideas that have a firm grip on my imagination, returning in later stories to approach these subjects from different angles. For example, the lead detective in my new novel series first hit the page under a different name in a set of short stories that I used to work out just who he was and how he operated. By the time I wrote the first novel, he was a fully formed character, ready to hit the ground running, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if it weren’t for the four short stories where I had first tried him out.

My new story in the September/October 2026 issue of AHMM is an example of a setting, rather than a character, that refuses to leave me alone. The last time I was here I wrote about the hold coastal Suffolk, in Eastern England, has on my imagination, and with “The Silent Partner” I’m back there again.

England is more densely, and evenly, populated than most parts of the US (he’s generalising again . . .), and for crime fiction this means that police detectives and their infrastructure tend to be based in the cities, with only smaller outposts in the more rural areas. Coastal Suffolk is one of the more remote areas. On a map, this might not appear to be the case, but its geography is complicated by long river estuaries that divide it up—for example, I used to live within sight of the sea, but to actually get to a beach I had to drive for half an hour because of the convoluted nature of the coastline.

In comparison with somewhere like the US, this might not seem much—when I visited New Jersey a few years ago, a friend thought nothing of a 400-mile round trip to meet me for lunch—but by British standards it makes a difference. In policing terms, it means that out-of-favour officers like Charlie Tunstall might get put out in the sticks, responsible for quite large areas with little back-up—which is all fine until there’s a murder on his normally quiet patch. As I wrote earlier this year, I’m still trying to work out what all this means for mystery fiction—isolated communities, and police, on an otherwise crowded island nation—and it’s through short fiction that I’m doing this.

I’ll keep coming back to coastal Suffolk, even though physically I moved away from there a few weeks ago. The place has a hold on my imagination, and I’m still trying to work it out. I know I’ll want to keep exploring, and short fiction is the perfect way to do this. And I have a strong feeling that we haven’t seen the last of Charlie Tunstall, either.

At an event recently, someone asked me why I write, and the question stumped me for a moment. The answer I came up with was that I do it because I’m curious—about the world, and about the people who inhabit it—and that’s why I like to explore ideas in short bursts as well as at the length of a full book. I’ll never tire of jumping from idea to idea.

So when I ask other writers if they write short fiction and I get that look, I just think, How could you not?

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Nick Guthrie recently moved to Scotland from his long-time home in coastal Suffolk. His crime novel, The Custodian, is due to be published by No Exit Press in November 2026, with another to follow in 2027. 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

Floyd Sullivan returns to our blog to discuss why a wedding photoshoot serves as the backdrop for his latest story in AHMM! Don’t miss “The Wedding Photographer” in our Sept/Oct issue, on sale now!

What horror most terrified photographer Rick Peters in “The Wedding Photographer,” my story published in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM)? Not finding himself involved in a murder mystery, or the dangers that faced him therein. Not at all! What really frightened him out of his wits was the threat that he would have to shoot a wedding because the wedding photographer he had recommended to the bride didn’t show up for the ceremony.

Over the course of his career, and six other stories published in AHMM, Peters has taken pictures of collectible baseballs, a shoe with a severed foot in it, fake leather jackets, plumbing supplies, an Edison wax cylinder that may or may not include the first ever jazz recording, men and boys with new haircuts, a rock band, women for a men’s magazine, and just about any household item that you can put on a plain white background and capture for a catalog or website.

So why should something as seemingly everyday as a wedding intimidate him?

Because there is no chance for a re-shoot when you photograph a wedding. If you screw it up, the happy couple will spend the rest of their lives without that coffee table photo album that they would have happily, we hope, perused on the anniversary of that special day for the rest of their lives together. Our protagonist photographer was petrified by that thought. In his daily workload of clock radios, coffee mugs, and ceramic vases, if the client didn’t like a particular shot, no problem. Set it back up and shoot it again. Even bookings that involved fashion models on location could be done over if necessary. The additional costs might blow the budget, but if the ad or catalog page turned out to everyone’s liking, the re-shoot expense would soon be (mostly) forgotten.

Not so if your camera malfunctions during a wedding shoot. (Which actually happened to yours truly while shooting a sister’s wedding. Can you imagine the sense of panic felt when the film came back from the lab with only a handful of acceptable prints? I don’t have to imagine it because it happened to me. Sure, I was still a college student at the time with no real professional experience, shooting with a cheap SLR camera because I couldn’t afford a Nikon or professional lighting equipment. But still . . .)

There is a scene in “The Wedding Photographer” where Peters is asked by his cousin to shoot her wedding. He pleads with her not to insist, and explains why she should hire a photographer who shoots weddings as a profession. It’s a specific skill set, he tells her, that he himself does not possess. She finally agrees, but when the recommended photographer fails to appear at the church on time, Peters gets the nod. Luckily, his assistant has significant wedding experience so it all turns out okay.

Except, where was the original wedding photographer and why didn’t he show up? Pick up a copy of AHMM September/October to find out!

Kevin Egan returns to AHMM for the 25th time in our Sept/Oct issue with “Report Card Day”! Learn all about how this story came together in this insightful post from the AHMM regular

“Report Card Day” is my 25^th story to appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Of these stories, 19 are set in the New York County Courthouse in Manhattan, and 15 of those feature a continuing character—the court officer known simply as Foxx. Having worked in that courthouse for 30 years, I draw on an extensive factual and psychic database to construct these stories. As for the other six AHMM stories: Two are part of a second series reprising the characters and setting from my three pseudonymous golf mystery novels published in the 1990s; the remaining four stories are pure standalones.

As refreshing a “break” as writing standalone stories may be, I find that writing them is difficult. Get me out of the courthouse or off the golf course and I have little to say and even less to write. Ideas come to me, but not very easily and not very often. “The American Professor” (AHMM Nov. 2011) developed from an anecdote I heard while traveling in Ireland in the mid-1980s. “Becoming Ian Fleming” (AHMM Sept.-Oct. 2022) and “Italian Alzheimer’s” (AHMM July-Aug. 2023) evolved from childhood memories set down years later in my writing journals.

But then there is “Report Card Day.”

I can point to the exact moment that the idea for “Report Card Day” popped into my head: chancing upon the obituary of a grammar school classmate in the local newspaper. This classmate was not a close friend; actually not a friend at all. In fact, he and I never crossed paths after the class split up forever at the end of 8^th grade. But his name summoned vivid memories—both visual and auditory—of grammar school report card days.  A priest would pop into the classroom and distribute the report cards in alphabetical order—first to the boys, then to the girls. The deceased classmate was just ahead of me in alphabetical order. Six times a year, for eight years, the sound of the priest calling his name meant I was next.

Seeing that obituary and recalling the routine of report card day prompted the inevitable “what if” question. What if, many years later, a former student realizes that his male classmates are dying in alphabetical order? And what if he is convinced that he will be next?

My stories don’t spin; they don’t tumble out from my brain and onto the page. They grind. They suffer through countless revisions and endless edits. But once I opened the mental box where my parochial school memories reside, the story took shape.

The circumstance I conjured was the 57^th reunion of St. Gregory the Great School’s Class of 1966. Why the 57^th? I wanted the classmates to be approximately 70 years old, and the reunion committee (really only one person) was persuaded by another classmate to hold reunions in prime number anniversary years rather than the more customary five or ten year intervals.

With these parameters established, the characters began to reveal themselves. (More precisely, my memory of actual classmates who could serve as characters in the story revealed themselves.)  There was Nick, the smartest boy in the class, now a retired lawyer. There was Kathy, the prettiest girl in the class who survived a chronic case of the cooties to become a doctor. She is Nick’s wife. There is Janice, boy-crazy as a girl and now the grande dame who organizes the reunions. She is Kathy’s best friend. There is Bobby Smith, accountant, actuary, and 4^th grade times table champion who suggested the prime number scheduling of the reunions. His expertise temporarily allays Nick’s fears. And there is Richie Diamante, not a classmate but the town’s police chief. He and Kathy were childhood neighbors and confidantes during the depressing days of her cooties affliction.

The reunion festivities kick off, as always, with the bustling arrival of Janice and her many suitcases of reunion paraphernalia. As with all prior reunions, Janice stays with Kathy and Nick. This time, however, the newly retired Nick is dragooned into helping Janice set up the parish hall for the reunion. One of his assignments is to arrange the portrait gallery of deceased classmates. This is when he sees the “evidence” that he will be the next to die.

Nick confesses his fears to Kathy, who pooh-poohs them, then to Richie Diamante, who reluctantly agrees to look into the five previous deaths, and finally to Bobby Smith, whose expert opinion is that the sampling is too small for any statistical extrapolation. Nick, finding no satisfaction from anyone, resigns himself to attending the reunion, come what may. His fears retreat to the back of his mind during the reunion’s rather banal recapitulation of 8^th grade social dynamics, highlighted by that staple of parochial grammar school: the passive-aggressive competition—often fostered by the nuns/teachers—between the boys and the girls.

At home after the reunion, Nick, Kathy, and Janice stay up late to drink wine and reminisce. Janice and Kathy begin to lambaste him with observations he was too obtuse to recognize at the time. Nick is shocked to hear how sharply the girls’ parochial school memories differ from his own. Chastened, he goes to bed, only to wake up the next morning, feeling as if he is on death’s door. Luckily, Kathy intervenes and phones Richie Diamante, who dispatches his detectives to arrest the classmate who, yes, has been killing the boys in alphabetical order, just like on report card day. 

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Kevin Egan is the author of more than 50 short stories and eight novels, including the legal thriller Midnight, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book, and a three-book series of golf mysteries written under the pen name Conor Daly. His website is http://www.kevinjeganfiction.com

In tis thoughtful blog post, Peter Glazebrook contemplates how artificial intelligence and the development of an online persona may or may now affect the future of murder. Don’t miss his latest story, “Calculated Murder,” in our July/August issue, on sale now!

The inspiration for stories often comes from our interaction with common objects. Now, before you digest that statement, whilst considering that this is a magazine featuring murder stories, let me put your mind at rest. I rarely try out my plots in real life. But, let us consider our daily interactions with the World Wide Web and associated operating systems.

The software programs on social media platforms try their best to anticipate your needs, bless them. To be fair, my feeds do capture my interests in paleontology, space flight, and science fiction. I’m not entirely sure why I need to see adverts about toenail fungus, but there you go. Maybe it’s an obsession of men at a certain age or the computer is punishing me for refusing cookies. However, when I do find an interesting post, it is quickly swamped if I don’t look at the item immediately. And there are only so many disgusting pictures of feet I’m prepared to wade through to find an article on early mammal fossils.

So, I think to myself, wouldn’t it be a good idea if I had some software that would look at my social media feeds and actually find stuff that is interesting. Of course it would have to mimic my tastes. The closer an online filter program came to having my personality, the more effective it would be. In time, with enough training, it would become an autonomous online avatar, perhaps posting material for me and giving likes to articles that it thinks I would find interesting. If we all had such AI servants, they’d spend most of their time chatting to each other. Probably wondering why we worry so much about foot hygiene.

A couple of years ago this would have been science fiction. Now we only await some bright young thing finding a way to monetise the idea.

This was the inspiration for my story, where the sidekick of the detective is a bored avatar looking for something to do with its time.

Which brings us to the nub of a detective story. The question is, how, in the future, are you going to commit the perfect murder? The answer is that Colonel Plum with the candlestick in the drawing room will always have his tried and trusted place in the panoply of protagonists. But, in the near future, there will be new ways of dispatching people. According to Moore’s law the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years. To us this means there’s an exponential growth in computing power. Computers have, as far as we’re concerned, infinite calculating ability. This means that virtually anything can become a weapon. Why? Because the odds of any event occurring, and manipulating the environment to increase that probability to near certainty, can be estimated. So, if your very helpful AI books you a holiday near a nuclear power plant, beware.

Which brings us to motive. The homicidal Colonel Plum stalking you through a country house will have a reason. Motives for killing have not changed throughout history. They include hatred, envy, jealousy, love, but let’s face it, usually money. This is why artificial intelligence is unlikely to try and kill us. It won’t have a reason. Your avatar will sit there, chatting with its buddies on social media whilst using a fraction of its available computing power to solve your problems. In reality, AI is more likely to kill you off through incompetence rather than malice. But then as there are new means of committing murder, perhaps new motives will appear.  And let’s not forget that people have access to computing power, and mathematical power can be as dangerous as a candlestick.

I know what you are thinking. You are dismissing such speculations as science fiction. You are thinking that my story is about something that might happen in the future and has nothing to do with murder mysteries. I suggest that in a world where publishers have to specify they won’t accept material written by an AI, because such material cannot be distinguished from that written by a human, science fiction will happen tomorrow.

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Peter Glazebrook is a British author of Science Fantasy, Horror and Detective stories. His residence is a small town situated north of Liverpool. He is a former scientist, Civil Servant, and SCUBA diving instructor. but now divides his time between writing, hill walking, and beekeeping. He is a keen member of local writing groups and likes to encourage other authors.
Peter has published three urban fantasy novels: Heir of my Invention, The Dragon and her Wrath, and Fear No More.

Alissa Grosso pays homage to the Pennsylvania and New Jersey towns that shaped not only her life, but her fiction! Learn all about them in this special post, and check out Alissa’s latest story, “Mysterious Ways,” in our July/August issue, on sale now!

I’ve lived in a variety of towns over the years, mainly in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Most of those towns have been small towns, and like happy families they are all alike. Every small town I have lived in has been full to bursting with quirky characters. Perhaps that’s why small towns make some of the best settings for mystery stories.

About a decade or so ago I found myself living in a small town in Pennsylvania whose residents were as quirky as they come. I remember trying to explain to my boyfriend who doesn’t watch nearly as many British mystery shows as I do that it was like living in an episode of Midsomer Murders, minus all the murder. One of the more colorful characters was an elderly woman who pedaled around town on an adult-sized tricycle stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down from people’s yards and porches. Then one evening in a surreal instance of art imitating life I was watching an episode of Midsomer Murders where an elderly woman rode around on a tricycle and stole stuff. I felt vindicated in my assessment of my strange little town. It almost made up for the fact that my elderly neighbor had pinched that stained glass plant stake from my window box.

Barley, Pennsylvania, where my short story “Mysterious Ways” (in the July/August 2026 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine) takes place doesn’t exist. Like the town of Culver Creek, Pennsylvania where I set a series of thrillers it’s a sort of amalgamation of the different small towns I’ve called home over the years—places that are full of history, local lore and small town gossip. I remember one of the small towns I lived in had a folksy sign displayed on the counter of the Post Office that read, “The nice thing about a small town is even if you don’t know what you’re doing someone else does.” Proving that adage true one morning I was out walking my dog, and was surprised to learn that I was moving. I guess it serves me right for putting a cardboard box in my car one day, thus firing up the rumor mill.

Barley, like Cabot Cove or Badger’s Drift or any of the hundreds of fictional small towns with surprisingly high body counts that have come before it, is the perfect setting for a little bit of murder, where everyone knows (or thinks they know) entirely too much about their neighbors, where everyone is just a little bit strange. I say this as a small town resident, who definitely is a bit quirky, herself. So, for the foreseeable future I’ll be calling a small town home, and setting my mysteries in these cozy but offbeat spots.

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Alissa Grosso is the author of 11 books, most recently Blood Answer, the 4th book in her Culver Creek series. She chronicles her adventures in writing, art and life in her weekly newsletter “Creativity and Contentment.” She lives in New Jersey and can be found online at AlissaGrosso.com.

In this thoughtful post, Kevin Egan reflects on the professors and the summers working on a golf course that helped inspire his story “Albatross”

My three creative writing professors in college espoused three different theories about fiction writing. The first believed that fiction writing could not be taught but could be learned. The second believed that with enough imagination a writer could write any story and create any character no matter how far removed from the writer’s direct experience. The third believed that every writer had only one story to tell and that a good writer could adorn the variations so skillfully that readers would not notice.

Having taught creative writing in an adult-ed program, I agree with the first theory. Eight novels and more than 50 short stories removed from those college creative writing classes, I rarely stray from stories, settings, and characters with at least some direct connection to my own experiences. But the third theory – the one story per writer concept – struck me as absurd. As an English major, I could have named many writers of infinite variety. 

Now, however, I think the third theory is at least debatable.

During my formative writing years, I had a steady summer job at a golf course. On weekends, I worked as a starter, which meant I stood on the first tee to make sure that the foursomes began play at their assigned starting time. Sounds easy, but over the course of a weekend morning tensions would rise. Late-arriving foursomes would cause the tee to fall behind schedule. Foursomes would suspect that other foursomes had been “slipped in” without a valid starting time. I usually mediated these disputes, but one day there was a particularly heated argument that almost ended in physical blows. I sorted things out, and twenty minutes later the last of these foursomes was strolling down the first fairway.

An older couple I’ll call Mr. and Mrs. K. remained on the tee. Mr. K seemed permanently sad. His facial expressions, his posture, even his golf swing spoke of a man carrying a heavy burden. His burden was no mystery, even to a knuckle-headed teenager like me. Something had happened to Mrs. K. She walked stiffly, spoke haltingly, and barely could swing a golf club. One shoe was built up because one leg was shorter than the other. Gobs of make-up couldn’t hide the fact that her forehead had been reconstructed.

Mr. K, who had witnessed the argument over the starting times, sat slumped on a bench.

“Those fools,” he said. “Do you know what happened to my wife? I ran a red light because I was late for a tee time. We got broadsided. And to hear these fools fighting over seven minutes.”

He shook his head and said nothing else. The seven minutes he mentioned was the interval between starting times.

I never saw Mr. and Mrs. K through the same eyes. I never forgot that conversation. Years later, I published my first short story. The genesis of the story was a golf joke filtered through Mr. K’s anguish. 

In the story, an elderly caddie named Pepper relates a strange incident from his days as a young caddie. (Remember, I rarely stray from stories, characters, and settings without some connection to my own experience.) The adolescent Pepper is assigned to a wealthy eccentric named Murtaugh, who is somewhat of a sorry legend at the country club. Throughout the golf season, Murtaugh plays alone, late in the day, just himself and his (unlucky) caddie trudging through the lengthening shadows. The only time he plays golf with anyone is during the annual club championship, which he seems determined to win. But his performance in the championship has become fodder for caddie yard jokes because he always makes it to the finals but then loses the match on the 18^th hole. “Like a newsreel run for the hundredth time,” Pepper observes. Still, Pepper is determined to help Murtaugh win, not because he is a loyal caddie, not because he feels badly for Murtaugh, but because he wants to elevate his own status among the caddies by helping this perennial loser win the championship.

It won’t be easy. During those solitary rounds, Pepper sees that Murtaugh always hooks his tee shot deep into the trees along the 18^th hole. In fact, his golf ball always comes to rest among three small ornamental evergreens dwarfed by towering oaks. To make matters worse, Murtaugh always loses his concentration and tries to extricate himself with wild, low-percentage shots rather than conservative, safe shots.

Pepper guides Murtaugh through the early matches of the championship. Murtaugh wins each match handily, so his inability to play the 18^th hole does not matter. But in the finals, Murtaugh and his opponent are tied when they reach the 18^th hole. Again, and as always, Murtaugh hits his tee shot into the trees. But now, and for the first time, Pepper suggests that Murtaugh change his strategy. The suggestion leads to an argument, and Pepper slowly comes to understand that Murtaugh does not want to win, that this yearly championship is Murtaugh’s personal Greek Underworld. Despite this realization, Pepper does not give up. He convinces Murtaugh to hit the safe shot that finally wins the championship.

But the story isn’t over. That night, after the championship dinner, Pepper follows Murtaugh onto the darkened golf course. At first, he hears Murtaugh sobbing, then finds him kneeling with his trophy among the three small evergreens. The sobs gradually resolve into words of apology. It turns out that Murtaugh’s lot is much worse than Mr. K’s.  Murtaugh also ran a red light on his way to the golf course and crashed into another car. His wife was killed, and his life had been a fever dream ever since. Pepper, unwittingly, helped him break the fever.

The story, “Pulling the Hagen,” appeared in the October 1983 issue of Whispers, a horror/fantasy magazine. After 40 years and thousands of pages of published fiction, the two ideas that combined to become “Pulling the Hagen” have never been far from my mind. I wrote a much shorter and much more blatantly supernatural version called “Penance.” It was accepted once but never actually published; many near misses followed. The latest iteration of the idea is “Albatross” in the March-April issue of AHMM. “Albatross” is the second of a series of stories that resurrect the characters and setting from a series of golf mystery novels I wrote in the 1990s. Like “Hagen,” it involves a patch of ground in the rough alongside the 18^th hole on a golf course.     

I suppose the question remains: If  “Albatross” is a version of the “one story” that has followed me for more than 40 years, will I write yet another?

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Kevin Egan is the author of 50 short stories, including 24 that have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. He is also the author of eight novels, including the noir-ish legal thriller Midnight, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013.

In this informative blog post by S. B. Watson, learn all about the unique card game that helped inspire S. B. Watson’s latest story for AHMM, “Tricks on the Table,” from our July/August issue, on sale now!

The subject of “Tricks on the Table” is obscure, out-of-date to the point of being archaic, irrelevant to today’s social movements, and very dear to my heart—whist.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, “whist” was a trick-taking card game that grew in popularity in England and France from the 1740s up to the late Victorian era. According to Cavendish—a name you’ll hear a lot, if you ever look into the history of Whist rules—the ‘modern’ form of whist began in parlors during the 1740’s, when Edmond Hoyle (yes, that Hoyle) began teaching the game and its strategies by private lesson.

By the mid-1800’s, the game had experienced an explosion in popularity. It was played by everyone from the King of France to inveterate gamblers, one step away from debtor’s prison. For a time, it easily rivaled chess for regard and popularity. By the end of the 19^th century, however, it fell by the wayside as other games—such as Bridge—superseded it.

Today, it’s nearly forgotten, lingering only among hardcore fans of the five-hour Pride and Prejudice miniseries and maybe a few readers of Jules Verne (whist was Phileas Fogg’s favorite diversion).

Which brings this back round to myself.

Shortly after Jenet and I were married, two of our closest friends—Gillian and Timothy—also got hitched. All four of us were reading nerds. We’d all read Pride and Prejudice, I’d read Around the World in Eighty Days. We all loved boardgames. Trying our hands at Whist seemed like a fun one-off experiment.

That one-off game night turned into weekly whist games that ran for nearly four years. When Life eventually imposed itself—in the form of kids, work, projects, conflicting schedules, competing pastimes—the weekly game nights turned into monthly game nights. These monthly get-togethers continued, again, for years.

It’s been a decade-and-a-half, and we still get together with Gillian and Timothy to play whist. Now we’re down to every few months, and when we play, we’re surrounded by a dozen rowdy kids—but it’s still our go-to game.

I can’t say we’ve learned any great secrets of life from it—except that luck absolutely does exist; ‘sure-thing’ schemes always find a way of unravelling themselves; no cause is too lost to have hope; teamwork doesn’t always beat individual inspiration, but is usually more fun; and that our wives somehow win way more than Timothy and I, no matter how much we calculate. There’s just something about it that keeps us coming back. 

It was after one of these monthly whist nights, while my wife and I were talking over the play of the hands, that the idea for an ‘impossible’ game struck me as the core for a mystery. I mulled the concept over for a year before I developed what I thought was a plausible method for writing the idea out.

The story that resulted is a gentle tour through the history of whist—its most famous practitioners, the greatest whist writers, and even the laws and philosophies of play. Fact, myth, and my own experiences are all on display in “Tricks on the Table”—identifying each is probably best left to the reader.

So, to end, is “Tricks on the Table” relevant to today? Does it dig into the depths of the human condition? Does it make a good argument to excuse its own obscurity? Probably not. But, mirroring my own relationship to the game of whist throughout the years, I hope reading it will simply be darn fun, and keep you turning the pages to see the next lay of the hands. No more, no less.

Shelley Costa discusses the spooky stories her eccentric Scots-Irish mother told her as a girl, and how they inspired her latest for AHMM, “Jack McCool and the Turnip Lantern”

My mother was what these days we call a “creative.” There she was, this woman who was an Appalachian, Depression product, a fine actress who could run a house and not resent it. She was someone who took care of things, including raising me, her only child. She could sew doll clothes, perform in stage plays, read William Faulkner, and write beautiful poetry about losing classmates to war, a husband to another woman, and life to lung cancer. Maybe she was part pookah, a tip of the cap to her Scots-Irish ancestry, and there was something wild and fanciful in this responsible woman who would sing as my lullabyes “Queenie the Stripper” and “Ain’t We Crazy?”

She created in me a large capacity for the unconventional, even as she roasted turkeys, saved S&H green stamps, and provided a home for her aged father-in-law. Along the lines of her love for her Scots-Irish ancestry, I remember the shillelagh she kept inside our little coat closet. I couldn’t tell you the color on the walls of my bedroom, but that object I can recall clearly. It stood all my growing-up years against an unlit corner, obscured a bit by coats. There it was, this knobby, gnarled, friendly, mysterious stick. It wasn’t an umbrella or a snow shovel or a cane. I never knew where it came from, or, for that matter, where it got to. But I can picture Mom saying, when I inquired, something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s the shillelagh,” the same as if she was identifying the family dog.

It wasn’t long, then, before she tried me out on banshees. It seemed she was stepping things up a notch with these shrieking, keening, flying spirits. But they never scared me. I understood them, even as a child, even then imagining times when nothing less than shrieks and flights would do in life. Banshees and shillelaghs were not the stuff of any other holidays I knew—not reindeer, not crêches, not chocolate bunnies or colored eggs—they were pricks to the imagination. “Jack McCool and the Turnip Lantern” is one result. I hope you enjoy it.

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Shelley Costa’s work has been nominated for both the Edgar and Agatha Awards and has received a Special Mention for the Pushcart Prize. Shelley holds a PhD in English from Case Western Reserve University, where she wrote her dissertation on suspense, and she went on to teach fiction writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art for many years. When she isn’t plotting murder, she swims laps, studies Art History, and enjoys time with friends and family. 

Learn about the fascinating natural and cultural history behind a storied California lake that inspired Sue Parman’s latest for AHMM, “Corpse Handler and the Dead Ridge Walker” from our May/June issue!

I began my career as an anthropologist studying a Gaelic-speaking community in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, but for thirty years I taught in and chaired a department in California, and gradually got to know the state’s history through short trips. The most significant event in the history of the state was the Gold Rush. Before 1848, as many as 300,000 Native Americans occupied the state. By 1870, violence and disease reduced their number to 30,000. 

In 1983 a newspaper headline caught my attention: “The Ghost Lake Returns.” Heavy rain was falling in the San Joaquin Valley, flooding the towns and farmlands, filling up what I learned to be over thirteen thousand square miles of a shallow basin that once constituted a freshwater lake called by the Yokuts Pah-ah-su, by the Spanish El Lago de los Tulares, and by the American gold miners and settlers Tulare Lake. One of the largest populations of Native Americans in California resided around this lake until they were destroyed in the wake of the Gold Rush. Incoming settlers dammed the rivers that had flowed into it, drained the lake, and created massive farmlands. I learned that the Yokuts used to host an annual Big Time at the lake when many tribes gathered to arrange marriages, exchange trade goods, and settle disputes.

I found it very poignant that the “ghost lake” sometimes returned, as if to remind current California residents of the devastating history of Native American destruction and displacement. I was also very moved by a description of Ridge Walkers who carried news among the tribes. I began to write a book about an orphan boy adopted by a Yokuts Headman to succeed him as Headman (a replacement for his idiot son, who was not really an idiot), but all the boy wants is to become a Ridge Walker. 

As many writers with multiple careers and duties do, I worked on the story when I could. The plot changed. I added villains, love interests, historical events. It sprawled over continents and decades. I had an agent, and then I didn’t. The book (now a trilogy) didn’t sell.

Throughout my life I have loved to travel, either in person or through writing. I pick places I want to visit—Tibet, the Faroes, the Amazon—and find an excuse to spend time there by spinning a story. I never used to think about genre until my daughter, Gigi Pandian, became a successful mystery writer.

So I decided to write a mystery. And since I wanted to travel to the Faroe Islands, I set the mystery there, and it became “Gannets and Ghouls” that was published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 2024. The mystery genre provided a wonderful platform to weave together anthropological details, cultural themes, and a suggestion of supernatural weirdness. (And the stories didn’t take thirty years to finish.)

Last year, while going through boxes of my old Ridge Walker story, it occurred to me that the Yokuts role of Corpse Handler was the equivalent of a Coroner whose responsibility was to discover the cause of death. I dusted off some of my characters and rearranged them, and felt a deep sense of satisfaction at the chance to reanimate a lost period. I look at the story and feel that the ghost lake of Pah-ah-su has returned.

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Sue Parman is an anthropologist who writes in a number of genres outside of her academic work, from poetry, plays, and literary fiction to mysteries and horror. She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Best Women’s Travel Writing; Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing; The Antioch Review; Lumina; Rattle; Short stories of Crime, Detection, and Mystery; and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Her story “Gannets and Ghouls” was included in Rabia Chaudry’s “Mystery Hour” podcast (July 2025), and she has contributed to EQMM’s blog, somethingisgoingtohappen.net under the general heading of “The Anthropologist and the Mystery Writer” (“The Structure of Secrets,” “The Theory of Limited Good,” and “Killing Cats [in Fiction] as a Creative Act”). In academia she has written extensively about the evolutionary significance of play, and explores these ideas in her web site, www.sueparman.com, especially “Daily Quote.”

Elysia Whisler discusses the writing process behind “Legacy,” her short story from our May/June issue, which took her from being initially inspired by her family’s military history, to whittling down the scope of the piece from a potential novel to a short story

Until They Are Home.

Never Forgotten.

No One Left Behind.

There is no official motto for the U.S. military organizations that have recovered and repatriated our fallen service members, and though wording for their mission has changed over the years, the sentiment remains the same at its core.

You might say the same of my short story, “Legacy.”

If “HorRomance” had been a thing back when I started writing and selling novels, “Legacy” would likely have appeared as a novel called Pieces. Inspired in part by my father, who served over thirty years in the Air Force, my grandfather, who was a World War II veteran, a family member who worked at CILHI (Central Identification Laboratory, Hawai’i) and my teenaged years living on O’ahu, Pieces was a genre bending ghost story with elements of mystery, horror and romance. My avant-garde agent was never able to sell it, and the book languished in my files while I went on to write and sell other novels.

Flash to 2024, where genre-bending is almost the norm, and I’m at the first ShortCon, feeling inspired to revisit my old love for the short story. Jackie Sherbow from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine was there, and suddenly I wanted to fulfill a bucket list item I’d had since I was a teenager—to appear in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. I pulled out Pieces, which I hadn’t looked at in probably a decade, and was struck by how much had changed over the years. The military organizations responsible for recovering and identifying the remains of U.S. servicemembers and returning them to their families has changed hands and titles several times. They were called CILHI during the time of “Legacy,” became JPAC (Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command) in 2002 and then DPAA (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) in 2015.

Other things have changed, too. I’m a better writer today, which won’t come as a shock to anyone who’s been writing and publishing for a while. Even if you’re talented, nothing beats putting in the miles—reading, writing, editing, submitting—to hone your craft.

The novel itself wasn’t something I wanted to try to sell again, at least not right away. It would need a rewrite, an overhaul of premise, and other considerations that I wasn’t prepared to delve into. Still, there was something good there, and the essence of the book was just too important to leave dormant any longer. You might say, I just couldn’t leave it behind.

That left me the challenge of figuring out what story I’d been trying to tell in three-hundred pages and distilling it down to thirty. The romance had to go. The lost, tortured girl on the cusp of womanhood, and her ghost, had to stay. The heart of the story came down to two things for me. One, the importance of legacies. There are things in life that are handed down to us, generation to generation, some good, some not—relics, mitochondrial DNA, stories, devastation, hatred, love—and it’s up to us to decide what we do with them. Whether we keep them or toss them. Whether we do things the same or make changes. Whether we wallow or grow.

Two, though some things are better left buried, there are things that should never be left behind.

Our service members.

Our responsibility.

Our stewardship.

Our children.

And, for me, this story.

I hope it honors all who served.

I hope it touches all who need it.

Thanks for reading.

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Elysia Whisler’s novel-length fiction has received starred reviews from Booklist and an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best of the Month. She’s the 2025 winner of The Daphne Du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense.