Trace Evidence

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).

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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.

Follow Al Onia on Facebook and Linked In or visit: https://ajonia.com

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.

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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 . . .”

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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!

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This interview with Barbara Peters, Poisoned Pen Press, is one I like very much:

Katherine Hall Page & The Body in the Web

It, and much more, is available on my web site www.katherine-hall-page.org I am also on FB

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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.

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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.

A story which appeared in the January/February 2020 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine had a profound emotional impact on me. “The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74” by Art Taylor. I guess I wasn’t alone. It was named a finalist for the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards. It won the Derringer Award and became the title story for a fabulous collection of Art’s stories. A puzzling mystery, a heart-felt tale of lost innocence, a period piece, and a clear-eyed commentary on social injustice, the story weaved together more beautifully crafted elements than I had previously believed possible in short crime fiction.

I loved the way Art firmly anchored the action in time and place, somehow rendering the themes more universal in the process. Of course, I wanted to emulate his work in that way and many others, but for a couple of years, I couldn’t discover any germ of a story that carried sufficient gravitas.

Then, in 2022, an old friend and veteran of The US Marine Corps described how he experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis at age eight, stocking up on peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate milk, crawling under his family’s front porch with the girl from down the street, waiting for the flash. I knew that I had to build a story around that moment.

Weaving in a crime element and finding unifying themes took a while, and my first efforts were a hot mess.

“You don’t want to be too precious with your work.” That’s how one respected short crime fiction author responded when I told her about my story in progress, two years and thirty major drafts later. One excellent author-editor gave me some disbelieving side-eye.

They both meant well. We’ve all met that aspiring author, the one trapped in the hamster wheel of unending revision, their debut and magnum opus never complete.

As a modern author, you must embrace deadlines. You must relish the opportunity to write with a gun to your head. The Amazon halo effect following a successful book release grows shorter in duration with each passing year. Short story authors need to crank out more titles to make up for the ever-dwindling returns in the sea of financially challenged online and print markets.

But how precious is too precious? The question is not new to our time. A hundred and eighty years ago, a relatively unknown author by the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne penned a short story called “The Artist of the Beautiful” that wrestled with the same idea. His protagonist, Owen Warland, a craftsman, pursues an all-consuming passion to create something of extraordinary beauty, even as his youth and the love of his life slowly drift away. Hawthorne’s keen observations on the intersection between art and mortality are every bit as valid today as they were in his century.

 “. . . he was incited to toil the more diligently by an anxiety lest death should surprise him in the midst of his labors.”

“So long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty of its texture.”

Hawthorne values passionate devotion to a single creative vision, even in the absence of any material reward, even if it takes a lifetime to fulfill.

Of course, not every vision requires a lifetime. Art Taylor took twenty-five years to complete “The Boy Detective,” started in 1995, but he’s also completed stories in a single evening.

When I told him that I was revising a piece inspired by his own work, he graciously agreed to read “The Bank Heist Before Armageddon.” He offered encouragement and his own invaluable insights. A few revisions later, I was delighted to receive an acceptance from Linda Landrigan, editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She said the story was beautiful. I fervently hope that readers agree.

My father is a firefighter. His origin story is well-known and well-told in our family. As a toddler, young Bruce was riveted by television news coverage of a certain historic fire in Hartford, Connecticut, captivated by the shining trucks on display and the helmeted army deployed to battle the blaze. Attending elementary school, he anxiously awaited each Fire Safety Day and the chance to meet his heroes. And on the day that he turned eighteen-years-old, he returned home from high school to be greeted by the local volunteer fire chief, who was waiting with a membership application in his hand.

Ever since, my father has been responding to emergencies and putting out fires, racing toward the danger rather than away. He’s dedicated his life to protecting the people of his community and the things they hold most precious. Today, in the very hometown he grew up in, he is the department chief who hands out the new member applications, and in his white helmet he leads a proud team of dedicated volunteers who put themselves at risk day after day, year after year.

I never felt the calling to follow in my father’s footsteps—my own passions led me into a world of books, to academia and publishing—but the fire service has been a constant in my life, too. To this day, my father keeps a simple crayon drawing of a firetruck that I scribbled one evening at the scene of a call when I was just a boy, as I watched him don his turnout gear and roll out hoses. I have borne witness to his sacrifice and to the fellowship shared by all firefighters. It has instilled in me a deep understanding of the heroism of the first responder.

Truly, these are heroes every bit as awe-inspiring as the legends who have captivated me in detective stories throughout the years—in print, the likes of Holmes and Marple and Brown; and on television, everyone from Columbo to Magnum to Briscoe to Frank Black.

When my abiding love of detective fiction inevitably inspired me to write my own mystery tales, I was bound and determined to make these stories about firefighters. Here was a dangerous and thrilling arena of heroes and monsters to rival that found in the police procedural! Here was an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the unparalleled heroism of the firefighter and those in the emergency medical services. I found my detective hero in retired fire marshal Richard “Dick” Byrne, an arson investigator who works with the Metropolitan Police in the District of Columbia, not so far from the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg.

I hasten to add that, in personality, Byrne is nothing like my father. A chain-smoking Scottish expat with a lifetime of experience fighting fires, Byrne is also irascible, as uncouth as he is uncompromising. He’s possessed of a fiery spirit that often gets him into all sorts of entertaining trouble during his investigations. His methodology, however, and that unwavering commitment to protecting the innocent and safeguarding his city, that was something familiar.

I’ve had no shortage of inspiration. Over the years, I’ve put together a battered notebook bulging with scraps of paper bearing all sorts of ideas for Dick Byrne mysteries, many of them suggested by my father and his work. There are more arson cases hinted at in those pages than I will ever be able to write. Slowly but surely, however, the best of them have made their way to the page.

Dick Byrne makes his Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine debut in “The Black Box.” This is a short story that you won’t find referenced in my notebook of ideas. Instead, I was presented with a writing prompt to craft a mystery that focused on “a black box.” Like most writing prompts I’ve been handed over the years, the creative challenge of it drew me in. What sort of arson investigation might center on a black box? The answer, as you will soon read, lies within a literal black box—a fire safe made of steel and vermiculite, designed and manufactured for heat endurance, shock absorbance, and water resistance. A strongbox made to ensure that the most precious of secrets will survive any disaster.

I knew the concept could be pushed further, however, to the study of behaviorism, to stimuli inputs and output reactions—to the black box of the human mind. Dick Byrne is a brilliant detective, but here was a dramatic opportunity to explore his most pronounced shortcomings. For though Byrne possesses an expert knowledge of chemistry, thermodynamics, and pyrolysis, like so many of us, he often struggles to understand what goes on in the minds of his fellow human beings. The result of that writing prompt became a spiraling story of boxes within boxes, mysteries within mysteries.

The spirit of the investigation—and of the characters who take part it—remains the most essential part of the formula for Dick Byrne. At the heart of “The Black Box,” you’ll witness police, firefighters, and emergency personnel working together to resolve a crisis. As in each installment of this series, you’ll find the District of Columbia Fire Department doing what they do best. And for all his flawed humanity, the selfless and steadfast spirit of the firefighter endures in the heart of the detective.

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Brian A. Dixon’s short fiction has appeared in the pages of publications such as Connecticut Review, Zahir, A Thousand Faces, and Honeyguide. He has also edited anthologies including Columbia & Britannia: An Alternate History (2009), nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. His most recent book, Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast (2025), is available from Fourth Horseman Press.

Not long ago, on the Short Mystery Fiction Society blog, several writers weighed in on a simple question: Do you base fictional characters on real people?

“Second Chance,” which appeared in the Nov.-Dec. 2025 issue of AHMM, is my 20th story set in the New York County Courthouse. The courthouse is a real place occupied by real people, and for 30 years I was one of those real people, working as a judge’s law clerk and, later, as an administrator. Which, I suppose, begs the question: are any of the many characters who inhabit these 20 stories (and, by the way, three novels) based on real people?

The short answer is No. None of the characters are based on real people. The long answer requires some explanation.

As a workplace and as a social structure, the courthouse is a stratified environment. In simplest terms, the judges are at the top, while everyone else mucks in down below. Who makes up the everyone else? The answer is several hundred people who occupy different levels of responsibility and authority based on their job titles. First, there are the chambers staffs, consisting of the 40 or so judges, their law clerks, and their confidential secretaries. Next there is the administrative staff, consisting of the chief clerk, a deputy chief clerk, and several department heads who manage the daily activities of courtroom clerks, back-office clerks, court reporters, and stenographic secretaries. There a legal staff, consisting of court attorneys not assigned to any particular judge but whose cumulative bank of legal knowledge is impressive. There are court aides, messengers, custodians, and the engineers who attend to the building’s physical plant. Finally, there are the court officers—the men and women in blue uniforms who provide security and protection. And beyond these 400 or so employees, there are the thousands of people who visit the courthouse every day: lawyers, litigants, prospective jurors, delivery people, and plain old sightseers. Quite a daily population for drawing inspiration or stimulating the imagination.

The continuing character in these stories is a court officer named Foxx, whose back story is deliberately vague. He began his career as a court officer in Bronx Criminal Court, where he was charged with dereliction of duty for “losing” a juror during an overnight sequestration. His union lawyer, a woman named Bev Caruso, settled the disciplinary proceeding for an unpaid two-month suspension and a transfer from Bronx Criminal Court to the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Years later, when the stories are set, Bev is now the Inspector General of the courts, while Foxx, is a seasoned court officer who doubles as her undercover agent.

In several of the stories, Foxx “looks into things” at the behest of Bev. Most of these “things” involve corruption or ham-handed attempts at corruption. In other stories, Foxx discovers wrongs he feels compelled to right.

What generates these stories? Where do I search out the ideas that I can spin into fiction? Rarely do these stories involve the cases I observed during my tenure as law clerk or the tabloid headlines a courthouse often generates. Instead, I focus my attention on representative characters within the courthouse hierarchy. What might their issues be? What might they want most, or least? Ultimately, what bubbles into my consciouness is a clash between characters, either from different strata or within a single stratum. So far the stories have focused on: a judge’s spouse [“A Small Circle”]; chambers staff [“Midnight”]; a courtroom clerk [“Black Hole Devotion” ]; a confidential secretary [“Work Lovers” ]; a custodian [“Reconciliation”]; a retired judge [“Term Life”]; a court aide [“The Heist”]; a dying court officer [“The Book of Judges”]; a coffee shop employee [“The Movie Lover”]; a corrupt law clerk [“The Courthouse Paperboy”]; a self-represented litigant [“The Harbinger”]; and a lovesick court officer [“Buds”].

In “Second Chance,” I turned to a pair of long-time friends and law school classmates. One is a well-respected judge; the other is a legal department staff attorney. The story begins when the staff attorney, Richard Heiser, fails to show up for his monthly lunch with Hon. Edmund Greenstreet. The judge becomes concerned—and because a judge is now concerned, Bev becomes involved. Her solution is to dispatch Foxx to find the missing man.     

Foxx begins his investigation by questioning the judge and his law clerk. The judge’s reaction to his friend’s disappearance strikes Foxx as odd; he seems more annoyed than concerned that Heiser has gone missing and insulted that the IG has sent a lowly court officer rather than a polished investigator. The law clerk remains conspicuously silent during this brief meeting. Foxx then interviews Heiser’s department head, who suspects that Heiser has been spiraling into a depression because the court system’s adoption of AI technology has rendered his particular skills—he is considered to be an amazingly creative wordsmith of legal writing—obsolete. Foxx, still troubled by his conversation with Judge Greenstreet, circles back to the law clerk. He knows that a chambers is a high-stress working environment and that the law clerk’s silence during the interview could mask a simmering antipathy. His intuition proves correct. Meeting with the law clerk alone, he quickly gets her to dish about the judge’s unhappy marriage and greedy adult children. She also provides a significant clue: Heiser owns no cell phone and routinely calls the chambers land-line on the same day of the week to confirm the monthly lunch date. Foxx, lurking after hours, finds the call on the chambers voice-mail log. This call becomes the strand that unravels the mystery of Heiser’s disappearance. And, without giving anything away, what Heiser wants most is what Judge Greenstreet wants least.

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Kevin Egan is the author of 50 short stories, including 23 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.

“Circumstantial Evidence” came about from two personal experiences of mine.  In 1992, I bicycled solo across the United States.  On August 12, 1992, I happened to cycle through Vega, Texas on their “Round Up” day.  Vega was a small town of maybe 1000 people.  But they put on quite a show what with the softball tournament, invitation Rodeo, the parade down Main Street and a bar-b-cue out in front of the town’s courthouse.  The other incident was a murder investigation I covered as a newspaper reporter for a small paper in Connecticut.  It seemed like a good idea to combine the two stories.  West Texas and the characters I met gave me the perfect stereotypes to play off of.  And as far as the murderer goes, he made only one mistake by overlooking the obvious.

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“Circumstantial Evidence” marks Eric B. Ruark’s third appearance in AHMM.  Currently he is supposed to be retired but is working on a series of sci-fi/mystery novels called Conquest of the Stars.  For your listening pleasure, he has recorded several of his other mysteries which can be found on Audible and over 50 other audiobook sites.