“Welcome To My Tribe” by Robert Lopresti

Novelist, short-story author, and nonfiction writer Robert Lopresti is a government information librarian at Western Washington University. He blogs at SleuthSayers, Little Big Crimes, and Today in Mystery History. Here he talks about the mystery-fiction community and writing his story “Nobody Gets Killed” from the current issue of AHMM.

Everybody needs a little help sometime.

My story, “Nobody Gets Killed,” which appears in the March/April issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, consists of just one scene: a confrontation between a cop and a driver on a country road.

It didn’t take long to write it, but after the first draft I got worried. I didn’t want my cop to do anything wrong—at least, except if I intended him to wrong, of course. And what do I know about police procedure?

Not much. So naturally I called the cops. Specifically, I called my friend David Dean, who is both a crime writer and the retired chief of a police department in New Jersey. He quickly read over the story and made one correction, which I was happy to accept.

Now the moral of this story is not that you should all send your short stories to David for free editing (I promised him I would say that). My point is that mystery writers help each other out.

You might not know that if your knowledge of us comes primarily from, well, mysteries. In those tales you frequently find writers plotting fiendishly against each other, with gossip and backstabbing—figurative or literal—galore. What fiends we all seem to be! (And, full disclosure, my “Shanks On Misdirection,” from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine’s July/August 2009 issue, is about two crime writers being distinctly mean to each other.)

But I confess: It’s all make-believe. The truth is, we’re a pretty nice crowd. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard Newbie X tell how Best-selling Y went out of their way to help X up the ladder when there was no chance for reward. Not long ago a crime novelist connected me to her Hollywood agent because she thought my Greenfellas would make a good movie. A lot of paying forward, as they say.

When I hear about a new market for short stories I always pass the news on to my short fiction friends. I know they will do the same for me. And the best part of events like Bouchercon is swapping stories over a coffee or beer with your sibling scribblers, the only ones who really understand how it feels when a reviewer condemns you for not writing the book they wanted, instead of reviewing the one you did write.

Maybe we get all of our nasties out on the page and don’t feel the need to do it in real life. As I recall the late great Sue Grafton claimed she wrote her first mystery for the chance to kill off an ex-husband in it.

At the 1993 Edgars Banquet, when Donald E. Westlake was recognized as a Grand Master he got choked up and told the crowd “You’re my tribe!” I can’t put it better than that, and I’m proud to be a member.

I wish I could end on that note, but in the spirit of honesty I have to report that while this piece was gestating I heard from a female mystery writer that when she announced a piece of good news to a crowd of her peers one man said “Who did you have to have sex with to get that?” Except he didn’t say it nearly so politely.

I’m sure he would say he was joking, but come on. Does anyone not understand what underlies that kind of joke? And in the autumn of #MeToo could anyone claim it was an innocent mistake?

Which just proves, I suppose, that there are jerks in every tribe. And maybe they tend to be more visible to the women in the crowd than the men.

And that, oddly enough, brings me back to my story “Nobody Gets Killed,” which is about two strangers trying to negotiate a difficult situation, both hoping there are no jerks involved. If/when that happens to you, I wish you the best.