What aspect of mystery stories gives you the most pleasure? Is it the puzzle? Do you adore a locked room? A brain teaser? The slow elimination of suspect after suspect? Do you love to re-read Golden Age classics in which fair play was a given, with the author sworn to provide reader as well as detective with all the clues needed to solve the mystery? Or is it crime itself that fascinates you? The shock? The gore? The ingenious method of dealing death? Or the heart-pounding suspense that keeps you up late at night, turning pages frantically to find out what happens?
Or are you really in it for the characters? Like many hopelessly addicted mystery and crime fiction readers, I find most literary fiction boring. Of course there has to be a crime, a murder, a caper, a puzzle, or a high stakes threat to an appealing character. Something has to happen. But it has to happen to characters I care about, so character-driven mystery and crime fiction is my preferred fare, my filet mignon and potatoes au gratin, as both reader and writer.
I’m not talking about cozies, which spend a lot of time describing literal steak and potatoes—or wine or cheese or cupcakes—as well as clothing, which doesn’t interest me. The real problem with cozies is that the characters’ development is circumscribed by convention. There’s a glass floor that keeps their problems from going too deep. I find true traditional mysteries and the kind of police procedurals in which the reader learns more about the personal life of the protagonists as the series continues the most satisfying character-driven reads.
It’s easy to find character-driven novels, but how do authors develop characters and their relationships fully within the compass of a short story? The short story series offers unlimited opportunity to do just that, along with creating puzzles without sagging middles, gratuitous second and third murders, or excessively convoluted plots.
Look at the fictional character who’s most generally agreed to have come to life in the hearts and minds of readers since he first appeared almost a century and a half ago: Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes canon includes only four works that were considered book-length in their day at word counts between 43,000 and 59,000 but would be rejected as too short for publishable novels nowadays. The rest of the series consists of short stories. Does anyone ever say, “Oh, Conan Doyle wasn’t really a writer. He never wrote a novel.” I don’t think so!
My two series, the contemporary Bruce Kohler Mysteries and the historical Mendoza Family Saga, both started about fifteen years ago with published short stories, went on to novels, and are still alive today with new short stories continuing to appear. In both cases, my characters told me in no uncertain terms that they had more to say for themselves. I also wanted to know more about what happened to them after they solved not just the crimes they had to deal with but also the initial dilemmas that made them interesting.
Many readers complain about the trope of the alcoholic cop or private eye in crime fiction. Bruce Kohler is an alcoholic who gets sober. If he doesn’t relapse, what happens next? I’m a shrink who ran alcohol treatment programs for many years, so I know a lot about the recovery process. Readers who follow the series find out that Bruce does not spend the next few years going into bars and thinking about having a drink. He gradually grows up and deals with life and becomes what in Yiddish is called a mensch. He also stumbles into murders and gets nagged by his exasperating but funny friend Barbara into investigating them.
In the first Mendoza story, Diego Mendoza sails with Columbus on the Santa Maria because the Jews were kicked out of Spain on the very same day in 1492. I knew that fact well enough that Diego came to me in a dream, demanding that I tell his story. What happened to the Jews after they left Spain? I didn’t know. But I did a ton of research and discovered enough fascinating information to keep on writing. Thirty years later, Diego and his sister Rachel and their families are living in Istanbul. Diego is a prosperous merchant and ship builder. Rachel is working in Suleiman the Magnificent’s harem as a personal shopper to the ladies there—yes, Jewish women had this job—and solving mysteries. Just the other day, I was asked if I’m related to the Mendozas. Nope, I made them up. My forebears were not Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula but Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe, as both my DNA and my cultural traits (interrupting, talking with my hands, bagels—much like Bruce’s friend Barbara) confirm.
Trace Evidence 
I’d love for you to take a look at my new mystery The Book of Answers. The reluctant sleuth protagonist is a recently widowed pastor who is essentially forced by circumstances to re-engage with life when the bodies drop in the church where he works as the assistant pastor. I like mysteries in which an unlikely but interesting sleuth does the leg work.