I’ve been writing and selling short stories for almost four decades now, almost exclusively science fiction, fantasy and horror.
Almost exclusively.
I’ve also written westerns with time machines. Histories of film stories with ghosts. Educator stories in the near (and far) future. And, as it turns out, the occasional crime story with a fantastical element.
Coming from a science fiction mindset, it didn’t occur to me when I started that I’d ever appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, but I had a story that seemed mystery adjacent. The editors agreed. That was “Once They Were Monarchs,” which looks like a summer lifeguard story, but turns into one with a dragon, a troll and a criminal. The second involved the filming of Holiday Inn in 1941 with dancing girls, Fred Astaire, a murder and a ghost. “Carrying the News for a Dead Paperboy” is a coming of age story about a paperboy, a tragic killing and, well, spooky stuff.
And then my latest, “Midnight Movie,” which is hard to describe, but comes from a love of movies, old theaters and the future of mass entertainment. Oh, and there’s a detective, a body, and a crime.
Four stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine spread out over twenty-five years.
When I was young I read science fiction and fantasy almost exclusively, but some of those authors worked in mystery too. Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Isaac Asimov wrote the Caves of Steel stories with his robot detective, R. Daneel Olivaw. Philip K. Dick penned Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that became the movie, Blade Runner.
Someone asked me if I enjoyed genre bending. I never really thought about it that way. After all, mysteries are a part of a rich tradition in all genres.
Trace Evidence 