I write short stories and novels and a novella here and there. I believe most authors write short stories as a way to “cleanse the palate” during the long haul of writing a novel, although some prefer to concentrate only on this most tortuous art form. I say tortuous because writing short is famously more difficult than writing long.
My shorts are stories that don’t fit with any of my three series, or story ideas that can’t be stretched to novel form, or tryouts for a new character or setting I’m experimenting with. But it’s always something that won’t let me go until I at least get it sketched out, then come back later to devote the better part of a month to tinkering with it. Sometimes the story won’t gel, and I have to put it away for a while.
In the case of “Cold Cases,” my story published in the January/February issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the sketching and tinkering stretched into years. I would have to leave the story but I always came back to it; I changed the title several times before finally hitting upon one that exactly described what the story was about. After that, the writing pretty much took care of itself.
That I couldn’t decide on the title was unusual, but I couldn’t let the idea and the main character go. It was too much fun and too different from anything I’d done before.
You see, “Cold Cases” bends the mystery genre into a ghost story, one in which the ghosts, all murder victims haunting a rustic Overlook-like resort hotel, are trying to earn a “get out of purgatory free” card. They are saddled with each other, possibly for eternity, as they try to bring their plight to the attention of the authorities.
Two of the ghosts were rivals in life, but their time in eternity is teaching them something like tolerance.
It should be a dark story, and it is. But it’s also filled with moments of irony and even humor, as the ghosts fumble through the afterlife, still clinging to old grudges and quirks from their time among the living. There’s something almost absurd about watching them, eternally bound to the scene of their demise, bickering over the past while trying to cooperate on solving their murders. It’s a story that highlights the complexities of human nature—how even in death, we’re shaped by the lives we lived, the choices we made, and the unfinished business we leave behind.
The challenge with “Cold Cases” was balancing that fine line between the macabre and the humorous, between the tragedy of these lost souls and the absurdity of their circumstances. It’s what kept me coming back to the story again and again. The characters, dead as they are, were very much alive to me, and I think that’s what every writer hopes for—that the characters take on a life of their own, refusing to let go until their story is told.
In the end, it’s not just about solving the mystery of their murders. It’s about redemption, even when redemption seems out of reach. It’s about finding closure in the most unlikely of places and circumstances. And maybe that’s why I kept at it for so long—because sometimes, like the ghosts in “Cold Cases”, we’re all just trying to find our way out of purgatory, one unfinished story at a time.
Trace Evidence 