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There’s no getting away from it. Writing a novel or a short story is a strange thing to do. 

You spend long periods of time inside your head, but that’s not claustrophobic, because inside your head there are entire worlds, complete living and breathing people, conflicts and dramas that nobody else will ever feel as fully as the writer does. If we’re good, we’ll manage to capture some of that in words that will allow other people to share those worlds and characters and dramas—at least to some extent—but it’s never the same. 

Unless you’ve written stories, it’s hard to convey that. The closest I can get is when you compare watching a film to reading the book it was based on. The film has its own aspects that you can’t capture in a written story, but generally, losing yourself in a story brings more depth and detail, more power of emotions. The difference between reading a novel and writing one is comparable: a similar stepping up in intensity and verisimilitude. Writing a book is so much more real than reading one.

But there’s another category that fits into this spectrum somewhere: the books we will never write.

One of the most commonly asked questions of a writer is “Where do you get your ideas?” And if there’s one real trade secret in the writing world it is that coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part. Writers have ideas spilling out of their ears. We have notebooks crammed with them; or nowadays, lots of us have files on our computers and phones and other devices that are just as crammed as those old notebooks were. Most of our ideas never get developed into stories, because we simply don’t have the time.

Out of that pool of ideas, there are the initial sparks of the ones we go on to write, and there are the ones we will never write; but also, there are the ones that will very nearly get written. We can spend, weeks, months, even years in odd moments here and there, coming back to a particular idea and adding notes, expanding that idea until we have bloated files full of the things we need to know, or find out, if we ever get to turn that idea into a fully fledged story. 

Sometimes that’s just an early stage in eventually sitting down and writing the story itself, but often it stalls. The idea doesn’t quite come to life. Or we realise that it’s too similar to an existing story. Or another idea jumps the queue and demands to be written. Or we get sidetracked by working with a publisher on something else we’ve already written that needs editing and polishing for publication. There can be any number of reasons why an idea a writer has put a lot of work into might miss that moment of peak excitement when it simply has to be written, and slides off into the long twilight of wouldn’t it have been nice to write that one?

Those books don’t cease to exist, though. They vie for space in my head, alongside all the stories I’ve actually written: like memories of holidays and old friends, these stories and nearly-stories are about people I know intimately, set in places I know inside out; they’re part of who I am. (A writer never stops being a writer, because even if you’re no longer putting words down on paper the act of having been a writer has created the mental structures of who that person is.)

Those books, the stalled, incomplete worlds and characters that have possessed my thoughts for long periods of time, might not be as fully formed as something I’ve gone on to spend months and years actually writing, but they’re there. They’re part of who I am. In my head as I write this—the thing that prompted this little essay—is a mystery trilogy set during the Blitz. I’ve written a short story that, with a lot of hacking about, would serve as the opening of a novel. In my head, I know where that novel goes, I know the characters that leap to life from that initial short story, and the ones who we will later learn to distrust and even despise. I know where a follow-up novel will go, albeit in less fleshed-out detail, and, most importantly, I know how this second book will bring to the fore elements of back story touched on in the first book. And I know how all these threads come together in a third novel, that will bring that back story out front-of-stage, and big issues will be confronted and, to varying degrees, resolved.

All of this is in my head and in some files on my computer, and along with a million other things I’ve been working on it for three or four years. 

It won’t get written though. In doing all this work to explore and build up the stories and characters, I’ve realised that too many elements of it have been done before by others. Maybe one day I’ll work out how to twist it away from those other stories, but there are so many other ideas to explore, I know that’s becoming increasingly unlikely. 

In all likelihood, that trilogy will never get written. 

But it exists. In my head, in those files of notes. In the three or four years that I’ve kept coming back to it. I know the characters, I know the settings, more vivid than many people and places I’ve actually known. It’s more real to me than a film, more real to me than a story I might have read, but less real than if I’d actually written it. But it’s there, and my life has been much richer for knowing it, and experiencing it. 

So yes, there’s no getting away from it. Writing a story or a novel is a strange process. But not writing one can be just as weird.

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Nick Guthrie is a crime writer based in East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, and his short fiction has sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other magazines and anthologies. Under other writing names, he is the author of more than twenty books, and his work has been shortlisted for various awards and optioned for the movies. You can find out more about Nick and his work at www.nickguthrie.co.uk and at Bluesky and Instagram.

My mother was not much of a disciplinarian. Most of my childhood memories are of her seated in an easy chair with a cigarette and a cup of coffee, reading her newest find from the public library.

Maybe seeing her consume all those murder mysteries was enough of a threat to keep us kids in line. Mom surely knew things about hiding bodies.

After working my way through Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series, and being profoundly influenced by Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, I was running thin on reading materials. 

What was so fascinating that Mom had to be torn away from her novel by clamoring, hungry kids?

First and foremost, Mom was an avid fan of Erma Bombeck, author of The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank (1976). Bombeck wrote non-fiction about suburban life with a wry sense of humor matching my mother’s.

Second in the lineup was the Dorothy Gilman Mrs. Pollifax series. There are fourteen books in the series, and I’m certain Mom read every one. Multiple times.

Emily Pollifax is a depressed empty-nester widow who desperately needs to find a purpose in her golden years. In a totally unlikely series of events, she ends up going on a courier mission for the CIA. Emily quickly proves her worth, and becomes an agent.

I realize the appeal now. Mom spent her twenties through forties saddled with a pack of unruly children (despite the implied threat of the tutorial from all those murder mysteries). I can’t say she ever had grand expectations for a life of adventure. Or even the desire. She seemed perfectly content to travel with Mrs. Pollifax to exotic locations from the comfort of her armchair. 

I had to understand the mystique. So I picked up book one, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. And I was hooked. I’m not the only fan. Blogger and reviewer Mark Baker named his website Carstairs Considers after Mrs. Pollifax’s boss.

Blame Dorothy Gilman. I slowly delved into the world of mystery. Surprisingly, not spy novels. Mrs. Pollifax was my gateway drug to the cozy mystery world.

During a college literature class, I had the revelation that I did not want to make my life’s work studying and writing about other authors. I wanted to BE an author like Dorothy Gilman. I wanted to write cozy-flavored adventures. 

The decision to not enter academia lead me down a path of blue-collar jobs. But some of that drudgery inspired future short stories (my Charles Jerome Harrison and Marlin Hammerbach factory-based stories appear in AHMM). I eventually had a nice career in environmental compliance. A regulatory paperwork sort of drudgery, but better paying than factory floor labor.

My brother took the Gilman influence in a different direction. He decided he wanted to be a spy. But the CIA wanted him to experience military service first. By this time, he was married and starting a family. Apparently, walking into CIA headquarters and offering your services didn’t work like it had for Mrs. Pollifax. He changed directions to become a lawyer.

Mom never did attempt to become a spy. Or an author. She was content to read about adventure, not pursue it. And that may be the greatest impact Dorothy Gilman had on me.

There is a world of readers who want to be entertained. Romance author Nancy Naigle describes that her writing career “all started with a desire to write one book to help one busy gal through one bad day.” 

There is nobility and purpose in quietly living your life. I’m an author, but I take the same relief from life’s pressures in the enjoyment of other writers’ good tales. It doesn’t have to be deep. It doesn’t have to be long. Just take me on an adventure.

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Catherine Dilts debuted in 2013 with the short story The Jolly Fat Man, set in a factory. Since then, ten of her stories have appeared in AHMM. Number eleven, Real Cowgirls Like It Hot, takes place during a farmers’ market hot sauce contest. Catherine writes the Rose Creek cozy mystery series, and a YA science fiction series co-authored with her daughter under the pen name Ann Belice, The Tapestry Tales. https://www.catherinedilts.com/ 

I love dogs.

I love my first dog, Olo, who would wait up at 1 a.m. to greet me when I came home from my ER shift.

I love my now-dog Roxy, whom I adored from the first moment she lick-lick-licked my hand in the shelter.

Yet it didn’t occur to me to write short dog mysteries until author Kristine Kathryn Rusch asked me to create a story from a canine perspective. I penned “My Two-Legs,” where Star, a yellow lab/golden retriever, inspired by Olo, rescues her human. It was published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and won the Derringer Award, was shortlisted for the Macavity Award, and longlisted for the Staunch Prize. Cool!

For some reason, probably because I’m dense, I didn’t write a related tale until Hitchcock’s Editor in Chief, Linda Landrigan, mentioned that she’d enjoy another doggy detective story from me.

Huh!

How could a second dog solve a mystery? And why?

I researched dogs and crimes and was astonished to learn that, since 2022, the most popular breed in the United States, overtaking the Labrador retriever, is the French bulldog. No wonder people stole Lady Gaga’s two “Frenchies” in 2021.

Should I focus on a doggy kidnapping?

I imagined a French bulldog named Claude. Claude began to grow on me, with his snuffly breathing, his stubby little legs, and his penchant for sleeping.

I also felt for his human, Mrs. Lee, who doted on Claude in her Montreal apartment.

How would the villains separate Claude from Mrs. Lee?

How could Claude save himself and foil the villains? My family has never adopted anything but big, active, loving rescue dogs. I’m not familiar with purebreds with built-in health problems like respiratory disorders and skin fold dermatitis.

But I loved the idea of a tiny canine hero who might fight the odds in order to save the day, reunite with his human, and nibble on a treat.

Then I turned my pen to a third dog, inspired by our rescue mountain cur, Bell. When we adopted her, she was so thin that her ribs were showing, and she would watch us scoop up her food like it was a magic show. But that’s literally another story.

I hope you enjoy “For Love and Bacon,” in Alfred Hitchcock’s September/October issue.

In the meantime, please hug your dogs. Treasure their soft ears and huge hearts. I will never get over their unconditional love and loyalty. Dogs and books for the win!

Write what you know, they say. So, I did. I wrote about a schoolboy who rides his bicycle across town for his weekly piano lessons (as I did for several years in the early 1970s). One afternoon, en route to a lesson, the schoolboy discovers the dead body of one of his schoolteachers—the man has been murdered. And there begins my new mystery short story: “Murder in F-Sharp.”

Write what you don’t know. Just to clarify, I’ve never discovered a dead body. Although I once thought I had, and it was on a bike ride to a piano lesson—it was just a drunk guy lying in the weeds in a narrow alleyway between streets.

In my story, Thomas Phipps is a high school student in 1950s Henderson, New Zealand (my hometown). Henderson is a suburb in the western district of Auckland city. Thomas is taking piano lessons, but he doesn’t like them. My piano teacher twice asked me if I would prefer to switch to learning “modern”—I was learning classical. I was 12, and I didn’t appreciate the difference. Thomas Phipps, 16, is learning classical, but he really wants to play jazz.

Jazz was the thing in New Zealand in the 1950s. Contrary to popular misconception (the filter of nostalgia), 1950s Auckland wasn’t rock and roll, Presley, Haley, et al. Had you hung out in an Auckland city milk bar or coffee shop, you would have heard the cool people listening to jazz on the jukebox. Rock and roll didn’t land until well into the ’60s.

And naturally, anything young people like (be it jazz or rock and roll) is immediately hated by their parents. This counter-culture clash—for want of better words, this generation gap—is the central conflict in my story that runs underneath the mystery of the murder.  

“Is this a YA story?”

This was asked by someone who read a draft before I submitted the story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. You could make a case that “Murder in F-Sharp” a Young Adult story—a teenage boy wants something that’s antithetical to his father and his piano teacher. But I didn’t write it with any intention to be YA fiction. And it’s not the first time I’ve been asked the question. Ten of my published short stories have featured protagonists in the 12–20 age range. Except for two (written for Mystery Writers of America YA anthologies) the rest were written for anyone to read—young or old. Honestly, aside from wanting to make a story readable and exciting, I don’t give much thought to the reader’s age.

Which brings me to my book.

After twenty years of writing short stories, I’m pleased to report that my first mystery novel, THE BRIDE MUST BE STOPPED! goes to print at the end of this year.

Thornton Thacker—a Philip Marlowe-esque teenage detective—his sister, and their two best friends follow a trail of Egyptian hieroglyphics and a missing mummy, and find themselves up against ancient supernatural forces, with Thacker’s girlfriend’s life at stake. 

Set in the 1950s in the US, The Bride Must Be Stopped! is the first novel in my Mean City Mysteries series.

My pitch for the series was: Imagine if the Famous Five novels had been written by Raymond Chandler. (The Famous Five was a series of British adventure/mystery novels written in the 1940s and ’50s. Of comparison in the US would be the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mysteries.)

The protagonist of my book is a high school student, and again it’s not a YA story; I wrote it for anyone to enjoy—anyone who likes a mystery/thriller with a tall serving of noir. Also again, the protagonist is a musician. He plays upright bass in a jazz quartet. Hey, I’m a musician (piano and electric guitar). I write what I know.

Readers of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine over the last 16 years are likely already aware of Julius Katz, but I’d like to introduce my Boston-based detective to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine readers who are encountering Julius for the first time in Julius Katz Draws a Straight Flush. Julius Katz, as the name implies, is a homage of sorts to Nero Wolfe, as is the name of his erstwhile assistant, Archie. So are the slightly twisted names of the three PIs Julius often makes use of: Tom Durkin, Saul Penzer, and Willie Cather, and the homicide detective Julius frequently butts heads with: Detective Mark Cramer. There are other similarities, such as Julius being brilliant but innately lazy, and frequently needing to be pestered by his assistant, Archie, to take jobs so he can continue to enjoy his desired lifestyle. Both men like fine food—although Julius frequently dines out at Boston’s finest restaurants, while Nero enjoys food prepared by either himself, Fritz, or the two of them in collaboration. Both are avid readers. There are also countless differences. Julius owns a townhouse in Boston’s Beacon Hill district, Nero Wolfe a brownstone in Manhattan. Julius is handsome, physically fit, holds a fifth-degree black belt in Kung fu, and spends two hours each morning engaged in an intensive martial arts workout, Nero Wolfe is famously one-seventh of a ton and tends to avoid all exercise except for potting orchids. Julius, at least until he meets Lily Rosten and is smitten by her, is a womanizer, Nero Wolfe is not. Nero has a staff including Fritz (his chef) and Theodore (his orchid nurse) living in his brownstone, Julius lives alone. Julius preferred activities (excluding women): poker (and occasionally horse races when he’s given a tip about a fixed race) and collecting expensive wine; Nero Wolfe: orchids, fine cuisine, and drinking beer.

About Julius and his wine—I’m more like Nero Wolfe on that regard. I prefer beer, although I prefer bourbon to either of those. When I occasionally order a glass of wine with dinner, I know just enough about wine to know that I like Malbec. The reasons I made Julius an oenophile (and, yes, I needed to look that up!) were (1) to draw yet another distinction between Julius and Nero Wolfe, (2) to give Julius an expensive hobby to provide impetus for him taking on a job. I wrote the first Julius Katz story in 2008, and if I realized then how expensive single-barrel bourbon could be (if it was that expensive in 2008??) I would have made Julius a bourbon drinker/collector. But I didn’t, and hence I’ve been needing to do a fair amount of wine research with most of my Julius Katz stories.

Where Julius Katz mysteries are most like Nero Wolfe’s are in the structure of the mysteries. A murder is committed, a group of suspects are interrogated, Archie gathers evidence, occasionally Julius hires one or more of his preferred PIs to perform a task of some sort, frequently Julius will butt heads with Cramer, and all the suspects will be gathered into Julius’s office where he’ll point out the guilty party. And of course, Julius will always be two or three steps ahead of Archie. Where they’re next most alike is that they’re both narrated by an Archie, and that’s also where they’re most different. Nero Wolfe’s Archie is Archie Goodwin, a wisecracking detective with the heart and soul of a hard-boiled PI. Julius’s Archie is a piece of AI that Julius wears as a tie clasp, although also with the heart and soul of a hard-boiled PI.

Below is how Archie describes himself in the first Julius Katz mystery titled aptly “Julius Katz”:

My name isn’t really “Archie”. During my time with Julius I’ve grown to think of myself as Archie, the same as I’ve grown to imagine myself as a five-foot-tall, heavyset man with thinning hair, but in reality I’m not five feet tall, nor do I have the bulk that I imagine myself having, and I certainly don’t have any hair, thinning or otherwise. I also don’t have a name, only a serial identification number. Julius calls me Archie, and for whatever reason it seems right; besides, it’s quicker to say than the eighty-four-digit serial identification number that has been burnt into me. You’ve probably already guessed that I’m not human, and certainly not anything organic. What I am is a one- by two-inch rectangular-shaped piece of space-aged computer technology that’s twenty years more advanced than what’s currently considered theoretically possible—at least aside from whatever lab created me. How Julius acquired me, I have no clue. Whenever I’ve tried asking him, he jokes around, telling me he won me in a poker game. It could be true—I wouldn’t know since I have no memory of my time before Julius.

Are my Julius Katz stories a Nero Wolfe pastiche? Merriam-Webster defines pastiche as:

“a literary, artistic, musical, or architectural work that imitates the style of previous work,” and given that definition I’d say no. Julius Katz has clearly been inspired by Nero Wolfe, and is more of a nod to those great mysteries, but there has been no attempt on my part to imitate Rex Stout’s style. Are they a Nero Wolfe parody? Again, going to Merriam-Webster, we have the definition: “a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule,” and given that, I’d say definitely no. Again, there’s no imitation, and each story is as well-crafted a mystery story as I’m capable of writing. While I’ve heard from a number of Nero Wolfe fans about how much they enjoy these stories, I think it’s not because of any familiarity with the names, but that there’s a comfort in the world I’ve created for Julius and Archie, as well as in the interplay between the two of them, and ultimately in watching a genius detective solve a nearly impossible case.

Julius Katz Draws a Straight Flush is what I’m calling the first of the “early” stories. After 19 Julius Katz mystery stories and one novel, the series reached a natural conclusion. But after a short break from Julius and Archie, I realized I missed spending time with the two of them and decided to write stories that take place before the first one (“Julius Katz”). In these stories, Julius hasn’t met Lily yet, and so there’s a slightly different Julius than what readers have so far experienced. While I recognize that this might blur the line between Julius and Nero Wolfe somewhat, especially after writing an article attempting to unblur that line, to try to make these early stories more fun for Nero Wolfe fans, each of them have a connection of some sort to a Nero Wolfe novel. In any case, this has made it more fun (and challenging) for me to write. It shouldn’t be too hard for Nero Wolfe fans to figure out the connection for this first one, but they do get harder to spot!

Many fiction writers find they need to hold down some other job to pay the bills. Writers are advised to make it as different as possible, such as waiting on tables, or as related as possible, working at some other kind of writing, perhaps business manuals or advertising copy. 

My own 15-year adventure in computer programming—mainframes, big business computers in the years before widespread use of personal computers—proved to be a poor choice as a companion job. It was all-consuming time wise, and also scratched a certain creative itch, not completely, but enough so that writing fell by the wayside.

But when we moved to the northwestern Catskills in the nineties I landed in a perfect situation for me—a part-time job that would also serve as classroom and that intensified the itch that needed to be scratched.

Just seven miles from my house, on a road with two houses on it, pretty much qualifying it as “in the middle of nowhere,” a small Mom and Pop type business specialized in book layout for university presses—UPNE, SUNY, and several others. Do not assume size and location indicate a lack of sophistication or experience. Both partners had spent years at McGraw Hill and the wife had spent further years at Oxford University Press, New York. These were people who knew books. 

Initially I was tasked with inputting manuscript corrections, allowing me to see the changes the editor wanted. Lesson number one very quickly became obvious: about 75% of the occurrences of the word “which’ should have been “that”; the reverse is also true. Another thing that seeing hundreds of edited manuscripts teaches you is to be careful to avoid the incomplete change. An author decides to change something in a sentence, but doesn’t notice the effect that change has on some other part of the sentence or a related sentence. Another word should have been deleted or its tense or number should have changed for consistency. It became a game to try to determine what the sentence had said before the change. 

Not all of the books were great, but all presented opportunities to read or at least skim through material I might not have otherwise chosen. Some were so great I’ll remember them forever.

The manuscript for one job of correction inputting was so funny I would read bits aloud to my two coworkers, who would almost fall off their chairs laughing while I, choking back laughter, struggled to say the words. A bit over twenty years later, that book, Percival Everett’s Erasure became the movie American Fiction. And while the film stayed fairly close to the book, some of its funniest parts could only exist on the page—little philosophical asides on the nature of language and communication presented as puns and jokes.

Most books came as electronic files, on floppy disks during the first few years, with the corrections marked on a paper copy. But a few books had to be typed. I input hundreds of poems from tear sheets for a collection by an author whose name I didn’t recognize. About halfway through the project I found myself thinking, “This guy can write!” The “About the Author” section at the end of Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 confirmed my assessment—Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa can indeed write.

Eventually I learned how to do layout. That little company is no more, but I still do layout for a few friends and private clients who self-publish. For someone who loves books, the ability to make one is a treasured skill, a gift from lovely people. Considering the depth of their knowledge, I doubt they taught me everything they knew, but they surely taught me everything I know about making a book.

The Kinley Hotel in Chattanooga operates a retro speakeasy tucked off its lobby, no sign, no door. You have to know where to look. Now, I had no idea about speakeasies when I checked in. I was only stopping over on my way to a beach writing break. But the Kinley drops hints about their hidden bar, some subtle, some impossible to miss. The bar also has a website and legally obtained permits, so no, G-men won’t be busting in with guns drawn. And yes, getting past the lookout is easy enough. They let me in, if that says anything about their standards.

This was 2022, and I’d been brainstorming ideas for a recurring character: Vernon Stagg, a small-time Nashville lawyer with more bluster than skill. Vernon headlined two earlier stories for AHMM, and I was shooting for a third. The problem was finding the right setup. The stories have a particular voice and feel, and I needed an equally offbeat premise to set the characters in motion. If that sounds simple, it’s not. Humor is hard work.

Then, boom. Here was a faux speakeasy 130 miles away from my writing desk. A recurring gag in the earlier stories was that Vernon kept getting banned from his favored drinking holes. So yes, a speakeasy could work, or a hotel bar playacting the part. Even better, speakeasies are a very Nashville idea.

A century later, we tend to view the Prohibition Era through a Gatsby-sequel lens. Prohibition wasn’t confined to Manhattan jazz clubs or an Untouchables Chicago thing. People flaunted Prohibition everywhere. In Nashville, ignoring the Eighteenth Amendment nearly sunk the Nineteenth. This was 1920 at downtown’s Hermitage Hotel, where captains of industry teamed up with Anti firebrands to run a 24/7 whisky lounge on the eighth floor. Their goal: drown the Suff cause in illegal booze. It nearly succeeded.

Welcome to Nashville. The town that ran the Jack Daniels Suite is the same town that formed Tennessee’s first temperance society and, in 1909, passed a state prohibition law a decade before the Volstead Act. The true believers deliver their speeches, but, as can often happen in the South, much of the show is performative.

No ban was ever getting enforced here, not when Nashville’s saloon culture is as old as the churches. Today’s honky-tonk mega-district sits exactly where yesterday’s saloons entertained locals, railroad stopovers, and riverport crews. And of course, any ban overlooked why the saloons flourished in the first place. Business got done in the saloons. Friendships and alliances got sealed. Political machines cultivated influence.

The exception proves the rule. The most successful dent in Nashville’s saloon trade was the Union Army. The Union generals tried to regulate the place, but the party moved to the edge of town—and made good money off the Bluecoats. When the Union left, the bars spread back downtown like bramble.

Prohibition followed that playbook. The saloons went underground, often literally. It’s rumored that the Maxwell House Hotel vault served as a locker club for its guests. Not far downhill sits Nashville’s most famous scofflaw, Printer’s Alley. Before Prohibition, the narrow stretch housed over a dozen publishers, print shops, and the pressrooms for the city’s major—and feuding—newspapers, The Tennessean and the Nashville Banner. The alley happens to be perfectly central for downtowners, a good place to hitch a horse, load a delivery wagon, or after 1909, run a drinking hole. When Prohibition faded, the clubs hung their signs outside. Today, it’s a neon tourist draw.

If Chattanooga is trying faux speakeasies, Nashville’s entertainment complex would definitely give it a shot—and go full blast with it. As it turns out, Nashville has. Since I submitted the finished story to AHMM, at least two hidden-door bars have opened downtown.

Big money entertainment venues and five-story corporate honkytonks. This is the modern Nashville—and yet, a lot like its roots. It’s the Nashville that Vernon can’t quite figure out anymore. Drawing Vernon into that boomtown time warp, speakeasy-style, spurred “This One Oughta Go Different” to life.

I just had to leave town to see it.

My grandmother raised my sister and me, and we called her “Mutha.” As a child raised by her grandmother, I didn’t realize at the time how much a good home-cooked meal was for the soul. Especially Mutha’s blackbottom sweet potato pies. Those sweet potato pies were a pure delight, along with the rest of her cooking. She was the true original version of what it meant to be a grandma, always making me feel safe, important, and well fed. Those big Sunday dinners were the best of all. She would do lots of the prep work the night before. Letting my sister and me play assistant chefs. I loved it. We would have to pick the collard greens, then cut up celery, bell peppers, and the onions that were used for the cornbread dressing. Although the main course was always a well-seasoned pot roast or baked chicken, cooked to a perfect brown crispness. Side dishes were usually green beans with potatoes or black eyed peas, and there was always hot cornbread in a cast iron skillet. Thinking back, all those aromatic scents brought a sense a warm love, joy, and calmness to me. It was like a warm hug in every bite. Especially those blackbottom pies.

Most kids think October is the month for Halloween and pumpkin carving, but I always thought of it as the start of soul food season. The big yellow mixing bowl was out and ready to blend up all the sweet ingredients. Six large, sweet potatoes, one cup white sugar, brown sugar, nutmeg, four eggs, two sticks of butter, Carnation milk, and pure vanilla extract. Mmm, mmm, mmm . . . my eyes started dancing. 

Early on those Sunday mornings the five foot two woman would stand in front of the kitchen window above the sink in her quilted pink buttoned-down housecoat and start scrubbing, then peeling the sweet potatoes. She could peel a entire potato with a paring knife and not break the skin even once. They looked like curly fries. I tried to help but she said I was peeling the whole potato away. (I’ve since learned her technique.) Once all the potatoes were peeled and washed they were dropped into a large silver pot that was already heating on the stove. After cooking the potatoes, she drained the water from the pot. With the potatoes still steaming, she would start to use her masher and go to work. Once everything was cooled and mashed, she’d head over to the accordion doors leading to the pantry where a white linen bag was hanging on the wall inside. This was the “sanky bag.” It held all the main ingredients for baking goodness: the sugars, nutmeg, cinnamon, pure exacts of vanilla and lemon, banana, and a couple of cans of Carnation milk, and a glass measuring cup. She also would stash extra sweets, like boxes of Jell-O, honey buns, peppermint patties, and butterscotch candies, in case we had a sweet tooth. If there is one thing Mutha could do it was multi-task, whether it be cooking while doing the laundry or keeping an eye on us. She would also be on the yellow telephone with that extra long cord allowing her to walk from one end of the kitchen even down the hall, laughing with her daughters and gossiping about the stories on television.

I loved being in the kitchen when she was baking. She would let me preheat the oven, which was always set to 350 degrees. She’d tell me to grab the crusts from the freezer and open them. She would make no fewer than six to eight pies at a time. Now some of you might be lost at the thought of frozen pie crust, but if you made as many pies as Mutha did, you, too, would take a few short cuts. However, she always made homemade dough for her juicy peach cobbler, but that’s a whole other story and recipe.

Okay, back to the pies. She’d mix all those ingredients and have me lay the pie pans on top of the stove four at a time and, with a fork, poke holes in the bottom crust. This allowed the heat from the stove to thaw the crust. After making a dark brown sugar and melted butter mixture, she’d add a teaspoon of her secret ingredient. She would spread the thick almost black sugar mix coating to each pie pan. Now we had the black bottoms, so it was time to add the sweet potato mixture. The crust was always deep dish. She couldn’t stand a shallow pie any more than she could shallow people.

The crust was filled with the perfect amount so they would spill over during baking. After completing the first batch, we’d fill another four piecrusts. Then all eight went into the oven. She never used a timer. She just knew when to peek in the stove and pull them out. To me, it felt like eternity. Thinking back, it was about forty-five minutes to an hour. Why so many pies for one dinner? Mutha was the kind of grandmother that never turned away a person if they were hungry. She showed her loved through cooking. So she made sure to have enough for one of her ten kids to take a black bottom sweet potato pie and leftovers home if they wanted. There was plenty to go around.

When I think about making those black bottom pies, I remember why I loved them so much. Once those pies were in the oven. It was time to get the kitchen and dining room set. She would have me get a tablecloth out get all the plates and silverware. She never used paper plates. There would be two crystal pitchers, one filled with sweet iced tea and the other with red Kool-Aid with lemon slices. Also, at the end of the table would be a cake plate with a yellow cake and chocolate frosting and white plastic pie racks. By the time the meats were plated and the beans and collard greens placed in a serving bowl, Mutha would be asking for a dish rag or potholder to get the pies out of the oven. With the pies placed on the stacked pie racks, the combination of a savory and sweet aromas put everyone in a heartwarming mood, and that could only be created by Grandmother Mutha’s pies.

Oh, I miss her so. She would always say, “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”  Boy was she right. She was glue that held our family together.

Even after all the intervening years, I cherish those memories of her and those special pies. I loved them so much that I had to create a fictional short story called “Blackbottom Pies,” which is in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. I hope you enjoy the recipe and read it the story.

While thinking about what might work as subject material for a detective story, I happened to think of an old friend who is an over-the-top classic movie buff, although our definitions of what counts as classic differ somewhat—he has many more Westerns on his list than I do on mine. How would he react to encountering a group of stars on a street corner?

My own introduction to the stars I would eventually cast in “Double Take” came through Saturday afternoon television when I was a kid. I was especially fond of the screwball comedies: Bringing Up Baby, Arsenic and Old Lace, Adam’s Rib, Sullivan’s Travels, You Can’t Take it With You, It Happened One Night, The Man Who Came to Dinner, To Be or Not to Be, and of course all the Marx Brothers movies, which were zany beyond the category of screwball comedy.I also had a few favorites that leaned toward noir, particularly Bogart and Bacall pairings. Best of all were those films featuring wit and plays on words. My hope for “Double Take“ was for it to be a blend of the two—screwball noir.

But something felt wrong about writing in a fictional way about real people, even though those people were all dead. Perhaps they were just too close in recent memory. My experience of them, of course, was only of their public personas. I needed the freedom for my characters to behave and be in ways that those real people hadn’t behaved or been. I needed faces divorced from real personalities; if their projected screen personalities shone through, that would be a plus, adding to the reader’s perception of the character.

Faces divorced from personality is what I got by making them celebrity doubles (since that’s revealed right at the start of the story I don’t think saying it here counts as a spoiler).

I started out knowing who did it and why. But that’s not how it worked out. I can’t point to a moment when I decided it should be different, it just became different on its own and surprised me. I’m not the first writer to discover that characters sometimes have minds of their own.

And while it is definitely fiction, a lot of the setting is accurate fact. Since it’s been many years since I’ve spent any significant amount of time in Manhattan, research was necessary. My detective’s specific address isn’t mentioned, but I knew what his building looked like because I had searched and found online an apartment available for rent that he could afford. (Do I hear faint echoes of “Where? Where?” coming from all over New York?) There really is a beer distributorship just a few blocks away in his neighborhood. Several photography studios actually exist on the block where some of the characters worked at a photo shoot. Reality can be a helpful tool in fiction, lending credence to the imagined portions.

“Double Take” was a lot of fun to write and I couldn’t be more pleased that it will appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

Over the many years in my role as a teacher of high school mathematics, I was often asked to write letters of recommendation for students applying to college. I knew how important these letters could be, and tried my best to make them as personal as possible, to paint a picture of the individual and student in the best possible light, without exaggerating or crediting them with things they hadn’t done or attributes they didn’t possess. Most of the time the writing came easy. But there were rare instances where crafting one of these truthful letters was nearly as difficult as coming up with a fresh idea for a mystery story.

Getting accepted at the college of their choice is something that a lot of teenagers stress out about these days. Kids put a lot of pressure on themselves to get into what they perceive as the right school. Sometimes, in the process of the college search, they latch on to the idea of going to a particular school without a rational reason for doing so. Honing in on acceptance at what’s perceived as an elite school can set some kids up for a major disappointment.

Of course, some of the strain on kids can also come from external sources. There are parents out there who tend to apply pressure on their children based on their own wants and needs. We all remember the big college admissions scandal from a few years back, in 2019 when the results of a years-long investigation were made public. More than fifty people were charged by federal prosecutors with various things like felony counts of conspiracy and money laundering. The whole mess led to firings of college coaches and administrators, and even jail time for a few well-known celebrities. Some very wealthy and influential people made some bad choices in an effort to circumvent the standard college admission process. Even Netflix made a documentary about the investigation, called Operation Varsity Blues.

I first had the seed of an idea for the story “Admissions” long before the scandal broke in 2019. I was teaching at a private high school at the time, and had been asked to serve with other faculty members on the admissions committee, screening and voting on which applicants would get to join the ranks of our student body in the coming school year. That got me thinking about the whole admissions process. Not for high school, but college.

I knew some people who worked in college admissions and wondered what would happen if they were faced with an applicant with excellent credentials, but who, for some intuitive reason, they had misgivings about accepting. My idea was that they might hire a private investigator to look for something to use as a reason to reject the candidate’s application. I made notes on the idea and stuffed them into the bulging folder with all my other scribblings on stories I hoped to write someday.

Years later, in the summer of 2021, when I finally got around to starting to write the story, my original concept had changed direction. I decided the story idea might work better if the student in question had already been accepted at an elite college of her own choosing. One that her parents weren’t particularly happy about, given the exorbitant cost of matriculating there. And what if this particular student was one with less than stellar grades, mediocre recommendations, few extracurricular activities or sports experience, and little in the way of community service. 

And maybe this student was more than just a little on the unscrupulous side.

To add further conflict to the story, I came up with the idea that the director of admissions had insisted on her acceptance, despite the serious misgivings of the admissions committee and the assistant director.

With all that in place, the story “Admissions” was off and running, with P.I. Pete Barrow being hired by an old friend now the assistant director of admissions to find out why his boss was so insistent on accepting such an undeserving applicant.

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Ken Linn’s short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. His professional debut short story, “Stray,” appeared in the January/February 2021 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and was included in the list of “Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense of 2021″ in the volume The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022.

“Admissions” is his third story for AHMM featuring private investigator Pete Barrow and Sheriff Oscar Murphy. Dwellings, the first novel in the series, is scheduled for publication by Level Best Books in January, 2026. 

Visit his website at  kenlinnauthor.com