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For years, sitting in a circle in various writing groups among my peers, I often tossed out the empty line “I like the voice of the story,” or my more insightful variant, “I liked the voice of the story very much.” Truthfully, I didn’t know what “voice” was, but I had an English degree, so I knew it was something.

As a “civilian” reader, I had encountered my share of stories, poems, novels, essays that had stuck with me—all composed of lines that came back to me over and over again. The line from Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “ ‘She would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’ ” is one that speaks to me.  And says different things at different points of my adult life. And there are so many other stories that just seemed to hum with meaning. It’s that hum that I have now come to understand is voice.

It wasn’t until I became an editor, though, that I really started to ask, What do we mean when we talk about voice?

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Angela Zeman did such a wonderful job creating the world that Roxanne lives in for “The First Tale of Roxanne” that by the end of the story you are ready for more. And the title indeed suggests a second, and a third . . . So we asked Angela to talk to us about her creative process when starting out a new series.

A few days ago I was thrilled to read in the NY Times section of Unrequested Advice that dark chocolate is now healthy to eat all you want. Yes! Then my copy of AHMM came in the mail and my story was on the cover. I forgot chocolate. Nobody from AHMM had mentioned “cover” to me, so I was shocked and thrilled. And reminded of my very first story sale—my first sale of anything—to the late Cathleen Jordan, the editor of AHMM at that time. She phoned me to buy it, too, which made the event all the more stunning. Then, in the throes of my euphoria, I exposed the enormous amount of water behind my ears and requested that my name be put on the cover. She kindly said, “maybe another time.” From that sale came the Mrs. Risk story series and a novel, all now re-published as e-books by Mysterious Press.

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AHMM congratulates B. K. Stevens, whose “Thea’s First Husband” has been named a finalist for the Agatha Award for best short story. “Thea’s First Husband” appeared in our June 2012 issue.

The Agatha Awards will be presented at Malice Domestic in Bethesda, Maryland, on Saturday May 4th. (Coincidentally, June will be the 25th anniversary of Ms. Stevens’s first story for AHMM in 1988, “True Detective.”)

Congratulations also to AHMM authors Margaret Maron, for her nomination for Best Novel (The Buzzard Table); Rhys Bowen, for Best Historical Mystery (The Twelve Clues of Christmas); and Dana Cameron, also a nominee for Best Short Story for “Mischief in Mesopotamia” which appeared in our sister magazine, EQMM.

More often than not, mystery novels end with a definitive solution to the puzzle; real life is not always so accommodating, perhaps especially when the mysteries in question are historical rather than criminal.

How delightful, then, to see a historical mystery resolved so thoroughly as that of the identification of the remains of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. Scientists have applied archaeological, osteological, and genetic analysis techniques to determine that the skeleton, discovered under a parking lot in August of last year, is “beyond reasonable doubt” that of Richard III. The BBC has an interesting interactive guide to the remains.

Undoubtedly, many readers will be moved by this news to revisit Shakespeare’s play, which has done so much to shape our contemporary image of the hunchbacked king (“My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, / And every tongue brings in a several tale, / And every tale condemns me for a villain”). Mystery lovers, however, may feel an additional impulse: to re-read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, in which Inspector Alan Grant, confined to his sickbed, investigates the longstanding charge that Richard murdered his two nephews to protect his claim to the throne. He comes to a surprising conclusion.

In 1990, the Crime Writers’ Association named The Daughter of Time the best mystery novel of all time.

What better excuse do you need?

The current (July 23) issue of The New Yorker includes an article by Jack Hitt on forensic linguistics. I loved the description: “If ‘forensic linguist’ brings to mind a verbal specialist who plucks slivers of meaning from old letters and segments of audiotape before announcing that the perpetrator is, say, a middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far from the truth.” The field had its fifteen minutes in the ’90s, when its techniques helped identify Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber and Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, but it continues to play a role in courtrooms.

A passage that particularly struck me was: “Most people assume that meaning is embedded in the words they speak. But, according to forensic linguists, meaning is far more vaporous, teased into existence through vocalized puffs of air, hand gestures, body tilts, dancing eyebrows, and nuanced nostril flares . . . And context is crucial; when we try to record a conversation, we are capturing only part of the gestalt of that moment.”

This got me thinking about dialog in fiction. Of course, dialog is never realistic: it mostly excludes the uhms and ahs, the Continue reading →

Rob Lopresti recently posted his own version of a How’d That Happen piece over on the SleuthSayers blog, describing the genesis of his story “Brutal” from the current (September 2012) issue.

Also, on SleuthSayers, Leigh Lundin offers some commentary (taking time from an amazing-sounding trip) on that same September issue.

And Diana Deverell has announced the e-publication of Run & Gun: A Dozen Tales of Girls with Guns, most of which first appeared in AHMM. Diana’s character. Dawna Shepherd, is an FBI agent, but her experiences as a college basketball star for the University of Texas help her to process information quickly and to land on her feet when the unexpected is thrown her way.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing a Short Story, which originally appeared in his collection Bagombo Snuff Box, are a perennial favorite of bloggers because of their blog-friendly humor and pith, so I would probably be well advised to stay away from such familiar material, but I think they are worth sharing and discussing because they are specifically rules for writing short stories.

(Among other places, you can find them here, here, and here.)

Rule One is “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” I love the fact that Vonnegut foregrounds the duty of the writer to the reader. In fact, he goes on to declare that this is the only inviolable rule.

I read a lot of short stories that don’t work, and one characteristic that many share is that they feel as if they were written Continue reading →

B. K. Stevens has written a nice guest post about her AHMM story “Adjuncts Anonymous” at Schooled in Mystery, a blog devoted to academic mysteries. You can hear her read the story by downloading an audio file from iTunes or PodOmatic.