Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

I’m not sure when it started—this fascination with dark things. It might be in the blood.

Halloween was quite a big thing in Scotland. The guising is an old tradition. Dress up as a demon, to scare the real demons away. We do it at Samhain.

Trick or treat, as we know it today, comes from the guising. If you turned up at someone’s door in costume, if you wanted a treat, then you had to perform for it; either tell a joke or sing a song. I think I dressed up once as a plumber—I guess someone has a phobia of plumbers, somewhere—and another time, I hesitate to say, as a “Mean Arab”. Not my idea, either of these, I should stress. Whatever you’re picturing, the reality was less impressive. Different times, folks.

Santa saw fit to bring me Dick Smith’s Scary Faces make-up kit one year, and I delighted in the fake blood, the Dracula teeth, the gelid moulds that you had to leave in the fridge. That same Christmas, the BBC showed a midnight double bill of the old Hammer movies—Curse of Frankenstein, and Horror of Dracula, one after the other, and both fitting neatly onto a three-hour VHS cassette, if you timed the recording right. To me, these were “safe” horrors – not exactly Scooby Doo, but a world away from the video nasties then in vogue in the playground and on the front pages of the papers.

My dad enjoyed the Hammers, and boasted of having seen Christopher Lee’s first stint as the Count in the year it was released. Along with David Attenborough documentaries, these movies form a cherished bonding memory of my father.

I always loved monster movies, especially Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion marvels (again, thanks to my dad for that). Scooby Doo was also a part of the picture, not only for the monsters, but the fact that they were humans, unmasked by the gang at the end. This was usually done by Fred, after Velma had done the hard yards.

On top of this, a short-lived comic that I adored appeared on British news-stands. Scream! was an EC-style publication that was aimed at children aged eight to 14, if you can imagine that. With video nasties being all the rage, the comic’s editors (including the great Barrie Tomlinson), shrewdly identified a clear need for an accessible horror publication for children. I was seven when it appeared in the newsagents, having been widely advertised on television. I begged my mum to get it for me, and I was rewarded. I read every issue from cover to cover. It had Dracula, werewolves, giant spiders, killer cats, monstrous uncles locked in attics, leprosy-riddled gravediggers, and a killer hotel computer called Max who created a virtual reality nightmare zone for wrongdoers in The Thirteenth Floor. This latter, in 1984, was a long way ahead of its time.

There were only 14 issues of Scream!, for a variety of reasons. Apparently it was caught up in industrial action involving printers. Another story goes that the comic was simply too chewy for children, with IPC magazines still smarting from their experiences at the hands of the tabloids a few years previously on the notorious Action! weekly. Whatever the case, it was folded—unannounced—into the Eagle, reappearing in summer specials all the way up to 1989.

Scream! wasn’t too bloody but it was gruesome on occasion, and certainly the stuff of nightmares. A 40^th anniversary edition collecting every single issue in hardback has just been issued by Rebellion, and you can bet I was one of the first little ghouls in line for a copy. It still has its moments—particularly the one-off story The Drowning Pool, in a which a skeleton of a persecuted witch appears in a pond to strangle the unwary, with fresh roses in its hair.

“Ye Gods!” indeed.

We move onto real world horrors all too soon—and my dad was a connoisseur of these, too. Jack the Ripper was a subject of interest to him, and he also recorded the Michael Caine/Lewis Collins mini-series when it was broadcast in the autumn of 1988, on the 100^th anniversary of those ghastliest of crimes.

Again, I was too young to be watching these, but I did, and I never forgot that handsome, if bloody, production. But in adulthood, we know all too well that the stuff of corn syrup gore and faux-Victorian whiskers is a fraud committed upon real life, and real-life victims. Your conscience pays a price for ghoulishness. Modern day studies of the Whitechapel killings are more focused on the victims, with Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five being perhaps the key work in this regard. We may never know the real name of the killer, but we do know the names of the victims, and we can’t let their lives be reduced to a simple number, as if they were a score to be totalled.

Just 10 years after watching that dramatisation, I was working in newspapers, reading about true life monsters carrying out sordid crimes that you wouldn’t have thought possible in a well-educated, well-ordered society. But as any police officer will tell you, it happens every single day. And the person behind the mask—or worse, the person in the tragic handout photos—might look very like you.

My dad’s ghoulish tastes followed him all the way to the grave. When he was very ill, he had my sister buy him magazines he saw advertised on his satellite TV package, as he devoured true crime documentaries. These were publications about famous murders; sensationalised headlines, stories of multiple killings, grim photography, the appalling business of homicide and its investigation. My sister was quite embarrassed about queuing up in shops for these, but god bless her, she did, routinely and faithfully. It seems extraordinary to me that my dad was reading about forensics and what happens to your body after life is gone when he was so close to his own mortality. But I guess you’re into what you’re into.

So now I write about fictional crimes, as well as real ones. “Masquerade” takes us closer to those early days, and the thrill of horrible things. It’s intended as confectionary, perhaps something sweet to be enjoyed after trick-or-treating. Not too close to the business of real life, the ugly stuff that I hear about in my day job… but close enough. Looking back on the drafting of the story, I feel a chill when I consider the “last seen alive” flashbacks. That’s as it should be.

Perhaps scary stories are a vital part of human life, stretching all the way back to when we huddled around fires in caves, keeping the shrieking wind and howling predators at bay. A warning from the frontiers of human behaviour. A reminder that monsters are very real, and sometimes very ordinary. It’s a matter of blood.

Sometime around 2016 I started talking to Kensington Books about writing a series for them. The problem was what type, or genre, and after some discussion they thought a serial killer series would be the best fit. While I’m a devout reader of crime and mystery fiction, I’m not much of a reader of serial killer fiction and I was going to pass, but my future editor, Michaela Hamilton, gave me several of John Lutz’s Frank Quinn books to read, and that changed my mind. The books were a lot of fun, quick, twisty, with rotating perspectives between Quinn and his team, the victims, and the killer. It gave me ideas for my own series where I’d place the action in Los Angeles and make the quest for fame a running theme throughout the series. I also saw a way to how I could write the books more as crime novels masquerading as serial killer novels, with the killers having motives different than simply being driven to kill. I was sold.

The first step was to create a full history, not only for my hero but his family and all the members of his team. If I was going to write a series, I wanted to make sure my characters were fully fleshed out before I started. The name I picked for my hero was Morris Brick—Morris, so I could name him after an uncle, and Brick because I was going to describe him as being on the shorter side with a compact body, kind of like a brick. Brick’s history would have him as a celebrity member of the LAPD who had solved several big serial killer cases before starting his own private investigation firm, and his team would consist of former homicide detectives. Morris would be married to a wonderful woman and successful therapist, Natalie, and would have a daughter, Rachel, finishing up law school. He’d also have a bull terrier named Parker who’d be involved in the action to varying degrees. Since Kensington wanted me to use a pseudonym to differentiate these books from the crime and horror novels I’d been publishing, I chose Jacob Stone, figuring that Stone would fit seamlessly with Brick.

Five of the aforementioned novels were written before I decided to write my first Morris Brick mystery story, “Lulu & Heartbreaker.” Like the novels, I wanted this story to be fast-paced and with humor, and while written in the third person, I would switch between Morris’s and the other characters’ perspectives. But unlike my novels, I didn’t want anyone to die, and while there’d be plenty of action and some violence, nothing grisly. What I came up with was a Continental-Op like story where Morris and his team are searching for a missing actor while a pair of killers, Lulu & Heartbreaker (who gets his name not for being a heartthrob, but because he’s rumored to once punching a man so hard in the chest as to have torn the man’s heart apart) are also searching for the same actor. The mystery ultimately solved is who hired these killers and why. An advantage I had was having fully defined characters with rich backstories not only from the outlines I wrote but from the five novels.

My original goal was to write only that one story to help promote the novels, but after Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine published it, I came up with an idea that was a slight twist on the first one. The next story was titled Fay & Wray. In this one, a pair of grifters named Fay Hastings and Danny Wray steal Parker. While still a crime/mystery story, I also had fun working different references to King Kong into the story. After Fay & Wray came Mary & Shelley, James & Bond, and the recently completed Alfred & Hitchcock.

Writing my Morris Brick thriller series provided a rich set of characters for my new mystery/crime short story series. I also stumbled upon a formula that’s allowing me to write entertaining crime stories where the possibilities are endless. Bugs & Bunny, anyone?

My high school junior theme was titled “Jazz as an Art Form.” It was 1966. I was sixteen years old and knew nothing about jazz except it seemed to favor saxophones, pianos, and trumpets over the guitars made so popular by the recent “British Invasion” groups. But I liked music and had joined a garage band. I don’t recall the other topics given us to choose from, but none of them sounded particularly interesting to me. Writing an essay about any musical genre was my best option.

As part of my research I subscribed to DownBeat Magazine, which netted me a free jazz album. It was an Ornette Coleman LP that I didn’t understand at all. But the fact that such music could be recorded and released for sale amazed me. So I kept digging into it. I went to Rose Records on Wabash in Chicago because it had most if not all of the Schwann Catalog listed albums in its racks. My brother joined me and together we discovered Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Mart on Grand just west of State Street where Koester would spin discs and chat endlessly about jazz and blues and had more obscure records, many of them discontinued, than any other music retailer. Over the months we delved deeper into jazz history, seeking out the earliest recordings available on reissue collections. We scoured antique stores and resale shops for vintage 78s, and we found a few good ones. We went to the Chicago History Museum’s library and searched for “race records” ads in the microfilm files of the Chicago Defender. But there was one recording we had heard of that no one had as yet found—no jazz collector, no jazz student, no jazz scholar.

I’m not about to tell you what that was here! No spoilers! When you read my story “Cover Shot” in the September/October 2024 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM) you’ll find out. But my brother and I would spin our Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five reissues and fantasize about finding the long lost recording that predated all of them. We would stumble across it in a junk shop, or in one of the crude stalls of the Maxwell Street open-air flea market.

How exciting would that be?!

So many early jazz and blues “race records” found their way to Chicago during the Great Migration that it was not out of the question for a copy of this one to show up. A garage sale on the West or South Side, perhaps. The problem was we were suburban kids and were not at all likely to extend our search into the city. But we kept dreaming. We’ll find the recording and play it for Louis Armstrong, who was still alive and performing in the late 1960s! He claimed to have heard the music when he was only five years old, but we were sure he could still authenticate the recording for us.

Some jazz scholars are not convinced that the record really exists, or existed past tense, that it’s a legend and searching for it was like searching for the Ark of the Covenant, a subject playfully imagined in the Indiana Jones movies. But others have testified that it indeed exists, including one member of the band who claimed to be on the recording and once had a copy of it.

Well, I thought, if Steven Spielberg could run fast and loose with the lost ark, why not craft a tale around the legendary lost jazz recording? I would somehow feature photographer Rick Peters, protagonist of my previous three stories published by AHMM, and I would pay homage to Jazz Record Mart’s Bob Koester who had introduced us to so much great jazz and blues. And finally, I would include a tribute to a photo stylist who had worked with me on so many photographs, including a number of cover shots, when I produced catalogs for a Pennsylvania dinnerware manufacturer.

Luckily, AHMM editor Linda Landrigan liked the resulting tale enough to include it in the September/October 2024 issue. So I would like to close my tale of mystery and fantasy with a special thanks to Linda, and to Jackie Sherbow, both of whom have supported my Rick Peters stories over the last several years. And by the way, just in case you’re wondering, and there’s no reason why you should, I got a B on my junior theme.