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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.

It began, appropriately, in Los Angeles, in the 1950s, guided by the HOLLYWOOD sign up on Mount Lee. Showtime! So, before preachers like Joel Olsteen and Pat Robertson there were Fred Schwartz and Billy James Hargis, the real-life models of my assassinated, anti-communist crusader Dr. Timothy St. John Mahoney.

I was born under that big white sign in Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital as WWII was ending. One of my earliest memories is walking a few blocks to Beverly Blvd. in the evenings with my father. We stood in front of the appliance store watching the televisions glowing against the dark. We moved to the San Fernando Valley, bought that first black and white television, and watched “The Ed Sullivan Show”.

Their script hasn’t changed much over the years. Then the bad guys were the communists and the bad Negroes like Martin Luther King. Now the bad guys are progressives, Black Lives Matter, Alvin Bragg, and, interestingly enough, still the communists. The stage directions haven’t changed either. Mock them, hug flag, thump Bible, waive arms, bright lights, patriotic songs. It is mesmerizing. It draws you in as it drew in my fictional Beth. You can hate them because they’re not us. God didn’t create the Other, they are the spawn of Satan.

When I was in high school, my girlfriend and I attended one of Fred Schwartz’s Southern California School of Anti-Communism meetings in the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as my fictional Reverend Mahoney rising up through the stage, but close. Schwartz invented the televised anti-communist crusade. He talked the then independent, now Fox affiliate, KTLA into doing a remote. He began with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and prayers. Communists don’t pray, we do. And tithing, yes. Oh, yes. Lots of tithing. Love Jesus and pass the basket.

It is for that reason that Joel Olsteen doesn’t fly coach.

Billy James Hargis, who attended a series of rural Bible colleges, jumped onto the Schwartz bandwagon. I don’t think he was the first anti-Communists, pro-segregation televangelist to be accused of abusing the young who fell under his spell. He may have been the first to be publicly accused of doing it with both girls and, shudder to think it, boys.

The draught that hit California five years ago triggered, pun intended, the idea of the police finding a rifle in the exposed bottom of a reservoir. Was it the gun that killed Mahoney? I could, if only in a story, make a fictional Schwartz or Hargis pay for their many sins.

Write what you know, the oldest admonition to the writer. But in my case Beth, who attends the rally with my unnamed protagonist, is the antithesis of my date who attended that Southern California School of Anti-Communism meeting with me in 1961. She is my wife, the Stanford educated, New York trained lawyer. Beautiful like Beth, but not Beth.

The truest, if truth is subject to degrees, thing in “Roses for Beth” is the post-rally trip to C.C. Brown’s for a dark chocolate sundae. The Beach Boys got right almost everything about that California era, the T-Bird and surfing, the Little Deuce Coupe. But I’ll never know why they didn’t cover the C.C. Brown’s sundae. It was, as my unnamed protagonist explains, proof positive to the young Californian that there is a God. There should have been a song in that.

I can still picture it. A ghostly green face staring through a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez. Above it in black letters is the question: Whose Body? The memory takes me back to being twelve, standing in my school bookshop, unable to look away. I bought the Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel, and my love of crime fiction began. In the intervening decades, not only have I read crime fiction, but I’ve enjoyed listening to interviews with authors, and been fortunate enough to attend a couple of crime writing festivals. One question that’s invariably asked is where the inspiration for a story comes from. The answers are as varied as an inscription on a Victorian gravestone, to something pulled from a recent news headline. Perhaps, because I trained as a photographer, and spent my career analysing images, I often find at least part of my inspiration comes from a visual source.

When I began thinking about my story that became “The Fall,” I knew I wanted to use an idea I’d had for several years. It was based on a newspaper article about a high-end mugging and, while in reality the victim was innocent, I could see a way in which the situation might not be quite so straight forward. My problem was I couldn’t find a context in which to set the story. It was winter, and I was flicking through a calendar I’d bought in readiness for the new year, when I saw an image that almost immediately inspired the framework for the story. The calendar was a National Trust one, and the photograph was the view across the Parterre gardens at Cliveden House, Berkshire. Cliveden is built high on a ridge, and in the picture you can see the light catching the River Thames as it winds its way through the trees below. The grounds are open to the public, and I’ve spent many happy times walking here, and along the section of riverbank beside the estate. I knew I’d found my location.

Once I’d settled on the location, I looked at other images of Cliveden, including photographs I’d taken when visiting, and found myself drawn into its colourful past. I already knew some of the stories connected to the house, but I was interested to know more. Although currently a respected, five-star hotel, looked after by the National Trust, (Meghan Markle spent the night before her wedding to Prince Harry here) Cliveden’s history reveals times when something darker was going on beneath its glossy surface. The current, opulent Italianate house was built in 1851, but two earlier properties on the site were destroyed by fire. The original house was commissioned by the 2^nd Duke of Buckingham as a gift for his mistress. He later fought a duel with her husband, who subsequently died from the injuries he sustained. But it’s perhaps an event from comparatively recent history that’s defined the house. In the summer of 1961, married politician, John Profumo, met Christine Keeler in Cliveden’s outdoor pool. He was the Secretary of State for War. She was the teenage mistress of an alleged Russian spy. They began an affair, and lied to cover it up. When the relationship became public it led to resignations, national security concerns, a media frenzy, a suicide, court trials and a prison sentence. It was also a contributing factor in the downfall of the government Profumo had been a part of. The British Politician Sex, as referenced in Billy Joel’s lyrics to “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” remains one of the biggest scandals in British political history.

Cliveden’s past isn’t all dark though. Throughout its history, the various houses on the site have been owned or rented by dukes, earls and princes, but perhaps Cliveden’s most glamorous era came in the early twentieth century, during the tenure of William and Nancy Astor. William gave Nancy a tiara containing the fifty-five carat Sancy diamond, currently in the Louvre in Paris, and John Singer Sargent painted her portrait. They turned Cliveden into a weekend party house on a grand scale, with guest lists ranging from George Bernard Shaw to Charlie Chaplin, and Winston Churchill to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The exposure helped American-born Nancy become the first female seated member of the British parliament.

Although Cliveden is far too grand a property for my protagonists, its mixture of intrigue, scandal and decadence were all elements I wanted to include in my story, albeit on a smaller scale. Gradually, the idea of a couple living their perfect life in a beautiful house began to form. While I didn’t envision Miles and Nina as a down-market version of William and Nancy, I did see them as outwardly successful. I imagined their dreams, although shared, to have come between them. I was interested in exploring what would happen if it looked like this lifestyle was ending. For the idea to work, the stakes had to be high and, while there are many ordinary houses close to Cliveden, there are also some spectacular riverside properties with gardens stretching down to the water. I felt one of these could incite the behaviour the plot required, particularly if it was about to be lost.

I can trace my thought process that ended in the idea of a luxury house, where things weren’t all as they appeared, back to seeing the calendar photograph of Cliveden. It’s not the first time an image has inspired my writing either, but it’s not always one as spectacular as this. I was fortunate enough to have a story published in the September/October 2020 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It’s called “Fruiting Bodies.” I came across the phrase I used for the title while looking at pictures of fungi, and trying to determine which species was invading my lawn.

Cliveden historical references: https://www.clivedenhouse.co.uk/the-house/

There were two main influences for “Alibi in Ice.” The first is obvious—I wanted to pay homage to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, which meant that my main sleuth, rock-star-turned-private-eye Martin Wade, had to be stuck inside (in his case, with the flu) while his assistant, Valerie Jacks, did the work in the outside world and brought it back to him helped solve the case.  

Valerie is new to the series, which has run in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Tough and the Anthony-nominated Lawyers, Guns & Money anthology* since 2020, and was first introduced in the story “Wait for the Blackout” (EQMM May/June 2023). But because she is a POV character in Negative Girl, the first Wade & Jacks novel (forthcoming from Datura in September), I wanted readers to get a sense of her voice and what she brings to the agency – namely a deep knowledge of her hometown’s lore and mysteries and a pair of boxing-trained fists.

The second influence comes from the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.

Though they’re best known to most people for their 1997 hit “Zoot Suit Riot,” the Daddies have been putting out swing, ska, punk and funk records since 1990s Ferociously Stoned.  Though they became the whipping boys for the swing revival backlash, the band, fronted by Steve Perry, has continued to put out music, with their latest album From the Pink Rat, released July 26^th.

The band is deeply underrated and has been a huge influence on me since I first heard Zoot Suit Riot. My earliest crime stories were set to noir-ish tunes like “Brown Derby Jump,” and I was a frequent fixture at swing nights in the early 2000s. Even my clothes still honor this tradition; I’m easy to spot at a convention because of my victory rolls, crinolines and Vampire-heels.

Given that my first novel, The Big Rewind, revolved around a mix tape, and the protagonist of the Wade & Jacks series is a former rock star, it should be no surprise that music is one again a major influence on my work. In this case, the song is “The Lifeboat Mutiny,” from Ferociously Stoned, which tells the story of a girl who feels crushed by the pressures of her life, of feminine beauty, shallow friendships and self-esteem, simultaneously embracing and rejecting those expectations.  She is both the betrayed and the betrayer, evidenced by the “Death mask of Judas” and identification as “the mutineer” inside the lifeboat alongside her vapid friends.

Perry, now a resident of Eugene, Oregon, also hails from the Binghamton area, where I went to college and subsequently discovered crime fiction. I find that the Daddies’ music—especially songs like “Grand Mal,” “Cosa Nostra,” “Concrete Man Blues,” and “Kids on the Street” convey an intrinsic understanding, a bloodline, even, of the scrappy, working class struggle that underpins the area, even today.

A second Daddies-influenced story, “Dr. Bones,” (also from a Ferociously Stoned track) is forthcoming in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. And I doubt it will be the last time this band has a place in Martin & Valerie’s world—they’ve been there since the beginning, and aren’t going anywhere soon.

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*My story, “Charlie’s Medicine,” a Martin Wade prequel of sorts, took home the 2023 Shamus Award for Best Short Story.

Despite coming from the heart of the UK, Country music, especially of the 1960s and early 1970s,  has long been a love of mine, and when it came to writing a story of obsession and revenge, the world of Country—one of whose foundational texts is “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”—seemed a natural fit.

As well as focusing on the revenge aspect, I also knew that I wanted the story to be about how men construct images of women—literally in terms of crafting a stage image and persona, or figuratively in terms of  how they may build up an image of who they think a woman might be, without actually bothering to involve her in the process. Country often deals in first-person perspectives of heartbreaks, but those first-person perspectives also allow for a certain amount of bias, obfuscation and unreliability (does Jolene even know that the narrator of her song exists, or is it all  just a manifestation of the narrator’s fears and insecurities?), and so I wanted to tell my story from the POV of someone whose feelings and actions we can understand and empathize with—right up until we can’t.

As well as there being an inherent idea of authenticity to Country music—the idea that the artist has “lived” their songs—there is also a concomitant idea of artificiality, the desire to create a “show” persona, part of which involves a costume, so I wanted to make my protagonist someone involved in that process. Years ago, while working as part of a film shoot in the South of the US, I’d visited the Country Music Hall Of Fame in Nashville and seen the exhibits there, many of which contained examples of heavily rhinestoned stage costumes, and the likes of Gram Parsons’ marijuana-leaf-embroidered “Nudie” suit, so that felt like a natural fit. I loved the idea of somehow making embroidery dangerous.

The story spans three decades and two different countries, jumping in time to catch the characters a little older and a little more changed,, a structure which hopefully gives the reader a sense of the scale of the protagonist’s dedication to revenge, as well as giving the idea of the arc of a career—from small beginnings to heights of fame and back out the other side. It’s full of the big feelings you find in Country music—heartbreak, longing, regret—paired with some of the drivers of crime fiction—resentment, jealousy, desire—to hopefully create something that feels true to both genres.

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Steven Sheil (X: @ssheil) is a writer and filmmaker from Nottingham, UK. His work has previously been published in Black Static and The Ghastling, online at Fudoki, Horla, Punk Noir Magazine and Pyre, and as part of the Black Library anthologies Invocations, The Harrowed Paths and The Accursed. He is also the writer and director of the feature film Mum & Dad (2008), the co-director of Mayhem Film Festival, and an enthusiastic collector and reader of vintage crime fiction.

There’s a fascinating mechanism hardwired into our human behavior that engages interest, boosts retention, and provides a satisfying sense of closure in many a life situation. I’ll call this phenomenon The Rule of Three and apply it, for our purposes, to writing and telling a story.

I use the term “rule” loosely since there are few, if any, rock-hard rules to writing and the three that once existed are lost to history, as pointed out by Somerset Maugham. There is, however, a trove of time-honored traditions so ingrained in our culture and consciousness that calling upon them invokes power while ignoring them may constitute a missed opportunity.

Or worse.

So let us embark on an exploration of The Rule of Three, that we may discover, examine, and enjoy this intriguing device. (see what I did there?)

Consider: do things really happen in threes? Or does it just seem that way because the convention is so firmly embedded in our cultural expectations? It’s everywhere.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Blood, sweat, and tears.

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Comedy writers understand the inherent power of Three and know how to wield it with impeccable timing. Here’s Dave Barry serving it up:

“I should be a happy man. I have all the elements of a good life: a loving family, a nice home, a dog that doesn’t pee indoors without a good reason.”

Here’s another example with a mystery/crime twist from Laura Kightlinger:

“I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name, or how you met, or why they’re dead.”

And one more, from The Dick Van Dyke show—a waitress serving a bald man:

“Can I get you anything? Cup of coffee? Doughnut? Toupee?”

I challenge you to find a political speech of more than three minutes that isn’t rife with examples. Take this, from Benjamin Disraeli:

“There are three kinds of lies—lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Or this sage advice for speakers, from Franklin Roosevelt:

“Be sincere. Be brief. Be seated.”

And harking back to my high school humanities class, a literary instance from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

“Friends, Romans, Countrymen. Lend me your ears.”

And since we’re on the subject of literature and entertainment, how about Goldilocks and The Three Bears, The Three Musketeers, or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

I remember watching a Sesame Street sketch as a child, with a catchy tune by The Talking Heads that still plays in my mind. It’s about a cartoon creature named Seymour caught up in a story that has a beginning, middle, and an end.

In writing, we often use the three-act structure. We employ three try-fail cycles in a buildup to the climactic scene.

We can use The Rule of Three to establish a pattern and then break it to instill a sense of unease or outright surprise in the stories we tell.

We can use it to direct reader attention, emphasizing what we want them to remember by keeping it within the three-part structure. Or—a nifty tool for those of us who write mysteries—we can use it to hide in plain sight what we want our readers to forget.

Thus, we can play fair, providing that vital clue, but burying it in the fourth position out of a list of five. People tend to remember the first, second, and last items in a list, so a catalog of just three items sticks in the memory, while a longer list leaves a lot of scope for hiding information.

And think of the potential for deepening character dynamics. With just two characters, A interacts with B and B interacts with A. But when you add a third character, possibilities for conflict sprout like dandelions after a spring rain.

Writers through the ages have used the power of Three to create memorable and compelling stories. There’s the triangle of Elizabeth Bennett, Mr. Darcy, and George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. Rick, Ilsa, and Laszlo in Casablanca.

And what if the writers of the movie Ghost had left out Oda Mae? Instead, they created a gap between Sam and Molly that only Oda Mae could fill, adding the dimension and conflict that makes the film so enjoyable to watch.

And much of what we experience as a result of The Rule of Three—both on the part of the reader and the writer—occurs on a subconscious level, making it all the more powerful.

I bring all of this up because The Rule of Three is what prompted me to write my story, “Delivering the Egg MacGuffin,” which I’m delighted to see appearing in the July/August 2024 issue of AHMM.

I took a writing workshop based on exploring The Rule of Three in storytelling. The assignment at the end of the class was to write a story using what we learned. I leave it to you to read my Egg MacGuffin story and discover what I did with The Rule of Three, but I want to tell you about one very obvious way I used the device because it involves a subject I find fascinating—perspective.

A story should be told from the perspective, or Point of View, of the character best positioned to communicate that story to readers. But this doesn’t look the same for every story.

One story may feature a single POV character relating the entirety of the tale, while another story may be told by multiple characters through their own points of view. Add to this another dimension—when I am reading or writing a story, I am keenly aware that other characters, besides the one “speaking,” have their own lives, their own stories, viewed through their own prisms.

And sometimes, those stories must be told.

In “Delivering the Egg MacGuffin,” I give readers the story of a single event from three different viewpoints, each one peeling back a few layers to reveal more about what actually happened.

I’m intrigued by the concept of differing perspectives, as in the movie Rashomon, where Kurosawa uses the technique to reveal the complexities of human nature. Four people give their account of the same incident—a murder—and each is accurate in its way and yet quite different.

I used the same sort of idea when I wrote my first two novels. In Nocturne in Ashes, my main character, Riley Forte, is trapped in an isolated community with a killer after the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Rainier. She teams up with a cop, but their distress call is cut short when cell towers and radio communications fail. Three days pass before help arrives.

In my original plans for the book, the sheriff’s deputies who respond to their call had their own point of view chapters, but there was so much to tell in this five-hundred-page thriller that I had to cut their subplot from the final version.

However, Chief Deputy Randall Steadman and his partner, Frost, screamed to have their story told. That’s when I created their paraquel—not a prequel or sequel, but a story happening alongside another story, touching briefly at a few points and centered on the same major event, but distinct and thrilling in its own right.

That’s how Steadman’s Blind was born.

It may be true that there’s nothing new under the sun and every story has already been told. Perhaps all we can offer, as writers and storytellers, is our own voice, imagination, and perspectives as we craft our stories the best way we know how, using techniques like The Rule of Three to engage, entertain, and thrill our readers.

That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.