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.
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.
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 TheBest 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.
Let’s get the question of the hyphen out of the way before I begin. When Scooby Doo, Where Are You! premiered on CBS in 1969, the titular hero’s name was written without a hyphen between “Scooby” and “Doo.” The talking Great Dane’s name was Scooby Doo, no hyphens, and it remained that way until some bored Hanna-Barbera executive decided to hyphenate it to Scooby-Doo and have the name retconned for consistency.
As a lifelong Scooby fan, that hyphen just looks wrong to me. Whenever I watch any of the dozens of incarnations that followed my favorite cartoon, my crotchety old man persona comes out: Back in my day, after those bats flew out from that creepy old mansion, there wasn’t a dang hyphen in the cartoon’s opening sequence! And we liked it that way! When the bats flew away, the title flashing spookily on the screen was Scooby Doo Where Are You! Not Scooby-Doo Where Are You!
Scooby Dooby Doo is his proper name, now and forever. That said, if I could change anything about the cartoon’s title, the English major in me would trade the exclamation point for a question mark. That’s proper punctuation, and no fan, however crotchety, can argue the point. Also, I would’ve added the comma after Doo, as it appears in the brief animated sequence where Scooby and the gang run across the screen, right beneath each episode’s title. As in:
SCOOBY DOO, WHERE ARE YOU! IN: GO AWAY GHOST SHIP
To sum up, the dog’s name should be Scooby Doo and the cartoon’s official title should be retconned to Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
But I digress.
THE 1970s – CARTOON NIRVANA
To me, the 1970s were the Golden Age of cartoons. As a child, I spent Saturday mornings in the living room scarfing down Cap’n Crunch cereal in front of the family TV. I could rattle off dozens of titles, but my favorites were Super Friends; Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle; Star Trek: The Animated Series, Jonny Quest, Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets, Laff-A-Lympics, and The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour.
But the king of cartoons was Scooby Doo, Where Are You! It was a crazy show, when you think about it. A Great Dane and four teenagers ride around in a weird van, The Mystery Machine, solving mysteries. Did these kids live in the van? Go to school? Did they have jobs? Parents? Responsibilities of any kind? Apparently not. All they did was hang out at malt shops and pizza parlors, drive around the country, randomly run into very dumb criminals masquerading as ghosts or monsters, catch said criminals in elaborate traps, and literally unmask them by the episode’s end. Oh, and their Great Dane talked and usually played an integral part in solving the mysteries.
Crazy. At the time, I didn’t realize I was enjoying my very first mystery series, though I use the term “mystery” rather loosely. As a kid, it didn’t matter to me that the clues rarely made sense, or that the traps to catch the crooks defied the laws of physics. Fred, the gang’s leader, could shoot a “monster” in the butt with a toilet plunger tied to a rope, then capture him by hoisting him up to the ceiling via a pulley. Shaggy, Scooby’s best friend (I was going to say Scooby’s owner, but that’s a debatable topic), could devour a double triple-decker sardine and marshmallow fudge sandwich in one gulp…unless Scooby stole it. “Danger-prone” Daphne, Fred’s girlfriend, could fall through a trapdoor and plummet to a dungeon’s stone floor without so much as suffering a hangnail, let alone broken bones. And don’t get me started on Velma. She was a walking, talking encyclopedia, a convenient deus ex machina who could pull out any clue or factoid necessary to wrap up the mystery.
The mysteries weren’t so much solved as they were resolved. The gang gathered clues, sure. But by the episode’s end, the clues didn’t really matter when all they did was construct an elaborate trap, catch the villain, and pull off his mask to reveal that the seemingly supernatural monster was, after all, a very human criminal.
For all its goofiness and inconsistencies, I was obsessed with this show. I wanted to drive around in The Mystery Machine, eat Scooby Snacks with my talking dog, hunt for clues, catch crooks, and party at The Malt Shop afterwards. I think the appeal of Scooby Doo for me—and maybe for everyone—was this: kids were solving crimes that confounded adults. And that leads me to “Shane on the Scene,” my story in the May/June issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
“SHANE ON THE SCENE”
This story idea was born from an anthology call for private eye stories exploring 1960s America. (Since my main character was an amateur sleuth and not a paid professional, turns out he didn’t qualify as a private eye. Sigh.) Anyway, the assignment was to take some culturally significant event from that tumultuous decade and use it as the background for a private eye story. I’m sure there were lots of stories about Woodstock, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and other monumental historical events.
At first, I had no idea what to write about. For one thing, I wasn’t alive in the 1960s, so I felt little connection to the decade I was researching. But, as a child of the seventies, I came to realize I was very much plugged into the pop culture of the sixties through television. That was my angle.
But what TV show should I write about? StarTrek? The Twilight Zone? Those were two of my favorites from the sixties, and they were finding new audience members like me through the power of syndication. As a kid, I didn’t necessarily understand the decade preceding my birth, but I did take note of the Cold War, Space Age, and apocalyptic storylines running through those shows. Those lessons applied to my world in the seventies. In Star Trek’s “A Private Little War,” I realized we were the Federation and the Russians were the Klingons, and our conflict was being played out in other countries instead of other planets. In The Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough at Last,” I learned we lived under the threat of a nuclear holocaust…and to always carry an extra pair of reading glasses, in case the first pair broke.
But all of that seemed heavy and depressing. What I remembered from the seventies was a brand of happy curiosity, a feeling of adventure. I needed to capture a sense of childhood’s . . . mystery.
WOULD YOU WRITE IT FOR A SCOOBY SNACK?
When I hit upon the idea for Scooby Doo, I knew I wanted to model my mystery after the plot of a real episode. My amateur sleuth, using lessons learned from a show he’d watched on a Saturday morning, would solve an actual crime. With my premise chosen, I was excited to have my chance, through Shane, to vicariously become the hero I’d dreamed about.
But which episode? I started watching Scooby Doo, Where Are You! for inspiration. Now, I’ve done all kinds of research for stories, everything from reading entire books to mapping out historical constellation patterns. I’ve even bought a video game console just to learn Texas hold ’em, literally playing thousands of poker hands to master the game and get the details right. As entertaining as that was, watching old episodes of Scooby Doo was by far the most fun I’ve had doing research.
While I enjoyed episode eleven, “A Gaggle of Galloping Ghosts” (probably my favorite, since there are three monsters), I went with episode fourteen, “Go Away Ghost Ship.” In my story, Shane watches that episode the Saturday it premiered on CBS, December 13, 1969. Just as Scooby and the gang snag the Ghost of Redbeard and unravel an insurance fraud scheme involving ship manifests, Shane unmasks the perpetrators of a similar crime.
I hope you enjoy reading my story as much as I did creating it. If you have a subscription to the streaming service Max, check out Scooby Doo, Where Are You! and the other incarnations of America’s favorite canine sleuth. The kids in your life—and maybe the kid inside you—will thank you for it.
I am thrilled to be in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine!
This is the magazine that was always around when I was a kid. My mother subscribed, she has always been a fan of Hitchcock; his movies, television show, and the monthly collection of short stories, which was read by the whole family. Though as an adult I don’t write or even read many mystery stories, I still remember certain stories that I read some fifty years ago in AHMM. Those clever concise stories likely informed my craft as a writer of flash fiction. I have written many flash fiction and short stories, some even dark or mysterious, but “Nuisance Bear” is my first actual murder mystery, though I suppose it’s not really too much of a whodunnit.
“Nuisance Bear” takes place in northern Vermont. If you are not familiar with northern Vermont, watch the Hitchcock movie, The Trouble With Harry, which was filmed around here in 1954. (yes, my mother got autographs, and yes, that lakeside cabin in the movie is still on the very lake that I now live on) If you are not familiar with northern Vermont, you might not notice how Hitchcock had to fudge some of the shots when the weather and foliage that fall did not comply with his wishes. Of course, if you are familiar with northern Vermont you know that’s just how it goes. And you might also notice from the movie how much remains the same and how much has changed around here since that time. Maybe that’s part of what “Nuisance Bear” is about; managing change and preserving place.
At over 3000 words, “Nuisance Bear” is one of the longer stories I’ve written. I usually write flash fiction, which in my book is most often 99 words, though definitions of flash fiction vary. I enjoy the puzzle of fitting a complete story into an exact set amount of words. I have found too that a low word count forces tough decisions which make the finished product more polished through word choice and economy of details. But the flashes don’t have to stay at that word count, don’t have to be terminally “finished.” Often a 99 word story is inherently mysterious; they can leave the reader (and writer) wondering what might happen next. The thing about such short stories is they can be considered scenes, seeds for the writer to grow and expand the story.
Now would be the time to say that “Nuisance Bear” grew from a flash fiction seed, but that would not be true. It’s too bad, it’d be fun to share that transformation, but this is one of those rare for me stories that I just sat down and wrote until it was finished. But the habits and skills developed through flash fiction writing served me in the writing of the story, and more important, the revising of the scenes. I hope the tale got told with just the right amount of words.
Sometimes my flash fictions produce characters who do not want to be finished at the end of the 99 word story. I become quite fond of some of these characters and so they find there way into ensuing stories and scenes. Nuisance Bear is finished; after all it’s a story of the perfect crime. However, I have lately been hearing whispered suggestions from Barret Ingram. Hmm. Character, check. Setting, check. Hmm.
This was my first mystery story, but maybe not my last.
D. Slayton Avery lives in northern Vermont beside a mountain under some trees overlooking a lake, along with one husband and one cat. Though an award winning poet and published author of flash fiction, “Nuisance Bear” is D.’s first murder mystery. You can sample D.’s prose and poetry at ShiftnShake.
My story, “Fire on the Mountain,” started with a challenge: to write a long short story in the style of Hitchcock’s thrillers.
To begin, I listed all the essential elements of his films: an everyman falsely accused, an absurdist plot, a McGuffin, and of course a mysterious blonde.
I chose North by Northwest as my model because it included wide open spaces, national parks, and a surreal climax.
However, I wanted to update his style to the new century, so I chose a familiar scenario in my home state of California: wildfires.
Since I’m an avid hiker and frequenter of the outdoors, I didn’t have to do much research on the landscape and scenery. I picked Redding, a small mountain town at the base of Mount Shasta, as the setting both for its beauty and its fondness for New Age mysticism.
Next, I drew from my day job at a college. To me, one of the enduring appeals of Hitchcock’s best films is they feature everyday people caught up in heightened scenarios. For my protagonist, I didn’t want some superhero or private eye or courageous cop. I am tired of reading about them. Give me an everyman any day. Instead, I chose a biology professor collecting specimens during a sabbatical.
I also didn’t want a traditional love interest from the 1950s, so I added an independent female forest ranger who is more interested in arson than in a husband. I included a range of suspects, from a family out on a camping trip to a crew of inmate firefighters. And I finished with a climactic chase through the park.
The hardest choice for me was the antagonist. After debating several options, I settled on an arson investigator from the U.S. Forest Service. He knows that the most likely culprit in any fire is the person seen closest to its ignition point, which leads him to suspect the professor. You don’t often read firefighters being cast as bad guys, but it was a fun riff on stereotypes for me.
This is the second piece of mine for AHMM with overt references to a Hitchcock film. In one of the prior stories, I included a Vertigo reference and a few allusions to Rear Window. It’s hard to write a thriller without thinking of Hitch, so I don’t try.
David Hagerty has published four mystery novels and more than 50 short stories, including 8 in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. If you’d like to read more of his work, much of which is available free online, please visit his website, https://davidhagerty.net, sign up for his newsletter (there as well), or follow him on Facebook: David Hagerty Author.
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