I grew up in a place and time where superstitions abounded. The place was rural Mississippi, and the time was the 1950s and ’60s, when kids were free to roam the countryside as long as they got home by suppertime—and it was easy for us to imagine terrible things lurking in the dark woods and swamps where we played and explored. I still shiver a little when I see tall columns of kudzu rising from hollows like silent green monsters, having covered trees, buildings, and anything else in its path. Who knows what might be hiding in there?
This was the part of the country I chose for my short story “The Cado Devil” (Jan/Feb 2025 issue), although it’s set in the present day. I first pictured an isolated house under construction at the edge of a swamp, and a young woman standing there in her almost-completed living-room, measuring and planning and looking forward to the day she and her husband would move in. I then of course decided to have something happen to upset it all—in this case, the arrival of a murderous escaped convict, on the run and looking for someplace to hide.
Alone and unarmed and terrified, my protagonist’s only hope is her familiarity with the partially-finished house and her knowledge of a local legend about the nearby swamp and the mysterious creature that supposedly lives there. What she does in order to survive was inspired in part by my memory of a wonderful movie I saw while in college called Wait Until Dark. In that film, as in my story, a young woman is alone and defenseless in an enclosed place with a knife-wielding killer, and no one is coming to help her. Her only weapon is a quick and imaginative mind.
I once heard that the requirements of a story are to (1) get someone up a tree, (2) throw rocks at him, and (3) get him down again. In other words, (1) problem, (2) complication, (3) resolution. You’ve already heard the problem I created for my heroine in “The Cado Devil,” and I think I managed to make her situation grow even worse—I certainly tried to—before providing what I hope is a satisfying ending. You’ll have to be the judge of that.
Anyhow, I do hope you’ll like the story. If you have half the fun reading it that I had writing it, I’ll be happy.
John M. Floyd’s short stories have appeared in AHMM, EQMM, Strand Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Best American Mystery Stories, Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and many other publications. A former Air Force captain and IBM systems engineer, John is also an Edgar nominee, a Shamus Award winner, a six-time Derringer Award winner, and a past recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for lifetime achievement. His website is www.johnmfloyd.com
I write short stories and novels and a novella here and there. I believe most authors write short stories as a way to “cleanse the palate” during the long haul of writing a novel, although some prefer to concentrate only on this most tortuous art form. I say tortuous because writing short is famously more difficult than writing long.
My shorts are stories that don’t fit with any of my three series, or story ideas that can’t be stretched to novel form, or tryouts for a new character or setting I’m experimenting with. But it’s always something that won’t let me go until I at least get it sketched out, then come back later to devote the better part of a month to tinkering with it. Sometimes the story won’t gel, and I have to put it away for a while.
In the case of “Cold Cases,” my story published in the January/February issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the sketching and tinkering stretched into years. I would have to leave the story but I always came back to it; I changed the title several times before finally hitting upon one that exactly described what the story was about. After that, the writing pretty much took care of itself.
That I couldn’t decide on the title was unusual, but I couldn’t let the idea and the main character go. It was too much fun and too different from anything I’d done before.
You see, “Cold Cases”bends the mystery genre into a ghost story, one in which the ghosts, all murder victims haunting a rustic Overlook-like resort hotel, are trying to earn a “get out of purgatory free” card. They are saddled with each other, possibly for eternity, as they try to bring their plight to the attention of the authorities.
Two of the ghosts were rivals in life, but their time in eternity is teaching them something like tolerance.
It should be a dark story, and it is. But it’s also filled with moments of irony and even humor, as the ghosts fumble through the afterlife, still clinging to old grudges and quirks from their time among the living. There’s something almost absurd about watching them, eternally bound to the scene of their demise, bickering over the past while trying to cooperate on solving their murders. It’s a story that highlights the complexities of human nature—how even in death, we’re shaped by the lives we lived, the choices we made, and the unfinished business we leave behind.
The challenge with “Cold Cases” was balancing that fine line between the macabre and the humorous, between the tragedy of these lost souls and the absurdity of their circumstances. It’s what kept me coming back to the story again and again. The characters, dead as they are, were very much alive to me, and I think that’s what every writer hopes for—that the characters take on a life of their own, refusing to let go until their story is told.
In the end, it’s not just about solving the mystery of their murders. It’s about redemption, even when redemption seems out of reach. It’s about finding closure in the most unlikely of places and circumstances. And maybe that’s why I kept at it for so long—because sometimes, like the ghosts in “Cold Cases”, we’re all just trying to find our way out of purgatory, one unfinished story at a time.
G.M. Malliet <gmmalliet.com> is the author of three mystery series; a dozen or more short stories published in The Strand, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine; and a standalone suspense novel. She wrote the Agatha Award-winning Death of a Cozy Writer (2008), the first installment of the DCI St. Just mysteries, which was named one of the ten best novels of the year by Kirkus Reviews.
It took me far too long to come to terms with the fact that a central part of writing is not writing.
Way back in the late 1980s I took a year out after university to write full-time. At that point, I’d only sold a couple of pieces of writing to small-press magazines, and I had very little money to live on, so it was a huge gamble. Because of this massive commitment, I felt I had to prove myself by being at my desk all day, every day. It was a good discipline, and it certainly worked: in the first twelve months I’d completed a novel and I had started to sell short fiction to professional magazines and anthologies. On the back of this, I gave myself an extra six months and during that time I sold my novel to a major publisher; somehow that year out lasted ten years, before the erratic lifestyle – and income – of a writer was no longer enough for my growing family responsibilities and I finally had to get a real job.
It was probably only when I stopped writing full-time that I realised how important the whole not-writing thing was. Just because I was away from my writing desk, it didn’t mean the creative part of my brain was switched off, and often it seemed to function better away from the blank page: no matter what I was doing, that part of my brain was bubbling away in the background. I’d get ideas for new stories or plot twists or random stray images while I was commuting to work, or in a day-job meeting, or chatting to someone while we waited for the kettle to boil.
A writer never stops.
The need to pay the bills and support my family kept me in day jobs through until ten years ago. When I finally returned to the life of a full-time writer, it was as if I had unlearned that lesson. All over again, I felt the need to justify myself: I had to be at my desk, and I had to feel that everyone could see that I wasn’t slacking just because I was my own boss again.
It took me at least a couple more years to convince myself that it was just as important to be away from the desk as at it. One day I might write a thousand words of new material; another day I might edit a couple of chapters, fixing all those shoddy words I’d churned out a few weeks before; and another day I might go for a ten-mile walk and have a single idea that comes from nowhere but which will move my work-in-progress forwards, or which might twist the plot in unanticipated directions, or simply give me a new insight into why my characters are the way that they are. Which of those days is more productive? None: they’re all vital parts of the process.
Most days now I go for a walk, even when I’m writing hard and fast; some days, going for a walk is all I do. One way I helped myself to accept the importance of all this not-writing was that I started to call it my Outdoor Office, and I’d post photos online of my Outdoor Office of the Day. Sharing photos on social media has been appreciated by many of my friends, but I do know that it’s also irritating: reminding them that they’re stuck in their offices and classrooms while I’m out hiking. But what can I do? It’s part of the job. Honest, it is!
One of the unexpected bonuses of this is that it has reawakened my love of photography. Back when I was a teenager, my ambitions were to become either a writer or a photographer. (Or a rock star, but that was never going to happen.) The writing won, and for all kinds of reasons the photography fell by the wayside. The Outdoor Office social media postings started out as simple photos taken with my phone, but soon that old passion was reignited. Now, my Outdoor Office days are rarely without a proper camera and a couple of lenses. In fact, they can be so much about the photography that I’m in danger of forgetting the real justification for my time away from the desk (“It’s work. Honest it is!”) But then I’ll stumble across a ruined old building, or a minor detail in the landscape, and I’ll get absorbed in how to find a composition that will make an image that will tell the story of the place… and then I’ll start thinking about that story, and what might have happened here; I might latch onto that or my mind might start skipping in all kinds of random directions, and I’ll get that one idea or insight that is worth those thousand words at the desk, and it will all make sense.
It really is my job, doing all this, and I love it!
The roots of the story “Las Hermanas Cubanas”—The Cuban Sisters—go back several years. In 2014, after retiring from my “real” job, my wife and I sold everything and left our home in Oregon for the beautiful colonial city of Cuenca, Ecuador.
The first Ecuadorian that we interacted with was Emilio Morocho. Emilio owned a taxi, and we had hired him online to take us from the airport in Guayaquil to our new home—a four-hour journey from sea level to 8500 feet elevation in the Andes Mountains. The journey showcased some of the most jaw-droppingly spectacular scenery you will ever witness, but in all honesty, I was most impressed by our driver. Emilio, like many Ecuadorian males of his age—mid-thirties—had spent several years in the United States, so his English was quite good. If the Ecuadorian people had hand-picked an ambassador to welcome us to our adopted country, they couldn’t have chosen a better one. He had an intimate knowledge of the history of the country as well as the current political and economic climate.
Emilio left Cuenca for Minneapolis around 2005 and had just recently returned. It struck me as we talked how terrifying it must have been for him at the age of twenty-five to relocate to a city 3,500 miles away where he barely spoke the language. Conversely, what must it have been like returning almost ten years later, with all the changes that his hometown had undergone.
I am a writer of mysteries and so I’m always looking for new characters. I knew that I had found one. Fortunately for Emilio and his family, but unfortunately for me, he was the personification of a hard-working family man. So, I loaded him up with a raft of insecurities and a drinking problem and sent him out onto the streets of Cuenca as Wilson Salinas, Investigador Privado.
I needed characters for Wilson to interact with. Over the next couple of years as I refined Wilson, I created a cast of supporting characters, most of them based loosely on Ecuadorians I had met or observed in my daily life. A couple of those characters figure prominently in this story:
Javier (Javi) Morales, another friend from childhood who had become a transit cop but used his knowledge of the inner workings of Cuenca’s myriad bureaucracies to augment his income.
Capitán Ernesto Guillén, a corrupt detective with Ecuador’s policía nacional. Wilson and Guillén meet in my first mystery published in AHMM—“The Karaoke Singers”—March / April 2018; https://tinyurl.com/Karaoke-Singers
Guillén quickly became a favorite of mine to the point that I started another series of Ecuadorian mysteries featuring him. I made him a bit less corrupt and more competent as a detective, rather than just a foil for Wilson.
But, back to the story at hand. I have over the years begun stories where Wilson and Guillén might interact not as comrades but as reluctant co-conspirators. Most of them fell by the wayside, but I think this one hits the mark.
“The Cuban Sisters” grew out of a day trip my wife and I took to Azogues, a colorful city of 75,000 souls about twenty miles northeast of Cuenca. I was struck by the number of likenesses of Ernesto “Che” Guevarra that we saw around town—on walls, lampposts and on the front of a small restaurant aptly named Café Che. The story came to me like most of them do, as an imaginary scene inspired by an actual setting.
I originally envisioned this story as a vehicle to highlight the character, Javi Morales. Although Javi appears in many Wilson Salinas mysteries, this is the first time that he plays a major role.
I soon realized that this might be the story where Wilson must work with Guillén, his sworn enemy. Guillén needs Wilson’s help to locate Javi, whom he suspects of murdering his brother-in-law. Wilson agrees to help him, in the hopes of at least derailing the investigation into his friend, or at best, proving his innocence.
I enjoy writing—and reading—character-driven versus plot-driven stories. I enjoy crafting interesting but believable characters. The most challenging aspect of writing for me—and paradoxically the most satisfying—is creating situations to put the characters into and finding unusual but realistic ways to get them out.
As a side note, I have to say that writing about Ecuador has made this aspect much easier. Frequently over the course of the six years we spent in Cuenca I heard expats and visitors proclaiming, “Ecuador is like the U.S. was in the fifties and sixties.” I will let others debate if that is a good or a bad thing. But from my view as a writer, the relative “technological innocence” of the Ecuadorian people as well as the lack of network connectivity between bureaucracies allows me to emphasize the characters rather than the “CSI” aspect. In my opinion a story such as this one would not work if set in the modern-day U.S.
BTW: The characters of Virginia and Carla are based (very loosely) on two elderly Cuban sisters I met on a visit to an old sugar mill that had been run by their father.
“Las Hermans Cubanas” is Tom Larsen’s fourteenth contribution to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. His stories have been published in Black Cat Mystery Magazine,Mystery Tribune, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine and others. Tom’s short story, “The Body in the Barrel” AHMM July/August 2021; https://tinyurl.com/Body-in-the-Barrell received the 2021 Black Orchid NovellaAward and appeared in “The Best Mystery Stories of the year, 2022.” His story, “Poor Maria” AHMM January / February 2022; https://tinyurl.com/Poor-Maria appeared in “The Best Mystery Stories of the year, 2023.” Tom Lives with his wife in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. You can read some of his work here: http://www.amazon.com/TOM-LARSEN/e/B00N00JLZM
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 40th 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 100th 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 2nd 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.
Trace Evidence 