Trace Evidence

What aspect of mystery stories gives you the most pleasure?  Is it the puzzle? Do you adore a locked room? A brain teaser? The slow elimination of suspect after suspect? Do you love to re-read Golden Age classics in which fair play was a given, with the author sworn to provide reader as well as detective with all the clues needed to solve the mystery? Or is it crime itself that fascinates you? The shock? The gore? The ingenious method of dealing death? Or the heart-pounding suspense that keeps you up late at night, turning pages frantically to find out what happens?

Or are you really in it for the characters? Like many hopelessly addicted mystery and crime fiction readers, I find most literary fiction boring. Of course there has to be a crime, a murder, a caper, a puzzle, or a high stakes threat to an appealing character. Something has to happen. But it has to happen to characters I care about, so character-driven mystery and crime fiction is my preferred fare, my filet mignon and potatoes au gratin, as both reader and writer.

I’m not talking about cozies, which spend a lot of time describing literal steak and potatoes—or wine or cheese or cupcakes—as well as clothing, which doesn’t interest me. The real problem with cozies is that the characters’ development is circumscribed by convention. There’s a glass floor that keeps their problems from going too deep. I find true traditional mysteries and the kind of police procedurals in which the reader learns more about the personal life of the protagonists as the series continues the most satisfying character-driven reads.

It’s easy to find character-driven novels, but how do authors develop characters and their relationships fully within the compass of a short story? The short story series offers unlimited opportunity to do just that, along with creating puzzles without sagging middles, gratuitous second and third murders, or excessively convoluted plots.

Look at the fictional character who’s most generally agreed to have come to life in the hearts and minds of readers since he first appeared almost a century and a half ago: Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes canon includes only four works that were considered book-length in their day at word counts between 43,000 and 59,000 but would be rejected as too short for publishable novels nowadays. The rest of the series consists of short stories. Does anyone ever say, “Oh, Conan Doyle wasn’t really a writer. He never wrote a novel.” I don’t think so!

My two series, the contemporary Bruce Kohler Mysteries and the historical Mendoza Family Saga, both started about fifteen years ago with published short stories, went on to novels, and are still alive today with new short stories continuing to appear. In both cases, my characters told me in no uncertain terms that they had more to say for themselves. I also wanted to know more about what happened to them after they solved not just the crimes they had to deal with but also the initial dilemmas that made them interesting.  

Many readers complain about the trope of the alcoholic cop or private eye in crime fiction. Bruce Kohler is an alcoholic who gets sober. If he doesn’t relapse, what happens next? I’m a shrink who ran alcohol treatment programs for many years, so I know a lot about the recovery process. Readers who follow the series find out that Bruce does not spend the next few years going into bars and thinking about having a drink. He gradually grows up and deals with life and becomes what in Yiddish is called a mensch. He also stumbles into murders and gets nagged by his exasperating but funny friend Barbara into investigating them.

In the first Mendoza story, Diego Mendoza sails with Columbus on the Santa Maria because the Jews were kicked out of Spain on the very same day in 1492. I knew that fact well enough that Diego came to me in a dream, demanding that I tell his story. What happened to the Jews after they left Spain? I didn’t know. But I did a ton of research and discovered enough fascinating information to keep on writing. Thirty years later, Diego and his sister Rachel and their families are living in Istanbul. Diego is a prosperous merchant and ship builder. Rachel is working in Suleiman the Magnificent’s harem as a personal shopper to the ladies there—yes, Jewish women had this job—and solving mysteries. Just the other day, I was asked if I’m related to the Mendozas. Nope, I made them up. My forebears were not Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula but Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe, as both my DNA and my cultural traits (interrupting, talking with my hands, bagels—much like Bruce’s friend Barbara) confirm.

Summer 1986—my track record as a writer: one published short story and a completed novel. After months of trolling for an agent by snail-mailing hard-copy packages made up of the first three chapters plus an outline, I had only one bite. “Cut out the first three chapters,” the agent suggested, “then start with chapter four.” I was rewriting furiously, aiming to resubmit before she forgot about me. And amidst all this the same questions nagged me: Am I a writer? Can I consider myself a writer? Can I even say the word in mixed company?

My concern went beyond my thin track record. I had a full-time job as a lawyer. My writing time was confined to my 45 minute Metro North commute between the suburbs and New York City, plus whatever lunch hour I could grab. With such a tight schedule, output was always a top of mind concern. Could I ever rain words down on the page at a rate that would allow me to write the novels I envisioned myself writing?

The answer came in the form of a book, Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. I’d purchased the book a few years earlier from the Quality Paperback Book Club, a choice made hastily to avoid automatically ordering the club’s monthly selection. And there it sat on my bookshelf, its spine unbroken, not even for a cursory browse. In the summer of 1986, I opened it.

The book was not what I’d expected. It mostly ignored the craft of writing and concentrated instead on how to be a writer, or more precisely, how to become a person who can exist as a writer. The chapter titles mixed the nebulous with the practical: What Writers Are Like; Harnessing The Unconscious; Writing On Schedule; and The Critic At Work On Himself. I read the book and found it interesting. But the lasting takeaway came in a section called Toward Effortless Writing. This, I thought, was what I needed.

The advice for achieving effortless writing was very specific: “rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise . . . and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before—begin to write.” The subject of this writing was to be anything that came into your head. The goal was to write “rapidly and uncritically” because “the ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet.”

I began this practice on August 4, 1986, printing the words “Morning Sketches” on the cover of a 6″ by 9″ college ruled wire notebook. So what came into my head while sitting alone in my quiet kitchen with a cup of coffee at my elbow? As this regimen of daily sketching developed into a habit, the recurring subjects fell into a few broad categories:

                                    —meditations on places where I’d lived

                                    —anecdotes from the courthouse where I worked

                                    —sketches of people I knew or recently met 

                                    —childhood memories re-examined with the benefit of adult wisdom

I soon realized that these daily sessions were not only strengthening my writing stamina but also honing my abilities in the four building blocks of fiction. My meditations on familiar places became conscious attempts at creating settings. My courthouse anecdotes blossomed into mini-plots. My sketches of real people trained my eye to look deeply into characters. And my re-examined childhood memories added dialog to create rounded scenes. 

I wrote my Morning Sketches for more than three years without missing a day, then for another eight years skipping only weekends and holidays. By 1998, the entries became sporadic. Now they are so rare as to be non-existent. Did my writing ever become effortless? I don’t think so. But I managed to transform all those train rides and many lunch hours into eight published novels and, as of today, 40 published short stories.        

The germ for “Italian Alzheimer’s” was a Morning Sketch from August 14, 1997. The entry recounted a discussion about two neighborhood women, each by then deceased, and a suspicious connection that bound them together. It was this connection — a vague story involving the unsolved murder of a NYC taxi driver who may have dated both women simultaneously in the late 1940s—that piqued my interest enough to explore in a story.

Morning Sketch entries have suggested other stories in my personal bibliography: “The American Professor” (AHMM Nov. 2011); “The Visit” (EQMM Sept./Oct. 2019); “Escape Velocity” (EQMM Mar./April 2021); and “Becoming Ian Fleming” (AHMM Sept./Oct. 2022).

Those spiral notebooks (18 of them with 108 pages in each, written on both sides) sit on a bookshelf in my basement. An incomplete index, which I attempted to create in the mid-1990s, offers some guidance. But lately, I’ve been pulling down a notebook at random and diving in. I find myself continually surprised at the neatness of my penmanship and the clarity of my writing. More importantly, I turn each page with the possibility of finding the seed for my next story.      

Compasses aren’t fashionable, anyway, even if you had remembered to bring one. We’re supposed to charge into the badlands relying on our shiny new GPS app, even it if does sometimes tell us to drive over the nearest cliff. How rude. It doesn’t even say please.

Good, tuned-in people go it alone. You’ve been told repeatedly that to rely on maps, or a compass, or stories, or any other sort of objective guidance is a myth, maybe even oppressive, because guidance is Old School. Guidance means subjugating your journey to the experience of others, leftover advice from the imperialist days when two plus two always equaled four. No point asking those dead people for directions, even if they did know where the cliffs used to be and maybe still are. Better to forge into the unknown without the stale, elitist privilege of advice from those who’ve been there before.

Listen, you don’t play games with this place. People really do die out there. The desert makes it real easy to be stupid.

But why should you presume to be better than stupid people? How dare you be such a snob! You can just imagine the comments, if this were a video and not just some anonymous, undocumented walk.

You grab the plastic bottle of water from your central console, grateful to the Navajo teenager at the gas station who insisted you take it, a stocky young man with skin that glowed like polished oak and an impossible fall of coal-black hair streaming to his waist, hair that managed somehow to be black, coarse and featureless and yet shimmering all at the same time. The water had been cold when you accepted it. Now, it’s the same temperature as your skin.

You pause, standing next to your cooling, clinking car and then step away, hoping it will start up again when you need it to. You head east where the moon is rising and the hills strike your eyes with a sharply silhouetted clarity usually seen only by saints and lunatics. Everything’s fine. Why be afraid when here it’s all about you.

Sure, someone not you built a shack here once, but now it’s almost collapsed, as gray and splintered as any seaside shanty. You walk on and stumble on strange symbols, a Maltese Cross, fifty feet across, with concrete, triangular petals converging on a round, central plaque.

1966. U. S. Army Map Service

Presumptuous. Imperialist. Elitist. Obsolete junk.

Further on, you see disintegrating strips of concrete, hints of what might once have been roads. Dream streets, for a project that never was, started and never finished by someone who isn’t you and isn’t here now. You don’t need no stinking roads.

And there, in the middle of all the nowhere, a six-foot square of wire fencing protects a featureless gray trapdoor in the sand. The gray paint on the steel is mottled and split like the skin of one of the local reptiles but the hinges are oiled and shiny. The lock was recently replaced. Someone uses this to go down into the rocky dirt, but they’re not leaving you any hints. No maps. No guidance this time. Where they go to and why is none of your business. The yellow and red WARNING sign tells you so. Move along.

The next ridge over, swirls and spirals have been left behind in the rough sand, big and obvious as crop circles. People, kids, on ATVs, spinning donuts into alien code that will last decades.

These people, the strange crowd that’s passed through and left graffiti behind them in concrete or steel or sand, are gone. It’s all about you because you are the only person, the only human, for all the miles that are visible.

I gave you water because you are beloved. Dear, dear fool.

In the desert you can remember your name so the song says. But your name is not the problem. You have so many names, created to make you predictable, allowing you to pass in the world that has no guidance. Please, doctor. Excuse me, Miss? Hey, buddy. Listen, lady!  Names created to bury truth rather than reveal it. Names that eliminate surprises. My ex. The suspect. The witness. Person or persons unknown. Names that are excuses. Normal, usual, everybody else does it. What else could I do?

So much. So much else you could have done.

This is the desert. You can find clues, but you can’t hide them here. Your steps remain behind you for years. You can see the outline of the shallow graves of your truths glaring in their mounds of dug industry and trash amidst the glistening perfection of what had been perfect land, wind blown into uniform ripples. So foreign, here, these human acts—the steel, the concrete, the discards, the lies. So different from the efficient skitterings of reptiles and insects, the invisible landings and delicate foraging of the birds.

Every act, recorded in salt and silicon. Every step, seen. You walk on, deliberately choosing a fractured path around a tiny hill that will hide the distant view of your car. And then you realize that you did this crazy thing, drove all this way, were guided here to wail, to mourn, to repent. It’s all about you.

By using the weapons of your enemy, you have sacrificed
that which you fought to protect.

And these, the darkened gray hills, the scrub that is releasing new, mysterious tweets and rustlings as the sun sets, the open bits of sand that might be the path back to your car, these lovely horrors, are your only reward.

The Royal 22^nd is a French Canadian infantry regiment with roots back to the War of 1812. The Van Doos—anglicized from le Vingt-deuxième—have served with distinction in Flanders, Sicily, and Kandahar. Their home station is Quebec City’s La Citadelle, and in 2017 I was there watching the Van Doos’ changing of the guard. Among their many traditions, one snagged my creative attention. Their beloved goat, Batisse.

Don’t picture some yard goat chewing trash. Batisse is magnificent. He stands waist-high and sports a regal blue cape and golden horns to inspect the ritual. Since 1955, the Crown has kept the Van Doos in goats from the royal Tibetan flock. I’d encountered Batisse XI. You can buy his merch in La Citadelle’s gift shop. The city hockey team has his profile on their sweaters. Batisse is the bomb.

A goat heist might make one hell of a story.

But, my right brain interjected, the caper can’t use the actual Batisse. Legal issues galore, and there would be military-grade security to research, and anyway, everyone loves Batisse. No, I should use a Batisse-inspired mascot somewhere easier to access. So long as the heist was humane yet funny.

And that, friends, is where it starts. Those first qualifiers are where ideas bloom or die.

Capers are tricky things. What reads like a lark is precision work by the author. It’s not just mapping an outlandish crime and each next obstacle. A character needs personal stakes in taking such a bold risk, something to balance conflict with that lark tone. Not easy, not at all. It’s why Donald Westlake and other greats of the form get far too little credit. And it’s why a mascot heist remains on my brainstorming list.

There is danger in self-editing a new idea. If reality-checking douses enough creative sparks, that invites negativism. Over time, fatalism, someone afraid the spark is gone. The fine line is curious realism, a weighing of merits not too early to buzzkill the left brain and not too late to waste precious time.

When I first tried short fiction, I might’ve jumped onto a mascot heist because it should be hilarious. Ah, should. An artistic word, so full of possibilities. Except within the big universe of shoulds, we have to recognize the coulds. A goat heist should be a killer premise. But could I make it work? The mascot heist idea had legit problems, not least that it didn’t compel me to solve them.

On that same trip, I walked through Old Town looking for a lunch spot. Quebec City always has cruise ships in port, so the food options abound. Pubs, pizza, creperies, the works. After a search, and hungry, I picked a smallish place with a smallish chalkboard out front promising Québécois fare. Not selling it hard, just saying what the place was about. That simple message spoke to why I’d come to Quebec. To experience it. I had the elk something something.

Journaling afterward at my hotel, I jotted down another idea. Quebec, the real Quebec and someone who craved that experience. Vague, but I understood travel cravings in my wandering soul. Lots of other folks heard the call to here if only based on that cruise ship traffic. We all had our reasons for coming. So could a strong main character.

I started playing with opening paragraphs, and sure enough, my right brain rattled through its early questions. Who is this traveler? Why are they here? What expectations did they have of Quebec? Did those match up to reality? Finding those answers grabbed and held my interest. Which was needed fuel, because this story took my requisite long struggle to nail down. Time well invested. This second Quebec idea grew into “Spirits Along the One North Road” and landed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

Someone, please write a goat mascot heist. I might never be the guy for it. But I’m not sweating that, either. Ideas come and go. Time is the short supply. I’ll take that second breath and stay open to goat capers and travel cravings and to anything else I stumble upon. In the final math, I’ll have more sparks than years to chase them.

“The trouble with being a window washer is that the better you do your job, the less you have to show for it.” -Richard Kopperdahl

I am very pleased to have a story in the July/August issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. I worked very hard on it.

I hope you can’t tell.

That’s one of the many weird things about writing fiction.  You work like crazy to try to convince the reader that you aren’t working at all.  Like the duck who is serene on the surface and paddling like hell underneath. 

Most of the time (and we’ll get around to exceptions) the writer is trying to be transparent: You don’t see me.  I’m just the lens through which you see these characters, this world . . .

My story, “Law of the Jungle,” is set in 1910 and involves hoboes, or if you prefer, railroad bums.  Before writing it I read several books on the subject and skimmed many more. 

I hope you will get the impression that I know what I’m talking about, but I don’t want to hit you over the head with it.  Math teachers say show your work but editors say: Don’t.

So I try to show you the one crucial detail that convinces you I know a hundred others.  For example, I explain how my characters travel on a freight train by riding the blind baggage and hope you understand that I have learned several other ways they could have done it.

I use a classic technique for introducing this strange world to the reader: One of my characters is a prenshun, a brand-new traveler.  (And that word is another fruit of my research.) This teenage runaway knows just as little about hoboing as you do.  As he learns, so does the reader.  I, as third-person narrator, can stay as far from the action as possible.

But as I said at the beginning, there are exceptions.  If you are writing in first person then your narrator is a character and you want what she says to express her personality.  Archie Goodwin and Kinsey Milhone are both private eyes but they have very different voices.

And, of course, some authors prefer to provide a third person narration that  expresses a view of the world.  Rather than being invisible they want you to know that someone is deliberately choosing what you get to see.  Compare a page of Mick Herron to one of Joyce Carol Oates and you will see very different omniscient narrators at work.

Generally I try not to impose myself in the story, but I will do so when it serves the tale.  My stories about Leopold Longshanks, for example, have a very opinionated third-person narrator. Consider this passage about our hero and his wife from “Shanks Goes Hollywood.” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, April 2005.)

She and Shanks  were visiting the left coast because a cable network had come banging on the door for one of her novels—romance, not mystery. 

And Shanks was just fine with her success, really.  REALLY.

So, transparent or highly visible? As always, the one key rule is: what works for the story, works.

And I hope “Law of the Jungle” works for you.  Really.

We’ve all had the experience—during that ruminative pre-story stage—of something catching us like a bramble during a walk in the woods. It took five years and plenty of brambles before I had what I needed to write “The Knife Sharpener.” One bramble was Jennie Wade, the only civilian casualty during the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. Jennie was kneading dough in her sister’s kitchen when a bullet found her on the third day. This interested me.

As time passed, it became clear—or what we mistake for “clear,” early on—that I wanted to exalt the poor bread-baking Jennie by making her (somehow) the reason Jeb Stuart was off raiding the countryside instead of being more usefully present at the start of the three-day battle in Gettysburg. I wanted to suggest that Jennie was possibly responsible for the Union’s winning the battle. But over time, other brambles caught at me: I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the twenty-year old Jennie managed it, for one, and for another . . . I didn’t particularly like her.

We all know how stuck we get with a new idea, an original concept, the story as it first appears to us out of the mist. There’s a bit of love-at-first-sight about it, so it takes a lot of maturing before we can even think about letting it go. We fight to make some of it work. Did I have to reveal how Jennie managed to send Stuart and his cavalry off raiding somewhere? Maybe I could just imply it? Maybe she wasn’t accidentally shot after all, but, oh, she was a double agent, and assassinated by one of those Confederate sharpshooters who found her out? I didn’t like it, no sirree.

And no matter how I tried to exalt Jennie, nothing felt true to me—even if it was fictitious. What became truly and finally clear about the original concept was that it was oddly inert and uninteresting, despite the history-making three-day battle. I could add a lot of backstory, but for a short story, that’s risky in terms of pacing. All I had was the image of Jennie being shot dead in her sister’s kitchen while she (strangely) stuck to her routine of making bread. Where was the action of the story? Where was the development of my characters?

I was stuck. I was finally ready to come at my Gettysburg story from a different angle. But I didn’t know what that angle was. For a good couple of years, I mucked around in what felt like a need to do justice to all three days of the Battle of Gettysburg. Maybe, rather like Jeb Stuart, I was off raiding the countryside of my own mind, looking for material. For some reason, I felt responsible for putting this nation-changing event fairly and grandly on the page. But, all in ten or twenty pages? Really? Yet another bramble. A bramble bush. Something I had to let go.

And then, finally, one day I came across Tillie Pierce, fifteen years old at the time of the battle, who, twenty years later wrote a 100-page memoir, “At Gettysburg: What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle: A True Narrative.” After I read it, I knew I had my central character. It had a walloping bit of irony right up front: to keep their daughter Tillie safe, the Pierces, who lived in town, sent her three miles down the road to stay at the farm of friends – at the base of Little Round Top! Tillie had been sent right into the thick of the battle, comforting the dying, witnessing amputations. What could I do with this wonderful girl?

Slowly, Tillie’s story came to me, and the brambles lost their will and fell away when I brought a jaded, club-footed knife sharpener to Gettysburg. I had my story, but not yet my point of view, and what I managed to save from the first idea was a sense that heroism isn’t always pretty. . .or even very public. What I found, when I relinquished the first idea, was a far greater theme, one that matters to me. Over these five years, I toured the battlefield (still need to return to walk Pickett’s Charge), and when in Brunswick, Maine, for family events, I lay flowers on the grave of Joshua Chamberlain, the commander of the 20^th Maine Regiment that saved Little Round Top for the Union that day. Finally, all the pieces I needed for the story fell into place. And even Jennie Wade figures in it.

After five years, I wrote “The Knife Sharpener” in one week.

I was six or seven when I heard my uncle Bill play the piano at my great-aunt’s house, and I knew I wanted to play piano, too. Our smaller home had no room for a piano, and my parents wouldn’t let me ride my bike clear across town, especially since Aunt Sarah lived on a main drag on the East Side. When I was in fifth grade, they suggested violin as an alternative. I tried it for a year and hated it.

That was the end of my music endeavors until the Beatles erupted on Ed Sullivan. My parents hated Elvis, rock ‘n’ roll, and everything associated with him and them, too, but I knew all the words to every song on the car radio while I learned to drive.

When I went off to college, the first live act I saw was Martha & the Vandellas. More importantly, the Muddy Waters Blues Band opened for them. They played several songs I’d heard from the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, and the Shadows of Knight. But Muddy played them s-l-o-w-e-r so they sounded real dirty (heh-heh-heh). Weeks after getting my first dose of Chicago Blues, I bought a cheap guitar and the Mel-Bay guitar method and started memorizing chords. Since I was self-taught, my “technique” was mostly a catalogue of bad habits.

Then I transferred to another college, where two guys in my dorm finger-picked Mississippi John Hurt, Dave Van Ronk, and the Reverend Gary Davis. I wanted to play that music, too. Alas, my fingers were short, and I fractured my left wrist playing football. It never healed right so I have limited mobility and strength in my left hand. I still play guitar, though, and perform at local open mics almost every week. Arthritis is an issue now, but I’m still out there. It gives me an excuse to see my friends.

Much to the dismay of my wife and our cat, I found a used keyboard on sale a few years ago and am trying to teach myself piano, too, about sixty-five years late. I read music a little better now and understand theory more fully, but I will never be more than adequate. Doesn’t matter. I love it.

Music inhabits much of my writing. Chris “Woody” Guthrie, the protagonist of several PI novels, is a wannabe guitar hero, and his girlfriend Megan Traine is a former session keyboard player. I met former high school classmate Susie Woodman at a reunion years ago and learned she was a session musician in Detroit. She inspired the character of Megan and gave me lots of background details, including what it’s like to be an attractive woman in what is still a primarily male occupation.

Since Chris plays guitar, all the titles in his series are either song titles or allude to songs. Fifteen of my sixteen novels and almost half of my fifty short stories use song titles or allusions.

While I’m only adequate as a musician, two or three bass players and a percussionist who have joined me on stage at one time or another have no trouble following me because I my playing has a tight rhythm. Music is one of the two sources for that.

The other is theater.

In the early ‘80s, I agreed to fill in for someone in a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at Wesleyan University. As an English teacher, I’d taught several of Shakespeare’s plays so I was fairly familiar with the language. My apartment also happened to be across the street, less than a hundred yards from the performance space. I was terrible in the role, but loved the experience. I joined a local community theater and helped build sets and hang lights. I performed more, too.

Eventually, I studied acting, directing, and design in grad school. Directing a play, especially Shakespeare’s work, helps you see, hear, and feel when a scene drags. Rhythm is vital on stage, and it carries over into my writing. I can tell when a scene needs cutting or more detail. Because of participating in over 100 productions between the early 80s and about 2010, I can hear when a line of dialogue works . . . or not.

Now I conduct several fiction-writing workshops, including one on writing dialogue. I constantly fall back on music and theater for examples to make my suggestions clearer to my students.

In April, my wife and I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at Hartford Stage Company. Yep, the same play that introduced me to theater forty-some years ago. I even directed that same play in 2003. The following night, Barb and I went to the community theater where we first met long ago and saw several friends perform the premiere of a new work. I could feel scenes dragging and knew how to fix them, but I wasn’t the director.

Later this week, I will take my guitar to another open mic. More importantly, as I write this, I have two stories in complete early drafts. I’ll be going back over them to polish the dialogue, among other things, and tighten the rhythm until those stories sing to me.

“Nero Wolfe spent four hours every day . . . up in the plant rooms on the roof and during those hours he was unavailable.”

–The Golden Spiders, Rex Stout

If we lived in Rex Stout’s fictional world of New York in the middle of the Twentieth Century and the time was anywhere between 9am and 11am, or between 4pm and 6pm, you could be assured that Nero Wolfe was on the top floor of his New York brownstone dedicating his time to his orchids. 

These plant room sessions were to be interrupted only in the case of emergencies. Wolfe would excuse himself from everything—including conversations with clients—if the clock struck 9 or 4. The plant rooms had to be tended to. 

As a long time fan of the Nero Wolfe series, I always enjoyed this characteristic quirk, but I considered this habit in a new light when I heard how Raymond Chandler approached his writing schedule.

He would dedicate time to do absolutely nothing—or write. He told himself he was allowed to sit and not write, but what he couldn’t do was anything else. No cleaning, no distractions. Considering the choices, boredom eventually overtook him, and he wrote.

And THEN I heard an interview with Neil Gaiman, in which he said he did the same thing. He has a property in Wisconsin that he says is very lovely and peaceful. And when he goes there, he also allows himself just two choices—he could sit and enjoy the scenery, or write. No phones. No distractions. As with Chandler, writing won out.

Which leads me back to Wolfe.

Why not set time for our orchids? Our own plant rooms?

Wolfe had 10,000 orchids—orchids that are notoriously difficult to maintain. They require vigilance and supervision. Any habit that requires constant attention seems relevant here.

It would take some discipline, of course, but certainly we can dictate some time to the distraction-free practice of our craft, whatever it may be. And if instead of tending orchids we simply said we could write, or do nothing—well wouldn’t that work?

The adage that an author must open a vein and bleed on the page never felt more accurate than when I started writing autobiographical fiction. (ABF)

When I retired in the early days of the pandemic, I had hoped to complete the research for my works-in-progress. Yet, most of the university libraries closed indefinitely. My chances of research vanished. The only thing I could write was my own experience during this era.

While ABF is a well-known subgenre of realistic fiction, I couldn’t find many examples of autobiographical mystery fiction. In my research, I learned that ABF is not a set formula; it’s a scale from “loosely based upon” to “only the names have been changed.” Therefore, the author has a great deal of leeway in creating the story.

Since the genre I know best is mystery, I decided to kill a few people as I shared that era with the reader. As I’m writing more stories in the series, the crimes have ranged from strict reality to could have resulted in death to I just didn’t like that person.

Plot and setting are intertwined. I chose to write about an event that took place as I ended my time at my first job at a roller disco. A man had been stabbed in the parking lot. Googling the event to learn of the crime’s motive or consequences, I found no record of any stabbing, making the event feel surreal—and fair game for my imagination.

The crime needed to be organic to the scene and era. The stabbing had taken place at a roller disco, giving me the location—and the time was 1978.

In ABF, the main character is typically yourself. So having a crime, I then needed to determine what facets of me I wanted to show the readers.

In my early days of employment, I was a very reluctant worker. The only thing that got my nose away from a book and to the roller disco was another book. In my mid-teens, I’d discovered the wonderful world of Agatha Christie—and book collecting. Working brought me money, which bought first editions, even when I couldn’t have defined what a “first edition” was.

The quest to read as many crime novels as possible in a short period of time was one of the driving forces of my teen years. In three to four years, I had devoured most of the Golden Age mysteries I could get my hands on. My favorite authors and their books became a part of the stories.   

In talking to others who have read the stories, the memories of music are a catalyst to recalling that era and various memories. Listening to same songs at the roller disco five nights a week, I was convinced I would forever remember the lyrics to six particular songs. I can still sing them at age 62. (If you buy me a drink at a future conference, I’ll be happy to prove it.) So music became another aspect of my life that would also appear in each of the stories.

Finally, I wanted to include the awkward navigation of my orientation. I have eschewed any tropes that I’ve seen so often about gay men, but I must confess that it’s been challenging to recognize and excise them from my works. Since that was one of the drivers that started my work, I wanted to include the main character’s orientation as an impediment to solving the case and other issues.

At this point, I have developed the storylines for three more crime stories based on my memories. As you progress with these projects, you’ll be amazed at the details you’ll recall about those events—and even more, crimes that can serve as the source materials for other works. I hope as I continue down this path.

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“Disco is Dead” by Jeffrey Marks appeared in the November/December 2022 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.