One of the initial decisions that every author must make is whether to write in the first-person (I) or the third-person (he/she/they). To the reader this may seem like a technical matter with limited effect on the end product, but in the mystery story, the stakes are amplified; there is a crime to be solved, and having—or not having—access to the inner workings of the mind is of paramount importance to how the solution to the mystery is revealed.
The first-person narrator seems less popular in contemporary crime fiction as writers appear to prefer the freedom to move through time and space, from scene to scene, from character to character, and from mind to mind. But it wasn’t always this way: the Sherlock Holmes stories, the early Agatha Christie, and the Nero Wolfe novels all employ a first-person narrator. And in each case, it’s the plodding sidekick—Doctor Watson, Captain Hastings, and Archie Goodwin—who tells the story from the perspective of “I”. There is good reason for this: the reader needs to be kept a distance from the machinations of the mastermind detective’s inner thoughts. Imagine if the reader is permitted to know all that Holmes, Poirot, or Wolfe are thinking. The mystery would be solved quickly; the story would be over almost before it began. Justice would be served, but the reading experience would be short. How often is Watson forced to admit, “I confess that I was filled with curiosity, but I was aware that Holmes liked to make his disclosures at his own time and in his own way”? The good doctor is the filter between the reader and the detective, denying us access to Holmes’ omniscience.
Most of the earliest authors of the hardboiled school, who, in inventing their own style, wrote in reaction to the intellectual puzzles of the earlier mysteries, continued to write in the first-person: Hammett, with his nameless Continental Op, Chandler with Phillip Marlowe, and later, Ross MacDonald with Lew Archer. The new hardboiled detective wasn’t a genius, he was a man of action, tough and immediate. He wasn’t sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, thinking about whodunnit; he was knocking down doors not knocking on doors—and getting knocked down himself, if not knocked out. The detective in these early noir novels parallels the reader: the two locked together, united in purpose, chasing down the killer page by page; the detective’s discoveries are simultaneously made by the reader. There is no space between when the detective has a flash of understanding and the reader learns of it.
And it’s not just the immediacy: writing in the first-person is the most realistic of all narrative techniques. It is how we experience our world everyday: locked inside our heads, looking out at the mystery of life around us, unable to see into the black boxes of others’ psyches. In truth, the novel is the one artistic form that fully allows us into the mind of another, to know—if only on a fictional level—the voice, the thoughts and emotions, the dreams and loathings of another. (Film occasionally tries voice-over to get at this intimacy and fails miserably.) James M. Cain took it a step further and had some of his first-person narrators explain the very act of writing their stories. Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice: “So I’m in the death house now, writing the last of this so Father McConnell can look it over and show me the places where maybe it out to be fixed up a little, for punctuation and all that.” Even the copy-editing is made transparent!
And so when I write, I’m reaching for that same feeling—to be immediate and realistic, to show the world as we experience it, to propel the reader through the pages alongside the detective, to have them in his head sharing his discoveries, failures, and doubts in real time as if they were their very own.
Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson is a writer living in Toronto. He is a past winner of the Black Orchid Novella Award, the Crime Writers of Canada Best Novella Award and the Toronto Star Short Story Contest. His first novel, The Road to Heaven, was published by Dundurn Press in 2024. Visit his website at https://www.alexisstefanovichthomson.com/
When most readers and writers think of a crime fiction series, they envision following a single protagonist and his or her sidekicks through several stories. Consider, for example, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, and any of hundreds of other amateur and professional sleuths who come immediately to mind.
Not me. I stumbled backward into writing a series in which the setting—a fictional version of West Texas—is the reoccurring element that ties the stories together. This began with “Quarryville, Texas,” a story I wrote for The Private Eye Writers of America Presents: Fifty Shades of Grey Fedora (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2015). In the story, a private eye from Waco travels to Quarryville to solve a decades-old crime.
The quarry at the heart of Quarryville’s economic existence had closed in the early 1950s, leading to the town’s “long, slow slide into oblivion,” and the “dried-out scab of a town” is barely clinging to life at the beginning of that story. I returned to Quarryville for “Smoked,” written for Noir at the Salad Bar (Level Best Books, 2017), a story later included in The Best American Mystery Stories (2018). In “Smoked,” a former biker in the Witness Protection Program opens Quarryville Smokehouse, a barbecue joint that is soon named one of the state’s best. This unexpected publicity leads to all kinds of trouble.
The notoriety of the Quarryville Smokehouse brings visitors to Quarryville, and that sparks a “rebirth on Main Street” in “Mr. Sugarman Visits the Bookmobile,” written for Shhhh…Murder! (Darkhouse Books, 2018). As the story begins, an antiques shop and an art gallery are scheduled to open within the month.
In “Sonny’s Encore” (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #9, 2021), we visit Quarryville’s past when we experience the 1935 robbery of the quarry’s payroll office.
In subsequent stories, the town plays a minor role. Instead of featuring Quarryville, I developed the region, adding towns such as Chicken Junction and Mertz. Even so, characters visit Quarryville, spend the night in the six-room motel, dine at the Quarryville Smokehouse, or travel through on the way to somewhere else. I even set stories outside of West Texas in which characters from Quarryville play prominent or minor roles.
But I didn’t return to modern-day Quarryville as the central setting until “Barbed Wire Bison” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November/December 2024). The smokehouse is still popular, the antiques shop and the art gallery are now open, and the town is no longer a dried-out scab.
In “Barbed Wire Bison,” a woman moving to Quarryville hires two retired barflies to help her unload her rented moving van. There aren’t many secrets in a small town, and before long they wonder what she’s hiding or who she’s hiding from. When violence comes to town, they learn the reason behind her relocation.
This is far from my last West Texas story. There’s one coming up in a future issue of AHMM about a young woman from Quarryville who travels to Hollywood to seek her fame and fortune, and there are others in the pipeline.
While every West Texas story can be read and enjoyed without reading any of the others, seeing how they all tie together provides readers with a richer experience.
And, as I discovered by accident, a series doesn’t need to feature a reoccurring protagonist. Sometimes the right location can tie everything together.
Michael Bracken (www.CrimeFictionWriter.com) is an Edgar Award and Shamus Award nominee whose crime fiction has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and many other publications. Additionally, Bracken is the editor of Black Cat Mystery Magazine and several anthologies, including the Anthony Award-nominated The Eyes of Texas. In 2024, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for his contributions to Texas literature. He lives, writes, and edits in Texas.
If you’ve visited my website, the first thing to catch your eye was probably the dragon. It’s perched on a mountaintop only slightly smaller than itself, wings spread as if to fly off the screen. Or perhaps it was the image of the cowboy with the smoking gun, my recurring Texan private eye, Trip Allison. Or, maybe the haunted graveyard struck you, with its askew tombstones jutting out of the mists. (There were supposed to be zombies, but I ran out of money for my Web designer.)
As for me, my personal favorite is the alien spacecraft hovering above all of these disparate elements. Suspended against a star-studded sky, a beam shines down from the ship’s belly, highlighting these words:
WORLDS ABOVE & WORLDS BELOW
The Fiction of James A. Hearn
Confused yet? You’re not the only one, my friend. You see, I’m a multi-genre writer. Or at least I’m trying to be.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS . . .
Science fiction, fantasy, and horror were my first loves. As a kid, my brother Sidney and I consumed thousands of hours of genre fiction in the form of comics, television, and movies. Our favorites were Superman, StarTrek, and StarWars. I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without my brother’s creative mind lighting the way, that’s for sure.
These weren’t idle pursuits for Sidney, or for me. You see, Sidney had Down Syndrome and was afflicted with a degenerative hip that confined him to a wheelchair in his final years. Genre fiction—with its fantastic, reality-shattering elements—enabled him to literally live out his dreams, to take his mind places his body couldn’t go. And by extension, because I understood my big brother through these stories, I was able to understand what he was saying when others couldn’t. To borrow a StarTrek concept, I became his universal translator in later years. (To read more about Sidney, visit my guest post in SleuthSayers, “An Evening at the Opera House.”)
Naturally, when it came to writing, I returned to my favorite genres. It never occurred to me that I could write crime fiction until the summer of 2017, when I crossed paths with Michael Bracken.
WHEN REAL LIFE GOT TOO REAL . . .
In 2016, after losing a comfortable job and basically hitting rock bottom, I returned to writing fiction. I’d gained valuable life experiences. Joy. Grief. Getting married on the beach in Maui to my best friend. The death of both parents to cancer. Sidney’s passing in 2019. The everyday triumphs and everyday trials that make up the sum of who and what we are.
But instead of novels I couldn’t quite finish, short stories were coming out. I wrote about aliens, robots, vampires, and wizards. Unfortunately, none of these stories sold at the time. My only encouragement came in the form of nicely worded, non-generic rejection letters. Editors had read my stories to the end, at least, but had decided to pass for one reason or another.
I pressed on, becoming a two-time Finalist in Writers of the Future. WotF is a quarterly contest for amateur science fiction and fantasy writers. Winning would’ve been like getting the Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory—you go to Hollywood, you meet contest judges like Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson, and you get into a kick-ass anthology.
But I didn’t win. I kept wondering if I was any good, and there was a nagging suspicion that I wasn’t.
A SALE! THE EDGARS! BAMS!
I first met writer and editor Michael Bracken at a science fiction and fantasy convention in Austin, Texas. Actually, let me back up; that’s not quite true. He was participating on a panel about writing for anthologies and I was safely, anonymously, in the audience.
I am by nature a shy person and public speaking of any form is my greatest fear. (I don’t know why public writing doesn’t bother me.) Anyway, I wanted to introduce myself to Michael and tell him I was interested in writing a story for The Eyes of Texas, a private eye anthology he was pitching.
But I didn’t. Despite never having written a private eye story in my life, I was determined to write one for The Eyes of Texas. A few weeks later, “Trip Among the Bluebonnets,” my first sale, was born.
Other sales soon followed, including a horror story, “Tunnel Visions,” to Monsters, Movies & Mayhem. Later, Michael and I co-wrote “Blindsided” and sold it to AHMM. When I walked into a brick-and-mortar bookstore and bought that issue, I fulfilled a lifelong dream. Yes, I cried (read Trace Evidence, “A Writer’s Tears”).
In 2022, “Blindsided” was nominated for an Edgar. I traveled to New York City and got to meet some great writers, including R.T. Lawton (the winner). Here’s a secret: I wanted to win, of course . . . but a part of me was actually relieved that I didn’t have to get up on that stage and read my little speech.
Michael doesn’t know it, but I still have his voicemail saved to my phone from the day he called to say we’d been nominated. Whenever I’m feeling a little down, when Imposter Syndrome rears its ugly head, I pick up my phone and play that message. I have no doubt when my obituary is written, hopefully years and years from now, Michael Bracken’s name will be mentioned. Hey, it’s not every day that two guys are nominated for an Edgar for Best Short Story!
I’m not sure anything will top the Edgars (other than winning), but having “Home Is the Hunter” chosen for Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 comes pretty darn close. Written for my Dad, a hunter, “Home” is pure noir and a search for the childhood home I’ve lost. Every once in a while, a reader will contact me through my website and tell me how much they enjoyed that story. I’m blown away that random strangers will take time out of their lives to send me a few kind words. It means a lot.
CROSS-GENRES . . .
I guess it’s only logical that my other genres bleed over into my crime fiction. “The Nine Lives of Dr. Impossible” is my fourth story for AHMM, and it is by far the most unconventional. “Blindsided” dealt with the aftermath of crime; “When the Dams Break” was a mystery about a missing woman; “For Lydia” was a private eye and confidence game story. As such, these fit squarely within the pages of AHMM.
But “The Nine Lives of Dr. Impossible” doesn’t fit the mold of the traditional crime story. It’s a genre-bender; there’s a TV superhero, his mysterious “ensorcelled” mask, a romance gone wrong, an attempted murder, and a Christmas miracle. It’s Adam West’s Batman meets Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; it’s a weird story and I love it because it’s weird.
I’ve written other genre-benders. “The Third Wish” (Black Cat Weekly #69) is about a troubled child of divorce who goes to live with her mother and her new husband, a ruthless gangster. Though set at Christmas, this story has a sinister streak reminiscent of TheOmen, one of my favorite movies. It’s a blend of crime and horror, but it’s also noir.
“Here Comes the Judge” is a novella in Michael Bracken’s Chop Shop series, an anthology about Dallas car thieves. In my story, brothers Brad and Rolly steal The Judge, an ultra-rare vintage GTO, from a funeral home for the biggest payday of their careers. But instead of cruising Easy Street, the discovery of cursed tarot cards and an unwelcome guest in the trunk sends them on a collision course with the afterlife. It’s a crime caper, a ghost story, and a comedy.
THE FUTURE . . .
I’m still writing about robots and wizards, and I have a dream to write a fantasy novel where I can build the world from the ground up. In short, I’m keeping my weirdly themed dragon-spaceship-graveyard-P.I. website. Truth be told, I’ve had much more success in crime and mystery fiction than my original loves of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
And that’s fine by me. In middle-age, just when you’re thinking you’ve likely experienced “the best” in everything, from music to movies to books, it’s an absolute blessing to discover something new. That’s what crime fiction and all its subgenres are to me. In addition to a slew of modern short story masters in AHMM and EQMM, I’m diving headlong into Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Agatha Christie, and James M. Cain, to name a few.
Honestly, I kinda feel like my brother Sidney is here with me, looking over my shoulder as I read. The way he did when I used to read comics to him. With every new book and short story, we’re Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock on the Enterprise, boldly exploring new frontiers in genre fiction. Sid’s playing Kirk, of course, but that’s as it should be.
Live long and prosper, y’all.
An Edgar Award nominee for Best Short Story, James A. Hearn writes in a variety of genres, including mystery, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In addition to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, his work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Monsters, Movies & Mayhem and Best American Mystery and Suspense. Visit his website at http://www.jamesahearn.com.
If you’re a reader of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, it’s a dead certainty you enjoy reading mysteries. It may reasonably follow that you delight in thrillers and suspense fiction, as well. All three types of stories can present the reader with the kind of scintillating and satisfying experience found in no other genres.
But are there distinctions between the three—mystery, thriller, and suspense? Does it matter if there are?
If, like me, you are fascinated by what captivates us as lovers of the mysterious and suspenseful, please join me for a closer look into what sets these story types apart and what drives us to devour them with such pleasure.
Most merchants of mystery, AHMM included, define a mystery story as one that features a crime or the threat or fear of a crime. So, let us start with the crime as we examine the differences between our three chosen genres.
Naturally, there will be exceptions to the observations I’m making throughout this exploration, but most mysteries open with the crime—the grisly discovery of a corpse or an empty safe, bereft of jewels and bearer bonds. If the crime hasn’t occurred by page one, count on it to happen soon.
That’s because the remainder of the story revolves around discovering whodunit, why they did it, and how it was carried out. The answers to those questions are what keep us turning the pages, piecing the clues together, pitting our own gray matter against the sleuth at the wheel.
We want to solve puzzles and anticipate a resolution at the end, but our expectations go far beyond that. We also want to identify with the hero, experience the thrill of the hunt, and revel in the satisfaction of seeing the perpetrator punished.
Thrillers also involve a crime. Usually, there is the threat of some horrific catastrophe looming ahead and the bulk of the story consists of spine-tingling, nerve-wracking attempts to stop that crime from happening.
If the action kicks off with a crime, that early crime is just a sample of what’s to come. If there’s not a crime at the start of the book, there must be the credible threat of a crime waiting in the wings. The story centers on the hero’s efforts to prevent such a calamitous crime from occurring.
Crime lurks beneath the surface of a suspense story, too. Tales of suspense are about danger, or the provocative threat of danger. The peril can be clear and present or a low-level hum but it must persist throughout the story as a pervasive element.
While a crime must take place in a mystery so that there’s something to solve, and the threat of a disastrous crime serves as the driving force of a thriller, it’s possible to have a complete and satisfying suspense story where the crime never occurs. The fear of it, the underlying menace, is enough to produce a full-fledged, emotionally fulfilling reading experience.
In all well-told stories, there must be something at stake. In a mystery, the risk may not rise to the level of life and death, at least not in the physical sense. The stakes may involve the detective’s reputation or relationship with a loved one. But there has to be something the protagonist yearns to gain or fears to lose.
In a thriller, the stakes are large, usually (but not always) expanding well beyond the personal realm. Life, liberty, and justice—these are the values on the chopping block of a thriller. We want to share the hero’s experience of riding the razor edge, nearly losing the desperate gamble, and then pulling back from the gaping jaws just as they snap shut!
We want to free the captives and defeat the enslavers, conquer the villain and see him get what’s coming to him. Give us anything less than life, liberty, and justice at stake in a thriller and we’ll walk away disappointed.
Beyond the intangibles at risk, we thrill over having something concrete in the mix—the formula for a dastardly bioweapon or a time machine programmed to bring Hitler into the twenty-first century. If you’ve ever heard anyone refer to the MacGuffin, this is what they were talking about.
It’s the back and forth of the game that keeps us enthralled and turning pages, keeping score and placing bets as we anticipate what will happen next and how it will all turn out.
While the scope of a suspense story doesn’t usually rival that of a thriller—entailing danger to a single person or small group rather than a widespread population—the measure of risk to the individuals involved should still be life and death, or something comparable.
The focus of the story differs as well across these three genres. In a mystery, the focus is on the crime and follows the protagonist in their pursuit of the perpetrator.
In a suspense story, that focus is flipped. The shadowy black hat is inexplicably in pursuit of the hero, who must peel back the layers to find out who wishes them ill, learn why, and figure out a way to stop it from happening.
In a mystery, the sleuth often labors to find a way into the puzzle. In a suspense, she’s trying to find a way out.
In a mystery, something has happened. In a suspense, something is about to happen and there’s a tantalizing tension as we try to fathom what, why, and who.
In a thriller, we often know what’s going to happen and even who’s responsible for the threat—although the protagonist may still be in the dark. The focus is on the fight, the chase, the race, the frantic battle to prevent the nightmarish disaster from occurring.
One of the most compelling characteristics of a thriller is its almost relentless fast pace, leaving us breathless as we speed through the pages. Suspense stories, on the other hand, can move ahead at just about any pace.
As an example, an all-time favorite of mine, Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, is fraught with suspense and an underlying sense of peril. Yet it ambles at a leisurely pace through the dark halls of Manderley, taking its time in revealing, piece by piece, the secret that lies at the heart of the story.
Like suspense, the tempo of a mystery story can vary but won’t reach the breakneck level of a thriller and, in fact, usually contains more variation in pacing throughout.
This brings us to the ending of the tale, the finale, the happily ever after. Or not.
The ending of a mystery must provide a resolution. We expect it. Without it, we are not satisfied.
I remember reading Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend and being bitterly disappointed to reach the last page without knowing who committed the crime laid out at the book’s beginning. My fault, I suppose, for mistaking the story as a mystery when perhaps it’s not intended to be so.
There are occasions when the resolution may not exactly include the solution to the puzzle. But the story has to wrap up in a manner that will satisfy us, as readers, and justify the time we invested in reading it.
The ending of a suspense story is sometimes a bit more nebulous, in keeping with the distinctive and moody ambience they often engender. One hallmark of suspense fiction is the setting which tends toward brooding environments with a gothic sensibility—remote, macabre, mysterious.
Such stories may leave us deliberately in the dark at the close of the story. And yet, we might feel there could be no more fitting way to end the tale.
A thriller concludes after the final electrifying confrontation, the climactic scene pitting the rivaling forces against each other in a duel to the death—literally, in most cases. But there’s an important convention in a thriller that gives it that extra twist, the bite we crave in this particular type of story.
The false ending.
You know, when we think everything has been neatly wrapped up and we let our guard down. And then—wham!—out of nowhere, the unexpected happens, squeezing yet more suspense out of the story.
Think Casino Royale, Alien, or The Silence of the Lambs. These movies feature such a double ending. I’ll bet you can think of several more and they’re probably among your favorites.
When I was writing my first thriller novel, Nocturne in Ashes, it wasn’t until I reached the end of the book that I realized it was missing something—that false ending that leads to the final surprise twist. As I pondered how I might fix this deficiency, the solution jumped out at me with such force that I literally stopped in my tracks, stunned.
I, who had written the book, hadn’t seen it coming. And I knew readers wouldn’t see it either. When I hear from fans who’ve read the book, that twist is what they talk about most. It satisfied the convention, leading to satisfied readers.
So, I’ve made the argument that there are distinctions between mystery, thriller, and suspense and I’ve laid out my reasons. But how much does that matter?
To some, it matters a lot. To others, not so much. As for me—I love them all. Each one brings its own delicious flavor to the table. I hope our exploration has whetted your appetite and inspired you to dig into your next mystery, thriller, or suspense story with gusto!
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
Trace Evidence 