Tag Archives: Kristine Kathryn Rusch

September 14, 2018 · 12:01 pm

All in the Family (September/October 2018)

Old songs notwithstanding, we are not, strictly speaking, required to always hurt the ones we love—but as this issue’s stories demonstrate, things often work out that way. Ah, family!

Consider siblings. In R. T. Lawton’s “The Chinese Box,” for instance, the city-bred and educated son of a Shan Army warlord finds himself in stiff competition with his own older half-brother, while two actors who once played brothers on a hit TV show have a very different off-screen dynamic in Brendan DuBois’s “The Wildest One.” Ecuadoran P.I. Wilson Salinas, meanwhile, must retrieve his neighbor’s granddaughter—snatched by her own father in Tom Larsen’s “En Agua Caliente.” A woman working a prison kitchen is tested when the man who killed her father demands that she help him escape in Janice Law’s “Good Girl.” And a family inheritance is at stake in our Mystery Classic, “Betrayed by a Buckle” by Louisa May Alcott, introduced by Marianne Wilski Strong.

Conventioneers extraordinaire Spade and Paladin see their extended family of SF fans and writers divided by a bitter schism with criminal consequences in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Unity Con.” A mob family’s brutal management of a co-op inspires two retired seniors to act in “Rats” by Tom Savage. And new to our pages this month, Matthew Wilson brings a tale of an army sergeant confronting racism among his brothers-in-arms at a training base in Germany in “The Cook Off.”

A man who once looked for unexploded WWII ordnance in Europe must confront his own past when he encounters an old lover in Mark Thielman’s atmospheric “Buried Past.” Loren D. Estleman’s Four Horseman return with a case involving a patriotic “Scrap Drive.” Feuding neighbors bring color and headaches to Detective Sergeant Fritz Dollinger’s investigation of the murder of a young musician in John H. Dirckx’s procedural “Counterpoint.”

History repeats itself in Dennis McFadden’s dual coming-of-age story, “Coolbrook Twp.” And a bad actor gets a shot at auditioning for a psychological thriller in this month’s cover story, James Lincoln Warren’s “Casting Call.”

Once again, these stories show that blood will tell.

On “Bothering With the Details” by Dayle A. Dermatis

Dayle A. Dermatis is the author of several novels (including Ghosted, in the Nikki Ashburne series) and over 100 short stories in the mystery, thriller, romance, YA, science fiction, fantasy, and other genres. She is also a founding member of the Uncollected Anthology project. Here she talks about her story “Bothering With the Details,” from the current May/June issue of AHMM.

Some stories have tenuous beginnings: a phrase, a scrap of dialogue, a what-if, an interesting fact that sends the brain spinning. Other stories have such murky origins that by the end of writing, whatever sparked the story is long lost.

“Bothering With the Details” is not one of those stories.

In 2015 I took an intensive Mystery Writing Workshop run by Edgar- and Shamus-nominated writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I’d taken such writing workshops from her before, so I should have known what I was in for. I knew I’d be writing a story ahead of time, and at least three stories during the week-long workshop, along with novel sketches and technique assignments and more.

Before the workshop, Kris asked for several pieces of information, including one or two things we were proficient at doing. Along with writing, my “day job” is publishing: copyediting, design, etc. Having just finished a copyediting job, I responded to her question with “copyediting.”

As I said, I should have known better. At the workshop, she assigned us to write a crime story in which the thing we were good at was integral to the story. In other words, if you take out that skill, the story doesn’t work.

I found myself faced with writing a crime story in which copyediting was paramount.

Well, hell.

As a copyeditor, I’ve encountered many writers who think they don’t need a copyeditor. (My own mother, for instance, was sure that her first readers would catch everything. When I published her novel, I hired an outside copyeditor . . . who, unsurprisingly, found errors.) Yes, most folks—such as my own husband—can catch typos. But it takes another level of skill to know, say, when to use “a while” versus “awhile,” or the nuances of the n-dash. The difference between “my husband Ken” and “my husband, Ken” speaks to how many husbands I might have.

You get the idea.

So I started with a woman who’d been downsized because the company didn’t think they needed someone who bothered with those details . . . and off I went. I haven’t got the Chicago Manual of Style memorized like Lydia does, but I had a great time researching (one might say bothering with) the details as I wrote the story. Reader, I laughed.

A possibly interesting side note: at the workshop, we were later charged with writing a story using a secondary character from one of our other stories. I chose Brittani, the granddaughter of Lydia, the protagonist in “Bothering With the Details.” Delving into Brittani’s past, I’ve written several stories about her history as a “fixer” at her high school, including ones that are slated to appear in Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine and Fiction River: Dark and Deadly Passions.

Finally, if you’re a writer interested in learning more about the craft of writing mystery, Kristine Kathryn Rusch will be teaching the above-mentioned workshop again in 2019.

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Tagged as copyediting, crime, dayle a. dermatis, editing, fiction, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, mystery, short story, writing

November 16, 2016 · 7:21 pm

60 Is the New . . . (December 2016)

Editing a magazine is all about novelty—the next issue, the new stories, the new authors. One of the nice things about a significant anniversary is the occasion to pause and reflect. As we notch our sixtieth year, we thought it would be fun to invite some other voices that have long been associated with the magazine, contributors and a few staffers, to reflect on AHMM in this month’s special feature (The Case File).

But it’s the stories and authors that are the magazine’s raison d’être, and this celebratory issue is also a fine representation of AHMM’s recent decades. We are delighted to welcome Lawrence Block back to our pages with “Whatever It Takes”; Mr. Block first published a story in AHMM in 1963. And we are also delighted to welcome Bruce Arthurs, who makes his AHMM debut this month with “Beks and the Second Note.” And in between those extremes, we have new stories from other writers who have long associations with the magazine: John C. Boland (first AHMM story in 1976); Kristine Kathryn Rusch (1989); David Edgerley Gates (1991); Kathy Lynn Emerson (2001); and Stephen Ross (2010).

I wish I had the room to list the hundreds of authors who have graced AHMM’s pages with stories that have delighted and horrified and intrigued our readers for 60 years. We are grateful to them all.

The Man Behind Spade/Paladin

If you’ve ever been to a fan convention (mystery, science fiction, or other), then you know they can nurture intense friendships based on mutual interests. In this guest post, Kristine Kathryn Rusch describes just such a friendship—and the influence it had on her fiction.

This story, “Trick or Treat,” makes me sad. Not because the story is sad. It isn’t. But because of what happened after I wrote it.

For a couple of years now, I have written stories about two very different detectives who work science fiction conventions. Spade is a Secret Master of Fandom (SMoF) and a forensic accountant; Paladin is an enforcer, for lack of a better term. Spade is large and geeky; Paladin is small and tough (and geeky).

When I wrote the first Spade/Paladin Conundrum, “The Case of the Vanishing Boy” (AHMM, January/February 2010), I gave it to my long-time friend, Bill Trojan, to vet. Bill had a long history at science fiction conventions. He was a junior-level SMoF, meaning he ran some conventions, knew SMoFly traditions, and didn’t get too deeply involved in the politics. For the first twenty years that I knew him, he also sold books at both science fiction and mystery conventions. If you went to any, you would see his very large table in the front of the dealer’s room. The name of his story was Escape While There’s Still Time.