Tag Archives: short stories

January 6, 2025 · 11:46 am

Genre Benders and “The Nine Lives of Dr. Impossible” (by James A. Hearn)

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, Star Trek, and Star Wars. 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 Star Trek 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 The Omen, 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.

“‘Coolbrook Twp’ and Other Characters” by Dennis McFadden

Upstate New York writer Dennis McFadden is the writer of the collection Jimtown Road, which won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Here he talks about his story in the current issue and writing vivid characters.

My stories all start with character. There’s a very good reason for that: When you’re as lousy at plotting as I am, they almost have to. I’d love to be able to craft a pristine Rubik’s Cube of a tale that leaves readers nodding in admiration at the sleight-of-hand they should have been able to detect along the way, but Agatha I certainly ain’t. Memorable characters are my best hope to connect with a reader.

The smallest seed can blossom into a good character. The characters I come up with originate in different ways, but primarily they fall into one of two categories: those based on real people I’ve known, and those I essentially invent—people I wish I had known? Well, maybe. Except for the psychopaths.

I’m not sure what it says that my most successful stories seem to be based on a character, Terrance Lafferty, who falls into the latter category, a complete product of my imagination. Maybe my real friends and acquaintances are too bland to compete with him? Or maybe this invented guy couldn’t be my real-life friend, because he might be somebody I wouldn’t want to be seen hanging around with in public? Naw—I’d love to go on a pub crawl with him. Of course, I’d have to buy. Lafferty is an Irish rapscallion, an antihero, fond of the horses and allergic to labor, whose fight or flight instinct came minus the fight part, and whose dimple just below his smile seems irresistible to most members of the opposite gender. I like him so much he’s starred in multiple stories, many of which have found fine homes, such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and The Best American Mystery Stories, a couple of times. Colorful—that’s the word. Maybe to achieve real memorability, a character has to be bigger-than-life colorful, more colorful than the real folks we know.

Or maybe not. Jimmy Plotner and Buster Clover (our heroes in “Coolbrook Twp,” who transform before our very eyes into James and Russell) are not bigger-than-life colorful. Maybe everyday, run-of-the-mill colorful, tops. And maybe that’s because they’re based on me and my lifelong best friend.

“Coolbrook Twp,” for those of you who haven’t yet read it (and what are you waiting for?), is constructed of alternating sections set in 1994 and 1954. This much, from the earlier sections, is true: My friend—we’ll stick with his fictional nickname, “Buster”—and I attended a four-room country schoolhouse, we competed climbing the tilting flagpole in the yard, we had a severe teacher much like “Mr. Fenstemaker,” famous for his huge paddle and readiness to use it, and we devised the brilliant scheme of hiding in the playroom cubby hole one afternoon after school so we could have the place all to ourselves. And we peed on the furnace, casting an unholy stench over the rest of the school. Or one of us did. We’ll stick with his fictional nickname too, “Jimmy.” Oh, and the first-ever orgasm “Jimmy” experiences at the top of the flagpole? Yep. True. Can’t make this stuff up. Stranger than fiction and all that.

What didn’t happen? Pretty much all the rest of it. We didn’t get caught, our teachers weren’t carrying on (that we know about), “Mr. Fenstemaker” was not murdered forty years later.

But the bits that did happen were enough to make me want to mine them for a story years later when I started writing fiction. The whole sexual awakening theme was already there, so, to enhance that theme, I invented the teachers’ affair, the boys getting caught, Buster getting a beating, the “Man, are we in for it now,” and there the story sat, contained in 1954, for years. Recently, I brought it out and dusted it off, looked at it with older, fresher eyes. I’d learned by then that a good way to give depth and resonance to a story, to make a story better, is to tell two stories at once; and so the 1994 plotline fell into place—you see, by then too, the mysteries of everyday life, the utter unknowability of exactly what the hell’s going on around us as we live out our years, had become my main preoccupation in story-telling, the underlying theme in nearly all my stuff.

One of the most rewarding things about writing “Coolbrook Twp” was the chance to play with the perspective offered by the distance of time—that wider, wiser perspective, the way lifetimes fall into focus, patterns and destinations become revealed, is one of the nifty things about getting older. (And there aren’t all that many nifty things about it.) Over forty years is a long time for a friendship to endure, and “James” and “Russell” are every bit as grounded in reality as are “Jimmy” and “Buster.” And, then again, maybe the 1994 plotline was motivated in part by the desire to extract a bit of revenge on “Mr. Fenstemaker” for the real-life beatings he inflicted on many a poor boy, “Buster” included.

And “Jimmy”? No. He was far too angelic and well-behaved to ever have encountered that fearsome and legendary paddle.

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Filed under Criminal Masterminds

Tagged as characterization, characters, crime fiction, editing, fiction, history, short stories, writer, writing

January 10, 2017 · 4:03 pm

How I Came to Write “The Hawaii Murder Case” by Terence Faherty

Terence Faherty is the author of The Quiet Woman as well as the Owen Keane and Scott Elliott mystery series. His recent short-story collection Tales of the Star Republic is available from Gisbourne Press. Here he talks about the inspiration behind and the writing of his story “The Hawaii Murder Case” from the January/February 2017 issue of AHMM.

My wife and I enjoy traveling, and I thought it would be fun to write a new short story for each place we visited. Instead of forcing a whodunit format on each locale, I decided to let the setting suggest the proper story to tell. For example, St. Simons Island, where we stayed in a creaking old carriage house, seemed like a good place for a ghost story. When we visited Scotland, we encountered the life and legend of Mary Queen of Scots everywhere we went, so I came up with a suspense story that used the famous queen.

But I was hoping for more inspiration than just what type of story to write. Years ago, I came across a writer’s block remedy. It consisted of a deck of cards that would randomly generate certain basics of a story, like setting, protagonist, and problem. Trying to weave together those random elements was supposed to stimulate creativity. I never used the card system, but it occurred to me that I could let our trips serve the same role. I began traveling with my notebook at the ready, so I could jot down random elements that I would later weave together in a story. I’m happy to report that the system worked. And it not only served as a creativity stimulus, it made each story a scrapbook of that particular vacation.

“The Hawaii Murder Case,” as the title reveals, was inspired by our vacation on Kawai. I came back with the following story elements. 1) During the trip, I was reading a Philo Vance mystery, The Kidnap Murder Case. 2) While we were standing at the edge of a remote waterfall, a branch the size of a suburban tree fell from the forest canopy and narrowly missed us. 3) To access the beach nearest our condo, we had to go up and down a long, steep stairway that was out of sight of anyone not on the stairway itself. 4) On the beach, we observed a May/December couple who barely spoke to one another. 5) Our condo building contained three units, all of which were owned by the same person and decorated identically.

From those major elements, and a dozen minor ones, I came up the story of a vacationer who is conked on the head by a falling tree branch and begins to take on the characteristics of the fictional detective he’s been reading about. There follows a sudden death, of course. I made it a comic mystery—told by the “famous” detective’s harried wife—because the crazy premise pointed that way and because I enjoy writing funny stories. They’re a nice break from the grim stuff. You can check out the results in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine’s January/February double issue. And if you’re ever facing writer’s block, try the random detail remedy. I recommend trying it in Hawaii.

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Filed under How'd That Happen

Tagged as detective, hawaii, inspiration, mystery, short stories, travel, whodunit, writers, writing

October 14, 2014 · 2:36 pm

In Extremis

Mystery stories are often driven by people in dire straits—such as an accountant standing on a skyscraper ledge, waving a pistol. That’s the crisis facing Loren D. Estleman’s resourceful Four Horsemen police squad in “Tin Cop.” Meanwhile, broken ex-Wall Streeter Pit Geller finds himself holed up in Las Vegas with a family torn apart by a dead guy in John Gregory Betancourt’s “Pit and the Princess.” Jay Carey imagines policing a future Sarasota, Florida ravaged by global warming, destructive storms, and crumbling infrastructure in “We Are Not Insured Against Murder.” A literary publisher finds himself at the end of a rope—specifically, a noose—in John C. Boland’s “The Man Who Stole Trocchi.” A curious “curator” roaming Europe is unaware of the wolves at his heels in Stephen Ross’s “Gallery of the Dead.” And B. K. Stevens closes out her long-running series featuring Lieutenant Walt Johnson and Sergeant Gordon Bolt this month in “True Enough: Bolt’s Last Case.” To mark this transition, watch this blog space for the author’s reflections on her decision to say goodbye to one series and start another.

Plus we bring you a bit of espionage when radio producer Margo Banning visits a munitions factory in “Margo and the Locked Room” by Terence Faherty. John H. Dirckx, well known to AHMM readers for his Cyrus Auburn procedurals, translates and introduces this month’s Mystery Classic, “Justice by the Book” by Pedro de Alarcón. Finally, Robert C. Hahn introduces us to a new crop of bibliomysteries in his Booked & Printed column.

The Short of It

There’s something deeply satisfying about the Nobel Prize for Literature being given to short story writer Alice Munro. Munro is one of the few authors who have received acclaim on the basis of short fiction only, and the award is an affirmation of the story’s significance. She even told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.”

Hear, hear.

Personally, I think stories can be more powerful than a novel. You can’t really escape in a short story, it demands too much concentration. It demands that the reader bring as much to the story as the writer. I recall in another interview Munro said she often took more than a month to write a single story, and I think it can similarly take about that amount of time to come to an understanding of a story.

Often Munro’s stories seem, at first read, a somewhat haphazard amassing of scenes and recollections. But the second and third time through, I begin to see a pattern, an arc that builds, almost like an argument. I agree with this comment by Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize: “If you read Alice Munro, sooner or later you will stand face to face with yourself and you will go from that meeting a different person.”

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Filed under Awards

Tagged as Alice Munro, short stories