by Louise Penny
• My U.S. publisher wanted to do a collected edition of all the Jack Reacher short stories and asked for a new story to anchor the volume. I wasn’t keen—I was in the middle of writing my next novel and didn’t have much time. But ironically I ended up very happy with “Too Much Time”—as a concise piece of work I thought it was one of the best things I had ever done.
Michael Connelly has published thirty-one novels, most of which have been about the exploits of LAPD detective Harry Bosch or the Lincoln lawyer Mickey Haller. He is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America. He splits his time between the Los Angeles he writes about and the Florida where he grew up.
• In “The Third Panel” I got the chance to write about the painter who has had a great influence on me and my books, Hieronymus Bosch. I studied this fifteenth-century artist while in college, and what I found is that there are many different interpretations of his paintings, particularly his masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. I have always been drawn to the third panel, because it depicts the wages of sin and in many ways is similar to a macabre crime scene. Though Harry Bosch does not appear in this story, his name and perhaps grim outlook are drawn from this panel. This is the world where he dwells. I enjoyed writing about it.
John M. Floyd’s work has appeared in more than 250 different publications, including Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Strand Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Mississippi Noir, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2015. A former air force captain and IBM systems engineer, he is also an Edgar Award nominee and a three-time Derringer Award winner. John’s seventh book, The Barrens, is scheduled for release in 2018. He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Mississippi.
• As soon as I received the invitation to submit a story to the Coast to Coast: Private Eyes anthology, I knew what kind of tale I wanted to tell. Back in 2013 I’d published a long story called “Redemption,” about a former gunfighter turned Pinkerton’s agent who quit both careers to open a private-investigation office with his brother in San Francisco in the 1880s, and I had for some time been considering doing a sequel to that story. After all, I’d grown up watching westerns and reading about private detectives, and I’ve always been fascinated by stories/novels/movies about reluctant gunfighters in the Old West—Shane, Unforgiven, Open Range, etc. And since I already had a main character I knew well, my only task was to give him a challenging new case and come up with some twists and turns. I finished “Gun Work” several weeks later, sent it in, and was pleased to find that the C2C:PI editors, Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks, liked it. Now I’m even more glad they did . . .
David Edgerley Gates is the author of the Cold War thrillers Black Traffic and The Bone Harvest and the companion novella Viper. His latest book is Exit Wounds; the next is Absolute Zero. His short stories have been nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, Derringer, and International Thriller Writers Awards. Gates blogs regularly at www.sleuthsayers.org; his website is www.davidedgerleygates.com.
• “Cabin Fever” is one of those stories that started in my head with the weather, something ominous building on the horizon, and picked up momentum from there. It’s the fourth of my stories to feature Hector and Katie, and like the others, it’s much about physical landscape. Here’s a curious thing. I’d already written “Cabin Fever” when I happened on the Craig Johnson novel Hell Is Empty, which I hadn’t read before. Craig’s book has Walt Longmire in pursuit of an escaped con deep in the woods, trapped in a blizzard. Ideas gather shape in their execution. Two different guys pluck a similar situation out of the zeitgeist, independently, and then take off at right angles to each other. It’s a little odd, but there it is.
Charlaine Harris is a true daughter of the South. Born in Mississippi, she has lived in Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. Her career as a novelist began in 1981 with her first book, a conventional mystery. Since then she’s written urban fantasy, science fiction, and horror. In addition to over thirty full-length books, she has written numerous short stories and three graphic novels in collaboration with Christopher Golden. She has been featured on bestseller lists many times, and her works have been adapted for three television shows. Charlaine now lives at the top of a cliff on the Brazos River with her husband and two rescue dogs. She has three children and two grandchildren.
• I’ve written about Anne DeWitt several times, and it’s always fun to see what she’s up to. High school principals always seem extremely powerful to the staff and students, but Anne takes this several steps further; she’s a survival expert who’s trained clandestine operatives, and she’s intensely goal-oriented. Travis High is going to be the best high school in North Carolina . . . or else. “Small Signs” is about Anne’s past rising up to bite her and how she reacts to the threat.
Rob Hart is the author of five novels: Potter’s Field, The Woman from Prague (selected as one of the best reads of summer 2017 by Publishers Weekly), South Village (a best-of-2016 pick by the Boston Globe), City of Rose, and New Yorked (nominated for an Anthony Award for best first novel). He also cowrote Scott Free with James Patterson. His short stories have appeared in such publications as Thuglit, Needle, Joyland, and Shotgun Honey. Nonfiction articles have appeared at Salon, the Daily Beast, Literary Hub, Nailed, and Electric Literature. He is the publisher at MysteriousPress.com and the online writing workshop director at LitReactor. Find him online at @robwhart and www.robwhart.com.
• Someone else noticed before I did: over the course of a few months I had published short stories involving a bagel maker defending his storefront, warring food trucks, and a restaurant scam. A friend asked when my collection of food-noir stories was coming out. When he said that, I was working on a story about the murder of a bouncer at a popular pastry shop. I was writing to a theme without knowing it. Which, in retrospect, is not surprising. I like crime fiction and I like food. And they’re both great vehicles for storytelling. Crime is a measure of people at their worst, and food speaks to a wide range of cultural and personal attributes. It turned into a challenge: how many food-noir stories could I write? This is my tenth. I knew I wanted to set a story in Chinatown, and I knew I wanted it to involve enigmatic deliveries. I’ve always loved walking into Chinatown restaurants and bodegas and feeling completely lost in the city where I grew up. Those vague notions percolated for months until I ran across a news story about a gambling parlor busted above a restaurant in Chinatown. The story clicked immediately.
David H. Hendrickson’s first novel, Cracking the Ice, was praised by Booklist as “a gripping account of a courageous young man rising above evil.” He has since published five additional novels, including Offside, which has been adopted for high school student required reading. He is at work on a new suspense series, scheduled to release in early 2019. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and numerous anthologies, including multiple issues of Fiction River. He has published over fifteen hundred works of nonfiction and been honored with the Joe Concannon Hockey East Media Award and the Murray Kramer Scarlet Quill Award. Visit him online at www.hendricksonwriter.com.
• During my family’s trip-of-a-lifetime to Africa, I was amazed at the breathtaking wonders of the Serengeti, from the stunning diversity of life in the Ngorongoro Crater to the hundreds of thousands of wildebeests and zebras gathered near the Mara River, where crocodiles awaited, including one giant beast estimated to be eighteen feet long and weighing over a ton.
At the same time I was saddened to hear stories about poachers and their impact, especially devastating on the rhinoceros population. In fact, during our entire trip our group spotted only a single rhino, and that one only barely discernible in the distance through the strongest of binoculars.
That trip inspired my novel No Defense (a seemingly oxymoronic combination of a hockey romance and Africa) as well as several short stories. When I heard that Fiction River: Pulse Pounders Adrenaline would consist of short thrillers, going back to Africa was the ultimate of no-brainers.
If my imagination doesn’t make many more return trips to the Serengeti, I’ll be very disappointed.
Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally best-selling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood; Don’t Say a Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas; and Empire of Lies. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He wrote the screenplays to A Shock to the System, which starred Michael Caine, and One Missed Call, which starred Edward Burns. His political satire videos have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and he currently does a popular podcast, “The Andrew Klavan Show,” at the Daily Wire. His most recent book is a memoir of his religious journey, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. His most recent fiction is the fantasy-suspense podcast “Another Kingdom.”
• The idea for “All Our Yesterdays” came to me more than twenty years ago, when I was living in London. I had meant to come to the city for a year but fell in love with the place and ended up staying for seven. Part of what I loved about London—and about the U.K. in general—was the deep presence of the past. Something about walking on ground the ancient Romans had trod gave me a peaceful feeling of being part of the great sweep of history. The notion that the love of the past might have a dark side as well led to the idea. I thought it would make a good movie and have pitched it many times without success. But now, with an increasing awareness of “time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” I feel the urge to get as many of my best ideas as possible down on whatever passes for paper. I’m delighted to find myself once again included in this anthology.
Martin Limón spent twenty years in the U.S. Army, ten of them stationed in South Korea. While still on active duty he began writing, typing on a Smith Corona portable typewriter (purchased in the PX) at his on-base quarters. After four years of trying, he published the first of what have now become over fifty short stories. His debut novel, Jade Lady Burning, featured 8th Army criminal investigation agents George Sueño and Ernie Bascom. It was published in 1992, shortly after he left the service, and it was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Since then George and Ernie have appeared in twelve more novels in addition to Nightmare Range, a short story collection. The most recent novel in the series, The Line, concerns a murder at the Joint Security Area on the Korean DMZ and is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2018.
• Juliet Grames at Soho Press challenged me to write a Christmas-themed story for inclusion in their collection The Usual Santas. At first I balked. Christmas stories seemed to be mostly set in quaint little towns in cozy little bungalows with plenty of snow outside and warm fires inside.
I write about military bases. And military crime.
But then I realized that even at overseas military bases, Christmas—inevitably—comes and goes. And what did commanders worry about most during those holidays? One word leapt immediately to mind: suicide. The military suicide rate rises before, after, and during the Christmas holidays, despite the army’s best efforts to keep it down. Back in the early seventies, at the 8th Army Headquarters in Seoul, the commanders also worried about an increasing holiday rate of black market activity. That is, soldiers and their dependents buying duty-free consumer goods in the PX or commissary and then reselling them on the Korean economy. Profit margins were two or three times what the GI shelled out in the first place.
I threw these two issues together, posed a problem for my intrepid investigators, backed them up with a few other characters who I hoped would be interesting, and came up with “PX Christmas.” It’s not a story for the faint of heart, but I hope that the reader might come to realize that Christmas gifts come in all sorts of packages, even a few wrapped in horror and still dripping with blood.
Paul D. Marks won a Shamus Award for his novel White Heat, a mystery-thriller set in Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots. His story “Ghosts of Bunker Hill” (EQMM, December 2016) was voted number one in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s 2016 Readers Choice Awards and was nominated for a Macavity Award for Best Short Story. “Howling at the Moon” (EQMM, November 2014) was shortlisted for the Anthony and Macavity Awards for best short story in 2015 and came in seventh in Ellery Queen’s Readers Choice Awards. His short fiction also has been published in Akashic’s Noir series (St. Louis), Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Crimestalker Casebook, Dave Zeltserman’s Hardluck Stories magazine, Gary Lovisi’s Hardboiled Magazine, Weber—The Contemporary West, various anthologies, and many more. He is coeditor of the Coast to Coast: Sea to Shining Sea mystery anthologies. His novella, Vortex, was released in 2015. White Heat has been reissued and the sequel, Broken Windows, is due out in fall 2018.
Paul also has the distinction, dubious though it might be, of being the last person to have shot a film on the fabled MGM back lot before it bit the dust to make way for condos. According to Steven Bingen, one of the authors of the well-received book MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, “That 40 page chronological list I mentioned of films shot at the studio ends with his [Paul D. Marks’s] name on it.”
Paul has served on the boards of the Los Angeles chapters of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.PaulDMarks.com.
• Much of my work is inspired by Los Angeles, which I like to think of as another character in my stories. Growing up here, I’ve always had a fascination with Venice (where I lived for a time as a child and which I visited a lot as a teenager and over the years), both its history and the current carnival-like atmosphere that permeates every inch of it. Venice started as developer Abbot Kinney’s fever dream of creating an elegant resort mimicking the romance of Italy’s Venice, complete with canals and gondoliers. He wanted his Venice-by-the-Sea to be a cultural mecca. That didn’t last long. Neither did most of the canals, many of which were gone by 1929. Over the years the culture and glamour wore off, leaving behind a kitschy and slightly rundown beach town of leftover canals. By the 1950s it was a slum. In the 1960s it was a hangout for Jim Morrison and the Doors. In the ’70s and ’80s it was a haven for hippies and gangs. Today it’s a mix of free spirits, skateboarders, tourists, and gentrifying locals. That contrast between elegant and seedy, glamorous and gauche, old and new, trendy and trashy, rich and poor, intrigues me.
And despite its past-its-prime appearance, Venice has become the number one tourist destination in Los Angeles, at least according to some.
Most everyone knows the famous Venice boardwalk that runs along the shore, but one of my favorite spots is Windward Avenue, a street known for its long, arched colonnade that runs perpendicular to the shore and dead-ends into it. Windward doubled as a Tijuana street in Orson Welles’s great film noir Touch of Evil, and Venice’s oil wells of that time (the late 1950s) were where the oil-field scenes in Touch of Evil were filmed.
Venice is a little piece of the exotic on the edge of Los Angeles. That got me thinking about setting my story there and showcasing the colorful and sometimes dangerous streets of Venice Beach in my story “Windward” for Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea. So I gave Jack Lassen, my PI, an office (complete with 1950s bomb shelter) amid the old-world columns and archways of Windward. With a setting like that I needed a crime that would be equally intriguing, and what better fodder for crime than the façade of the movie business, where nothing is what it appears to be and a hero onscreen might be a monster offscreen?
Ultimately Venice is more a state of mind than a location. But either way, a great setting for a story.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the story collections Dis Mem Ber and Beautiful Days. She is visiting professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley (spring 2018) and visiting distinguished writer in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University (fall 2018). Stories of hers have appeared previously in The Best American Mystery Stories and in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She is the 2017 recipient of the International Festival of Literature and Art with Humor Award (Bilbao, Spain) and was i
nducted in 2017 into the American Philosophical Society.
• “Still she haunts me, phantomwise”—this line from a poem by Lewis Carroll about his great devotion to Alice Liddell, the seven-year-old daughter of Oxford University friends to whom he’d told the original story of Alice in Wonderland, has also haunted me for years. Indeed, the very word phantomwise is unique to this poem; I have never encountered it elsewhere.
In my story “Phantomwise: 1972” a nineteen-year-old named Alyce, a sophomore at an upstate New York university, finds herself the object of devotion of an older, much-acclaimed poet with an obsessive interest in the original “Alice in Wonderland” at the same time that she is, less benignly, an object of revulsion on the part of a young philosophy professor who has exploited her naiveté and regrets his involvement with her as a threat to his professional career. The story follows Alyce’s adventures in a wonderland, or perhaps a looking-glass world, in which she is simultaneously loved sincerely by one man and detested by the other; a world in which she is simultaneously treasured by one man (who wants to marry her) and an impediment to the other (who wants to annihilate her). Which Alyce prevails? The reader is welcome to decide.
Alan Orloff’s debut mystery, Diamonds for the Dead, was a best first novel Agatha Award finalist, and his eighth novel, Pray for the Innocent, was released earlier this year. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Jewish Noir, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Snowbound: Best New England Crime Stories 2017, and The Night of the Flood. Alan lives in northern Virginia and teaches fiction writing at the Writer’s Center (Bethesda, MD). He loves cake and arugula, but not together. www.alanorloff.com.