by Barry Ergang
You may have discerned from the aforementioned list of authors that in addition to hardboiled private eye stories, I have a fondness for tales which involve “impossible” crimes. I always wanted to write at least one such salable story. In March 1999, for the first time in more than thirty years, the germ of an idea that might lend itself to one occurred to me.
John Dickson Carr once pointed out that locked rooms and other seemingly impossible situations have to arise logically within the story; they cannot be added simply for the sake of mystifying the reader. Thus, the impossible situations must occur from a fortuitous convergence of circumstances or be contrived for plausible reasons by the villain. If the author throws in an impossibility for its own sake, he or she is violating the writer-to-reader contract.
In developing what became “The Play of Light and Shadow,” I needed a venue in which a locked-room situation could logically occur. Most locked-room stories feature murder or theft in a room sealed—doors and windows—from the inside, so it’s apparently impossible for a killer to have slain his victim or a thief to have stolen an object and escaped from the room. Initially I’d hoped to include both crimes. As the story took shape in my mind, I realized I’d have to confine the impossibility to theft, with the less “exotic” homicide occurring later on.
“The Play of Light and Shadow” concerns a renowned professor of art history who has acquired a painting by a deceased artist whose work he admires and about whom he’s writing a critical study. The artist had a criminal past: a felonious association with a legendary thief who specializes in pilfering artwork. The artist and thief had a falling-out which resulted in the thief vowing to destroy the artist’s every extant painting to prevent him from attaining the reputation to which he aspired. The flamboyant thief is reputed to have stolen the artist’s work both from private collectors and from museums, despite state-of-the-art security systems, on the day of private delivery or museum debut.
The art professor engages the services of a private detective to guard the gallery in his home, which is filled with expensive paintings and sculpture, on the day he intends to celebrate the painting’s acquisition by throwing a party for family and friends. The gallery is windowless and locked from the outside. Ten minutes before the party guests are admitted, the room is inspected and found empty of intruders, the artwork safe. Yet when the guests enter, the room—which the detective had under constant surveillance in the interval—is discovered to have been invaded. The painting is missing. The detective’s prime witness—or suspect—is subsequently found strangled.
A note about the title: it alludes to an aspect of the fictional artist’s technique but also describes the essence of the formal detective story: a drama in which umbrageous actions, motives, characters, and events are ultimately elucidated.
I’m not certain how the art angle came about. At eleven years’ remove from the story’s conception and composition, I can only surmise that it arose partly because I had customers from the audio business whose house was filled with expensive paintings and sculpture. Although I’ve never known anyone who’s done so, it struck me as feasible that some collectors would have galleries in their homes. I confirmed this with a friend, Andrew (a.k.a. Drew) Wilson, who majored in Art History in college, and with a gentleman at the Philadelphia Museum of Art whom I consulted about lighting.
I’m indebted to Drew for his patience because, as the story started to take shape in my mind, I phoned him frequently to throw ideas and questions at him. Assimilating his answers and suggestions enabled me to develop the setting, populate it with appropriate characters, and fabricate background information about the artist and the thief. To the latter end, Drew sent me the July 18, 1999 issue of The New York Times Magazine, which contained an article by Peter Landesman titled “A 20th-Century Master Scam.” Apart from its overall usefulness, it cited a statistic about art forgeries I used in the story—adding a footnote so readers wouldn’t think I’d made it up. “To Catch a Thief” by Susan Caba, in the November 7, 1999 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, provided additional information about art theft.
Now that I had the story’s principal location and a general outline of its events, I had to devise a locked-room method that was plausible but not too far-fetched. I wrestled with and rejected several notions; then, while walking the dog one evening, I realized that something I’d seen nearly every day of my life but hadn’t attached any significance to was the key. I don’t want to reveal specifics, but it’s not giving anything away to tell you it pertains to closets.
After several false starts, and still having only a general plan in mind, I started writing, groping my way into the story and its characters. (The hardest part about writing a fair-play whodunit is planting clues the detective—and reader, if he or she is astute enough—can identify and assemble to solve the mystery. You hope you’re subtly misdirecting the reader instead of limning the clues in neon letters.) The first draft was completed at the end of December 1999, coming in at nearly 20,000 words—a length not viable in today’s magazine marketplace. It took nine months to write because I was rusty, not having written fiction in about ten years; I was working full-time; and my mother was in poor health and needed looking after. I put the manuscript aside to “cool” for a month or so before starting revisions but they had to be postponed for a couple of years. In early 2000, my mother’s health took a turn for the worse, and between then and September 11, 2000, when she died (yes, a year to the day prior to the WTC/Pentagon/Pennsylvania tragedies), I spent my days running to work, to a hospital or nursing facility to visit my mother, and home to take care of the dog and get a little sleep. A month and a half after my mother’s death, major changes occurred in the workplace that further delayed my getting back to the story. For reasons not relevant to this article, I left the workplace in February 2002. My priority? Turn “The Play of Light and Shadow” into a salable piece of work. I spent the next five months restructuring, tightening, pruning, eliminating some characters and better defining others. The final draft was the eighth.
I sent the story out, received two rejections—one of which included a note complimenting the story‘s plot, characters, and prose style, and telling me “try us again”—then sent it to Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine (now Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine). FMAM was my last hope: the story was just under 14,000 words, I couldn’t cut it further—try though I had—and no other markets were amenable to stories of this length. In October 2003 I received an e-mail from the then-Mystery Editor, Mark Orr, accepting the story. Subsequently the publisher, Babs Lakey, notified me that it would appear in Issue 35, the 3rd quarter 2004 issue.
In 1970, when I made my first sale, I told myself to savor the elation it engendered because it would never come again. I was wrong. I felt it when I first had a poem accepted for publication.
Seeing “The Play of Light and Shadow” in print was the most satisfying triumph of all, the fulfillment of an adolescent goal: publication of a fairly-clued detective story that includes a locked-room puzzle.
It only took 45 years.
About the Author
Former Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine (which position he attained long after the publication of “The Play of Light and Shadow”) and First Senior Editor at Mysterical-E, Barry Ergang’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. He was the recipient of a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society for the best short mystery story of 2006 in the Flash Fiction category. His website address is http://writetrack.yolasite.com/
Discover other titles by Barry Ergang at Smashwords.com:
Slow and Quiet, Drift Away
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/23417
PUN-ishing Tales: The Stuff That Groans Are Made On
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24380
Stuffed Shirt
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24385
A FLASH OF FEAR: Six V
ery Short Stories
(http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/22337)