The other day, a good friend who admits her taste in men is deeply flawed, told the funniest story in her best deadpan style. Husband № 3 was ‘hair-challenged’, i.e, balding. He believed dying his hair and eyebrows jet black would make it seem he had more, fuller hair. The opposite appears to be true, but he didn’t know.
Instead of asking for advice and assistance (thus acknowledging characteristic presence of Y chromosomes), he attempted the process by himself. Soon enough, his wife heard him yelling and cursing.
Yes, boys and girls, he had dyed his flesh. His entire forehead had taken on the complexion of a Goodyear tire.
In times like this, I picture an often brutal Wheel-of-Fortune® device called the Wifey-Sympath-O-Meter™ where ‘sympath’ may relate more to ‘symple and pathetic’ than sympathy. Wifey wheel segments might contain such phrases as: “You poor thing,” to deep Southern “Bless his heart,” to Great Northern “You nincompoop!” As if pretending it mitigates the sting, we even hear foreign phrases, such as the French inspired “nicodème,” which means, well, nincompoop, or the German “dummkopf,” literally dumbhead.
Nitrogenic Mustard Gas Formula The situation was more dire than they realized. Chlorine and ammonia were principal ingredients in WW-I’s chemical warfare compound, the vesicant (blister agent) nitrogenic mustard gas. Naïve housekeepers have died mixing the two.
Doofus husband begged his darling to google for a solution. Unbeknownst to her, he didn't wait. A man of ill-considered action instead of patience, he applied household bleach.
Meanwhile, Google found a couple of dye removal suggestions combining ammonia and an oil. She returned and started rubbing the oleaginous solution on his head, whereupon a sizzling “Sssssssss” and a scream rent the atmosphere. The concoctions chemically reacted into a substance resembling battery acid.
God love her. At one point, she was working on future ex-husband № 5, but may have reconsidered. She’s now found a guy who treats her well and has a full head of hair.
In the meantime, may crime lovers carefully mind their household chemicals, especially in the presence of those with uncluttered minds, who have less in their heads than on it.
Like most writers who've been at it for a while, I've gravitated toward certain kinds of stories. I wander off the path pretty regularly--any route you follow too often gets old--but I find that most of my stories these days involve (1) mystery/suspense, (2) a Southern setting, (3) a protagonist who's a regular, average person, (4) a handful of named characters (no more than four or five), (5) either a murder or a robbery, (6) a third-person POV, and (7) a plot with at least a couple of twists.
If you consider two of my latest published stories, you'd find all these elements, but you'd have to look at both to find them all. Each story veers some distance away from my norm, and that's something I didn't even realize or think about while it was being written. I only noticed it later.
Here's what I mean.
My latest story in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine went on sale a few weeks ago--"Heading West" appears in their May/June 2025 issue. In some ways, that story fits right into my comfort zone: mystery /crime, robbery, less than half a dozen named characters, third-person viewpoint, several plot reversals, etc. But in other ways I varied the template a bit. For one thing, this story is set in the Old West, which I have done often in the past but rarely at AHMM. Out of my 28 stories there, two have been Westerns.
NOTE 1: A quick word about writing in the Western genre. I've often heard writers say they like to do mystery stories because those always contain a crime. Why's that important? Because a crime story means conflict is already there--it's built right in--and we all know that conflict makes for a good story (usually the more the better). I think the same can be said of Westerns. Almost every Western story I can think of, except maybe Old Yeller, contains gunfights and violence of some shape or another, so . . . well, you see my point.
This story also contains some conflict that goes behind human vs. human. Much of the agony in "Heading West" is human vs. nature. Not only the rough environment, but the gradual buildup and arrival of a powerful tornado. (Living where I do, I know a bit about tornadoes, and the one in this story scores a 10 on the Wizard-of-Oz scale.) When you mix a terrible storm with a band of crazed outlaws who want to kill your protagonists, that makes things tough for the home team. It also makes things fun for the writer. If you happen to read the story, I hope you'll have half as good a time as I did, writing it.
The other recent publication I wanted to mention is my story "Redwood Creek" in Michael Bracken's anthology Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Materialistic Eighties (Down & Out Books). It appeared about the same time as my new AHMM story did, and features 13 other stories, each of them based on something memorable from that decade. I picked (naturally) "Movies of the '80s," so I dutifully made sure the early clues to the identity of the villain came directly from the movies that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, etc., during those ten years. Putting together a plot puzzle based on Academy Awards trivia turned out to be great fun.
Some of the things (besides the 1980s theme) that made this story a bit different from most of my creations were that it was a PI story (I don't write a great many of those); it featured 16 named characters, which is a lot for a 5100-word story; its crime was a dognapping; and it was written in first person. As for POV, I've actually found myself writing more first-person stories than I once did, especially if there's a detective working a case that I want him/her to solve along with the reader.
I also made sure my private eye was far different from the Spenser/Mannix/Spade/Marlowe stereotype. Here's an early paragraph from the story:
My name, by the way, is Ryan Grant, and I'm a retired private investigator. I was not, however, a movies-and-novels kind of PI. No downtown office with a bourbon bottle in the desk drawer for me, no pebbled-glass window in the door, no ceiling fan, no overflowing ashtray. I didn't even smoke. For twenty years I worked out of an office that was once the guest bedroom in our home while my college-professor wife earned most of our income. I was a liberated man.
NOTE 2: Another different--and, to me, special--thing about this particular anthology is that all the other contributors are friends that I've met in person or via Zoom. That doesn't happen often, and makes me look forward even more to reading all their stories.
How about the rest of you? Do you find yourself leaning toward the same kinds of stories, the more you write? Do you find yourself breaking the mold now and then? When you do, how much do you vary your settings, plots, POVs, characters, etc.? Do you ever hop from one genre to the other, or mix them up? How often? Has that been successful? Let me know, in the comments section below.
As for me, several more "unusual" shorts are coming up later in May--but, hey, that's a different story.
From the Dakota Scout, some interesting stories from yesteryear:
March 29, 1900 - from the Madison Daily Leader, South Dakota was in the middle of a smallpox epidemic and in Ipswich, SD, schools were closed until fall to limit the spread of diphtheria.
MY NOTE: My mother had diphtheria as a child in the Appalachian mountains of the 1920s. She never mentioned any vaccine (which had just finally been invented), but she did get the old-fashioned treatment for it, which included cauterizing the throat. It was so painful she hoped it would kill her.
April 5, 1950 - State cement plant employee Ray Deig reported Rapid City's first flying saucer encounter. He saw one on the night of March 21, but he didn't report it because he thought it "was one of Uncle Sam's secret developments" and "I thought people wouldn't believe me." (No idea why he changed his mind about folks not believing him...)
April 19, 1900 - Five prisoners escaped the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls by breaking off the bottom of a fence during morning yard work.
May 2, 1949 - Sioux Falls veterans tried to be first in line for the processing of their WW2 bonus forms, and pilot Joe Foss flew the paperwork overnight to Pierre, but Bonus Director J. J. Kibbe refused to accept it because it hadn't been mailed. The forms were then mailed to the Pierre post office. (Meanwhile, I'm sure much cursing was heard and Mr. Kibbe became the most unpopular man in Sioux Falls.)
August 18, 1899 - the Weekly Capital reported that Manly Beaver, a 13 year old boy, saved the lives of 93 teachers taking a train ride into Spearfish Canyon, who were stuck by the wreckage of an accident on the train bridge. Beaver ran down to flag the next train and warn them of the danger ahead. Beaver received $10 and a "free course of education at the Madison Normal School" (now Dakota State University).
August 24, 1899 - Trainmen operating a freight engine in Hermosa had to fight off half a dozen tramps, one of whom drew a gun on the trainmen. The workers forced the tramps into the depot and kept them locked inside until the law arrived.
September 4, 1949 - The Daily Plainsman reported that Redfield Maynard Schultz was charged with murder after getting involved in a private fight, and becoming so angry he rushed into the police station, grabbed his own .38 service pistol, and returned to the parking lot and killed Roy Sieben. (Sadly, no backstory given, as in what was the argument about?)
September 9, 1899 - the Kimbal Enterprise reported that a customer paid a 20 cent lunch tab with a $20 bill, but no one noticed that it was a Confederate $20 until the guy left the restaurant. "When reported to federal authorities, the restaurant owner was told that the government didn't regulate the use of confederate money." (I think they started regulating after incidents like this... But you could always try it at a restaurant of your choosing.)
September 17, 1999 - One hundred years later, an Alaskan man was buying rounds for the house until Sioux Falls police showed up and arrested him. Charles Cooper (don't you wish it had been D. B. Cooper?) was wanted for robbing the nearby U.S. Bank before heading straight to the bar. Loren Bultena, who was one of those getting free drinks, commented, "He can't be all bad, he bought beer." (Spoken like a true bar fly.)
September 13, 1924 - Mr. and Mrs. Steinbaugh and Tom McGray met with City Attorney Steinback, trying to reconcile their marriage after an affair between Mrs. Steinbaugh and McGraw. Everything went well until Mr. Steinbaugh pulled out a pistol, killed McGraw, and then shot himself to death. (I hope Mr. Steinback gave up marriage counseling after that.)
December 4, 1924 - From The Black Hills Weekly: Blackie Brady and Jack Wilson broke out of the Pennington County Jail and stole a Ford car. Trouble was, it was snowing (no surprise there) and the car left tracks in the snow. The two headed toward Buckhorn, Wyoming, and the authorities were alerted, and the two men were arrested at a nearby lumber camp. (It really is all about winter in South Dakota.)
Now this one is out of sequence, but has modern repercussions and stories to go with them:
March 31, 1950 - An explosion at the Black Hills Ordnance Depot munitions facility in Igloo (named after the dome-shaped storage buildings) killed 3.
BHOD Landscape, taken by Vigilante Scout, Wikipedia
UPDATE: "The Vivos xPoint survivalist community was developed in 2016 on the site of the former Black Hills Army Depot munitions storage facility. More than 500 above-ground concrete bunkers are marketed for lease to those who are worried about a potential national or global disaster or who want to live mostly off-the-grid. It’s located in a remote area 8 miles south of Edgemont in southwestern South Dakota... The concrete bunkers, which look like earthen igloos, held military conventional and chemical munitions from 1942 to 1967. The town of Igloo grew up around the depot and was once home a young Tom Brokaw, a South Dakota native and former NBC anchor. The base and town are now abandoned." Which sounds great, BUT
In 2024 "David Streeter thought abandoning his traditional life to relocate into a survival bunker in South Dakota would allow his family to retreat from the stresses, expenses and restrictions of the modern world. The family of three also wanted to be prepared in case an apocalypse of some kind altered the course of mankind and threatened their lives and way of life.
"But 18 months after leasing a former Army munitions bunker in the Vivos xPoint residential complex south of Edgemont, the Streeters have had their dreams shattered. And they now find themselves embroiled in a situation that has brought on a level of upheaval, worry and danger they specifically sought to avoid... In August, Streeter – an Army veteran who was injured while serving in Bosnia – shot a Vivos contract employee at close range. Streeter said the man had threatened his family and he was defending himself. No charges were filed in that case or another fatal shooting involving Streeter in Montana in 2010.
Who could have predicted that a community of off-the-grid doomsday preppers could be a dangerous place to live?
MEANWHILE: HUZZAHS ALL THE WAY AROUND!
SleuthSayers' anthology, "Murder, Neat" has won the Derringer Award for Best Anthology! Thanks, Michael Bracken and Barb Goffman for a fantastic job of editing, and thanks to all of us weird and wacky SleuthSayers for writing some really wicked stories! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!
REPEAT BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION:
Rabia Chaudry reads my story, "The Seven Day Itch"
aloud on her podcast, Rabia Chaudry Presents The Mystery Hour with
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
This piece has nothing to do with crime, but it certainly is related to writing. Or one specific writer.
Back in March came Purim and so my wife was fine-tuning her recipe for hamentaschen, the cookies that are traditional for the holiday. One of the texts she consulted was the Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook. I knew a little about what led to the creation of that book but I wound up doing a deep dive, and here is what I brought to the surface.
Tillie Edelstein was born in New York City in 1899. Her father, a mediocre businessman, ran a hotel in the Catskills and part of Tillie's job was writing skits for the guests to perform. She was required to create speaking parts for every child in attendance so one of her plays was "Snow White and the Twenty-Eight Dwarfs."
Tillie married Lewis Berg, an engineer, and when the factory in New Orleans where he worked burned down they returned to the city and Tillie started looking for a job. Or rather, she decided to create one.
In 1928 Gertrude Berg, as she now called herself, managed to wangle an interview with the local CBS radio station and presented a script she had created about two sales clerks at a department store - a show about working women? Pretty radical. Effie and Laura was cancelled after the first episode because one of the clerks decreed "Marriages are not made in heaven."
A year later she sold another idea to the NBC station. The Rise of the Goldbergs was about a Jewish family in New York. Molly and Jake were immigrants with thick accents. Their children were typical first-generation Americans.
Berg wrote the scripts, produced the show, and was reluctantly corralled to star as Molly. She had one week to write the scripts for four 15-minute episodes. She wrote them - and many of the thousands more that followed - in the Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library, because her own apartment was too noisy. The series premiered in November, 1929, just after the stock market crash.
This was long before sophisticated methods of checking who was listening to what so no one knew at first whether the show was a hit or flop. But three weeks into the scheduled four-week run Berg got a sore throat and the show had to be dropped. The station received over 100,000 letters of complaint - and remember, this show was running on one station, not yet a network. NBC promptly bought The Goldbergs, as it was renamed, for the whole season.
The show ran, on radio, live stage, and then television (starting in 1948) for more than two decades. Fortunately for Berg she had kept ownership rights to the characters. In the beginning The Goldbergs was sometimes funny, sometimes melodramatic. (If a female character was to be written out she got married. A male character got sick. When an script called for an actor to cough he would ask Berg "How long have I got?") By the time it reached TV it was definitely a sit-com.
The show was always recorded live, leading to some bizarre adventures. During one TV episode two of the three cameras failed so the actors, on the fly, had to revise the story to take place in only one room. Talk about improv skills. When one of Berg's TV scripts called for a baby elephant and the critter refused to get in an elevator, they had to rebuild the apartment set on the ground floor.
Berg was loved by her audience but some people described her as ruthless. For example, Himan Brown helped her get in the door at NBC but she canned him after a year in favor of a more experienced actor. Brown, who became a legendary producer of radio drama, never forgave her. She was also the defendant in the first ever intellectual property case involving radio - which she won.
Glenn D. Smith, in his biography of Berg asks the reasonable question: was she more ruthless than other producer/stars like Bob Hope or Groucho Marx -- or was she just the only one in a dress?
In 1950 Philip Loeb, who played her husband on TV, was accused of being a Communist and blacklisted. Berg did her best to defend him but The Goldbergs was cancelled. Four years later Loeb committed suicide.
Berg's career continued in a diminished state. She appeared in summer stock and on Broadway but, not surprisingly, was only invited to play Jewish women, usually mothers. She died in 1966.
Oh, remember that cookbook? That's how I got into this mess. Because Molly was a great cook a lot of fans had requested her recipes. The book was published in 1955 and Gertrude Berg was listed as co-author with Myra Waldo. Waldo did the recipes because Berg was no cook.
And finally there is a sort of mystery in her autobiography which I invite you to solve. Around 1940 the Berg family moved to Bedford, Connecticut. She wrote about a mystery writer who used to visit them there:
According to the writer, nothing in the whole world was right and life seemed to be a losing battle, from childhood on it was a downhill fight that we were all in except himself. He was above the crowd, a lonely observer, born too soon or too late or something.
The writer was a short man, a little too stout, and every time he "drove by" the house it was in a different car with a different woman. The cars he borrowed from friends, who, it seemed couldn't say not to him. The women he borrowed also. They, too, couldn't say no, but they were all of a pattern. They were disappointed modern-dancer types who wanted to study with Martha Graham but never quite made the grade.
We are also told that this author didn't like Shakespeare. "For Othello he gives Shakespeare A for effort."
Eventually a "husband who didn't agree with the writer's views on sharing the wealth (car and wife) manhandled him one night and the writer left New York for the coast."
So there is my final question for you: Who was this mysterious mystery writer? Gertrude Berg, who told so many thousands of stories, does not reveal the end of that one.
I just returned from this year's Malice Domestic convention, where I had a lovely time celebrating my friends Marcia Talley, Donna Andrews,Gigi Pandian, and Les and Leslie Blatt, who were, respectively, the guest of honor, the lifetime achievement honoree, the toastmaster, and the co-fan guests of honor. (There also were two honorees with whom I have no personal connection. Lucy Worsley was honored as the Poirot Award recipient, and Dorothy Gilman was remembered--Malice's term for honoring a deceased mystery community member.)
While at the convention, I saw many friends, made some new ones, sat on one panel, moderated another, hosted a table at the banquet, won the Agatha Award for best short story of 2024 (for my whodunit "The Postman Always Flirts Twice," from Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy), received some other good news (for myself and for a fellow author), saw a character naming I donated to the charity auction go for $500, and listened to authors speak eloquently--and humorously--on panels. It was a great time, even if I did lose my retainer.
Here are some quotes from the panels. My apologies if I didn't get some of the wording exactly right.
"Motivation for a killer is so important. You have to set it up right away." -- Tina Kashian
Marcia Talley during guest of honor speech
"Cozies are popular because they make people feel comfortable. Sure, people are killing each other, but they're doing it in a nice way." -- Marcia Talley
In response to a question about the best advice you ever received: "Find your community. As much as writing is a solo effort, you can't get through this alone. You need your people to help you when you get a bad review or a plot hole or ..." -- Sarah E. Burr. (Sarah didn't trail off in that last sentence, but I didn't get the end written down, hence the ellipsis.)
"A hate crime, such as a swastika painted on a synagogue, is dark, but when the whole town comes together to paint over the swastika and support the temple, that is the cozy treatment. That is how to use dark social issues in cozies." -- Kathleen Marple Kalb, who also writes as Nikki Knight
During a discussion about enjoying novels set during World War I and World War II, despite how horrific the wars were, Catriona McPherson made the following analogy: "You can be nostalgic for a time--like the lockdown--without being nostalgic about Covid. It's being nostalgic for the time spent with your family."
"Cozies are for optimistic readers. Bad things happen, but everything is right in the end. Noir is for pessimistic readers because the ending gives them what they expect from the world." -- Paula Munier
If you're interested in learning about Malice Domestic, which brings fans and authors together to celebrate the traditional mystery every April in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, click here. The website has not been updated yet for the 2026 convention, but it should be soon. I hope to see you there next year, when the honorees will be:
Genre fiction readers know all about plots that are tortuous and bloody. Whole genres, horror and Gothic, are devoted to terrifying the reader. On the more sedate end of the spectrum, probing the minds of serial killers and describing torture with loving precision easily become hot crime fiction trends. Readers don't mind suspending disbelief in order to admire the cannibal Hannibal Lecter who escapes prison hidden in the skin of a flayed victim in Silence of the Lambs (a book I wished I could unread) or love Dexter, the serial killer with a moral compass (first appearing in the 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter), a character any expert forensic psychologist can tell you doesn't exist and never will.
Today, good little mystery writers try hard not to plug too many coincidences into their plots. Some subgenres put limits about how over the top the atrocities will go. The revered authors of classic literature didn't worry about that. Take Sophocles, the greatest of the playwrights of ancient Greece. In Oedipus Rex, the protagonist's parents give their baby up for adoption to avoid a prophecy that he'll kill his father and marry his mother. He meets a stranger at the crossroads, quarrels with him, and kills him. Guess who? He meets a widow twice his age and marries her. Guess who? For over-the-top twistiness and gore, take Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus is the most extreme example. The Roman general Titus captures the Queen of the Goths and her three sons in war and executes one of her sons. In revenge, they rape his daughter. After a lot of reciprocal accusations of murder, killing of sons, and cutting off of hands and heads, Titus bakes the remains of the Queen's sons in a pie and serves it to her at a feast.
The plots of soap opera on modern TV are so labyrinthine and unlikely that the term itself is used to describe any sequence of events that is so excessively dramatic and complex that it beggars belief. It has become so natural to think of any melodramatic story, real or imagined, as "soap opera" that my adorable husband used the term when I read him the synopsis of Il Trovatore, the opera I was about to see at the Metropolitan Opera. I live only twenty blocks from Lincoln Center and was able to accept the last-minute invitation to the Met by a friend with front row orchestra seats whose husband couldn't make it. Giuseppe Verdi's music makes Il Trovatore one of the gems of grand opera. The story, on the other hand, epitomizes the reason soap opera was named for opera, not the other way around: a theatrical presentation with a story as ridiculous as any opera's, with the added benefit of advertising soap.
Il Trovatore, the Troubador, is the leader of the rebel forces in a 15th-century Spanish civil war. He and his principal opponent, the Count, are both in love with the same lady. The Count seeks a gypsy woman, called a witch because she looks like "a hag" (ie old and poorly dressed) and can shift shapes (the villagers saw an owl—they're a superstitious lot). Her mother "bewitched" the Count's infant brother, so they burned her at the stake. The daughter got even by throwing the baby into the fire. It turns out that the rebel leader is the son of the gypsy witch (the daughter). Of course, the lady loves him, not the Count. Four acts later, it turns out that the Troubador is actually the Count's baby brother. The gypsy woman threw the wrong baby into the fire. Oops. The lady offers herself to the Count as the price of freeing her lover. He nobly refuses, but it's too late. She's taken a slow-acting poison. The Count finds out the enemy he's imprisoned is his brother. But it's too late. He's already beheaded him. Curtain.
The music is glorious. But don't you love mysteries? We ask the reader to suspend disbelief so little compared to opera. A coincidence here, an act of heroism there. A logical conclusion.
