Charles Raisch at New Mystery Magazine accepted my story and published it as an “author debut,” something he tries to accomplish in each issue. I cannot imagine any better care and handling of a new writer than what the folks at that magazine gave me.
Scott Bartels is a graduate of the University of North Florida, where he won the North Florida Young Writers Award. This is his first published piece. He doesn’t use the “F word” nearly as often as this story might lead you to believe.
• “Swear Not by the Moon” started with nothing more than a title (“Creole the Killer”) and the last sentence. Then I set about crossing the twain that separated the two. It was never a matter of wanting to see how the title and that last line intersected, but a matter of needing to. I paced the streets of the Quarter with Creole, rattled about in his empty house, traversed I-ioona shared pilgrimage.
So you can imagine my consternation when Tamaqua offered to publish the piece but asked me to change the title to “almost anything else.” For whatever it says about me, I agonized over this as much as I did the names of my children. I finally settled on Juliet’s admonition about pinning one’s love to things variable, although I ultimately disagree with her since we all wax and wane.
This story is about a number of things, among them, reconciling obligations with addictions. Creole’s is heroin, and I’d like to think that he beats it. Mine is writing, and I hope I never do.
Born in Buffalo, Lawrence Block has lived in New York City most of his adult life — though he travels almost as much as Keller, if to less purpose. His fifty-plus books range from the urban noir of Matthew Scudder to the urbane effervescence of Bernie Rhodenbarr, and include four volumes of short stories. An MWA Grand Master, Block has won a slew of awards, including three Edgars, and been presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana.
• Short stories, I’ve come to feel, ought to speak for themselves; writers, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t. I’ll just say that Keller first saw the dark of day in a short story called “Answers to Soldier.” I never thought I’d have more to say about him, but what do I know? A few years later I wrote “Keller on Horseback” and “Keller’s Therapy” and realized I was writing a novel on the installment plan. The novel, Hit Man, consists of ten short stories, of which “Keller on the Spot” is the eighth. It is, like its fellows, a variation on a theme.
And it was written by hand, with a ball-point pen and a yellow pad, aboard the SS Nordlys off the coast of Norway. I don’t know that Norway got into the story at all, and the only water’s in the swimming pool, salt-free but heavy on the chlorine. But it seemed like an interesting thing to mention.
Mary Higgins Clark is the author of fifteen novels, beginning with Where Are the Children? and three short story collections, each of which has been an international best-seller. She is the mother of five and lives in Saddle River, New Jersey.
• I took my first writing course when I was twenty-one. The professor gave our class the best advice I’ve ever heard. “Take a dramatic situation, one that appeals to you, ask yourself two questions, ‘Suppose?’ and ‘What if?’ and turn that situation into fiction.
That was a long time ago, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I did add a third question, “Why?” because a strong motive is vital.
Last year when I was doing publicity for my newly released book, I was in the Midwest and read about a man who had been arrested for breaking into his neighbor’s home by cutting the cinderblocks in the common basement wall between his townhouse and hers.
The situation made me feel creepy, and I began to ask myself the three questions. Suppose? What if? Why?
“The Man Next Door” is my answer.
Merrill Joan Gerber has published five novels, among them King of the World, which won the Pushcart Editor’s Book Award for “a book of literary distinction,” and The Kingdom of Brooklyn, which was awarded the Ribalow Prize from Hadassah magazine “for the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme.” She has also published four volumes of short stories; the most recent, Anna in Chains, was published in 1998 by Syracuse University Press. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Redbook, The Sewanee Review, The Chattahoochee Review; The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. “I Don’t Believe This” was included in the O. Henry Prize Stories, 1986. A recent essay was published in Commentary magazine. She studied writing with Andrew Lytle at the University of Florida, held a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship at Stanford, and now teaches writing at the California Institute of Technology. (More about Merrill Joan Gerber can be seen on her website at http://www.cco.cal-tech. edu/~mjgerber.)
• There are all kinds of mysteries in life and one of the most puzzling to me is the failure of friendship, or worse, the betrayal of friendship. In “This Is a Voice from Your Past” I examine the circumstances of such a failure and its terrifying consequences.
Edward D. Hoch, past president of the Mystery Writers of America and winner of its Edgar Award for best short story, is a native of Rochester, New York, where he still lives with his wife, Patricia. He is the author of some eight hundred published short stories and has appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for more than twenty-five years.
For twenty years Hoch edited Best Detective Stories of the Year and its successor, Year’s Best Mystery and Suspense Stories. He has published forty-two books in all, including his two most recent collections, Diagnosis: Impossible and The Ripper of Storyville.
• Just thinking about writing a story like “The Old Spies Club” makes me feel old. My former British code expert, Jeffrey Rand, was introduced to readers of EQMM back in 1965, and for many years I made the mistake of aging him along with the calendar. Though he took early retirement from British Intelligence in 1976, he still manages to find mystery and intrigue just about everywhere.
And happily he isn’t aging nearly as fast these days as he once did.
Pat Jordan is a freelance writer living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is the author of hundreds of magazine articles (New York Times Magazine, GQ, Playboy, Men’s Journal, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Life, etc.) and nine books. “Beyond Dog” continues the adventures of Sol, Bobby, and Sheila, all of which have been published in Playboy.
• Sol, who was the inspiration for my story “The Mark,” which was selected for last year’s Best American Mystery Stories, was again the inspiration for this year’s selection, “Beyond Dog.” Before Sol was sent to prison on a marijuana smuggling conviction, he lived in the apartment next door to mine and my wife’s. When I took my dog, Hoshi, for a walk I often stopped first at Sol’s apartment to talk about his latest scam. One day, Hoshi was annoyed that Sol was delaying his walk, so he raised his leg and pissed on the chair Sol was sitting on.
Sol was very amused. It appealed to his perverse sense of humor, and after that he took a liking to Hoshi, whom he called either “The Hosh” or “My Man.”
Then Sol went away on his “sabbatical” to a prison in Georgia. Often, my wife, Hoshi, and I would visit him. Hoshi had to remain in the car while we talked to Sol in the prison visitors’ room. When we returned to the car Sol would already be walking across a field to his dormitory, so we would let Hoshi out of the car. Hoshi would smell Sol off in the distance and begin to howl pitifully while Sol waved to him.