• Once in a while a story comes to you from an outside source. “Christians” found me several years ago, when Alabama writer and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham called to say she’d read my novel Hell at the Breech. This novel is based on a dark, little-known chapter in Alabama history known to locals as the Mitcham War. It took place in Mitcham Beat, the worst voting beat (district) in one of the poorest, most rural, most violent sections of one of the poorest, most rural, most violent counties in a poor, rural, violent state. There have been books other than mine about these events, which, in some circles in Clarke County, are still contested because a lot of truths are (and likely always will be) hidden, unknown. What’s known is that poor sharecroppers and farmers waged a war against less poor townspeople. These countrymen called themselves Hell-at-the-Breech and wore white hoods and did terrible things until county officials, and even the governor, took notice and eventually put a bloody end to it. A lot of people died, some innocent, some not.
Ms. Windham had read my novel and liked it and said she had another Mitcham Beat story for me. As she told me about the young man the Hell-at-the-Breech gang had sent to kill a preacher, as she told how his supporters killed this young man instead, how they took him home to his mother, as Ms. Windham told me, “It was August, so they had to bury him quick,” I knew I was being given a gift. I listened, I took notes, I began to write.
Stephen King is one of the world’s most famous and popular authors, with more than 350 million books sold worldwide. Noted primarily for his horror and supernatural fiction, he has also written numerous crime and mystery novels and stories, westerns, and cross-genre works. In addition to countless awards for horror, supernatural, and science fiction, King has received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature. More than sixty motion pictures have been produced from his work, mostly notably Carrie, The Shining, and The Shawshank Redemption.
Elmore Leonard wrote more than forty books during his long career, including the bestsellers Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch, as well as the acclaimed collection When the Women Come Out to Dance, which was a New York Times Notable Book. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. The short story “Fire in the Hole” and three books, including Raylan, were the basis for the FX hit show Justified. Leonard received the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He died in 2013.
Evan Lewis received the 2011 Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for “Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man,” published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The adventures of Hobbs, who believes himself the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, continue in Ellery Queen, while an Alfred Hitchcock series features a modern-day descendant of Davy Crockett, a man bedeviled by the spirit of his famous ancestor. Lewis also spins yarns of pirates and cowboys, and has contributed articles on such detective writers as Frederick Nebel, Richard Sale, Norbert Davis, and Carroll John Daly. He resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Irene, his pulp collection, and a pack of pint-sized rescue dogs.
• The Portland I know — and have portrayed in my Skyler Hobbs stories — is fiercely proud of its image as a hip, clean, and progressive city on the cutting edge of social and environmental issues. Imagine my surprise to discover that as recently as the 1950s it was a hotbed of racketeering, bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, and political corruption.
That revelation came in Phil Stanford’s rip-roaring 2004 exposé, Portland Confidentiaclass="underline" Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Rose City. I came to the book a few years late, but hot on the heels of my umpteenth reading of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op series, culminating in his hardboiled masterpiece, Red Harvest.
Yikes. The mayor, the police chief, and the judiciary all playing footsie with the Mob. It was as bad as Hammett’s Poisonville. So the leap was easy: this was a job for the Continental Op. From there, the plotting and drafting of “The Continental Opposite” was a pure joy, and I am indebted to Linda Landrigan of AHMM for giving the story legs. The cleansing of Portland has just begun, so there are more adventures of the Op and the Opposite on the way.
Three childhood moments Robert Lopresti remembers vividly: reading the words “They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”; discovering the Nero Wolfe books while hiding in the mystery stacks from librarians who wanted to banish him to the Children’s Room; and seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine on a newsstand. Almost half of his sixty-plus published stories have appeared in Hitchcock. They have won the Derringer (twice) and Black Orchid Novella awards. His first novel, Such a Killing Crime, was set in Greenwich Village during the Great Folk Music Scare of 1963. His latest book, Greenfellas, is a comic crime novel about a top New Jersey mobster who decides it’s his job to save the environment — by any means necessary. Kings River Life Magazine ranked it as one of the best mysteries of 2015, but he is proudest that a reader called it a book about “ethics as a last resort.” Exactly.
Lopresti is a librarian and professor at a university in the Northwest. You can read his multiple blogs at www.roblopresti.com.
• One Saturday evening I tuned in to the NPR show Says You, and the goal of the quiz was apparently matching great detectives with their nemeses. (Yes, that’s the plural of nemesis. It doesn’t look right to me either.) When they got to C. Auguste Dupin I thought, Can they possibly mean the orang-outang? They did (although the contestant guessed gorilla). It struck me as bizarre to treat the ape, who never physically appears in the story, as if he were an archcriminal — and then the idea for “Street of the Dead House” hit me so hard I stumbled and almost fell down.
It was great fun to give Edgar Allan Poe the steampunk treatment while trying not to contradict anything in the original story. Through dumb luck, I saw a notice that nEvermore! a Poe-themed anthology, was looking for a few more tales. Many thanks to editors Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles for their helpful suggestions.
Dennis McFadden lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Best American Mystery Stories (2011 and 2013), Fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, The Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, and The South Carolina Review. His first collection, Hart’s Grove, was published in 2010; his second collection, Jimtown Road, won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction.