An Interview with Josh Pachter

The Second Black Beacon Book of Mystery will be released on the 8th of July (but the Kindle version is available for pre-order at just $1.99 instead of $3.99, and you can add it to your Goodreads list today) and to celebrate this new volume of short mysteries bound to get armchair detectives the world over donning their deerstalkers, we’re interviewing the contributing authors. Are you ready to glimpse the inner workings of these criminally clever minds? Sit back with a cup of tea and enjoy the following interview—on second thoughts, don’t drink that!

Hi Josh,

It’s always tricky interviewing a mystery writer about a particular story because we don’t want to give anything away, but can you tell us (carefully) where the idea for your story came from?

My wife Laurie and I are avid travelers, and when we return from our trips I usually write a story set in one of the places we visited. In 2017, we spent a month in Iceland, The Netherlands, and Belgium, and two stories resulted: “The Secret Lagoon,” set in Iceland, appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2019, and “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Murder” beat it into print by a year, appearing in the 2018 Malice Domestic anthology, Mystery Most Geographical. I should note that I love peppering my fiction with Easter eggs, those hidden “in jokes” that most people will miss but that will bring a smile to the faces of those who do manage to spot them. There are a couple of Easter eggs in “If It’s Tuesday” that American and British readers are unlikely to pick up on, but that fit the story’s Belgian setting. Inspector Bavo Van Laerhoven is named after two Flemish crime writers I’ve translated for EQMM’s regular “Passport to Crime” department: Bavo Dhooge and Bob Van Laerhoven. And the Auberge Dehouck is named after Bram Dehouck, another Flemish author.

There are several sub-genres of mystery fiction, but the stories in this anthology are traditional fair-play mysteries in which the reader can try to solve the puzzle before all is revealed. What makes this kind of mystery so timeless?

I have a sneaking suspicion that most people are afraid they’re not as intelligent as they think they ought to be. That’s why we like crossword puzzles and fair-play mysteries: because they are, ultimately, win/win propositions for us. If we solve them successfully, then we get the thrill of proving ourselves smarter than we were concerned we might be. And if we fail, well, at least we get to be right about our own limitations!

Give us one classic mystery writer you admire and one new talent (not from this anthology) readers ought to discover.

I am a big fan of Ellery Queen. It was Fred Dannay — who with his cousin Manny Lee was “Ellery Queen” — who encouraged me to write my first crime story…and who then purchased it and many more for EQMM. I love reading and rereading the EQ novels and short stories. I co-edited both The Misadventures of Ellery Queen and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen for Wildside Press. And a couple of years ago the Dannay and Lee heirs kindly granted me permission to write five new “Puzzle Club” stories to bookend the original five written by EQ in the ’Sixties and ’Seventies; my five were published individually in EQMM and all ten of the stories were collected last year in The Adventures of the Puzzle Club (Crippen & Landru).

If you’re a fan of the traditional fair-play mystery and you haven’t yet discovered Tom Mead, do yourself a favor and check out his delicious Death and the Sorcerer. (A sequel, The Murder Wheel, is due out this fall.)

How important is setting to you in your writing? Have you lived or visited where your story is set?

Setting is extremely important to me, and I have set my stories in many places — often but not always places I’ve visited. Want to see? Click here.

What are you working on now?

I’m reading final proofs for my sixth “inspired by” anthology (Happiness Is a Warm Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Beatles, coming this fall from Down and Out Books) and my first-ever novel (Dutch T(h)reat, also coming this fall but from Genius Books).

Where can we find you online?

I’m on Facebook, and I have a website: joshpachter.com