The Third Black Beacon Book of Mystery is out now and to celebrate this new volume of detective mysteries guaranteed to put your little grey cells to work, we’re interviewing the contributing authors. Do you dare peer into their devious minds, where criminal masterminds battle brilliant sleuths, private eyes, and police detectives? Settle down in your favourite armchair and get ready to pit your wits against the finest voices penning mystery puzzles today!
Hi S. B.,
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?
Sure, in this instance, I was chatting with a friend who regularly test-reads for me about locked room mysteries, and the idea came up of a man being shot at close range within a closed circle of witnesses, who could all alibi each other. We both agreed the premise, as we constructed it, sounded fairly impossible… and then a few moments later a solution struck me. I relish locked-room mysteries, and the whole Impossible Genre of crime in general. I’ve written a handful of them myself. For me, there seems to be two ways this can go—1) the mystery effect and solution generate in my mind at almost the same time, and I start the project knowing the entire mechanics of the trick, or 2) I have to reverse engineer from the effect. In this case, the solution came right on the heels of the original idea.
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 think because it’s relatively limitless. To clarify… Nowadays, a lot of crime and mystery fiction is concerned with psychological elements. Characters are presented with deep backstories and motivations, and tension often relies on emotional frictions and insecurities. Traditional mystery fiction still uses these things, but they are secondary to form. Characters are just as likely to exist as common archetypes, or to have their entire nature built quickly using literary shorthand, and are used more as pawns of an intricate plot rather than catalysts for intense dives into human perversion. Now, I like both types of fiction, but when you boil us humans down, I can’t help but wonder if we wouldn’t all reduce to the same stew of fear, love, greed, and hate. Ultimately, if I dislike someone, and a serial killer does as well, the dislike is the same, even if the end result might be different! With traditional mystery fiction, these psychological elements are used more to set up the plot than the other way around. And while human nature is ultimately cut from the same cloth everywhere you look, puzzles and plots are not. In that way, a well-written traditional mystery from one hundred years ago, and one written yesterday, will both satisfy the same craving in the reader—the urge to explore a written puzzle. Conversely, psychological motivators from a hundred years ago may well feel dated and lack relevance. That’s probably a controversial take, but it’s an idea I’m toying with at the moment…
Do you have a favourite fictional detective?
Travis McGee and Meyer. They’re a more hardboiled pair, though. Other, more traditional, favorites would be Tommy and Tuppence, and of course Sherlock and Watson. Recently, I’ve been quite taken by the sadly limited Kiyoshi Mitarai stories available in English, by the Japanese master of the impossible, Soji Shimada.
Is this the first mystery your protagonist has solved?
When we meet my cranky pipe-smoking Scottish detective, Dougal Grieve, he already has a reputation among the local constabulary as a solver of difficult puzzles. Another Grieve mystery, "The Problem of the Disappearing Heart", appeared last year in Murderous Ink Press’ historical crime anthology, Through the Past Darkly. It involves a fabled diamond, a human heart that is conspicuously not where it ought to be, and a stage magician whose abilities seem uncomfortably beyond the realm of the natural.
That’s a tough one… I regularly wear an old worn-out newsboy cap. To me, it’s just a hat, but the number of people who know me as The-Guy-With-The-Hat continually surprises me. So, it would probably be something silly and cosmetic like that. That or passionate opinions on trivial subjects.
Do you have a writing routine or particular requirements for a writing session?
I have absolutely no requirements for a writing session at all—the only necessity is that the time has been spent thinking about my projects. That can mean researching, outlining, putting words onto paper, or even—if the story in question is giving me problems—going for a long walk with my pipe. I write for two hours every day I work my day job, preferably before the shift. So every week I put in a consistent ten hours of writing. If necessary, though, I can up that significantly. Just this last October I had a large project and put in nearly thirty-five hours one week… The result of that will come out later this year, in Black Beacon’s Steampunk Sleuths anthology!
Thanks for playing along!
Thanks ever so much for having me.
