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

An Interview with Josh Pachter

Our next edge-of-your-seat anthology, A Hint of Hitchcock, will be released in time for Halloween, and is available for Kindle pre-order today for just $1.99 instead of $3.99. While the suspense is building, we're interviewing the contributing authors so you know a little more about what makes them tick...

Hi Josh, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. Let's get started! 

The first question is inevitable...which Hitchcock film is your personal favourite, and why? Which actor or actress do you think was the best he worked with? 

Oh, gosh, how do you pick one favorite out of such a cornucopia of wonderful films? If I absolutely have to pick only one, I’d have to say Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, and North by Northwest. Why? Because they rock, that’s why! And I’m also picking two actors, each of whom he worked with multiple times: James Stewart and Cary Grant.

What is it about Hitchcock's films that makes them so timeless, or is it just the opposite, that the appeal lies in that bygone era? 

To my taste, yes, Hitchcock’s films are timeless. I just retired from a long career of teaching film appreciation to American community-college students, though, and for the most part their interests are limited to superheros and anime. Sad. They miss so much!

Do you have a favourite director, other than Hitchie himself, of course? 

Frank Capra—and it’s probably not a coincidence that Hitchcock and Capra each worked with James Stewart and Cary Grant…

Without giving too much away, how did you come up with the idea for your story in A Hint of Hitchcock?

My stories usually begin with a title, and I keep a list of titles I want to use when I can come up with story ideas to fit them. “Better Not Look Down” was on the list for years—it’s the title of a song Will Jennings and Joe Sample wrote, B.B. King recorded, and I love—and eventually I integrated the lyrics of the song with my take on Hitchcock’s Vertigo and wound up with the story that’s in A Hint of Hitchcock. 

Time to get more personal. Tell us three interesting facts about yourself.

(1) As noted above, I just retired from college teaching, after fifty years in the classroom.

(2) I’ve been writing professionally for even longer than I’ve been teaching: my first published short story was in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1968; I was sixteen when I wrote it, and I remain the second-youngest writer ever to appear in EQMM.

(3) In addition to writing and editing, I translate crime fiction by Dutch, Flemish, Italian, Romanian, Argentinian, South African, and Chinese authors. 

What do you aim to give your readers?

In Edgar Allan Poe’s phrase, “surcease of sorrow.”

What are you working on now?

Every year, Crippen & Landru Publishers releases a limited-edition pamphlet containing one new short story for its subscribers. Publisher Jeffrey Marks invited me to write the 2022 story, and I’m sending my series PI Helmut Erhard—an American whose German father was incarcerated at a POW camp in Hearne, Texas, during the Second World War—north to Grapevine, the Lone Star State’s Christmas capital, where he will solve a murder on the North Pole Express.

Where can we find you online? 

www.joshpachter.com and on the Book of Faces.

An Interview with Josh Pachter

In the lead-up to the launch of The Black Beacon Book of Mystery in June, we’ve asked our contributors to answer a few questions so you can get to know them better. Let’s unravel the mystery behind the stories together.

Is there a story behind your contribution to The Black Beacon Book of Mystery? What inspired you to write this mystery? 

My first published story, "E.Q. Griffen Earns His Name," appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1968. I was sixteen years old when I wrote it, and my protagonist was a sixteen-year-old boy named Ellery Queen Griffen. I wrote a second story about E.Q. two years later, and one about his younger brother, Nero Wolfe Griffen, a year after that, but then I moved on to creating my own characters, rather than copying those of other authors. A few years ago, I realized that the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of my first story was approaching, and I decided it would be fun to bring its main character back, fifty years older, to celebrate the occasion. Where would E.Q. be, half a century on? Well, where was I? Writing has over the decades been a paying hobby for me. My job is in education — I teach communication studies and film appreciation at a two-year college in Virginia. So why not make the adult E.Q. Griffen a college instructor? I wrote "50" and submitted it to EQMM — and editor Janet Hutchings not only bought it, she agreed to publish it in the magazine's November/December 2018 issue, exactly fifty years to the month after my December 1968 debut. The next year, I was delighted to see "50" place second in the balloting for EQMM's annual Readers Choice Award.

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

In 1972, I backpacked across Western Europe and visited the Reichenbach Falls in Meiringen, Switzerland. A beautiful spot — and, unlike the fictional "221B Baker Street," a real place!

What are you writing now?

A year ago, I was asked to write a story for a collection titled The Eyes of Texas, edited by the prolific Michael Bracken. I created a Texas private investigator named Helmut Erhard, whose grandfather was a German Army officer who spent the last two years of WWII in a POW camp in central Texas and stayed on in the US after the war to raise a family. I had so much fun with the character and the small-town Texas setting that I've now written four more Erhard stories and am working on number six.

Where can we follow or contact you online?  

I don't often tweet, but I'm a pretty regular presence on the Book of Faces, and I have a website at www.joshpachter.com