• “Ike, Sharon, and Me” is a story that has been bumping around my head, my heart, and my portfolio in various shapes and forms for about thirty years. It is inspired by events and people in my life, not the least of whom is my old friend Patrick Snyder, who took a proprietary interest in “ISM” and would not let it die, even when I sometimes wished that it would. I wrote the last line just a year ago. That the story is finally amounting to something makes me proud and happy.
Charles John Harper is the pseudonym for Minneapolis attorney Charlie Rethwisch. His noir stories featuring 1940s PI Darrow Nash appeared in the February 2008, March/April 2008, and July 2009 issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine under the name C. J. Harper. A fourth Darrow Nash tale, “Lovers and Thieves,” was the cover story for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine’s April 2016 issue. Stand-alone stories have also appeared in those magazines. Harper has twice been shortlisted for the British Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, Dana, and their two itinerant kids, Ellen and Bobby.
• Heading to my day job one morning seven years ago. Slogging through traffic snarled by dreary Minnesota weather. Sick of the repetition of a mostly unfulfilling job. Frustrated at not having — or making — the time to do what I really loved to do. Feeling trapped. Seeing no end in sight. And worst of all, out of ideas for a new story.
Then Darrow Nash popped into my head. And all he did was simply give me a weather report of the world beyond my windshield: “It was a misty November rain.” Hmmm. Sounds like an opening line. Immediately my mood brightened. The gray skies took on some color. Even my day job became bearable. I had found a story.
A story from a line that seemed to offer very little. No plot. No clever twist. No distinct setting. No unique characters (other than Darrow, of course). But in fact it had something very intriguing to me: it had a feeling. An atmosphere. And out of that atmosphere arose a story. A story that grew more complicated the more I wrote. Luring me to two dead people on a couch in an apartment, a strangled man and a woman with a gun in her hand and a bullet hole in her head. To the police it was a clear-cut case of murder-suicide. But to Darrow Nash, all was not as it seemed. It sounded perfect.
So perfect that it took me four years and two rejection letters to finally figure out what really happened inside that apartment. But those four years not only helped me find the solution to the puzzle, they helped me uncover the issues that became the true heart and soul of the story:
The treatment of gay men in postwar America.
The differing attitudes that veterans had toward their service in the war, from bragging tin soldiers to silent heroes, some silent for decades.
And, ultimately, the contradictions that live in all of us and the facades we create to disguise those contradictions. Our immutable predisposition to be, like the crime in the story, not as we seem. To be in our hearts both the lover and the thief.
Craig Johnson is the New York Times best-selling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels, which are the basis for Longmire, the hit Netflix original drama, now in its sixth season. The books have won multiple awards: Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/Bibliobs, the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year, Le Prix 813, the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award, the Mountains and Plains Book of the Year, the SNCF Prix du Polar, Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, the Watson Award, Library Journal’s Best Mystery of the Year, the Rocky Award, and the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Fiction. Spirit of Steamboat was selected by the Wyoming State Library as the inaugural One Book Wyoming. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.
• As Jean Luc-Godard once said, “It’s not where you take things from, but where you take them to.” I have a weakness for quirky or forgotten writers from different geographic regions across the country, and one of them is Davis Grubb, the Appalachian author of such luminaries as Fool’s Parade, Cheyenne Social Club, and the better-known Night of the Hunter, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1955. Though his output was small, many of his best-selling novels were adapted as feature films with actors like Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Kurt Russell, and George Kennedy.
There is a scene in Fool’s Parade, one of Grubb’s lesser-known works, where a paroled convict, Mattie Appleyard, intimidates a guard, and that scene stuck with me since I read it many years ago. My protagonist, Walt Longmire, is the sheriff of the least populated county in one of the least populated states in the country, and in Serpent’s Tooth, the ninth novel in the series, the deputy, Double Tough, loses an eye and has a little trouble getting it replaced, in that he’s colorblind in the remaining one.
Every year since the debut of my first novel, I’ve written and sent out a holiday story to all the readers on my website newsletter, The Post-It, and last year I couldn’t help but do my take on Grubb’s gruesome display — even going so far as to include his novel in my short story.
In the idyllic setting of a country church in Story, Wyoming, an evangelical heroin addict has taken the congregation hostage, and particularly a young woman from the choir. The Highway Patrol, an adjacent sheriff’s department, and even a SWAT team have cordoned off the church, but there doesn’t seem to be much hope of resolving the situation without deadly violence when Double Tough, having also read Fool’s Parade, comes up with a unique response in “Land of the Blind.”
William Kent Krueger (he goes by Kent) writes the New York Times best-selling Cork O’Connor mystery series, which is set in the great Northwoods of Minnesota. His protagonist, Cork O’Connor, is the former sheriff of the fictional Tamarack County and a man of mixed heritage — part Irish and part Ojibwe. Krueger’s work has received a number of awards, including the Minnesota Book Award, Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, Anthony Award, Barry Award, Macavity Award, Dilys Award, and Friends of American Writers Prize. His stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace received the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He lives in St. Paul, where he does all his writing in a couple of wonderfully funky coffee shops.
• When I was invited to submit a story for Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, the anthology in which “The Painted Smile” was first included, I drafted two stories. My initial attempt was a straightforward take on Holmes and Watson, with a ghost in an English castle thrown in for good measure. The story felt too derivative, so I bagged it and tried another approach altogether. I’d been writing about adolescents for a while, an age in which innocence and worldly understanding tug ferociously at opposite ends of the psyche. The idea of a child, incredibly bright but terribly vulnerable, appealed to me enormously. During the writing, I kept trying to imagine what Holmes might have been like in his childhood. Of course, the story had to be set in St. Paul, a city I know well and dearly love. And instead of a ghost, I decided to throw in a clown. Those guys are really scary.