Sharon Hunt’s first published mystery story was in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. “The Water Was Rising” was nominated for the Arthur Ellis and International Thriller Writers’ awards. Additionally, her stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, on the mystery site Over My Dead Body, and are forthcoming in other publications. She has also written a lot about food and the memories it evokes. A novel she is reworking was nominated for a Crime Writer’s Association Debut Dagger Award. “The Keepers of All Sins” is her first story selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology. She lives and writes in Ontario, Canada.
• An image usually prods me into writing a story and it was no different with “The Keepers of All Sins.” For that story, the image was of a young woman on a ferry, growing more and more dehydrated. In reality, that young woman was two, my sister and me. Touring Europe, we had an afternoon to kill in Geneva and decided to take a boat tour. Somehow we ended up on a ferry instead and for seven hours were stuck on deck with little shelter from the sun and no water, because we assumed there would be a canteen onboard. I had experienced severe dehydration before and knew the signs — “feeling dried out like a prune” as my Newfoundland grandmother would say, the fuzziness that blankets your brain and how your limbs eventually take forever to do the most basic things. People boarded and debarked, but no one noticed our growing distress. When finally we stumbled back onto land and into our train, we were distraught, not about taking the wrong boat but because we were so ill prepared. For the rest of the trip, I was obsessed with water, which became central to this story.
Also central is the man from Hamburg whom the young couple meets. He was fashioned after a man from that same city we met on a train on that European trip. Our man, nameless but not forgotten, was aggressive and slimy although no doubt thought himself charming and we two naïve enough to fall for his lines. I could hear my grandmother’s warning: “Stay away from men who watch you too closely.”
This man did. He was a photographer, he said, and invited us to stay at his place in the red-light district for as long as we wanted. He was at our command. Other girls “not as lovely as you” who stayed with him had an unforgettable experience and we would too.
The train was full and we couldn’t change seats so did our best to ignore him.
Realizing he wasn’t getting anywhere with us, he grew sullen and before disappearing into the night, bent close to me. “This city can be dangerous for stupid girls.”
“Then it’s good we’re not stupid,” I remember saying, but not being stupid doesn’t always save you from harm, as my main character sadly discovered.
Reed Johnson is a fiction writer, translator, and scholar who holds an MA/PhD in Slavic languages and literatures along with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, and currently works as a preceptor in the Harvard writing program. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals like New England Review and online at The New Yorker, and he is writing a mystery novel set in Russia, where he spent nearly a decade of his life.
• When I was growing up, our family didn’t have much money, and we were often on the lookout for things to do that didn’t cost anything. One such free weekend activity was the open house. No doubt many of us have been to an open house with no intention of buying, and so we understand that there might be nothing real about this sort of real estate: the open house is a space for the imagination to roam, a place to picture alternate selves and alternate lives spent living there. At the same time, it’s rare that these houses turn out to be completely blank rooms on which we can project these imagined selves. The open house almost always contains the remainders and reminders of another set of lives — the lives, that is, of the current inhabitants. And in turn, these traces suggest other sets of dreams (or, as is sometimes the case with families moving out, failed dreams) that might collide with one’s own, creating interesting echoes and patterns of interference. In this sense, the open house is a lot like the story: a structured space that both constrains and spurs the imagination, an armature that gives shape to thoughts about how our lives might otherwise unfold.
Arthur Klepchukov found words between Black Seas, Virginian beaches, and San Franciscan waves. He adores trains, swing sets, and music that tears him outta time. Art contributes to Writer Unboxed and has hosted Shut Up & Write(!) meetups since 2013. His literary fiction appears in journals like The Common, Necessary Fiction, and KYSO Flash. His crime fiction debuted in Down & Out.
• A few years ago, I reached out to my oldest friend, Kyle Stout, about catching up in San Francisco. He didn’t want to come to the city when it was about to rain. But it’s a damn fine town in the rain. I jotted down what could be a phrase or a title. After Kyle and I made a short film in an Oakland coffee shop, we were inspired to find other limited settings for our stories. BART, the Bay Area’s subway system, somehow felt appropriately grungy and fitting. With a setting in mind, “A Damn Fine Town” took shape at The Lemon Tree House Residency in Tuscany. The irony of writing abroad about traveling without traveling seeped into my character’s attitudes. I’d still love to make a short film version. So on your next train to the airport, keep an eye out for Mr. Suitcase or Kid Cape. And keep an eye on your luggage.
Harley Jane Kozak was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Nebraska, completed NYU School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program, and migrated to Los Angeles. She starred in a few dozen films (Parenthood, Arachnophobia, The Favor, etc.), three soaps (Texas, Guiding Light, Santa Barbara), countless plays, and a lotta TV before taking a fifteen-year maternity leave and turning to crime fiction. Her first (of five) novels, Dating Dead Men, won the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Her short prose has appeared in Ms. Magazine, The Sun, Santa Monica Review, and eight anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of 2019.
• When Les Klinger and Laurie R. King invited me to contribute a story to their Sherlockian anthology series, I jumped at the chance, although not without trepidation. Fans of Watson and Holmes are a rabid bunch, rivaling those of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Shakespeare, and a writer ventures into those territories at her own risk. Probably that’s why I had a hard time coming up with a premise, plot, character — any doorway into a story. One night, a voice woke me from a dead sleep with the words “This is the first line of your Sherlockian short story.” I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down what the dream voice dictated. The next morning, I stared blankly at the scrawled words. It’s not every day you walk into your apartment to find your cat has turned into a dog. My big nocturnal “aha!” by daylight had all the literary weight of a grocery list. However, it’s not like I had any competing ideas, and also, I don’t like to argue with the voices in my head, so I started typing. The result was “The Walk-In.”