Mostly Murder: A Short Story Collection

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Writing is a profession you start to get the hang of about the time your non-writing contemporaries are talking early retirement. So selecting a group of your own stories is a humbling experience. True, each brings an earlier “you” back to life. True, you read with the eyes you wore when you wrote them, you smell the smells of then, feel the textures, hear the sounds, taste the excitements, remember the enthusiasms.

But reading them now, you also see what you should have done better, what you should smooth out, update, modernize. But you can’t. Mysteries, like Hamlet’s players, are the abstracts and brief chronicles of their time; to edit and alter them after the fact destroys much of their value. Any differences the scholars among you might find between the stories here and their first publication is just a restoration of the original text.

I didn’t set out to be a mystery writer. In those early years I just kept writing anything and everything — mainstream, mystery, adventure, sci-fi, 15–20 short stories in the mail at all times — and just kept getting rejected: over 1,000 printed rejection slips during the four years between graduation from Notre Dame and my first sale. I once papered a bathroom with rejection slips — a fitting ambiance for them, actually.

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