Graveyard Plots

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It is common knowledge that no one reads prefaces to short story collections.

That being the case, I’m writing this one to please myself. Which is as it should be, because that’s why the stories in this book were written in the first place.

Oh, the money factor entered into it, of course; I’m a professional writer and I make my living mostly from fiction, so every dollar helps. But it is also common knowledge that no writer ever gets rich writing short stories (and that only one author in the mystery and detective field, Edward D. Hoch, can make a satisfactory living doing them exclusively). In the main these stories were exercises in “self-expression” — a euphemism meaning some pretty good ideas occurred to me and I wanted to see if I could turn them into worthy pieces of short fiction.

And I had a devil of a time selling some of them, too. What I consider a good idea all too often fails to coincide with the opinions of magazine editors. Take “His Name Was Legion,” for instance. One editor I sent it to said that the biblical references were “too mystical” for the readers of her publication, whatever that means. Another editor said there was too much sex “for a family mystery magazine.” (There’s more sex in your morning newspaper than there is in “His Name Was Legion.” And it has always struck me as a tad hypocritical for a “family magazine” to piously reject stories on the grounds of sexual content, mild or overt, while specializing in all sorts of fictional murder, mayhem, and felonious behavior.) I finally sold the story to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine for 1½ cents per word — the munificent sum of $35.00. Writers definitely do not get rich writing short stories.

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