In case you didn’t catch Part I, be sure to check it out.

Read Part I Now

Otherwise, here’s the conclusion to Pawn.

He didn’t feel his fist clench into a ball. He didn’t feel the veins in his neck fill with fire. He didn’t even feel his legs start to move. The only thing he felt was her hand in the passenger seat of the crumpled car. And the only thing he saw was Gordie look away for a second to chuckle.

Stori was on his feet in a flash, his mouth still bleeding and mixing with saliva on his tongue. As Gordie turned, Stori spit venom into his eyes. Blood and salt. Gordie tried to lift the gun but he was stumbling backward, blinking, rubbing at his eyes with his free hand.

“You motherfu–” Gordie’s nose snapped before he could finish.

The gun didn’t last long in Gordie’s right hand as Stori went to work. He brought his knee up into Gordie’s crotch, grabbed Gordie’s right arm as he doubled over and slammed it into the shelf behind them. The gun bounced across the shelf into the next aisle. Stori brought another fist down on Gordie’s head. Then an elbow. Another knee.

And he was back in the car.

“It’s just community college, Stori,” she’d said with a grin. “Even you can manage that.”

They’d just finished dinner at the Outback on the west side of town. Stori would never take her to the south side, even though the food was better and he would have killed for a taco from one of the taquerias near his apartment. When they went out, he wanted her to see the sunset, not tire shops and drug deals. He wanted her to see the Catalina mountains painted in streaks of orange and purple, to see the way the shadows of the saguaro grew long, stretching out east, almost like they were begging to be set free.

“School’s your thing, girl,” Stori had said, even though he’d been planning to surprise her with his class schedule when they got back to her mom’s house.

She turned to him and shook her head as she smiled. “You worried you’ll be the old kid in class?”

“22 is old.” Stori watched every light, every speed limit sign. He’d had a few drinks, but he felt fine. Still, he didn’t want to give any cop a chance to ask him to step out and say the alphabet backward. “I’d be a grandpa in there with a bunch of babies.”

“You calling me a baby?” She’d only been a year younger than him, but she had a good reason for starting school late. She’d called it a gap year. Stori had never heard of such a thing, but in her gap year, she’d volunteered at the St. Anne’s near her mom’s house, helping the church sort through mountains of immigration paperwork. That was something else he’d never heard of, a church helping people like his Dad get across legally.

Stori slowed at the next intersection, and when the light turned green, he eased back onto the gas pedal and turned toward her to say she was his baby, but he didn’t get the chance. Instead, he saw the headlights. He heard the metal folding in on itself, the car screaming like it felt the impact in its soul. That was the sound he would never be able to shake.

And that was the sound he heard in his ears when he came back to Gordie. Only it wasn’t the sound of the car. It was the sound of a wrench shattering Stori’s orbital bone on the right side of his face.

Read more

The first time I ever queried an agent I wasn’t ready. I had just finished my MFA. My thesis project was a novel that I still love and will one day make work. But it wasn’t working then. Still isn’t working now.

As part of the thesis submission process, my professors read the novel and gave their feedback. Everyone was generally positive, including an adjunct who was also a literary agent. He couldn’t represent students, but he told me he’d recommend me to another agent at his agency if I queried. So, I did.

That agent, on my professor’s recommendation requested the full manuscript…and then promptly rejected me. I queried a number of other agents and no one even requested my pages.

I was not ready to query, and my novel was not ready to be queried.

So I wrote my next novel, and then I did the most logical thing. If you think I am about to say I queried again, guess again. I stuck that novel in a drawer and stopped writing for eight years. That’s a whole different story, but just know that this novel had gone through a single draft where no one besides my wife had read it. And then it collected dust.

Fast-forward eight years and I was working a job that was painfully boring. So boring that I would literally curl up under my desk and read for a good portion of the day. It was during this time that I wondered about writing again. Could I do it? Did I want to do it? A few weeks later while on an airplane for a work trip (airplanes are the best for thinking), I realized I didn’t want to die without writing again. So, I pulled that novel out of the metaphorical drawer and read it with very fresh eyes.

And it was good. Very good, actually.

I spent the next eight months rewriting, refining. I sent it to beta readers, got feedback, did more edits. Finally, I was ready to query. What’s interesting is I wrote a query letter for this novel before I ever wrote the novel, and I still had that query. I dusted it off and made some tweaks, then sent out a batch of queries.

As the rejections rolled in, I realized the query wasn’t working. I combed through Query Shark, reading everything. I used Reddit’s PubTips. I paid for query feedback. Eventually, I got the query into shape and sent out another batch of queries. I ended up getting three full manuscript requests with this batch and one offer.

After having a call with the agent who offered to represent me, and after letting other agents have two weeks to read my novel and decide whether they wanted to make their own offers, I signed with my agent. Together, we put together a submission package and my book went out on sub in the summer of 2025.

More than one year later, that book has died on submission, and the process was as brutally painful as you can imagine. I’m not alone in this experience. Depending on your source anywhere between 33% to 95% of novels dies on submission. But statistics do not understand the anxiety and hope of a writer.

When I was on submission, I distracted myself by writing my next book. Highly recommend this strategy. But also know, it doesn’t work. There’s no such thing as distraction during this process. At least not for me. I was patient externally, asking my agent for updates only once every three months. Internally, I was refreshing my email every morning. Just kidding, I was refreshing multiple times per day.

The rejection feedback was not helpful, either. Every rejection that said they loved my writing but didn’t think they could sell it was an emotional roller coaster in and of itself. Do not pay attention to the feedback. This is a good rule, generally, but I won’t follow it. I didn’t follow it and I think it’s unreasonable to assume I will follow it in the future. But it’s still a good suggestion.

After more than a year on submission, my book has died. It died in the depths of literary anxiety, the constant wonder if today might be the day. The anxious feeling of hope when you open your emails.

I lived through this. I did not die, my book did. And I’m going to do it again. Next time, I hope for different results. But if my next book dies on submission, guess what? I’m going to go through the process again. I’ll do it again and again until I get the ultimate yes and my book is published.

I leave you with the immortal words of Tupac:

Makin' money off of cuss words, writin' again
Learn how to think ahead, so I fight with my pen

Keep fighting with the pen.

This week’s story is a fun one for me. A couple of years ago, I wrote a short story (it’s actually the free short you get for subscribing). I wanted to live in that world for a while, so I wrote a few more stories in that same timeline, same plotline. I thought I might create a novel through short stories.

It seemed like an interesting idea. But as I sat with it longer, I realized I wanted to write a real novel with these characters. This story doesn’t give anything away in the novel and it doesn’t actually appear one-for-one in the novel, but just know that this story was part of the inspiration for the novel I’m currently working on.

I hope you enjoy!

Pawn

Stori Guerrero heard the bell and looked up from behind the counter. He had to squint to see in the old Dodge Duster’s rearview mirror he’d hung in the corner. He used to have a big circular mirror up there like you’d see at a convenience store, but he’d ripped that thing down and stuck the car’s mirror up so he couldn’t forget. No matter how hard he squinted, the only thing he could see in that little mirror was the night 12 years ago. It wasn’t until Gordie rounded the corner of the shelf-lined entry that he realized who’d come in.

Gordie ran his free hand along the glass covering rusty pocket watches and old typewriters. He stopped at the case with the set of arrowheads that Stori told everyone who’d listen came from honest-to-God Apaches. Gordie smiled, shook his head, then turned to Stori.

“Still can’t unload these, huh?”

Stori slid one ass cheek off the stool he sat on behind the counter, just enough for the toe on his left foot to touch the ground. If he had to move, he wanted as much of an edge as he could get. He said, “No one appreciates Native American history anymore.”

“Especially not a history manufactured by a Mexican pawn shop owner.” Gordie turned and walked toward the counter.

The first time Gordie had been in the shop, he’d sold Stori a set of wheels that the police came and took off his hands a few days later. Two hundred bucks out the window. When it happened, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t deal with Gordie anymore, but he also knew who Gordie ran with. So, Stori had kept doing business with that skinny white boy even if it might cost him a few bucks here and there. Right up until the last time when he looked in that old car’s mirror, saw her face, and swore on her name he wouldn’t take another thing from Gordie.

As Gordie got closer to the counter, Stori realized he was carrying something wrapped in a t-shirt.

“Only two things come in t-shirts like that,” Stori said. “Dead animals and stolen guns.”

Gordie stopped short of the counter. “That right?”

“That’s right, and I don’t want neither.”

“No one’s ever come through here with something special that they wanted to protect? Something they wrapped up to keep safe?”

“Not in a shit-covered t-shirt, no.”

“It ain’t shit, Stori. It’s oil. Now quit fucking around.”

Stori took another look at the mirror in the corner, wondering if he deserved what came next. He’d done this job so long that he knew it’d end the same way it began. The violence wrapped up inside that nasty t-shirt would echo through Stori’s life. “I’m not buying anything this week.”

Gordie set the t-shirt down on the glass counter with a thud. Stori wished he’d done like the community policing liaison had told him a few years back. She’d told him that people were mostly good and the neighborhood was getting better, but for those times when the stragglers came through, a nice thick sheet of bullet-resistant glass would come in handy. Stori’d gotten hung up on the “resistant” part and wondered why he’d pay for something that wasn’t a sure thing.

“That’s good to hear because I’m not selling.” Gordie pointed at the t-shirt. “This is special, and I need you to do me a solid.”

Stori shook his head and inched a little further off the stool. High school was a hell of a long way away, but back then Stori could run. Ran track and cross-country. They all used to call him Shit Stain back then because he was brown and ran like a streak. He didn’t mind. Winning made people like you, and he won a lot. He didn’t think he could win much anymore, but if he had too, he’d pick running back up right now. “I don’t want anything to do with it.”

“Stori, you’re a part of it man. You know why?”

“I’m not—”

Gordie slammed his hand down hard on the counter, and Stori worried the glass would break. But it held. Probably as strong as that bullet-resistant glass, he thought.

Read more

I was reading Harlan Coben’s new writing guide/memoir this past week, and he talked a bit about how writers should watch movies and television and listen to music. How they should explore art outside of writing. He goes on to list numerous songs that are, in and of themselves, short stories. They are narrative theater in song form.

This got me thinking about some of my stories and how they originated from songs. This may expose you to some of the music I listen to, but you’ll be okay. You might even like it. There are three short stories I can think of that were directly inspired by songs. I will link to them where I can and I will link to my collection where there’s not an online source for you to read (you should buy my collection anyway!).

Broadway Summer

This story started after I listened to Three Days Grace’s song Expectations for the ten millionth time.

The idea behind the song is a girl that is looking to make it big and can’t wait to escape her small town and small life. On her way, she takes some wrong turns, meets some bad people, gets arrested. And then she meets a guy who turns out to be abusive. While he’s drunk and passed out after buying lotto tickets, she realizes he hit the jackpot. She steals the ticket and the car and takes off.

For some reason, on that ten millionth listen, I realized I had to write a story about this girl. I gave her a name and placed her in the desert. I made her every bit as fucked up as she seemed in the song, but made her more real. I gave her a life and dreams. She wanted to be a Broadway star and was set on making it to New York.

The story is gritty and violent. I kept asking myself what drove this girl? What made her want to leave? What made her human, even if fractured? And that’s what filled the pages of my story. All from a single song from 2012.

Unfortunately, this story isn’t available online but it is part of my collection.

Miracle Mile

This next story was a risk. I wrote it while I was going through my MFA program. I wrote it knowing it would be read and critiqued by my cohort. I wrote it knowing the content was sensitive. And it all began with Sick Puppies’ song Howard’s Tale.

The first time I heard this song, I was blown away by how raw and real it was. It’s a story of a young man who was sexually abused as a child. Abused for years. As he got older, he was confused about himself, his sexuality, and in the end confused about whether or not he might also like young boys.

I knew I had to write a story based on this song. In Tucson, there’s an old road that used to be the epicenter of cool in the desert. Miracle Mile was neon and hotels and restaurants and celebrities. Anyone passing through Tucson in the 1950s would stop off on Miracle Mile. Over time, the neon faded and the businesses shut down. Drugs and prostitution took over. When I moved out as a teenager, this was the first place I lived. I lived in a house that had just recently been shot up in a drug deal gone bad and the previous tenant had been hit in the back while she slept.

THIS is where the main character of my story would spend his time. And my story follows the song closely. The difference between a song and a short story is you have more time to spend in the character’s head. Which I did.

You can read this one here.

You Can Only Drown As Long As There’s Water

This one is a little different from the others. It’s not entirely based on a full song. Instead, it’s based on specific lyrics in the song. Bring Me The Horizon’s Can You Feel My Heart has a great line:

I can’t drown my demons, they know how to swim

I got hung up on that lyric and though about what someone must be going through to think that and how they might try other ways to drown their demons.

My story takes the concept of drowning demons and applies it to a brother and sister who are trying to live their lives after growing up with criminal parents who were eventually arrested while the siblings were teenagers.

The sister uses drugs, the brother uses adrenaline rushes of increasing intensity and risk. It’s a short one. It’d been almost a decade since I wrote flash fiction, so I used this as an opportunity to give it another spin. I’m pretty happy with the result.

You can read it here.

I doubt these will be the only stories I write that were inspired by songs. There is so much storytelling in music and if you explore it with an open mind, the creativity begins to flow.

Oh, and P.S., Harlan Coben’s Plot Twist is really good. Whether you like his writing or not, I think the book is entertaining and useful.

What songs inspire you? What are your favorite narrative-heavy songs?

Last week, in Part I, Joey and Mike got the fake plates on the Ford Galaxie and are loaded up to go rob a gas station. We conclude the story today in Part II.

Enjoy!

Galaxie Under The Stars

We hadn’t talked about who was going in. I assumed Joey thought it’d be me since he was driving. I figured it’d be him because, well, because it was his goddamn idea. Back in junior high and high school, we sold the shit we stole. Worked out a hell of a lot better than keeping the junk we got tired of after a day or two. Joey made enough to buy the Galaxie. I made enough to buy weed.

I pulled the baggie of joints from my front pocket, passed one to Joey, and lit one for myself. He shook his head, but before he could actually say “no,” he was lighting up.

“How much you think they keep in the register at a place like that?” Joey asked.

“A thousand at most.”

“And you don’t think we can get the guy to pop the safe?”

“Can you fucking read?”

“Fuck you, Mike.”

“The signs outside every gas station in town make it pretty clear. The clerks can’t open the safe.”

Joey turned down a dirt road that led toward the main drag we’d take. There was a gas station off Fifteenth open twenty-four hours that saw almost no customers after eight at night.

“Seems kind of fucked up, you know?” Joey asked, blowing smoke out the driver’s side window. “They just leave these clerks there to get their brains blown out if some robber wants the safe?”

“Why would someone blow the clerk’s brains out?”

Joey stuck his arm out the window, flicked the joint into the night, and I watched its cherry glide across an endless sheet of stars before disappearing into the brush.

“Think about it. Guy comes in thinking he’s going to score big. Clerk says, ‘No, I can’t get into the safe.’ Guy thinks it’s bullshit, starts getting pissed. The clerk, he can’t do a damn thing, and that pisses the guy off more. All of the sudden, the guy’s got a gun to the clerk’s head, promising to pull the trigger he don’t get the money from the safe. Clerk is crying now, still can’t do shit. Guy pulls the trigger without thinking.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Joey didn’t say anything for a while, and I knew we’re both thinking the same thing. When we hit the paved road and started the mile long drive past old streetlights, beat-up trailer homes, and ranches that haven’t seen work in decades, I popped the glovebox. Pulled the .38 into my lap.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

Joey shook his head. “No, I have to.”

“Why?”

“My plan.”

“So?”

Joey sighed. “Look, my brother’s been locked up a few times now. We haven’t seen him in over a year, and I don’t know if he’s in or out right now. So, if someone gets popped for this, who is it going to hurt less, me or you?”

“We won’t get popped.”

“This isn’t stealing toys at the mall, Mikey.”

I didn’t say anything. I looked out the window. He knew I’d let him do it. He wished I would have argued more, but he knew all along I was going to stick him with the shit job. Because I’m a shit friend. I finished my joint, tossed it out the window, looked over at Joey, then handed him the gun.

“You didn’t load it did you?” he asked.

I’d forgotten Joey wanted the gun just for show. I’d loaded it a few days after we bought it downtown. But fuck it. He didn’t know what might happen in there. He might need to fire off a warning shot. Might need to blow a hole in the register if the thing got stuck. There were a hundred different reasons Joey might need the bullets in that gun, but he didn’t need to know they were there.

“No, it’s clear.”

When we made it to the gas station, there wasn’t a car in sight. The two pumps outside had dim, yellow lights overhead, and the brick convenience store was lit from the inside only. Joey pulled into a spot right out front. He looked at me and nodded.

I pulled the ski mask on, and he did the same. I didn’t think there’d be cameras, and even if there were, this was the type of station where they wouldn’t be recording. Still, no sense in risking it.

Joey took a breath, looked at me. “Slide over as soon as I get out. Keep it running. I have no idea how long this will take.”

Of course he fucking didn’t. We’d stolen toys and televisions and iPhones. We’d stolen from people’s apartments, their cars, their purses. Everything we stole had to be converted into money. This would be the first time we stole actual bills that we could spend right off the bat.

“Keep the gun in your hoodie pocket,” I said.

Joey nodded, slid the .38 into the front pocket of his hoodie, pulled the hood over his head, and climbed out of the Galaxie. I climbed over the console and into the driver’s seat and he shut the door. I’d expected him to hesitate. To stumble, then gather himself. But no. Joey was on the sidewalk out in front of the store in a second, his hand reaching for the door in two.

He walked into the gas station’s convenience store as a twenty-three year old with twelve college credits under his belt and hopes of at least nailing down an associate’s degree. But that’s not who I saw enter that store. I saw my fat friend from elementary school. The kid I met on the basketball court after my head came up into his nose and blood sprayed everywhere. I saw the kid who entered junior high with a his brother’s shadow following him around. I saw the kid who’d said “fuck it” and decided to live his own life. And I saw the kid who kept me from sliding down the drain when my mom went away.

They say you can’t blame your choices on other people, but fuck that. I decided I could blame anyone I wanted for anything I did. Had Mom not met that realtor up north, had Dad not been such a pussy, I wouldn’t be sitting here waiting for Joey to come back out with barely enough money for me to get a week’s worth of weed.

He pulled the gun.

I hadn’t noticed at first. But there it was, hanging from Joey’s right hand. I hadn’t expected him to need it. I thought he’d be able to tell the clerk he had a gun, and that’d be enough. But no, Joey had the .38 pointed at that pock-faced kid’s chest. The kid behind the counter seemed pissed, not scared, but he held his hands up and backed away a couple steps.

I saw Joey yelling something, and the kid turned toward the register. There we go. Get the money, get the fuck out of there.

I looked over my shoulder, half-expecting to see Tucson P.D. rolling up behind me, but the road was clear. I looked out beyond the road, into the desert across the street. In the sky, the clouds slipped past the moon, and the desert shed its darkness for a moment. Infertile land that gave us just enough to survive. An offering. A chance. But it would never be enough. Nothing would ever be enough.

When I turned back, Joey was looking out the glass door, looking at me. He nodded.

No, dumb fuck. Watch the guy.

The clerk noticed Joey’s distraction, seized the moment. The clerk reached beneath the counter, hit the alarm, then came back up with a shotgun in his hands.

Joey must have heard the movement, because he turned back at that moment. He saw the gun, jumped back.

And he pulled the trigger on the .38.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I said, pulling the shifter into the reverse, foot still on the brake.

The bullet tore through the clerk’s black polo. It hit the kid in the stomach or the chest. Fuck, I couldn’t tell. But it blew the clerk back against the cigarette rack. He fell to the floor, and Joey looked at the gun. Then he dropped it to the floor, looked out the window at me.

He would have been dead, I told myself. Had it not been loaded, Joey would be the one bleeding out on the dirty linoleum floor of that convenience store. But he was alive because I loaded that fucking gun. He should thank me. He would thank me when he got into the car, but Joey didn’t move. He sat on the floor, his legs half folded under him.

I reached for the door handle, considered dragging him out. But there wasn’t time. I didn’t know how long it’d take police to get there after the alarm had been triggered. Probably a few minutes. But everything had slowed down. It could have been a few minutes already for all I knew.

I slammed my hands down on the horn. Held them there. Waited.

Joey didn’t look. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, grabbed the top of his head, right through the ski mask. But he kept it on. Kept himself hidden.

I had to go, but it was Joey. It was the only person who’d ever really given a shit about me. He helped me ask Shelly Donaldson out on a date freshman year. He’d given me one of his old man’s beers when Shelly broke up with me three months later. Jesus, it was fucking Joey.

But it didn’t matter.

I opened the door, swung my left left out into the crumbling tar parking lot. As soon as my foot hit the ground, I heard the sirens. Joey heard them too—had to have—but he didn’t move.

Joey looked at the gun laying a few feet away. Looked at me. But he didn’t try to stand. I saw the other outcomes in that moment. I saw Joey, chest blown open, lying on the floor. I saw me and Joey in that Galaxie cruising back to his house, counting the money we’d just scored. I saw the police knocking on my door three days later. I saw Joey hopping a Greyhound as I was led through lockup to my new cell.

But no. Joey wouldn’t have left me. Even if I had to leave him.

Joey pulled his mask off, and I did the same. I tossed mine into the passenger seat and swung my left leg back into the Galaxie. Joey watched me shut the door, watched me ease back out of the parking spot. He watched me peel out and watched me leave my best friend.

The freeway east to New Mexico was flashes of white painted stripes under the yellow headlights of the Galaxie. Cacti and dust and three thousand pounds of metal carrying friend away from from friend. Chased by an ocean of stars that wouldn’t let up, telling me that they’d always be there.

Reminding me.

I noticed something the other day about my writing. I don’t usually analyze my writing. My wife does that for me. However, I was thinking about the novel that got me my agent (the one that died on sub - someday I’ll write about that whole process). I remember when I wrote that novel that I considered it a love story compared to my prior novel. My prior novel, I thought, was about hate.

Upon reflection, I’m not sure I was honest with myself on that prior novel. And as I look back across my crime stories, I see a very clear theme. Love is a powerful motivator for people to do stupid, violent, and criminal things.

Let’s take a story that might find its way here as a Friday Read eventually. This story was one of the two I had to write during the summer before my MFA program began. The goal was to have two stories from each member of the cohort so that when we had our first residency, we’d be able to spend the week workshopping. For some reason, I can only remember one of the two stories I submitted. But that story is a love story. It’s also a coming of age story. I think I have typecast myself as the coming-of-age-love-story-crime-writer. If so, I’ll take it. Anyways, back to this story.

The story is about a high school couple taking what seems to be a joy ride. The boy is helping a friend pull off an auto insurance fraud scheme where they will steal the car, destroy it in a remote area, and collect the insurance money. However, as the boy in the story drives and thinks about his girlfriend riding shotgun, things turn tragic. The violence in this story comes from the decisions these young people make and mother nature. The crime is the tragedy. It’s also fueled by love. The boy may have done this regardless, but the girlfriend wanted an adventure. Wanted to be the boy’s Bonnie to his Clyde. It is in that stupid, young love that the two of them lost track of reality and fell into the dark pull of the crime they were committing. And the results were not kind.

As I look through my stories and my novels, that theme—love as a propellant toward crime and/or violence—runs deep. A brother protecting his younger brother from a meth-addicted mother, two friends stupidly robbing a gas station out of loyalty, a father helping his son run to Mexico after the son killed another man. These stories are powered by love.

I am not unique in this type of storytelling. Shakespeare did it. Homer did it. John Steinbeck and Stephen King too. There are countless examples, but there are also countless counter-examples. Plenty of crime fiction, detective novels, noir, and more that don’t use (or need) love to pull the crime through.

I wonder why I’m drawn to this type of writing, and I think it’s because of the path not traveled. Better stated, it’s possibly because of the path avoided. When I ask “what if” to many of the situations in my life, things could have gone a completely different direction. The things we do or could do because of love—the love of our friends or family or a romantic partner—is a fascinating study of the human condition. I like to explore that version of what if.

I will leave you with this because I’ve been enjoying her music a lot and because it’s fitting. As the singer/songwriter Kami Kehoe says, Love is a Weapon.

This comes from my short story collection, Leaving Arizona. I like this story because it represents a theme that carries through a lot of my short stories. I’ve written about it here previously, but coming of age through crime is interesting. This is two young men, clearly lost in life, making bad decision that alter their lives. There are many ways to come of age, some of them violent and bad.

Anyway, I hope you like it. Part I below.

Galaxie Under The Stars

Joey had a 1963 Ford Galaxie. It was a piece of shit. But I didn’t have anything except the old ten-speed my mom gave me before she split for Phoenix on my sixteenth birthday. And that didn’t make for the best getaway vehicle.

“Pull the plate,” Joey said while tossing a duffle bag into the backseat.

I looked around his parents’ garage and wondered what they might be wondering about us. If it was my dad, he’d probably just think I was jacking it to one of the old Playboys he knew I’d found in his nightstand back when I was fifteen. But Joey’s parents were different. Sitting in the living room watching re-runs of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Joey’s old man might have slipped his Miller Lite into a koozie and wondered if his kid was about to get himself killed. Joey’s mother—she would’ve been flipping through an old Home and Garden—might have asked herself if Joey would make it to college graduation before getting arrested. After all, Joey’s brother didn’t even make it to high school graduation. Derek, he got himself popped at fifteen years old for running cases of hard cider out the back of Tom’s, a grocery store just down the road.

“Pull the fucking plate, Mike,” Joey said again, this time standing right next to me.

I grabbed the screwdriver off Joey’s father’s workbench and got to work. Three screws and the rear plate fell right off.

“Where’s the fourth screw?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Ask your sister.”

I didn’t have a sister, but I laughed anyway and slid the license plate into one of the drawers on the workbench. “You got the other one?”

Joey leaned into the Galaxie and pulled out a different license plate. He handed it to me, and I started to ask about it, but I stopped. Didn’t matter where it came from. I screwed it in place, and I thought about the days when Joey and I didn’t need to go to this much work just to steal something.

Ten years ago, Joey and I were too young to be left at the mall by ourselves. But my mother did it anyway. Thirteen with no money and no idea when Mom would be back. We didn’t have much choice. We had to steal from the toy store.

Neither of us suggested it. We both just ended up there, walking down the empty aisles, lifting toys of the shelves, putting them back. Then, at the back of the store, I looked up and spotted a black dome. A security camera. “Do it on one of the other aisles,” I had told Joey.

“Do what?”

“Take something.”

“You fucking take something.”

So I did. And he did. Nothing too expensive, though. We got out of there with a couple Nerf guns shoved down our pants.

I stood back up after getting the new plate on, and asked Joey if he’d caught the Suns game.

“Fuck the Suns,” he said. “Lakers, man. Lakers.”

“The fucking Lakers? Since when?” I went around to the passenger side of the car and climbed in.

“We live one hundred miles from where the Suns play. Why should I care about them?”

“Because you live a hundred miles away, and because the Lakers are five hundred miles away.” I popped the glovebox in the Galaxie and pulled out the .38 revolver I’d stashed there earlier in the night. I flipped open the chamber, saw that it was loaded, locked the chamber back in place, and tossed the gun back into the glovebox. “And fuck the Lakers.”

Joey shook his head, went around to the trunk, popped it open. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I knew he was checking the spare. He had a blow out on the highway to California six months ago. No jack stand, no tire iron, no spare tire. He sat there for hours. So now, he checked the spare tire on his piece of shit Galaxie every time he went anywhere.

Even when he was about to go rob a gas station.

Joey shut the trunk and came around to the driver’s side. “Let me tell my folks we’re heading out.”

“Sure.” I watched Joey head inside and thought about the first time his parents let me stay the night. My mother hadn’t yet split, and my old man still cared enough to beat the shit out of me. That night, it’d been a fight about cigarettes. I hadn’t even smoked them, just had the pack in my pocket, but Dad didn’t care. Said he’d rather raise a piece of shit thief than a smoker. I bet he’d never considered I’d be both. But that night, I cut the screen on my window, slipped out into the rock and clay behind our house, barefooted. I walked the three miles to Joey’s house, cutting through washes and dodging cacti. Joey’s mom asked if I was all right. Joey’s father grunted. But they both helped me get settled in for the night.

Joey came back out into the garage, two ski masks in his hand. “We almost fucked up.”

When he slid into the driver’s seat, I took one. “Where’d you even get these?”

Joey fired up the Galaxie’s engine and backed out of the garage. “My brother went to Ruidoso every winter with the whole soccer team—school-sponsored trip, or some shit. He’s got a shit pile of these laying around.”

Part II is out now! Read it now.

Many novelists create fictionalized representations of real places. They do this for a variety of reasons, but I suspect the most powerful reason is the license to make shit up. It’s an important license to hold.

When you fictionalize your setting and base it on existing towns or cities, you have the best of both worlds. You have landmarks that you can use to anchor you to the place while not having to abide strictly to the real place’s politics or roads or schools. You can fictionalize the populations, increasing or decreasing it as it serves your writing. You can make up streets and businesses, juxtaposing them against known landmarks in the real town.

The creative freedom of fictionalizing a town also comes with creative constraints. Let’s say there is a popular landmark (mountains and the University of Arizona tend to be mine) and you want to include them in your story. These landmarks are tied to a city people might know, so using them in your fictionalized town can be jarring. I’ve struggled with this. Often, in my short stories at least, I simply choose not to name the town. It’s in Pima County. It’s in the Sonoran Desert. It just doesn’t have a named town.

However, in my novels, I’ve used the fictionalized version and used the real city. In my last novel, I made up a town named Nakisha—based heavily on Tucson, AZ but with a smaller population. I mention the University of Arizona but only in the context of it being a popular choice for Arizona residents, not in the context of location. In my most recent novel, I chose to frame everything in the real city. In Tucson. This was a challenge because now I am placing readers in the city where I grew up. It’s a city they may have heard of or visited. They can research it and find gaps in how my story uses the city versus the reality. But for this story (at least for this moment), Tucson felt like the right choice. I wanted to use the Tucson newspaper, I used the mountain ranges around Tucson for important pieces of the plot. I also use the small city of South Tucson, which makes it hard to fictionalize my main setting.

As I edit this novel, I still wonder if I made the right decision. There’s something so powerful about a fictionalized setting. I want my characters to live in Nakisha, not Tucson. Because in Nakisha, I can do whatever I want. Yet there’s distinct beats in my novel that lean into Tucson’s complicated history and how that history impacted the shape and demographics of the people who live there.

I don’t have great advice about how to decide if and when to use a fictionalized setting versus not. It’s largely a feel thing. But as I’ve illustrated above, even the feel can be borderline. What I can tell you is that I am not alone in having to grapple with this decision. Nor are you. So many of the authors I have had to decide between fictionalized and real. It’s easier when you set your stories in very large cities (New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, etc). However, when you’re writing Southern noir or Southwestern noir or Appalachian lit grit, it’s much harder.

David Joy fictionalizes the towns in his novels (mostly) but uses the real characteristics of the county in which these towns are set. He uses the Appalachian mounts as his anchor. Jess Lourey uses both real towns and neighborhoods in Minnesota as well as fictionalized ones. Her book, The Quarry Girls sets much of the story in the very specific (and real) neighborhood called Pantown. However, she has a couple of novels set in the fictional Minnesota town of Lilydale. J. Todd Scott’s first three novels (his Big Bend series) was set in a fictional town in West Texas. It allowed him the creative freedom to move between the fictional town and real West Texas towns easily. Some of his later novels focus on real towns, real places, real histories.

Surely, these authors struggle the same way I do. The same way you might. Does the creative freedom of a fictionalized town outweigh the verisimilitude of setting your story in the real town or city? That’s a question that often doesn’t get answered until you’re well into the writing of your story. My current novel started with Nakisha—my fictionalized town—but switched to Tucson. Even as late as a few weeks ago, I considered changing it back.

All I think this means is that setting is important, but it’s not as important as the story. If you tell a great story, the setting amplifies it. But the difference between a fictionalized locale and a real one may not carry as much weight as you think.

(Or maybe that’s just me coping)

If you didn’t catch part one last week, be sure to go read it now. This week, we follow through on Finnegan McGrath’s plans and watch as Abel is introduced to how the family business is expected to run.

I hope you enjoy!

Finnegan held up his hands. “What are you doing, my friend?”

Reynato removed his hat with his free hand and tossed it onto the sofa. He paced the room, gun shifting its sights from Finnegan to Abel and back.

“Señor Medina,” Abel said.

“Shut up. Both of you. You are thieves, the two of you.”

“I assure you, my father—”

“Cállate,” Reynato yelled. He walked up close to Finnegan and pressed the gun to Finnegan’s chest. “You thought you could steal the ledger and, what, skim?”

“Steal the ledger?”

“Don’t insult me, please. I know the ledger is gone. The client list is gone. All of it.”

Abel looked at Finnegan, eyes wide. Finnegan shrugged, smiled. He looked up at Reynato. “None of it is gone. The ledger, the client list, all of the McGrath-Medina Shipping Company paperwork has simply shifted hands.”

Reynato backed up, turned around, ran a hand through his thinning hair. Finnegan started to stand up, but Reynato spun around, gun outstretched. “Sit back down and tell me who you gave this information to? Carlos Oestre? Jonathan Cooper?”

“Now you insult me, Reynato. Those men are bootleggers, not enterprises. We, what we built, it’s an enterprise. I would not give those idiots anything.”

“What are you talking about?” Abel asked.

Reynato turned to Abel then looked back at Finnegan. “Your family doesn’t even know your plan? They don’t know what you’re doing?”

“Well,” Finnegan said, lifting his hands toward Abel—a preemptive apology. “Some of my family knows exactly what’s going on. Abel just needed to know the business behind it. See, we’re expanding, Reynato. We’re just doing so without you.”

“What the fuck?” Abel said.

“You will be doing nothing,” Reynato said. “I will take it from you. I will expand the business on my own.”

Finnegan shook his head. “Aye, that might be the right play. You have the gun. You seem to have the leverage. Except, you don’t know who I gave our paperwork to.”

Reynato’s eyes widened, he mashed his jaw. “Who?”

“The sheriff, the mayor. They had concerns about illegal alcohol flowing through the city of Bisbee and the county of Cochise.”

Reynato laughed. “Then you have ended us both.”

“Not quite. See, I’m a businessman, Reynato. It is my duty to report wrongdoing even if it impacts my own business. McGrath-Medina cannot be allowed to be a front for bootlegging.”

“What are you talking about?”

Abel stood. “This is ridiculous.”

“Sit down,” Finnegan and Reynato said simultaneously.

“Finnegan, you’re not making sense,” Reynato said as Abel sat back down.

“I gave the authorities everything they needed to stop the independent distribution of illegal alcohol by one Reynato Miguel Medina—a violation of Volstead Act.”

“You did not think this through. Without me, you have nothing.”

Abel nodded and looked at his father.

Finnegan smiled. “I have everything. I have the production facility in Oaxaca. I have the distributors. I have the storage facilities in Agua Prieta.”

“No,” Reynato said, pacing.

“It turns out, people are motivated by money. My youngest son should be completing his last round of payments as we speak. Law of diminishing returns or not, I’ve offered them all more money to funnel everything through me, and me alone.”

“My son-in-law oversees the storage in Agua Prieta. He will not allow this.”

“I’m afraid your son-in-law has no room for complaint now.”

“What do you mean?”

Finnegan looked at Abel then turned back to Reynato. “My oldest son—you’ve met him, haven’t you? He provided the leverage we needed to make sure everyone in Agua Prieta understood the new hierarchy.”

“And Sandoval? What have you done with him?”

Finnegan held up his hands. “Oh, it was not me. I couldn’t say what happened to your son-in-law. You’d have to ask Charlie about that.”

“Jesus Christ,” Abel said, leaning his head back against the sofa.

“You’ll need more than Jesus, now,” Reynato took two steps toward Finnegan and pulled the hammer back on his revolver.

Abel leapt from the couch and threw a shoulder into Reynato, knocking him to the floor. The gun skipped across the carpet as Abel and Reynato struggled.

Finnegan crossed his legs, looked at his watch. He waited, then he turned toward the double-doors just as they opened. Three sheriff’s deputies entered followed by two men in suits. The deputies rushed Reynato and pulled him off of Abel. The men in suits explained the charges to Reynato as he was dragged away. Finnegan nodded to the men.

And then he and Abel were left alone in the silence of a room that had been begging for violence.

When Abel caught his breath, he pulled himself off the floor. Finnegan smiled and patted the cushion next to him on the sofa. Abel’s hair was disheveled, vest missing a button, white shirt untucked. He sat next to Finnegan but didn’t say anything.

“You understand why you couldn’t know about this, don’t you?”

Abel didn’t respond.

“You, my son, are too important.”

Abel looked at Finnegan. “If that’s true, why did I find out as Reynato found out?”

“Because I could not risk you in the things I asked your brothers to do.”

“Instead, you risked us both being shot here in this room.”

“I admit, it was a risk I had considered. But when weighed against the alternative, I thought this best for you.”

“And what about what’s best for the family?”

“This is what’s best.”

“How?” Abel asked, sighing. “We gave the business away.”

“No, son. We gave Reynato away. The business is secure. It is all ours.”

Abel shook his head for a long time. Then he looked at Finnegan. “We can’t run this entire operation on our own from the hotel. Before, we had Reynato’s offices. Now what?”

Finnegan stood, pulled out the flask, took a sip, then replaced it. “I hear there is plenty of land available south of here. I’ve had my eye on a ranch in Gleeson that would be a wonderful operations base.”

“And who owns it?”

“Just a couple of Mexicans who are in over their heads. They’ll sell cheap, that way we don’t have to worry about that whole law of diminishing returns business.” Finnegan winked, then walked away.

I’ve written before about reading widely. I’m not the first to suggest this, I won’t be the last, and I’m certainly not the most famous, but if you want to be a good writer, you have to read. There’s no way around it. Importantly, you have to read across genres. You might write romance, but you can extract so much from other genres like sci-fi and fantasy. I write crime, but I read everything from the classics to new literary. It helps me refine my own words.

All this said, there’s another reason to read widely. It provides inspiration and gives you hooks into the ways to tell a story. But books aren’t the only medium that can do this. Film can do the same, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a small indie horror film or a summer blockbuster. They all provide inspiration if you’re willing to look.

Admittedly, I am a movie nerd. The idea that movie theaters are dying makes me sad. It’s such a wonderful experience to sit in a theater with a bunch of other people, collectively experiencing something together. But that experience is different for each person regardless of everyone sharing the same room. It’s the experience that can shape your writing, if you let it.

When my kids were young, my wife and I were pretty locked in to kids movies at the theater. We lived off a steady diet of Illumination, Disney, and Pixar movies for years. And that was fine. I was just watching a trailer for Wildwood and thinking about how, if our kids were younger, we’d absolutely be seeing that movie. And you might think these children’s films are just there to satisfy a child’s imagination, but if you think about what a writer is, you’ll see we’re nothing more than grown children. We use our imagination like children, in ways that have died off in many other adults. Children’s films, like all other films provide inspiration and storytelling beats you can take with you in your writing. All films do, if you’re looking for it.

Movies are often compared to books, especially when the movie is an adaptation of a book. That’s natural. However, we shouldn’t think of them as mutually exclusive experiences. You might like the book more than the film, but what did the film do that created a story or a moment or an emotion that the book was unable to provide? What can you find in movies that helps you shape the pacing of your own writing? Are there character development moments within a movie that you can steal and use in your books?

And you should steal. As long as you do it right.

For me, I am constantly thinking about my own writing while watching movies. It doesn’t mean that I need to make my scenes more cinematic. Your writing should serve the medium and the story. In a novel, if it make sense to have the storyline unfold similar to a movie, do it. If not, use other elements. Use the emotional build-up. Use the way a movie might have used Chekhov’s gun just right.

Find inspiration in the story, not necessarily the medium. Don’t discount film as a source that can fuel your writing. Read widely, sure. But watch widely as well.

This one is interesting because it’s a short story and a prequel and a character study. It was never destined to be published. During my MFA, I wrote a novel. I still love that novel and would like to find a home for it some day (after I completely gut it and rewrite it). But one of the things I wanted to do while editing that novel was understand my characters better.

So, I wrote a prequel. It’s mostly a self-contained story, but it does hint at the backstory of the characters in the novel. Because it was never meant to be published, it did not go through multiple rounds of edits. It’s not my cleanest writing.

But I want to share behind-the-curtains types stories alongside more polished ones. This is a special one because it’s not my normal modern crime story. It’s historical, set in the middle of prohibition in Southern Arizona.

Hope you enjoy!

Diminishing Returns

Finnegan McGrath saw the bulge of a gun beneath Reynato’s blazer. Careless concealment by a man not accustomed to carrying such a weapon. As Reynato approached, Finnegan smiled, turned to his son, and said, “Abel, no matter what, we’ve got to make it to the ballroom at the hotel.”

“What does that—”

“My friend, how are you?” Finnegan said to Reynato, standing and extending his hand.

The two men shook, Finnegan’s smile never wavering despite the heat from the sun and the heat along the back of his neck from anger. This man was his partner. For the last two years, Finnegan and Reynato had built quite the business under the McGrath-Medina Shipping Company name. And yet, he came here armed.

“It seems to me your accent fades more and more every time I see you,” Reynato said.

Finnegan wouldn’t lose his accent, and he didn’t want to. It was as much a part of him as Ireland was. But Reynato liked to make small talk, liked to say things that weren’t true in an effort to force your guard down. It’s why Finnegan was drawn to him when searching for a partner two years ago. When he and his sons first arrived in Arizona, he had three requirements for a business partner:

Someone who was already running booze, someone who needed an infusion of cash, and someone who could talk a priest into a whorehouse.

Finnegan sat back down and motioned to the chair across from him and Abel. “Have a seat. Cool down before we go to our meeting.”

Reynato took his seat, careful not to let his blazer hug too close to his chest. He looked across the table, lifted the gaucho from his head and placed it upside down on the table. Finnegan watched the man look around the restaurant. It was all but empty, and that was to be expected. A midday trip out to a restaurant was just not as entertaining as it had been a few years before. What the country had failed to realize when Prohibition was enacted was that people left their homes for liquid socialization. Take that away, and they preferred confinement.

Reynato smiled at Abel. “Your son is ready to join the family business, no?”

“I prefer to stay away from business of any sort,” Abel said.

Finnegan patted his son’s shoulder. “And yet, he’s so good at it. Which is why he’s here today. To help us.”

“This meeting, it is for expansion?”

Finnegan nodded. “That’s right. We’ve come far, but now it’s time to run this operation from New Mexico to California. The border will be ours.”

“Bueno.” Reynato smiled. “But why the sudden change?”

“Do you know what’s made us so successful?”

“I believe it was all about timing, no?”

Finnegan looked at Abel, smiled, nodded. Abel straightened in his chair and said, “It’s the product Señor Medina. You and my father distribute something others don’t.”

“Mezcal?”

Finnegan nodded. “Let the Yankees back east move the whiskey. What we have, what you gave us access to, is the best mezcal in the country.”

“Si, and it comes at a cost to us. Our drivers go for three days just to get it from Oaxaca to the border.”

“And that cost is passed along to our all-too-eager clients.” Finnegan turned to Abel. “Isn’t that right?”

“It is, and people would pay more. You and my father offer a boutique operation.”

Reynato laughed, pressed down the edges of his mustache. “You two are funny. If we are boutique, how is it that such an expansion as the one you propose might come to pass?”

“That is what we will be discovering in our meeting at the hotel.” Finnegan reached into his jacket, and Reynato nearly jumped out of his seat. Finnegan smiled and pulled out a flask. “First, a drink to our continued success.”

Reynato took a breath, smiled. “You know, I remember coming here with my father. You could drink to anything then without fear of jail.”

Finnegan smiled and took a drink, replacing the cap when he was done. “Well, we shall drink without fear this afternoon, my friend.”

He passed the flask to Reynato. Reynato unscrewed the lid, smelled the liquor inside, and sighed. “We do have the best stuff, don’t we?”

Finnegan watched Reynato take a sip then pass the flask back, and he thought about the operation. As it was when the McGrath family arrived to Arizona, Reynato’s business would not have survived. He was paying too much for transportation. His storage location just across the border in Agua Prieta was far from secure. And while Reynato had been able to sell mezcal to people more accustomed to tequila, he was not able to sell it to the right people. Finnegan, and in part, Abel, changed that.

“Shall we head over?” Finnegan said, rising.

Abel and Reynato rose as well. Finnegan watched Reynato’s hands, watched his blazer. Any indication that the fucking gun was coming out, and he’d use the tables as protection. But Reynato turned and walked toward the exit. Finnegan looked at Abel—a smart kid, a helpful kid, but too idealistic. He motioned for Abel to go ahead of him, putting at least one person between Reynato’s gun and Finnegan’s chest.

His son hadn’t even wanted to make the move to Arizona. When the tobacco business dried up in Pennsylvania, Abel refused to travel in search of what he called “illegal commerce.” Finnegan’s son would prefer an education at a university over distribution of the next vice. But what Abel never understood was that denying a man’s desires was the only truly illegal action humans could take. Finnegan had learned this long ago from his own father back in Ireland. He’d tried to pass along the knowledge to his sons, but it failed to sink in with Abel. At least he had Braden and Charlie.

Finnegan, Abel, and Reynato exited the restaurant and stepped into the dusty street under a one-hundred-degree sun. The hotel, fortunately, was just across the road.

If all had gone well, Finnegan’s oldest son, Charlie, would have already crossed into Agua Prieta. He was to wait until exactly two o’clock. And Braden, he had been in Mexico for a week now, stacks of cash in hand.

“Who, exactly, are we meeting with?” Reynato said, turning around and stopping in the middle of the road.

“Who do we always speak with, Rey?”

Reynato smiled. “Politicians, Finn, pinche políticos.”

Abel pointed toward the entrance to the Bisbee Grand Hotel and guided Reynato across the road. Finnegan and his boys had been renting two suites in the hotel for the past two years. An experiment of sorts, but it was time to put down roots. To become real Arizona cowboys.

Finnegan almost laughed to himself. He and his boys might soon own cows and horses, but they would never be cowboys. They were businessmen, and it was time Finnegan cut the deals he’d always intended on cutting when he came west.

Inside the hotel, Finnegan nodded to the concierge, then pointed Reynato and Abel toward large, wooden double-doors beyond the lobby. Abel opened the doors and allowed Reynato to enter first. Finnegan watched his business partner brush his hand along the bulge in his blazer before entering. Abel and Finnegan followed, allowing the doors to shut behind them.

“Where is everyone?” Reynato said, his voice higher and faster than Finnegan could ever remember it in all their dealings.

“Late, as we might expect.”

Finnegan sat on one of the sofas in the room, pulling the flask from his jacket. He took a sip while Reynato paced. Abel stood near the door until Finnegan addressed them both.

“The two of you are making me nervous. Sit down.”

Abel came across the room and sat on the sofa across from Finnegan. Reynato sat next to Abel.

“Are you going to tell me what to expect of this meeting?” Reynato asked.

Finnegan took another sip from his flask, replaced the lid, then put the flask away. “Of course. Abel, he’s the real economics genius, so I’ll let him explain.”

Reynato shifted in his seat to face Abel, pushed his hat back a little further on his head.

“This is simple economics, Señor Medina. You are facing the law of diminishing returns.”

“¿Vale, cómo?”

“You and my father have been increasing the number of people working for you. More people may mean more production, but in most cases, it just means more costs. Protection, production, distribution, it all adds up. And your margins are down significantly since my father made his initial investment.”

Reynato shifted again in his seat. He looked as if he might stand, but he took a breath and looked at Finnegan. “What is this?”

“It is business, Reynato.”

Reynato nodded for a moment. “So you propose expansion—more cost—to fix our problems?”

“It could—”

“No, Finnegan,” Reynato said, standing. He pulled the gun from his blazer and pointed it first at Finnegan, then at Abel, then back to Finnegan. “I know what this is.”

Part II is out now!

Read Part II

I’m re-publishing an old article I wrote for LitReactor. Partially this is because I think it’s good and it’s good to get it out there again. But also, if I’m honest, it’s because I’m traveling for work. Yes, as much as I’d like to be writing full time, I have a day job, and that day job can be pretty demanding on my time.

So, this week, I’m lazy. Or smart. Or both. And I’m sharing with you this article from 2017 that still holds true for me. I’ve modified it a bit because part of the goal of the article (sorry for revealing how the sausage was made) was to include affiliate links to new books coming out. We don’t need that here. Anyway, enjoy!

Who among us didn’t come of age as a criminal? Wait, that can’t be. No, no, you were a criminal too. You just might not realize it. Whether it was that pack of gum you stole in fifth grade or the test you cheated on to pass math in junior high, you’re a criminal just like me. Just like us all.

Of course, the degrees of crime in which we all participated varied, but there is almost universally some transgression during our formative years that strips us of the perfection our parents once hoped for. It might not be stealing from the mall and selling the products at school (*Looks around*). It might not be insurance fraud scams (Who the heck did that?!). It might not even be a crime we committed. Regardless, minor or major, negative acts tend to shape us when we’re young. Which is why coming of age crime stories work so well.

Today I want to explore just what it is about placing young people in terrible, criminal situations that helps drive a good coming of age story. First, it’s probably best to define what I mean by “crime” in this context.

Coming of age crime stories don’t strictly have to be about crime. They are not necessarily noir. These stories simply have some criminal element in them. They have some illegal activity that the main characters (young adults or children) interact with. So, with that definition, let’s test your knowledge.

A good story doesn’t ever truly end. It finishes with a new opening.

There are so many good example of coming of age crime stories. Even if you don’t quite see it as that. The Body, Stephen King’s phenomenal novella falls into this bucket (for those who don’t know, the movie is called Stand By Me and it received multiple Academy Award nominations as well as Golden Globe nominations). So does The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton’s classic. I could list hundreds of books, but I want to focus on one that many may have missed.

The November Criminals came out in 2010 and did well enough to get a film adaptation in 2017. The book follows Addison Schacht, a high schooler who is a little too philosophical regarding his own place in the world. Schacht, a criminal in his own right, uses this philosophical understanding and a sort of young adult reckoning of his past to help drive him (intentionally or not) towards an investigation of the murder of a classmate.

The trope here is that kids do dumb things, but the story is actually about how kids change, how they grow up almost in an instant when placed in a criminal environment. Both the crimes the young protagonist commits and the investigation into the ultimate crime against his classmate are mechanisms for making him grow up faster than we would otherwise expect a teen to.

And that is the key to why these types of stories work so well. We’ve long had the Updike-style (Updikian?) coming of age story. We’ve had the literary fiction versions of kids becoming adults, or coming close to adulthood, at least. We’ve also long had the dystopian YA coming of age—the stories where the children become adults because they have to fight for civilization itself. And sure, we’ve always had coming of age crime stories. I even referenced a couple older ones above: The Body and The Outsiders. But what makes this specific sub-genre of stories work so well is the versatility.

In crime, there are nearly limitless storytelling possibilities. There are government conspiracies and drug crimes and gang violence and home violence and alcoholism and bank robberies. There are kidnappings and larceny and sabotage and financial crimes. There are countless ways to place a young adult in a bad situation and make them figure out the world—figure out who they are.

The November Criminals uses two sides of the criminal coin—the protagonist’s crimes and the investigation of another crime—to force growth and understanding and revelation. Sam Munson captures the heart of why coming of age crime stories work.

We care about young people. We want them to be safe. So, we are immediately invested in the outcome. Place a young person near a criminal element and we get angry. We are angry at the with them. We’re angry at the adults who put them in that situation. But that anger quickly fades as we find ourselves rooting for the young person’s escape.

If there is one.

The point is, when a someone comes of age in a criminal environment, they don’t just become an adult. They become an adult that can walk one of two paths. We root for the them to overcome, to grow up and fight the evil they were forced to deal with as a youth. But that doesn’t always happen. And that’s what’s so compelling. We don’t know how these characters will ultimately turn out in most cases. We’re left at the end of a novel or movie with a resolution to that particular story, but not a resolution to the character’s story. So, we fill in the timeline. We create a world. Does the protagonist become a mob boss when she’s older? Does the little kid who watched his dad blow up a bunch of office buildings become an arson investigator? Does our heroine ever make it out of jail, lesson learned?

I have many short stories that focus on this concept. My novels, though, tend to focus on adults. That said, every one of my characters have deep, traumatic pasts where as young people they were thrust into some criminal element against their will, forcing them to grow up too early. And that makes for good storytelling.

A good story doesn’t ever truly end. It finishes with a new opening. And that is what coming of age crime stories provide us as readers. A conclusion we can only really form in our minds. When your protagonist comes of age under the veil of crime or violence, there is always another story to be told later, one that the reader must form in their mind. One that they must predict. The ending is the beginning, and a criminal coming of age story provides the perfect template to force the reader’s mind to wander well beyond the last page of the book.

Welcome back to the conclusion of Four Corners. If you missed Part I, make sure to check it out. I’m excited to see how everyone feels about this.

As I mentioned last week, this was an early experiment in quasi-mystery. It’s still more thriller than mystery and there’s a lot I would change if I were writing this today. But I hope you still enjoy it.

Four Corners Part II

I woke before dawn. Someone was banging on my trailer door. I grabbed the .38 from my nightstand, pulled my robe closed around me, and went to the door. I peered through the peephole and saw Harry standing there, flowers in hand.

I slid the .38 in the pocket of my robe and opened the door. He stepped in, no words, no warning. He kissed me, then he stepped back and extended the flowers.

“Harry, it’s what?” I looked at the clock on the microwave in the kitchen. “Jesus, it’s three in the morning. What are you doing?”

He smiled now. “I’ve been feeling down. Like I haven’t paid enough attention to you lately.”

Harry was the only one who paid any attention to me. Everyone knew why I washed out from Dewpoint P.D., but he was the only one who didn’t care. He was the only one who gave me a job, gave me money, helped me get a place here on the reservation rent-free.

“You’ve been fine.”

He kissed me again and pushed me back toward the bedroom. I wanted to, but I was tired and I had started thinking about the case the minute I woke up.

“Wait,” I said, and he did. We stopped in the hall and I looked at him. “Harry, I’ve got to get to work on this case soon. Got to get down to Hopi P.D. before they release some evidence to the feds.”

“Is that right? So, you’re making progress already?”

I nodded.

“Good,” he said, stepping back into the living room. “Didn’t seem like the feds or locals were getting anywhere, but you’re my girl. It’s not surprising.”

Harry ran a hand through his hair, smiled at me again. I motioned toward the couch, but he shook his head.

“I’m sorry about this. I was up drinking tonight. I shouldn’t—”

I laughed. “Harry, I’d have you in my bed right now if I didn’t have to get moving in a couple hours. Don’t apologize to me.”

“All right, all right.” He still had the flowers and he nodded to them. “Will you at least take these?”

“Of course.” I went to the kitchen and pulled a glass from the cupboard. I filled it with water and came back into the living room.

Harry handed me the flowers and I put them in the cup. He said, “What’s the evidence you’re after?”

“Trash,” I said.

He laughed. “Trash?”

“That’s all I know. Little Saveka girl, the sister, she said Hopi P.D. collected trash from out in front of the house. Bagged it up and took it with them.”

“Interesting,” Harry said. “Well, I’ll let you get some sleep. Keep me post though, huh?”

I winked at him. “You got it, boss.”

I wasn’t able to sleep after Harry left. For me, that meant thinking about things I didn’t want to think about. It meant thinking about that boy I shot.

He was high on meth and he had been reported by a neighbor. She’d called in saying he was waving a gun around. I was first on scene, and the fucking kid went into his pocket. Wouldn’t stop when I told him. When his hand came out, he was pointing something at me, and I fired. Six shots in all.

And all he had was a flashlight.

The board called it a clean shoot. The department might have let me stay on, but there were two problems. You couldn’t shoot a boy in Dewpoint and stay on the good side of its residents. And I couldn’t stop seeing that boy every time I climbed into my cruiser.

Brandon would be at the station by five, and it was a bit of a drive. Fuck it, I thought. I threw on a pair of jeans, pulled on my boots, grabbed a leather jacket from the bedroom closet, and tossed the old John Deere cap on my head. I clipped a holster to my belt and tucked the .38 inside.

I drove in the early morning darkness, shivering under my leather jacket and wishing the heater on my El Camino worked better. I thought about the case while I drove. Jonathan Saveka was a nobody. He wasn’t the type to be involved with anything that would lead to this. It didn’t make sense. When a body was dismembered like that, there was always a reason. A message. I’d seen it in some of the case files I reviewed when I was still a cop. But this felt off.

I didn’t know who Harry’s buyers were for any of the products he held. But I did know how he laundered the money. The buyers spent their money in the casino. Legal gambling on the reservation as far as the outside world could tell. But in reality, they were washing the money. In exchange, Harry released the product to these buyers. I didn’t know where the product came from, and I didn’t care. Not part of the job.

But I did care that the operation was put on hold because of this body. Because of Saveka. It meant that my paydays might not come as frequently. It meant that Harry’s mood might turn sour. It meant that I might have to go back to a world where I was forced to confront what I’d done to that boy, to that boy’s family.

Fuck, there had to be something I was missing.

I heard the metal crunch before I felt the tail end of the El Camino slide. I caught a brief glimpse of a headlight in my side mirror before I spun.

I remembered the academy as the El Camino spun on the slick, wintery road. I let go of the steering wheel and lifted my foot away from the pedals. All I could do is let momentum and the engine do its thing. And hope the impact wasn’t that bad.

The front end of the car hit the guardrail and jolted me forward and to the left. The car ratcheted around and the driver’s side hit the guardrail next. But the El Camino had come to a stop. I was facing the wrong way in the road and with a fucked up car, but I was alive.

My driver’s side headlight was out, but the passenger side light illuminated an old Ford pickup barreling down on me. I grabbed the shifter, threw the El Camino into reverse, and jammed on the gas.

The Ford bounced off the guardrail and kept on coming. Another flashback to the academy. J-Turns. I hit the brakes just enough to pull the shifter into drive. At the same time, I spun the steering wheel. It happened in a second, but I was facing the right way in the road now.

The Ford was still behind me. I gunned the engine and flew down the highway. I couldn’t outrun the Ford. I needed to do something.

I reached for the .38, considered firing it out the window. But that wouldn’t do anything. The Ford was right behind me now. I swerved into the oncoming lane and hit the brakes. The Ford flew up next to me, and I was able to swing the El Camino back into the rear corner of the truck.

The Ford spun in front of me, and then it was behind me. I lost sight of it in my rearview just after I saw it slam into the guardrail. I kept my foot pressed down on the accelerator and drove as fast as I could toward the station.

“What the fuck?” I said to myself.

Someone was following me. They would have seen me go to Saveka’s place. They would have seen me talking to the girl, going to the station, calling Brandon.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Brandon. He picked up, but I didn’t let him speak. “Get the evidence, get a gun, and be ready for me.”

“What? Why?”

“Just do it, Brandon. Trust me.”

“All right,” he said. “When will you be here?”

“Five minutes,” I said before hanging up.

I was there in three. I slid into the parking lot, across the ice and snow and gravel. I swung open my door and ran into the station. Brandon was sitting behind the desk with a shotgun resting on his lap. He lifted it when I came through the door.

“Fuck, Reagan.”

“Where is it?”

“Right here.” He pointed at a bag on the desk.

I walked to the desk and told him what had happened. Told him about the case, the Ford trying to run me off the road. I didn’t tell him why the case was important to Harry.

Brandon came around to the front of the desk, held the shotgun on the front door. I looked at the baggie on the counter. At the piece of trash collected from the Saveka place. Just trash. But it was also more than that. It was an empty package of nicotine gum.

Buckle.

I was turning to tell Brandon when the front door’s glass blew out. Brandon managed to squeeze the trigger on the shotgun, but all he hit was the wall to the right of the door. He stumbled backwards and I tried to catch him. But he was on the ground. He was bleeding, and someone was coming through the destroyed opening that used to be the station’s entrance.

I reached for my .38, but Buckle yelled and fired a shot over my shoulder.

“Don’t move,” he said.

He was a shed, a house. Buckle was a wide man but not fat. And he moved with ease. That’s why Harry employed him. Buckle was the intimidator. And apparently, Buckle was able to chop up the body of an innocent man.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Maybe he didn’t know why I was there, what I was doing.

“What’s in that bag there, Reagan?”

I shrugged. “Junk, it looks like.”

He laughed and took a step closer, his .45 pointed at my chest. “Show me, slowly.”

I lifted the bag off the counter and held it up for him to see. “Looks like nothing to me.”

Buckle shook his head. “You’re better than that, Reagan. We both know you know what that is. I know where it was found because I fucked up and left it there. So, you know what comes next, right? You know how this has to end.”

I did. But I was curious. Before he put a bullet in my chest and made this all look like my doing, I had to know why he’d done it. “I get that you enjoy violence, Buckle. But I can’t figure out why you chopped that poor man up. What was the point?”

Buckle laughed. “It wasn’t about him. Not at all about that fucking Indian. Harry’s next few shipments were going to be a bit low.”

I cocked my head, and Buckle winked. I let him go on.

“Harry ain’t the only one who can make deals. I cut a few of my own, supplied some friends with some guns for a fair price.”

“Which meant Harry’s contacts, who had already paid for their product, would be shorted.”

Buckle tapped the barrel of his gun to his forehead. “Now you’re getting it. I figured we’d get more product, and I’d come up with a story for the stuff I sold. But I needed time for that. I needed to shut down distribution.”

“So, you killed someone, spread his body parts across four states, and let the shit show handle the disruption for you.”

“Bingo.”

“But why Saveka?”

“Because he was there. He was easy.”

I shook my head, and Buckle took one more step forward.

“No more questions,” he said.

I watched Buckle’s finger on the trigger, saw it tightening. I thought about trying for the .38. Didn’t have much to lose. But it was too late. Buckle was going to pull the trigger. He would kill me and set the whole scene to look like I’d gone insane. Done something terrible.

Buckle smiled as he squeezed the trigger, but his gun didn’t fire. Instead, there was an explosion by the door, and Buckle’s head snapped forward. He fell to the ground and I saw the bullet hole in the back of his head.

Then I saw Harry.

He stepped through the mess, lowered his gun, and hugged me. “You’ve got to go. You can’t be here.”

“But,” I said, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“I felt bad about barging in, and I was coming back to your place to apologize. I saw the lights on here, saw Buckle’s truck and your car.”

I nodded and said the only thing that made sense. “Thank you.”

Harry stepped back. “I’ll clean this up, but you have to go.”

I looked down at Brandon. I’d hoped he was still breathing, but his body was still. Then I looked at Buckle. His blood was pooling with Brandon’s. I stepped over Buckle, walked to the door. I looked back at Harry one more time and he waved me off.

Outside, in the cold morning air, I looked around. This place was all I knew, but maybe it was time to move on. I got into my car and thought about my father. Then I thought about the boy I shot. Maybe if I was gone—really gone—his family could forgive me. Or forget me.

I once had a creative writing professor tell me my writing was too violent. This was the same professor who also told me I shouldn’t use the word “fuck” in my writing. This article in LitReactor was my ode to that professor. Needless to say, I discounted the advice at the time.

However, as I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve learned that there is a fine balance in the violence writers should show on the page and the violence they should leave off the page. In crime fiction, you will inevitably run into violence. It’s what you’re chasing as a reader who picks up such books and stories. The question is: how will that violence manifest itself?

Good writers know when to paint every detail of the bloody, ugly crime on the page. When to pull the reader along in the stomach-turning description of a murder scene. When to suggest the horror of a character being tortured instead of showing it. But where is that line? How do writers know when to cross it and when to toe it?

I think the answer comes down to experience. That professor I had in my undergraduate studies was right. My early writing was probably more violent than it needed to be. Not gratuitous necessarily, but it left too much on the page. The blood splattered writing took away from the story. Remember, the violence itself is not the story. The crime and the characters are the story. Later, in my graduate studies, I had a professor who pointed out examples of writing where the suggested violence was worse (in a good way) and more powerful than if the writer had chosen to show the full scene. This helped me as I refined my crime writing. I don’t claim to be a good writer, but I do think I have a good grasp of when to show violence and when to suggest it.

The idea for this article came as I was reading Jordan Harper’s A Violent Masterpiece. The title should tell you what to expect. And if you have ever read Harper’s work, you know, he uses the blood and gore as a story-telling device as well as anyone. His writing and his stories benefit from the blood on the page. It needs to be there. It cannot remain a mere suggestion.

Without giving anything away from his new novel, I can highlight examples of this violence in a scene where one of the victims of a serial killer is found. Harper does not give us the news report style description of this victim’s death. We get the first-person view. Not only does the violence shown in this scene shock, it serves an important purpose in the story. I’m not going to name that purpose here because you need to read the book and I don’t intend to spoil it. But trust me, had Harper not walked us (literally) through the crime scene in gritty detail, it would not have worked.

Another book that comes to my mind often when I think about violence on the page is David Joy’s Weight Of This World. David Joy is an incredible author. His books are some of my favorites. He writes with a level of empathy that every crime writer should try to emulate. His characters are flawed and often downright bad. But Joy does not allow himself to judge these characters in his writing. He let’s them live, for better or worse. And then he lets them die (sometimes).

In Weight Of This World, one of Joy’s characters completely snaps and tortures another in such a sickening way I actually had to put the book down. It was necessary to have that violence on the page, though. It showed just how broken the character was. Had Joy left the torture off the page and simply shown us the outcome, we wouldn’t have felt the character’s fall so viscerally. The violence served the plot and led directly to subsequent scenes that just could not work if the torture was off-page.

I could go on and on with examples of violence on the page (Don Winslow’s Border Trilogy, S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes, etc). But we should explore counter-examples. Where the violence is better served off the page because putting it on the page would slow the plot, hurt the story.

You’ll often find violence off the page in mystery novels because the violence itself it central to the mystery. In Ivy Pochoda’s masterful Visitation Street, violence comes from mother nature and teenage stupidity. But you never see it. You only see the aftermath. The impact. The violence sits in the shadow of the psychological impact the characters must carry. And it’s a different kind of violence than in the books I mentioned previously. Had Pochoda chosen to show this violence, it would have made the book decidedly worse.

I recently finished Tana French’s In The Woods, and this novel (also a mystery) perfectly highlights what I’m talking about. There are two bits of violence in this book that are kept off the page. There’s the original crime that took place twenty years before. We never see the violence that led to a little boy standing in shoes filled with blood, but it hovers over the entire story. It’s a great example of not showing the actual violence on page. The other example in that book is the central murder. We hear how it happens, but we never see it. The violence of it is not something we need to see. It’s the emotional fallout that is most important.

I could go on and on with examples from both sides. So, the question is: how does an author know when to go all in and when to hold back?

I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer this, but I’ll give it a shot. I think the answer is feel. Authors know the feel of the book. They know the tone. Does the violence play a critical part in the story, or would it provide more depth if it were kept off the page. Only the author can know this, and they can only know it by feeling things out. I don’t think this can easily be surfaced in an outline. It has to be felt through writing.

Back To You

This all, of course, is one writer’s opinion. What do you think? Do you prefer stories of one type versus the other? How and when should the violence be shown on the page and when should it be held back?

Thanks for reading!

This week’s Friday Read is another one from the archives, another early story where I was still experimenting and finding myself as a writer. It was also my first attempt at something close to mystery. It leans a little toward the hard-boiled detective side of fiction as well, which is interesting.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Four Corners!

Four Corners

Buckle dropped the newspaper on the table in front me, chewing his nicotine gum with an open mouth. “This is yours.”

He didn’t speak much, but when he did, he was so eloquent. I looked at the paper then back up to Buckle. “I don’t subscribe.”

“Not the paper, Reagan,” he said, pointing to the top article on the front page. “The job.”

I read the first few lines. Someone had chopped a person up and spread the body parts out across the four points of the Four Corners National Monument. “Jesus.”

“Harry wants you on it.” Buckle leaned in close when he said this. I heard his lips and gums and tongue mashing and moving the little white piece of gum in his mouth.

“You’d think if they’re going to make you chew a gum, they might actually add some breath freshener to it.”

Buckle stood up straight, blew into his hand, and sniffed. He shook his head then walked out of the break room, down the hall, and presumably back into the security closet that he called home. Harry may have gave him the title—Security Manager—but Buckle was the muscle. That’s it. The job was a front, something to make him look respectable to the outside world. Not a dumb move by Harry, but if the casino ever needed real security, I wasn’t sure Buckle would know what to do.

I took a minute to read the entire article. It wouldn’t be the first murder Harry had me investigate, but this was was more brutal than the others. Most everything else was a simple bullet to the head, a beating gone too far, a knife driven into just the right spot.

Those investigations stayed in house. With me. So did the thefts and people disappearing and the exploration of new business contacts and their histories. These were the things I was good at. The things I was trained for. The things I had done while I was still a cop.

This, though, this was different. And I knew why Harry wanted me on the job.

It wasn’t the type of case I’d work normally. The victim was not part of the organization. He wasn’t a business partner. He was a Native American who had lived on the reservation like I did. He did so because of his blood. I did so because they liked having me there.

The reason Harry wanted me on this was because the placement of the body and the victim involved federal law enforcement, local law enforcement from four different states, and the tribe police. All that heat converged on the main trucking route we used. Harry couldn’t deliver his customer’s products in a timely fashion without that route. And he couldn’t just send trucks loaded down with stolen goods, guns, and drugs into the open arms of cops.

I was about to stand and head out to the casino floor when Harry came into the room. “Hey, sweetheart.”

He kissed me on the top of the head and I thought about the night we had two months ago. Nights like that happened from time to time. He knew and I knew that they couldn’t happen all the time. He was twenty years older than me, he was on the police big board, and my father was still a detective with Dewpoint P.D.

“Harry, this case,” I said. “What the fuck?”

“I know, I know.” He sat down across from me.

“Where are you sending the trucks?”

He smiled. “See, there’s a reason I hired you. You catch on, girly. You catch on real quick. Right now, I’m not sending them anywhere. That’s why you’re on the job.”

“I’ll head out to the rez this afternoon, start asking about the vic.”

Harry’s hair was gray and long, but he kept it combed back. When he nodded his approval to me, I watched two or three strands fall across his forehead. I wanted to reach out and brush them away. I wanted to come across that table and kiss him. But I knew everything happened on his terms. In his time.

I winked, grabbed my John Deere trucker’s cap off the table and put it on, sliding my ponytail through the back. People on the reservation knew I had been a cop, but people around here—Native American or not—preferred the down-home, country girl. And that’s what I’d give them.

***

Dewpoint, Arizona is made up of 2,238 residents, not including the tribe. The northern point of the Hopi Indian Reservation stretched across the bottom half of Dewpoint, in the mountains of Northern Arizona. It was a short drive to Four Corners, and it was a good distribution hub.

I had called my father on the drive and got the victim’s home address. Jonathan Sakeva lived a couple miles from my trailer on the rez. Hopi Police had already been there, interviewed his wife and sister. They’d collected evidence and packaged it all up for the FBI, I assumed.

My dad, always hesitant with the information, had asked me about the job I was working. “Reagan, you know the people you work for. I shouldn’t be helping you on any of this.”

“Dad, I worked casino security and Jonathan Saveka was suspected of counting cards. My boss—”

“Harry Belmont,” my father said, interrupting. “Do you know who Harry Belmont is?”

“Yes, Dad. He’s my boss. He’s worried that someone at the casino took things personally, and they want me to check in on it. That’s all.”

My father knew I wasn’t just some private investigator working casino crimes. But he also loved me, felt bad for the way I fell out of the department. I had felt bad too, but I’d had eight years to think about it, and I was tired of apologizing for a mistake I didn’t make.

But the thoughts of the boy I shot didn’t just go away. I could see his face, his hands, the quick movements. And I still saw him on the ground, bleeding, his mother being held back behind the police tape.

After he gave me the address, my dad warned me that the feds were keep a tight lid on the case. They were trying to push out locals. It made sense, at least from their perspective, from their perception of the police around there. Can’t have stupid hicks from Northern Arizona fucking up a murder investigation in which someone was scattered across four states.

I stopped my El Camino in front of the squat adobe house where Saveka had once lived. Before popping the door open, I wondered how someone from the tribe could get themselves mixed up in something like this.

As soon as I climbed out of the car and stepped into the snow-packed dirt in front of Saveka’s house, I was hit with a rock.

“Go home,” a voice yelled from somewhere near the house. “You people did this to him.”

Another rock hit my car, and that’s when I got pissed. I leaned in through the driver’s side window, opened the glove box, and pulled out my revolver. When I came out of the window and leveled the gun toward the house, the rocks stopped flying. And then I saw the girl.

She was standing on the porch in a brown canvas dress with a black hoodie over top that was two sizes two big. Her eyes were wide and looking right at my .38. I lowered it then slid it into the waistband of my jeans near my back.

“Why are you throwing rocks at me?”

The girl, who couldn’t be but twelve, shook her head. “Because you did this to him.”

I walked across the lot, careful to avoid the patches of snow packed in so tight that they had turned to ice. “Who did?”

“You.” She pointed at me. “Your people. The casino.”

“He was your brother?”

She nodded. “And he is gone because of your people.”

She meant Harry. That’s who everyone meant when they talked about the casino. Harry didn’t own the casino, of course. It was on Native American land and owned by the tribe. But Harry financed it, and it financed him.

“My name is Reagan Jones, and I’m here to help figure out what happened to your brother. I want to find the person who did this to him.”

She considered this for a moment. All I really cared about was solving the case so that Harry was happy, so that business could flow again. I thought about my father in that moment. He would have cared about Saveka.

The little girl shook her head. “You can’t do anything.”

“If you help me, I can.”

“How?”

I took stepped onto the porch and sat down next to her. After a moment she as well. “Did you see anything weird before this happened to your brother?”

“Like what?”

“Anything that you normally wouldn’t see.”

“They already asked me all this. They asked if I saw any people, any cars, any anything.”

I nodded. Of course they did. “Well, maybe they forgot to ask you some questions. So, let me ask you this one. Did the police take anything from around here?”

She thought about this, tilted her head. “They looked around a lot, but the only thing they took was a piece of trash.”

“Trash? What trash?”

The girl shrugged. “I saw them pick it up, but I couldn’t tell what it was. They put it in a plastic bag and took it away.”

“Did you see which police took the trash? Was it Hopi police?”

She nodded.

Thank God, I thought. If they hadn’t sent the evidence along to the FBI, I might still be able to get a look at what they took. I’d have to call in a favor.

The mother wasn’t home and there wasn’t anything else for me to ask, so I patted the girl on the shoulder, and pulled a business card out from my back pocket.

I looked at the card. Reagan Jones, P.I. It had my email address and phone number listed. It also had the casino’s address printed at the bottom. You had to have an address to qualify for the investigator’s license, so that was mine.

The girl took the card and slapped it off her thigh. She looked up at me, her eyes a little wider. I smiled and told her I appreciated her help. Then I left before she could cry.

Hopi P.D. had a quiet station in the northern part of the reservation. It’s even quieter in the winter. When the snow falls and the ice builds up along the walks, the few officers working tend to stay home.

So when I got there by late evening, the lights were off and the doors were locked. I dialed Brandon on my cell. Time to call in that favor.

He answered after six rings. “Hey, Reagan.”

“You guys don’t work around here, or what?”

“Ain’t shit to do.”

“I got something for you to do.”

Brandon’s voice lowered, got playful. “Oh, I bet you do.”

“Shut up.”

“What do you need?”

“Heard you guys pulled some evidence from the Saveka house.”

“Yes we did, but it’s going to the feds.”

I climbed back into the El Camino and cranked the engine. I let it idle on the side of the highway next to the darkened police station. “Has it gone yet?”

“No, first thing tomorrow.”

“I need to see it before it goes.”

“Reagan, I can’t let you take the evidence.”

I pulled out onto the highway and headed for my trailer. “I don’t want to take it. I just want to see what it is.”

Brandon was quiet for a while. “Shit. Yeah, all right. Come by first thing. I’m supposed to run it up to their command post.”

“I’ll see you bright and early.” I clicked off and drove as the sun set behind me.

Part II of Four Corners comes next Friday. Hope to see you back here, but let me know what you thought about Part I.

Admit it, you’re addicted to social media. Or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re one of the few who has been able to stay free from the algorithmic grasp of an endless feed. For most people though, social media is an addiction that’s hard to break. It was for me.

Rather than deleting social apps or setting screen time limits, I tried a different approach recently. I bought a small 10-year-old Kindle on eBay with the goal of replacing every urge to reach for social media with some reading. It was surprisingly easy.

When eating a quick lunch during work, social media was a constant companion. Now, I flick open the book I’m reading on Kindle and get a few pages in. At nighttime before bed, instead of Threads or X or Instagram, I pop open the Kindle and read until I’m ready to fall asleep.

Because the Kindle is small, it goes everywhere with me easily. The same way my phone goes everywhere with me. That makes it much easier to reach for the Kindle and read a book instead of scrolling a social media feed.

But outside of kicking the social media addiction, why is this important?

Reading Is Writing

The more a writer reads, the better they write. I don’t think there’s much dispute in this logic, but how much is enough? Can you quench your thirst for reading? Can you hit a peak in writing quality at which point you don’t need to read anymore? Probably not. With reading, more is almost always better.

I was already what I would consider a voracious reader. But since I implemented this new social media replacement strategy, I am ripping through books. I use Libby to find e-books from my local library, and if I can’t find something I want, Kindle books are relatively inexpensive. Because I’ve increased my book consumption velocity, I’ve been reading wider than I normally would.

Literary fiction, mystery, science-fiction, and yes, of course thrillers. Book club fiction and things a little more academic. I’m consuming in a way that is productive and educational while also being fun.

Being exposed to multiple types of writing from people of all different backgrounds, my own writing gets better. Books challenge me to experiment with my writing. They suggest new ways of bringing characters to life, new ways to present dialogue and life on the page.

As Stephen King once said:

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Book Recommendations

What I’m reading has not changed. I’m still working through the same three books I mentioned last week, but after talking with Ron Clyburn last week (more on that below), I realized there are a lot of books I’ve read in the past that I could recommend here. Some of these books, I’ve read multiple times. Let’s take a look at three very different books.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

If you’ve never read Liz Moore’s work, I highly recommend you change that. The God of the Woods is her most recent novel and it’s an incredible mix of generational trauma, period piece, and mystery.

Not only does Moore make you feel like you’re living in the middle of the 20th century throughout the novel, she also makes the setting so real you can feel it and taste it. The God of the Woods is set between the early 1960s and mid 1970s and follows the disappearance of a camper at a summer camp owned by a wealthy family. It just so happens that the missing camper is the daughter of the family and her brother also went missing 15 years before.

River, Sing Out by James Wade

For the crime fiction lovers, this one is highly recommended. Wade’s River, Sing Out is far more literary than most crime fiction, but that doesn’t slow the plot at all. Wade has a talent for writing action and dialogue within a violent world that draws you in and makes you forget the danger until it’s right there upon you.

The novel follows a young boy living in East Texas with his dead beat father. The boy crosses paths with a teenage girl on the run from dangerous men. Despite the boy’s age and his fear, he refuses to leave the girl’s side as they both navigate the violence around every corner.

Wonder Valley by Ivy Pochoda

Ivy Pochoda is a master story-teller. It’s hard to compare her to anyone else because the way she writes is both immersive and effortless. Surely, it’s not actually effortless, but it feels that way, and that’s damn hard to pull off. Wonder Valley is an acid trip of a story that revolves around a commune in the middle of the California desert.

In Wonder Valley, Pochoda traces the lives of multiple characters from very different circumstances. Two violent criminals (one more violent than the other) on the run, a business man from Los Angeles who becomes entranced by a man running naked on the freeway, a girl who seems to be on the run herself as she finds the commune, and the commune itself. It’s run by a family with the patriarch leading nightly story-telling and communal killing of animals. Every character’s collision is well timed and leads to an explosion of violence and relief.

Person of Interest

Last week, Ron Clyburn—a fellow Substack writer of crime fiction—was kind enough to have me on his podcast. We ended up going for a full hour and talked about everything from books and writing to 1930s immigration and naturalization in New York.

I had so much fun chatting. I hope you’ll give wrong a follow, subscribe to his Substack, and watch/listen to the podcast.

Back To You

I’d love to hear how you read. E-books? Audio? Paperbacks with cracked spines? Brand new hardcovers? How has reading influenced your writing if you’re a writer? How has reading influenced your life if you’re not a writer?

If you missed last week’s read, be sure to read that first. Now, we continue with the conclusion of Uncle Paulie.

Uncle Paulie

“Hey, you know your grandpa was in deeper than us even?” Uncle Paulie ask wanting conversation to break his mind away from the coke.

“What do you mean?” Anson asked.

“My old man rolled with hard dudes. None of the stuff we’re into. He rolled internationally.”

“Like Mexico?” Anson asked.

“Mexico’s international, yeah? Fuck yeah Mexico. He crossed the border every couple weeks.”

Uncle Paulie stared at the white lines on the road ahead. They seemed to begin wiggling side to side like a snake that was always a step ahead of them.

“That’s what got him killed, though,” Uncle Paulie finally said.

“Thought so,” Anson sighed.

“That’s part of why I’m so careful with it all, you know?” Uncle Paulie asked, not looking for a response.

Anson laughed. “You’re careful?”

“Fifteen years out is fucking careful, boy,” he said.

“No, that’s lucky,” Anson shot back.

Pride swelled in Uncle Paulie’s chest and he banged happily on the dashboard, ignoring Anson’s suggestion that it was all luck. “Think what you want, but I built a damn empire. We run a hundred-k every month, and you know how many of us got popped last year?”

Uncle Paulie knew Anson had the answer already, but he didn’t let him reply. “Fucking two!” Uncle Paulie said.

“Counting me, right?” Anson said sarcastically.

A long time ago, Uncle Paulie felt like the weight of everything he was doing would crush him. He’d wake up in the middle of the night covered in sweat. The first time it happened, he thought he pissed the bed it was so wet. Those nights, he’d feel his chest shrinking. He expected it to crush his lungs, his heart. He expected to be found dead, a disgusting pile of smashed bones and organs. The feeling always passed, but it made him wonder too much.

He finally found solace in the sins of others. Anytime he felt guilt or remorse creeping in, he reminded himself there was always someone worse. Eventually, he stopped waking up at night. Eventually, he didn’t have to remind himself of the evils of other people. He became content in what he did. No, he became happy in it again.

“We’ve got a big deal coming up, so what’s it gonna be?” Uncle Paulie asked. “You got enough rope to roll on it?”

Anson nodded, “Yeah, no one’s on me. I just have to check in weekly for the next thirteen months.”

Uncle Paulie laughed. “Fuck, that’s a good deal! You should be happy, kid.” A star-shaped splash of water hit the windshield. “You know when I went in the first time, I begged for a deal. Would’ve taken anything. But you know what they were giving? Shit. They were giving fucking nothing.”

The sky spit two more drops onto the windshield.

“’Bout time,” Uncle Paulie said. “So, this deal. I can’t trust anyone else to lead it, so you’ll run it straight right? None of that righteous, ‘oh we hurt someone,’ or ‘I don’t wanna go back to jail’ shit, right?”

Anson looked Uncle Paulie in the eye, “I might be pissed, but I’m not a bitch. Have I ever fucked you?”

Uncle Paulie pursed his lips and raised his hands in mock defense. “Alright then.”

“Alright,” Anson said.

There wasn’t another drop of rain for the next ten miles. Uncle Paulie and Anson seemed bound to the silence of the car while they waited for the sky to explode. But it never did. Finally, Anson pulled out another cigarette from the glove box, and spoke.

“Details now or later?” Anson asked.

Uncle Paulie shrugged. “Whatever. You can remember it, I’ll run it down now if you want.”

Anson rubbed the bridge of his nose and nodded. It reminded Uncle Paulie of the fight the kid got in when he was sixteen. Anson saw some fucking black kid getting the shit kicked out of him in the street. Was for nothing more than being black, or something. Anson had this sense of duty that served him well as part of Uncle Paulie’s crew. That sense of duty got him into shit where he shouldn’t have been when he was younger, though.

The fight unfolded on the street in front of Uncle Paulie’s house. Anson and a kid six inches taller going at it. Rolling around on the black tar street, punches flying. Neither kid won. They eventually just got tired of beating on each other. Anson walked away with a broken nose. The other kid had to watch his back with one eye for a week straight while waiting for the swelling to subside in his left eye.

Uncle Paulie chuckled to himself. All that shit just for a kid Anson didn’t even know. He hoped Anson didn’t have any of that shit left in him. It’d get him killed one day on some random job.

“You take two of the guys — probably Juan and Joe-Joe — and head down to Abilene. You aren’t going to meet anyone there, but you’ll have some shit to do. Count on that,” Uncle Paulie began.

Anson adjusted himself in the seat, listening as far as Uncle Paulie could tell.

“There’s an old Pizza Hut down there. It’s just a shell now. Boarded up windows, but you’ll know it from that God damn hut-roof they have on all their joints,” Uncle Paulie took both hands and held them up in the shape of a roof. “I’m gonna let you figure out positioning, but I don’t want you going in. You send fucking Joe-Joe for that shit.”

“Any heat to worry about?” Ansons asked.

Uncle Paulie shook his head, “Not from the cops, no. But this here is a bigger deal than we’ve done. Heat will come from elsewhere if it comes.”

“Another crew?”

“Or bigger. But don’t worry about that. Just be prepared. Guns, exit plan. You know the drill.” Uncle Paulie stuck his left arm out the window to feel the warm, wet air. “Is it ever going to fucking dump on us or what?”

“How much are we pulling from the Pizza Hut?”

“Three barrels. You’ll have to unload them into something else though. I fucking told ‘em barrels are too conspicuous, but they insisted the drop be in barrels,” Uncle Paulie said.

Writing a novel is hard. It is for me, at least. Short stories are hard in a different way, but they are sort of like bowling with bumper rails. You know where the edges are and it’s pretty hard to fall off the tracks. Novels have no bumper rails and there are endless ways to land in the gutter.

To help mitigate this, when I have a novel idea I never begin writing it. I might take note of the idea or the character. Sometimes it starts with a single line. Sometimes it starts with a character’s name. Regardless of what sparked the idea, though, I need the idea to become real. I need the character to live inside my head long enough to build relationships with other characters, long enough to grow a life. Like a weed taking over a lawn, I need the story to consume my brain.

Many writers experience writing this way. The characters become real. You can see them and hear them. Your brain, while technically and physiologically in control, takes a back seat and the characters drive. While folding laundry, the characters speak. While in the shower, they act. While working out or jogging or walking, the entire world builds inside your mind, all seemingly without your control.

If I were to start writing my novels the second the inkling of an idea hit, I would lose the opportunity to watch my characters grow. The story would be so much harder to write. It would come out forced.

Stephen King, famously, does not outline his novels. He let’s the characters take the wheel and often doesn’t know where the story will lead until it’s reached its destination. This is how my writing works as well. I wrote last week that for my first mystery novel, I had to do some quasi-outlining because I had no idea how to write a mystery and how to land the clues and proper beats. Still, I didn’t know where the characters would take things. I had no idea what people would do in my story until they did them.

This is only possible if you allow the characters to breathe. To live. Let them hang out in your mind before committing them to the page. Let them be vulnerable and free. As soon as the first words hit the page, the walls start to close in and the freedom is minimized.

For me, at least, writing is hard but living with the characters in my head is easy. If I can do that for as long as possible, I make the process of actually writing that much easier.

New Reads

I picked up a few new books this week, all in different formats.

A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper

I’m reading Jordan Harper’s newest thriller on my Kindle. I picked up an old Kindle about a month or so ago and it goes with me everywhere. Maybe I’ll write about how it has largely cured my social media scrolling, but that’s for another post.

This book from Harper, like his others, creates a depressing and sad depiction of Los Angeles. And that’s intentional. Harper wants to strip his settings to the most authentic version of themselves. In Los Angeles, he doesn’t want you to see the tourism-soaked postcard version. He wants you to see the depravity of greed, the destruction of poverty. He wants you to feel every punch and kick, whether metaphorical or physical. And he does an amazing job.

I’m about half-way through, so we’ll see how it turns out.

The Likeness by Tana French

This is now the third book I’ve read/am reading from Tana French. She’s a new favorite for me. I’m listening to this one on audiobook when I workout or am commuting. The Likeness is the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad series.

When you hear series, you probably think it follows a single detective (or partners) across multiple books, but French does things differently. She switches the point of view to a character that has appeared in the series but was not the protagonist in prior books. This being the second book, French follows Cassie Maddux, the former partner of the first book’s protagonist.

This is the first Tana French book I’m listening to, and I appreciate the Irish accent of the narrator. It makes the book feel more authentic and immersive. This is a long one—21 hours in total. So I’ll be listening for a while.

All The Colors Of The Dark by Chris Whitaker

Whitaker’s debut novel, We Begin At The End was amazing. I loved it. I’ve mentioned Whitaker before because he’s a Brit who writes about American small towns better than most Americans. All The Colors Of The Dark is his second novel and landed on many top lists.

This one is a paperback copy sitting on my nightstand. It’ll take me longer to read it because it’s my night reading only at the moment.

What Are You Reading?

I like reading multiple books at once and in different formats. Am I alone in this? Let me know what you’re reading right now and how you prefer to read.

As I read this, I can see myself starting to develop my voice. This isn’t set in Arizona, but is still very much Southwestern noir. I hope you enjoy!

Uncle Paulie

The drive from fucking Amarillo was a beat down. Three hundred and sixty-seven miles of West Texas and New Mexico desert. He lifted his pinky nail to his nose and snorted. Uncle Paulie didn’t let himself get lost in his own supply. He’d grab a taste here and there when needed, but if he ever found himself spiraling into the hole, he’d check himself into some rehab center and clean out. That was the beauty of money. It could buy you what the junkies only wished they could have. Control.

Uncle Paulie checked the gas gauge. The ’67 El Camino was sitting at three-quarters of a tank. He figured the rumbling engine was sucking down a gallon every six miles. This trip was going to cost him a fortune. He’d remind Anson of that as soon as he picked him up.

Anson Belmont was lucky to have landed at Cibola instead of some other federal prison. Uncle Paulie wasn’t sure how Anson’s attorney had swung the deal, but he was glad. No matter how long the stretch, he needed Anson back in one piece.

With spotty sunshine blazing trails of light along Interstate 40, Uncle Paulie scanned the side of the road. Anson would be walking east, but Uncle Paulie was driving west. He’d have to look across the eastbound lanes and hope to spot Anson on the access road. He didn’t figure the boy would be walking along the highway.

He pulled the black cowboy hat down low across his brow as he searched. He grew up as far from the cowboy life as you could get in Texas. He was born in Fort Worth and raised in Plano. He was a city boy, but when he went into business for himself and moved down around Amarillo, he needed a persona. The black cowboy hat worked.

It was six in the morning, and the rising sun behind him was a welcome relief from the deepness of the dark he had driven through to that point. But the fucking clouds kept snuffing out the sun every few minutes. He never did understand why the prisons let inmates out at all odd hours. A little consistency would be appreciated. Or at very least, they could let folks out in the afternoon. Instead, Uncle Paulie had been driving for five hours so that he could catch Anson on the side of the road before he had to walk too far.

Brownish-green sagebrush flew past either side of the highway. The private land beyond Interstate 40 was marked by barbed wire and not much else. Open fields of dry, dead desert. Just beyond a rotted billboard, Uncle Paulie spotted someone walking the access road. It had to be Anson.

He checked his mirrors. No cops. He slowed the El Camino down and turned into the dirt and brush of the median. Uncle Paulie pulled back onto Interstate 40 eastbound just as the sun ducked back behind the gray sky.

He knew Anson had seen him, but he blared the horn anyway as he pulled to the shoulder. Anson had to climb an embankment made of reds and browns and yellows. Uncle Paulie leaned over and opened the passenger door as Anson made it to the car.

“Couldn’t pick me up at Cibola?” Anson asked, sliding in and pulling on his seatbelt.

Uncle Paulie wanted to believe he saw some resemblance, but Anson looked more like his pops than his mom. To the rest of the crew, Uncle Paulie was just Uncle P. It was a name, something to take a little bit of the stress out of the job. To Anson, it was blood. It was Uncle Paulie to him and him alone.

“Shit man, you know I don’t do well around joints like that. Jails or prisons or whatever the fuck you wanna call them. Them and police stations.” Uncle Paulie snapped his fingers, “Oh, and courthouses.”

He kicked the El Camino into gear while staring at Anson’s profile. He’d yet to turn and make eye contact with Uncle Paulie. Even without seeing the eyes, he knew Anson had changed. It’s hard not to once you go inside. Anson’s hair was shorter, but still the same color dirty blonde. His jawline looked crisper, more defined. Uncle Paulie saw Anson’s shoulder muscles stretched and sculpted beneath the thin t-shirt he was wearing. Six months of lifting in the yard.

“Told you to keep your head down, nose clean, you’d be out in way less time than the sentence, right? Was I right or what?” Uncle Paulie asked.

Anson nodded, staring at the empty stretch of black asphalt ahead of them. The clouds drifted together to form a solid slate wall in the sky. The sun did its best to light the morning, but the darkness hung around.

“Hell of a lot better than two years, yeah?” Uncle Paulie asked, begging for some conversation.

Anson looked at the dash, “You still ain’t got A.C. in this thing?”

“A.C.? Fuck that. You ain’t some prissy movie star, are you? Our crew don’t need luxuries. I know I don’t, at least.”

Anson rolled down his window letting the forceful wind of highway speed air break through the car.

“Besides, I hollowed out the condenser in this thing,” Uncle Paulie continued.

Anson looked at Uncle Paulie for the first time. “Why?” he asked.

Uncle Paulie laughed. “Why? Boy, you forget the whole operation while you were inside?”

Anson shook his head and returned his stare to the road ahead. Jagged brown rock hills rose from the ground to either side of the highway. In the distance, below threatening skies, a purple mountainside taunted them and reminded them of the long drive ahead.

“I’m ever in a pinch, right? I can run some in the condenser. The only way it’ll be found is if cops have a goddamn drug-sniffing dog,” Uncle Paulie said.

“Running your own dope now?” Anson asked.

“Come on, Annie,” Uncle Paulie started, watching for the expected agitation in Anson’s face at the nickname he hated. “I do what I gotta do.”

“Like get your nephew locked up, right?” Anson asked.

Uncle Paulie hated ungratefulness more than anything. Guys in his crew made good money, but they had to take risks. Blood or not, Anson didn’t get to be pissed for getting caught.

“What’re you bitching about?” he started. “You got popped for the first time at 30. I did six different stints before I turned 25. Now, I’ve been free and clear for fifteen years running.”

Uncle Paulie slapped Anson on the arm and tried to lighten the mood. This was no time to start letting the tempers flare. “You get popped sometimes, but as you learn, you get better. You’ll ride it out after this. I’m sure.”

As they rumbled on toward Albuquerque, the dark skies split ever so slightly just above the horizon. The sun streaking across the break in the clouds reminded Uncle Paulie of the first burst of paint from a sprayer on the stripped panel of a hot car. That’s where he got his start when he first got to Amarillo.

It wasn’t always drugs. Uncle Paulie started making a name for himself when his crew got good at flipping stolen cars. Painted up nice, numbers wiped, the cars sold quick in the classifieds. If they couldn’t sell a car, they could sell the parts. Problem was, no matter how hard they tried, some cars could be traced. It was too risky.

Beyond the risk, Uncle Paulie made the jump from cars to drugs for the simple fact that the money was better in drugs. Less work, more money. It was an easy decision.

“How’s Ma?” Anson asked while scraping at a piece of vinyl on the door.

“I ain’t her babysitter,” Uncle Paulie replied.

Anson stared over, his mouth tight. “She’s your sister, man. You should’ve been checking on her while I was away.”

Crackling of electricity popped at the front of Uncle Paulie’s head. He didn’t want it to, but the temper always flared just after he felt that electric feeling in his head and his blood starting to heat. It wasn’t a great feeling, but it helped him get to where he was.

When Uncle Paulie turned thirteen, just dipping his toes into the pool of adolescent angst, he discovered how frightened people were of his temper. The anger he was capable of, the destruction he could wreak in a single fit of rage, was enough to force most people to step aside or give him what he wanted. He used this as he stumbled through the awkward years of high school. He used it when he first started running with a low-level crew run by Smitty Barnes outside Amarillo. He used it when he took every last one of Smitty’s guys and made them part of his own crew.

“I took care of her my whole damn life! Older sisters are supposed to take care of their younger brothers, but fuck no. Ten years older than me, and I still have to babysit her?” Uncle Paulie’s voice rose above the blast of wind jumping between the two open windows.

“You take care of her? You?” Anson started, his voice never rising. Uncle Paulie respected his even head, but he knew Anson lacked the rage that would truly make him great. “Fuck that. I took care of her. Were you there when she was flopping around like a fish out of water, high off your damn supply? Were you there when she was locked in her bedroom closet, a .357 to her fucking temple?”

Maybe it was just because they were family, but Anson was the one person who never bowed to Uncle Paulie’s temper. It should have made him angrier, but Anson’s defiance always impressed him. Eventually, the rage would burn itself out, no harm, no foul. He couldn’t say the same for other people who ignored the temper.

“No, I wasn’t there for that shit, kid,” Uncle Paulie felt like calling Anson ‘kid’ or ‘boy’ would help put some distance between their ages. Most people thought it was fucked up enough that they were only ten years apart, so he’d try anything to make that gap feel larger.

The next sixty miles blew by in silence. The clouds chased the El Camino along the Interstate 40 corridor, never opening up and dumping on them. Uncle Paulie figured the sky would wait until they hit Texas. It wasn’t West Texas unless there was the threat of a spring tornado.

His voice broke the silence like the thunder that the clouds just couldn’t push out. “So what’re the terms? Can you start working or you looking at too much heat?” Uncle Paulie asked.

Anson shook his head, “Work.”

“Yeah, fuckin’ work. Making money for you and for me,” Uncle Paulie said, feeling his temper rising again.

“Work with you’s a fucking trap,” Anson said. “You even think about her?”

The desert landscape slowly gave way to signs of civilization ahead. Albuquerque was rising up in front of them. Uncle Paulie figured they’d have to stop for gas, but he wanted to push it as long as he could. Maybe they’d make it to the eastern outskirts.

“No. Bottom line, shit happens,” he said.

Anson snorted. “Yeah, shit to her, shit to me.”

Uncle Paulie thought about the sawed-off shotgun beneath his seat. Anyone else, it’d be over. He looked at Anson. Thirty years old, single, and free. What the fuck else did he want? Uncle Paulie had given the kid everything. A job and money to burn. All he asked for in return was a little respect.

“Pushing your luck here, Annie.”

Laceless boots flew up to the dash. Uncle Paulie knew Anson was testing him with feet up on the El Camino. He let it slide. Getting deep in this shit while riding in the car wasn’t part of his plan. He and Anson always got along fine. They respected each other’s work, maybe even loved each other like normal uncles and nephews do. But the girl fucked everything up.

Part II coming next week…

The mystery thriller where the mystery is the element that propels forward the thrill of the novel, and that thrill can be danger or violence or a ticking clock. It can be a lot of different things, but the thrill of the thriller is an accelerant and it quickens the pace of the book.

Then there’s the psychological mystery—often still referred to as a psychological thriller, but I think they are different. Here, the mystery is deep and it plays on the characters’ psychological tendencies, their flaws, their traits. It’s not always as fast-paced as a true thriller, but it’s still propulsive.

Noir mystery is not generally a term you’ll find in the bookstores, but I think it’s an apt description of mystery novels that take are told from the perspective of criminals or victims. When people think of noir, they often think of private detectives, but noir is broader than its cousin Roman noir which focuses more on detectives and is more hard-boiled.

Regardless of the type of mystery novel, it’s hard to write one. At least for me.

My First Mystery Novel

I’m currently querying agents with my mystery novel. It’s my first mystery, and it was incredibly hard to write. Harder than anything else I’ve ever written. First, let me give you the two-line pitch, and then I’ll explain why it was so hard to write.

Returning home to care for her dying mother, Sara Campbell falls into the very obsession that destroyed her father: solving the 1981 cold case of a dead girl found in the desert. But as her viral 2001 blog uncovers a dark web of small-town secrets, Sara must break a generational cycle of vengeance before the truth claims another life.

This novel was inspired by two things:

1. My grandfather, who was a real police sketch artist and drew the picture of an unidentified girl—a case that was eventually solved by an early internet sleuth who went on to start the Doe Network

2. A short story I wrote during my MFA

The short story was not a mystery, but I knew the novel had to be. But I’d never written a mystery novel despite reading so many of them. So, as I wrote, I listened to mystery novel audio books and I re-read some of the paperbacks I had loved in the past. Still, I wasn’t getting anywhere.

Finally, it dawned on me that I could not write this book the way I had written others. I’m what the kids call a pantser. I don’t have outlines for my books. I just write and hope the characters guide me. This was impossible to pull off when writing a mystery. I needed to know the specific beats, the clues, the threats, when they would land. All of that had to be planned up front.

So I outlined for the first time ever and it mostly worked. It helped me get a first draft done. And then, I had to refine the story, refine the mystery. I still laugh at this page in my notebook from the outline.

Ignore the terrible handwriting. That sentiment encapsulates my headspace as I was writing the first draft and outlining it. It was hard. Harder than anything I’ve ever written.

But, you know what? I loved it. I want to write another mystery. I want to get better at it. We’ll see what happens with this book, but I’m already sketching out the plans for my next novel. And you better believe there will be a mystery element to it.

Oh, and if I had to categorize my story, I’d put it in the psychological thriller bucket.

Now, let’s take a look at some authors who have done mystery well in each of the categories I listed earlier.

The Professionals

These authors are just a few contemporary picks I came up with and I have personally read that I believe do mystery well in each of the categories I mentioned.

Mystery Thriller

Dennis Lehane is one of my favorite authors. I’ve mentioned him before. He showed me what I was allowed to do in writing and unlocked so much. Turns out, he’s a pretty damn good mystery writer. His original Kenzie and Gennaro series would be considered Roman noir, not necessarily noir. But I put those books in the Mystery Thriller category because they are truly thrillers.

Both Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are constantly on the run, getting shot at, shooting at other people, and generally just in some really bad situations. It’s fun and fast-paced. And the thriller portions of the books do not minimize the mystery elements.

Now, we should contrast that with another category. Dennis Lehane does Noir Mystery as well as anyone. Look no further than Mystic River. It’s an incredible example, and it show his range.

Psychological Mystery

There are so many examples, it’s hard to pick just one. The knee-jerk reaction would be to list someone like Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl is the preeminent example of psychological thriller (and also a myster), but I wanted to pick someone slightly less mainstream.

Tana French is an Irish author, and she very much is mainstream. She’s incredibly successful, but I’d bet many people who have read Flynn have not read French. Pick any of French’s novels and you’ll find wonderful psychological elements that make the story work. In fact, without the deep psychological angles, her novels probably fall flat. Her Dublin Murder Squad books all have flawed and complex characters grappling with their psychological demons, but it’s a newer standalone novel I want to focus on.

The Witch Elm is a perfect example of a psychological mystery. I wouldn’t consider it a thriller at all. It’s a mystery through and through. It’s relatively slow paced, and that’s intentional. French wants you to live inside the protagonist’s head and understand his trauma and his ego. Specifically, a traumatic event at the beginning of the novel shapes everything this character does. It paints the entire mystery differently than if this character had not gone through the ordeal he does. It’s a wonderful novel.

Noir Mystery

Often books in this category are labeled as crime books. And what is this Substack if not a crime fiction blog, so it’s fitting. However, most crime novels have mystery elements. Not all, but most. I want to highlight someone who has done noir mystery as good as anyone.

Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows is a brutal, pessimistic (but probably accurate) portrayal of Los Angeles. The characters are often bad people. They don’t just operate in the moral gray zone, they step entirely across the line. But his characters are rich and real. You can see them and hear them like they are in the room with you.

And then there’s the mystery at the center of the novel. It fuels everything that happens and it is what makes you willing to live with these characters. That and the writing is so damn good.

Back To You

What are some of your favorite sub-genres of mystery? Who are your favorite authors and favorite books? Mystery is such a fun genre, despite how difficult it is to write.