Art Taylor's Blog

The First Two Pages: “Garbo’s Ghost” by M.E Proctor

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

In this week’s essay, M.E. Proctor starts out with her excitement about the call for submissions for the anthology Celluloid Crimes—and I have to admit that I shared that same enthusiasm when I first saw the call for stories. It seemed like such a great idea! Good intentions don’t always lead to successful follow-through (at least for me), but I’m glad to see the collection is out, and with such a terrific list of contributors in addition to Proctor: Gabriel Valjan, Robert Lopresti, Peter W.J. Hayes, P.A. De Voe, J.J. White, Deborah Lacy, Jeff Tanner, Nina Wachsman, Nicky Nielsen, C. C. Guthrie, Greg Herren, Wendy Harrison, Devon Ellington, Kerry Hammond, Matt Cost, and Colin Campbell (in order of appearance in the book).

Here’s the description of the anthology:

Lights. Camera. Murder.

In Celluloid Crimes, the silver screen casts long, dangerous shadows. This gripping anthology of short stories pays homage to the spirit of the razor-sharp wit and smoky intrigue of classic noir-think The Thin Man with a fresh twist of lemon and blood.

Tales include sharp-talking investigators, private eyes, weary cops, rookie reporters, and even the occasional actors, on the way up, or on the way down. One thing is for sure: Everyone is hiding something. Smart, stylish, and steeped in grit and glamour, Celluloid Crimes delivers mystery with a knowing smile and a loaded .38.

Cue the dramatic music. The reel is rolling. Time to solve a murder.

From there, I’ll let M.E. Proctor step into the spotlight! She’s the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries Love You Till Tuesday and Catch Me on a Blue Day and of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments. She’s also the co-author of a retro-noir novella, Bop City Swing. You can find out more at www.shawmystery.com.

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

Celluloid-Crimes-Proctor-Garbos-Ghost

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Books & Beverages

It’s been a nice week for bookmail—including two anthologies featuring stories of mine. As always I took the opportunity to toast the occasion and the books themselves!

Double Crossing Van Dine is paired with a Perfect Manhattan, made with Green River Rye. I helped organize this anthology with Donna Andrews, Greg Herren, and an uncredited-but-so-much-appreciated Jeffrey Marks, publisher of Crippen & Landru, who published both this book and its predecessor, School of Hard Knox. My story for the anthology is “Dalliances”—and it’s a long one, which was necessary for breaking my assigned rule. (For more information on those rules and my fellow rule-breakers, follow each of those embedded links.)

This year’s Best American Mystery and Suspense, edited by Don Winslow and Steph Cha, is due out on Tuesday, October 21, and features my story “Dark Thread, Loose Strands,” originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Here’s more information on both the BAMS appearance and the EQMM publication. This one is paired with a Bénédictine and Brandy.

Cheers!

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The First Two Pages: “Murder & Mystery: Live in Five” by K.C. Selby

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

Today marks the third and final essay in a series focused on The Most Dangerous Games, edited by Deborah Lacy and published last month by Level Best Books. So far, we’ve hosted L.L. Kaplan on “The Hack Job” and LaToya Jovena on “Six Questions,” and this week, we’re welcoming K.C. Selby, reflecting on the thoughts and decisions behind the opening of “Murder & Mystery: Live in Five,” a story that’s mystery with a side of speculative fiction. As she explains in the essay below, she “didn’t want the overall feel of the story to be sci-fi,” but the setting is 2044 and the game here is a virtual one, and I was interested to hear about this balancing of genres, this weighting in one direction or another. And in that regard, it’s worth mentioning that her website includes a range of short fiction publications, mystery here, more literary there, and a forthcoming story, “Earth to Echo,” in Flash Point Science Fiction in October. Great breadth here.

Joining Jovena, Kaplan, and Selby in The Most Dangerous Games are an equally broad range of contributors, including Heather Graham, Alan Orloff, Shannon Taft, P.M. Raymond, Kerry Hammond, Rebecca Lugones, BV Lawson, Stephen M. Pierce, Maya Corrigan, Bruce Kubec, JD Allen, Jane Limprecht, donalee Moulton, Kirlagh James, Robert Lopresti, Sharyn Kolberg, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Chris Chan, and Daphne Silver.

Pick up The Most Dangerous Games at Amazon here, and thanks to these three contributors for the terrific essays—on equally fine stories!

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

First-Two-Pages-by-K.C.-Selby

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The First Two Pages: “Murder & Mystery: Live in Five” by K.C. Shelby

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

Today marks the third and final essay in a series focused on The Most Dangerous Games, edited by Deborah Lacy and published last month by Level Best Books. So far, we’ve hosted L.L. Kaplan on “The Hack Job” and LaToya Jovena on “Six Questions,” and this week, we’re welcoming K.C. Shelby, reflecting on the thoughts and decisions behind the opening of “Murder & Mystery: Live in Five,” a story that’s mystery with a side of speculative fiction. As she explains in the essay below, she “didn’t want the overall feel of the story to be sci-fi,” but the setting is 2044 and the game here is a virtual one, and I was interested to hear about this balancing of genres, this weighting in one direction or another. And in that regard, it’s worth mentioning that her website includes a range of short fiction publications, mystery here, more literary there, and a forthcoming story, “Earth to Echo,” in Flash Point Science Fiction in October. Great breadth here.

Joining Jovena, Kaplan, and Shelby in The Most Dangerous Games are an equally broad range of contributors, including Heather Graham, Alan Orloff, Shannon Taft, P.M. Raymond, Kerry Hammond, Rebecca Lugones, BV Lawson, Stephen M. Pierce, Maya Corrigan, Bruce Kubec, JD Allen, Jane Limprecht, donalee Moulton, Kirlagh James, Robert Lopresti, Sharyn Kolberg, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Chris Chan, and Daphne Silver.

Pick up The Most Dangerous Games at Amazon here, and thanks to these three contributors for the terrific essays—on equally fine stories!

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

First-Two-Pages-Essay-by-K.C.-Selby

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The First Two Pages: “Six Questions” by LaToya Jovena

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

We’re continuing a series of essays on the anthology The Most Dangerous Games, edited by Deborah Lacy and published last month by Level Best Books. Last week, we hosted L.L. Kaplan, talking about her first-ever publication (see her essay on “The Hack Job” here), and this week we’re moving from emerging author to established one: LaToya Jovena, whose short stories have been published in both Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock too, in addition to being selected for the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology—woo hoo! Emerging, established… what caught my eye at the start of LaToya’s essay is her line “I hate to admit this, but it wasn’t until this blog post that I realized I start most stories with the setting.” I love this line, because of the sense that whatever stage we’re at, we’re all (me included, I need to stress) still learning something about craft, still seeing fresh things about our own approach—and having to analyze and then articulate our own craft choices can bring that kind of recognition.

As with the best storytellers, LaToya moves from a catchy opening to a cliffhanger of an ending, urging readers to pick up the anthology to find out more—and I’ll echo that call to action here. The Most Dangerous Games offers a great theme: “What happens when a game gets out of hand? The most dangerous games are the ones that lead to murder. Chess simulates war, the high stakes of professional sports, mind games, trapped in a board game . . .” And the contributors list is terrific, including both Jovena and Kaplan and also Heather Graham, K.C. Selby, Alan Orloff, Shannon Taft, P.M. Raymond, Kerry Hammond, Rebecca Lugones, BV Lawson, Stephen M. Pierce, Maya Corrigan, Bruce Kubec, JD Allen, Jane Limprecht, donalee Moulton, Kirlagh James, Robert Lopresti, Sharyn Kolberg, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Chris Chan, and Daphne Silver.

Pick up The Most Dangerous Games at Amazon here—and stay tuned next week for another essay too!

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

Jovena-Dangerous-Games

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The First Two Pages: “The Hack Job” by L.L. Kaplan

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

Level Best Books released The Most Dangerous Games at the end of August, so we’re a little behind here timing-wise, but I’m very excited about celebrating this latest project from Deborah Lacy, whose work I’ve followed in many forms: as a short story writer herself, as a force behind the scenes for mystery conventions, and as the powerhouse behind the long-time blog Mystery Playground. This new project has a brilliant theme. As the call for submissions stated: “What happens when a game gets out of hand? The most dangerous games are the ones that lead to murder. Chess simulates war, the high stakes of professional sports, mind games, trapped in a board game . . .” And what a group of contributors answering that call! The anthology features stories by Heather Graham, K.C. Selby, Alan Orloff, Shannon Taft, P.M. Raymond, Kerry Hammond, Rebecca Lugones, L.L. Kaplan, BV Lawson, Stephen M. Pierce, Maya Corrigan, Bruce Kubec, JD Allen, Jane Limprecht, donalee Moulton, Kirlagh James, Robert Lopresti, LaToya Jovena, Sharyn Kolberg, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Chris Chan, and Daphne Silver.

The First Two Pages is hosting essays by three of these contributors, beginning this week with L.L. Kaplan—talking about her first published story, “The Hack Job.” To her credit, though, she writes with such authority about craft choices in the essay that I didn’t know it was her first fiction until I read her bio—and the momentum is building, with another story, “Chocolate Karma,” already in the pipeline for publication next year. You can find out more about her work on  Instagram and on Facebook  as well as at her website: LLKaplanAuthor.com. 

Pick up The Most Dangerous Games at Amazon here—and stay tuned next week for another essay too!

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

Kaplan-Hack-Job

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Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement

I was so sorry to miss this year’s Bouchercon in New Orleans—especially because the Thursday night opening ceremonies included the presentation of this year’s Derringer Awards, and I wish I’d been there to accept the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement, such a tremendous honor!

Robert Lopresti hosted the awards presentation for the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and I’m grateful to Alan Orloff (my sometime dopplegänger!) for stepping up to accept the prize on my behalf. Here are the remarks I sent his way.

I’ll admit to being of two minds about receiving this year’s Golden Derringer Award. Thrilled by the honor, of course, but also stumbling over that phrase lifetime achievement—scrambling suddenly to take stock of where I’m at, what I’ve accomplished, what more I might have accomplished, and what possibilities still await (hopefully!) in the further lifetime ahead. To be honest, a lifetime achievement suggests I at least know what I’m doing, but—another admission—each blank page still leaves me scratching my head a-fresh: What now? What next? 

Whatever my struggles or status, however, I hope my work as a writer, an editor, and especially as a teacher have helped inspire and encourage other writers, at all stages, who have endeavored  to find their own way past that blank page and into a short story—both throughout our mystery community and especially in the Short Mystery Fiction Society, to whom I’m so overwhelmingly grateful for this award.

Thanks to Martha Reed for sending the photo at the top of the post. For more information on the award, here was the official announcement at the SMFS Blog. Appreciative as always of the Short Mystery Fiction Society and all its members!

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The First Two Pages: “High Hit Area” by Margot Douaihy

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

This week continues the celebration for Crime Ink: Iconic: An Anthology of Crime Fiction Inspired by Queer Icons, co-edited by John Copenhaver and Salem West, publisher of Bywater Books. The anthology’s stories draw “inspiration from queer icons—James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Candy Darling, Radclyffe Hall, Babadook, Megan Rapinoe, Laverne Cox, Dolly Parton, Vita Sackville-West, and many more.” And the contributors list spans from emerging writers to some of the leading names in crime fiction today, including “New York Times Best Crime Novels of 2024 honorees Margot Douaihy, Robyn Gigl, John Copenhaver, and Katrina Carrasco; Lambda Literary winners Ann Aptaker, Greg Herren, Ann McMan, and J.M. Redmann; and other celebrated writers like Cheryl Head, Penny Mickelbury, Christa Faust, Jeffrey Marks, and Kelly J. Ford.”

Last week, we welcomed Anne Laughlin to discuss her story, “Swan Club” (essay here), and this week, Margot Douaihy joins us for some insights into her contribution, “High Hit Area.”

Douaihy is an assistant professor with the Popular Fiction MFA at Emerson College in Boston and is the is the author of the award-winning, bestselling Sister Holiday Mystery series, including Scorched Grace and Blessed Water—both named New York Times Best Crime Novels of the Year—and Divine Ruin, forthcoming in January 2026. Douaihy is also a poet, whose collections include Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, Scranton Lace, and Girls Like You.  Find out more at Douaihy’s author website.

For more information on Crime Ink: Iconic, visit Bywater Books.

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

High-Hit-Area-by-Margot-Douaihy

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The First Two Pages: “Swan Club” by Anne Laughlin

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

Today is pub day for Crime Ink: An Anthology of Crime Fiction Inspired by Queer Icons, co-edited by John Copenhaver and Salem West and published by Bywater Books. I was pleased to receive an advance copy of the book from John, a good friend and fellow alum of George Mason University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing—and pleased too to provide a blurb for the published book too, which is fantastic! John has established a tremendous career as a crime writer, with novels which have collectively won the Macavity Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Lefty Award, and a shout-out from the New York Times as one of the Crime Novels of the Year, and he’s become a force in the literary community as well, including being a founding member of Queer Crime Writers. As introduction and context for the anthology he and Salem West organized, here’s the book description below:

In 2023, crime fiction anthologies featured 517 stories across 30 titles—but shockingly, fewer than 1 percent were penned by LGBTQ+ writers. Crime Ink: Iconic (An Anthology of Crime Fiction Inspired by Famous Queer Icons) is a resounding response to this glaring disparity, offering a vibrant collection of stories by and about queer authors and characters.

Drawing inspiration from queer icons—James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Candy Darling, Radclyffe Hall, Babadook, Megan Rapinoe, Laverne Cox, Dolly Parton, Vita Sackville-West, and many more—these tales span the rich spectrum of crime fiction, from cozy mysteries and whodunits to noir, psychological thrillers, and police procedurals. Each story is a testament to the depth, ingenuity, and thrilling originality of queer voices in the genre.

This anthology showcases an incredible array of talent, including New York Times Best Crime Novels of 2024 honorees Margot Douaihy, Robyn Gigl, John Copenhaver, and Katrina Carrasco; Lambda Literary winners Ann Aptaker, Greg Herren, Ann McMan, and J.M. Redmann; and other celebrated writers like Cheryl Head, Penny Mickelbury, Christa Faust, Jeffrey Marks, and Kelly J. Ford. But that’s not all—this collection also includes many more decorated and emerging voices, ensuring a dynamic reading experience that is as inclusive as it is entertaining.

To celebrate the new collection, I’m pleased to welcome Anne Laughlin this week with the first of First Two Pages essays about stories from Crime Ink. Anne is the the author of seven crime novels, mostly set in her native Chicago; her latest, 2024’s Clean Kill, features Nicki Sullivan, the resident manager of a sober living home in Chicago. Anne has won four Goldie (Golden Crown Literary) Awards, recognizing “excellence in sapphic and women-loving-women literature,” and she’s been nominated three times for Lambda Literary Awards. In 2022, she was awarded the Alice B Medal for excellence in lesbian fiction. She currently serves on the national board of the Mystery Writers of America and reviews books for the Gay & Lesbian Review.

Anne is writing on her story, “Swan Club,” inspired by English author Vita Sackville-West, as she explains in the essay below. And stay tuned next week for an essay by Margot Douaihy on her story, “High Hit Area.”

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

Laughlin-Swan-Club

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The First Two Pages: “Confess Your Secret!” by J.C. Bernthal

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.

I’ll admit it: I’m instantly drawn in by a title that includes emphatic or unexpected punctuation: a question mark? a exclamation point! even a semicolon will catch my attention; one of my former teaching assistants, Victoria Reynolds, had an intriguingly titled poem in the Santa Clara Review with just such a flourish: “Consider the hairpin turn;” (and I find myself not knowing whether/how to add a period at the end of that sentence; hence this parenthetical). All of this is to say that I was hooked from the start by J.C. Bernthal’s story “Confess Your Secret!” in the new anthology Double Crossing Van Dine, which I helped organized alongside Donna Andrews, Greg Herren, and Crippen & Landru publisher Jeffrey Marks. Published last week by Crippen & Landru, the anthology invited contributors to break the rules of crime fiction as laid down by mystery writer S.S. Van Dine, creator of the detective Philo Vance. The new collection is a follow-up to the Anthony Award-nominated anthology School of Hard Knox, which gave a similar treatment to Monsignor Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction.

I first knew of Jamie Bernthal’s work in a more scholarly direction. He is the author or co-author of three books on Agatha Christie—Queering Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: A Companion to the Mystery, and, with Mary Anna Evans, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie—works which have been named finalists for the Agatha, Edgar, and Macavity Awards. And on a personal note, I was pleased that he selected an essay of mine, “It’s No Mystery: What Genre Fiction Can Teach All Writers,” for a teaching forum section Clues: A Journal of Detection. But Jamie has also established himself as an equally strong voice in the world of fiction, and his very first published short story for an anthology, “A Date on Yarmouth Pier,” won the 2025 CWA Short Story Dagger. Not bad at all!

In addition to Jamie’s story (!!!), Double Crossing Van Dine features short fiction by each of the collection’s co-editors (my own story is “Dalliances”) and John Floyd, Michael Thomas Ford, Barb Goffman, Elly Griffiths, Cheryl Head, Vaseem Khan, Edith Maxwell, Tom Mead, Richie Narvaez, Erica Ruth Neubauer, Alan Orloff, Gigi Pandian, Leigh Perry, Delia Pitts, Marcia Talley, and Elaine Viets. You can also find Delia Pitts’ First Two Pages essay on her story, “Better Together,” here.

An added bonus: To celebrate Double Crossing Van Dine, Crippen & Landru is running a special between now and Bouchercon—clipping this information from the latest newsletter:

While I didn’t list them, we have a number of other authors included in this book, Double Crossing Van Dine, who have collections with Crippen & Landru. We’re so lucky to have them. Since we’re celebrating our authors, the collections by these authors will be available at half-price (50% off) if you purchase Double Crossing Van Dine. If you purchase the clothbound edition, you may choose to buy the clothbound of the collection(s), or the paperback(s). If you purchase the paperback edition, you may choose to buy the paperback(s) of the collections. In either case, you may purchase up to five books at the discounted price.
These authors are: 

Edith MaxwellTom MeadMarcia TalleyLeigh Perry (whose collection came out under Toni. L.P. Kelner)Art TaylorElaine Vietsand Gigi Pandian (who wrote the introduction for Funeral in the Fog by Edward Hoch.)School of Hard Knox 

Hope you enjoy Jamie’s essay below—and hope you’ll take advantage of the special deal from Crippen & Landru too!

Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.

Bernthal-First_Two_Pages

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