Notes from the Bench

Violence off the page, the dead treated with decency, the town as important as the crime. The puzzle is no softer for it, and I would not write it any other way.

A clue that can only mean one thing gives the case away. The craft is an innocent reading a careful reader would prefer, until the evidence rules it out.

A repair ticket has four fields, always in the same order, and I ran my own working life on the same form before I ever gave it to a detective. The last field asks what the fix cost, and in a mystery that cost is never only parts and hours.

Before I draft a page I know who, how, why, and what the crime left behind. Everything else is built to put that trace in my detective's path.

Wear is a record of habit, not of intention. This is how I read a worn object, and how I put that reading to work in the fiction I write.

Fair play means the reader gets the same evidence as the detective. Here is what that promise costs a writer, and why I keep it.

The written entry outlasts everyone who was there. That lesson became a way to plot a mystery.

For twenty years I wrote down how things broke. This is why I turned that work into mysteries.