Notes from the Bench

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

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.

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.

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.