The Magical Steven Steinbock

At the Malice Domestic Convention last month, Janet Hutchings, the editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, moderated a panel “Remembering Ed Hoch.” She was the natural choice because Ed had been published at least once (and sometimes twice under a pseudonym) in every issue of the last 30-odd years, so she got to pick the panel.

She chose Mary Higgins Clark because Mary had known Ed for years as part of MWA’s New York Chapter. Doug Greene was there because he had published collections of Ed’s stories, I was there because I was evidence of Ed’s generosity in welcoming unknowns into the tribe of mystery writers, and we had served overlapping terms on the MWA board of directors; but who was this fourth panelist, Steven Steinbock?

None of my closer writers friends seemed to know him, so I did what anyone else would do: I Googled him. Hmmmmm. His Facebook page said he liked detective fiction. Okay. Nothing about writing it though, while Ed had written a scant handful of novels and nearly a thousand short stories. And there he was on Crime Space—a place for readers and writers to meet.

Reader? Okay. But writer? I checked out Amazon.com and found three books on Judaism. What in the world did arcane Judaica have to do with Ed?

When the panel convened, I soon found out. The mystery world is indeed an interlocking series of friendships. Steve had met Doug at one of the gatherings of the tribe and discovered a mutual interest in debating religion. At one point, it was decided that a Protestant and a Jew weren’t enough. Doug looked around, spotted Ed across the room and hollered, “Hey, Ed! Over here! We need a Catholic.” Thus was the friendship born.

After the panel, while hanging out in the lounge with my husband and Julian Cannell, I spotted Steve and invited him over to meet Julian since they both live in Maine now. He immediately noticed that Julian’s wedding band was engraved in Hebrew and read it out loud, first in Hebrew, then the beautiful translation: “I am my beloved’s and he is mine.”

When Dan Stashower’s family joined us and he pulled a coin out of one of the boys’ ear, I was smitten. I adore tabletop magic and so does Dan. They mentioned some simple tricks, including something called the ring-and-string trick, but Steve couldn’t demonstrate because he needed a long string. “What about the cord on my ID tag?” I asked. Before he could stop me, I’d cut it free and handed it to him. He slid his wedding band onto the string, let us all tug it, then let us hold the two ends while he covered the ring itself with his hand. When we jerked the string taut, the ring remained behind in his hand. Two or three variations followed and I was as entranced as the Stashower boys.

After coming home, I learned that Steve is a bona fide mystery writer after all. His first short story was published in a spring issue of EQMM. Can’t wait to read it and I bet Ed would have liked it, too.

Short Stories vs. Novels

My short story, “Io Saturnalia,” set around 200 AD, appears in the January issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, now arriving in your mailbox (if you subscribe) or on newsstands. (http://www.themysteryplace.com)

For the first ten or twelve years of my professional life, I considered myself strictly a writer of short stories  and those stories were indeed short.  Few ran more than ten double-spaced pages and most were well under that.   I was so intimidated by the novel that I knew I could never fill three hundred manuscript pages with one story line.  Twenty-five hundred words were a snap.  Seventy thousand? 

No way.

With short stories, a plot with a twist would occur to me.  I would think it all out in my head, then create characters who would jump through the hoops I placed in their paths.  Seven or eight pages later, I could type “The End” and send it off.

Then the short story market began to dry up.  Mystery magazines folded left and right, and the women’s magazines—Redbook, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, etc.—cut back on the fiction they ran each month until they quit running fiction altogether.  I was faced with writing longer or no longer writing.

The last short story that hadn’t sold was set in a fictionalized version of Brooklyn College and featured a male NYPD homicide detective.  When it was rejected all around, I added a few complications and doubled it into a novelette such as one of the two remaining mystery magazines printed every month.

This didn’t sell either, but by then, I had concocted more plot twists and, because women were starting to move into the NYPD and were being promoted up the ranks, I decided to change the male protagonist to female.  The third try came in at 35,000 words—a real book-type novelette.

Someone had recommended an agent and he called me after reading it.  He liked the college setting, he liked Lt. Sigrid Harald, he liked the plot, “But nobody’s buying novelettes these days.  Do you think you could double it?”

At this point, I went back and interpolated a subplot that finally got the manuscript to 60,000 words, which was the average length of a mystery novel in those days, and One Coffee With became my first published novel.

Because it still followed the plot of the original short story, it kept the same killer.   After I was well into the book though, and it was time for my original villain to do the dirty deed, she flat-out refused.  She dug in her pretty little heels and insisted that she would never, never, never kill someone.

I took a second look and realized that she was right.  As she had evolved into a more rounded character, she had indeed become someone who could not kill.  Of course, I could have gone back and reworked her character, but I rather liked her as she was.  To my surprise, there was a minor background character wildly waving his hand.  “I could do it!” he volunteered.

He was right.  He could.  Not only was he more willing than the young woman, he had a better motive, and a much better method.  I only had to change a single line to put him more in the forefront.

That was when I finally realized that for me, short stories are all about plot while novels are more about character.

Short stories still come more easily for me, but after twenty-seven novels, I’m beginning to think I may have a handle on that form as well.

This and That

First of all, my thanks to all who have written to say they like the redesign of my website.  I’m particularly happy that I’m now able to blog on this opening page without having to bother either of my web gurus, so if you’d like to ask a question or want to suggest a topic you’d like me to write about — an aspect of the writing life, or life in general — please drop a line.

Second, it was truly gratifying to be told how pleased some of you were to get that update on Sigrid Harald’s life (“Murder at Montefugoni” in the September/October 2008 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.)  My agent and I are exploring the possibility of putting some of the earlier titles back into print.  There are so many options these days:  from print-on-demand to letting a bookstore do it.

In the meantime, I’ve just been told that  Death’s Half Acre, the 14th Deborah Knott novel, is ready to ship and that I should be getting my author’s copies any day now.  Even though this is my 24th novel, it’s still exciting to open the box and hold my newest baby.  It’s not quite the thrill of that very first book, but it never gets old. 

Summer is my best writing time and I’m well into next year’s book.  I know some of my friends prefer the coziness of snuggling in to write in winter, but winters here in eastern North Carolina are too nice to stay inside.  It’s when the temperature soars to 100+ during July and August that I’m happy to take a jug of cold water and head off to my gazebo, away from the distractions of telephones, eMail, and the Internet.  There's a ceiling fan if the wind's not blowing and an outlet where I can plug in my laptop.  True, I may get too involved in a hawk’s hunt for field mice in the lower fields or watching to see if the lizard on the screen door is going to catch that black beetle, but on the whole it’s a good place to get a lot of work done.

Speaking of which, if I’m going to make the rest of  today’s thousand-word stint, I’d better unplug from the Internet and get to it!