Steve Steinbock will return next week. In the meantime, here’s an amusing piece of personal history from one of our favorite colleagues. I might mention that almost exactly the same phenomenon described below happened to me, except that it took me fifteen years longer and I’m older than Brendan. (Some folks are just slower.) —JLW

HOW I ENTERED A LIFE OF CRIME

by Brendan DuBois

Left to right: Brendan DuBois, Melodie Johnson Howe (Angela Zeman behind her), Bones Howe, and Janet Hutchings at Bouchercon 2010. Photo by Steve Steinbock.

There’s a funny scene in an old Seinfeld episode where Jerry is pressured to wear a pirate shirt for an appearance on the “Today” show, because of a promise he had allegedly made. Jerry’s classic response is, “But I don’t wanna be a pirate!”

And that phrase rings true for me, for — and don’t be shocked — “I didn’t wanna be a mystery short story author!”

But somehow that happened — unplanned, unforeseen, but in the end, richly rewarding.

However, I must warn you all: kids, don’t try this at home.

Since I was 12 or thereabouts, I knew I wanted to be a writer. But my first and only love wasn’t mystery fiction; it was science fiction. This was in the early 1970s, just after the moon landings and first real explorations of the solar system. I didn’t read a lot of science fiction; I inhaled it. Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, DeCamp and so many others. Then I discovered science fiction fandom and science fiction magazines — Analog, Galaxy, If, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction — and I thought, hey, I can write a short story. How hard could it be?

Er, pretty hard, as it turned out.

Writing at first on an ancient Royal typewriter with an elite typeface, and then graduating to an electric typewriter with a pica typeface purchased when I was a senior in high school (one of the more exciting things that happened to me as a high school senior, which shows you what a wildly exciting teenager I was), I kept writing awful science fiction short stories and sending them out to the magazines. Stories with such arresting titles as “Two Light Years to Doom” or “Just Add Water,” they kept on getting rejected. Soon I had a pretty fair pile of rejection slips, but I kept at it.

And at it.

And at it.

Off and on, through high school, college and my first job as a newspaper reporter, I wrote scores and scores of science fiction short stories, and kept receiving a matching number of rejection slips. Sometimes the slips would have a little handwritten note from the editor, giving me that faint hope that I was making progress. And I played the counting game: “Let’s see, I submitted the story six weeks ago, the editorial guidelines say a response within four weeks, I haven’t heard yet, maybe a contract is coming my way . . .”

Er, not really.

But I never did give up. Then, in a flash of inspiration — or desperation — I quit journalism for a more regular nine-to-five job as a tech writer, so I could set up a regular schedule for writing short fiction. My grand plan was to sell some science fiction short stories, get some notice, and then write a great science fiction novel.

Didn’t quite happen that way.

One day, I had a short story called “The Stalker” (I like to think I’ve improved in my title naming skills since then) that had been rejected by all the science fiction magazines. I thought it was a pretty good story, and then I realized, heck, there was an element of mystery in it. There should be mystery magazines out there, right? And I hope I don’t get hate mail from any True Mystery Fans out there, but at that time, I had a vague notion of the mystery field. Sherlock Holmes, of course, and Agatha Christie, and… wait, Sam Spade. Maltese Falcon and all that.

So I went through my trusty “Writer’s Guide to Markets” and saw that there two prominent mystery magazines in the field: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. EQMM promised a response in four weeks; AHMM promised a response in eight weeks. And I thought, well, if I’m going to be rejected, might was well get it over quickly. “The Stalker” then went off to EQMM.

That’s what I meant by “Kids, don’t try this at home.” I didn’t research the markets, didn’t read the magazine, and I was as ignorant of the mystery field as my cat is of quantum physics.

But maybe ignorance is bliss. A couple of weeks later, I nearly had a coronary when I saw a little envelope with the return address of EQMM. No nine-by-twelve manila envelope with my own handwritten address on the outside. Nope, a lovely note to me from the editor, Eleanor Sullivan (God bless her), who liked the story and asked me if I would perhaps take the time to make one little change.

I made the change that night, sent it out the next day, and a week or so later, got my first short story contract.

And that’s when I decided I wanted to be a mystery writer.