How Things Change

when you take the time to look at them …

Strange things happen to stories when you put them together in one book … for two reasons.

The first one is that the stories need to be read again, not just to whack the resilient typo that survived endless fine-tuning and more than one pair of eyes, but because years have passed and experience was gained. I don’t write today like I wrote fifteen years ago. Looking at an old story, I see the wrinkles and the places where I should hit the mark faster. I’m also detached from the text, as if I read something written by somebody else. With the distance, it’s a lot easier to cut and tweak. Nothing in these stories is sacred and publishing a collection is an opportunity for improvement. Most of the pieces in A Book to Live By have undergone some sprucing up.

The second reason has to do with proximity. All writers have their favorite ways of stringing words together. Stand proudly, one foot forward, and call it ‘style’ or ‘voice’. Look at it objectively and it becomes ‘habit’, ‘shortcut’, ‘go-to’ structure. If you use similar sentences in two stories published four years apart, nobody will raise a flag. When the stories are shoulder to shoulder in a collection, you cannot unsee the glitches. They have to be fixed.

Some of these ‘habits’ are funny. For instance, I have too many characters named Jack, Kathy, or Danny. These boys and girls need new IDs. My editor at Wordwooze Publishing is also very good at catching spelling inconsistencies. Is it Mamma or Mama? T-shirt or tee-shirt? You can really obsess about these things.

Something else I noticed is an evolution in my sources of inspiration. Up until five years ago, I wrote only stand-alone stories. Each piece was a small chunk of a universe, with its particular characters.

I was more likely to revisit locations than feature recurring characters.

Moonbase Alecto (*), for instance, is a setting in three science-fiction stories included in A Book to Live By: Green Thumb, Luna Moth, and One-Second Venom. My other collection, Family and Other Ailments, was inspired by East and West Texas, as well as the beaches of the North Sea.

(*) Alecto is one of the Furies of Greek mythology. She’s also the youngest of three sisters in Jean Ray’s gothic horror, Malpertuis. One of the books that I devoured as a kid and reread frequently. Subconscious influences ...

(Photo M.E. Proctor)

Then something happened in my writing. Characters appeared that could barely be contained in one story and I wanted to spend more time with them.

It started with Harry McLean.
I was working on these detective novels with a cocky Houston PI named Declan Shaw, getting bites from publishers (nothing happened with Declan for three more years but that’s a tale for another day), and I thought: I wonder if I could write a detective short story. I was dubious. How can you wrap a complex case in a few pages? Anyway, it was worth a try, and I wrote Back Alley Blues (you can read it here at Expat Press). Initially, I didn’t think Harry had more than one trip in the tank. The concept of a recurring short story protagonist was not yet on my radar.

A few months later, in walked Tom Keegan, a homicide detective in 1950s San Francisco. Based on a story my dad told me as a kid, inspired by my post-WW2 Underwood typewriter, and a tip of the hat to the movies I love. Gallons of atmosphere. Mist over the Bay. I reposted Lit Up on Substack last year. I liked Tommy but I didn’t have other plans for him right away. It took a year, an Italian sandwich, and a variation on Romeo and Juliet to bring him back (that story was In Chains, at Mystery tribune).

Max, the moody hitman, was even more of a long shot. He appeared for the first time in Wreath, a flash posted on the Guilty website.

On the other hand, I knew I had a character with tons of potential with Maeve ‘Mae’ Rollins, the Deputy Sheriff of Barwin County, Texas. She made a smashing entrance in Family and Other Ailments (the anchor story of the collection, originally published at Mystery Tribune). I decided on the spot to give her a supporting role in one of the Declan Shaw books. You’ll have to wait to see what she does in there but she’s already starred in a few short stories in the meantime.

Jack Carver, a quirky Los Angeles PI (no classic investigations for him), is the latest addition to the roster. He made his debut in Poolside, published in the LAXtras anthology last year, and has an upcoming appearance in Crimeucopia’s A Coterie of Dicks.

I write more stories with recurring characters than stand-alone these days. When an idea pops into my head, my first reaction is ‘Who can do the job?’. With these five on call, there’s room to play.

This is how their credits stack up so far:

Tom Keegan – 12 stories + 2 in progress + 1 in the back of my head. And 2 books: Bop City Swing and the upcoming Kansas City Breakdown (more on that soon!) - Tom has a heavy caseload.
Harry McLean – 9 stories (one of them a Shamus Award nominee, go Harry!)
Max – 4 stories (but he may have retired, something scared him badly in the last one).
Mae Rollins – 4 stories + a supporting role in a Declan book.
Jack Carver – 2 stories + 1 in progress.

Recently published stuff with these guys:

Whack a Moll at The Yard Crime Blog, here on Substack – Where a gangster beats Tom Keegan to the punch. Can’t win them all …

The Museum Girl (at DNDP Quarterly) Tom again, in hardboiled mode, dealing with upper-class suspects in the hills above Sausalito. Movie vibes.

Drop Dead Gorgeous in The Best PI Stories of the Year 2025 – Harry McLean is having a crush on a con artist.