ANNOUNCING: In The Red Room - A Crime Anthology with Heart

If crime never pays, and if love hurts, then what could possibly happen if you combined the two?

Available now on Amazon is yet another anthology of stories that several authors and myself were lucky enough to be a part of, under the astute editorship of Renee Gendron, the editor behind Beneath the Twin Suns. It's an anthology containing what she calls "romantic crime stories," the title of the compendium will be In the Red Room: A Crime Anthology with Heart.

This book, and the 12 stories that comprise it, has slowly been in the making for awhile because we, the contributors, actually got word of it back in late 2020, shortly after Twin Suns went live on Amazon.

An email invite appeared in my inbox around October inviting many of us Twin Suns alumni the opportunity to contribute. As with the first book, Renee not only asked us to contribute but also laid out some interesting guidelines for what our stories had to contain. 

In this case, there were four stipulations.

First and foremost, the genre: crime fiction.

Secondly, a hard word count limit of 3000 words (double what we had to work with the first time).

Third, the inclusion of a "romantic element," of some kind.

Fourth, and most importantly, a particular setting. Included in the email was an attachment of a Victorian, Aristocratic sitting room. In fact, you can see the picture below.

Now, what's with this picture? Well, this is where Renee's challenge, and the book's title, come into play. While we were all free to write a crime fiction story of our own making, we all had to adhere to one hard requirement: that the crime, whatever it was, had to take place in this room. So, we had our fair share of things to check off as we wrote.

In my case, the story I wrote was one entitled "Deliver Us from Evil," (a line I stole from The Lord's Prayer, which does in fact appear, almost completely, in the story).

This story for this project was a real challenge to me, aside from the stipulations Renee set for us. The reason why is that crime fiction, as a genre, has never been something I've been particularly good a writing. I read crime fiction occasionally, as a part of my reading diet, and like most people who watch TV, I love a good crime drama or thriller movie, but for this writer telling stories of crime has never been easy. 

Part of why is because, when I think the words crime fiction, my mind immediately goes to the classic whodunit, which is easily my favorite crime subgenre. It's also a genre I'm completely incapable of writing because you, essentially, have to plot backwards. You have to know who committed the crime, how they committed the crime, and why, and then you have to bread crumb it backwards to the beginning, throwing in a red herring or two as you do. 

This is impossible for me because I don't outline my stories. Though, I did try to once, a long time ago.

When I was just starting to get interested in writing fiction--I would've been about 14--I did attempt several crime short stories, mainly because I was so enamored with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes at the time. In fact, my first attempt at crime came in the form of a Holmesian story titled "The Tortoise Shell" (a piece which will never see publication if I can help it). Objectively speaking, it was basically my attempt at creating a Holmes and Watson duo, who lived and solved crimes in St. Louis.

There was only one problem: the influence was blatantly obvious. 

There was nothing original in this story. The stories were first-person, told from my Watson character. My Holmesian character did all the explaining, in long soliloquies. It was horrible. 

Good for an imitation, as one unfortunate person who read it, said to me, but bad for originality.

The shame of that failure basically caused me to abandon any hopes of writing in the genre, and I haven't since. That is, until now.

So, how did "Deliver Us..." come into existence. Well, as is the case with most of my short fiction, it began with a few opening lines:

"As they left the AA meeting, Rosa kept smiling while Burke spoke to her. Over the past several months, the two of them had grown closer, attending meetings--one in the morning, one in the evening. Everything though had remained platonic, which was perfect.

All she wanted was his friendship--his trust."

I didn't know who these people were, at least not at first. Then, once I got to the end of the first scene, I figured out my answers. I decided that Rosa was in fact a former Cop-turned Private Investigator, who was hunting this man (Burke), because she believed he was the serial killer who kidnapped and murdered her daughter.

I had my protagonist, and I knew what she wanted. The question then became would she get what she wanted? 

If you wanted to know the answer...well, you'll have to read the story to discover it.

As a side note, "Deliver Us..." was also an odd story for me to write because I wrote it in an atypical way for me.

 Rather than writing it in a linear fashion--which is how I normally proceed because I like understanding the causality from one scene to the next--I wrote this one out of sequence. I wrote each scene basically separate from the whole, partly for my own knowledge. There are several scene that I wrote for this story that are in my files but don't appear because I needed to understand something about Rosa. That's one reason this piece, as a whole, has an odd structure--moving back and forth in time. So, it felt, in the end, less like I'd written the story and more like I'd assembled it.

The other reason why is that it's a fairly contemporary story, something else I don't tend to do. Many of my fellow contributors tried to mold the rules Renee set forth into a genre they're more comfortable in, but I apparently am incapable of doing that. Writing a more contemporary story, with contemporary language was actually a great deal of fun, to my surprise, because I was at liberty to use a more natural contemporary language. So, despite this being an odd story for me to write, I think it also has some of my best writing within it. 

In the Red Room, at present, is available on Amazon as an eBook, but it's final print on demand edition isn't yet available. So, if you enjoy an actual, physical book, you'll have to wait a bit longer. If you've enjoyed all the past endeavors we've had with Renee, if you like stories tinged with a bit of romance, or if you enjoy stories with , I guarantee you'll enjoy this book.

(As a bonus, check out the video below, featuring Renee's appearance on the Boomers on Books show.)