I'm not a natural short story writer. I don't dash them off when I have a spare five minutes − I tend to need a commission and a deadline in order to get my brain into gear. Even better if the publisher dictates the subject or the theme but now and then an idea for a short story just pops up out of nowhere and I simply have to get it down on paper.
Some novelists, I know, began their careers exclusively by writing short stories and eventually decided that they needed more space, more freedom to develop their favourite characters. With me it was the other way round − I wrote my first novel when I was just a teenager and it came naturally to me to develop the story line and the characters at length. That first effort wasn't published but some very encouraging critiques from several generous editors encouraged me to keep on grafting.
My professional writing career took off in 2001 with the publication of the first Charlie Fox book − Killer Instinct. It wasn't until 2003 that I published my first short story. Since then, I find myself increasingly being asked to submit stories for anthologies and my American publisher, St Martin's Press, favours the idea of including a Charlie Fox short story in each new novel in the series.
Mammoth Book of
Best British Mysteries
Edited by Maxim Jakubowski
(UK) Constable & Robinson, March 2008
(US) Running Press, April 2008
Tell Me
'So, where is she?'
CSI Grace McColl ducked under the taped cordon at the edge of the crime scene and showed her ID to the uniformed constable stationed there. The policeman jerked his head in the direction of the band shelter as she signed the log.
'You'll have your work cut out with this one, though,' he said.
The Getaway
Lenny Bright sat opposite the Holland and Seagrave Building Society in a gunmetal grey Honda Accord with the engine running. He hadn't taken his eyes off the front door for the last twenty minutes and right at that moment he would have sold his soul for a cigarette.
Lenny's cigarettes, together with a cheap disposable lighter, were in the inside pocket of his black bomber jacket, but he knew it was more than his life was worth to reach for them. He couldn't even fall back on another nervous habit, chewing his fingernails, on account of the string-back driving gloves he'd been told to wear.
Edited by Megan Abbott, foreword by Val McDermid
Busted Flush Press, September 2007
Served Cold
Layla's curse, as she saw it, was that she had an utterly fabulous body attached to an instantly forgettable face. It wasn't that she was ugly. Ugliness in itself stuck in the mind. It was simply that, from the neck upwards, she was plain. A bland plainness that encouraged male and female eyes alike to slide on past without pausing. Most failed to recall her easily at a second meeting.
From the neck down, though, that was a different story, and had been right from when she'd begun to blossom in eighth grade. Things had started burgeoning over the winter, when nobody noticed the unexpected explosion of curves. But when summer came, with its bathing suits and skinny tops and tight skirts, Layla suddenly became the most whispered-about girl in her class.
St Martin's Press/Dunne, August 2007
(all-new Charlie Fox short story written specially for
mass-market paperback edition of First Drop)
Postcards From Another Country
Somebody once said that the rich are another country − they do things differently there. It didn't take me very long working in close protection to realise that was true. Hell, some of them were a different planet.
The Dempsey family were old money and that put them at the outer reaches of the solar system as far as real-world living was concerned. Personal danger came a distant second to social disgrace, which was always going to make life tough for those of us tasked to keep them from harm.
Official Anthology of
the Crime Writers' Association
Edited by Martin Edwards
Do-Not-Press, October 2003
A Bridge Too Far
I watched with a kind of horrified fascination as the boy climbed onto the narrow parapet. Below his feet the elongated brick arches of the old viaduct stretched, so I'd been told, exactly one hundred and twenty-three feet to the ground. He balanced on the crumbling brickwork at the edge, casual and unconcerned.
My God, I thought. He's going to do it. He's actually going to jump.
Edited by Duane Swierczynski
Busted Flush Press, July 2006
Last Right
The youth arrived like a peasant, hitching a ride on the flatbed of a rusty pickup truck to the end of the driveway − two bales of straw, a goat, and an iPod, his travelling companions.
The guards watched him walk the last half-mile in, shouldering his rucksack and trudging between the citrus trees, his feet kicking up the dirt into the shimmer of the hot dry air. They took lazy beads on him with their rifles, and joked with each other about whether they should shoot him before he reached the main gates, just to relieve the boredom.
It was only when he drew nearer that they recognised his face, despite the simple clothes, and they shivered at the thought that they had even contemplated killing Manuel de Marquez's son, just for sport.