For writers and screenwriters of crime and mystery stories, cellphones pose some problems but also some solutions.
Two of the three novels I’ve written have been set pre-cellphones, in 1984 and 1948. I really enjoyed writing scenes for THAT OCTOBER and GHOST SHOW in which the characters have to urgently contact or find each other and can’t communicate via cellphone like my characters in SEVEN ANGELS – set in 2019 – can. It’s a great exercise in how your characters can problem solve.
Cellphones are so handy to modern-day stories that they can pose a problem writers must work around: They’re so handy that you have to find a way to circumvent them, like no cell service or a broken phone or a lost phone. Kind of like how the writers of the Superman comics, radio show, TV show and movies had to find a way around Superman’s godlike powers. The dude is hugely powerful, so you introduce Kryptonite or block him from the rays of the yellow sun, two things James Gunn used in his excellent 2025 film.
But one way that cellphones change everything is surveillance in thrillers, cop stories or spy stories.
No long would a gunsel like Elisha Cook Jr. in “The Maltese Falcon” have to sit in a public place, pretending to read a newspaper, looking so suspicious that Humphrey Bogart clocks him.
These days, a shady type can simply sit or stand and look at their phone, or pretend to. Think about it: How many times a day do you see someone looking at their phone and assume they’re scrolling social media or watching Korean pop music and never think they’re surveilling someone? Surveilling you?
It’s been two years since the first time one of my short stories was published in an anthology. The Cowboy Jamboree Press MOTEL anthology, edited by Barbara Byar, came out in March 2024. I’d had short stories published before, starting in 2023, and of course my non-fiction had been published since 1977 and in true crime books since 2016. But having a short story in an anthology was a very cool development.
I still really like the story, “Independence,” about an unnamed cowboy passing through a small Tennessee town who gets caught up in a conflict between some small business owners and the corrupt sheriff. If you read my upcoming second novel, SEVEN ANGELS, you might realize that town is Seven Angels. I never cite the town by name in “Independence” but the sheriff in the short story is named and he’s the same corrupt sheriff as in SEVEN ANGELS.
It was a kick to have the story published in an anthology and a few followed. It’s always a kick, although I suspect the anthologies you have to purchase have smaller readership than the stories published online. Still a kick, though.
This year, in 2026, I’ll have short stories in three anthologies I know of, including my story “A Fighting Life,” about foul-mouthed kids in 1948 who figure out they can make money by scrapping with neighborhood kids, which is in the just-published-in-paperback FIGHTING WORDS. My story “This Just Doesn’t Seem To Be My Day,” about a kid spending the day with his older brothers in 1970, will appear this fall in DAYDREAM BELIEVER, an anthology of crime stories based on Monkees songs.
And a while back, I had a crime story accepted for an anthology that hasn’t been announced yet.
For me, three stories in anthologies in one year is a lot, so I doubt there will be others. But I’ll submit some stories and we’ll see.
Here’s a link to the paperback of FIGHTING WORDS is you want to read my short story and the work of some really amazing authors:
I’m occasionally posting here the kind comments provided by authors who read my new novel SEVEN ANGELS. They’re included in the book – out in paperback on June 1 and available for pre-order – and have my undying gratitude.
Today I wanted to include author Colin Harker’s quote and I love that she noted Seven Angels, the small town in Tennessee, would be a nice place to visit. I agree – once my heroine Gloria Shepherd and her friends have worked to clean up the town.
If you judged Colin by her writing, you’d think she was a horror maven and that’s certainly true. But since Colin and I became friends a couple of years ago, I’ve learned there’s a lot more to her. She’s a wonderful writer, definitely, but she’s a wonderfully engaged reader too and even though we’re not at all in the same age cohort, she has a love for some of the great books I loved growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, we’ve been bonding over Harlan Ellison, the famously talented and cantankerous author.
I got to have dinner with Colin and her sister – another hugely talented author – at Bouchercon in Nashville in 2024 and we talked about all kinds of things, maybe especially ghosts.
This is ancient history – actually, that would be a good name for this site – but there was a time in the 1970s when “Star Trek” looked deader than one of Dr. Leonard McCoy’s patients. The original series had ended nearly a decade before, the show’s creative minds were waffling between making a new TV series and a big-screen movie – I don’t have to tell you how the success of “Star Wars” in 1977 made up their minds to produce a theatrical film – and it was not at all certain the franchise – which isn’t a word that was commonly applied to creative properties back then – would continue.
So Paramount’s decision to hire director Robert Wise to make “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” was a pivotal moment in the … well, franchise.
I can’t describe to you today what it was like to be watching a syndicated rerun of the original “Star Trek” series one Sunday morning on an Indianapolis TV station in 1979 and see a commercial for “The Motion Picture.” My friends and I in our local “Star Trek” club had been keeping up on the making of the film, of course, so it wasn’t a surprise. But it damn sure was a thrill. (Say what you will about the first movie, but we anticipated it like crazy.)
Fast forward to spring 2026 – it is spring, isn’t it? – and “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” has been canceled after its first season on the Paramount Plus streaming service. A second season has already been filmed and will air, I guess, on the streamer, as well the fourth and fifth seasons of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which have already been made and which has already been canceled.
I’m not inclined to support Paramount because of its repugnant politics, but I gotta say I’ve stuck around with the service in part because of the chance to see new “Trek” episodes. These cancelations aren’t giving me many reasons to stick around longer.
I know plenty of people who are so sick of working in restaurants and stores and even patronizing restaurants and stores and hearing music from a half-century ago playing on the Muzak. When will Boomers die and take their music and their franchises with them? I’m at the tail-end of the Boomer generation and I wonder that sometimes too.
But we’ve reached a point here in which we might see an end to, or at least a hiatus of, some long-running franchises.
“Doctor Who” is at a crossroads with the latest season of the show, which began in the 1960s, ending (except for a purported Christmas special still to come this year) and Disney opting out of future involvement.
The “Star Wars” franchise – HOW MANY TIMES WILL HE USE THAT WORD? – had substantial success with the recent “Andor” series and some uncertain promise with the “Mandolorian” movie – or has interest in that story and the lil Yoda kin dude already faded? When will we get “Star Wars” stories that aren’t immediately adjacent to the Skywalker family saga? And will we accept them if and when we do?
I suppose it’s logical enough to ask how much longer Marvel movies and TV series will continue to be made, but while the Marvel Comics world has been around for more than 60 years the MCU hasn’t been around for 20 yet. And a big hit movie will clinch the MCU as an ongoing thing.
As a matter of fact, a big hit lifts all boats. And studios are loathe to give up on any intellectual property, which is why we’re going to see more “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” shows and movies. We’ll someday see more Indiana Jones, I’m sure, and we’re already seeing more Godzilla. And I did a whole piece for CrimeReads about the Universal Studios monsters and their undead – undying – popularity.
As for “Star Trek,” it’s a shame that things – a new series? a new movie? – are so up in the air this year, the 60th year of the intellectual property.
But I’m sure the franchise will be back with some hit and life beyond the grave at some point.
And we can go on saying “franchise” and “intellectual property.”
Damn right they are. But they do more than gauge or reflect popularity. They raise visibility and awareness.
If you’re eligible to vote for the annual Anthony Awards in crime fiction, I’ll note that my 2025 novel THAT OCTOBER is eligible for the Anthony for Best First Novel.
The list attached here is in no way an exhaustive list of novels that could win the award when it’s presented at Bouchercon in Calgary this fall. But I’ll note it here anyway.
If I’m ever swept away by a tornado, you can blame the authorities in Tennessee.
I appreciate that I can get notifications on my phone. They’re often helpful. I just wish I could choose when I want them to be helpful.
Notifications – letting us know we’ve got a text message or a new email or if bad weather is on the way or a public figure has kicked the bucket – are a way of life for many of us now, and I’m not going to disable all my notifications – which are called “push alerts” by many newspapers, or just a “push” – because they can be useful.
These thoughts are occasioned by a couple of obnoxious instances of push alerts or notifications in the past couple of days, some of these of the health app variety. Yes, thank you, phone, for letting me know my trend in walking has changed lately. Did you happen to notice how rainy it was? And yes, thank you, other health app, for waking me up in the middle of the night to let me know of something that might otherwise have let me croak deep in peaceful slumber.
Part of my hate for pushes is that I’m obsessive enough to not only swipe them off my screen but actually go to my email inbox to delete the email that generated the push or, gasp, read it and even possibly respond.
(Don’t think we don’t understand that the Push Alert Industrial Complex is conspiring with our phone manufacturers to ensure we spend more time on our devices. It’s true. I read about it on the internet.)
Anyway, I’ve gradually over time changed my phone settings to end most push alerts from the authorities, who seem to abuse the tool.
The final push alert that broke the camel’s back was one recently that alerted me of a fatal shooting in Memphis, which is five hours and 47 minutes from me. Needless to say, this 2 or 3 a.m. push alert was not from a news outlet. It was from a state-run agency. I won’t comment on why this push was sent out but not why other fatal shootings are not sent out. You can guess.
So here I am, because the state insists on alerting me to things happening six hours away, perhaps expecting me to run down to the street at 3 a.m. and scan passing vehicles for the suspect, without any means of being woken in case of forest fire or flood or tornado or hurricane.
I’m posting some blurbs I’ve received from authors who read my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS and were kind enough to give me a blurb to use in promoting the book.
We at Constellate Publishing will publish SEVEN ANGELS on June 1. It’s available for pre-order through all the usual outlets now.
I asked a few authors I know if they’d read the book and, providing they didn’t hate it, give me a blurb.
Claire’s blurb, as seen above, suggests the background she and I have in common: journalism. I was a newspaper reporter and editor in Indiana before I started writing fiction. Claire’s reporting experience was all over the United States.
I met Claire at Bouchercon in Nashville in 2024. She was the moderator of a panel I served on about true crime writing. It was a great group and I was really pleased to get to check in with Claire again at Bcon in New Orleans in 2025.
Sometime after that point, I asked if she’d read SEVEN ANGELS and she did and gave me that wonderful blurb. I was somewhat surprised she had time because she’s incredibly busy and prolific and her book history demonstrates that.
Yesterday the mail brought my print proof of my book SEVEN ANGELS.
And it looks so good.
I posted some video on Instagram and other social media to mark the occasion, so cruise over there if you want to see it in motion. But the photos here give you a pretty good idea.
The book comes out around June 1 from our imprint, Constellate Publishing.
I’m spending a couple of days reading through the book, looking for any issues, but Jill Blocker and I have pretty thoroughly gone over the book in the past few months. So no unpleasant surprises so far.
I grew up in the 1960s and `1970s – ha! I bet you thought I was a youngster, huh? – and TV was a huge part of our lives. Obviously. This was during a period when weekly episodic TV series had long seasons of many episodes, certainly by today’s standards.
I mean, “Star Trek” had 79 episodes over only three seasons (and some of those episodes were outright losers that I’m sure somebody is nostalgic about now) and “Trek” looked like a piker compared to many TV series: “Gunsmoke,” which ran for 20 seasons, aired 39 episodes in each of its first few seasons, although those were admittedly half-hour episodes. Yesterday I noticed that “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” also had 39 episodes some seasons.
That reinforcing of the idea that vintage TV series aired a boatload of episodes back in the day compares and contrasts to today, when it’s a shock when any new series runs more than 10 or 12 episodes per season. The excellent “The Pitt” is the exception with 15 episodes per season. (“The Pitt” is also the exception compared to many current series in that the seasons air only a year or less apart.)
Enter “3 Body Problem,” the terrifically entertaining Netflix adaptation of the science fiction bestseller (and Chinese TV adaptation). Yesterday news broke that the second season of the series would consist of only six episodes compared to eight from the first season. Forbes wrote that the third season is supposed to be even shorter. This as people note that author Cixin Liu’s three novels get longer with each book.
Oh, and also, it’s been two years since the first season.
Add to that the apparent circumstance that there’s no telling when the second season of the great series “Pluribus” will be produced or seen.
I don’t necessarily want to return to the days of 39 or even 22 episodes, the latter still a common number among some network series.
But I wouldn’t mind if other series followed the schedule of “The Pitt” and gave us a few more episodes in a slightly more timely manner.
Here’s another in a series about the authors who so kindly read my new novel SEVEN ANGELS – out from Constellate Publishing in June.
Ken Jaworowski and I haven’t met but I feel like I know him, not only from his writing but also from interviewing him a couple of times for articles for the Daily Yonder. I was delighted to be able to read and review his novels SMALL TOWN SINS and WHAT ABOUT THE BODIES for those articles and had some illuminating interviews with Ken.
He was kind enough to read SEVEN ANGELS and, as a writer who writes masterfully about small towns and crime, give me the blurb above.
Ken’s work is thrilling and fascinating for how he writes about everyday people who are having the worst day of their life.
keithroysdon 