An Eye For Mysteries
Mystery Scene Magazine
December, 2002

I started writing fiction six years ago after my father died—probably my way of dealing with grief. Four months later I emerged from my basement with my first mystery novel. A blend of amateur sleuth and police procedural (kind of), it should never see the light of day. Nevertheless, I kept going and, over the next two years, wrote two more police procedurals featuring a pair of male cops on the North Shore of Chicago. Neither were published.

During that time I was lucky enough to join a mystery writers' group. I needed to learn the "rules," and the group, several of whom were published, weren't shy about teaching me. I got bloodied pretty well the first year or so—one evening, after receiving the group's critique, I checked over my pages and wailed, "I don't think you guys missed a single line."

Which might have been why I turned to short stories. There's a freedom in short stories that you don't find in novels—the freedom to experiment with voice, characters, plots, and settings. But there's a limit too. They're short, so you can't get yourself in too much trouble.

My first short story was "The Day Miriam Hirsch Disappeared." It was set in the 1930s in Lawndale, at the time, a thriving Jewish community in Chicago. The story introduces a young man, Jake Foreman, who develops a crush on Miriam Hirsch, an actress at the Yiddish theater. Miriam, unfortunately, only has eyes for "Skull," a dapper young man who might or might not be a gangster. The story follows all three characters during the summer of Thirty-eight, a time when the Nazi Bund was active on the North side of the city.

On a whim, I entered the story in the 1999 Bouchercon Short Story contest. To my surprise, it won and was printed in the program book. Though it wasn't technically published, it was a thrill. Afterwards, I entered the story in two other contests and came in second in both. There was no money involved and publication was limited, but as any struggling writer knows, the affirmation that comes with any kind of recognition is much more important. Someone liked my writing—they really did!

Which was fortuitous, since it was becoming clear that my police procedurals weren't setting the world on fire. My agent at the time suggested that I change genres. Change voices. Agents too, I discovered, when he dumped me the next week.

Once I recovered, I realized I had nothing to lose by following his advice. The problem was finding something new to write about. Nothing seemed right. Nothing fit. Nothing turned me on. Until, one day, I reread "Miriam" and had what can only be called a "Eureka" moment: What if I brought Jake into the present? He'd be an old man, somewhere in his eighties—but—what if he had a daughter? If he happened to have married relatively late in life, his daughter might be somewhere in her forties.

Hmm. Suddenly possibilities suggested themselves, and I began to imagine what Jake's daughter would be like. Where did she live? What did she do? Was she married? Divorced? Did she have any kids? And, perhaps, the most important question—which I borrowed from a former boss who based her hiring decisions on the answer—would I want to go out to lunch with her?

The answers to all those questions produced Ellie Foreman, a freelance video producer and single mom on the North Shore of Chicago. In a way, I'd come full circle—like that Liza Minnelli song where she travels to Dubrovnik only to meet her next-door neighbor from New York. That sense of "coming home" extended to voice, as well. When I switched POV—from third person male to first person female—Ellie literally sprang onto the page, fully formed, demanding to know where I'd been keeping her locked up.

An Eye for Murder was written, rewritten, and—with invaluable suggestions and comments from an independent editor—written again. It marries past with present, and, in addition to Ellie, features Ellie's father, Jake, and her twelve-year-old daughter, Rachel. Skull returns in historical flashbacks. So does the girl who broke Jake's heart—not Miriam, but a German immigrant named Lisle.

The book opens with an exchange of intelligence in Prague in the waning days of WWII. It quickly segues to the present, where Ellie's name has turned up among the possessions of an elderly man who recently passed away. While trying to find out who the man was and starting work on a campaign video, Ellie stumbles into a web of secrets and deceit that reaches back over half a century.

Apparently, it resonated—my new agent sold Eye to Berkley Prime Crime for a three-book series. Berkley then sold the subsidiary rights to Poisoned Pen Press, which is bringing it out in hardback a few weeks prior to Berkley's mass market version.

While I hope that speaks to the appeal of the book, the challenge—and the satisfaction—for me was exploring the themes of hate, revenge, and how we fail to learn from the past. I tried not to be heavy-handed about it, and I hope readers will appreciate Ellie's sense of humor and tolerate her character flaws. Indeed, it's my hope that as the series unfolds, readers will want to see how Ellie copes with her father's declining health, struggles with her teen-age daughter, and deals with her relationships with men.

In other words, I hope Ellie turns out to be the type of character you'd like to go out to lunch with.

All content © Libby Fischer Hellmann.