The Very Bad Thing

Note the banner, "A Dred Balcazar Mystery," implying there would be more in the series (there weren't).

Dred Balcazar was the character I created for my Mailbox Mysteries series of competitive, serialized whodunits by mail, which featured weekly packages of photos, letters, placemats, business cards, transcripts of interviews, and anything else that was flat enough to go into a mailer. Each series had a winner, who would call an 800 number identifying the murderer... first prize was dinner for two at a restaurant of the winner's choice and a character of their choice from the mystery as a special guest.

Winners ate (naturally) at the very best restaurants in Boston, New York, Los Angeles... it was a very pricey first prize and eventually did us in. But we ate well.

Literary agent Meg Ruley saw Mailbox Mysteries, loved it, and peddled the idea to Viking Penguin. They liked my character and the basic concept, but they didn't want to publish loose pieces of stuff in envelopes. They made books.

Viking came back to me and asked if I wanted to write a book about How To Solve a Mystery, which would mean travelling around interviewing famous mystery novelists. I said no (truly! I thought the idea was dumb). So we negotiated a different project - a mystery novel, with the same Dred Balcazar as the main character. I wrote it in the third person, and had to come up with dozens of different ways to avoid using the phrase "Dred said" in stretches of dialogue. Painful. Just as painful for my editor was that it was a very unconventional whodunit, with no dead body by page ten. But they bought it anyway, based on two chapters and an outline.

The story was ambitious, mixing the worlds of computer artificial intelligence, rock and roll, and an obsessive relationship that would become a dire threat to the book's lead female character. It was also a challenge for me because I had just quit smoking... I'm embarrassed to say the novel contains the word "asymptotic." But I'm proud to say I have a secondary detective character saying, "On and on it goes, ad infinauseam."

You can still get used copies through Amazon.