Notes from the Bench

A length of old wire keeps a record of everything that was done to it. Heat, strain, age and a tool each leave a different mark, and that is why the evidence in Dead Short is electrical.

Gault Mills once strung its whole main street for Christmas, pole to pole, with a frame over the crossing. It has been dark for ten years. This is what the display was, and what a small town does with a December that has no lights in it.

Six weeks after Fixed to Death launched, a plain thank-you, a note on what this blog has been since March, and why the series keeps a ticket open.

A woman came in with a doorbell transformer off her own wall and asked me to make the bell ring softer, for a house with no noise allowed in it from the morning to the middle of the afternoon. Nothing was wrong with the box, and a bell has no volume to turn down, so what went home with her was a cut-off switch to fit by the bed.

September brings the rain back, and the whole region turns over with it. It is my working weather, and it is the weather my first novel happens in, because it is the weather I wrote it in.

Violence off the page, the dead treated with decency, the town as important as the crime. The puzzle is no softer for it, and I would not write it any other way.