BAMS '25: Meet Art Taylor
Part 12 of the 'Best American' Interview Series
Hello, Callers! Thanks for being here, thank God it’s Friday, and thank you Art Taylor for helping us wrap up the week. Art Taylor was the 2025 recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement, and we’re delighted to have him as the final installment of our interview series with BAMS ‘25 contributors.
We’re also just one day away from our BAMS launch party in Indianapolis, featuring special guests Rob Smith and James D. F. Hannah. Come out and say hi!
Can you give us a taste of what your story’s about?
“Dark Thread, Loose Strands” charts the journey of three characters whose paths cross around what seems like a bullying incident in a schoolyard: “shouting, fighting, anger and pain, someone hurt or about to be hurt.” The characters are two young boys caught up in those middle-school troubles and then the driver of a passing car who stops to intervene. The story delves into each character’s point of view—an attempt to immerse us in their larger histories and deeper struggles and trace those steps that led them toward one another. The story originally appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
What originally inspired this piece?
I originally wrote “Dark Thread, Loose Strands” for an anthology of crime fiction inspired by the work of photographer Henry Wessel (a collection that never came to fruition, sadly). As I explored Wessel’s work, I was drawn immediately to the photograph “Incidents 006,” part of the Tate Galleries Collection in the U.K. In the picture, one young boy crouches on the ground while another bends down above him, either pushing him down or pulling him up (and I keep doubting myself about which one it is). The whole scene is framed by a passenger car window, and one detail that’s always stood out me is the raised lock on the door—which seemed an opening of some kind or at least helped open up my own imagination in some way. Everything evolved out of that image.
Who are your biggest influences? Have you had any mentors or teachers that particularly helped shape your craft?
I’ve been fortunate to come through two creative writing programs—at NC State University and at George Mason University, where I’m now a professor myself—and I had terrific teachers at each, shout-outs to John Kessel, Angela Davis-Gardner, Peter Klappert, and Susan Richards Shreve in particular, all now retired. But beyond the classroom, I find that I’m constantly returning to a handful of writers as models and inspirations: Stanley Ellin, Daphne Du Maurier, Ruth Rendell, Peter Lovesey, Flannery O’Connor—I could probably name a half-dozen more, but reading/re-reading them offers both specific lessons in prose and plot and structure and also a general nudge toward trying to be a better writer than I am.
Beyond those influences, are you part of any writing communities?
I always say that while writing might be a lonely art, I wouldn’t be anywhere today without the support, encouragement, or sense of shared purpose from others in my writing communities. And when I think of communities, I am indeed talking about them in the plural: writing organizations like MWA and Sisters in Crime, conventions including Bouchercon and Malice Domestic, and then small, more immediate groups too.
I mentioned the two creative writing programs where I was a student, for example, and I still share drafts in progress with friends from my grad school years, including my wife, Tara Laskowski, also a Mason alum. In the undergraduate “Writing Suspense” course I’m now leading at Mason this semester, I have many students I’ve taught in previous classes, and it’s a true joy to see how they’ve been forging their own friendships as creative artists, helping one another improve their craft, cheering on accomplishments. I hope that the communities these students are forming—the same kinds I’ve enjoyed and benefited from—will continue to serve them equally well, cultivating their craft, building bridges toward their own successes ahead.
Art Taylor is the Edgar Award-winning author of two short story collections—The Adventure of the Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions (2023) and The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense (2020)—and of the novel in stories On the Road with Del & Louise (2015), winner of the Agatha Award for Best First Novel. His short fiction has also won three additional Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, four Macavity Awards, and four Derringer Awards, and he was the 2025 recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement. His stories have been selected for both The Best American Mystery Stories and now Best American Mystery & Suspense. He is a professor of English at George Mason University.