Three Things We Loved This Week: 7/17/25

Moving detectives out of the city, a victory for moral rights, and the keys to writing suspense

Hello Callers. Thanks for being here.

Last week we published Calamity Creek, new fiction from the incomparable Colleen Quinn. Catch up now so you’re ready for our interview with her next Wednesday!

Today, here’s a look at a few of the things that caught our attention this week.

M.E. Proctor interviews James D.F. Hannah

I’ve been enjoying M.E. Proctor’s Substack, The Roll Top Desk, but I especially liked this interview with James D.F. Hannah, just published today.

As a Midwestern writer myself, I think a lot about how to tell stories set outside of places like L.A. and New York. So I enjoyed reading more about Hannah’s own approach to this:

I grew up in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, and I hadn't really seen that region represented much in crime fiction. When I got serious about writing a book, I decided to take the tropes I loved—the knight in tarnished armor, the benevolent sociopath sidekick, wealthy people hiding terrible secrets—and move them away from an urban landscape like L.A., New York, Boston or Chicago, and set the book in an environment I understood. The challenge became figuring out how to write a PI novel where everything took place in the hollers and hills and one-stoplight towns of Appalachia.

Read the rest here.

Victories for Moral Rights

The recent acquisitions of legacy magazines like Analog, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, among many others, has led to a lot of nervous anticipation about the direction these publications might go under new management.

Recently, that discussion has focused especially on the question of “moral rights,” which include, among many other things, rights of attribution. Analog, one of several legacy magazines acquired by Must Read Publishing, created a stir when their new contracts were revealed to include a moral rights waiver—a decision that led the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Association to consider de-listing the publication.

Fortunately, news broke this week that these moral rights clauses would be removed from Analog’s contracts (as well as those of other Must Read publications). According to sources within the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s discussion boards, Ellery Queen has also committed that they will not ask writers to waive moral rights to their work.

Certainly this is something to continue to watch, and for writers to be mindful of when reviewing new contracts. For now, however, this looks like some good news for writers.

Victoria Smith on Suspense Writing

What’s the key to writing great suspense? Let Victoria Smith be your guide: