Thanks to Rabia Chaudry for choosing my story “Better Days” for this week’s episode of The Mystery Hour with Alfred Hitchcock’s & Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazines—such an honor!
“Better Days” appeared in the May/June 2019 issue of EQMM, and it went on the to win the Macavity award, as well as being named a finalist for the Agatha and Anthony Awards too.
The father and son in “Better Days” also appeared in an earlier EQMM story, “A Drowning at Snow’s Cut,” and the characters were very loosely inspired by my own dad and my relationship with him. The first story was actually directly sparked by a boat trip my dad and I took along the intracoastal waterway in North Carolina, from the Atlantic Beach to Southport—though while the fictional father and son in that story followed our same route, our trip was much less eventful.
It was great to return to these characters in “Better Days,” a story which I see now as suffused with a bit of grief—evident in the story but also intensified by looking at it in retrospect and through a very personal lens. In late June 2019, just after “Better Days” was published, my dad died—so I can’t think of the story without thinking of him in several ways: inspiration, loss, more.
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