In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
In 2019, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine published the first of Anna Scotti‘s “librarian on the run” stories, and since then stories from the series have been picked up three times by the Best Mystery Stories of the Year series from Mysterious Press. Next month, Down & Out Books will publish a collection of these tales, It’s Not Even Past, and as an added bonus, the new issue of EQMM (the first under the new ownership of Must Read Magazines) features a brand new story from the series: “Traveller from an Antique Land,” which Anna shares more about in her First Two Pages essay below.
As an introduction to the stories generally, here’s the description from the new collection:
A PhD candidate who can quote Shakespeare, Beaudelaire, and Louis Leakey with ease, the brainy but naive librarian we know as “Cam Baker” must go on the run, trusting Witness Protection to keep her alive as she jumps from one alias to another, always just a step ahead of her ruthless ex and his cartel henchmen.
Hiding her intelligence and education, Cam accepts menial jobs that will let her stay on the down-low, experiencing the best and worst of the human condition along the way. From her first placement as nanny to two over-achieving teenaged girls in Billings, Montana to her final adventure living rough on the streets of L.A., Cam solves murders, confounding her WITSEC handlers and the handsome police detective who tries to befriend her.
It’s Not Even Past takes Cam from a shack in the mountains to the sunlit beaches of South Carolina and Hawaii, from pastel sweater sets to hacked-off yoga pants and a tattoo. But even as she grows sarcastic and street-wise, Cam never really loses her innocence, and gets her heart broken more than once.
In addition to her success as a mystery writer, Anna is also an accomplished poet, with work in the The New Yorker among other venues and an award-winning collection, Bewildered by All This Open Sky. You can find out more about her work at her website: https://www.annakscotti.com/
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
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