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.
I’ll admit it: I’m instantly drawn in by a title that includes emphatic or unexpected punctuation: a question mark? a exclamation point! even a semicolon will catch my attention; one of my former teaching assistants, Victoria Reynolds, had an intriguingly titled poem in the Santa Clara Review with just such a flourish: “Consider the hairpin turn;” (and I find myself not knowing whether/how to add a period at the end of that sentence; hence this parenthetical). All of this is to say that I was hooked from the start by J.C. Bernthal’s story “Confess Your Secret!” in the new anthology Double Crossing Van Dine, which I helped organized alongside Donna Andrews, Greg Herren, and Crippen & Landru publisher Jeffrey Marks. Published last week by Crippen & Landru, the anthology invited contributors to break the rules of crime fiction as laid down by mystery writer S.S. Van Dine, creator of the detective Philo Vance. The new collection is a follow-up to the Anthony Award-nominated anthology School of Hard Knox, which gave a similar treatment to Monsignor Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction.
I first knew of Jamie Bernthal’s work in a more scholarly direction. He is the author or co-author of three books on Agatha Christie—Queering Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: A Companion to the Mystery, and, with Mary Anna Evans, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie—works which have been named finalists for the Agatha, Edgar, and Macavity Awards. And on a personal note, I was pleased that he selected an essay of mine, “It’s No Mystery: What Genre Fiction Can Teach All Writers,” for a teaching forum section Clues: A Journal of Detection. But Jamie has also established himself as an equally strong voice in the world of fiction, and his very first published short story for an anthology, “A Date on Yarmouth Pier,” won the 2025 CWA Short Story Dagger. Not bad at all!
In addition to Jamie’s story (!!!), Double Crossing Van Dine features short fiction by each of the collection’s co-editors (my own story is “Dalliances”) and John Floyd, Michael Thomas Ford, Barb Goffman, Elly Griffiths, Cheryl Head, Vaseem Khan, Edith Maxwell, Tom Mead, Richie Narvaez, Erica Ruth Neubauer, Alan Orloff, Gigi Pandian, Leigh Perry, Delia Pitts, Marcia Talley, and Elaine Viets. You can also find Delia Pitts’ First Two Pages essay on her story, “Better Together,” here.
An added bonus: To celebrate Double Crossing Van Dine, Crippen & Landru is running a special between now and Bouchercon—clipping this information from the latest newsletter:
While I didn’t list them, we have a number of other authors included in this book, Double Crossing Van Dine, who have collections with Crippen & Landru. We’re so lucky to have them. Since we’re celebrating our authors, the collections by these authors will be available at half-price (50% off) if you purchase Double Crossing Van Dine. If you purchase the clothbound edition, you may choose to buy the clothbound of the collection(s), or the paperback(s). If you purchase the paperback edition, you may choose to buy the paperback(s) of the collections. In either case, you may purchase up to five books at the discounted price.
These authors are:
- Edith Maxwell
- Tom Mead
- Marcia Talley
- Leigh Perry (whose collection came out under Toni. L.P. Kelner)
- Art Taylor
- Elaine Viets
- and Gigi Pandian (who wrote the introduction for Funeral in the Fog by Edward Hoch.)
- School of Hard Knox
Hope you enjoy Jamie’s essay below—and hope you’ll take advantage of the special deal from Crippen & Landru too!
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.
Bernthal-First_Two_Pages
