Crippen & Landru is celebrating the new anthology School of Hard Knox this week, encouraging folks to spread the gospel on Thursday, November 9, about the new collection and its all-star contributors—and as one of those contributors myself, I’m thrilled to shout out the good word!
My story “Ordeals” breaks one of Monsignor Ronald Knox’s cardinal rules for writing crime fiction—but readers will have to read the story and others in the collection to find out which rule was broken! Joining me in this gleeful conspiracy are co-editors Donna Andrews and Greg Herren, plus Frankie Y. Bailey, Nikki Dolson, Martin Edwards, Naomi Hirahara, Toni LP Kelner, Richie Narvaez, Gigi Pandian, S.J. Rozan, Daniel Stashower, Marcia Talley, and—with an extraordinarily special contribution—Peter Lovesey.
You can order the book from Crippen & Landru here (including as a special limited edition hardcover) or from your favorite local bookstore through Bookshop.org—and thanks to one of my own favorite local bookstores, One More Page Books in Arlington, for featuring the book in an Instagram post this week. They have copies in stock!
And here’s Crippen & Landru’s official description too—one last enticement for you to pick this one up!
Rebels with a Cause!
Nearly 100 years ago, The Reverend Monsignor Ronald Knox of the famed Detection Club developed ten rules—a Decalogue he called them—that he felt were “necessary to the full enjoyment of a detective story.” Fairness with readers seemed an author’s highest calling, and—lo!—“the faculty for writing a good mystery story is rare.”
Writers (those heretics!) regularly bristle at a challenge, and being told that a literary twist is forbidden makes their fingers twitch at the keyboard.
This anthology contains fourteen of today’s finest English and American short story authors, trying their best to break one—or more!—of the good monsignor’s rules. Twins, supernatural events, and sleuths not sharing their clues are all in here—transgressions in all directions.
(Father, forgive us, for we have sinned.)