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.
It’s not often that we’re able to celebrate the First Two Pages of a story and then point you toward reading the story itself—both in full and entirely for free. So there’s an added bonus in hosting donalee Moulton this week with her new story for Elementary, My Dear Marple, a special issue of The MockingOwl Roost that celebrates short cozy mysteries. “Lagniappe,” donalee’s contribution, takes the anchor position in the new issue, and the story is part of a series featuring her amateur sleuth, Ruth Harper, who once worked as a lawyer and now sells… well, sex toys, so there seems to be a challenge to the tenets of traditional mystery right from the start. But as donalee writes, wherever those references to vibrator and Ben Wa balls might suggest the story is going, “This is a traditional mystery: crime committed, clues scattered, deduction done, justice served.”
donalee’s first mystery book, Hung out to Die, was published in 2023. and her bookConflagration! won the 2024 Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense (Historical Fiction). She also has two books coming out this year, Bind and Melt, the first in a new series focused on the Lotus Detective Agency.
You can find out more about donalee at her website, donaleemoulton.com, or find her on social media in various spots: on Facebook, at Goodreads, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and on Bluesky.
And check out the full story and complete issue of The MockingOwl Roost here!
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.
donalee-first-two-pages.lagniappe
