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.
Josh Pachter’s name may have appeared here at The First Two Pages more often than any other author’s—not only as an essayist (I think he’s contributed only one, celebrating his milestone story “50” back in 2018) but more regularly as an editor of anthologies represented in so many other posts (a list too long for me to reconstruct and link). Today, though, he returns to the spotlight—or at lease sharing the spotlight, with another milestone: a collaborative story with a writer who died over a decade ago, and looking at that other writer’s first draft and the craft decisions/revisions that gave the story a new life and led to its publication in the new issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
The other author here is William Bankier, the second-most prolific writer of short stories for Ellery Queen. He contributed more than 200 short stories to Ellery Queen’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery magazines and various anthologies. He was nominated for the Edgar Award in 1980 and three times for the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award, and he received the Crime Writers of Canada Derrick Murdock Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1992. Later this year, Crippen & Landru will publish a collection of his stories, Welcome to Baytown—the first in a two-volume set selected and edited by… Josh Pachter! (…bringing us full circle again.)
Enjoy this preview of both Bankier’s and Pachter’s work—and a look inside a unique collaboration.
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.
