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 The School of Hard Knox to find out which rule was broken!
Additional conspirators contributors include Donna Andrews, Frankie Y. Bailey, Nikki Dolson, Martin Edwards, Greg Herren, Naomi Hirahara, Toni LP Kelner, Richie Narvaez, Gigi Pandian, S.J. Rozan, Daniel Stashower, Marcia Talley, and—with an extraordinarily special contribution—Peter Lovesey. And thanks to Donna Andrews and Greg Herren, who first originated the idea for the project, for inviting me onboard as a consultant—and then including my name on the cover too!
Here’s Crippen & Landru’s official description:
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.)
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