Notes from the Bench

Fair play means the reader gets the same evidence as the detective. Here is what that promise costs a writer, and why I keep it.

A mill town does not empty all at once, and the mill itself goes last. This is what stays, and why I built my town to keep it.

A man brought in an old slide projector days before his anniversary, the lamp dead and the loaded tray jammed fast. The lamp and the changer were an afternoon's work. Proving them was the harder problem, because a projector is proved by what it throws, and the tray was forty years of somebody's life.

A man of about fifty brought in his mother's treadle sewing machine to be made ready to sell, and told me it had just stopped. The wear underneath said a hand had been inside it within the month, and the second field of a ticket takes the owner's words, not mine.

The written entry outlasts everyone who was there. That lesson became a way to plot a mystery.