Notes from the Bench

September brings the rain back, and the whole region turns over with it. It is my working weather, and it is the weather my first novel happens in, because it is the weather I wrote it in.

Violence off the page, the dead treated with decency, the town as important as the crime. The puzzle is no softer for it, and I would not write it any other way.

Late August in the town I made up. The river is down to its gravel, the evenings are coming in earlier, and everybody is waiting on the wet half of the year to start.

Six years ago, on the day her name came off the post-office window, the town threw Dot Kowalski a going-away party in the church basement. Somebody asked the question the town had waited thirty years to ask. This is the answer she gave them, and the one she kept.

For a good many years, one man came to Dot Kowalski's window every month to sign for a registered letter. Then, month over month, the signing got harder, until a day the pen would not make his name at all, with a line waiting behind him and the postal rule saying no signature, no letter. What that rule also held, and what Dot did with it, is the whole of this one.

A clue that can only mean one thing gives the case away. The craft is an innocent reading a careful reader would prefer, until the evidence rules it out.

Fixed to Death is out next Tuesday. A fuller look at the book, how the pre-order reaches you on release day, and where the launch note goes out.

A customer had said the woman weighed heavy, and the talk went round the town a day before her scale reached my bench. She wanted it checked, not defended, and the weights had an answer that ran the other way from the accusation.

A repair ticket has four fields, always in the same order, and I ran my own working life on the same form before I ever gave it to a detective. The last field asks what the fix cost, and in a mystery that cost is never only parts and hours.

A repair café is a hall, some borrowed tables, and a line of toasters waiting to be fixed for nothing. They are the most cheerful rooms I know, and I gave my fictional town one and put my sleuth behind the counter.

Pre-orders for Fixed to Death are open, and the cover is the premise in one image, a mended cash register set in a lit shop window.

The case had not come down off that cabinet in years. The boy knew it for a fact, and he built his whole plan around it.