As a writer, I am not a big craft guy. Workshops, story arcs, x-act structures, beats . . . I get that they can all help people and perhaps I’d be a better writer if I steeped myself in that stuff. In my formative years (hopefully I can still be formed, or maybe reformed), my favorite contemporary writers were William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon. Did any of them have MFA’s?
 
Of course, I have come to know and read some very good writers who went down that path, so more power to them, to each his own, etc.
 
I remember reading Gore Vidal, an eloquent writer for sure, saying that he tried to write good sentences, one after the other, and that he usually had no idea what was actually going to come out on the page, even if he knew the narrative direction.
 
I saw David Lynch give a talk a few years ago, and he talked about fishing for ideas; and how he had no idea what he would find when he put a hook in the water. Given that the water was Lynch’s unconscious, I think we all would agree that there was no telling what was going to come out. But, Lynch said, you have to bait the hook.
 
To my mind, plot and story are the bait on the hook. And you hope that you catch something real, something true. How to depict reality/truth—or perhaps more properly, how to evoke it—cannot be accomplished by painting by the numbers.
 
One of the most eloquent artists on the creative process was Francis Bacon, whose alarming and grotesque images seemed to come with no precedent. Bacon was dismissive of Abstract Expressionism and abstract painting in general, and believed that art was a duality, that it was reporting/recording. He wanted to find ways to “trap the fact”, as he put it, that he was obsessed by.
He makes a very interesting comment about this Rembrandt self-portrait:

“If you think of the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence . . . you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks . . . That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you’re just making another form of illustration.  . . . In this Rembrandt self-portrait, there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image.” 1
 
Now writing is not painting. William S. Burroughs is almost alone in introducing chance into the writing process through his cut-up and fold-in methods, which mixed up his own prose with those of Kafka, Conrad, Joyce and others, resulting in passages like this, near the close of Nova Express:
 
“The great wind revolving turrets towers palaces—Insubstantial sound and image flakes fall—Through all the streets time for him to forbear—Blest be he on walls and windows people and sky—On every part of your dust falling softly—falling in the dark mutinous ‘No more’— . . . Melted into air—all the living and dead . . .” 2
There are bits of the close of Joyce’s “The Dead” here and who knows what else. When I was quite young, and probably quite stoned, I did some cut-up experiments and actually used a few bits of the result in my first published story, which had a fairly conventional dystopian plot.
 
I do not attempt now to introduce chance or accident into my work the way that Bacon or Burroughs would. Writing is a different modality than painting, Burroughs experiments notwithstanding.
 
But accident plays a part in writing. As you being to write a passage, the hook baited with the scene or character, what comes out on the page reflects the accident-filled operation of your mind as it strings together words. That is where the art—at least a large portion of the art to my thinking—occurs.
 
And even in plotting this occurs. You may be working on the plot in an outline or notes, and you encounter suddenly, coming from nowhere, a new—a truer—formulation of what will happen as the reality of the characters and their situation forces the truth to come out.
 
Joseph Conrad’s Preface to “The Nigger of the Narcissus” is amazingly, touchingly and profoundly eloquent on the writing process and echoes these thoughts:
 
“There is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity.  The task . . . is to hold up unquestioningly the rescued fragment . . . to show its vibration its colour, its form . . . to disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. 3
 
I urge any writer, and readers for that matter, to read the entire Preface. Conrad never says how this can be done—of course. There is no way to tell someone how to do this.
 
I will leave you with the words of another absolute writing master, Tom Stoppard, from his play The Real Thing. The character speaking is a writer who has been asked by his spouse to punch up the politically-motivated yet artless prose of her protégé. He is exasperated with the task and explains how to think about writing:
 
“This [cricket bat] here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together . . . so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout. What we’re trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw them up an idea and give it a little knock it might travel.”
 
(He picks up the offending script). No what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting “Ouch!”
(Indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy . . . to keep cudgels out of Lords [a cricket venue]. It’s better because it’s better.” 4
 
Thus, the offending script is not “The Real Thing”. Of course Stoppard’s writer/character, Henry, also accuses Bach of stealing “Air on a G String” from “A Whiter Shade of Pale”:
 
Annie: It’s Bach
Henry: The cheeky beggar.
Annie: What?
Henry: He’s stolen it.
Annie: Bach?
Henry: Note for note. Practically a straight lift from Procul Harum. And he can’t even get it right. Hang on, I’ll play you the original.
 
Well, there you have it. Don’t put your trust in writers. They’ll tell a lie every time in pursuit of the truth.
 
 
Joel E. Turner is the author of WILDWOOD EXIT, a noir tale set at the Jersey Shore, published by Level Best Books in 2025.
 
You can find more of Joel E. Turner’s writing, including fiction and musings on literature, music and movies at joeleturnerauthor.com.
 
Footnotes:
 
1.David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962-1969, (Oxford: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 58.
2.William S. Burroughs, Nova Express, (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965), 154.
3.Joseph Conrad, Tales of Land and Sea, (Garden City, New York: Hanover House, [1897] 1953), 106-107.
4.Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing, (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 1982), 51.
5.Stoppard, The Real Thing, 74.

My father lectured his children on the importance of completing a task. Love it or hate it, nothing in life should be left unfinished. Thinking of this now, at the age of eighty, I smile. The journey that ended with the publication of my first mystery, The Curtain Falls in Paris, began in 1996. (Yes, 1996, that’s no typo!)

After having lived in Paris for nearly five years, I moved back to the States, settling in Silicon Valley. (I was supposed to stay there for three months to study the language, but… well, it was Paris.)  Before Paris, I was earning my living as a freelance writer for high-tech companies, and I was able to fall back into that work within weeks. And why not? I was brilliant at writing with knowledge and authority about new technologies. The fact that I understood absolutely nothing never got in my way.  

I awoke one morning, turned on the PC, and got to work. I think it was a user manual for a new Hewlett Packard integrated software system. It was a total mystery to me, but I wrote as if my financial life depended on it… which it did. As I conjured reader-friendly text, a thought passed through my head. While sleeping, had I dreamed something? A story? I went back to the HP work, but the thought persisted. Had I awakened myself in the middle of the night, turned on the PC and typed the story? I looked at the desktop and there it was, a Word file called mystery…. three single-spaced pages describing a murder that takes place in a Paris theater.  

So, here’s where my father’s advice comes in. Over the next twenty-eight years, I wrote the story, revised, tore it apart, and revised it again… and again. During that time, I created seven anthologies. My agent loved all of them, but not my Paris mystery. She criticized with kindness, but told me with sadness that she couldn’t send it out. She was right. It was disjointed; there was no continuity. I kept editing. Finally, when it was clear she couldn’t get behind the novel, I sought another agent.

It was my great fortune that agent Darlene Chan, from the Linda Chester Literary Agency, loved the story. We both knew something was amiss, but couldn’t decide exactly what. With great hope, it went out to editors. Many of the rejections came with praise about the writing, the story, the characters, and several of these editors noted that something was missing… but they weren’t sure what.  

When it was sent to Level Best Books, everything changed. Shawn Reilly Simmons came back with an offer. And not only an offer, but an editing suggestion. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Chapter Four, describing the murder, should be Chapter One. Who couldn’t see that? Well, for starters, me!

And so my relationship with Shawn and Level Best Books began. On May 13, nearly thirty years after that dream, The Curtain Falls in Paris was published.

Does the final product resemble the 1996 dream? I’d say as much as 90% of the original story is in this novel. Same characters, a few name changes, a few country villages added, but the plot is the same.

So, what’s the story?

San Francisco-based journalist Aria Nevins is on the cusp of international prominence with her series on drug abuse. When she suffers a lapse in judgment and short-cuts the fact-check process, an innocent woman dies. She’s dismissed from the paper, removed from Pulitzer consideration, and faces a civil suit from the victim's family. Georges de Charbonnet, a major player with the Paris police, needs to stop the bleeding after weeks of bad press around the death of a young man in custody. He hires Aria to follow a homicide team, led by Noah Roche, and write about their diligence.

With French parents and much of her life in France, Aria sees a way out of the spotlight, a break from the shame brought upon herself and her family. She learns that Roche has attained a high rank without the benefit of the bourgeois family ties many have used to get ahead. He’s respected, but he is not liked, especially by de Charbonnet. She senses that if she writes about Roche’s failings, de Charbonnet can justify appointing someone more fitting to take his job. Before she even meets Roche, she feels trapped in the middle of the judgments of these two men.

Roche bristles at Aria’s arrival. He resents an outsider—an American, a journalist, and a woman—subjecting his team to round-the-clock scrutiny. And he knows how much de Charbonnet would love to demote him.

At Roche and Aria’s first meeting, there is mutual dislike. And then she mentions attending a play that night and Roche is gobsmacked. It's a one-night-only performance of Hamlet’s Father and the hottest ticket in Paris. The lead actors are iconic octogenarians Solange and Bertrand Gabriel, whose careers were launched in these same roles fifty years earlier—and who happen to be old friends of Aria’s family, as is the play's preeminent director Max Formande. Aria has an extra ticket—her mother is too ill to join her—and hopes that her largesse might soften Roche a bit. She gives him the ticket.

They meet at the theater and the tension remains, not helped when, during a quick intermission, she pulls out her recorder and begins to interview him. As Act II of the play begins, Solange Gabriel throws out a cue for actress Camilla Rodolfo, but it goes unanswered… twice. She exits stage left. Director Max Formande finds Roche and begs him to come backstage. With Aria close behind, they go to Camilla’s dressing room and find her brutally murdered.

Roche gets to work. His first move is to call his two dedicated young detectives, Anuj Kumar and Tenna Berglof. Again, Roche expresses resentment when he sees Aria recording everyone. But how can she not? This has the makings of a big story; she can feel it in her bones. And dogging Roche and his team is what she was hired to do.

The plot, as they say, thickens. (Who “they” are, I’ve no idea!) First there’s the dead actress, and then the attempt to kill young Joseph, the lighting technician. Why is actor Anton Delant making this investigation so difficult? Clearly, he has much to hide. And the elderly Gabriels? Outrageous as it seems, all evidence points to them. As Aria and Roche peel away the layers, they discover that appearances are not only deceiving, they can be deadly.
 
It gives me great pleasure that nearly every reviewer admits to being surprised when they learn who the killer is. I’m reminded of mystery writer Anne Perry’s comment about revealing the murderer: surprise is great, as long as it makes sense. So, the response “I didn’t see that coming, but there were hints all along the way!” is truly satisfying. I hope The Curtain Falls in Paris offers a few good surprises for all readers.

Sometime in my fifties, my mother told me that I was a late bloomer. Now that I’m eighty, and with several novels coming out in the next three years, I wonder what she’d say. As for my father? His insistence that I never quit, never give up, and follow every project to completion has paid off.
 
Victoria Zackheim is the author of novels "The Bone Weaver" and "The Curtain Falls in Paris" (May 2025), with two sequels (2026, 2027).  She is the creator/editor of seven anthologies, including the international bestseller "The Other Woman", adapted to the theater and performed in several dozen theaters across the United States, and Faith. She wrote the documentary "Where Birds Never Sang: The Story of Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps", which aired nationwide on PBS. She teaches creative nonfiction in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is a frequent conference speaker and writing instructor in the US and abroad. A freelance editor, Victoria has worked with many authors on their novels and memoirs. She is a San Francisco Library Laureate and lives in Northern California.   

After decades as an art historian, journalist, curator and director of a historic house museum, ten years ago I felt the urge to write murder mysteries. I was not, however, inspired to make them up out of whole cloth. For some unexamined reason, I choose to do away with real art-world characters who are, in fact, dead but who (with one exception) didn’t die when or where I kill them. All of them meet ends different from their actual deaths. 
 
Scholars aren’t supposed to make up stuff like that, so I don’t think my grad school advisor would have approved. Journalists are also expected to be factual, though as a New York Times art critic I had license to express my opinions, but not to be inaccurate. Museum directors and curators need to get their information right, too. Honest mistakes happen, but none of those lines of work tolerate outright liars.
 
So why would I go against the accepted ethical norms? Well, to be honest, just for the fun of breaking the rules and keeping my readers guessing. Locate the fictional crime in an authentic setting inhabited by people who were, or could have been, there at the time, have them interact with imaginary characters, and it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s false. That’s how I’ve constructed all my Art of Murder mysteries, set in the creative community that migrates between New York City and the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, where my husband and I have lived for nearly fifty years. It’s such a rich source of potential victims and suspects that I’ll never run out of material.  And while the art world may seem opaque to outsiders, its machinations and motivations are entirely recognizable to the average reader.
 
As one of my fictional characters breaks it down, there are five universal motives for murder: jealousy, deception, rivalry, greed and revenge—words to live (or die) by in the world at large. Each of my novels takes a different slant on one of them, with predictably fatal consequences. In the first, An Exquisite Corpse, titled after a Surrealist parlor game, greed is at the forefront. Number two, An Accidental Corpse, hinges on jealousy. Revenge is the motive in the third, An Artful Corpse, while deception is at the heart of number four, An Elegant Corpse, and the latest, number five, A Willful Corpse. I’ll examine rivalry in mystery number six, published in April by Level Best Books. 
 
The Art of Murder series develops chronologically, decade by decade, starting in 1943, when a contingent of Surrealist artists and writers fled Hitler’s Europe and camped out in New York City during World War II. Those who know the true story have asked me why I decided to kill Wifredo Lam, one of the exiled Surrealists, who died in 1982 and who wasn’t even in the city during the war. The answer is, he was the perfect victim to lead the narrative in intriguing directions, and to rope in colorful characters who were his real-life associates. 
 
Two fictional NYPD officers, Brian Fitzgerald and Juanita Diaz—yes, there were female cops back then—who investigate the crime fall in love and marry, and their family story carries forward through the series. By 1956, they’re vacationing in East Hampton with their eight-year-old son, Timothy Juan, known as TJ. He helps solve the mystery of what looked like an accident but may have been the murder of Edith Metzger, a passenger in the car crash that killed the painter Jackson Pollock. (This is the only one of my novels in which the victim dies when and where, though not how, it really happened.) 
 
TJ takes the lead in the next book, set in 1967 New York City amid anti-Vietnam War protests and the heyday of Pop art, when the controversial artist Thomas Hart Benton—who died in 1975 and, like Lam, wasn’t in New York at the time—is stabbed to death at the art school TJ is attending. At age 19, TJ, who’s also studying at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is torn between a career in law enforcement and life as an artist. He resolves the conflict by giving up on art class, but not on his classmate, Ellen Jamieson. Fast forward to 1976, when TJ, now 28 and a licensed private eye married to Ellen, investigates the murder of his friend and mentor, the wealthy artist Alfonso Ossorio, who is found dead—14 years before his actual demise in 1990—in his East Hampton mansion. Ten years later, TJ is hired by Francis V. O’Connor, the leading expert on Jackson Pollock’s work, to track down an art forger, but winds up trying to find out whether O’Connor’s sudden death was an accident, suicide, or murder. Book number six will circle back to 1939, with Brian Fitzgerald as a rookie cop patrolling the soon-to-open New York World’s Fair, where muralists meet with mishaps—one fatal—that are definitely not accidental.
 
As a New York City native and longtime Hamptons resident who trained as an artist before studying art history, I’m intimately familiar with the milieux in which my mysteries are set. Many of the real characters were my friends or acquaintances, so I have an insider’s view of their personalities and behaviors. I knew Pollock’s long-suffering wife, Lee Krasner, and his lover, Ruth Kligman, as well as several of the artists in their circle. Ossorio and his life partner, Ted Dragon, were much as I describe them, and I was especially close to O’Connor. After reading An Exquisite Corpse, he told me I had a flair for mystery writing—high praise from a very judgmental critic. Sadly, A Willful Corpse, the book in which I kill him, was published in April, more than seven years after his death in 2017, so he will never know whodunit.
 
During her 34-year tenure as director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York, Helen Harrison began writing mystery novels set in the art world of which she’s a denizen. A widely published author of nonfiction books and articles on art, she enjoys making up stories in which fictional characters interact with people from her own background and experience as a New York Times art critic, NPR arts commentator, curator at the Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall Museum and the Queens Museum, and a practicing artist. Her second novel, An Accidental Corpse, won the 2019 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Mystery & Suspense. A Mystery Writers of America active member, she and her husband, the artist Roy Nicholson, live in Sag Harbor, NY, with the ghost of Roy’s beloved studio cat, Mittens.

Since the beginning of recorded time, music, percussive instruments, and songs have played a central role in shaping how people experience, understand, and remember conflict. Deep, additive melodies are used to boost morale, commemorate sacrifice, and, in some cases, protest violence. Often, these songs are only footnoted, yet their impact during that period is profound. Just as love songs help process heartbreak, war music provides the platform for processing trauma, heroism, and political motivations. These songs cross the globe, tracing back centuries.

Music brings people together as a unifying force, creating a crowd mentality and amplifying its impact far more than if soldiers were singing in isolation. Songs were used to unite soldiers in marching and boost their courage while also forging bonds with their comrades. During World War I and II, songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Pack Up Your Troubles,” and “We’ll Meet Again” were popular among troops and civilians. They exuded a sense of resilience, national pride, and courage in the face of the unknown.

At home, in the U.S., war songs were just as essential and were heard daily over the radio, taught in schools, and sung at rallies to promote unity, patriotism, and support for the war effort. The song “Over There” became an anthem of sorts, inspiring the young to enlist. The melodies had a magical effect, transforming abstract ideas like duty and honor into emotionally resonant messages, making the war feel tangible for those not directly involved in the fighting.

Over time, as our wars became increasingly controversial, especially during the Vietnam era, war songs underwent a significant transformation. They shifted from themes of unity and resilience to challenge and rebellion, reflecting a society more willing to push back against its leadership. Songs like “The Eve of Destruction,” sung by Barry McGuire, and the works of artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Creedence Clearwater Revival exposed the abuse of authority and the horrors of war. This shift transformed war songs from mere tools of propaganda into powerful expressions of dissent, leaving the public concerned about the sacrifices of American soldiers.
​
George Cohan’s song “Over There” represented the critical role of the United States in ending the Great War. An exhausted army of French and British soldiers was buckling under the relentless force of the German army. With the sinking of the Lusitania and the Zimmerman memo prodding Mexico to attack the US on the Texas border, the US had reached its last straw. It was time for the country to coalesce and demonstrate its might...Over There.


A cancer diagnosis unveiling a genetic defect, together with a lifelong fascination with the history of medicine, propelled Jane Rubin to put pen to paper. In 2009, then a healthcare executive, Jane poured her energy into raising research dollars for ovarian cancer research with the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance (OCRA) while learning more about her familial roots. Her research led her to Mathilda (Tillie), her great-grandmother, who arrived in New York City in 1866 as a baby, at sixteen married a man twelve years her senior, and later died of “a woman’s disease.” Then, the trail ran cold. With limited facts, she was determined to give Tillie an exciting fictional life of her own. Jane was left imagining Tillie’s life, her fight with terminal disease, and the circumstances surrounding her death. 

Her research of the history of New York City, the plight of the immigrants, its ultra-conservative reproductive laws, medicine during that era, and the forces that drew the United States into World War 1 have culminated in a suspenseful, fast-paced, award-winning three-book historical series. Her engaging characters are confronted with the poverty in the Lower East Side of NYC, the shifting role of midwives, the dangers of pregnancy, the infamous Blackwell’s Workhouse, and the perilous road to financial success. These themes resulted in the books, In the Hands of Women, 5/23 (Level Best Books), and its prequel, Threadbare, 5/24 (Level Best Books). Over There, the third in the trilogy, transports members of the Isaacson family into the heart of France during World War 1, challenging the family values they dearly cherish. Over There was shortlisted by the Historical Novel Society for the 2024 First Chapters Competition. 
Jane’s other publications include an essay memoir, Almost a Princess, My Life as a Two-Time Cancer Survivor (2009 Next Generation - Finalist), and multiple magazine articles. She writes a monthly blog, Musings, reflecting on her post-healthcare career experiences and writing journey. 

Ms. Rubin, a graduate of the University of Michigan (BS, MS) and Washington University (MBA), retired from a 30-year career as a healthcare executive to begin writing full-time. She lives with her husband, David, an attorney, in Northern New Jersey. Between them, they have five adult children and seven grandchildren.