"A Short Madness"

Although "A Short Madness" appeared in print more than a year after "The Last Dance" was published in Mystery Most International, it was in fact the first story I wrote about Dr. Joseph Guislain (who actually existed, and who founded Belgium's first psychiatric hospital in 1857) and his assistant Amandine Caekebeke (who I made up and named after my favorite University of Ghent student during the semester I taught there in the fall of 2022).

I wrote the story while teaching at UG, when British author Tom Mead and American author Gigi Pandian, both friends of mine, invited me to contribute to an anthology of impossible-crime stories they were co-editing. I'd never written an impossible-crime story before, but it seemed like an interesting challenge -- and I'd just visited the Hospice Guislain and thought it would be a perfect location for a locked-room murder. Raising the stakes even further, I decided to make Dr. Guislain himself my detective, which meant that "A Short Madness" would also have to be my first-ever historical.

I wound up beginning the story in 1917, when Amandine was an old woman living in a nursing home. A reporter asks her to reminisce about her former employer, and she thinks back to the time in 1857 when they were confronted by the murder of a patient under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Tom and Gigi accepted the story, but they wanted their anthology to be published by a top-level house and had trouble finding one. I wound up withdrawing it and sending it to EQMM, where Jackie Sherbow accepted it for the first issue she edited on her own after long-time editor Janet Hutchings' retirement.

Jackie put my name on the issue's cover, my first appearance there since my fiftieth-anniversary story, "50," in the November/December 2018 issue.

Meanwhile, my Flemish friend Dominique Biebau translated "A Short Madness" into Dutch and submitted it to the Goekenpris competition for the best Dutch-language short crime story of 2023, where it finished third!

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