Crime in the Old Dominion
edited by Josh Pachter and K.L. Murphy
When the Central Virginia chapter of Sisters in Crime decided to publish an anthology of stories by chapter members, they hired Kellie Murphy and me to co-edit it.
Earlier the same year, when I was hired to edit Invasive Species solo for the Northern California SinC chapter, I had no input into the selection of the stories, and the original idea this time was for the same thing to happen, with a panel of outsiders picking the stories from the submissions and then Kellie and I doing the editing.
Despite extending the submission deadline, though, we simply didn't get enough stories that were good enough to justify a book. So we extended the deadline again, and this time Kellie and I had some say in the final selections and agreed that we had sufficient material for a worthwhile anthology.
My contribution, "The Perfect Job," came about in an unusual way. Sometime around 2021, Laurie and I had dinner with our friends Mark and Ruth Bergin. Mark's a crime writer and an ex-cop, and I told him about something that happened to me when I was teaching at the Grafton Correctional Institution in Ohio back in the 1990s. He asked me if I'd written the incident up as a short story, and when I said I hadn't he said I should, and if I didn't would I be willing to let him turn it into a story? Well, I wasn't about to give away what I realized was indeed a perfectly fine idea, so I wrote it up.
Janet Hutchings at EQMM and Kerry Carter at Mystery Magazine both rejected it, but I thought the story was publishable ... so I changed the setting from Ohio to Virginia and included it in Crime in the Old Dominion.
The book was published by Level Best and was originally supposed to come out on December 17, 2024. Because the contributors were all members of Sisters in Crime, though, the SinC national board had to approve the cover, and there were some delays there, so final publication didn't happen until January of 2025.
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