"Een Korte Razernij"

In the fall of 2022, I celebrated my fiftieth anniversary as an educator by retiring from my full-time position at Northern Virginia Community College ... and accepting an invitation to spend a semester teaching two courses in short crime fiction (one in reading it and one in writing it) at the University of Gent in Belgium.

It was an interesting couple of months. UG saddled me with more than twice as many students as they'd originally said I would have and put me in student housing instead of visiting-faculty housing. But I was in Belgium, in Gent, and although what they were paying me didn't fully cover my expenses, it did allow me to spend three months in one of my favorite cities, to work with almost a hundred mostly delightful students, to spend time with some of the Flemish authors I've translated over the years, and to take weekend trips to London, Amsterdam, and Nürnberg. So I'm not complaining, and in fact I'm grateful to have had the opportunity.

While I was there, my friends Tom Mead and Gigi Pandian -- both talented crime novelists -- asked me to contribute to an anthology of impossible-crime stories they were co-editing. I'd published more than a hundred short stories by then, but I'd never tried my hand at a tale of impossible crime and had no idea how to go about writing one. Invitations don't grow on trees, though, so I agreed to take a shot at it.

While I was trying to come up with a plot, I happened one afternoon to visit the Museum Guislain, which is a museum devoted to the history and practice of psychiatry, located within the Hospice Guislain -- which, when it was founded by Dr. Joseph Guislain in 1857, became Belgium's first hospital devoted to the treatment of patients suffering from mental illnesses.

And this, I thought, would be a perfect location for a locked-room mystery: all I had to do was figure out how to murder a patient locked into a hospital cell from which no unauthorized entry or exit would be possible.

I wound up deciding to set the story in the past and make Dr. Guislain himself the Sherlock Holmes of the piece. Every Sherlock needs a Watson, of course, and in that role I cast the doctor's secretary, who I named Amandine Caekebeke after a young woman who was taking both of my courses at UG and who was far and away the brightest of my students.

So, I wrote the story, called it "A Short Madness," and sent it to Tom and Gigi. They both liked it a lot and accepted it for their book.

That was around the end of 2022. A year later, Level Best Books put out a call for submissions for an anthology to be titled Mystery Most International, and I decided to resurrect Dr. Guislain and Amandine for a second case. I called that story "The Last Dance," and it was accepted and published in April 2024.

Meanwhile, I've been translating short stories by Dutch and Flemish crime writers for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for decades, and when I heard that the annual Goeken Prijs for the best Dutch-language crime story of the year was open to stories written by multiple authors working together, I suggested to Dominique Biebau (whose "Russian For Beginners" I'd translated for EQMM's "Passport to Crime" department in 2022) that he might like to translate "A Short Madness" into Dutch and submit it to the contest -- and, if we were lucky enough to win, we could split the €1000 prize.

He agreed, translated the story as "Een Korte Razernij," and entered it -- and we found out on June 17, 2024, that it had placed third. Only €50 instead of a thousand, but on June 19 the story was published in an e-book with the contest winner and the three other Top Five finishers. If you happen to read Dutch and are interested, you should be able to download the ebook for free at this link. (Scroll down to the burgundy rectangle headed "Download het ebook" and click on the white rectangle labled "Download het gratis ebook.")

Meanwhile, Tom and Gigi were still trying to market their impossible-crime anthology, and I wound up asking them if they'd mind my sending "A Short Madness" to EQMM. They said that would be fine, but asked me if, should editor Janet Hutchings accept it, I'd write something else for their book.

I submitted the story to Janet and, not waiting for her decision, wrote a third Guislain-and-Caekebeke story, this one called "The Allegory of the Five Senses," in which a painting with that title is stolen from Gent's Museum of Fine Arts.

As I write this webpage on June 20, I haven't decided what to do with "The Five Senses." If Janet takes "A Short Madness," I'll send it to Tom and Gigi. If not, well, I'm not sure. It's good enough, I think, to find a home somewhere....

Return to Bibliography.