Starry Starry Night

written with Rene Appel

Rene Appel is known as "the godfather of the Dutch psychological novel." I first "met" him by email in 2005, when EQMM editor Janet Hutchings asked me to find and translate a Dutch story for the magazine's "Passport to Crime" feature, and my old friend Theo Capel recommended Rene as the right person to approach. My translation of Rene's "Bloody Hot" appeared in August 2006, and I later translated another of his stories for EQMM, one for AHMM, and one for The Mammoth Book of Best International Crime (Robinson, 2009). We also collaborated on a story, "A Woman's Place," which was in the September/October 2017 issue of EQMM.

In 2016, Akashic Press commissioned us to co-edit Amsterdam Noir for its City Noir series of anthologies, and we decided that, in addition to editing the book, we should also write a new collaborative story for it. As we did with "A Woman's Place," we went back and forth via e-mail, suggesting plot ideas and writing sections of the story, each in our native language. When we were finished, Rene translated my English sections into Dutch and I translated his Dutch sections into English, and we wound up with a story we both liked.

The book was published in Dutch by Ambo|Anthos in May 2018, and can be ordered here, and the English-language edition can be preordered here.

On December 21, 2018, the story was published on the Crime Reads website as a teaser for the upcoming release of the book.

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