Steal Away:

Crime Fiction Inspired by the Captains of Yacht Rock

edited by Josh Pachter

This is my tenth "inspired by" anthology, following volumes inspired by the songs of Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel, the Marx Brothers, Paul Simon, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Stephen Sondheim, and Lyle Lovett, and this one's a departure in two significant ways.

First, each of the previous nine volumes focused on the songs of one singer/songwriter or band (or, in the case of the madcap Marxes, the films of one comedy team), while each story in Steal Away is inspired by a song recorded by — though not necessarily written by — a different artist.

And second, submissions to each of the previous books were by invitation only, and this time I decided to do my first-ever open call. That was a risk, because I knew that an open call might mean I'd have to wade through a hundred or more submissions in order to wind up with fifteen or twenty stories for the book, and I really wasn't looking forward to that. As it turned out, though, I only received around thirty-five submissions and wound up accepting eighteen of them, which meant that — after writing the title story myself, as usual, there are a total of nineteen stories in the book, inspired by songs ranging from Stephen Bishop to Bill Withers, from Bread to Toto.

Some of the contributors (Ashley-Ruth Bernier, Debra Goldstein, James D.F. Hannah, Adam Meyer, Kathryn O'Sullivan and Paul Awad, Marcia Talley, Joe Walker) are people who've written for me before. Some (Black Orchid Novella winner Pete Barnstrom, Leone Ciporin, John DeDakis, Mary Dutta, former NPR correspondent Corey Flintoff, Kate Jackson, Cathy Wiley) are people I know from various places but who hadn't written for me before. And some (Matthew Greene, Sharon Marchisello, Sally Milliken, Ed Teja) are people I hadn't previously encountered. All in all, a nice mix, as are the stories.

My own story is inspired by Robbie Dupree's "Steal Away," a song I discovered during the year I spent in Bahrain, when I was buying a lot of one-dollar bootleg cassettes in the souk. And in a third departure from the previous books, Robbie agreed to read the manuscript and wound up sending me an enthusiastic blurb that we put on the front cover: "It's an honor of a special order to see my song 'Steal Away' used as the inspiration for a terrific crime story and the title of an anthology of stories that kept me fully involved through every twist and turn."

On October 4, 2026, Dru Ann Love did a cover reveal at Dru's Book Musings.

The book was published two months later by Crimson Gate, and in December 2026 Art Taylor ran essays by contributors on three consecutive Tuesdays at his "First Two Pages" blog: Pete Barnstrom (December 1), John DeDakis (December 8), and Kate Jackson (December 15).

You can order Steal Away from your local independent bookseller or from any of the usual online vendors. I recommend purchasing from bookshop.org, which supports local indies, at this link.

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