Author Robert Lopresti says some nice things about my short story Button Man, in his weekly blog Little Big Crimes. The story ran in the March 2013 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
It’s nice to get noticed by Lopresti, the 2012 winner of the Black Orchid Novella Contest, which is devoted to stories in the spirit of Rex Stout’s creation, Nero Wolfe. Lopresti’s winning novella, announced at the Edgars last year, will run in the July/August issue of AHMM. I know Lopresti only by his work. He’s a hugely prolific short story writer with credits going back to the 1970s!
I actually wrote a first draft of Button Man in a creative writing class back in the mid-1980s. I was still in college, taking a class led by Tobias Wolff. I revised the story for class, and Wolff urged me to start sending it out, but I never did. It sat around in my hard copy files for about twenty years before I digitized it and revised it once again in 2012. Interestingly, the revised version which ran in AHMM is actually closer to the original story. Prior to submission, I ended up cutting two big scenes I remember adding upon the advice of that class. They just didn’t add anything to the story. Must be a moral in there somewhere.