So, what I have so far is my detective, a hard boiled type pushing the edge of parody without quite crossing the line, yet close enough to have some fun with the genre. I've got a victim, the woman eagle watcher. False suspect is the male eagle watcher. Obvious suspect is the husband, as marriage was under strain, and he was having his own affair. Misleading eyewitness testimony who sees a flash of color in the male watcher's car and believes it is the blond head of the woman when it turns out to be, in fact, a yellow lab's head.
What we need now is the actual killer. Some seeming unimportant character who is involved with the woman. Perhaps something about the eagle watching organization. She, this unimportant character, introduced quickly early in the story, is the treasurer skimming money. She is found out by the woman, who was in fact having a relationship with the treasurer's husband. Getting a bit complicated for a short story, but we'll see how it develops.

Beginnings

Stone Cold Dead my new mystery novel has just come out from Arbutus Press, and I am heavily involved in promoting the book. Years ago, when I first began writing, I had the naive notion that the writer writes the book, and the publisher sells it. In this fantasy, the writer delivers the manuscript, sees it through the press, and then sits back waiting for the royalties to start flowing in.
I don't know any writer who lives that life.
After The Monkey Rope, my first novel, was published some years ago by Walker, my then editor suggested I put together a press kit to start drumming up business for the book. That was when I realized that writing the book was only the beginning.
This new book may or may not be the beginning of a series, depending upon how well it does. In the meantime, I am working on an idea for a short story. As many mysteries as I have written, including six published novels and a number of short stories, I always forget how important it is to get the back story straight before beginning to write. Perhaps that is because I am a strongly intuitive writer who likes to plunge into a story, with just an idea of how it will develop, and then see how it goes as I write.
The story I have just begun, in my usual precipitous way, was prompted by something I saw on my daily bike ride through the rolling hills and orchards of Old Mission Peninsula in northwest lower Michigan. My usual route has me turning off onto a cross road on my way to the post office to pick up our mail. One day, I saw two cars parked nose to nose. I do not now recall the one in which a woman sat behind the wheel, but the other has stayed in my memory because I continued to see it on subsequent days. It is a light blue Toyota Tercel some five or ten years old.
That first scene stuck in my mind. Two cars nose to nose, woman in one, man in the other, on a road flanked by a dead orchard on one side and woods on the other. No hoods up and battery cables snaking from one car to the other. Must have been a meeting. Perhaps they were going to wander into the woods for some privacy.
Thereafter, just about every day I saw the Tercel, but not the other car. In my imagination the woman was missing and then found dead. He would be suspected of having had an affair with the woman. Something went bad. He killed her. My private eye would establish his innocence.
In real life the two were probably dedicated bird watchers, for there is an eagle nest just about where they were parked. I will retain that detail in the story but the police will discount it as a reason for the meetings between the woman and the man.
I haven't figured out who the actual killer is yet. Her husband is possible, but too obvious. I need to introduce a seemingly tangential character who turns out to be the killer.