Guest Post: Curtains by Scott Nicholson

I am super lucky to be part of Scott Nicholson's epic Kindle Giveaway Blog Tour. He's my very first guest to post on my blog and I'm super excited.

Curtains

By Scott Nicholson

http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/

When I started releasing my story collections as e-books, Neil Jackson of Ghostwriter Publications did a wonderful cover for my collection Ashes that had a red velvet curtain on one side.

We already had a “monster eye” cover for The First, and I thought it would look cool to use the curtain for the monster eye as well. That led to the “curtains” motif we used in Flowers as well, to create a linked set. I had stories left over for at least two collections, so when it came time to come up with a name for my mystery collection, it was obvious: Curtains.

In slang, one of the meanings is to “drop the curtain,” as in the closing of a show or to conceal an object. I like to picture a gangster pointing his Tommy gun and saying to the victim, “It’s curtains fer ya.”

A good bit of my early stories were in the mystery genre, back when my goal was to be published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. I have eight or 10 rejection slips from there but I never hit the right tone for the magazine, which was a lot different from the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies I used to read—those were darker and had as much horror as crime, and the mystery field has always struggled between its two extremes of serial-killer noir and tea-room cozies.

That’s fine with me. I have always liked extremes. In the world of Scott Nicholson, I can write a light-hearted mystery veiling a romance (“Kill Your Darlings”) and I can literally kill some darlings, as in “The Weight of Silence,” where family is only worth what the insurance policy claims it is.

The collection features one of my best stories, “Dog Person,” which arose from a real-life story about one of my friends making the decision to put his beloved dog to sleep rather than spend thousands of dollars on surgery and treatments. My friend then spun a story idea out of it, and we challenged each other to add an extra twist to make the decision less voluntary.

In the late 1990’s, there was a mystery e-zine called Blue Murder Magazine that managed to put out about five issues as PDF downloads. It was a little ahead of its time, because nobody wanted to read PDFs on their computer screens back then, and nobody wanted to advertise in magazines they thought nobody wanted to read. I managed to place stories in three of the issues, and I still have one of the last surviving T-shirts. I’ve also been fortunate to publish in some of the other top crime magazines like Cemetery Dance and Crimewave. Cemetery Dance is, of course, the top horror destination as well, while Crimewave constantly features some of the best writers in the United Kingdom.

The collection also contains a couple of bonus contributions from J.A. Konrath, the e-book Pied Piper and author of the Jack Daniels series, and Simon Wood, who is one of the best hard-edged crime writers working today.

I’ve since spun my interests into the crime novels The Skull Ring and the forthcoming Disintegration, and my forthcoming collaboration with J.R. Rain will overlap into mystery as well. I’ve read a wide range of mystery novels, from M.C. Beaton and Carl Hiassen to Patricia Highsmith, Dennis Lehane, and Donald Westlake. Those I enjoy the most tend to be those that border on psychological horror, like Silence of the Lambs, or more literary novels that play on mystery convention such as Richard Brautigan’s Dreaming of Babylon and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.

Maybe I shouldn’t even investigate the origins of my influences. I think the only answer I’d be able to come up with is, “It’s a mystery to me.”

-------------

Scott Nicholson is author of 12 novels, including the thrillers Speed Dating with the Dead, Drummer Boy, Forever Never Ends, The Skull Ring, As I Die Lying, Burial to Follow ,and They Hunger. His revised novels for the U.K. Kindle are Creative Spirit, Troubled, and Solom. He’s also written four comic series, six screenplays, and more than 60 short stories. His story collections include Ashes, The First, Murdermouth: Zombie Bits, and Flowers.

To be eligible for the Kindle DX, simply post a comment below with contact info. Feel free to debate and discuss the topic, but you will only be entered once per blog. Visit all the blogs on the tour and increase your odds. I’m also giving away a Kindle 3 through the tour newsletter and a Pandora’s Box of free e-books to a follower of “hauntedcomputer” on Twitter. Thanks for playing. Complete details at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/blogtour.htm