All hail Edgar Award-winning local author Steve Hockensmith. He has been writing from his corner of Bay Farm Island for a few decades now and has hit some high notes with his fiction—sometimes hilarious, sometimes edge-of-your-seat gripping.
In case you’ve never heard this author’s name, Steve Hockensmith has written books for middle-grade readers, but mostly he writes for grownups. His freaky, funny Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, was a New York Times bestseller. He also wrote a sequel to that, in case you want even more of the Bennet sisters kicking rotting flesh down the high street, called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Unhappily Ever After. So much for classic lit.
You might have tumbled across his mystery-Westerns, in the “Holmes on the Plains” series—a couple of dudes in the Wild West, solving mysteries a la Sherlock Holmes. Cowboy brothers Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer and Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer are featured in several novels, novellas and short stories.
Hockensmith caught us up on his career over email last week, and is pleased to let his readers know: “I’m two-thirds of the way through the eighth ‘Holmes on the Range’ novel, Strong Medicine. It’s due to my publisher April 1 and should be available a few months after that. (My publisher moves fast!)” His other Wild West collection is called the “Double-A Western Detective Agency” series, with two mysteries thus far.
“Strong Medicine [his eighth Holmes novel] is set in Galveston, Texas, and revolves around quack ‘patent medicines’ and bogus pseudo-science. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it,” says Hockensmith. “All of the ‘Holmes on the Range’ stories and books have humor, but this is the closest I’ve come to writing a screwball comedy.”
As Hockensmith has combined two of English literature’s favorite genres in the Holmes and Double-A series—the Western and the British mystery—the reader wonders if either Louis L’Amour or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lent more influence to Hockensmith’s pen.
“I do enjoy L’Amour, though my favorite writer of Westerns is probably Larry McMurtry,” Hockensmith says. “McMurtry manages to mix verisimilitude and a kind of defiant, almost perverse quirkiness in a way I haven’t seen anyone else pull off in the genre. But when I first started writing the ‘Holmes on the Range’ stories nearly 25 years ago (wow!), I wouldn’t have described myself as a Western fan… I hadn’t read many Western novels. I considered myself more of a classic mystery guy.
“[T]he biggest influences on my early novels were Arthur Conan Doyle and certain movies, particularly the ‘Thin Man’ series and the Agatha Christie adaptations starring Peter Ustinov.” He continues, “Today I probably read three times more Westerns than mysteries.”
Do any of his books have an Alameda connection? No, says the author, “though a couple have come close. The second ‘Holmes on the Range’ novel, On the Wrong Track, ends in Oakland. And the third novel, The Black Dove, is mostly set in San Francisco (with a wee little interlude in Oakland again). But Alameda hasn’t made it into any of my books—yet!”
He’s also co-written three adult novels in the “Tarot Mystery” series, about a reformed con woman-turned-Arizona fortune teller, with author Lisa Falco.
If you have middle-grade readers, Hockensmith’s Nick & Tesla series offers a brisk blend of suspense and science. The books follow 11-year-old twins with a talent for electronics and invention who, after their parents’ mysterious disappearance, are sent to live with their Uncle Newt—a secretive inventor working on classified government projects. Soon the siblings are drawn into dangers of their own making, relying on MacGyver-style gadgets to get out of trouble. There are hands-on DIY science ideas in each book.
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Today, we’re taking a look at a holiday-specific collection of Hockensmith’s short stories, Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime, that will not only give you a jolly holiday thrill but will show you a little of what his writing is like.
Originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, these holiday shorts (heh-heh) are a crack-up, and all in the classic crime way. What’s the least favorite, most ubiquitous baked holiday gift? A fruitcake. Expect to find a poisoned fruitcake in this collection. Was Grandma run over by a reindeer? No, but it is possible that a college student on break killed Santa Claus by accident.
And speaking of English literature again, there’s a Charles Dickens-inspired murder mystery that involves Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit and some magic mushrooms. These stories all show off Hockensmith’s zany sense of humor, his skill with plot and sharply drawn characters, voice, and playful tone, plus a familiarity with classics off the shelf that make old-style mysteries feel fresh, and new mysteries feel familiar. That’s a trick that neither Conan Doyle nor Zane Grey managed (although we must take a stand for the unparalleled Miss Austen).
Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime is well worth reading—perhaps aloud by the holiday fire or on a sleigh ride to Grandma’s house (although they are murder mysteries, they are rated PG-13). These nine short crime stories from Hockensmith are a perfect antidote to too much sweetness, or too little time, on the holidays. Download the ebook to your tablet for immediate access, or order it in paperback via Books Inc. or Bookshop.org.
For more information on Steve Hockensmith, visit his website or keep an eye out for him at Forbidden Island, where he might be sipping a mai-tai.
Julia Park Tracey is an award-winning journalist, poet and author of nine books. On January 8, she will be reading at Books Inc. from her new novel, Whoa, Nelly! Julia was Poet Laureate of Alameda from 2014 to 2017, and was a founding editor at the now-defunct Alameda Sun.
