Write what you know, they say. So, I did. I wrote about a schoolboy who rides his bicycle across town for his weekly piano lessons (as I did for several years in the early 1970s). One afternoon, en route to a lesson, the schoolboy discovers the dead body of one of his schoolteachers—the man has been murdered. And there begins my new mystery short story: “Murder in F-Sharp.”
Write what you don’t know. Just to clarify, I’ve never discovered a dead body. Although I once thought I had, and it was on a bike ride to a piano lesson—it was just a drunk guy lying in the weeds in a narrow alleyway between streets.
In my story, Thomas Phipps is a high school student in 1950s Henderson, New Zealand (my hometown). Henderson is a suburb in the western district of Auckland city. Thomas is taking piano lessons, but he doesn’t like them. My piano teacher twice asked me if I would prefer to switch to learning “modern”—I was learning classical. I was 12, and I didn’t appreciate the difference. Thomas Phipps, 16, is learning classical, but he really wants to play jazz.
Jazz was the thing in New Zealand in the 1950s. Contrary to popular misconception (the filter of nostalgia), 1950s Auckland wasn’t rock and roll, Presley, Haley, et al. Had you hung out in an Auckland city milk bar or coffee shop, you would have heard the cool people listening to jazz on the jukebox. Rock and roll didn’t land until well into the ’60s.
And naturally, anything young people like (be it jazz or rock and roll) is immediately hated by their parents. This counter-culture clash—for want of better words, this generation gap—is the central conflict in my story that runs underneath the mystery of the murder.
“Is this a YA story?”
This was asked by someone who read a draft before I submitted the story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. You could make a case that “Murder in F-Sharp” is a Young Adult story—a teenage boy wants something that’s antithetical to his father and his piano teacher. But I didn’t write it with any intention to be YA fiction. And it’s not the first time I’ve been asked the question. Ten of my published short stories have featured protagonists in the 12–20 age range. Except for two (written for Mystery Writers of America YA anthologies) the rest were written for anyone to read—young or old. Honestly, aside from wanting to make a story readable and exciting, I don’t give much thought to the reader’s age.
Which brings me to my book.
After twenty years of writing short stories, I’m pleased to report that my first mystery novel, THE BRIDE MUST BE STOPPED! goes to print at the end of this year.
Thornton Thacker—a Philip Marlowe-esque teenage detective—his sister, and their two best friends follow a trail of Egyptian hieroglyphics and a missing mummy, and find themselves up against ancient supernatural forces, with Thacker’s girlfriend’s life at stake.
Set in the 1950s in the US, The Bride Must Be Stopped! is the first novel in my Mean City Mysteries series.
My pitch for the series was: Imagine if the Famous Five novels had been written by Raymond Chandler. (The Famous Five was a series of British adventure/mystery novels written in the 1940s and ’50s. Of comparison in the US would be the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mysteries.)
The protagonist of my book is a high school student, and again it’s not a YA story; I wrote it for anyone to enjoy—anyone who likes a mystery/thriller with a tall serving of noir. Also again, the protagonist is a musician. He plays upright bass in a jazz quartet. Hey, I’m a musician (piano and electric guitar). I write what I know.
Murder in F-Sharp by Stephen Ross Appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (September/October 2025)
First published in Trace Evidence Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine blog (October 3, 2025) ©2025 Stephen Ross