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EQMM regular Josh Pachter returns to our blog with the fascinating story of how a trip to Belgium’s first psychiatric hospital helped inspire his first locked-room mystery, which you can read in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]
“A Short Madness,” which appears in the May/June 2025 issue of EQMM, had an unusual path to publication, and I appreciate the opportunity to share its journey with the readers of Something Is Going to Happen.
In a previous contribution to this blog (“Passport to Crime Fiction”), I wrote about an opportunity I had to teach two courses in short crime fiction at Belgium’s University of Ghent in the fall of 2022. One of the photos illustrating that post showed me during a long weekend in London with authors Paul Charles and Tom Mead.
That afternoon, Tom invited me to contribute to an anthology of “impossible crime” stories he was co-editing with our mutual friend Gigi Pandian. I’d never tried my hand at an impossible-crime story, but it was an intriguing challenge, so I said sure.
As it happens, shortly before my trip to London I’d visited Ghent’s Museum Dr. Guislain, which combines a collection of outsider art and a museum of the history of psychiatry inside Belgium’s first hospital for psychiatric patients, founded in 1857 by Dr. Joseph Guislain. It’s a beautiful yet at the same time eerie complex of brick buildings, and as I pondered the idea of writing an impossible-crime story I found myself thinking that the Hospice Guislain would make a perfect setting for a locked-room murder.
I went back for another look and came away having decided not only to set my story there but to set it then, during the brief period between 1857, when the hospital opened its doors, and 1860, when Dr. Guislain died … and to have the doctor himself serve as my detective, my Sherlock Holmes. This would add a second level of challenge for me, since I’d never written a historical mystery, either.
Of course, every Holmes needs a Watson, and to fill that role I invented an assistant, a young woman I named—with her permission—after one of my students, Amandine Caekebeke.
As if writing my first impossible-crime story and my first historical wasn’t enough, I decided to up the stakes even further and tell the tale across two different timelines. We begin in 1917, as WWI rages across Europe and Amandine is a woman in her seventies—which at that time was old for a European—and living out her days in a nursing home. A reporter visits her, looking for a human-interest story about her former employer, and she reminisces about the time in 1858 when the doctor solved a mysterious murder at the brand-new Hospice Guislain.
I sent the story, which I called “A Short Madness”—a reference to the Roman poet Homer, who wrote that “anger is but a short madness”—to Tom and Gigi, and they liked it and accepted it for their anthology.
And that’s where it sat for about eighteen months. They were determined to find a top-of-the-line publisher to release their book, but they just weren’t getting the interest they were convinced—I’m sure with good reason!—it deserved. They asked their contributors to be patient, and most (perhaps all) of us agreed.
While we waited, two things worth mentioning happened.
First, Level Best Books announced their intention to publish an anthology to be called Mystery Most International. I wanted to submit something, decided it might be fun to give Dr. Guislain and Amandine a second case to investigate, and wrote a story I called “The Last Dance.” It too was set at the Hospice Guislain and followed the same basic format: the elderly Amandine Caekebeke looks back to the time she assisted Dr. Guislain in his investigation of an impossible crime, this time a theft from a locked box inside a locked safe inside a locked office—so, in effect, a locked room inside a locked room inside a locked room! Mystery Most International was published in April 2024, so the second Dr. Guislain story came out a year before the first one.
Well, in English, anyway.
Which brings me to my second “thing worth mentioning.”
Readers of EQMM know that I’ve been translating stories by Dutch and Flemish authors since Janet Hutchings introduced the magazine’s “Passport to Crime” department more than twenty years ago. (If you’re a long-time reader of Something Is Going to Happen, you should know. I’ve written about that in this space, too, a dozen years ago.) One of the Flemish authors I translated was Dominique Biebau, whose “Russian For Beginners” appeared in the March/April 2022 issue, then tied for ninth place in the Readers Award balloting and was a finalist for the International Thriller Writers Thriller Award in 2023.
Also in 2023, while I continued to wait for word about Tom and Gigi’s anthology, I heard that the Goekenprijs—a new award for the best Dutch-language short crime story—was open to authors working collaboratively. I asked Dominique if he’d—yes, in Flemish, Dominique can be a male name, and in this Dominique’s case it is—be interested in translating a story of mine and entering it in the contest and, if it won, splitting the thousand-euro prize. He agreed, I sent him “A Short Madness” … and, as “Een Korte Razenij,” it finished third out of well over a hundred entries. Third place only got us fifty euros, not a thousand, but we still split the money. It wasn’t possible to split the lovely runner-up plaque, though; I got custody of that, and it hangs on my office wall.
Anyway, in June of 2024, a year and a half after I wrote “A Short Madness” and with Tom and Gigi’s impossible-crime anthology still looking for a home, I asked them for permission to submit it to EQMM and promised that, if it was accepted, I’d write a new Dr. Guislain story to replace it. They agreed, I dropped the story into the magazine’s online submission system, and after Janet’s retirement it was one of the first stories Jackie Sherbow accepted as EQMM’s fourth editor-in-chief.
If you enjoyed reading about Dr. Guislain and Amandine—as of course I hope you will—perhaps you’ll seek out “The Last Dance” in Mystery Most International. And when Tom Mead and Gigi Pandian’s impossible-crime anthology eventually appears in print, you’ll have the opportunity to visit with them again, as they leave the Hospice Guislain to investigate the theft of one of Belgium’s most important art treasures from Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts, in a story whose title matches that of the painting, “The Allegory of the Five Senses.”
And if I can ever get it finished, I hope at some point to be able to share with you the longest and most complex story I’ve ever written, a locked-room mystery that also incorporates the Queenian “dying message” trope, is set across three time periods, and has Dr. Guislain matching wits with the French author Victor Hugo. Stay tuned!
