Volume 41, No. 2, Summer 2025
Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARTICLES
- Apprehending the Snatchers and Sneak-Thieves by Ashley Bowden
- Retail Means Shoplifting by Rona Bell
- Death in Department Stores by Aubrey Nye Hamilton
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
- My Dead-End Retail Jobs by Elaine Viets
- Murder with Flowers by Rebecca Tope
- How Working Retail Enriched My Writing Life by Terri Thayer
- Experience as Inspiration by Karen Rose Smith
- Retail as a Character: How “The Treasure Chest” Shapes My Mystery Series by Joanna Campbell Slan
- My Contractor/Consultant Character by Dale T. Phillips
- Man’s Best Friend by Paul R. Paradise
- Hidden Rooms and Secret Passageways: Selling a Sense of Childhood Wonder by Gigi Pandian
- How a Real-Life Retail Shop Turned My Books with a Fictional Retail Shop into Best Sellers by J. Michael Orenduff
- Welcome to Suite and Savory—Can We Help You? by Donalee Moulton
- Von Stray and Mrs. Omloop’s Orderly Shop by Andrew McAleer
- Peter Fallon Sells History by William Martin
- The Shopping Center Cats by Sharon Marchisello
- A Shell of a Lot of Fun by Molly MacRae
- My Mysterious Connection to Retail by T. C. LoTempio
- Working Retail Can Be Murder by Dorothy Howell
- How a Camera Shop Led to Deadly Negatives by Russell Hill
- Learning the Spa Business with Aroma Wellness Mysteries by Daryl Wood Gerber
- Behind the Vintage Candy Series by Kaye George
- Small-Town Crime: Writing from Real Life by Trish Esden
- Finding Comfort in Bookstores and Cafés by Alex Erickson
- “Two-Eleven Just Prior” by Jim Doherty
- Serving Up the Urban Cozy by Cleo Coyle
- Come for the Mystery, Stay for the Shopping by Michael Cooper
- Flowers and Murder? by Kate Collins
- Donut Shop Drudgery by Nancy Coco
- Death of a Salesman by Lynn Cahoon
- Welcome to Deputy Donut by Ginger Bolton
- Taking a Bite Out of Crime—One Sale at a Time by Leslie Budewitz
- Murder, Mocha, and the Penny University by Ellis Blackwood
- A Cozy Shop in Omnipodge by Mike Befeler
- Selling in a Mystery by Anne Louise Bannon
- Shop Till You Drop … Dead by Tessa Aura
COLUMNS
- Mystery in Retrospect: Reviews, by Lucinda Surber and Lesa Holstine
- Children’s Hour: Retail Sales Mysteries by Gay Toltl Kinman
- Crime Seen: The Retail Murder Hallmark by Kate Derie
- From the Editor’s Desk by Janet A. Rudolph
My Dead-End Retail Jobs
by Elaine Viets
The hardest job in the world?
Retail.
I’ve worked at least a dozen retail jobs, most for my Dead-End Job mysteries. The pay is lousy, the shops are short-staffed and the conditions hard.
(You try smiling at strangers while standing in heels on concrete floors all day.)
But the real drawback is dealing with the public.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve met kind people. But the difficult ones often outweigh the good people.
I worked at a bookstore to research Murder Between the Covers. “Bookseller” is not a Dead-End Job. Not in my book. I love being surrounded by books.
I was ringing up sales for a long line of customers when a hunk with curly black hair threw a fat paperback on the counter and said, “I’m returning this book, and I want this one. Same price.” He started to walk off with the new book.
I grabbed it and said, “Wait, sir! You can’t do that. We have computerized inventory. The manager has to approve the return before you can take the new book.”
I picked up the phone and paged, “Manager to the front.”
The manager was running around the store in six different directions. (remember I said we were short-staffed?)
“You’re an idiot,” the dark hunk said.
“Yes, sir.” I paged, “Manager to the front.”
“You’re stupid.” The hunk was getting uglier by the moment.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and paged, “Manager to the front.”
“I can’t believe what a moron you are,” the man said.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and frantically paged the manager.
The woman behind him said in a loud voice, “I hate it when people don’t take their medication.”
The woman behind her said, “Rude people stink!”
With that, the manager rushed to the front and approved the exchange. The hunk slunk away. The next woman in line patted me on the hand and said, “You hang in there, honey. You’re doing a good job.”
Thank you, ma’am. You have no idea how much your kind words meant.
Retail workers are subjected to “clerk abuse.” A customer has a fight with a spouse or gets yelled at by their boss, and they take it out on the clerk. We can’t fight back.
Usually.
For Killer Cuts, I worked as a gofer in a high-end hair salon, delivering drinks and magazines to clients. An old, balding man was waiting while his much younger wife had her blonde hair blown out. When I brought him lemon water, he pinched my bottom.
I smiled sweetly at the old goat and stepped on his foot. Hard.
I worked at a local library for Checked Out, and my skills were prized by the head librarian.
Wow. Was it my work ethic? My ability to alphabetize?
Nope. “You’re tall enough to reach the top shelf,” the head librarian told me.
I couldn’t believe what people left behind in library books. Not just dirty tissues, mail, and airplane boarding passes, but a fried egg, a strip of bacon (not together) and a used condom. (Yuck.)
One older patron used a dollar bill as a bookmark. Occasionally he’d forget it in a book. The librarian saved his bookmark and returned it to the man at his next visit.
Both bookstores and libraries are used as drop-off daycare. At the bookstore, the manager learned a little girl had been playing alone in the children’s section since nine o’clock, when the store opened. It was now noon, and no sign of Mom. The manager called the police. The child’s mother came running in screaming. “You can’t take my child,” she said. “I was just shopping at Marshalls.”
“On the other side of the mall,” the manager said. “If a kidnapper had carried off your little girl, and she was crying, I’d assume a parent was taking her home.”
“But I thought bookstores were safe,” the mother said.
Oh, no, ma’am. Our store had its own personal perv, a creep who liked to hang around the comic book section, masturbating while he watched the children. We’d call the police, and they’d lock him up for thirty days. Soon he’d be back and sneak inside the store.
Libraries aren’t any safer, I’m sorry to say. Librarians told me that the warnings about pervs go back to the late thirties.
Librarians and booksellers both get asked this question, as least once a week: “I’m looking for a book. I can’t remember the author or the title, but the cover is blue.”
Here’s a variation: “I can’t remember the title or the author’s name, but I heard her interviewed on NPR. This week. No, last week.”
Thank you for your service, booksellers and librarians.
I worked at a posh pet store for Murder Unleashed, where the pets were treated better than most people. One customer, a burly, bearded man, needed help picking out a coat for his Boston terrier with bulging eyes and a pushed-in face. I suggested a stylish plaid or a bold red coat to set off the terrier’s black-and-white colors.
“No,” he said. “She’s a girlie girl.”
The homely-cute pup trotted out of the store in a pink coat sprinkled with satin rosebuds.
The one Dead-End Job with no redeeming moments was when I worked as a telemarketer to research Dying to Call You. I sold septic tank cleaner and parroted, “Tank Titan 2000 eliminates odors, large chunks and wet spots.” I worked in a boiler room, a dirty, dusty place with rows of long folding tables and chairs and robo-dial phones. We could never rest between calls. When one ended, the next call began.
Absolutely no one says, “I want to be a telemarketer when I grow up.” Most employees were desperate, usually out of work. Except for the druggies, who sat in the back of the boiler room. Heaven knows what they did.
For hours, we telemarketers were cursed, threatened, and had phones slammed in our ear. One man I called threatened to shoot his phone.
Worse, we had a boss who listened in on our sales calls. If my technique didn’t seem persuasive enough, he’d hiss in my ear, “Sell it, you idiot.”
We were also cheated. No official records were kept of our sales, just what we wrote down on scraps of paper. Every payday our commissions were much lower than what we sold. No one dared complain. The owners from New York would show up at the Florida office in shiny suits, with big bulges under their armpits.
If I go to hell, I’ll spend eternity as a telemarketer.
Elaine Viets is the Agatha, Anthony, and Lefty Award-winning author of 34 mystery novels and dozens of short stories. There’s more, much more, about her adventures in retail. For a different slant, try her Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper series.
Hidden Rooms and Secret Passageways: Selling a Sense of Childhood Wonder
by Gigi Pandian
Secret Staircase Construction, the family business at the heart of the Secret Staircase Mystery series, is more than a home renovation company—it sells magic for grown-ups. Specializing in hidden rooms, secret passages, sliding bookcases, and all kinds of architectural illusions, the company transforms ordinary homes into cozy spaces filled with mystery and delight. Their mission is simple: to rekindle childhood wonder through architecture.
Tempest Raj is a former stage illusionist who returns home to join the family business after her career is sabotaged. She trades grand illusions on stage for crafting architectural misdirection tailored to individual clients. Tempest’s role is to interview clients, uncover what’s meaningful to them, then dream up ways to tell their stories through whimsical architecture. Her designs aren’t just functional—they are deeply personal, weaving each client’s dreams and memories into the walls and floors of their homes, making every project a unique work of art. Tempest’s favorite projects are the ones where she gets to bring classic mystery novels to life.
Gargoyle door knockers, fireplace bricks pushed in just the right way to open a secret panel, a book pulled off a bookshelf that triggers a door to a hidden library, a secret entrance to a book club meeting room resembling a pub in a favorite novel from the Golden Age of detective fiction, a grandfather clock leading to a secret garden. These all add a sense of adventure to everyday life and evoke cherished childhood memories and scenes from beloved books. Their projects inspire clients to see their homes as places of possibility, where the ordinary can become extraordinary.
This sounds great, right? It is—until impossible crimes begin to emerge from within the architecture.
In Under Lock & Skeleton Key, the first book in the series, a body falls out of a wall that’s been sealed for nearly a century. Tempest watches in disbelief as her former stage double tumbles from the old wall they’re demolishing for a renovation project—which, of course, is impossible.
It seems the Raj family curse has finally come for Tempest, but her background in creating stage misdirection makes her uniquely equipped to unravel the seemingly supernatural crime. I consider it a great compliment when reviewers describe the series as “Scooby-Doo for adults.”
The Secret Staircase Construction team’s goal is to bring the magic of childhood to all, so they don’t just renovate private homes. In the most recent book, The Library Game, they’re turning a house into a library devoted to classic detective fiction. The newly renovated library turns deadly during a literary-themed escape room. A body appears, then immediately vanishes—yet no one has left the library. There’s a body in the library, and everyone is a suspect.
By selling wonder in the form of mysteries hidden within architecture, Tempest and the Secret Staircase Construction team create not just architectural marvels, but the perfect stage for impossible crimes. Their blend of nostalgia, ingenuity, and whimsy ensures that every project invites people to believe in the magic of the impossible. But of course, with a fair play puzzle and rational explanation at the end.
Gigi Pandian is a USA Today bestselling and Agatha, Anthony, and Lefty Award-winning author who writes the Secret Staircase mysteries, Accidental Alchemist mysteries, and Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt mysteries. Gigi lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and a gargoyle who watches over the garden.
Serving Up the Urban Cozy
by Cleo Coyle
The idea of an amateur sleuth living above her shop may sound like a trope, but for me the concept was a lived experience—and became the inspiration for the Coffeehouse Mysteries, a series that I write in collaboration with my husband. Marc and I recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of our first title, On What Grounds, but the conception of our caffeinated crime fiction goes back a lot further.
In 1985, I was just out of college and working as a cub reporter for The New York Times. Despite the prestigious sound of that, it was a low-paying gig with long hours. I was a working-class kid from Western Pennsylvania who did well in school (scholarships, writing awards, etc.). But without a trust fund or supplemental income from well-off parents, surviving New York was a struggle, and not just financially.
Back then, the city’s East Village was far from the trendy, hipster area that it is today. The neighborhood was rough and gritty with plenty of street crime, much of it related to the epidemic of crack cocaine. East Village apartments were more affordable, so I unpacked my suitcase in a shotgun-style flat on 7th Street between Avenues A and B (aka Alphabet City).
My tiny apartment was located two floors above a woman-run bakery and coffee shop called Bread and Roses, which sat across from a small city park that was (at the time) notorious for drug dealing. Despite the crime wave around me, I appreciated the many good things that came with living in New York—and one of them was that little bakery and coffee shop.
This warm and welcoming place offered a cozy oasis smack in the middle of New York’s not-so-nice noir. And that early experience, seeing and feeling that odd juxtaposition of cozy and noir, light in the darkness, is what inspired the unique voice and vision of our Coffeehouse Mystery series.
As every writer knows, a concept is not a novel, and a single novel does not a series make. To develop the premise of an amateur sleuth running a coffee shop and solving neighborhood crimes, I not only drew on my experiences as a journalist but also my part-time work in food service jobs to make ends meet.
My husband became my collaborator, and together we sketched out the blueprints for the series. We’d worked together on other projects, including the first tie-in book attached to the groundbreaking, Emmy-winning Fox television series 24, which in itself was an education in structure and narrative.
Marc and I knew that my vision for our series, setting it in NYC, was a risk for the cozy genre, but we liked the idea of creating something unique, a little offbeat, and authentic to our lived experiences in this extraordinary city.
Creating what we coined as an “urban cozy” would also allow us to present a more diverse cast of characters and an interesting range of crimes. Our stories are almost always based on real crimes or events. And New York has plenty.
To create our cast—including our amateur sleuth, coffeehouse manager, master roaster, and single-mom Clare Cosi; her business partner, globetrotting coffee hunter Matteo Allegro; and his octogenarian mother, who owns the business—we researched the workings of modern coffee shops, the “third-wave” specialty coffee trade, and the details and dangers of sourcing coffees worldwide.
We conducted interviews with coffee professionals, and even took barista courses with “Joe – The Art of Coffee” (now Joe Coffee Company) at its flagship store in Greenwich Village. And though Clare’s landmark “Village Blend” may be fictional, we chose to embed it in a real place, New York’s Village, a cheeky nod to the typical village setting of traditional mysteries, but also a neighborhood with a storied history that we often celebrate in our series.
Many of our plotlines were also inspired by the workaday problems of running a coffee shop, starting with our first Coffeehouse Mystery, On What Grounds. The story opens with what appears to be a slip-and-fall accident by an employee (an aspiring professional dancer whose grace and balance make her an unlikely candidate for a clumsy tumble down the basement steps). The threat of a lawsuit from the young woman’s mother spurs our coffeehouse manager Clare to focus on finding the clues that add up to attempted murder.
In Shot in the Dark, Clare must deal with the threat of an “active shooter” in her shop, the result of another challenge faced by coffee shop managers—serving sometimes volatile swipe-to-meet-dating customers.
In Bulletproof Barista, we drew on the familiar New York experience of movie crews taking over stores for on-site filming. When Clare’s beloved Village Blend becomes the location shoot for a hot new streaming show, she’s thrilled, until her coffeehouse becomes the scene of a true crime. Then she and her baristas set out to find and stop a ruthless killer.
In our latest title, No Roast for the Weary, we were inspired by the long history of writers gathering in coffeehouses. But before we created our fictional “Writer’s Block Lounge” or came up with the crimes related to those writers, we opened with the all-too common problem facing retailers in post-pandemic urban areas—the rise of remote work and devastating loss in foot traffic.
Whatever the plotline, our mysteries are always character driven. From what readers tell us, watching our amateur sleuth navigate the peaks and valleys of her personal and romantic relationships, run her charming historic coffeehouse, and wrangle her quirky crew of baristas is as much fun as watching her follow clues that help solve perplexing crimes.
Despite those crimes, our stories are ultimately uplifting. No matter what challenges Clare and her baristas face, they strive to survive a city of dark deeds the way we do, through bonds of love, faith in each other, a strong sense of humor, and a good cup of coffee.
Cleo Coyle is the New York Times bestselling pseudonym of Alice Alfonsi, who collaborates with her husband, Marc Cerasini, to write the long-running Coffeehouse Mysteries and Haunted Bookshop Mysteries. When not haunting coffeehouses, hunting ghosts, or wrangling their rescue cats, Alice and Marc are also NYT bestselling media tie-in writers.
Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.