"A Short Madness"

"A Short Madness" was the first story I wrote about Dr. Joseph Guislain (who actually existed, and who founded Belgium's first psychiatric hospital in 1857) and his assistant Amandine Caekebeke (who I made up and named after my favorite University of Ghent student during the semester I taught there in the fall of 2022).

I wrote it while teaching at UG, when British author Tom Mead and American author Gigi Pandian, both friends of mine, invited me to contribute to an anthology of locked-room stories they were co-editing. I'd never written a locked-room mystery before, but it seemed like an interesting challenge -- and I'd just visited the Hospice Guislain and thought it would be a perfect location for a locked-room murder. Raising the stakes even further, I decided to make Dr. Guislain himself my detective, which meant that "A Short Madness" would also have to be my first-ever historical.

I wound up beginning the story in 1917, when Amandine was an old woman living in a nursing home. A reporter asks her to reminisce about her former employer, and she thinks back to the time in 1858 when they were confronted by the murder of a patient under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Tom and Gigi accepted the story, but they wanted their anthology to be published by a top-level house and had trouble finding one. While they were looking, Level Best Books put out a call for submissions for an anthology to be titled Mystery Most International, and I decided to write a second story featuring Dr. Guislain and Amandine. I called it "The Last Dance," and it was accepted and published in April 2024.

Meanwhile, my Flemish friend Dominique Biebau translated "A Short Madness" into Dutch and submitted it to the Goekenpris competition for the best Dutch-language short crime story of 2023, where it finished third! (If you can read Dutch, you can download a free ebook containing my story, titled "Een Korte Razernij," and the other four Top Five prizewinners, here.)

I eventually asked Tom and Gigi if they'd be willing for me to send "A Short Madness" to EQMM, with the understanding that -- should it be accepted -- I'd write a third Guislain/Caekebeke story for their anthology. This was right around the time that Janet Hutchings retired, after editing EQMM for thirty-four years, and "A Short Madness" wound up being one of the first stories new editor Jackie Sherbow accepted. She included it in her first issue and put my name on the cover, my first appearance there since my fiftieth-anniversary story, "50," in the November/December 2018 issue.

In June 2025, "A Short Madness" was selected to be read on Rabia Chaudry's The Mystery Hour podcast. (Given the similarity of the last names, I was actually hoping she'd select one of my Mahboob Chaudri stories, but I was delighted to have something of mine chosen at all.) Unfortunately, The Mystery Hour went on what's being called an "indefinite hiatus" in July, before my story could be posted. Hopefully it'll return at some point....

I did write a third story in the Dr. Guislain series, "The Allegory of the Five Senses," for Tom and Gigi, and it will appear in their anthology when it's published (at long last!) in the summer of 2026. And I subsequently wrote two more stories about Joseph Guislain and Amandine Caekebeke, but I'm not yet ready to provide any information about those. "Melancholia" is currently out on submission, and I'm waiting to see what happens with that one before I decide where to submit #5, which will bring the series to a close....

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