"Me Japanese Boy I Love You"

Laurie and I spent about six weeks in Japan in 2024, and not long after we returned to the US my English friend Martin Edwards invited me to contribute a story to an anthology he was putting together of crime fiction inspired by Burt Bacharach's songs.

I'm not really a big Bacharach fan, but I like Martin — and it's not every day an invitation to write for someone else's anthology comes along — so I Googled "Burt Bacharach songs" to see if anything jumped out at me as a possible inspiration ... and discovered to my delight an early lyric he wrote for Bobby Goldsboro called "Me Japanese Boy I Love You."

So, start with the fact that Martin's anthology was intended to raise money for autism charities, and I'd recently written a story from the point of view of a teenaged male autistic character for Dawn Barclay's Elton John anthology. Add to that a second fact: near the end of our time in Japan, Laurie and I attended a Tokyo Swallows baseball game. Put Burt Bacharach, autism, and Japanese baseball together, and wallah! The result was "Me Japanese Boy I Love You," in which an autistic fourteen-year-old American girl accompanying her mother on a business trip to Tokyo solves a dying-message murder at the Swallows stadium.

What the World Needs Now: Mysteries Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach will be published by Level Best in June 2026, and I hope it makes a ton of money for the UK and US autism charities Martin has selected as recipients for the royalties it generates.

Return to Bibliography.