Art Taylor is a Mason professor and mystery writer. Photo provided.
Art Taylor says he doesn’t write private eye stories—but he is always up for a challenge.
In fact, testing himself is how the Mason English professor approaches all his award-winning mystery stories. His most recent short story, “A Necessary Ingredient,” was a finalist for three mystery writing awards: the Agatha Award, Anthony Award and the Macavity Award.
Taylor enjoys exploring the boundaries of his comfort zone, which is why he accepted a good friend and editor’s request to contribute to the short story collection “Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea.”
“Part of the conceit there was, ‘how do I write a private eye who's not really a private eye, trying to fumble his way through it?’” said Taylor.
The story is a fresh take on a classic tale. It follows a “private eye” who rents an office to get his father off his back but doesn’t actually take any work—until, one day, a young woman walks in with an interesting job he can’t refuse.
Taylor uses his stories as architectural practices, such as the structure he undertook while writing “English 398: Fiction Workshop,” which appears in the July/August issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
As Taylor explains on his author website: “Sprinkled through this story are the bits of advice that aspiring fiction writers might get in any college-level creative writing workshop. It was a real joy playing with those writing guidelines and letting them guide parts of the storytelling itself.”
He wrote the story in a modular format by composing isolated pieces of information that come together at the end to form a meaning.
This is a format that he also presents to students when he teaches the actual class ENGH 398 Fiction Writing. When students are taken outside of their comfort zones, said Taylor, they are able to challenge themselves to become better writers.
“[The students are] having to flex some different creative muscles,” said Taylor.
Taylor has written a number of short stories in addition to a novel, “On the Road with Del and Louise,” but his love for his craft doesn’t end there. He also regularly teaches classes on crime fiction at Mason, including a section of ENGH 202 this coming semester titled Five Killer Crime Novels. He uses five different novels to better explain larger social subjects such as race, gender and class.
“Crime novels, in some ways more than literary novels, serve as windows into the social issues and social values of their eras,” said Taylor.
He said, for example, students can learn a lot about class expectations and tensions through the work of Agatha Christie, racism in the United States from Chester Himes or ideals of masculinity from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
“Even on the first day of class, I could tell he really cared about what he was teaching. He opened me up to an entire genre that I had never really experienced,” said former student Conor Terry, whose passion for crime and mystery novels was inspired by one of Taylor’s classes.
Formerly a journalist, Taylor left his job at a city paper in Raleigh, North Carolina, to pursue creative writing. He came to Mason as an MFA student and teaching assistant in 2003; after graduation he decided to continue teaching.
Since then, he has won many awards for his mystery writing, including multiple Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, two Macavity Awards and three Derringer Awards. His stories have appeared in three volumes of the Chesapeake Crimes anthology series—“This Job is Murder,” "Homicidal Holidays” and “Storm Warning”—in addition to other magazines and anthologies.