A Conversation with Josh Pachter
on Sondheim as crime fiction
Josh Pachter, editor of the new anthology Every Day A Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Stephen Sondheim, brings a unique perspective to the intersection of crime fiction and musical theatre. After decades as a writer and editor, including seven previous anthologies inspired by musicians from Joni Mitchell to The Beatles, Pachter’s connection to Sondheim’s work dates back to 1973, when he cast the tie-breaking vote that earned The Last of Sheila an Edgar Award. In this conversation, he discusses curating stories that span Sondheim’s entire career, while featuring a diverse collection of voices both established and emerging. Our conversation begins below:
It’s great to meet you. You tell an amazing story in the introduction to Every Day A Little Death about your close relationship with The Last of Sheila, which I think makes for a perfect jumping-off point for our conversation. Could you tell readers a little more about this rather special connection?
Well, Sondheim’s obviously best known for writing musicals, but in 1973, together with Anthony Perkins, he wrote a non-musical film. It’s a very traditional Agatha Christie-style whodunit. And it’s a marvelous film which, for reasons I can’t even begin to explain, is today almost completely forgotten. The film came out in 1973, and I at the time was teaching high school in Detroit, Michigan. I was a member of an organization that still exists today, the Mystery Writers of America. I was then and still am a writer of short crime fiction, and I was teaching film production and film history and appreciation at the time.
Because of my connection with both film and crime writing, I had been asked to serve on a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Awards committee to select the best mystery film of the year. The other four members of the committee were all living in New York, and so they held a meeting to select the winner from four finalists—and they were tied 2-2 between two films, The Last of Sheila and Serpico. I couldn’t make the meeting because of my teaching commitments, so they called me to cast the tie-breaking vote. I’m sorry to have to say this, but I did feel that Serpico was a better film. However, it was not a mystery film, so I cast my vote for The Last of Sheila… and it won. And so Stephen Sondheim, along with Anthony Perkins, won an Edgar Award for The Last of Sheila thanks to my voting for it.
At that point in ‘73, when you encountered The Last of Sheila, to what extent were you already aware of Sondheim as a cultural figure?
Well, I grew up in New York. I grew up on Long Island, about probably 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan—and as a kid my parents were Broadway fanatics, and so they would take us in to see Broadway shows. I don’t remember ever having gone in to see a Sondheim show, though. The first time I remember having the opportunity to see a Sondheim show was that year, in 1973, when I was teaching in Detroit, and the first national touring company of A Little Night Music came to Detroit and my department at Cass Technical High School, which is where I was teaching.
My department made arrangements to go see A Little Night Music, and we somehow managed to wangle a backstage visit with the wonderful Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, who was playing Madame Armfeldt in the production. Unfortunately, just like I couldn’t go to New York to vote for The Last of Sheila, for whatever reason, I couldn’t make it to A Little Night Music. But I remember saying to my department chair, “If you don’t bring me Margaret Hamilton’s autograph, I’ll die.” I was being a little melodramatic. But on Monday morning, sure enough, she came to my office and handed me the program from the show. On the front cover of the program was written, “Dear Josh, don’t die. Margaret Hamilton.”
I have seen many Sondheim shows since, and I am filled with admiration for his ability as a lyricist. And that’s why, having done seven of these inspired-by books, all inspired by pop singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, the Beatles, when I decided to do a Broadway book, the first person I turned to was Sondheim.
And the short stories in this collection span all the way from Saturday Night through to Here We Are, which I was particularly excited to see included. How did you decide which show to base your own story around?
Well, for each of the books in the series, I always look in the work of the artist for a song title that would serve well as the title for the book. For the Jimmy Buffett book, for example, I picked a song called “The Great Filling Station Holdup,” because it’s so obviously a title for a book of crime stories. For Sondheim, I picked “Everyday a Little Death” which, as it happens, comes from A Little Night Music. I didn’t pick that song because of my own personal connection to that Detroit production of A Little Night Music. I picked it because it had the word death in it!
I always like to write the title story myself, so I sat down with the lyrics to the song and read them a hundred times. One of the things that I’ve always admired about Sondheim is the subtext work. Typically, in a crime story, the action is right there on the surface: if it’s a murder story, you see the murder happen, or you hear people talking about the murder. But I decided to write a story where it would be all told in subtext. And if you read my story superficially, really almost nothing happens. But if you read it a little more carefully, beneath the surface, it is a crime story. The crime element of the story is all told in subtext.
And I’d love to ask about the other authors that you’ve included in this volume. Are these people that you chose because of they were already familiar with Sondheim and his work? Or was there something quite fun about inviting people who’d be coming to the source material completely fresh?
I have a number of agendas that I look to fulfill when I’m putting together a cast of characters for these anthologies. One of the things that I’m looking for is people who have some kind of geographic connection to the subject matter. When I did the Billy Joel book and the Paul Simon book, I was looking for a lot of New York-based writers. When I did the Beatles book, I was looking for British writers. When I did the Sondheim book, I was looking for writers who had a connection to the theatre, so that was either crime writers who had an interest in theatre, or I looked for people who weren’t crime writers but who were connected to the world of the theatre, who I thought might find it an interesting challenge to write a crime story.
There were also some authors who really inhabit both worlds: Joseph Goodrich, for example, who is a dramatist. He’s written several well-received plays, but he also writes crime fiction. Jeffrey Sweet, who I’ve actually known for 50 years, is now predominantly a dramatist. He’s actually on his way to London right now to mount a production of his play, The Value of Names. But he got his start as a professional writer, as I did, with a short story that he wrote for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
I’m also looking for as diverse a group of writers as I can possibly find. Crime fiction throughout its history has largely been a cisgendered male white environment, and that is slowly changing. I’m hoping to be a part of that change. So I’m always looking for women writers, I’m looking for LGBTQIA+ writers, I’m looking for members of underrepresented communities to contribute to my books, and that includes this project. I’m looking too for people who have not previously published crime fiction. I was lucky enough to be given a start as a kid. I had my first publication when I was 16 years old, thanks to Frederic Dannay, who was half of the Ellery Queen writing team. He gave me a boost when I was very, very young, and I’m looking to give that same kind of a boost to other people.
When I did the Beatles book a year or so ago, I reached out to two bloggers, Kristopher Zgorski and Dru Ann Love, who were very popular bloggers but had never written fiction before. I twisted their arms a little bit and got them to collaborate on a short story which went on to win the Anthony Award, the Macavity Award, and the Agatha Award for best short story of the year, which was obviously very, very gratifying. So those are the things that I’m looking for: people associated with the subject matter, people who represent different communities, and also people who are either at the early stages of their journey as writers or people who haven’t even begun their journey as writers yet.
Could you give us a flavor of some of these stories? I’d love to hear about those that particularly excited (or perhaps surprised) you to receive.
Well, I mentioned Joseph Goodrich a moment ago. Joe selected Sweeney Todd as the show that he wanted to work on, and he did something that was actually unusual in my experience with these books. He set his story in the world of the theatre, in and around a production of Sweeney Todd. We actually see Sweeney Todd being rehearsed, and behind the scenes of the production, something criminal happens. That’s probably about as close a connection between the song itself and the story as anyone in any of these books has attempted.
And then, on the other hand, probably the furthest distance between song and story happens with Kristopher Zgorski. Kris took as his subject matter a song from Follies, “Losing My Mind,” and his story is set in hell, of all places, in a coffee shop. When he told me that’s what he wanted to do, I remember thinking, “Okay, that’s an unusual choice… But if you can pull it off, great!” And Kris pulled it off. He wrote a story set in hell that I thought was just marvelous, and I was so happy to include it.
You mentioned that you were glad to see a story that took its inspiration from Here We Are. That was really a challenging one to integrate into the book, because I really wanted to have the book come out on March 22nd, 2025, because that’s the 95th anniversary of Sondheim’s birth. The problem was that when Here We Are was originally performed, not only were the lyrics to the songs not available—and of course it’s really difficult to write a story inspired by a song if you don’t have access to the lyrics—there was no cast album at first, either. Even the names of the songs weren’t available. It was really challenging to get somebody in a position where they could write a story inspired by a song from a show where not even the titles of the songs were available. So I kept delaying, delaying, delaying.
Finally, we came across a YouTube video which I think somebody in a performance had surreptitiously recorded... Alison Hubbard watched the video and contacted me and said, “Yeah, I can take that as an inspiration.” And so the title is “Only Just the End of the World.” I thought she did a really lovely job on very, very short notice of writing a story that was clearly inspired by that song, without even access to a written copy of the lyrics.
You’ve written short stories for decades in the crime genre, and beyond that too. Perhaps someone is reading this anthology and is inspired to write their own short story. In your view, what are the essential ingredients for a good short story?
Well, I’ll tell you the best advice I have ever heard. Sometime in the 1970s, I went to Europe for the first time, and I found myself in Ireland attending a conference for writers. I remember being in this big circular amphitheater, and I thought I was probably the youngest person there. It was all these elderly men with long white beards sitting in a circular amphitheater, pontificating about short stories, and if it weren’t for the fact that we were sitting in a circle, I would have gotten up and left.
Finally a hand went up, and it turned out I wasn’t the youngest person in the room. It was a young girl, probably about 15 years old, who I hadn't noticed. And she said, “You gentlemen have been talking about what makes a good short story, and I’ll tell you what makes a good short story.” She said, “A good short story is like a good sausage. The first bite is good, all the middle bites are good, and the last bite is good.” And at that point I got up and I left, because that was the smartest thing I had ever heard, and I’ve still never heard anything smarter.
Here’s one great piece of advice for people who want to write short stories, especially short crime fiction. The magazine in which I got my start, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, comes out six times a year, and in every issue they have something they call the Department of First Stories. There are two of them in each issue. Twelve times a year, that magazine publishes a story by someone who has never before professionally published a piece of fiction. That means that you’re not competing with people who’ve been doing this for decades. You’re competing with people who haven’t ever done it before at all. It is a great opportunity to get one of the best short crime fiction credits there is.
To pre-order Every Day a Little Death: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Stephen Sondheim, and for more information, simply click here.
On May 8th, New York City’s Drama Book Shop is hosting an event to promote Every Day a Little Death, to include a signing and live podcast recording, featuring Josh and many of the other writers featured in this collection. For more information and to register your interest, click here.