Catch and Release, published in “Snakeberry”

By Judith Carlough

(Noises of an AUDIENCE settling down, followed by applause as the SPEAKER—an elegant woman in her eighties—walks confidently to a podium and sets a leather satchel beside it.)

How lovely! Thank you for that kind recognition. Now, how about some applause for this gorgeous new addition to the Worcester Public Library, dedicated exclusively to mysteries, thrillers, and crime fiction. The Agatha Christie Whodunit Room!

(AUDIENCE applauds enthusiastically.)

I am honored to be the first author to keynote here. I suppose it had something to do with the recent release of the latest book in my Nelly the Near-Sighted Detective series. Or perhaps it’s because I was born in Worcester before moving to that other big city, east of here.

(AUDIENCE laughs.) 

I promise to keep the comments about my writing life brief, so we can get to the unveiling of the fabulous portrait of Dame Agatha—on the easel to my left, under that fabric drape. And then we can enjoy what we really came for, the open bar.

(AUDIENCE claps and whistles. SPEAKER holds up a hardcover book.)

Catch and Release is more than the title of my twenty-eighth Nelly book, it’s also the way I’ve lived my life. As a girl, I went fishing with my father in the nearby Wachusetts Reservoir. He taught me to throw back more than I kept. As a dutiful daughter, I put his philosophy to good use during the last seventy years. Not with fishing, lord no, I loathe fishing. And not by catching words on my keyboard before releasing them in books. No, I have employed the catch and release technique in a second profession, one that has been my secret for seven decades, one that may delight or disgust you, one that has consumed my creative energies more than anything in my life, including my writing. 

(AUDIENCE is still, spellbound.)

I am here to make a confession: The woman who stands before you is a thief. Doubtless the most famous thief you’ve never heard of.

(AUDIENCE titters nervously.)

Oh dear, perhaps I should have rewritten that last line. Can one be famous yet anonymous? Successful thieves must remain unknown or risk prison, so how to measure who is most famous? It’s one of those tree-falls-in-the-forest conundrums.

But I digress, an annoying habit that comes with age. I beg your indulgence.

(AUDIENCE remains quiet, heads nod.)

Having lived in the shadows to protect my felonious enterprises, I am delighted to divulge my secrets to you, the truest fans of mystery and misdemeanors. But I’m not going to lay it out, like a sumptuous buffet. Where’s the fun in that? I shall require that you read between my lines, and piece my clues together. I think Agatha would approve. After all, we’re in a locked room of sorts, aren’t we? 

(AUDIENCE reacts with more nodding heads.) 

The story of my secret life begins, as good stories often do, many years ago. I performed my first larceny at age fourteen, when I was a bit of a wallflower, eager to please, yet unremarkable. A friend dared me to steal the high school mascot—a bulldog—the morning of the homecoming game. I don’t know where I got the courage, but the challenge seemed like a puzzle to be solved and I’ve always loved puzzle. I hid Bruno in a safe place, then created a list of clues to his whereabouts. The pep squad had him back on the sidelines, safe and drooling, by kickoff. 

I can barely describe my euphoria. With that single, penny-ante escapade, I morphed from a wallflower to an enigmatic subject of conjecture. A phantasm, even as I stood in the cafeteria lunch line. Plus, I was completely hooked on the feelings that accompanied the heist. That dognapping tipped the first domino in a life dedicated to recreating those feelings again and again. 

By the time I graduated college and began the slow trudge that has characterized my writer’s journey, I had amassed a not insignificant, clandestine, criminal curriculum vitae. I always released what I had taken, neither needing nor craving the material gains that might have come had I fenced my thefts. I didn’t need money—my late father amassed a fortune as a patent attorney, his second favorite pastime after being a humanitarian fisherman. Uh-oh, is that an oxymoron? Humanitarian fisherman? Is pescatarian a word? Perhaps I should have shared my speech with my stalwart editor, Michelle, she would know.

Another digression, my apologies. 

(AUDIENCE has relaxed, warming to the story.)

Just as my father loved fishing for the act itself, not the fish, I was in thrall to the act of thievery, not the loot. I became head-over-high-heels enamored with the process. First, the all-encompassing mind-play of planning the heist, followed by the electrical jolt of pulling it off (the riskier the better), then the full-body adrenalin rush when I succeeded. Ecstasy. Elation. Exhilaration.

Ha! Michelle would have redlined all those overheated descriptors, so I’m glad she didn’t get a look at my speech. 

(AUDIENCE chuckles appreciatively.) ###END FIRST THREE PAGES

Available on Amazon in the anthology “SNAKEBERRY” Best New England Crime Stories

For many years, I honored my father’s philosophy of catching and releasing, until a series of temptations so profound, so irresistible, presented themselves, and I succumbed. Over time, I accumulated over two dozen objects—half from a single heist. They span a range of whimsical, beautiful, historical, and utterly priceless treasures. Alas, my purloined collection has created quite the quandary for me now, at the sunset of my duplicitous career. If only Nelly could tell me what to do! 

These precious objects remain in my possession at a secure gallery in my Boston home, an unpretentious, converted brick milliner’s factory on the fringes of one of the city’s gentrified neighborhoods. No one has seen any of my trophies for decades, except me. I never have visitors and I lock the gallery when services or repairs are required. Privacy is more than an eccentric vanity, it is an absolute mandate.

A few of you are nodding your heads. You’re thinking: That’s why she never allows photographs, not even a smiling headshot on her back cover. Good work, I dropped a clue and you gobbled it up. Photographs are anathema to my preservation. Imagine me in the midst of a heist, many of which involved public exposure. I couldn’t have people asking, “Aren’t you the author of those wonderful Nelly-the-Near-Sighted Detective novels?” A low profile was de rigeur. 

And I prided myself on crafting disguises that helped me disappear into the crowd. Sadly, in my later years, disappearing became all too easy because nothing is more invisible in our society than an old woman, as long as she’s quiet and sticks to her knitting. Which (I can share with you now) was one of my most successful disguise techniques—sitting on the outskirts of an event, knitting. Harmless and unremarkable as a May breeze. On those occasions when I really wanted to gild the lily, I brought a Tupperware container of oatmeal cookies. Innocence personified; no one gave me a second thought. 

But I’m off track again. Where was I? Oh, yes, the trophies I selfishly kept for my solitary pleasure. These objects have become the tiger I now hold by the tail, where keeping the beast presents as much of a dilemma as letting him go. And I promise you I intend to let them go. So let us see, today, whether the lady or the tiger succeeds, right here at the Agatha Christie Whodunit Room.

Now, I’m getting ahead of myself, and that would drive my editor Michelle nuts. Pace your story, let each scene build tension off the last, stack each one as you mount toward the climax. Of course, she’s right. Allow me to stack some scenes from my career, a sampling of my misdemeanors, to provide a sense of my modus operandi. I think you will discover that I followed that old, authorly dictum, write what you know: I used my crimes to create my novels. 

(AUDIENCE settles, as if getting comfortable for the stories.)

In 1959, the day Dr. Martin Luther King received his theology degree at Boston University, there was a delay in the ceremony. I was nineteen and had posed as a student photographer to facilitate burgling his cap, gown, and diploma. It took those academic dunderheads forever to decipher my clues and retrieve his duds. All those big brains, and they had less common sense than a bunch of radishes. That became the plot for Nelly Gets Her Degree.

Are you a college hockey fan? I stole the Beanpot trophy in 2006, only to learn that the year before, the awards committee had made a replica so they could safely retire the original, which been dropped, broken, mislaid, and used as an ashtray over the years. It irked me that I’d stolen a replica, so I kept it. But they had the last laugh; they’d made a duplicate of the replica and the ceremony went on, seamlessly. Do you recognize the plot for Nelly Gets Iced?