(2023) was named Best Baseball Novel by Twin Bill literary magazine and named a Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine. His novel Antler Dust was a Denver Post bestseller in 2007 and 2009. Buried by the Roan, Trapline, and Lake of Fire were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award (2012, 2015, and 2016, respectively), which Trapline won. Trapline also won the Colorado Authors League Award for Best Genre Fiction.
Stevens’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, and Denver Noir. In both 2016 and 2023, Stevens was named Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year. He hosts a regular podcast for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and has served as president of the Rocky Mountain chapter for Mystery Writers of America.
Stevens applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, No Lie Lasts Forever, and shared the following:
Well, bingo.Visit Mark Stevens's website.
I think the test works.
Page 69 of No Lie Lasts Forever is when our “retired” serial killer Harry Kugel starts to realize he needs to treat protagonist Flynn Martin, a sullied television reporter, as a “project.” By this he means that he needs to understand every inch of her life. This is how he used to case his victims before he would attack. (We’ll soon be given a precise example of Harry’s detailed, thorough process.)He needs to treat Flynn Martin as a project.At this point of the story, Flynn doesn’t believe that the anonymous messages she’s getting can possibly be from the actual serial killer who terrorized Denver fifteen years prior. She’s dismissive, dubious. So Harry is concocting a way to prove to her that it’s actually him. He needs her help because there is a new murder victim in the city and Denver police are claiming that the long-gone but never caught serial killer known as PDQ has resurfaced. But Harry knows that’s not true, because he is PDQ. He didn’t commit this latest crime. If he can convince Flynn to help him out, she can restore his reputation and take this murder off his list. And, in the process, he can help Flynn restore her reputation so she can get her job back.
Needs to work as carefully and think as carefully and act as carefully as if he were conducting a project.
The risks are the same.
By reaching out to defend his honor and his brand, after all, he might expose himself.
Every project needs a working title. The titles mean you are starting to write a story.
Blank page, working title, chapter one, go.
Titles mean you are organizing all the details into one new compartment in your brain. Storing all the factoids. What you need. How it’s going to work.
A title sets the theme and organizes his thinking.
If the title changes as the story progresses, that’s okay.
He feels like a writer in control of scenes on a page.
The Page 69 Test: The Fireballer.
Q&A with Mark Stevens.
My Book, The Movie: The Fireballer.
Writers Read: Mark Stevens.
--Marshal Zeringue