John McMahon is the author of three books featuring P.T. Marsh, a police detective in Mason Falls, Georgia. The first one, The Good Detective, was nominated for Edgar and Thriller Awards for Best First Novel. He followed that with The Evil Men Do, and now, A Good Kill. Today, MaMahon is our guest author. Thank you, John.

“Writing Spaces in a Post-Pandemic World”

Lately, I’ve heard a lot of interesting conversations about work spaces, as the pandemic has pushed us years into the future, to a place where we don’t have to live where we work – and a virtual desk might be as good as a real one. As an illustration, in my day job in advertising, the agency is estimating some 80% of the workforce will continue working from home, definitely through the calendar year and perhaps indefinitely.

It’s a sea change that many of us are still processing – trying to see the benefits – while also maintaining that distance that “traditional” work gave us – that when you leave the office, you can leave some of the work behind.

As a writer, my office for fiction has always been on the move. Writers’ laptops are their offices, but perhaps this was even truer for me. Those who know me well will say that I have written at least 50% of my books in 2 places: libraries and restaurants.

I wrote most of THE GOOD DETECTIVE and THE EVIL MEN DO in the Pasadena Central Library, as well as four restaurants throughout the Pasadena, Glendale, and Burbank areas in Southern California. At these restaurants (which I will leave unnamed), kind food service managers ignored my typing away after dinner. Eventually, they gently began mopping the place to signal that it was time for me to go home to bed. And while in the library, there was nothing better for inspiring great writing than to walk over and pick up a book from James Lee Burke, John Grisham or Cormac McCarthy. For me, libraries have always been a comforting and quiet place. My job in college was to work at UCLA’s Powell Library, at first at the information entrance desk, and later in the stacks, shelving books.

But then last year – something happened.

The pandemic hit and everything closed. There were no restaurants to write at and no libraries to go to. Worse, the space where I could write at home had become the space I did my day job, since the ad agency sent everyone home as well.

And so, I went out to my backhouse and started putting inspiring things on the walls. I have been lucky enough to be in The New York Times four times, and I framed them all. I cleaned the place. Not the way I normally clean… but instead, the way my wife cleans. I had to make this the ultimate space to plot, write, and re-write.

I built a plot wall of plastic holders to lay out an entire book plot on one wall. My daughter got a poster sized paper and drew a map of Mason Falls, the fictitious town in my three books, including all major locations, highways, etc. And I put up shelves for my favorite writers… my own home version of the Pasadena Library.

It turns out – where you write does matter, and you need that place to delve deep into your characters’ minds… to embody them. Sometimes when I am reading my own work aloud, my dog Tessie lifts her head up from off the couch and looks around – seemingly saying – who’s he talking to?

Things are opening back up now in Southern California, but most restaurants close way too early for me to write in them late. My favorite old haunt to do revisions, Pasadena’s Dupar’s, went out of business altogether. And with fewer tables, it now feels like bad form to sit at one for three hours.

The worse news of all is about the library. The Pasadena Central Library is closed indefinitely. It’s a heartbreaking story for a gorgeous building constructed in 1924 by the same architect who designed the Huntington Library and Occidental College. But sometime last month as we came out of the pandemic, city officials realized its walls were made of unreinforced masonry and considered unsafe. Worse, there was funding for buildings like this years ago, but no one realized that the library (a building on the National Historic Register) was among those structures.

In the meantime, I’ve built my own little area of the world to delve into the murder and mayhem at the center of my crime fiction. And if I order Door Dash from those same restaurants, it kind of feels like I combined the library with the restaurant. Plus, I can sit there in my PJ’s, which I cannot do at a chicken restaurant off the 5 freeway in Burbank.

But someday I hope to be back at the library.  I’m confident the city will figure it out. The place is just too much of a gem.

• John McMahon is the author of THE EVIL MEN DO and THE GOOD DETECTIVE, the latter a finalist for The Edgar Award for Best First Novel and ITW’s Thriller Award for Best First novel.
• His latest, A GOOD KILL was out on 6/15/21. AMAZON has named it a Best Book of the month for June 2021.

In his day job in the advertising world, McMahon has won a Gold Clio for a commercial for Fiat, and he’s written a Superbowl Spot launching Alfa Romeo in the U.S.

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Readers of John McMahon’s books might be interested to know that his daughter, Zoey McMahon, drew a map of Mason Falls.

John McMahon is the author of A Good Kill, The Evil Men Do, and The Good Detective, which was a finalist for both the Edgar Award and the Thriller Award for best first novel. His first two novels were each named “Top Ten Crime Novels” of the year by The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Southern California with his family and two rescue animals. His website is https://www.johnmcmahonbooks.com.

A Good Kill by John McMahon. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021. ISBN 9780593328361 (hardcover), 384p.

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A Good Kill –

An electrifying mystery featuring a troubled small-town police detective faced with three interwoven crimes that reveal sinister secrets about his community–and the deaths of his family, by the Edgar Award-and Thriller Award- short-listed author whose novels have been described by the New York Times Book Review as “pretty much perfect.”

In the years since the mysterious deaths of his wife and child, P.T. Marsh, a police detective in the small Georgia town of Mason Falls, has faced demons–both professional and personal. But when he is called to the scene of a school shooting, the professional and personal become intertwined, and he suspects that whoever is behind the crime may be connected to his own family tragedy.

As Marsh and his partner Remy investigate the shooting, they discover that it is far from straightforward, and their search for answers leads them to a conspiracy at the highest levels of local government–including within the police force. The stakes in the case become increasingly high, culminating in a showdown that has Marsh questioning everything he knows, and wondering if some secrets are better left undiscovered.

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Interested? Check out the book trailer for A Good Kill.