I could take you to the spot in the road where the idea for No Lie Lasts Forever bloomed in my head.
I was going 65 miles per hour. I know that detail because I was on Interstate 25 near downtown Denver and I never speed except for … I’m getting off track here.
My speed is important is because the whole idea for the novel came to me during my traverse over one slab of asphalt. That’s a technical term, slab. What I’m trying to say is that the idea arrived in quick fashion and it arrived fully formed.
It was night. Did that matter?
And I was all alone. Or that?
How did it happen?
I can’t tell you. I wasn’t driving around that day thinking, you need an idea for a novel. I’d written three crime novels at that point and I had good agents representing each of them, but I had not yet been published.
And, yet, there it was.
I’m telling you all this because I learned at that moment, as a writer, that you start to develop a writer brain. The more you write, I think, the more ideas you’ll have and the more your unconscious goes to work.
Before that moment, I don’t think I would have told you that this was possible. To that point, all my ideas had come from reading the newspaper or meeting people who I thought would make for interesting characters as main protagonists for crime fiction. My ideas evolved over time.
But straight from my unconscious? No.
And yet, there it was.
In one corner, a retired serial killer. Wants to go down in history with other notorious, never-caught serial killers. He’s working. A regular guy going about his day.
And in the other corner, a disgraced television reporter. A good reporter who screwed up, made a mistake, and has been suspended indefinitely by her station. (Yes, she was a female from the get-go.)
And what would bring them together? A new victim. Years and years since our serial killer retired, there’s a new victim with all the markings that indicate he has returned to the business of terrorizing the city. But our retired serial knows he didn’t do it. And he’s not happy. He doesn’t want his reputation, well, sullied. And he really doesn’t need the police mucking around in those old cases.
But he needs help and reaches out to our defrocked reporter. Soon, we have a story about mutual redemption. He can help her get her job back. She can help him get his reputation back.
Like I said, all of that came to me in a blink. True.
Writing this book and seeing it all the way to publication? That’s another story.
Mark Stevens is the author of No Lie Lasts Forever (June 2025 from Thomas & Mercer), The Fireballer (Lake Union, 2023), and The Allison Coil Mystery Series including Antler Dust, Buried by the Roan, Trapline, Lake of Fire, and The Melancholy Howl. Stevens has had short stories published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, and in Denver Noir (Akashic Books, 2022).
