"Murder in the Math Department" was a story I made happen despite considerable odds. When New West (later California) assigned it to me, it was never with any great enthusiasm. They saw it as a small side piece. Then, just as I was finishing up the research and about to start writing, my editor called to tell me to forget about it. The LA Times had just published a crime piece by a psychologist (the wife of Michael Medved) which briefly mentioned the Streleski case.

I told my editor not to worry, that there was no virtually overlap between what the Times had done and what I proposed to do. And she reluctantly let me go on, though with the admonition to "keep it short."

Yeah right. I think I eventually turned in 12,000 words, virtually all of which they printed.

Even though the story now seems obvious, when I first came across it, I didn't know what to do with it. I had just seen a single paragraph story about the case in the paper, saying little more than a student, who had spent 20 years trying to finish his Ph.D., had been convicted of killing his math professor. I cut it out the story and posted it on the wall above my desk where it sat for many months, curling upward and turning yellow. Occasionally I would reread it and forget about it for another month. One weekend, a girlfriend noticed the clipping above my desk and said, "Oh yeah, interesting story, perennial students."

Suddenly, I had the hook for my story. I wasn't just writing about a lone nut case. I was writing about perennial students. That's the basis on which I sold the story to New West. They certainly wouldn't have taken a story only about a student who killed his professor. There had to be a larger general theme. So, cunning country boy that I am, I wrote an intro to the story about perennial students, quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, and never mentioned the matter again. But to the editor mind, the story was now sanctioned. It dealt with a social issue, it wasn't just mere voyeurism.

Of course, from my point of view, it was voyeurism (in the best sense of the word), and furthermore I don't think there's a thing wrong with that. All the best selling novels in the world are. The only difference is they usually deal with larger issues as well (at least the best of them do). The fact that they don't spell out what the issues are in a bold-faced italicized introduction doesn't mean they aren't implicit in the story anyway.

Nowadays I don't bother with introductions that say up front what the story is about. I rather let the story stand on its own merit (and let the reader decide for himself what he thinks it means). A couple of years ago I wrote a story about a doctor who cut off a patient's leg so he could have an erection. At the time Salon.com had an editor who described it as "journalistic voyeurism at its best. This story serves no better purpose than to entertain you with sick examples of depraved humanity, and it does so very, very well."

I'm glad the reviewer liked the story but I don't think it was mere voyeurism just because I made no effort to address some specific social issue like the plight of transsexuals (trapped in the wrong sex's body, or how lack of government oversight of the medical field has allowed butchers like Brown to operate with impunity). I don't care about those issues, or leastwise I don't care about them enough to write about them in a story. My notion is that a non-fiction story serves many of the same functions as a novel (no one ever complains that Faulkner or Hemingway never explicitly wrote about a "social issue." Steinbeck, of course did, and that's one of the reasons why he's a second rate author). A good non-fiction story stands on its own because it deals (or should deal) with eternal issues that concern us all, just as good fiction does. Anyone who thinks the most important stories are those that deal with political issues is a propagandist, not writer.