HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY; Dan B. O'Shea

How I baked up THIN MINTS

At the beginning of 2010, we entered a strange period in the history of the O’Shea household where my wife took a job in the wilds of southwestern Wisconsin (in beautiful Lancaster, the ancestral home of Daniel Ames) and lived there during the week whilst I remained home here in the Chicago burbs. One of us would head one way or the other on weekends for conjugal visits. Scenic area, but it was very much small town America, veneer of friendliness with that creepy, incestuous, everybody-stop-and-stare-at-the-outlanders-when-they-walk-into-the-diner type of air to it. So I was looking to write something set there anyway.

Then I read about the Girl Scout Cookies. Seems the record for Girl Scout Cookie sales is 17,000 boxes and change. At four bucks a box, that’s almost seventy grand worth of cookies. And the way they go about it nowadays, setting up card tables laden with Thin Mints and such outside the local grocer and selling them more or less retail, it’s a cash business.

So I got to thinking about creepy small town America, and about desperate meth fiends and about what they might get to thinking if they got it in their heads that some cute little Girl Scout was sitting on a big-ass pile of cash and, well . . .

Anyway, you can read Thin Mints over at Crimefactory – issue three, if I remember correctly. Or pop on down to St. Louis, where it will soon be available in the Noir at the Bar anthology that Jed Ayers and Scott Phillips ginned up for Subterranean Books.

Dan O'Shea

You can find Dan right here.