When lecturer and author Scott Loring Sanders passed by a lemonade stand in Concord, Massachusetts, a few years ago, his mind went to the worst-case scenario.
“I’ve always felt like any time there’s a lemonade stand, it’s our duty as adults to stop and buy a lemonade,” Sanders says. “But if you think about it, for kids, a lemonade stand is sort of a vulnerable situation. That got me to thinking, ‘What if something bad happened?’”
That’s how most of Sanders’s stories start.
“I’m always thinking about ‘What if?’ It’s something I preach to my students all the time. ‘What if this happened?’”
That thought process paid off with his short story “The Lemonade Stand,” which won the International Thriller Writers’ Best Short Story of the Year this spring. This was Sanders’s second nomination and first win for an award that includes myriad thrillers published in English.
In the story, a young girl is abducted while selling lemonade. Though the girl emerges unharmed, the real complications begin when her father decides to exact revenge on the abductor.
“I wanted to flip that traditional idea of a child getting abducted and it often turning out very bad. In my fiction, I always like to try and turn things on their head and not do what typically happens,” Sanders says.
Whether he is running or on the chairlift at a ski slope, Sanders is always workshopping story ideas, continuously jotting plot twists in his Notes app.
Most of Sanders’s stories are in the crime and mystery genre.
“I’ve always been interested in the puzzle and plotting of things, so I think that’s why I’m drawn to it,” the author says. “It’s a puzzle in my head; I almost never have any idea where I’m going with my writing. There’s no rhyme or reason; it’s all organic.”
Sanders, a writing lecturer in our College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, explains his books are not the “whodunnits” of the past. You won’t find any Sherlock Holmes-type characters among his pages.
"That’s not what today’s mystery genre generally is. It’s more about the psychological aspects, either for the victim or the criminal themselves,” he says.
More of Sanders’s work will be in print soon. “The Lemonade Stand,” first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, is part of his upcoming novel “Right Between the Eyes,” which will be published in February 2023.
Sanders used a grant to underwrite his research for "The Lemonade Stand,” work that involved riding along with Concord police on patrol, to lend more accuracy to the action.
In addition to writing fiction, Sanders is the author of the memoir of essays “Surviving Jersey: Danger and Insanity in the Garden State,” His other published mystery stories include “Gray Baby,” “The Hanging Woods” and “Shooting Creek and Other Stories.”
