Anna Scotti Interview: It’s Not Even Past

Anna Scotti’s excellent “Librarian on the Run” stories arrive in a new collection from Down & Out Books this month!

Previously appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and three times selected for “The Best Mystery Stories of the Year,” these stories follow "Cam Baker," a brainy but naive librarian hiding inside the witness protection program, a step ahead of her ruthless ex and his cartel henchmen. In her coast-to-coast adventures, Cam experiences the best and worst of the human condition, solving murders, confounding her WITSEC handlers and the handsome police detective who tries to befriend her. But even as she grows sarcastic and street-wise, Cam never really loses her innocence, and gets her heart broken more than once.

In the first of a new interview series here at The Hourglass, Anna discusses the origins, evolution, and future of her page-turning series.

Can I call your character "Cam?" Your hero is so thoroughly incognito in this series, changing her name from story to story, that I'm not sure we ever learn her real name.  

The short answer is yes, I call her that myself! But I've learned something from the experience of creating a series with a character who's incognito. When we were putting the book together - writing cover copy, press releases, and so forth, I didn't know what to call her! I didn't want to use her real name, because it's an important plot point halfway through the book when it is suddenly and inauspiciously revealed. And although she's Cam Baker for several stories, she's Juliette Gregory in the first story, then Audrey Smith, and later Sonia Sutton and Dana Kane and - you get the idea! If I ever create another recurring character - and I'm working on it - I will name her in the very first story!

You mention Janet Hutchings and Jackie Sherbow of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in your acknowledgements. How did they influence and contribute to the series?  


They are incredibly supportive of writers! Ellery Queen is home to a lot of the best writers working in the mystery field. It's almost like a club - EQ writers trade tips, commiserate, share triumphs…but you know that first hand. Wasn't “Teddy's Favorite Thing” your first story for the magazine? And it won a Readers' Choice Award! So welcome to the club! 

Thank you. Janet bought Teddy for EQMM’s “Department of First Stories.” She was key to launching my career.

I've been reading EQMM, and its sister magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, since I was ten years old. My sister and I used to fight over every copy the day it arrived! So when Janet accepted “Krikon the Ghoul Hunter” back in 2017, I walked around in a happy daze for a week. Since then I've placed sixteen or seventeen stories with the magazine, some part of the Librarian-on-the-Run series, and some stand-alones, like “Krikon.” I've had my share of turn-downs, too, but one that's notable was when Janet told me she liked my story, “No Legacy So Rich,” but was on the fence because she didn't find it credible that anyone would take a high school admissions letter seriously enough to commit a major crime over it. A few days later the Varsity Blues Scandal broke - remember, with Felicity Huffman? And Janet reversed course and bought the story!

An editor wrote you back to buy your work after a rejection? I’d dine out on that story for the rest of my life.   

Ha, ha, yes - well, almost. She said she was undecided.

We are really fortunate, as writers, to have had her at the helm for so long, and now Jackie. Jackie knows everything - literally - about both magazines because she was the Managing Editor at both, simultaneously, before being promoted to Editor-in-Chief at EQMM. I had tea with her and Janet when “Schrödinger, Cat,” took third place in the Readers' Choice Awards. She loves mysteries and crime fiction, and really fiction of every kind. We are in excellent hands, Paul!

Did you make any significant edits or additions to the series when revisiting the stories for collection by Down & Out Books, aside from the new stories written for this volume? 

Oh, that's a sore point. I love dogs - they figure in a lot of my stories and in my novels, too. But I came to loathe the greyhounds, Vindi and Meme, first introduced in “What the Morning Never Suspected.” They hang around for several more stories, and one of them even makes it to “Traveller from an Antique Land,” which is not in the collection but is the next story after the collection in the series, in the May/June 2025 issue of EQMM. So…what happened is I got mixed up at one point about which dog is male and which female. 

I can imagine your language when you made that discovery. 

Frustrating to realize that I could have made things very easy on myself by keeping  notes and making a chart.

It wouldn't matter except that one of them loves Cam, and the other, not so much, and one of them has an integral role in one of the stories. So I found that I had switched their genders a couple of times here and there, and had to clean it all up for the collection. It got complicated. I still have headaches thinking about it.

I expected this volume to open with Cam's "origin story," but you begin in medias res, with Cam already on the run, and only hinting at her past. Can we expect this story to be told someday, or do you think it stronger that readers fill in the blanks?

I really like your question, Paul, because it's something I had to think about a lot as I began work on the screenplay based on the series. The screenplay - first draft currently in progress - merges some of the librarian-on-the-run stories together and adds bits from untold stories as well. So there's more backstory. 

Is this a feature screenplay, or a series pilot? 

It's a feature screenplay, but mostly because I'm a little more familiar with that form than with the series. I think we could go either way. I read feature screenplays for a living, briefly, so I'm familiar with the structure, more or less.

I found that to make it work, I had to show Cam's origin story - it's not enough, in a screenplay, to have someone tell it or refer to it in dialogue. You've got to present material visually. So I showed the murder of Cam's best friend, Monica, graphically. It's a great, though horrific, scene - Cam walks in on her fiance, Mateo, dallying with Monica. Mateo, to show that he's not serious about Monica, grabs her from behind, slits her throat and throws her over the penthouse balcony as Cam watches, shocked speechless. Then he laughs.

Tell us about screenwriting! Is this something you’ve done before? 

I haven't written a lot of screenplays - I wrote one years ago that was a quarter-finalist in the Nicholl Fellowship competition. I had no idea that that is a pretty big deal. Unwisely, I withdrew it from the competition to let "a guy who knew a guy" option it, and that went nowhere. The whole collaborative process of writing a screenplay and then turning it over to someone else for rewrites was really intimidating to me…but I think I could handle it, now. I entered another screenplay, based on a story I published in The Saturday Evening Post - it's called “On Blackpoint Road” - into the Claymore Award run by Killer Nashville, and it was a finalist! But I have to finish it before I take it further than that!

Cam lives a "life interrupted" -- she has a great future behind her with her academic life shattered by having to go on the run. She gives up her parents and her friends, and any hope of a career. In place of this, she takes tours through other people's lives, often seeing first-hand the things she might have had in a normal life. Does it make her regret what she can't have for herself? 

I love this question because it makes me, as the writer, take a close look at Cam's words and actions. Sometimes - as you probably know firsthand - you write something from the gut and if it feels right, you don't examine motives too closely. That's the case with Cam - being my younger, braver, smarter, and better-educated alter-ego, but nonetheless an alter-ego -  she's a lot like me and I'm able, therefore, to write instinctively. A lot of her "happy to be on my own" bravado fades away as the stories progress. 

Cam’s transformation makes this feel as much like a novel as a collection of stories. 

Yes, I've been told that. One publisher wanted me to make it a novel, and I turned her down. I want to say it was for some high-minded reason, but it just seemed like a lot of work, and to what end - the stories work well as they are, each with a beginning, middle, and end. I can even - moving forward - insert new stories into the existing framework, rather than continuing only forward, chronologically.

Midway through the book, Cam begins to refer to her loneliness not as a temporary condition imposed by circumstance, but as a real aspect of her being. It doesn't seem possible to Cam, who is fundamentally honest, that she can forge any real relationships while her life is based on a lie. Yet Antonio Morales and his wife Marta become her closest - and perhaps only - friends. I think she very much regrets what she doesn't have, and although she plays it cool with her handler, Owen James, through most of their relationship, she does yearn to go deeper with him. He knows who she really is, and therefore she can trust his judgement of her. When Cam begins to fall in love with him the reader realizes - I hope - that he has loved her for a long time already.

Cam frequently hides her education and intelligence to avoid blowing her cover. Do you see this as a metaphor for women in society, who can be made to suffer if they are smarter than their boss or partner? This strikes me as something Cam would have had to do around Mateo …

Oh, absolutely, Paul. Absolutely. Thanks for picking up on that. My mother, born in 1930, was the first in her family to go to university, and she earned a PhD at a time - and in a field - where that was rare for a woman. She ran a think tank and became an advisor to Congress. My dad "helped" her in a way that seemed at times heroic, taking care of five little kids after a long day of work, so that she could go to night classes, helping with housework and cooking. Yet he was very much helping, not pulling half the load. The care of five children and of the house was her responsibility, as the woman, regardless of her accomplishments. That was understood, even in a socially advanced household like ours. Mom deferred to her male boss - she had to - and bit back many a retort when confronted with sexism. I used these observations in developing Cam's backstory. 

I confess I have a hard time recognizing Cam as the woman that would let Mateo run such a number on her. And Cam seems to regard her prior self as a different person, too.

She realizes with chagrin and with real distress as her story progresses that the truth about Mateo was always there, but she chose not to see it. She loved the expensive Chicago penthouse they shared, the gifts, the dinners at Boka and Alinea - and she ignored the fact that Mateo's buddies dressed like gangsters and took orders from him, and that he could be crude, and even brutal. He was kind to her, impressed by her education and by her beauty, and that's all she allowed herself to see. In the early stories, Cam remembers her demure "sweater-set" days in the library like a beautiful dream - something she might even return to -  but as time goes on, she begins to regard her former self with a confused mixture of affection and contempt. The reader suspects -  I hope -  that however hard life gets for Cam, she will not sublimate her real self to please a man again.

Do literary allusions lead you to create a story, or do you find allusions that fit within the story you wish to tell?   

Oh, always the latter. It's characteristic of Cam that she often mumbles literary quotes and allusions aloud during moments of duress, and she also uses the words of her favorites to guide her actions. For example, more than once she reminds herself not to spend much time alone with Tony Morales because, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "we are a weak and fickle folk." She quotes Shakespeare readily - even the more obscure works -  but that's Cam, not me. I spend a lot of time researching quotations that fit her circumstances, and in real life I'm as likely to quote Gary Larson or Carl Sagan as Shakespeare, Donne, or Plato.

You've studied psychology and been a teacher, and you hold an MFA, and I can see where those careers and accomplishments have touched Cam. How about some of the other jobs Cam holds down? Any experience with elder care, like what we see in "That Which We Call Patience," the fundraising and charity world ("What The Morning Never Suspected"), or being a property manager ("Into The Silent Land")?

I was a journalist for several years, writing for the national "women's magazines" - we called them the "seven sisters" -  before most of them went out of business during the big magazine extinction event. You remember - Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, etcetera. I specialized in "disease of the month," in adoption stories gone wrong, and in "wojep," which means "woman in jeopardy." 

Journalist makes perfect sense, I should have guessed.

It was exciting and challenging, but depressing - I really covered some hair-curling stories - and finally a friend took pity on me and got me started writing for InStyle and for the late, great Buzz Magazine. One thing a lot of my mystery fans don't know about me is that I'm an award-winning young adult novelist -  Big and Bad won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People in 2021 -  and a poet, too. I'm fortunate enough to have been given a lot of honors and awards for poetry through the years. You can find my work in lots of little literary journals, as well as in The New Yorker and in my own collection.

So, most writers have held a variety of jobs over the years, and I'm no exception. And each of those jobs informs my work in some way. Like Cam, I've been a property manager and a personal assistant - there's the charity-world connection - and I've spent a lot of time teaching in high-end independent schools with celebrity PTAs. Tons of material there! Cam and I have both been lab assistants, although I haven't written about her experiences yet - they're just briefly mentioned. I've also been the buyer for a Tahitian export firm, a sandwich maker, a model and actress - not terribly successful in that last case, but you might catch me in an old film or TV series, or on a game show - I did tons of those!  

Tell us about the game shows. It’s too goofy that Cam would blow her cover by appearing on a show, so you won’t be spoiling any future stories.

Oh, I went on a bunch of them - I won eight thousand bucks on Sale of the Century, and that paid my rent for a year, so you can see it was a long time ago. I was on To Tell the Truth - that was fun - I even passed the test for Jeopardy, but they never put me on the show. Back then you had to actually go to a physical location and take a paper test. It was a bit intimidating. If you made it through - and most did not, trust me - then you had to play a sample round. I guess that's where I failed. I could NOT press that buzzer fast enough to get any answers in!

In college, I worked on a project teaching sign language to chimpanzees - thus Cam's PhD in library science has a focus on primates in literature. And I also worked on a cybernetics research project, and as a specimen preservationist at the Field Museum in Chicago. That last sounds weighty, doesn't it? What I actually did was hoist enormous, half-rotten snake carcasses out of vats of formaldehyde, tag and inspect them, and then re-inter the corpses. So although I learned a good bit about the city during that brief stint, I would say Cam's job was more glamorous!

And of course the big one -- YOU'RE not in WITSEC, are you?   


(laughs) I'm not in WITSEC, but then - I could hardly tell you if I were! Seriously, I had to learn a lot about the various witness protection programs and how they work in order to maintain believability through the series. And I'm sure I made some mistakes, even so. One thing that surprises some people is that the majority of protected witnesses are criminals themselves. Another is that there are several WITSEC programs - not just the federal program Owen James and Colleen Hendricks belong to, but programs that run at the state level, too. 

Without giving too much away, you conclude some of your major continuing arcs in this collection, but there is also a new Librarian on the Run story ("Traveller From An Antique Land") in the May/June 2025 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, so you obviously have more to say about this character. When can we expect a second volume of stories in this series?

That will depend upon the success of this collection - but also upon Ellery Queen's continuing belief in the stories. I'm so grateful to them - I will keep the series with them no matter what - and realistically speaking, with six double issues, the magazine can only publish one or two installments a year. That's what makes back stories so attractive in a collection - they don't interfere with the ongoing storyline!

But I think a more immediate project might be a collection of my non-librarian-on-the-run stories, those published in Ellery Queen and some from Black Cat Weekly, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and from some of the literary magazines that have been kind enough to publish my work. Those would include “Schrödinger, Cat,” which not only took third in the EQMM Reader Awards, but was also nominated for a Macavity and for the Thriller Award, and a novella EQMM published a few years ago, “Never Have I Ever,” which is one of my favorite stories, though also one of the darkest. And my stand-alones are dark - though often funny, too, I hope, as is “Schrödinger,” or even tender, as some have found “Krikon.” One the best stories I've written made barely a ripple in the mystery world. “What Anyone Would Think” is a bit of a hybrid of mystery, horror, and literary fiction, and I'm very grateful to the editors at The New Guard for publishing it a couple of years ago. So it would be great to be able to pull some of these published works together under one cover, along with a few originals! And that's the nice thing about a collection, which is written by one person, as opposed to an anthology, written by many. In a collection, the authorship provides a unifying theme to the stories, so it's okay if they vary a bit in genre and tone.

I think a goal of any short story writer is to have their work collected. A collection feels like a permanent home. Growing up, I imprinted on authors releasing anthologies once every couple years of stories printed in what was at that time a more robust magazine market. Fingers crossed for you that additional name recognition from this themed collection will leverage you into general collections of your work.

Oh, I hope it works out that way, Paul. It's a tough thing to be a short story writer these days. As you point out, almost no one publishes fiction anymore. The good part is that as the opportunities to publish shrink, the best writers do rise…

Any discussion of developing this property for television? An episodic structure is baked into the premise, which seems ideal for a limited series.   

Well, Paul, from your mouth to God's ear! I'm currently shopping for an agent who can make that happen! I would love to see Cam taken to the screen, big or small. I mentioned earlier that I'm working on a screenplay, but certainly Cam's story would work gorgeously as a series, given the episodic structure that already exists. It's a very interesting thing to me, to create an entire world and be bound by the rules of it, as a successful television series does. It's like playing Tetris, or maybe Jenga. Every piece has to fit, and every time you make a plot point, you complicate the puzzle - and make it more interesting! I'm a big fan of the Law and Order franchise and loved the way characters pop in and out of various incarnations of the show, in sometimes surprising ways. Cam's story lends itself to that. Without giving too much away for readers who haven't followed the storyline sequentially, there are a few people who come back into Cam's life long after we think she's said goodbye. I'll tell you one thing - if I sell the rights for a series - or a film - a little bit part for me is gonna be built right into the contract. I'll be the lady in purple walking her Pekingese on the beach, or maybe the lady in black sipping Frosé at the Chestnut Club in Santa Monica.

And I expect a cameo as a body they fish out of the water!

(laughs) Done!

Thanks to Anna for her thoughtful and forthcoming answers … with the time she put into this interview, we might have gotten another story out of her!

You can order It’s Not Even Past from Down & Out Books, Bookshop.org, and Amazon.

Connect with Anna at her personal site, Instagram, and Facebook.