The things I have started noticing since I began writing after dark

Writing mysteries does something to how you see an ordinary street. I did not ask for it and I cannot now switch it off. Here are some of the things I notice, none of which mean anything, all of which have ended up in a book.

Which houses leave a light on upstairs and which leave it on downstairs. The upstairs ones are telling the truth. Someone is home, reading, awake. A downstairs light left burning in an otherwise dark house is a message to the street, and the message is nobody is here but please think someone is.

The sound a town makes at the moment it changes shift. There is an hour, usually just after the last bus, when the daytime noises have stopped and the night time ones have not started. For about ten minutes a seaside town is genuinely silent, and if you are out in it you feel like the only person left who knows a secret.

Dogs that do not bark. A dog that barks at everyone is no use to anyone. A dog that is quiet, quiet, quiet, and then quiet in a different way, has told you more than any witness will.

Curtains that are new. A house can go for years with the same faded curtains and then one week they are crisp and lined and drawn very precisely, and I have no evidence at all for what that means and I have built an entire chapter on it anyway.

The last table in a cafe to be cleared. Whoever sat there stayed longest and left latest, and either had nowhere to be or very much did not want to go home. I have never once resisted inventing them.

Footsteps that match yours. Everyone has done this walking home. You speed up, they speed up, you slow, they slow, and then it turns out to be an echo off a wall, or it does not, and the whole difference between an ordinary night and the opening of a novel is which of those two it was.

Boats that come back wrong. I grew up near water and you learn the rhythm of it, who goes out when, who comes back when. A boat that returns at the wrong hour, or rides too high, or too low, pulls the eye the way a wrong note pulls the ear.

I want to be clear that none of this is detection. I am not clever and I solve nothing. It is only that once you spend your evenings asking what would have to be true for this to be the first page of something frightening, you cannot stop asking it, and the world obligingly fills up with small wrong details that were probably always there. The gift of the job, and the curse of it, is that you never get to walk down an ordinary street again. There are no ordinary streets. There are only the ones where nothing has happened yet.

If you share the after-dark habit of noticing, The Night Shift Almanac, Vol. 4 holds ten stories from the small hours of a city where the night's real work is feeding the morning.