Mass. author honored for Big Dig-based mystery story

Mark Ammons needs a tux. He has a big night ahead of him next month.

"I'm very excited," says Ammons, of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) ceremony, where he'll not only accept the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award, but be nominated for an Edgar Award. "In the mystery world, the Edgar's are like the Academy Awards."

Ammons was recently notified he won the Fish Award for his short story, "The Catch," published by Level Best Books, a small press based in Prides Crossing, Mass., in its anthology, "Still Waters: Crime Stories by New England Writers."

He will be honored by the MWA with the Fish Award in New York City on May 1 for the best first mystery story by a previously unpublished American author. Then it's on to the Edgars, where he'll be nominated in the Best Short Story of 2007 category.

Winning both a Fish Award and receiving an Edgar nod has never been done before.

And while Ammons is enjoying his sudden fame, he's equally surprised.

"I'm delighted," he says. "It's great, really, but I have to go back to work on the novel."

Ammons, a Medford resident for more than 30 years, says he didn't even know his publishers submitted his story, a mystery set in the bowels of the Big Dig. He says he didn't even plan on writing a short story.

Rewind two years.

Ammons, a fledgling writer, is working on what he terms "an off-center mystery about a hard-boiled tough guy with some slapstick," when he hit what every writer dreads: writer's block.

"Everyone runs into places where things stall out," he says. "Usually, I put it aside and come back to it, but not this time. I decided to do a short story."

He's still not sure where the idea for "The Catch" came from, only that several things gelled at once and out came the character of Michael Sean Figgis. He sent the story off in the spring of 2006 to Level Best Books, a cooperative venture of well-known writers Kate Flora, Ruth McCarty and Susan Oleksiw.

It wasn't published.

"They told me they liked the story, but it was missing an element of the crime that wasn't sufficiently defined," Ammons explains. "I put in a drawer and thought, 'Now what am I going to do with this?'"

Several months later, Ammons ran into Flora at a book event and she inquired about the story, saying Level Best Books would love to see it again. Ammons went home and did a thorough re-write.

In 2007, the story went back to Flora and company, where it was published in the fifth annual crime story anthology. Riding high from his first published work, Ammons never expected what came next.

"Well, I got up one morning in late January, early February, and there were seven calls on the answering machine," he recalls. "Everybody was saying, 'I guess you already heard, but you won the Fish Award and you're a nominee for an Edgar.'"

Ammons says it's quite an honor for someone who took to writing later in life, but he's thrilled and so is his family.

"They knew I was doing this in a serious fashion," he says of his newfound writing career. "They knew it wasn't a hobby."

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