People ask me where Ned came from. The honest answer is: a Tuesday in 2018, when I was three pages into something serious and I realized the something serious was profoundly boring. The character refused to be earnest. He kept making asides. He kept lying to witnesses. So I let him.

Satire is — for me — what happens when you stop trying to make a character likeable and start trying to make them recognizable. Ned is recognizable. He’s the part of every detective story you suspected was a lie. He’s the part you laughed at when nobody was looking.

The Crack the Case books grew out of that voice — short, interactive whodunits where the reader gets to choose how the case ends. There are real forensic facts in there (Ned, surprisingly, has standards). There is a great deal of snark. There are fewer dead ends than the genre demands and more bad coffee than is strictly necessary.

If you’re starting a satirical mystery yourself: don’t try to be funny. Try to be precise. Funny is a side effect of accurate observation. The rest is just typing.