By: Sean Walters

After decades spent studying literature, working in television, hauling scallops from cold New England waters, and teaching English, James Sulzer is stepping into a new lane: classic murder mystery. An Intensive English major at Yale, Sulzer worked in television for years before moving with his family year-round to Nantucket, Massachusetts, where he lived the layered, close-knit realities of island life—first as a commercial scalloper, then as a professional barbershop quartet singer, and eventually as an English teacher for three decades.

Sulzer’s bibliography has long leaned literary. He’s written historical novels centered on major poetic figures—The Voice at the Door (Emily Dickinson) and Writ in Water (John Keats)—along with Nantucket Daybreak and a middle-grade trilogy, The Card People. But with his newest novel, All That Smolders, Sulzer pivots toward whodunit territory, drawing direct inspiration from the queen of the genre: Agatha Christie.

At its core, All That Smolders is designed as both an homage and an evolution. “All That Smolders is a mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, set in 1980 on a small island off the coast of New England,” Sulzer says. “It’s autumn, and tourists have departed the island, leaving a varied and colorful group of locals who take part in community activities like scalloping and Halloween parades.” The seasonal shift is more than atmosphere—it’s a pressure change that reveals what’s underneath. “But then the body of a prominent lawyer is discovered, clearly a victim of murder, and the peace is shattered.”

The novel introduces Peter Christie, a journalist who arrives on the island hoping to rebuild his life. Sulzer describes him as “a once-promising journalist nursing the wounds of a failed marriage, a tarnished career, and a traumatic past.” Peter joins the island’s small-town paper “only to find himself caught in the biggest story the island has ever seen.” The murder investigation becomes a crucible—professionally, morally, emotionally—as Peter “must navigate a web of old grudges, hidden legacies, and dangerous lies.” And, as Sulzer puts it, “the truth may come at a cost—and someone will stop at nothing to protect what smolders beneath the surface.”

So why mystery now, after two literary novels anchored in Dickinson and Keats? Sulzer’s answer is both personal and craft-driven. “Any novel about Emily Dickinson definitely must wrestle with the many mysteries in her life!” he says. “But yes, All That Smolders is my first true mystery.” The deeper reason, though, begins at home: “I wrote this mystery in honor of my mother, Katharine, who was a huge fan of Agatha Christie. My mother is no longer with us, and I felt close to her memory in writing the kind of book that I think she might have loved.”

Sulzer didn’t approach the genre casually. He studied Christie the way an apprentice studies a master—by reading widely and analyzing the machinery. “In getting ready to write this book, I read a baker’s dozen of Agatha Christie’s novels, hoping to understand her artistry and the workings of her smooth sleight of hands.” The preparation became practical. “I picked up some helpful guidelines: have 5 to 7 possible suspects, each with motives and opportunity; embed a few seemingly minor details that turn out, in retrospect, to be crucial to solving the murder; give the characters an edgy realism (that is, don’t sugar-coat them).” Even at the sentence level, he aimed for clarity and tension: “Style-wise, I appreciated Agatha Christie’s relatively simple, direct sentences. She lets her characters’ hidden motives lurk behind the sentences, creating a world with depth and complexity. Naturally, I tried to emulate all that in All That Smolders.”

The setting—an island off New England—feels tailor-made for secrets, suspicion, and second looks. Sulzer knows that terrain intimately, having lived on Nantucket for more than 40 years. “I set this mystery on an island for a number of reasons. For one thing, who doesn’t love reading about a beautiful island?” he says. But beauty is only half the point. “Also, an island is a place where people think they know everything about each other, but are often ignorant of their deepest secrets—a situation which creates all sorts of interesting points of tension and intrigue for a mystery.” Sulzer adds that island life contains a paradox he wanted to explore: “I know the ongoing tension between the interdependence we all feel on an island and our fierce strain of New England individualism.”

One of the novel’s most arresting creative choices arrives immediately: its opening scene, rooted in trauma. “The first scene—Peter as a young boy outside his parents’ bedroom, overhearing sounds of abuse and suffering—is a direct transcription of what I heard when young.” For Sulzer, writing it was both difficult and necessary. “By the time I approached this novel, many decades later, my life had reached the point where I could finally write about this freely—the event and its effects on a child growing up.” He believes that emotional truth strengthens the mystery’s engine: “Recreating this painful memory unleashed a well of deep emotion which I hope gives the novel some real depth and feeling as well as a compelling arc to the main character’s life.”

Sulzer also builds a playful bridge to his inspiration by giving Peter Christie a fictional family tie to Christie herself. “Agatha Christie is the queen of all mysteries, and having read so many of her mysteries, I was intrigued to bring her into the story in some way,” he explains. “So I created a fictional, great, great nephew Peter Christie.” The connection lets Peter chase more than clues—it lets him chase a legacy. “It was fun to have Peter try to invoke his great great aunt’s sleuthing skills.”

And then there’s scalloping, a distinctive island detail that becomes part tradition, part industry, and part cover story. Sulzer writes it from lived experience. “For three years in the early 80s, I worked as a commercial scalloper during the season from November through March,” he says. “Since that time, I have been doing family scalloping every season.” It’s not just research—it’s a love letter to the water and the ritual. “I love being out on the water in Nantucket’s magnificent harbor, I love finding scallops, and I love the whole process of getting them ready to eat. And the best part of all is eating them!”

With All That Smolders, Sulzer delivers a mystery built on classic structure, a lived-in setting, and a protagonist whose search for truth is also a search for redemption. And he’s not done. “I am currently writing the sequel, entitled All That Matters, set in the year 2000 on the same island, with many of the same characters twenty years later.”