A mystery story from my new collection Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction… especially for those who would like to see more historical Lutheran pastors featured in detective stories.

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Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was old, sick, stiff, and hungry. For all that, he was the most able-bodied of his household. His wife Anna, terrified by reports of the battle in Long Island and little comforted by news of the Continental Army’s timely retreat, hid in the bedroom, alternately sleeping and indulging in fits of hysterics. Henry’s daughters and daughters-in-law had their hands full minding her and their little ones, not to mention the heavy burden of fear concerning the fate of their husbands. One daughter-in-law’s parents, their house in New Jersey having been quartered by the British, had fled and taken refuge at the Muhlenberg home, but they were still weak and in shock at losing all their worldly possessions. Not to mention the narrow escape en route from bandits, who enforced their own version of the law when the armies were engaged elsewhere.

All Henry wanted, then, was a nice dish of sauerkraut and dumplings, followed by a good night’s sleep. What he got instead was a pounding at the door and a summons from Lieutenant Colonel Brodhead’s men. “It concerns a prisoner. You are needed to translate” was all the flunkeys would say…

This story collection, Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction, gestated over a long period of time. “Iron” and “Gold” were the first two stories I drafted, well over a decade ago. At the time I didn’t have any sense that they would be linked by a common theme of an element of the periodic table to each other, much less to another eighteen stories.

I can’t remember anymore exactly how the idea for a whole book of stories based on the periodic table came together, though “Molybdenum,” as an exercise in metafiction, tells some of what I’ve been able to reconstruct from my memory.

After I settled on the idea, though, I read John Emsley’s comprehensive book Nature’s Building Blocks: An A–Z Guide to the Elements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). I took notes about aspects of the elements that I thought might give rise to a good story. The resulting stories are the ones that coalesced into a good yarn…