Tom Andes is a musician, a freelance editor and writing coach, and an award-winning author whose short stories have appeared in dozens of publications including Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, The Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. His debut novel, Wait There Till You Hear From Me: A Charles Prentiss Novel (Crescent City Books, October 2025), follows a would-be private eye through the streets of New Orleans as he searches for a missing person while also pursued by a stalker. Look for Tom on his website TomAndes.com and on Facebook. Wait There Till You Hear From Me is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.
What would you like readers to know about the story you tell in Wait There Till You Hear From Me?
To some extent, this is a classic detective or mystery story, but it’s also a story about someone figuring out who he is. When the book starts, Charles has been lying to himself, and he doesn’t really understand his own nature. It’s also about New Orleans, which has been a muse to me in so many ways, though I would despair of ever writing the definitive book about the city. Fortunately, no one ever will: it’s impossible.
What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
The biggest challenge was deciding what the book was. An agent who didn’t ultimately represent the manuscript asked for a rewrite. Of the draft she read, she said I needed to decide whether I was going for Chandler or Fellini. Up to that point, I think I hadn’t entirely committed to writing a mystery novel, so it still had literary qualities and contained elements of parody or pastiche. Once she put it to me that way, though, it was very clear to me that the answer was Chandler, and I rewrote the book from the beginning with that in mind. I’m sure it still has traces of those other qualities; they’re part of its DNA. But that was clarifying and led to what was basically the definitive draft of the book.
Share a little about your main characters, why readers will connect to them, and what makes Charles Prentiss the best private detective to carry your mystery series.
Well, I think a big part of Charles’s character is his hesitancy, the fact he doesn’t entirely know himself. He’s a working class kid from San Francisco. He’d wanted to be a private detective, but he chickened out on that and went to grad school after nearly getting shot serving papers to a career criminal. Now, he’s living in New Orleans; he’s got this desk job, and he’s engaged to an upper-class woman, a lawyer. He desperately wants to impress her family but fears he doesn’t measure up. Yet for all that, he’s aware of his class position and identity, he’s not entirely cognizant of how much he wants to climb the social ladder. I think one thread in the book is the question of whether he’s meant to be doing detective work. Geoff Munsterman, the editor at Crescent City Books, the press that gave this book a home, wrote on one draft of the manuscript, “Is Charles a good detective?” I think that’s a question throughout the book. Is he good at this job? Sometimes he is. Sometimes he’s blind to the obvious. Hopefully those qualities make him relatable. For all that we love our detectives tough and hard-boiled, the opposite qualities often make them memorable. Though of course they need to be tough and hard-boiled, too. And Charles gets his chance to be those things.
As for carrying the series forward, I think there is simply more I want to discover about all these characters.
Why did you use New Orleans as the main setting for the book? Do you consider the setting a character in the story?
The short answer is that I had recently moved back to New Orleans when I started writing this book, so the overwhelming sensory experience of being there—during the summer, no less—was foremost in my mind. Though I often set stories in places I’ve lived in the past, I wanted to be able to use stuff that was readily to hand, stuff I could walk out my front door and see. And yes, the city very much is a character in the novel. I think New Orleans is a difficult place to write, or at least to write well. I tried to write into the spaces people don’t think of when they first think of the city, Old Metairie, for instance, or the suburbs on the West Bank. Of course, a couple scenes take place in the French Quarter. But I tried to limit the time we spend there.
Tell us how the book came together.
The germ of this book comes from a short story I wrote when I was living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. All I really had, though, was the troubled brother and the class difference between the protagonist, Charles, and his fiancée, Gwendolyn. A couple years later, I decided this might be material for a mystery novel, so I sat down and tried writing one. That was 2012, so it took me twelve years to write, but that obviously wasn’t continuous. I was writing stories and songs and other things during that time. I wrote a first draft, which I condensed into a second draft that wasn’t substantially changed. That got the attention of the agent I mentioned above. I worked with an editor on a major developmental edit that involved changing the point of view from first- to third-person and beginning the story at what had been the twenty-five percent mark of the first draft. At one time, cutting 25,000 words would’ve frightened me, but it was incredibly freeing. I felt like I finally knew what the story was.
After that, I spent a year writing the draft that is to my mind the definitive draft of the book. The opening of that version won the Gold Medal for Best Novel-in-Progress from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society in New Orleans, which was a major shot in the arm, and which I’m so grateful for. I did three or four drafts after that, but none of them involved those kinds of major structural changes. There were still things I wanted to address, though. One, for instance, involved reinventing the character of Laura, who by the end of the book becomes Charles’s sidekick, or maybe he’s her sidekick.
All along, I was querying agents, and I had a few express interest. But I was also trying to sell it myself. When I thought I had a good draft, I sent it to Crescent City Books (CCB), which publishes terrific mysteries and noir set in New Orleans. I think the editorship at that press also shares some of the humor in this book, the way the real estate developer has his fingers in everything, for instance. Living in New Orleans, one develops a jaundiced eye as far as corruption is concerned. I knew CCB would give it a good home, so I was really happy when they took it. I signed the contract a month after leaving New Orleans, after we moved to Albuquerque.
What makes this novel unique in the mystery market?
The focus on Charles’s origin story and on his journey to finding himself makes this book unique in the mystery market. More than that, though, I think Gwendolyn makes the book unique. Early on, I had this idea about the fiancée being a femme fatale, and maybe to some extent she is. But I wanted to reinvigorate that trope, to make her motives legible and human. Even when she acts badly, I think we understand why. She knows Charles better than he knows himself. To whatever extent she does him wrong, she’s right about him and their relationship.
What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
I think my favorite part was doing that long, definitive draft where I rewrote this from scratch into third-person, when I finally committed to writing a detective novel. That draft wasn’t perfect, but every day I went to my desk feeling like I knew what I was doing. Would that every day could feel that way!
How did you choose Wait There Till You Hear From Me as the title of the book?
The working title of the first couple drafts was Desire. I chose that because the climax takes place in the Desire neighborhood, but it was also a way of shoehorning in this New Orleans specific reference that was never quite right for the book and was also kind of appropriative. The final title presented itself during that definitive draft, when I wrote it into third-person. I’d taken a couple workshops with the great short story writer Lee K. Abbott. Lee was amazing with titles. He was a big fan of titles that are complete sentences. I was writing the scene where Charles tells Gwen to wait for him, saying to her voicemail, “Wait there till you hear from me.” And it leapt out to me as a title. It’s a little romantic, a little desperate. It foregrounds their relationship. And all those things felt right.
How has the creativity and discipline you employ as a musician helped you in your writing journey?
As weird as this sounds, I think initially songwriting helped free me up to take fiction writing less seriously. I’ve always been terrible at letting go of things, and for years, I would just sort of endlessly revise instead of writing new things. Because I didn’t have the same ego attachment to writing songs, it was easier for me to let them go. Sometimes they were keepers; sometimes they weren’t. Either way, I just wanted to make the next one. I think it has really helped me to carry that attitude into my fiction writing, as best I can.
KL Wagoner loves creating worlds of fantasy and science fiction. Her current work in progress is The Last Bonekeeper fantasy trilogy and short stories in the same universe. A member of SouthWest Writers since 2006, Kat has worked as the organization’s secretary, newsletter editor, website manager, and author interview coordinator. Kat is also a veteran, a martial art student, and a grandmother. Visit her at klwagoner.com.
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