Stone Lyon Society
Cozy and traditional mystery writing, taught by working authors of the genre.
The lamps are lit. The door is open.
Something is being built in the drawing room.
A new school for the people who carry a half-finished mystery in their head. Who read Penny and Osman and Horowitz and want to write what they love. Who pick up Christie or Sayers, or French or Atkinson, and feel the form still has more to give.
We teach cozy mystery, traditional whodunit, and literary crime. Different rooms in the same house, the same craft underneath them all.
The doors open soon. The wait list is how you find them.
Founding members enter first.
What we believe.
Two paths through the house. One finished manuscript.
Some plot every clue. Others chase the story into the dark. We don't pick a side. We teach the house. You walk it your way.
Your voice is the work. Working authors protect it.
The strange turn of phrase. The way your sleuth thinks in fragments when she's nervous. The edge that makes a manuscript yours and no one else's — the thing AI would smooth away first. Working authors won't. That's who reads your pages here. By hand. Every time.
Cozy and traditional mystery, taught like the craft it is.
Other schools promise you a finished manuscript. We promise more than that. We exist to connect aspiring mystery writers with the working authors who came before them, and to put more good books on bookstore shelves than the genre has any right to expect. The puzzle, the village, the reveal. We treat them with the seriousness they deserve. Because the readers waiting for these books deserve writers who know what they're doing.
Eight rooms. One manuscript. Thirty weeks.
The curriculum is a house. Each room does specific work. Each one ends with a piece of your manuscript in your hands. You walk through them at your pace, and you don't have to walk them in order.
The Library
Where you study the form. Genre, sub-genre, reader contract, premise.
A working tool. Yours now.
Most writing schools teach the architecture. We start with the smallest unit.
Plot, structure, character. The high-level work gets all the attention. The actual writing, the moment-to-moment work of getting a scene onto the page, mostly gets left for you to figure out on your own. Open a blank document. Good luck.
We start at the smallest unit. The scene. The paragraph. The sentence. Once you can write a scene that lives, you can write anything.
The Opening Moves.
Six things every good scene does, somehow, somewhere. Not in order. Not all at once. Not every time. But once you can name them, you can find them. And when a scene isn't working, you can usually trace it back to the one that didn't land.
Some writers will use The Opening Moves as a scaffold. Stuck staring at a blank page, they'll pick a move, start there, and write their way into the scene. Other writers, the ones who draft in full sentences from the first attempt, will use the framework as a diagnostic instead. Where did this scene go off? Which move did I skip?
Both uses are right. The framework is a tool, not a method. Use it when it helps. Set it aside when it doesn't.
Works for mystery. Works for romance. Works for whatever you're writing.
We teach The Opening Moves inside The Study, on the second floor of the house. While the doors are still closed, we're sharing it free, taught against a passage from Dorothy L. Sayers and an opening from the novel-in-progress by the school's founder.
Four emails. One useful tool. No spam, no AI-generated nonsense. Just craft.
Taught by the working authors of the genre.
A small bench of mystery authors who publish right now in the genre you want to write in. Traditionally published, indie published, hybrid. We don't gatekeep on imprint. We hire for craft, teaching disposition, and time on the page.
The bench is being assembled. Names appear here as the doors open.
The founder
A note from Patrick.
I love to read.
And that's where it all starts, isn't it?
I wasn't always a voracious reader, though. In fact, I loathed reading for the better part of my childhood. I spent most of my time in front of a television watching shows and movies I was far too young to watch. It wasn't until that beautiful coalescence of the right book at the right moment with the right teacher that turned it all around for me. That was in high school, and I never looked back. I even majored in English Literature for my undergraduate degree.
I still wasn't a great reader at that time, though. How was I supposed to move beyond simply comprehending the words? To find theme and meaning? To dig my hands into the soil of the text and sift, search, and feel out the sublayer until I could extract the subtextual that, maybe, even the author wasn't aware of?
Fortunately, my professors didn't sniff me out. Well, most of them didn't. I think one suspected. I'm looking at you, Professor Frank.
The stacks of books from multiple classes, ranging from the classics to modern prize winners, were overwhelming. But they broadened my range. Gave me a deeper appreciation for the art form. I even wrote three full novels while I was an undergrad. That's right, I got the bug. I spent nights and weekends and free periods scribbling in a notepad or glued to a monitor to produce three horrendous, wandering, mixed-genre novels that should never see the light of day. And I love them whole-heartedly.
I carried on to an MFA in visual arts, where I wrote screenplays, directed film sets, and collaborated with people much cooler than I could dream of being. A few of those scripts have placed in competitions, most recently in 2026.
Somewhere along the lines, though, life took me in a new direction. I built a career in higher education administration, teaching writing on the side. Eventually, I parlayed that into a career in business. Business! How the heck did I let that happen? But turns out I had a knack for it. Maybe that observation and critical thinking I'd developed while analyzing stacks of books was paying off.
I never lost the itch, though. I kept writing. Bit of this and that. Scripts. Poetry. Song lyrics. Prose. You name it.
I never stopped reading, either. I love literary fiction, especially from British and European authors. But still, nothing seeps into my bones and sweeps me away the way a good mystery does.
I read every night before bed. A book typically sagging from my hands and down to my belly as my head lulls in my rocking chair, in the corner of my primary bedroom. I always have a mystery in hand or on deck. I force myself to alternate in literary fiction or other genres so I can better appreciate returning to my comfort zone.
Maybe it hit me in that rocking chair. Maybe earlier, somewhere I've forgotten. I want to see more mystery books on the bookshelves. I want more options, not just the few series I've personally fallen in love with. (Richard Osman has taken part of my year, every year, recently.) What if I built a place where aspiring mystery writers could learn from the working authors who came before them? More good books on bookstore shelves. More writers writing the genre I love.
That's what Stone Lyon Society is meant to do.
I'm here to keep my own writing alive and well, alongside yours.
Stone Lyon Society is named for two families who settled in northern New Hampshire and reportedly didn't get along. The Stones and the Lyons, somewhere in the mountains around Lincoln. New England's modest answer to the Hatfields and McCoys, by all accounts. Probably with fewer firearms. Probably more politely worded grudges.
I'm descended from both. I didn't learn that until my fortieth year, after I'd moved back to the region where the families originally settled, and I started pulling at the thread. The investigation is ongoing. Quebec is involved. Europe before that. There's more to find.
Which, if you think about it, makes a writing school for mystery a fitting place to spend the rest of my working life.
I hope it brings you the same joy it does me.
Now, let's go write our way into a corner and see if we can't get out of it.
— Patrick
The doors open soon.
Founding members get the founding price, first access to mentor selection, and a few quiet perks reserved for the people who showed up before the doors opened. The wait list is how you become one.
We'll send you the keys when it's time. Until then, expect a note from the drawing room every other Sunday. Some about craft. Some about the room we're building next. None of them written by a machine.