Goodreads asked John Everett Branch Jr.:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

John Everett Branch Jr. There’s more than one kind of mystery. In a sense, other people are a mystery. Why is X the way she is? Why did Y, during a certain period of his life, do the things he did? In a related sense, I’m a mystery to myself. How much of my character was shaped by genetics and how much by circumstance, accident, habits of thought and behavior I fell into? But answers to most of these questions wouldn’t lead to a good mystery plot. A question whose answer might pay off in that regard happens to occupy part of my mind these days. After he finished college in Texas, where he and I grew up, a friend of mine ended up moving to Mexico, where he had various adventures that I know little about, one of which was fatal. As I put it in a recent blog post, “Before he was (apparently) murdered by a vengeful former lover who was (apparently) a member of a crime family, he wrote a science-fiction novel.” How did these things come about?

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