Lea Wait's Blog, page 94

In the Beginning

John Clark playing with beginnings. I’m aware that many writers I know, or follow through online blogs are feeling the funk of an extended pandemic. I have no such problem, at least in terms of short stories. I’m particularly pleased with the two I’ll enter in the New England Crime anthology and Al Blanchard contests.

My compatriots in the pool asked me the other day when I was going to write them into a story, so I created character sketches of two of them last weekend. It will be interesting to see how those are received. That got me thinking this morning about what to write about for my January post at MCW. Below are ten possible beginnings to short stories. Which, if any pique your interest?

1-Sarah Tonin made everyone around her feel good. Her twin sister Mella, tended to put her dates to sleep and was so desperate to snag a boyfriend, she forced Sarah to issue an edict. Want to go out with me? Set up a date for my sister. Jube Pinkham was so enamored with Sarah, he realized it was time to call in a favor. He gulped, then picked up the phone.

2-Pastor Herb Biggins was feeling at the top of his game, a sense reinforced by the amount of cash and number of pledge envelopes being dropped in the collection plates that morning. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. He’d just set foot outside the front door to shake hands when a commotion in the parking lot caught his eye. Someone had broken the lock on his Cadillac and stuffed it with naked mannequins before painting ‘Repent’ and ‘Confess’ in bright red letters on the side.

3-Our farm was posted as ‘Hunting by Permission Only,’ but we never turned anyone away except for Earl Norwich. After the way he’d butchered Gramp’s woodlot, the bastard was unwelcome. That was why coming over the knoll and finding him standing with a rifle in his hand and a look of horror on his face was unexpected, but not as shocking as the huge and very dead creature at his feet.

4-My head hurt like hell and there was an unpleasant coppery smell drifting up from wet spots under my butt. I was confined in a space that made moving next to impossible, but there was a faint air flow, so I knew I wouldn’t smother. I tried to remember where I’d been and with whom, but the pounding in my head made thinking too difficult. I held my breath, straining to hear. There were faint noises, more like what I heard in the background of big city crime shows on TV, and definitely not any from small town Maine.

5-Fern Griffith was a most meticulous fellow, perhaps the best such example in East Mapleton. Even at seventy-five, his blueberry raking crew was the one everyone wanted to be on, even teens with attitudes. The crew had started working a new field that morning, one hillier than most, hence Fern’s making certain everyone got on the bus at quitting time. He counted, then climbed onto the bus and re-counted. He was three rakers short.

“Stay put, I’ll be right back.” He climbed down from the bus and started up the hill. When he got to the top, none of the three were in sight, but there was a depression just outside the stone wall and tendrils of smoke were drifting up from it.

6-What kind of person kicks their kid out during the worst blizzard in a decade? I wondered, but already knew the answer as I staggered along the edge of Route 27, leaning into a twenty-plus mile an hour wind spitting flesh-biting ice particles. My parents were religious zealots and I’d made the mistake of yawning during grace at the dinner table. It wasn’t my first sin, but in their eyes it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So here I was staggering along getting closer to frostbite with each step.

I never heard the snowplow coming up behind me and I doubted the driver even knew I was there, but the impact of flying snow, followed by the steel plow, shot me up and over the guardrail.

When I came to, pain masked the change in temperature. When I realized how hot it was, I muttered the first thing that came to mind. “Well, Dorothy, I guess neither of us is in Kansas any more.”

Then a melodic voice responded, “Who’s Dorothy?”

7-Clard Briggs was a hard man, more than halfway through a hard life, living in a hardscrabble Maine town. He got up every morning, knowing life was unfair, but that he’d survive to watch depressing events in other parts of the world unfold on Fox News that evening. That things might change never entered his mind until he was thrown from his bed one Saturday in early March by the mother of all explosions.

8-The Emma Clarice was considered a myth by most people living near the Narraguagus River. If it was real, folks said, the wreck would have been located by now, especially since treasure hunters had high tech metal detectors and drones. I might only be sixteen, but I knew something about the river nobody else did.

9-Washington County was my favorite part of Maine. Whenever I got a consultation request from one of the libraries Downeast, I accepted the offer immediately. Driving the Airline was quick and easy with minimal traffic. Every time I went that way, I passed Dark Mountain Road, but never saw cars entering or leaving it. This trip, I finished early and decided to explore it, but when I checked my DeLorme Atlas to see whether it led to a road bringing me back to the Airline, the road wasn’t there. Now I had to see where it led.

10-I remember it like it was yesterday instead of ten years ago. I was caring for my granddaughter so her parents could have an evening out. I came down to start supper and found her looking into the back yard where light snow was falling.

“I am the daughter who likes winter, dark winter,” she said, never turning to look at me. Two days later, she vanished.

Introducing Crime Writer Clea Simon

From time to time, we introduce you to other crime writers whose work might interest you. Usually Maine writers. Sometimes writers whose work we’ve read and enjoy. Today’s interview is with Clea Simon, whose latest book is Hold Me Down. Some lucky reader who leaves a comment will win a copy of the book.

Give us a little background, please.

I have written stories for as long as I can remember, since I learned how to write. (My mother saved one of my favorites, concerning a frog prince, in which I still didn’t quite have the correct alignment of letters down.) In high school and college, I found an outlet in school newspapers and literary journals. I ended up in journalism because it was an actual job that involved writing, and because as an arts journalist I could write about music, my other big interest.

 

You started out as a journalist, so how did you become a mystery writer?

I credit the late Kate Mattes of Kate’s Mystery Books. You remember, I’m sure, that she would have these great holiday parties. By 2002 or so, she and I knew each other fairly well – I was a regular customer, and we’d often talk books. That winter, my third nonfiction book, The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats (St. Martin’s) had just come out, and she asked if I wanted to sign at the holiday party. I pointed out that Feline wasn’t a mystery, and she responded, “You do realize there’s a huge overlap between women who love cats and mystery readers, right?” Well, of course I did – and she stocked my book and I signed copies and we all drank a fair amount of wine. And at the end of the night, when we were cleaning up, she said, “Clea, you should write a mystery.”  I started what would become Mew Is for Murder (Poisoned Pen) the next day.

In retrospect, I realized that when writing nonfiction, I felt like my writing was a useful vehicle for conveying information. Ultimately, it was the information that was important. To write fiction I had to accept that my writing alone had value. Kate gave me permission to believe that.

It seems like you’ve written in many corners of the big genre tent. Why is that?

A writer’s desk

To some extent, I’d say my various books spring from various moods; sometimes I’m feeling cozy. Sometimes not. Beyond that, different stories want to be told in different ways, and I am always grateful when a new story comes to mind.

Looking at your body of work, it appears that you write books both dark and light. Is that a challenge for you? Do you alternate between dark and light or just write the stories that come to you?

I’d love to alternate between dark and light, but it’s really just as things come to me. I’ve done some odd hybrids too – like my Blackie and Care series (three books) came to mind as a Holmes pastiche, but it turned into a dark futuristic feline fantasy. Go figure!

Readers are always curious about a writer’s process. So what’s yours? Pantser? Plotter? Do you write every day (or almost every day) or do you wait for the muse to appear and inspire you? Do you have a picture of your office/workspace you could share?

I start with a basic concept that may be as simple as a conflict I want to explore, or I may have an idea about the ending, but then I just go from there – so basically I’m a pantser. The pandemic has thrown me, and I always take some time off to do promotion, but now I’m back to my daily word count. For me, at this point in the process, that means going for 1,000 words a day, Monday through Friday.

  Where are your books set?

It depends on the book! Hold Me Down is set in Boston, in the rock clubs of the ‘80s and ‘90s and today, A Cat on the Case is set in Cambridge. So, yeah, most are local to Massachusetts, though the Blackie and Cares are set in a futuristic ruined coastal city that may have been Boston but is never named.

Along with dark psychological mysteries, you write cozies with cats. So tell us a little about writing with cats? Do you have cats? Do your cats help with inspiration? Do you also write dark books with cats?

My husband Jon and I have one cat at a time. Currently, we cohabit with Thisbe, a tortoiseshell rescue from West Virginia. She has a mind of her own and keeps us on our toes. I find cats both calming and inspiring. They’re so intense! What is going on in those little heads? And, yes, my Blackie and Care series – The Ninth Life, As Black as My Fur, and Cross My Path (Severn House) – are all rather dark. These are narrated by a feral black cat who watches over a homeless teen, Care.

  Over the years, we’ve talked a bit about the book we love that we can’t get published.

Thisbe the Cat

Mine is called Teach Her a Lesson. Is Hold Me Down that book for you? How does it feel to finally have it in print?

Absolutely wonderful! In retrospect, the years that I spent wit Hold Me Down before Polis published it this last October really allowed me to polish it. I’m extremely proud of it and, perhaps for the first time, I can say that this is exactly the book I wanted it to be.

You began as a reporter writing about the rock music scene. Your latest, Hold Me Down, is a return to that world. Tell us a little about the book and then what it was like to be back in that world while you were writing. It must have been a fascinating journey.

It was! I came of age in the Boston post-punk club scene, as a fan, a musician, and ultimately as a music critic, a role that gave me some standing and purpose in what was essentially a self-contained subculture. I loved that time, and there is still something that music evokes in me that I can’t necessarily articulate. That’s always the challenge of writing about music, isn’t it? But that’s what I love wrestling with – that and the various personalities who all came together in that scene.

Hold Me Down is, in some ways, a return to the world (and the style) of my 2017 psychological suspense World Enough (Severn in that it also deals with a woman whose youth was spent in the Boston rock scene, which shaped her in unusual ways. World Enough is centered on the fallibility of memory and the seduction of nostalgia. Hold Me Down expands on those themes to explore how events can alter our life’s course. In Hold Me Down, I also got to explore the complexity of relationships (with partners, bandmates, and families of choice) and how everything from love to trauma to decisions about family and parenting play out.

What is one interview question you’ve always wanted to be asked but never are?

Hmm…. How about what writers would I love to have dinner with? That would allow me to bring up some favorites, like J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. LeGuin (both of whom would magically come back to life) and Hilary Mantel (who was about to come to the US for a book tour – which she never does! – before COVID hit!! Damn!!), rounded out by Donna Leon, whose general erudition – especially about opera – would really add something. I’m a bit of a foodie, so you know I’d go all out for this dinner! No idea what I’d make, except that it would involve multiple courses, and I suspect I’d keep fussing with the dishes because I’d be a bit intimidated and just want to listen to them all talk.

What would you like to add?

Just that I’d like to encourage people to try something new. Try a book that seems slow at first and let it grab you. Those are the best! That and thanks for having me, Kate.

A former journalist, Clea Simon is the Boston Globe-bestselling author of three nonfiction books and 29 mysteries. including the new psychological suspenseHOLD ME DOWN.  While most of these (like A Cat on the Case) are cat “cozies” or amateur sleuth, she also writes darker crime fiction, like the rock and roll mystery World Enough, named a “must read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards. Her new psychological suspense Hold Me Down (Polis Books) returns to the music world, with themes of PTSD and recovery, as well as love in all its forms. Clea lives in Somerville with her husband Jon and their cat Thisbe. She can be reached at www.cleasimon.com, on Twitter @Clea_Simon and on Instagram @cleasimon_author

 

 

 

 

The Guy On The Train, Part Two

Last blog post I detailed my adventures on Boston’s MBTA. Today I’ll talk about my train adventures inside the U.S.

My first real train ride occurred when I was in college in the mid-eighties. A friend and I decided to travel to New York City to visit the museums and take in all the culture. I’d never been to New York City and was excited about it.

We made our way to South Station and boarded the train to The Big Apple. Despite all the subway trains I’d taken, this was an entirely new experience. The seats were bigger and more comfortable. We talked and read and stared out at the passing landscape, excited about the big adventure we were to embark on. A good deal of the journey took place along the water.

We arrived to the station and made our way up to the street level. My first introduction to New York City made quite an impression on me. A sniffling, coughing prostitute, carrying a small infant immediately propositioned me. We made quickly past her and out onto the street. The size and scope of the city awed me. We made our way to the museums and I was especially taken with the Museum of Modern Art. Then we ended our day at McSorley’s, NYC’s oldest brewery and pub. They served two kinds of beers: a dark and a golden.

My most adventurous train journey took place in September of 2001. I was living in Seattle with my wife and two young children, but we were preparing to move to Maine. I took the train from Seattle to Portland, hoping to find a home for us to live. And what a journey it was. The trip was two legs. The first leg from Seattle to Chicago was called The Empire Builder. Much of the time I sat reading in the view car, which was domed with glass. We passed through the mountains of Idaho and Montana and then cruised through the desolate plains. I didn’t get a sleeper, instead drifting off at night in my reclined seat. In the morning I had my coffee and breakfast in the view car, watching the sun come up and staring at the passing landscape, the sound of wheels over track lulling me into a state of relaxation. Then from Chicago we chugged toward Maine until we arrived in Portland.

I spent days in Portland searching for houses with my brother. Fortunately, he owned a car and was able to drive me around. While viewing one house we heard some disturbing news about an attack on The World Trade Center. We turned on the TV and saw the horror taking place in New York City. Searching for houses while knowing our country was under attack was quite unsettling. But once I did find a house the next day, I headed back to the train station to return home. My wife was upset and we kept in contact, filling each other in.

Train travel was near impossible after 9/11. Everyone wanted to travel by train on account that all air travel had been canceled. Fortunately, I had already pre-purchased my return ticket and had a reserved seat. But many travelers were stranded. The train was packed to the gills, unlike when I journeyed to Portland from Seattle. I made it home and embraced my family, grateful to have arrived home safely.

These were memorable train trips that I’ll not soon forget.

DEATH OF MARY BEAN (Not at the Bean Factory)

Jule Selbo, January 2022

The window next to my writing desk looks out over Back Cove and the B&M Bean Factory (at 1 Beanpot Circle in Portland). The rambling, multi-storied, old construction plant just looks like a fine place for a murder. I’ve wondered if there has ever been one there.

One day I spent a few hours researching. Not deep digging, but time-consuming enough to keep me from the work I should have been doing because one Google path took me to other paths and those took me to other paths …

But – did I find a report on some dastardly true crime event at the Bean Factory?

Maine Yacht Center Marina is near the old factory. When very wealthy friends visited us three years ago, they moored their Hinckley Picnic Boat at the Marina’s dock and used it to get to their 100-foot Swan (and waiting crew) which was moored in deeper water nearby (so the surroundings do have some ritzy elements). Didn’t find any reports of murder at the Yacht Center.

It’s easy to kayak in the Back Cove (at high tide). You can pass by the Bean Factory, head under I-295 and maybe hop out at Hannafords, grab a cold beer. Fishermen are in the summer waters, if they’re lucky they’ll pull out a few striped bass or yellow perch. Recently, there haven’t been any dead bodies found in the Back Cove. Has there even been one?

The Roux Institute (connected to Boston’s Northeastern University) has bought 100+ year old building, it’s supposed to be a new campus and its educational offerings will concentrate on studies of Artificial Intelligence and other state-of-the-art technologies (that’s what the newspapers report). An elected member of Maine’s House of Representatives hopes that the university and Portland can work together to restore the defunct railroad bridge (train cars used to haul cans of baked beans across it) and make it viable again – for something.  So many possibilities for mayhem, but I failed to unearth any gruesome crime/murder/intentional maiming or even spectacular tale of betrayal in (or near) B&M Bean Factory’s history.  I did learn a few things: George Burnham and Charles Morrill started the company around 1867, its first Portland home was at 13 Franklin Street. They designed and had built the massive, state-of-the-art place onthe Back Cove in 1913. B&M, at the outset, also canned fish and meat products, but when the new factory was built, they decided to concentrate solely on producing and canning brick-oven baked beans.

I found out that the pea beans, flavored with molasses and spices, were cooked in 200 pound iron pots, each held up to 900 pounds of beans. Surely that was big enough to cook a body. In the early decades of 1900s, the windows were small, there were no fans and temperatures could get up to 100 degrees inside the factory. Heatstroke could’ve done someone in. Or someone could’ve gone to the roof for a bit of fresh air and been tossed into Back Cove. There’s a possibility that a body could have been squished under a cart or severed by the wheels of moving train car carrying beans to faraway locations? A tooth or finger (other companies have been dinged for this) found in the can? Someone, at midnight, held hostage by a maniac, could’ve perished after being force-fed beans and died a bloated-farty death?

But my research came up with nothing. And now, the chances of the place being the site of future mayhem has diminished. The factory officially closed at the end of the 2021 summer. At that time, there were only 86 employees left on payroll.

However, my time on the internet was not for naught. I did find a “Mary Bean” murder in Saco, Maine, in 1840. It was in the world of textile mills, not a bean factory.  Mid 19th century was the Industrial Age; young women were leaving their familial homes to take solid steps towards self-sufficient life. (A textile carder would work a 12-hour shift and earn a whopping $3; a weaver could make slightly more.)  Many of the factories had boardinghouses where young women could live (for a cut of their wages), as long as they agreed to strict curfews and non-fraternization with the opposite sex.

A young woman in 1849, using the alias Mary Bean, had become pregnant with a machine operator named William (who didn’t seem to be able to hold onto one job for very long and was not keen on marriage). She was facing a future of shame and hardship. Abortions were not exactly legal at this time, but there were circumstances where the legality was fuzzy (at least, it seems to be so, until 1857). There were at least two kinds of trained doctors practicing at this time; one focused on botanical cures, the other concentrated on allopathic medicine (allopathic favors aggressive purgatives and bleeding, use of leeches and blistering to bring about healing). Mary Bean and William consulted a botanist MD – an herbal remedy was prescribed, one that was often used in successful terminations. However, the herbs did not bring an end to Mary’s pregnancy. The botanist MD attempted a surgical solution – it proved to be butcherous, bloody and fatal. (Anesthesia was getting some attention in 1846, but it was not widely available and Mary did not get any.) To cover up his actions, the doctor tied Mary’s dead body to a board, placed her in the Saco River and hoped all evidence would float away.

Mary’s death remained a mystery for only a short while. The board carrying her body became wedged on rocks and discovered. Her sister because the town’s amateur sleuth, put clues together, eventually found out about William’s culpability, as well as Mary’s belongings in the botanist MD’s lodgings. The doctor was convicted of second-degree murder and was sent to Maine State Prison. (He was released a short time later – something about conflicts between statutory law and common law – when abortion laws were being re-examined). The American Medical Association, in the 1850s, used this case and others to revise the country’s standing abortion laws.

A book was written about the case: Mary Bean or the Mysterious Murder (1851). The book is supposed to be more a cautionary tale than a mystery, focusing on reminding young women to shun the attentions of the opposite sex prior to marriage and “leave your family home at your own peril”. (A copy of the book may be in the holdings of the New Hampshire Historical Society but so far, I can’t track it down.) Elizabeth DeWolfe has also written an account of Mary Bean’s tragic fate and the trial of the doctor and how sensational it was for its time: The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories.

All this looking into the past has left me, basically, with two simple questions:

Has Maine’s B&M Bean Factory ever been used as a location in a crime novel?What are other creative ways for a victim to expire around beans, heat, vats, molasses and more….

Just wondering.

 

Weekend Update: January 8-9, 2022

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Jule Selbo (Monday), Joe Souza (Tuesday), John Clark (Thursday) and Vaughn Hardacker (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

from Kathy Lynn Emerson: I’ve just launched an updated edition of my 2008 Agatha-award-winning How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries. It’s e-book only at Apple, B&N, Kobo, and elsewhere. Amazon, unfortunately, won’t list it as long as the older Kindle edition is still available and even though that one is officially out of print and all rights have been returned to me, the darned thing is still up. If someone buys that one, at a much higher price, I won’t even receive royalties for it, but convincing Amazon of this looks to be a long, drawn out process. Anyway, for those who aren’t limited to buying e-books from Amazon, the new version is a real bargain at $4.99. Marv Lachman, reviewing the original in Deadly Pleasures, described it as “the best book about writing mysteries that I have ever read.” Most of my updating is in the sections on self-publishing and marketing, where there have been massive changes in the industry since 2008. All the good stuff is the same.

Kate Flora: The winners of the second Joe Burgess police procedural, The Angel of Knowlton Park, are Kay Garrett and Marge Schwietering. Please send your snail mail address to: writingaboutcrime@gmail.com so I can mail your copies.

If you are a New England crime story writer, you might be interested in this call for submissions:

Submissions to Deadly Nightshade: Best New England Crime Stories 2022 open on January 1, 2022. We will announce the stories selected and notify the authors in June 2022. Submission guidelines are here: https://necrimestories.wixsite.com/my-site/submission-guidelines

Today, we have a question for you:

Should Maine Crime Writers have another “Where Would You Put The Body?” contest this year? If you think we should, we’d love your suggestions about how to publicize it.

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

 And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

Home Economics

It’s a new year, and one has to confront reality, unpleasant as it may be. I keep seeing a meme on Facebook: “Who knew that the hardest part of being an adult is figuring out what to cook every night for supper for the rest of your life until you die.” Now, I happen to think some adult things are much harder—finishing books, for one. But I confess I have mostly lost interest in cooking.

When I began to write “for real,” some adjustments were made. I was still working, and woke up between 4 and 5 to get some words in before I left the house. I wrote when I got home, too, so I stopped watching TV. I’ve never seen an episode of Law and Order or Bones or Murder, She Wrote, which might have been helpful in the grand scheme of things.

Inspired after watching the Food Network for years, my husband decided he’d free up even more time for me. He’d earned money in college working at a pizza place, so he wasn’t a total kitchen virgin. His meatballs and chili were already legendary, but his repertoire expanded significantly. As I sat staring at a blank computer screen, he whipped up all sorts of deliciously edible things, occasionally shouting “Bam!” as he went along.

I did have one cooking caveat, though—the holidays were mine. I would juggle the turkey and the ham, stir the gravy, mash the potatoes. Make the gluten-free and gluten-full stuffing. But something happened this Thanksgiving. Everything was under control, until it wasn’t. I blame the baked sweet potatoes (which nobody asked for anyway) that were rock-hard despite spending time both in the microwave and the oven.

A bunch of people were standing around the kitchen talking and drinking and laughing and I wanted to hit them with frying pans. Those poor people—some of my most beloved family members—had offered to help, but I’d been too stubborn to let them. They were having fun. And I was not.

I was hot. I was tired. I’d been on my feet too long. I threw everyone out of the room except my oldest daughter and her delightful husband, a former pub owner, who drains heavy pots, carves, and consults with me over questionably cooked meat. My husband was too afraid to enter, which showed great perspicacity.

Everything was delicious (except for the sweet potatoes, which got another ride in the microwave the next day), but I realized I would have been just as happy with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Which made me think about the research I’ve done writing 1920s-era cozy mysteries. One always wants to add the appropriate historical flavor (pun intended), so I’ve looked at old menus and vintage cookbooks to see what my characters might have been eating if they were actually alive. (See below. I think someone does not understand the word “simple,” though.)

It turns out that the 1920s were a veritable golden age of food discoveries and advances. They’d finally got rid of the lead solder in cans, so tinned goods were more popular than ever (and didn’t poison you). Jello was everywhere and jiggled everything within from fruit to vegetables to cheese. Kitchens now had electricity, which meant refrigerators instead of iceboxes. Foods could be kept longer, or even frozen.

Enter Clarence Birdseye. During a hunting trip to Canada, he observed Inuits flash freezing their catch, and in 1922 offered his own frozen fish to the masses. His methods must have worked, since in he sold his company and patents for $22 million dollars in 1929! That’s a lot of ice.

Wonderbread is now 100 years old, although it wasn’t sold sliced for a while. In order for me to make that Thanksgiving PB & J sandwich, I’d have to wait until near the end of the decade though—Peter Pan Peanut Butter came into being in 1928, even if Welch’s Grape Jelly debuted in 1923.

Other familiar brands of the decade were Popsicles (1924), Hostess Cakes (1927), and Kool-Aid (1927). The Easter Bunny wouldn’t be hopping without Cadbury’s Crème Eggs (1923).  Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Charleston Chews, Baby Ruths, Milk Duds, and Butterfingers all found their way into candy stores, much to dentists’ delight. (My advice: life is short. Indulge that sweet tooth and eat dessert first. Get dental insurance.)

I’m hanging up my holiday apron. At our Christmas celebration, we did a potluck-ish thing. There was less stress, less mess, and the urge for frying pans was minimal. I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions since I so rarely follow through. But I’m contemplating returning to the battlefield every now and then, where I once made homemade jam, cakes from scratch, and a mean meatloaf. I canned, I pickled, I blanched, I froze—heck, I was a veritable Fannie Farmer in my salad days. It’s time to give my husband a break and find out how to set the kitchen timer.

Here are some sample dinner party menus from Mrs. Allen on Cooking, Menus, Service, published in 1924. Which would you serve? I love the fact they all have multiple desserts, but it’s a safe bet I’m not doing the jellied tongue. Maybe I’ll pick Chicken a la King and Charleston around the kitchen!

#1

Hot or Jellied Consomme, Bread Sticks

Chicken a la King

Cream Cheese Sandwiches, Brown Bread Sandwiches

Olives, Salted Nuts, Candied Ginger

Nuts and Date Salad Mayonnaise

Strawberry Bavarian Cream, Little Pound Cakes, Russian Wafers

Coffee

#2

Chicken Broth, Whipped Cream Rolls

Crabmeat Croquettes, Peas, Brown Bread-and-Butter Sandwiches

Jellied Tomato and Pimiento Salad, Olives, Celery Hearts

Nesselrode Pudding, Macaroons

Coffee

#3

Fruit Cocktail or Strawberries in Halves of Melons

Jellied Tongue, Harlequin Salad

Buttered Baking-Powder Biscuits

Olives, Salted Nuts

Biscuit Tortoni, Angel Cake Squares, Bonbons

Iced Coffee

Bon appetit!

 

The Stack

Here it is folks, my Christmas Stack.

My family and friends know what I like, and bless them, they come through year after year. I received a boodle of wonderful books this holiday season, perfect timing because with Covid surging again, I’ll likely be sticking close to home for the next month or so.

Midnight Hour is an anthology of twenty original stories by crime authors of color, including by legend-in-our time Frankie Y. Bailey, the marvelous Tracy Clark, David Heska Wanbli Weiden (whose 2020 novel Winter Counts was one of my top reads last year), Delia Pitts (author of the terrific Ross Agency Mystery Series), the ever-talented Gigi Pandian and my pal E.A. Aymar, among others. I need an entire day with no commitments to inhale this collection of short stories. Published by Crooked Lane and edited by Abby L. Vandiver, you can find it in local bookshops or here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673674/midnight-hour-by-abby-l-vandiver/

S.A. Cosby is the author of 2021’s runaway bestseller Razorblade Tears, one of  the most powerful books I’ve read in a loooong time. Last year he somehow also found time to edit Under The Thumb, an anthology of stories about police oppression. Featured writers include some I read regularly (New Hampshire friend Zakariah Johnson, short story master Joseph S. Walker, the always stunning Hilary Davidson) and others whose work I look forward to reading for the first time. The topic is worthy of close examination and I’m eager to see how the various authors address it. Order Under The Thumb from your favorite bookseller or find it here: https://www.rockandahardplacemag.com/under-the-thumb-stories-of-police-oppression

 

Dharma Kelleher’s Chaser is the first in her Jinx Ballou series featuring a transgender bounty hunter in Phoenix who co-splays Wonder Woman on the side. Jinx is smart, she’s fearless and she’s very cool. I took part in a virtual reading with Dharma in 2021 and have been a fan ever since. She has an incredible work ethic and talent to spare. For more info about Dharma and her books, go here: https://dharmakelleher.com/

If you’ve not seen Whitstable Pearl on Acorn TV you’re missing something special. Set in a small North Sea town not unlike places we know in Downeast Maine, the show is based on a series of cozy mysteries written by Julie Wassmer.  The protagonist, named Pearl, is a single mother who runs a restaurant and bar. As a sideline, she works as a private detective in a town where she knows everyone and everyone knows not only her, but her family secrets.  I usually read a book before I watch a film or video treatment of the material, but we bumped into WP last year when searching for comfort shows, and I got hooked.  FMI about the series, go here: https://greatbritishbookclub.com/all-of-julie-wassmers-whitstable-pearl-mystery-books-in-order/ For more about the Acorn videos inspired by the books, go here: https://acorn.tv/whitstablepearl/

I’m a big fan of Thomas Perry, especially his Jane Whitefield books about a Seneca woman who helps people whose lives depend on their ability to disappear. I’m so happy to have found both The Left-Handed Twin and Vanishing Act under the tree and cannot wait to dive in. I find his books unputdownable, so this will be a weekend’s worth of Thomas Perry immersion for me.

Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club lit me up last year. A fresh take on crime fiction with voice, voice, voice, it delighted me from the first page to the last. Now I’m keen to read his second in the series,  The Man Who Died Twice, featuring the same cast of characters on a new case. I understand Steven Spielberg is turning the first book into a film, so the whole world soon will become acquainted with Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, the murder club’s creative and hilarious members.

Thomas Perry and Richard Osman’s books likely are stocked at many local bookshops, including, in Portland https://www.printbookstore.com/  https://www.longfellowbooks.com and https://www.letterpress-books.com/ or if you prefer concierge service (mail and sometimes home delivery) on these cold winter days, https://kellysbookstogo.com/.)

New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Kent made her mark with historical fiction (The Heretic’s Daughter, The Traitor’s Wife) before turning her talent to crime writing. The Pledge is the third in her Betty Rhyzyk series featuring a lesbian cop raised in a family of cops in Brooklyn, NY.  She moves to Dallas, where she finds herself something of a fish out of water, but crime is crime and she’s damn good at tackling difficult cases. Betty is vulnerable beneath a hard-edged surface, and her lover has the ability to excavate the cop armor when it threatens Betty’s mental health. I loved the first two books in the series—The Dime and The Burn—and can’t wait for an unscheduled afternoon to immerse myself in another Betty adventure. For more about Kathleen and her books, go here: https://www.kathleenkent.com/

Last but not least, Santa brought me Soup of the Day, indulging my love of cooking and, well, of soup. There’s a suggested soup for each day of the year, meaning the pandemic supper rut we slipped into in 2021 soon will be no more. This weekend I’m planning to make Yellow Split Pea Soup with Ham. Later in January I’ll test the recipes for Sausage and Broccoli Rabe Soup and Smoked Trout Chowder. When February rolls around I’ll try Cheddar-Cauliflower Soup , Thai Squash and Coconut Milk Soup and Classic French Potage. If you’re envious, I’m sure your local bookseller (see list above) can order a copy for you.

In the meantime, picture me curled up in a comfy chair, book in one hand, mug of soup in the other, a big smile on my face.

Enjoy reading through your book stacks, friends. Happy new year!

What did your stack include this holiday season?  Let us know in the comments what books you received as gifts and cannot wait to read. While you’re at it, what’s your favorite soup on a cold winter’s day?

Brenda Buchanan brings years of experience as a journalist and a lawyer to her crime fiction. She has published three books featuring Joe Gale, a newspaper reporter who covers the crime and courts beat. Her short story, Means, Motive and Opportunity, was included in the 2021 anthology Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stores. FMI, go to http://brendabuchananwrites.com

 

It’s Win a Book Wednesday, Friends!

Kate Flora: I confess, I had great plans for today’s giveaway. I had a hot new book—not one of mine—that I know you all want to own. Well, somehow or other, the whole day yesterday got away, dark fell, and my most stellar accomplishments for the day were to walk five miles and to take the decorations off the Christmas tree.

Guess you’ll have to tune in again next week and see what this week’s book was going to be.

But instead, today’s book giveaway is a copy of my second Joe Burgess police procedural, The Angel of Knowlton Park. When I started the Burgess series, my plan was for a quartet. Four Maine seasons. Four books. Book one, Playing God, takes place during an icy Maine February; book two during a stifling hot July. Book three, Redemption, takes place in October, and book four, And Grant You Peace, is set in the spring. Four books and I was done. But both I and my readers ended up wanting more Joe Burgess, which is why the series continued with Led Astray, A Child Shall Lead Them, and most recently, A World of Deceit.

 I sat down on January 2nd several years ago with an idea for a Burgess book in my mind. Reacting to comments people had made at book events, in particular the comment, “I’ve always wanted to write a book and when I have a free weekend, I’m going to,” I decided to see how fast I could write a book. It didn’t take a weekend, that’s for sure. But after four and a half insanely intense months, I typed “The End” on Playing God. It was a hundred pages too long and I was exhausted.

The Joe Burgess series begins with Playing God

But a funny thing happened when I stopped that period of intense writing. I was lonely. I was bereft. I’d spent all my waking time with Joe Burgess, Terry Kyle, and Stan Perry, and I missed them. I felt like my best friends had abandoned me. The only cure for my condition was to write the second Burgess book. I wrote The Angel at a more reasonable pace, a respectable nine months. In the course of writing the story of a small boy from an indifferent family, ignored by social services, and left to fend for himself, I came to care deeply both for the victim and for the police officers who worked so hard to get justice for victims like him.

I also learned a truth that went against some advice I’d been given. The advice? If something in your book makes you cry, take it out. I believe if something in the book makes me cry, especially if it makes me cry on the third or fourth reading, it’s because I’ve touched on something authentic and moving.

It continues to fascinate me how series characters develop, often seeming to do it without input from the writer, as though they want to go their own way and our job is to follow and write it down. So it’s always an adventure when I start a new book and get to see what Burgess and Kyle and Perry are up to, and what their jobs will throw at them next.

So, as my late mother-in-law used to say, “That’s the story.”

If you aren’t today’s lucky winner, of a hardcover copy you can still read the book on your e-reader for less than the cost of a Starbuck’s coffee. https://www.amazon.com/Angel-Knowlton-Park-Burgess-Mystery-ebook/dp/B07QMF99FH/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1N6HVUNG81GO8&keywords=The+Angel+of+Knowlton+Park&qid=1641341419&sprefix=the+angel+of+knowlton+park%2Caps%2C103&sr=8-1

As soon as the next Thea Kozak mystery, Death Sends a Message, is done, I’ll be back with Burgess and his team to explore their next adventure.

Remember: to win a book, you have to leave a comment…

You’ve Always Wanted to Write, But . . .

Kate Flora: It’s January, the time of resolutions, resolves, soul-searching, and some impatience to start forming new habits, like writing that novel or story that’s been lingering in the imagination, and to break those bad habits that keep us from the writing desk. Right? So for years, before full-time writing swallowed me up, I used to teach a class called “I’ve Always Wanted to Write, But . . .” The idea for the class came from my own experience with college writing classes, plus the stories of many people who told me about their own horrible and discouraging experiences writing in graded classes with unkind, unsupportive, or downright cruel instructors. (I encountered another one of these in my MFA program. Sadly, they are everywhere.)

My goal, in teaching the class, was to stick bandages on aspiring writers’ wounds and encourage them again to follow their writing dreams and to begin to develop a writing practice. I’ve had several students who have taken so many writing classes filling their heads with do’s and don’ts that they can’t sit down and write at all. They’ve never been encouraged to first spend some time discovering themselves as writers—what works, what doesn’t, what their own ideas are, what their writing practice might be.

Part of the class is simply getting writers to focus on their process. If there is a weekly writing assignment, how do they approach it? Are they cookers, who carry the work around in their heads, working it until they’re ready to write it down? Are they revisers who like to write a draft and then tinker with it over the course of several days? Have they carried the habit from their school years of putting things off until the last minute?

Another thing we focus on is encouraging writers to believe that they have the right to write, that if they want to be writers, they have to take that passion for writing seriously and give it, wherever possible, dedicated time. For an unpublished writer, learning to honor the desire to write can be hard. Hard to defend that time against family, against daily chores, against friends who want them to come out and play. One important question here is where they write. Do they have a designated space for writing, preferably one that has a door that can be closed? One of my handouts during the class is a sign which reads: Not Now, I’m Writing. I tell them that only they will know whether the sign goes on the outside of the door to keep people away or on the inside of the door to keep them at their desks.

Another thing I work on with my students is tuning up their sense of observation. I ask them to carry a small notebook or index cards and write down things they see to share with the class. If a student comes into class and says the notebook is empty because nothing happened, I ask if they use earbuds or headphones as they travel through the world. This is important, because as writers, we should be constantly collecting material. Sometimes that material may be shadows or the weather, or a fragment of conversation, or someone wearing something unusual that can be used in a story.

Those found bits can be stored in a file and may only become useful a long time from now, but they have been seen, and that seeing encourages more seeing. Another thing I tell my students in that while their mothers may have told them to mind their own business, being a writer is a license to be nosy. We have to observe our world and wonder about it. “What’s that about?” is a fundamental writerly question.

Years ago, I was teaching at a writer’s seminar down on Cape Cod, and during a nightly stroll, in an otherwise dark area, I passed a lighted phone booth. The door was open and the person on the phone was saying, “You don’t have to cry about it.”

I’m still waiting for the right moment to use it in a story, but it is stored away, along with “the church where nobody prays anymore.”

The world is out there, full of stories, waiting for us to notice them and use them. And if we want to be writers, if we want to realize that dream, we have to believe in our right to write, make space for our writing, and tune up our awareness.

New Year Rituals

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. In 2019, for my first post of the new year, I wrote a blog titled “Taking Stock” to share the way I spend every January first. The ritual hasn’t changed, but some of the results certainly have.

My habit is to go over the records I’ve kept during the previous year while watching the Rose Parade. I tally business income and expenses for the year and record a few additional totals, such as how many books I read during the year—169 for 2021 (previous totals have been around 120). This time around, none were for research. All were for pleasure and a great many of them were comfort rereads. I reread a couple of series in order, including #3-52 of J. D. Robb’s In Death books. I listened to #1 and #2 as audiobooks at the end of 2020 and I’m reading #53 now. #54 comes out in February.

How did I have time for all that reading? Easy. I wasn’t writing.

As in 2019, the financial numbers told me I earned far less than I once did through my writing. In fact, My “business” is going to lose money, tax-wise, when April 15 comes around. In part, that’s because I invested a fair amount of cash in 2021 in bringing out self-published titles. Paying for professional cover design was a major expense. I also used the services of a professional editor for I Kill People for a Living and The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries. Money well spent, but it ate up a lot of my income from previous publications. So did the purchase of a new iPad.

Word to the wise for all you fledgling writers out there: unless you are lucky enough to hit bestseller lists, and even then, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to “live on your royalties” once you stop selling new novels. It’s a nice dream, but in reality that income isn’t likely to provide more than the proverbial “pin money” in your retirement.

Back at the start of 2019, I’d just sent my editor the manuscript of A View to a Kilt (the last Liss MacCrimmon mystery, although I didn’t yet know that) and I was about halfway through the very rough draft of the third Deadly Edits mystery, A Fatal Fiction. I wrote one more in that series (in 2019-20; published as Murder, She Edited in 2021), but by the end of 2019 I had seen the writing on the wall as far as more contracts with a traditional publisher were concerned and was actively working on the first book I intended to self publish, The Life of a Plodder.

In 2020, I self published updated editions of several previously published children’s books and original editions of two more that I wrote years ago. By this time last year, I had started to appreciate the independence of independent publishing.

One thing has definitely changed. In that 2019 blog I wrote: “I can’t not write. The ideas keep coming. Characters demand their voices. Plot twists beg to be explored. What I take away from this annual exercise is that I’m still hanging in there as a working midlist author. As long as people keep reading my books, I’ll keep writing them.”

By 2021, the only original writing I was doing consisted of these posts, one short story, and one novella. The last two were taken in large part from a failed book proposal, so while I finally finished them both in 2021, most of the creativity took place pre-2020.

So why do I spend the first day of the new year on statistics, aside from knowing I’ll eventually need most of those numbers in order to file my income tax? It gives me a sense of how much (or how little) I’ve accomplished and what my goals ought to be for the new year. And it forces me to take a hard look at whether I’m satisfied with the status quo.

Odd as it seems, even to me, after producing seventy-plus books in the course of the last forty-plus years, I am quite content with what I see. We aren’t wealthy, but we have income from Social Security, IRAs, and Sandy’s jigsaw-puzzle-table-making business. We own our house and two vehicles outright and can afford food, utilities, and books. If the IRS eventually decides my writing-related efforts are now a “hobby” (as in no profit for five years in a row) I can live with that.

These days, the song lyric “Don’t worry. Be happy.” makes a lot more sense to me than it once did.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others, including several children’s books. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Her most recent publications are The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries (a collection of three short stories and a novella, written as Kaitlyn) and I Kill People for a Living: A Collection of Essays by a Writer of Cozy Mysteries (written as Kathy). She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com. A third, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women, is the gateway to over 2300 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century Englishwomen.