Edith Maxwell's Blog, page 164

Nancy Drew and Scooby-Doo

by Barb, still at Crime Bake

Yes, that’s right, I’m still at the Crime Bake hotel, even though almost everyone else has packed up and gone home. It feels vaguely like that time in college when you had the very last final on the very last day before the Christmas holidays, and the dorm was empty and a little creepy.

But I’m actually still here for a happy reason. Long before my new granddaughter was born, we had determined that Veteran’s Day weekend was the best possible time for my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, Viola, to come up to meet the new niece/cousin. So we’re staying here for a couple of extra days and traveling to our daughter’s place in Boston to take turns holding the baby. (Infants are like campfires. You can stare at them endlessly.)

Many of you may have heard me bemoan that fact that children don’t read mysteries anymore. Vastly oversimplified, my fear is that while I cut my teeth on Nancy Drew, the twenty and thirty-year-olds in my life grew up reading Redwall and Harry Potter.  Therefore as adults, when they read genre fiction, they tend to read fantasy. Meanwhile, the audience for mysteries grows older and older.

My son and daughter-in-law assure me this is not true, and they cite as evidence Viola’s love for Scooby-Doo. Scoopy-Doo and the gang spend their time solving mysteries, after all.

Viola is a great believer in themes, and a planner of themed birthday parties and Halloween extravaganzas. She involves everyone she can seduce into these enterprises, which explains why, two years ago, I, a hater of Halloween and a hater of costumes, found myself happily wandering around Franklin Park Zoo dressed as the Flora, the red fairy from Sleeping Beauty. (Also, Bill was dressed as Merryweather, the blue fairy, so I really had nothing to complain about.)

[image error]Halloween 2016

Anyway, this year Viola’s theme was Scooby-Doo and as usual, everyone she had access to had to be part of the act.

[image error]Viola’s “other” grandparents, Grammy and Gramps, fulfilling the roles of Shaggy and Fred. Daphne expressing annoyance that the gang isn’t solving the mystery fast enough.

My son Rob points out that Viola can’t even read, but already she is a fan of mysteries. Perhaps there’s hope for the future.

[image error]Readers: How did you get started with mysteries? Nancy Drew? Hardy Boys? Encyclopedia Brown? Scooby-Doo? Leave a comment or just say “hi” to be entered in the giveaway for my latest release, Yule Log Murder, a collection of three novellas by Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis and me. The giveaway is open to readers from anywhere.

Thankful to Our Readers: Week Two Winners

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The winner of Nipped in the Bud is Susan O’Brien. Please email your snail mail address to Sheila@sheilaconnolly.com.

The winner of Murder in an English Village is Deb Price. Deb, please email your snail mail address to jessie@jessiecrocket.com

The winner of Edith’s book is Lee Sauer. Lee, please check out my published books and let me know which you want at edith@edithmaxwell.com, and include your snail mail address, too.

The winner of The Gun Also Rises is Taylor R Williams. Please send your snail mail address to sherryharrisauthor@gmail.com.

The winner of a book and swag from Leigh Perry is Mary C. — Leigh will send you an email!

Good luck to everyone next week!

The Game’s Afoot — Welcome Back Leigh Perry

We are delighted to welcome back Leigh Perry. The Skeleton Makes a Friend, the fifth [image error]book in Leigh Perry’s popular A Family Skeleton Mystery series, just came out! Thanks for taking the time to stop by, Leigh!

I used to be a serious gamer, spending my weekends playing Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs. (That’s D&D and RPGs, for short.) I had stacks of rule books, notebooks filled with character sheets, and so many dice! I met my first serious boyfriend because he was wearing a dungeon master t-shirt, and he in turn introduced me to my future husband during a Christmas-themed game where we rescued Santa Claus from the Grinch.

Over the years, life got busier, and I slowly weaned myself from D&D and I haven’t played in decades. Still, I thought that I could use that otherwise useless knowledge of saving throws and character classes to provide fun background for one of my Family Skeleton books. I knew the game had evolved, but I picked my gamer daughters’ brains and found that  biggest change was that instead of always playing in somebody’s basement—those scenes in Stranger Things are eerily accurate—a lot of gaming happens online. My girls play massively multi-player online role-playing games. (That’s MMORPG to make it a little shorter, pronounced ma-morg.) I decided MMORPGs would a perfect fit for Sid, one of the two sleuths in the Family Skeleton series.

[image error]If you haven’t read the series, I should mention that the Family Skeleton really is a skeleton. He walks, he talks, he makes bad bone jokes, and along with his BFF Georgia, he solves murders. For obvious reasons—meaning him being an animated skeleton—he doesn’t leave the house much and that meant that an MMORPG was just what the cleric ordered. (That’s an old-style D&D joke, cause clerics did most of the healing and… Yeah, I’ll stop now.)

Knowing that gamers are sticklers for details, I decided not to use a real MMORPG for Sid and run the risk of making a major boner. (I never promised to stop making bone jokes.) Instead I designed a fake one: Runes of Legend, an MMORPG with a Nordic flavor. My daughters helped design the character classes and a perfect group for Sid to join, and my husband Steve used his knowledge of Icelandic sagas to help me with names. (I even threw in a couple of Viking characters he’d created for a short story published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.) By the time I was done, I wouldn’t have minded playing the game myself.

You might think the game stuff was just scenery in the book, but remember how I dated one dungeon master and married another? RPGs have a way of sneaking into real life, or in this case, into my character’s lives. There’s something about RPGs that makes them different from most games—the role playing. People are intentionally trying NOT to be themselves, but the fictional selves they pick show a lot about who they want to be and sometimes, who they really are.

[image error]Going back to the book, a book character named Jen plays a tracker who figures out puzzles and  shoots with a bow and arrow. Jen herself is constantly trying to figure out people, and keeps them at a distance. The character also has a domineering mother, and while Jen’s mother means well, it’s easy to see how Jen might see things differently.

Sid plays a trickster, which means he declaims alliterative verse to spur his fellow players to greater efforts. In MMORPG lingo, he’s a buffer because makes other characters more “buff”–stronger, faster, better. Now my mind was on game mechanics when I made Sid a buffer, but it makes a lot of sense for somebody like him. Due to his unusual lifestyle—meaning him not being alive—he is on the sidelines a lot, and his major contributions to Georgia are encouraging her, supporting her, and helping her. In other words, he’s just as much a buffer in real life as in the game.

Then there’s the game character Erik Bloodaxe. (I can’t tell you the book character’s name because the initial thrust of the book is Erik going missing, and Sid and Georgia trying to find him. It’s kind of a big reveal when you find out.) Erik is a mighty fighter with a big axe, which you should have with a name like that. But he’s also a true leader and hero, something that the person who plays Erik wishes he can be. (Small spoiler: by the end of the book, everybody agrees that the player really was pretty darned heroic.)

Now don’t worry –you don’t have to be a gamer to read this book. I limited the game stuff and kept what I did include as simple as possible so as not to slow down the action. But if you are a gamer, whether an oldstyle pencil-and-dice player like me and my husband or an MMORPG fan like my daughters, the game is afoot in The Skeleton Makes a Friend.

NOTE: If you’re interested, there is some serious research into how people choose their characters in RPGs, including an honors psychology thesis by my husband.

Readers: Have you ever become obsessed with a game? It doesn’t have to be a video game.

Leigh is giving away a book and skeleton swag to a commentor.

 

Cover Reveal — Let’s Fake A Deal

By Sherry — I’m flying to Boston today for Crime Bake, get to see lots of friends, and take a master class from Walter Mosley!

I was so excited when Linda Langford (her blog is Chatting About Cozies) sent me a message Monday saying Let’s Fake A Deal was up for preorder! I rushed right over to look at the cover. And here it is:

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Here’s the back cover copy:

SHE’S GOT THE GOODS . . .

As a former military spouse, Sarah Winston’s learned a little about organizing, packing, and moving. Her latest project sounds promising: a couple of tech-industry hipsters, newly arrived in her Massachusetts town, who need to downsize. Unfortunately, when Sarah tries to sell their stuff, she discovers it’s all stolen—and she’s the unwitting fence.

BUT SARAH’S PROBLEMS ARE JUST BEGINNING

Michelle, an old friend of Sarah’s from the Air Force base, is in line for a promotion—but not everyone is happy about it, and she’s been hit with an anonymous discrimination complaint. When one of the men she suspects is behind the accusations turns up dead in Michelle’s car, Sarah needs to clear Michelle’s name—as well as her own for selling hot merchandise. And she’ll have to do it while also organizing a cat lady’s gigantic collection of feline memorabilia, or they’ll be making room for Sarah in a jail cell . . .

The team at Kensington does such a fantastic job with the cover art and back cover copy! I am so grateful to them. As you can tell from the cover and back cover copy Sarah’s newest client is obsessed with cats. Do you collect just one thing? Or are you all over the place like I am?

I’m going to give away an ARC of The Gun Also Rises to someone who leaves a comment. I may be slow to respond since I’m traveling today!

Wicked Wednesday: Thankful for Our Teachers

[image error]Hi, Wickeds. During the month of November we use our Wicked Wednesdays to talk about things we’re grateful for. My question for you all today. Is there a teacher or are there a few teachers in elementary school to grad school you’d like to say a few words about? Let’s hear it.

Edith: Ed Aguirre at Cloverly Elementary taught sixth grade and organized a trip for our class to visit Baja California (a three-hour drive south for us) for a week. It topped off a year of studying Spanish, Mexican culture, geography, and so much more. He was way ahead of his times in creating this kind of cross-discipline study. We camped on the beach, visited a school and a tuna-packing factory, and danced at a goat roast with local kids. Mr. Aguirre put up with my goofy, over-assertive eleven-year-old self and encouraged me to keep learning and exploring. And now…we’re Facebook friends! Thank you, Mr. Aguirre.

Liz: I had some amazing grad school teachers, some of whom I keep in touch with also. Jeff Seglin, who taught me all things publishing, and Jessica Treadway, who taught me how to write a novel (and some of it stuck!) Those were some of my favorite years.

Julie: Ms. Holbrook was my reading teacher in elementary school, and she was wonderful. Mr. Hathaway was another great reading teacher. Mr. Shriner was a high school history teacher I enjoyed. I’ve been really blessed to have had a number of great teachers, but these three stand out.

Sherry: I had a lot of wonderful teachers, but I have to thank Mrs. Kibbie my third grade teacher. I left first grade in the top reading group, but by the end of second grade was at the very bottom and I didn’t like to read. (My second grade teacher was a nightmare.) Mrs. Kibbie sent home extra reading for me to do. My love of reading came back and I was saved.

Barb: I was lucky in my young life to have a lot of great teachers. The one I want to thank today is the late Anthony Garvin who taught me American Civilization my first year at the University of Pennsylvania. Garvin was a brilliant teacher. Every lecture was interesting and entertaining, but it wasn’t until I put my pen down having filled my last blue book in the final that I realized what the course was about. It answered the question, “Who is an American?” “What makes us Americans?” In these days of caravans and travel bans, I think back to it so often. That course truly shaped the person I am.

Jessie: I was lucky to attend a school system for middle and high school that valued creative writing. In middle school one of my English teachers, Mrs. Rief, made me feel I really had aptitude in that area. When I reached high school Mr. Tappan did the same. Both of these teachers had a hand in the writer I have become and I feel very blessed because of their presence in my early years.

Readers, do you have a teacher or early mentor that was a help to you? Leave a comment for a chance to win two paperback copies of Murder in an English Village; one for you and one for someone you would like to treat!

Fall Reads 2018

Late fall in New England is a great time for reading. The sun sets wicked early. The pretty leaves are gone and it’s often dark and windy. Wickeds, it’s been a long time since we checked in on our reading. What are you reading this fall?

[image error]Edith: I’m starting to read my way through Lyndee Walker’s Nichelle Clarke Crime Thriller series and am loving it. Catriona McPherson’s just-out Go to My Grave is on its way, and I need to catch up with Sheila’s new series that began with Murder at the Mansion. Lea Wait’s Thread Herrings awaits, too, as does Mardi Gras Murder from Ellen Byron.  So many books, so little time… Also, see the end of this post for our daily giveaway!

Liz:  I started reading Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. I’m really enjoying it! And I have a list a mile long too, Edith…

[image error]Barb: And the pile will be even bigger after Crime Bake… I just finished Edwin Hill’s Little Comfort. (Who’s read it? Can we discuss at Crime Bake this week?) Loved it. Now I’m on to Lea Wait’s Thread Herrings and Kaitlyn Dunnett’s Overkilt, both of whom were on the blog last week.

Sherry: Edith, I love Lyndee Walker’s Nichelle Clark books. Barb, I read Little Comfort about a month ago and am ready to discuss. Last Saturday I attended the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime Author Extravaganza. We all took turns talking about our books [image error]that came out this year. After we signed books. I couldn’t resist buying some for myself and as Christmas gifts. The Widows of Malabar Hill  by Sujata Massey has been named  a Publishers Weekly’s Best Book of 2018!

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Jessie: All of those sound like fun! Right now my TBR list is housing The Dark Angel by Elly Griffiths, Atomic Habits by James Clear and The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes.

Julie: I am reading a lot of business books right now, so I’m grateful for these suggestions! I’m moving Little Comfort up on my list. Going to crack open Murder Flies the Coop next.

Readers: What’s on your TBR pile this fall? Edith will give away a signed copy of one of her published books – your pick – to one lucky commenter here today (US only)!

Have You Met Any Spirits Lately?

Halloween is past. That’s the day when spirits of the dead are said to walk the earth, if briefly. But if you ask me, I think they’re around far more than one day.

I’ve been a genealogist for decades (for myself and for hire), and have worked for two of the country’s best family history libraries. But that does not make me a ghost hunter, at least not for other people. Still, since I’ve “known” some of my ancestors for a long time, they’ve become more and more real to me (and incidentally, they provide a lot of story ideas). No, I don’t carry on conversations with them, and I don’t see them sitting in a chair across the room (although I know people who have laid claim to experiences like that, and I don’t question them).

I will say that I stumble over a surprising number of them purely by chance. One of my favorite stories is when I attended a fundraising conference in Boston, and started talking to a woman I’d never met before. Somehow the talk turned to ancestors, and I mentioned that several of mine had lived in Wellesley and Newton, and I knew which houses had been theirs. And when we got down to details, she said she knew the woman who lived in one of them and would I like to see it? Of course I said yes.

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Once when I was wandering around a cemetery I’d never visited, searching for one particular person, I looked up and realized that I was standing in front of a burial plot that contained at least a dozen of my ancestors, from two sides of one family. I had no idea they were there, much less all together, but somehow they called to me.

I attended Wellesley College, but it never occurred to me to visit the local cemeteries. It wasn’t until my tenth reunion that I walked through the nearest one–and found a whole row of my ancestral Pratts waiting there for me. Think that had anything to do with my choice of college?

I could go on, but there are a few episodes that are perhaps the most “supernatural” that I have experienced. Toward the end of his life my father lived south of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I lived maybe an hour away, in Swarthmore, and I’d take the back roads every few weeks to visit.

One weekend in winter I was headed to his house on a rural road and suddenly I was hit by a heavy (and heady) aroma of flowers. It was mid-winter, and all my car windows were shut. All I could think was that they smelled like funeral flowers. I looked around, and the nearest building was a church, set far back from the road, with a cemetery in front of it. I had to believe that I was smelling a funeral that wasn’t there. I slowed down (there were no other cars around) and inhaled deeply, once, twice. Yes, the scent was still smelling there. But there were no flowers in sight. I can’t begin to explain it, but it was real.

I’ve had only one other similar experience, and that one was more personal. A few years ago I was driving from Massachusetts to visit a friend in New Jersey. An hour short of her house I stopped in Westfield, where my mother was born and she and her family are buried. I’d been driving for four hours, so I stopped at a McDonald’s near the highway to get something to eat. I picked up my bag of fast food inside and went back to the car to eat it. And I was suddenly surrounded by my grandmother’s very distinctive perfume. I’d been in the car for hours and there was nothing in the car that had been hers, but there it was. I smiled, because I had planned to go to visit the family plot where she was buried when I finished my lunch, and I felt like she was welcoming me.

[image error] Readers: What about you? Have you ever had an encounter you couldn’t explain?

Leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of Nipped in the Bud, the latest Orchard Mystery, released a week ago. It’s set in a house built by an ancestor of mine, and the current owner says several people have seen a ghost (not me, alas–but I did find something in the attic there that I included in a short story before I ever knew about it.)

(Sheila has generously made this giveaway open to commenters from anywhere.)

Thankful for Our Readers: Week One Winners

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The winner of a signed copy of Lea Wait’s Thread Herrings is Andrea Lerum!

The winner of a signed copy of Kaitlyn Dunnett’s Overkilt is Jeanette Bailor!

Please email your snail mail addresses to barbaraross at maineclambakemysteries dot com and we’ll get those copies on their way.

Good luck to everyone next week!

The Holiday When We Ran Away from Home

Hi. Barb again. It’s the second day of the Wickeds’ month of Thankful for Our Readers giveaways and  we’re once again visited by a FOTW (Friend of the Wickeds). Kaitlyn Dunnett’s new Liss MacCrimmon Mystery, Overkilt, was released on October 30. She’s offering a signed copy to one lucky commenter on this post. You can leave a comment until midnight tonight. Winners will be announced tomorrow. This giveaway is for US commenters only.

Take it, Kaitlyn!

[image error]A writer’s inspiration comes from all sorts of things, although frequently the finished product doesn’t bear much resemblance to the event that inspired it. Take Overkilt, the newest Liss MacCrimmon mystery, for example.

My husband and I have lived fairly close to his family for most of our married life. At holidays, as long as his parents were living, we were expected to show up at their house for dinner on Thanksgiving and Christmas. One year, we decided to break tradition. The Bethel Inn, a little over an hour’s drive from our house, in the opposite direction from my in-laws, has long been renowned for their Christmas celebrations—tree lighting, carol singing, sleigh rides, and so on. We made reservations and then announced our plans.

[image error]The Bethel Inn

Let’s just say it did not go over well.

We went anyway and enjoyed our family-free vacation. I even used the experience of Christmas in a hotel in Relative Strangers, one of the romance novels I wrote as Kathy Lynn Emerson. But what always stuck with me was the knowledge that our break with tradition at the holidays seriously annoyed other people.

[image error]Bethel Inn gazebo

In Overkilt, Liss’s father-in-law, who owns Moosetookalook, Maine’s luxury hotel, The Spruces, offers a “Thanksgiving Special” designed to attract the business of childless couples who want to spend the holiday away from their families. The very idea, and the fact that some of the couples may be unmarried and/or same sex, outrages a local troublemaker, Hadley Spinner, leader of a religious sect calling themselves the New Age Pilgrims. He sees the promotion as an affront to family values and vows to ruin not only Joe Ruskin’s hotel, but also the businesses of Joe’s sons and daughter-in-law, if he doesn’t cancel it.

[image error]Since Overkilt is a mystery novel, this conflict leads to a murder at a demonstration held in Moosetookalook’s town square. Some of Liss’s family members and a couple of her friends are suspects, although I’m happy to say that none of them were among the protestors. Naturally, in the end the murderer is caught and the bad guys get what’s coming to them. The final scene takes place on Thanksgiving Day when the Liss and her family, and their pets, celebrate with a very traditional holiday meal, a happy ending during which Liss and her meddling mother declare a truce. Well, why not? This is, after all, a work of fiction.

Thanks to the Wickeds for asking me back. It’s always a pleasure to be here.

Readers: Have you ever rebelled against family tradition? Snuck off for a holiday? Tell us about it below or just say hi to be entered for a chance to win a copy of Overkilt.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett is the author of nearly sixty traditionally published books written under several names. 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. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries (Overkilt) and the “Deadly Edits” series (Crime & Punctuation) as Kaitlyn and the historical Mistress Jaffrey Mysteries (Murder in a Cornish Alehouse) as Kathy. The latter series is a spin-off from her earlier “Face Down” mysteries and is set in Elizabethan England. Her most recent collection of short stories is Different Times, Different Crimes. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at www.TudorWomen.com

Locked-room Mysteries? Escape Rooms? And then … a Locked-in Sleuth?

Hi All. Barb here. Today we’re celebrating the release of FOTW (Friend of the Wickeds) Lea Wait’s new book in her Mainely Needlepoint Mystery series, Thread Herrings. (Love the title).

But first, a word from our sponsors:[image error] As  we do every November, the Wicked Authors are holding a giveaway everyday this month to say thank you to our readers. Lea is kicking off the month by giving away a copy of her new release, Thread Herrings, to one lucky commenter on the blog. You can comment until the end of the day tomorrow (November 2nd). The winner will be announced on Saturday, November 3. This one is US only. We will have some giveaways that include our friends farther afield throughout the month.

Okay, that’s done. Take it away, Lea!

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841, is the story most people think of first when they think of a locked-room mystery: a sub-genre of crime fiction in which a victim is killed in a place (e.g. a locked room) seemingly impossible for a murderer to either enter or leave. The sleuth (and the reader) are challenged to use their knowledge and reasoning to solve the puzzle, rather than relying on forensics or interviewing suspects. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is one of the most famous sleuths to solve seemingly impossible crimes, but many well-known twentieth-century authors have used the same technique … some more successfully than others.

The challenge is so intriguing that today in many towns and cities amateur sleuths can test their own powers of deduction and teamwork by renting sixty minutes in an “Escape Room” – a locked room in which the team must solve a series of puzzles within sixty minutes in order to escape.

[image error]But – what about a sleuth who must solve the mystery from a locked room? Intrigued by that possibility, in Thread Herrings, my protagonist, Angie Curtis, is threatened by an unknown killer after she buys a faded piece of eighteenth-century needlework at an auction … and finds a mysterious paper hidden behind the fabric. At first the threats make no sense.

But after a friend is murdered and Angie’s car blows up, the police in Haven Harbor, Maine, insist that Angie stay hidden in protective custody. She does have a cellphone, a handsome companion, and she can call friends for help. But can she piece together bits of information from a wide variety of sources, historical and contemporary, and identify the killer before he (or she) finds her?

Barb again. I LOVE this idea and can’t wait to read Thread Herrings.

Readers: Are you intrigued by locked-room mysteries or Escape Rooms? What resources could a sleuth like Angie call upon? Give us your ideas below or simply say hi to be entered in the giveaway.

[image error]USA Today best-selling author Lea Wait lives on the coast of Maine where she writes the Mainely Needlepoint series, the Shadows Antique Print mystery series, and (under the name Cornelia Kidd) the Maine Murder series. She also writes historical novels set in Maine. https://www.leawait.com

— THREAD HERRINGS is the 7th in the Mainely Needlepoint series, set in the small working waterfront town of Haven Harbor, Maine.