Maya Corrigan's Blog, page 2

Puns in Book Titles

Puns in the titles of cozy mysteries signal a light tone and often a large helping of humor. The tradition of using a food pun in the titles of culinary mysteries traces back to the 1990s when Diane Mott Davidson’s Cereal Murders and Phyllis Richman’s The Butter Did It came out. If anyone knows of earlier punning titles of food mysteries, please let me know. Four of my titles incorporate a pun with food and the suggestion of wrongdoing or death. For all but my first book, the title dish has five-ingredients or fewer, appears on the cover, and plays a role in the plot. Needless to say, I obsess about titles.

​Comment with your favorite punning culinary (or other) mystery title for a chance to win an Advanced Reader Edition of S'more Murders, which comes out on July 31st. To comment, click on the word "Comments" in the column to the left of this post.
 
Note: I can ship only to U.S. addresses. The contest ends Sunday, July 8th at midnight. I'll contact the winner by email and announce the results in this blog.
Share your favorite puns and good luck! 

Titanic Fascination

Some books I consulted while researching S'more Murders. "I want you to duplicate the final dinner served on the Titanic. Ten courses for eight people.”

Val Deniston stared at Otto Warbeck. Was he joking? Not visibly. The yacht owner had wrinkles in his forehead, but no smile lines. Not a man given to jests. When she’d agreed to cater a dinner for him on the Chesapeake Bay, she hadn’t expected him to demand an elaborate, custom-made meal, not to mention one with really bad karma. --S'more Murders, Chapter 1
Today is the 106th anniversary of the day when the Titanic hit an iceberg. When I started researching S'more Murders, my Titanic-themed culinary mystery, I was surprised to find long shelves of nonfiction about the disaster at my local library, a small subset of the books on the subject. A Google search of Titanic brings up 28 million hits. A rare copy of a menu from the first meal served aboard the Titanic is slated for auction later this month, expected to sell for 100,000 British pounds (140,000 U.S. dollars).

What explains this fascination with a disaster that claimed 1500 lives more than a century ago? Comment with your thoughts for a chance to win an Advanced Reader Edition of S'more Murders. To comment, click on the word "Comments" in the column to the left of this post.
Read more about the book and the contest below. 
In S'more Murders, my 5th Five-Ingredient Mystery, the victim and suspects include Titanic memorabilia collectors, dealers, and thieves, as well as a descendant of a Titanic survivor. ​

As warm April weather brings boaters to the Chesapeake Bay, Val agrees to cater a dinner party aboard a yacht. Its owner, a collector of Titanic memorabilia, asks her to re-create the final meal served on that doomed ship. On the anniversary of the Titanic disaster, the yachtsman welcomes his guests aboard and assigns them roles in a murder mystery game called Death on the Titanic. Val soon reaches the chilling conclusion that the host is fishing for the culprit in a real crime. When someone disappears from the yacht, Val and her grandfather have to reel in a killer before s’more murders go down. 

Available now for preorder, S'more Murders comes out on July 31, 2017. ​To enter a contest for an advanced edition, leave a comment about Titanic fascination. The contest ends on May 1st. 

Rebecca's 80th Anniversary

Eighty years ago this month, Daphne du Maurier delivered the manuscript of Rebecca to her publisher.  The publisher ordered a first print run of 20,000 copies. Within a month the book had sold twice that number. The American Booksellers Association voted it 1938's favorite novel, and it has never been out of print since it was first published.

British bookseller WHSmith, celebrating its 225th anniversary this year, asked readers to select their favorite book of the the last 225 years. Books by Dickens, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Orwell, and Harper Lee made the shortlist. Rebecca came in as the readers' favorite. Click on "Read More" below for more about the book. 

What's your all-time favorite book? Comment with your answer for a chance to win a free book. To comment, click on the word "Comments" in the column to the left of this post. Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 suspense novel tells the story of a young woman who marries a brooding older man. At his remote estate, she finds constant reminders of his dead wife, Rebecca. The story combines the atmosphere of a Gothic novel with a mystery about Rebecca’s character and her death.  
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​Rebecca echoes the plot of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) with its naive heroine, Byronic hero, and mysterious first wife. Du Maurier incorporates elements that aren’t in the Bronte novel: sinister villains, serious crimes, and a modern understanding of obsession and repression. Both Jane Eyre and Rebecca serve as models for countless romantic suspense stories based on a fairy tale turned sour. Cinderella discovers that Prince Charming has warts and keeps a witch in his castle. What is she going to do about it?
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Not all great books become great movies, but this one did. Rebecca was Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movie and the only film he directed that won an academy award as best picture. By the time he directed it, he already had a reputation as the master of suspense and a 15-year career in British films, starting in the era of silent movies. Because of stringent Hollywood codes, this film version does not follow the ending of Daphne du Maurier’s novel. 

Leave a comment naming your favorite book of the last 225 years and your e-mail address for a chance to win an Advanced Readers' Edition of my latest Five-Ingredient Mystery, S'more Murders. ​The contest is open until the end of April.

A.A. Milne: Man of Mystery

A.A. Milne, photo by E.O. Hoppé, 1922 Author A.A. Milne was born on this day, January 18th, in 1882. Apart from looking in the photo here as if he's playing Sherlock Holmes, Milne had other connections to mysteries in his life and his writing.

Five little-known facts about Alan Alexander Milne:
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1.  The creator of Winnie-the-Pooh was on a celebrity athletic team with the creator of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle), and the author of Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie). What sport did they play? I'll leave you in suspense until the end of the post.

2. Milne had a secret job in British Military Intelligence. After being wounded at the front in the first world war, A.A. Milne worked as a propagandist. Though records of his MI7b unit were ordered destroyed, some mysteriously survived. Saved from a dump in 2013, the records include poems by Milne, one a satirical verse by a Captain William Shakespeare, who is assigned to the propaganda unit. Read more about Milne's wartime service.

3. Milne was the first author to sell merchandising rights to a character. He sold the rights in 1930 to an agent who earned $50 million within a year for a Pooh doll, radio program, board game, and other paraphernalia. The mystery, though possibly of interest only to copywriters, is whether to hyphenate Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne did. The Disney company dropped the hyphens when it acquired the rights to Pooh in the 1960s.

4. Milne wrote nonfiction, novels, and poems, but he was most prolific as a writer of plays and screenplays, with about forty to his credit. Reportedly the first drama to use the inverted form of detective fiction, his 1928 play The Fourth Wall (staged in the U.S. as The Perfect Alibi) showed the audience the murder in Act I, followed by the investigation in later acts. The play's popularity resulted in its adaptation as a movie, Birds of Prey (1930), for which Milne shares the screenplay credit.

​5. A.A. Milne also wrote a detective novel, The Red House Mystery, published in 1922, still in print and available as a free ebook through Project Gutenberg. The novel features an English country house setting, an amateur sleuth with a sidekick, a locked-room puzzle, and enough clues for the reader to solve the case. Read my blog post about the connection between this book and Downton Abbey. 

Answer to the sports question: A.A. Milne played on a celebrity cricket team with Arthur Conan Doyle, J.M. Barrie, and P.G. Wodehouse. Cricket is a mystery to me, as it is to many Americans. If you know of a brief, clear explanation of the game, please tell me where to find it.  

Holiday Giveaway

While writing a Poe version of "The 12 Days of Christmas," I researched the song's origin. The lyrics enumerate gifts given each day leading up to the 12th day after Christmas, the traditional end of the holiday season. According to Christian tradition, that was the day the Magi presented the Christ child with gifts. Twelfth Night festivities, which date back to medieval England, involved gift giving, games, songs, dances, and a special food--the Twelfth Night cake, made with butter, eggs, sugar, fruit, nuts, spices, and a dried bean. The person whose slice of cake contained the bean served as the king or queen of the revels, with power to command the others. Disguises and sometimes social role reversals occurred, as servants gave orders to their "betters" for one night a year.

To celebrate Twelfth Night, I'm giving away twelve books, mostly cozy mysteries, on January 6, 2018. To enter the drawing for the books, leave a comment about a food you associate with the holidays and include your email address. I'll announce the winner here on January 7th. One winner will receive all twelve books. Sorry, I can send only to postal addresses in the U.S. My favorite holiday food is my grandmother's dessert pierogi with a sweet cheese filling. What's yours?

Austen and Poe: 10 Things They Have in Common

On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death today, I was struck by the similarities between her and Edgar Allan Poe, inspiration for The Tell-Tale Tarte, my latest mystery.  
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1. Mark Twain dissed them both, and in a single sentence. Twain said of Poe: “To me his prose is unreadable—like Jane Austen’s.” 2. Both are honored with action figures, as is Shakespeare, but not Mark Twain (only a bobble head).   
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​3. Both died young: Austen at 41, Poe at 40.
 
4. Both published in the first half of the 19th century: Jane Austen’s major works came out in the 1810s, Poe’s in the 1830s and 1840s.
 
5. Both had difficulty getting published and earning a living from their writing. Poe needed money more desperately than Austen, whose poverty was genteel. 6.Both published anonymously at first: Sense and Sensibility was BY A LADY, Tamerlane and Other Poems was BY A BOSTONIAN. Jane Austen’s name did not appear on any of her works until after her death. While Poe later published under his own name, he also used several pseudonyms.
 
7. Both were influenced by Gothic literature, with its gloomy settings, haunted castles, and supernatural elements, but in different ways: Austen poked fun at Gothic fiction in Northanger Abbey, whereas Poe took it to new heights, though depths might be a better word given the frequency of live burial in his writings.

8. Both created models for genre fiction: Austen for the modern romance novel, Poe for horror, psychological suspense, and the detective story.
 
​9. Their works fetch the highest prices at auction. A first edition of Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems set a record for an American book with an auction price of $662,500 in 2009. A manuscript of Austen’s unfinished work, The Watsons, went for approximately  $1.5 million at auction.   10. Each has become a cultural icon with a recognizable face, which has appeared on postage stamps and, in Jane Austen’s case, on legal tender. Her image is on a new ten-pound note. She has inspired “more sequels, prequels, and fan fiction than any other classic author." Poe has more than 250 writing credits listed in IMDb (Internet Movie Database).  He is the only author with an NFL football team named for one of his poems, also the subject of a Simpsons’ episode, pop culture at its best.  ​

​Can you think of any other parallels between Austen and Poe? To win a copy of my Poe-themed mystery, The Tell-Tale Tarte, leave a comment by July 25th. 

Poe Museum in Richmond

​Edgar Allan Poe’s spirit hovers over the Mid-Atlantic. If you fly over the region at night, you can see a string of lights connecting places where Poe lived and worked: Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York. Each has a Poe museum. Looking forward to the publication of my Poe-themed mystery, The Tell-Tale Tarte, I visited the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond last weekend. What a treasure trove! The Edgar Allan Poe Museum, housed in the oldest building in Richmond, has the largest collection of Poe artifacts in the world. Besides manuscripts, letters, and first editions, you can see Poe’s silk vest, a walking stick inscribed with his name, and his childhood bed. Excellent signage and an audio tour tell the stories behind artifacts like the trunk Poe had with him when he made his final journey.
 
As he lay dying in a Baltimore, Poe couldn’t remember what had happened to his trunk of clothes. After his death, his cousin Neilson Poe, a man Edgar viewed as a bitter enemy, ended up with the trunk. Neilson received requests for it from Edgar’s sister in Richmond and from his beloved mother-in-law in Fordham, New York. Another Poe enemy, Rufus Griswold, convinced the mother-in-law to name him Poe’s literary executor and requested the manuscripts from the trunk. Neilson gave him the manuscripts and sent the trunk and the rest of its contents to Edgar’s sister. The Poe Museum also has the key to the trunk, found in Poe’s pocket after his death. ​

Having seen the Poe places in Baltimore and the Bronx, I have one more to visit--the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia. I'll do a write-up on each of them on this blog. If you've visited any Poe places in Mid-Atlantic, please leave a comment. 

Tell-Tale Tarte Review and Giveaways

Read Raven-Award winner Dru Ann Love's review of The Tell-Tale Tarte at Dru's Book Musings.  

​On Saturday, June 24th, Dru Ann  will host me on her award-winning blog . On that day you can get a peek at the opening chapter of The Tell-Tale Tarte and enter a drawing for the book.

The Tell-Tale Tarte Giveaways

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Giveaway ends June 11, 2017.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway​Win a free copy of the The Tell-Tale Tarte, the 4th Five-Ingredient Mystery.  Before the release date of June 27th, I'm offering free books on three websites. Please visit the sites to enter a raffle for a freebie.

The Goodreads raffle is already underway and ends on June 11th. That's also the day I'll be the guest at Mystery Lovers' Kitchen, writing about The Tell-Tale Tarte and sharing a five-ingredient recipe.  Please visit the site on June 11 and leave a comment to enter the drawing.On Sunday June 24th, Raven-Award winner Dru Ann Love will host me on her award-winning blog,  Dru's Book Musings, where you can get a peek at the opening chapter of The Tell-Tale Tarte and enter the drawing for the book.

Hitchcock and Final Fondue

This year marks the 90th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's first cameo appearance in a movie he directed: The Lodger (1927), a silent film about the hunt for a killer resembling Jack the Ripper. Hitchcock appeared briefly in 39 of his 52 films, often in street, bus, or train scenes.

​In a sense, he makes a cameo appearance in Final Fondue, the third of my Five-Ingredient Mysteries.

Shortly after cafe manager Val and her grandfather serve chocolate fondue to welcome house guests, one of the guests turns up dead in the backyard, strangled with a rope. Nobody imagines that the murder weapon was inspired by one of Granddad's Hitchcock movie posters until threats reminiscent of other Hitchcock films beset Granddad's guests. Is one of them a movie copy cat killer? Which Hitchcock film will inspire the next attack? And who will be the next victim? 

Read more about Final Fondue.

View Hitchcock's cameos.