Just in Time for St. Patrick's Day: IRISH KNIT MURDER
This time of year, at least in chilly northern New Jersey where I live, every holiday that offers momentary distraction from the gloomy skies, brown lawns, and leafless trees is welcome. Valentine’s Day, with its hearts, flowers, cupids, and billing and cooing birds, is one such holiday, and of course there’s Easter, with its explicit springtime imagery.
In between comes St. Patrick’s Day, an occasion for feasting and celebration. I look forward to making a traditional St. Patrick’s Day meal every year, with corned beef, cabbage, boiled potatoes, and homemade soda bread.
Coincidentally, my editor at Kensington suggested I add a St. Patrick’s Day theme to the Knit & Nibble mystery I began work on last spring, given that it had a spring 2023 release date. IRISH KNIT MURDER, with not one but two St. Patrick’s Day feasts, is now out.
The first feast is a luncheon featuring corned beef with all the trimmings, organized for the seniors group in Arborville, New Jersey, the town where the Knit & Nibble mysteries are set. Unfortunately the feast ends on a less than festive note! A local eccentric, Isobel Lister, has just finished presenting a concert of Irish songs when she is found dead.
The second feast has no such distressing climax. Bettina Fraser, who is the best friend and fellow sleuth of my series protagonist Pamela Paterson, invites Pamela to join her and her husband Wilfred for his annual corned beef extravaganza.
Besides the corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and homemade soda bread, he serves a dessert created just for the holiday: Irish Coffee Trifle. The recipe is included at the end of IRISH KNIT MURDER, and many photos of the treat are up on my website’s IRISH KNIT MURDER page: https://peggyehrhart.com/knit-and-nib...
Working out plot complications for IRISH KNIT MURDER, I decided to bring in the old Celtic nature religion that survives in present-day Wiccan beliefs. St. Patrick, to their way of thinking, isn’t a hero but rather something of a villain—because he discredited their belief system when he introduced Christianity to Ireland.
My Wiccan character is a suspect in Isobel’s murder, but she’s also a fascinating person. She’s a fount of information about the old nature-based calendar that gave us holidays like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and others when the Christian calendar was superimposed on celebrations that had been observed for, probably, millennia.
I also made my Wiccan character adept at the Tarot, a system of divination that uses a deck of special cards not really to tell fortunes—though some people believe that’s the point—but rather to help seekers understand situations they find themselves in and choices that confront them.
At the end of IRISH KNIT MURDER, my Wiccan character does a card reading for Pamela. I myself am not a believer, but in doing research for this scene I read a book about the Tarot and I bought a set of the cards, the Smith-Waite version.
This version, with drawings by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, is most commonly used now and its fascinating imagery grows out of early twentieth-century theosophical thought.
In the scene, I had Pamela draw three cards from the deck—the cards are face down and the seeker uses his or her left hand, thought to be more in tune with the unconscious mind.
Readers of the Knit & Nibble mysteries will know that an ongoing subplot involves Pamela’s romantic prospects, so I decided that the three cards she chooses would give some insight into her relationship with one romantic possibility, her neighbor Richard Larkin.
Earlier in the book, Richard Larkins asks Pamela to keep her eyes open for a cat that he might adopt, specifically mentioning that a black kitten would be fine. On the occasion of the Tarot reading, the Wiccan character’s cat has just given birth to kittens, including a black kitten.
I of course chose the cards for the reading quite consciously (no left hands involved) with the goal of having them indicate exactly what I wanted in the scene.
But I was surprised and delighted to discover that the image for the Queen of Wands, the card I chose to represent Pamela, includes in its design a small black cat.
Coincidence . . . or is it? Perhaps I will become a believer after all.
Postscript: I’ve definitely had St. Patrick’s Day on my mind lately. No sooner had I finished the manuscript for IRISH KNIT MURDER than my editor at Kensington invited me to contribute a St. Patrick’s Day-themed novella to a novella collection scheduled for release in January 2024. Since I’m a fairly literal-minded person, perhaps you can guess what the murder “weapon” is in the novella I contributed to IRISH MILKSHAKE MURDER.
In between comes St. Patrick’s Day, an occasion for feasting and celebration. I look forward to making a traditional St. Patrick’s Day meal every year, with corned beef, cabbage, boiled potatoes, and homemade soda bread.
Coincidentally, my editor at Kensington suggested I add a St. Patrick’s Day theme to the Knit & Nibble mystery I began work on last spring, given that it had a spring 2023 release date. IRISH KNIT MURDER, with not one but two St. Patrick’s Day feasts, is now out.
The first feast is a luncheon featuring corned beef with all the trimmings, organized for the seniors group in Arborville, New Jersey, the town where the Knit & Nibble mysteries are set. Unfortunately the feast ends on a less than festive note! A local eccentric, Isobel Lister, has just finished presenting a concert of Irish songs when she is found dead.
The second feast has no such distressing climax. Bettina Fraser, who is the best friend and fellow sleuth of my series protagonist Pamela Paterson, invites Pamela to join her and her husband Wilfred for his annual corned beef extravaganza.
Besides the corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and homemade soda bread, he serves a dessert created just for the holiday: Irish Coffee Trifle. The recipe is included at the end of IRISH KNIT MURDER, and many photos of the treat are up on my website’s IRISH KNIT MURDER page: https://peggyehrhart.com/knit-and-nib...
Working out plot complications for IRISH KNIT MURDER, I decided to bring in the old Celtic nature religion that survives in present-day Wiccan beliefs. St. Patrick, to their way of thinking, isn’t a hero but rather something of a villain—because he discredited their belief system when he introduced Christianity to Ireland.
My Wiccan character is a suspect in Isobel’s murder, but she’s also a fascinating person. She’s a fount of information about the old nature-based calendar that gave us holidays like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and others when the Christian calendar was superimposed on celebrations that had been observed for, probably, millennia.
I also made my Wiccan character adept at the Tarot, a system of divination that uses a deck of special cards not really to tell fortunes—though some people believe that’s the point—but rather to help seekers understand situations they find themselves in and choices that confront them.
At the end of IRISH KNIT MURDER, my Wiccan character does a card reading for Pamela. I myself am not a believer, but in doing research for this scene I read a book about the Tarot and I bought a set of the cards, the Smith-Waite version.
This version, with drawings by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, is most commonly used now and its fascinating imagery grows out of early twentieth-century theosophical thought.
In the scene, I had Pamela draw three cards from the deck—the cards are face down and the seeker uses his or her left hand, thought to be more in tune with the unconscious mind.
Readers of the Knit & Nibble mysteries will know that an ongoing subplot involves Pamela’s romantic prospects, so I decided that the three cards she chooses would give some insight into her relationship with one romantic possibility, her neighbor Richard Larkin.
Earlier in the book, Richard Larkins asks Pamela to keep her eyes open for a cat that he might adopt, specifically mentioning that a black kitten would be fine. On the occasion of the Tarot reading, the Wiccan character’s cat has just given birth to kittens, including a black kitten.
I of course chose the cards for the reading quite consciously (no left hands involved) with the goal of having them indicate exactly what I wanted in the scene.
But I was surprised and delighted to discover that the image for the Queen of Wands, the card I chose to represent Pamela, includes in its design a small black cat.
Coincidence . . . or is it? Perhaps I will become a believer after all.
Postscript: I’ve definitely had St. Patrick’s Day on my mind lately. No sooner had I finished the manuscript for IRISH KNIT MURDER than my editor at Kensington invited me to contribute a St. Patrick’s Day-themed novella to a novella collection scheduled for release in January 2024. Since I’m a fairly literal-minded person, perhaps you can guess what the murder “weapon” is in the novella I contributed to IRISH MILKSHAKE MURDER.
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