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MYSTERY READERS JOURNAL
The Journal of Mystery Readers International®
Volume 30, Number 3 • Fall 2014
Bibliomysteries
MYSTERY R EADERS JOURNAL
The Journal of Mystery Readers International ®
Bibliomysteries
Articles
“There Was No Beginning” by M. A. Adler
A Life Lived with Books by Robin Agnew
Limiting a Research Topic, or What To Do About
Thursday Next? by Mary P. (Mollie) Freier
Elizabeth Peters’s Bibliophile, Jacqueline Kirby
by Mimosa Summers Stephenson
Author! Author!
Writing the Book Collector Mysteries, or, Did I Just
Die and Go to Book Heaven? by Victoria Abbott
(Victoria Maffini and Mary Jane Maffini)
On Killing Booksellers by Donna Andrews
Biblio-Burgling by Lawrence Block
Through a Glass Fondly by Ali Brandon
My Cards on the Table by Eric Brown
Guidebook to Murder—The Bookstore Connection
by Lynn Cahoon
Mistaken Identity by Laura Caldwell
Selling Murder: Crime and the Popular Press in
17th-Century England by Susanna Calkins
Reimagining History by Kate Carlisle
Haunted by Books by Cleo Coyle (Alice Alfonsi and
Marc Cerasini)
Readaholics in Heaven by Laura Di Silverio
A Novel Idea! by Lucy Arlington (Susan Furlong)
Why a Culinary Bookshop? by Daryl Wood Gerber
The Poet and the Private Eye by Rob Gittins
Librarians Can Always Figure It Out by Karen Harper
A Conference, Books, and Bronson by L. C. Hayden
Brought to Book by Tim Heald
A Cautionary Tale about Book Groups by Maggie
King
“The Good Know Nothing,” and the Story Behind
the Story by Ken Kuhlken
Vol. 30, No. 3 • Fall 2014
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Literary Discussions in My Novels by Marilyn
Levinson
Brain-Bangers by Peter Lovesey
Crossword: If Books Could Kill by Verna Suit
The Librarian, the Witch, and the Spell Book by
Joyce and Jim Lavene
On Becoming a (Fictional) Librarian by Con Lehane
My Amateur Sleuths’ Mystery Library by Ed Lynskey
Reading for the Answers: Murder at the University
by Janice MacDonald
The Epistolary Novel—Yay! Or Nay? by Lise
McClendon
Look, There Are Books in My Book by Terrie Farley
Moran
Bibliomystery Geek by Otto Penzler
People of the Book by Neil Plakcy
Everyone Loves a Conspiracy Theory by Judith Rock
Book Wrap by Sheila Simonson
Writing “See Also Murder” by Larry D. Sweazy
The Book Shelving Workout by Elaine Viets
Between the Lines by E. J. Wagner
Books and Book Lovers Who Run Amok by Sally
Wright
Columns
Mystery in Retrospect: Reviews
The Children’s Hour: Bibliomysteries by Gay Toltl
Kinman
True Crime: Books on Trial by Cathy Pickens
Crime Seen: Murder, They Wrote by Kate Derie
In Short: Mysteries About Books by Marvin Lachman
From the Editor’s Desk by Janet Rudolph
Back Issues in Print and PDF
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Janet A. Rudolph, Editor • Kate Derie, Associate Editor
All unattributed material in the Mystery Readers Journal is written by Janet A. Rudolph, Editor. Membership in Mystery Readers
International (MRI) is $39 ($50 overseas airmail, $15 PDF download) for 2014 and includes a calendar year 2014 (Volume 30) subscription to the Mystery Readers Journal. Write MRI, PO Box 8116, Berkeley, CA 94707. Phone 510-845-3600. E-mail
[email protected]. Copyright © 2014 Janet A. Rudolph. All rights reserved. ISSN 1043-3473
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Bibliomysteries
ARTICLES
“There Was No Beginning” by M. A. Adler
John Dunning has written five Cliff Janeway
mystery novels drawing on his experience as a rare
bookstore owner in Denver, as a crime beat reporter for the Denver Post, and as a racetrack
hand. When asked when he began writing, Dunning borrowed a line from folk singer Burl Ives
and answered: “There was no beginning.”
While checking one of the books for this review,
I found myself, pages later, deep into the narrative.
Dunning lured me into a cold car journeying
through a wet Seattle night despite my knowing
where the car was going and how the story ended.
The writing is so beautiful and compelling, and
Cliff Janeway’s voice so strong, that I simply didn’t
want to leave it.
Dunning fashions intricate plots with unexpected twists, some with slightly flawed people
who make one mistake that ends up destroying
them, and some with outright bad guys. The books
are rich with long passages that seem to be “just
talk about books,” but are fascinating to lovers of
books and words. Were they not there, there
would be no mystery, for the crimes derive from
the book world and provide Janeway, and the
reader, the clues he needs to solve them.
When we first meet Janeway in 1986, he is disillusioned with the police force and yearns to be a
bookman. Books—first editions—are his passion.
His girlfriend says Hemingway reads just as well in
a two-bit paperback as he does in a $500 first
printing, and Janeway responds: “Only a fool
would read a first edition.”
He is one of the old-fashioned detective heroes,
one of the good guys, whose adherence to a strict
moral code always supersedes concern for his own
wellbeing. A former amateur boxer, he relishes
physical confrontations with the bad guys; the
fight scenes are believable, brutal and appropriate
to the story.
In Booked to Die (Scribner, 1992), Janeway
applies his bare-fisted brand of justice to an unpunished murderer, resulting in brutality charges
being lodged against him. He resigns from the
force and opens his own bookstore, but continues
to investigate a book scout’s murder. Janeway finds
a cache of fine books and an appraisal of a worthless collection that leads him to a book woman he
doesn’t quite trust. The book ends with a deviously
set-up but fair twist that I have remembered since
I first encountered it more than twenty years ago.
In The Bookman’s Wake (Scribner, 1995),
Janeway, who can’t resist a woman who needs him,
acts against his own interest and rescues Eleanor
Rigby, a talented book scout, from her pursuers.
While scouting, they find a book that would
have qualified as ‘fine’ if not for the handwriting in
it. Janeway asks: “Why is the book the only gift
that the giver feels compelled to deface before giving? Who would give a shirt or a blouse and write,
in ink, Happy birthday from Bozo all over the
front of it?”
Janeway soon finds himself on the run from the
police and some very bad guys while he hunts for
Eleanor, who has disappeared.
In The Bookman’s Promise (Scribner, 2004),
Janeway buys a rare book by Richard Burton, the
explorer, and is besieged by crackpot phone calls.
(One caller offered a copy of the actor Richard
Burton’s biography, in dust jacket, signed by Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and some woman named
Virginia Woolf.) Another caller turns out to be the
granddaughter of the explorer’s friend, and asks
Janeway to get back the extensive and valuable
Burton library that was bought for a pittance by an
unscrupulous book dealer.
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MRJ Fall 2014
When Janeway confronts a suspect who denies
he is writing about Burton, Dunning has a bit of
insider fun with writers: “You can always tell with
a writer: he gets that madness in his eyes whenever
his subject comes up.”
In The Sign of the Book (Scribner, 2005), Janeway must find out who murdered a man who owns
a collection of signed first editions. Janeway can’t
back down from a fight, and this time antagonizes
a somewhat too-bad-to-be-true sheriff ’s deputy
who does everything he can to stop Janeway’s investigation.
Janeway’s pursuit of a book dealer who tries to
steal the collection takes him on a detour that is
interesting, but not germane to solving the murder.
Once again Janeway puts himself at risk, this time
to save a boy from an abusive guardian.
In The Bookwoman’s Last Fling (Scribner,
2006), Janeway has discovered that he would
rather be out in the world solving book mysteries
than sitting in the bookstore. He goes to Idaho to
appraise a book collection, then finds himself undercover at a California racetrack. Dunning’s experience as a racetrack hand creates a realistic background for the book. Once again, Janeway and
those close to him are put in mortal danger by his
investigations. When his girlfriend asks him to
give up detecting, Janeway says what the reader
has known all along: “I love the book trade, but I
still want to be a cop.”
The Janeway books combine an insider’s look at
book collecting with old-fashioned detective stories. Some readers have criticized the later books
as not being as good as the earlier ones. Maybe.
But they are still among the best.
In Janeway’s words, “There’s nothing wrong
with writing detective stories if you do it well
enough.”
M.A. Adler lives in northern California and is the
author of In the Shadow of Lies: A Mystery Novel.
A Life Lived with Books by Robin Agnew
Twenty-two years ago, when my husband Jamie
and I opened our mystery bookstore, I don’t think
we had any thought that we’d be around this long.
As we were laying out the store and having it
painted the painter joked “We want to do a good
job so it still looks good in twenty years.” Little did
I imagine that we would still be in business, twenty
years later.
At first it was simply awfully convenient. When
we opened the store we had a one-year-old (she is
now twenty-three) and I had another baby shortly
thereafter. The bookstore provided a great deal of
flexibility as Jamie and I shared out tasks. He
ended up being our buyer and the curator and
procurer of our used book section, which now
contains around 20,000 volumes. He’s also at the
store more than I am as much of what I do can be
done at home.
I have ended up as the editor of our newsletter,
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check cutter, payroll person, book club hostess and
events coordinator. Running your own business
provides a great deal of variety in your job, and it
teaches you to think on your feet.
Being around for as long as we have has also
enabled us to build community contacts, make
friends with customers—some of whom I have
traveled with and shared meals with—and make
friends with and get to know many, many writers.
Some of our favorites were newbies around the
same time we were and it’s been fun to see their
careers grow.
When we first opened, it’s true we had a lot of
time to read, and we both still read a lot today, but
gone are the days (well, maybe in February) when
we can relax behind the register with a book.
There’s too much else to do!
Meanwhile, the books themselves have been
quietly replicating, and we find ourselves the tem-
Bibliomysteries
porary custodians of roughly 28,000 volumes. As
one customer recently put it as he handed me a
book he wanted to buy, “I’d like to transfer this
from yours to mine.”
And in twenty-two years we’ve seen authors
crest, diminish, hold steady, or disappear. Through
all our years, our steady sellers have remained constant—we still sell a great many Agatha Christie,
Conan Doyle, and Rex Stout titles. That makes me
happy. In fact hardly anything makes me happier
than selling a young person an Agatha Christie
title as they work their way through the Poirot or
Marple books for the first time.
With time has come a deep knowledge and real
love of the mystery genre, one that started at a
young age when like many other girls I devoured
Nancy Drew books. When we opened the store, I
was sure I had read almost everything and now I
know that can never be true! I get tips from cus-
tomers, from reviews, I even write reviews, but I
never feel as though I will quite catch up. There’s
always more books to read, and if there’s a more
reassuring thought than that, I’m not sure what it
might be.
And in twenty-two years we’ve seen the book
business go through seismic changes. The rise of
chains, the death of Borders (a company founded
here in Ann Arbor), the rise of e-books and Amazon, all kinds of competition everywhere. Independent bookstores seem to be settling back in for
the long haul—at the moment—as many of our
customers seems to appreciate our knowledge and
passion, and many of them prefer to read an actual
book printed on paper. You never quite know
what’s next, of course, but I do know for a fact
people will continue to read, to want stories, and
will want to talk about them. I’d like to continue
being a part of that ongoing conversation.
Limiting a Research Topic, or What To Do About
Thursday Next? by Mary P. (Mollie) Freier
A few years ago, I attempted to write an article on
the academic librarian in the academic mystery
novel. A good librarian, I consulted bibliographies,
used subject headings in WorldCat, and talked to
colleagues to collect my list of primary materials.
Even though at that time I was confining my study
to academic librarians, I was a bit surprised at the
length of my list, and quickly learned that my topic
was actually much more interesting than my original thought, which had been to explore the ways
that academic librarians were portrayed in mystery
fiction, and perhaps how those portrayals related
to the librarian stereotype. I discovered that I had
many and to me more interesting questions, such
as why are libraries such dangerous places? Why
would a small agricultural college have a collection
of rare books? Why do so many librarian detectives leave librarianship? So I decided to write a
book on libraries and librarians in mystery and
detective fiction, tentatively called Book ‘Em: Libraries, Librarians, and Information in Mystery
Novels, 1970–Present.
I had thought my original list of primary works
was long, but that list looked short in comparison
with the list that included public librarians. I included only those novels in which the library was a
major setting (often because a body had been
found in it) or in which a librarian played a major
role (in some cases that role is that of victim or
murderer, not detective). I did not include novels
in which a detective merely stops by the library to
read newspapers on microfilm, a fairly common
occurrence. I realized that my primary bibliography was not only extensive, but still growing. I
realized that I would have to limit my study in
some way, and decided to deal only with novels
published after 1970. The 1970s saw the first online public access catalogs, as well as other impor5
MRJ Fall 2014
tant changes in library work. This limit did not
shorten my list much.
At this point, I also realized that I did not want
to write about booksellers or book collectors, unless the novel also involved libraries and/or librarians. This limit helped more than the date limit, but
I still have a list of over 200 novels, in part because
the rare books mysteries that involve libraries and
librarians must be included. My current list has
221 entries, 110 of which were published in the
21st century. Many of these are series novels, novels in series begun in 2000 or later. The 21st century has brought us seventeen new librarian detective series, and several entries in established series
that involve librarians and/or libraries.
This popularity in the 21st century is intriguing
by itself. Perhaps people have begun to appreciate
their librarians and libraries more. Perhaps more
librarians are writing mystery novels. Certainly
librarians’ interest and concern about the librarian
stereotype has never flagged, with new articles and
books on this subject continuing to be published
(the most recent is a collection of scholarly essays,
The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Presentations and Perceptions of Information Work,
Association of College and Research Libraries,
2014).
Librarian detectives use many familiar means of
getting information to solve crimes. Most of them
live in small communities and use gossip
(although Jo Dereske’s Miss Helma Zukas refuses
to place credence in gossip). But many of them use
their expert search skills to unearth the truth
about situations and suspects, and, even when they
use internet searching to find this information,
they know how to determine that information is
reputable. Miranda James’s Charlie Harris even
gives the reader a brief lecture on the importance
of having a search strategy when searching the
internet in The Silence of the Library (Berkley
Prime Crime, 2014).
While the subplots of librarian mysteries usually
include their love lives (I have yet to encounter a
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librarian detective who is married in the first novel
in the series), there are also subplots involving
library board members, censorship, patron privacy, and library funding. Even when the library is
the site of the murder, the importance of the library to the community is underscored, in part by
the conflicts that the discovery of the body creates.
The importance of these series to my book project was clear, but, even after deciding to limit the
primary bibliography to those books that focused
on librarians and/or libraries, I had some decisions
to make. I knew that the mystery series with librarian detectives would have to be covered in
their entirety, even though many volumes of these
series don’t involve a library. For example, we
never see Elizabeth Peters’ Jacqueline Kirby at
work in a library, and none of the mysteries in this
series has anything to do with a library. Jacqueline
Seewald’s Kim Reynolds leaves librarianship, but
returns to it in the most recent volume of this series, The Bad Wife (Perfect Crime, 2014). However, the decision to include all of the books in
these series is relatively clear-cut, compared with
the question of what to do about Thursday Next.
Thursday Next is the protagonist of Jasper
Fforde’s fantasy-detective series about BookWorld.
Thursday, introduced to us in The Eyre Affair
(Viking, 2001), the case that made her famous, is a
member of the SpecOp 27—Literature Detectives,
the special branch of the police that deals with
literary cases. In BookWorld, Thursday serves as a
member of Jurisfiction, a group of characters who
police BookWorld.
This series certainly did not fit the criteria for
inclusion in my primary bibliography—however,
one book, The Well of Lost Plots (Viking, 2002),
did come up in WorldCat as a result of a subject
search for “Libraries.” The only actual library in
this book, however, is the Great Library in BookWorld, which includes every edition of every book
ever published. The Great Library can be used to
travel to any book that was ever published, even
those that were self-published. The Cheshire Cat is
Bibliomysteries
the librarian for the Great Library.
Despite the existence of the Great Library and
the Cheshire Cat as Librarian in this book, I found
this classification somewhat puzzling. Neither this
character nor this setting serves as a major element
in this book. The Well of Lost Plots is not a library,
it is where unpublished plots are kept until they
are turned to text or published. I was willing to call
this classification an anomaly, and go on without
Thursday Next.
However, in 2012’s The Woman Who Died a
Lot (Viking), a recuperating, middle-aged Thursday Next is given a new assignment. She had
hoped to be made head of the Literature Detectives, but that position was given to a much
younger woman. No, Thursday was made Chief
Librarian of the Swindon All-You-Can-Eat-atFatso’s Drink Not Included Library. Suddenly,
Thursday Next has become a librarian sleuth. Yet
this novel’s entry in WorldCat says nothing about
librarians and libraries.
But Thursday’s issues in this library do mirror
to some extent the situations that other librarians
encounter in 21st-century librarian mystery series.
The very name of the library, the Swindon AllYou-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library, indicates that the library has had its mission
of encouraging reading expanded to include food.
It is amusing that, in an age where library cafes
have become common, this particular in-library
eatery does not include the beverage. This library
is also facing severe budget cuts, but these cuts will
affect its munitions budget, which has traditionally
been quite generous. However, Thursday still has
connections in BookWorld, connections who can
help her deal with the many plot elements of this
novel, as well as learn to work with her rival, the
new head of the Literature Detectives.
Although at this point, the Thursday Next series
must be considered a librarian-detective series,
and although the bookish nature of the series
doesn’t make this inclusion unnatural, it does raise
a number of questions about the nature of libraries, librarians, and information. BookWorld’s concern about reading rates, about what can be done
to make reading more attractive in the Information Age, do mirror the concerns that the fictional
librarian sleuths deal with, although they refer to
circulation rates and gate counts. BookWorld’s
Jurisfiction plays the role of a library board, and
Thursday’s passionate arguing against the commercialization of, in particular, the works of Jane
Austen seems to mirror the concerns that people
have about diluting the library mission with coffee
shops and other programming.
Thursday began her series by saving the novel
Jane Eyre, being forced in the process to change
the ending to one that is universally beloved (before Thursday’s intervention, people loved the
novel but hated the ending). In First among Sequels (Viking, 2007), Thursday saves Sense and
Sensibility by outwitting the producers of a reality
television series in which the characters must
compete in tasks and the audience votes on what
will happen next. In this case, Thursday’s intervention preserves the original plot. Thursday Next
will be included in my book as a librarian detective, simply because she is dealing with many of
the same issues that are brought up in the other
library mystery novels.
I am still answering many of the questions that
began this essay, although I have learned that relatively few librarian sleuths change professions, and
that the dangers of libraries are outweighed by
their value in our culture.
Mary P. (Mollie) Freier is Professor and Head of Public
Services at Northern Michigan University’s Olson
Library in Marquette, MI. She has published on
information literacy and the detective novel, and has
recently published an article on the librarian in the
Harry Potter series.
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MRJ Fall 2014
Elizabeth Peters’s Bibliophile, Jacqueline Kirby
by Mimosa Summers Stephenson
I can think of nothing I enjoy more than sitting
down with a cup of creamy coffee and a novel
about Elizabeth Peters’s bibliophile. Peters devoted
four novels published between 1972 and 1989 to
the sleuthing of Jacqueline Kirby, a book person,
who is a librarian at “one of the big Eastern universities” in the first two books in the series—The
Seventh Sinner (1972) and The Murders of Richard III (1974)—and at Cold Water College in Nebraska in the third—Die for Love (1984). In the
fourth mystery in the series—Naked Once More
(1989)—she has resigned her job as a librarian and
taken up authoring historical romances. Kirby is
Peters’s most cynical, sardonic, sarcastic, and acerbic heroine, but she is still a cat lover, and surely a
stand in for Peters, a.k.a. Barbara Mertz and Barbara Michaels. All four of the novels have to do
with research and writing books, either as a
scholar or an author.
The first two mysteries are only tangentially
about books. In The Seventh Sinner, the sleuthing
librarian becomes friends with seven brilliant students in Rome, all studying with research fellowships and feeling great pressure to earn renewal of
their awards. While she and the heptet are visiting
the catacombs, an ugly, obnoxious hanger-on is
murdered, apparently by one of the students. Kirby
figures out that parental pressure has triggered
intellectual theft and emotional illness.
The second, The Murders of Richard III, alludes to Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time, which
Kirby has read, as the novel revisits Richard III
and the murders of the Princes in the Tower. A
friend wrangles an invitation for Kirby to a country house party with a group of eccentrics determined to restore the good name of the presumed
innocent Richard of Gloucester, maligned by the
Tudors who succeeded the Yorks. In this English
country cozy with medieval period costumes, the
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planned murder is averted by Kirby after the perpetrator has imitated the supposed murders of the
Yorkist villain/innocent, even to trussing up the
guest playing the Duke of Clarence and inserting
him head first into a wine barrel (a trick Martha
Grimes was to repeat in her first novel The Man
with a Load of Mischief, 1981). Peters’s first two
Jacqueline Kirby books dally on the edges of
scholarship, but they don’t directly concern books
(though The Murders of Richard III is wonderful
fun for me, as I teach Shakespeare’s Richard III).
The third mystery, Die for Love, is directly
about writing books. In this one Kirby attends a
historical romance writers’ conference in New
York because she is desperate to get away from the
Midwest and back to the big city on a holiday, the
expenses for which she can deduct from her income tax. Because she is attending a conference
devoted to historical romance, her lover, the chair
of the English Department at Cold Water College,
gives her two romance novels to read on the plane.
Kirby is such a swift reader that she devours both
novels on the flight to New York and gives them to
the stewardess who has been trying to read over
her shoulder.
As she attends the conference and observes the
politics, jealousies, and subterfuges, she determines to write a historical romance herself. In between solving two murders and avoiding being
murdered herself, she scribbles her first novel and
blackmails a powerful agent into marketing it for
her. Peters has Kirby say, “I wrote that first book as
a joke, you know. Surrounded by romance writers,
unable to believe the stuff I was reading had actually been published…”. The librarian has deserted
books but has turned to producing them.
The first three of Peters’s Jacqueline Kirby books
are full of literary allusions and snippets of quotation recognized by bibliophiles like me; however,
Bibliomysteries
no other Peters mystery matches the playful romp
through bookdom that is Naked Once More, a
serious, but hilarious, critique of the writer’s experience with agents and publishers.
Through most of the novel, Kirby finds herself
in an insular, backward town nestled between
mountains in Appalachia, “where the woodbine no
doubt twineth.” Seven years before, Kathleen
Darcy, author of a fantastically successful prehistoric romance, had disappeared and has now been
legally declared dead. Kirby, with two successful
historical romances accomplished, has been selected by Darcy’s family and agent to write a sequel
for Naked in the Ice.
The entire Naked Once More is a spoof from
the side of the author on the business of publishing
books. Reading the novel, I feel as if Peters is getting back at the businessmen who use her creativity to make money for themselves. Kirby even
complains that “the damned IRS has eliminated
income averaging” because a writer may work for
several years on a book and receive years’ worth of
income in one year when the book is published or
when she receives an advance.
The story of Naked Once More hinges on the
identity of the person who will write the sequel to
Naked in the Ice. Kathleen Darcy had loved the
Brontës and Jane Austen, who are alluded to
throughout the novel, and quite obviously Peters
loved them too. Darcy’s name comes from the hero
of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Fitzwilliam
Darcy. Kathleen has called her home Gondal from
the imaginary kingdom created when they were
children by Emily and Anne Brontë in their Gondal saga. Kathleen’s pseudonym, Augusta Ellrington, also comes from the Brontë children’s juvenilia, and she even looks like Charlotte Brontë.
Peters includes a lengthy paragraph describing the
Brontë juvenilia and comparing Kathleen’s work to
it:
endless poems, tragedies and histories of
Gondal and the rival island of Gaaldine… .
The women were all beautiful and tragic;
sometimes they died of a broken heart, occasionally they were betrayed and murdered.
The heroes brooded and plotted; languished
in dank dungeons, invaded and were besieged by foes; died gloriously on the field of
battle, or were stabbed to death by traitors.
As a further Brontë echo, Peters’s hero, Paul
Spencer, is “another damned brooding Heathcliffevariety hero.” I, too, love the Brontës and Jane Austen.
The snippets of quotation in Naked Once More
also reveal Peters’s familiarity with poets of earlier
centuries. When Kirby arrives at Gondal, she
thinks, “It was like approaching the door of the
Dark Tower,” alluding to Robert Browning’s
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” which
takes its title and last line from Mad Tom’s nonsense in Shakespeare’s King Lear, nonsense which
itself comes from a fairy tale about Childe Rowland. And she includes snippets from most of the
other great 19th-century English poets too—John
Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson,
Matthew Arnold—and even the minor Victorian
Ernest Dowson: “I have been faithful to thee,
Cynara, in my fashion.”
Shakespeare appears, with lines especially from
Hamlet and Macbeth, as in “Oh! what a noble
mind is here o’erthrown” and “Her thumbs were
already pricking.” Kirby alludes to another Renaissance English poet when misquoting Thomas
Nashe’s “In Time of Pestilence”: “Death hath closed
Helen’s eyes.” A slip of paper found in Kathleen
Darcy’s purse after she disappears quotes the 15thcentury English poet William Dunbar, “Timor
Charlotte and Branwell had composed the
chronicles of Angria; Emily and Anne wrote
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mortis conturbat me—” or “The fear of death disturbs me.” The quotations are far too numerous to
cite more, but obviously it is Peters who loves traditional English poetry, and Jacqueline Kirby is a
stand-in for her author.
Naked Once More reveals Peters’s attitude
about her creative efforts and the hurdles she faces
as she deals with agents and publishers. Kirby exclaims,
I don’t want to write lit-ra-choor, or win the
Pulitzer. The literary pundits may dismiss my
kind of writing as “popular fiction”; but it’s a
lot harder to write than those stream-ofconsciousness slices of life. A “popular” novel
is just about the only form of fiction these
days that has a plot. I like plots. I like a book
to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
I’m proud of what I do and I have no desire
to read or write anything else.
Part of this attitude is revealed through comments about the missing Kathleen Darcy; the
bookstore owner Jan Wilson tells Kirby that writing was “an integral part of [Darcy’s] very being.”
Kirby realizes that
Non-writers would never understand how
real the imaginary world of a book could
become, excluding all outside stimuli, consuming its creator. Nothing mattered except
the idea.
She even claims that a writer “wrestled [her ideas]
into submission.” In this particular murder
mystery, Peters wrote about her profession, her
emotional involvement in it, and the struggles it
presented to her, struggles she felt non-writers did
not understand.
Many related comments concern the author’s
financial reward, or lack of same. Kirby especially
resents being asked to work for free. She tells a
woman who insists she speak without remuneration to a woman’s group, “The word is work. Writing is work. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. That’s
10
how I earn my living.” Kirby is expected as an
author to make television appearances to publicize
her book, but she argues,
Writing is my job, and my sole source of income. If publicity is part of the job then I
should be paid for it. The people who interview me get paid, and the people who publish the magazines and produce the shows
make big bucks. Why should I be the only
one working for nothing?
Kirby also complains that when the royalties are
paid she will get only twelve and a half percent
because Kathleen Darcy’s heirs will receive the
rest, and of course the agent takes a cut. Kirby
even grumbles that writers aren’t paid while they
go on vacation, and they worry the entire time
they are gone about the characters they are in the
middle of developing.
Naked Once More is a murder mystery, but it is
even more a writer’s unburdening herself regarding the trials of her profession as Jacqueline Kirby
seems to be Elizabeth Peters herself in such details
as loving cats and having two children, a boy and a
girl. Traditionally writers have found ways to write
about themselves, either through overtly discussing their ills, as Percy Bysshe Shelley does when he
falls upon the thorns of life and bleeds, or even
through writing about some other art, as Thomas
Mann does in “The Infant Prodigy,” Franz Kafka in
“A Hunger Artist,” and Henry James in “The Real
Thing.” Elizabeth Peters has found an effective way
to present the trials of an author that I fully enjoy.
Her diatribe against the publishing world is pure
fun, but it is profoundly serious nevertheless.
Mimosa Summers Stephenson is Professor of English at
the University of Texas at Brownsville, where she teaches
Shakespeare and the Bible as Literature. She has also
taught at Hong Kong Baptist College, William Jewell
College, and Xiamen University in the People’s Republic
of China, the last under a Fulbright Grant. Her articles
have been published in such journals as The Nathaniel
Hawthorne Review and Studies in American Humor.
Bibliomysteries
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
Writing the Book Collector Mysteries, or,
Did I Just Die and Go to Book Heaven?
by Victoria Abbott (Victoria Maffini and Mary Jane Maffini)
Sometimes, I can’t believe my luck with my job.
Of course, that could be my character, Jordan
Bingham, talking, because she’s the research assistant for Vera Van Alst, reclusive and curmudgeonly book collector and the most hated woman in
Harrison Falls, New York. In the book collector
mysteries, Jordan gets to work hard, ahem, ferreting out rare first editions of mystery novels. Some
books in the collection are contemporary, but most
are from the Golden Age of Detection. Sure she
gets to live in the cozy attic quarters of historic Van
Alst House, chow down on the fabulous food produced by Signora Panetone, the Italian cook, and
indulge her own taste for vintage, antique and just
plain expensive items. As the first person in her
large Irish family to go straight, you can see how
she’d think she was in heaven. But at this rate, she’ll
never get back to graduate school even if she is
rebuilding her plundered reserves. Bad boyfriend,
long gone, but that’s a story for another day.
So it could be Jordan talking, but just as likely
it’s me. Picture this: it’s a lovely sunny day, not too
hot, not too windy and this writer is reclining in a
lounger, catching up on the latest stack of books
for whatever famous author of the Golden Age will
be featured in the book collector mysteries work in
progress. I have a glass of iced tea nicely at hand, a
dog or two curled up by the feet. Life’s a beach.
The scene can shift to cozy fall or winter settings inside, by the fire, but the essential activity is
the same. I must revisit the body of work of an
author I first fell in love with decades ago. I have to
find the elements of the series that will enrich the
action in the book collector mysteries.
There’s been a lot of background reading for
each of the book collector mysteries: the focus was
on Agatha Christie for The Christie Curse, Dorothy L. Sayers for The Sayers Swindle, and most
recently, the great Rex Stout for The Wolfe
Widow, which hit the shelves in September 2014.
Pause for fireworks. Right now, I have a stack of
Ngaio Marsh mysteries for “The Marsh Madness,”
which is underway.
While Vera is collecting ‘fine first editions’ of
these books, Jordan is getting immersed in collecting her own copies of used paperbacks from the
seventies. No fine firsts for me either, alas. I am
picking up copies where I can, as many of the
books are out of print or not easily available. I get
them from dealers, bookstores, used bookstores,
friends, my own bookshelves and here and there.
Sometimes my readers get them for me. When the
manuscript is finished, most of these books continue to keep me company on my office bookshelves. Like Jordan, I love the changes in the style
of cover art each decade or so, particularly those
psychedelic covers from the seventies. They’re
hard to beat.
On the long road to finishing each book, there
are biographies of the authors. Agatha Christie,
Dorothy L. Sayers and Rex Stout each lived far
from ordinary lives. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why their books—products of their time and
culture—still live on with their readers and admirers.
I look forward to learning more about Ngaio
Marsh. For sure, you can see her background in
theater in the way she reveals her characters and
11
MRJ Fall 2014
stages each scene. They rise off the page. But what
else will I learn about her? Whatever, I hope to
weave it into “The Marsh Madness.”
But until then, I’m reveling in the release of The
Wolfe Widow, not least because Jordan has a major crush on one of the finest figures in crime fiction: the delicious Archie Goodwin. It is complete
coincidence that I do too. The Nero Wolfe mysteries are some of the most enduring, and endearing,
of all the great series. They stand the test of time
and they are just as much fun to reread as to discover for the first time. Nero is unique: brilliant,
difficult, audacious.
Some people say that Vera Van Alst is like Nero
Wolfe without the charm. Be that as it may, let’s
hope she makes it to the end of The Wolfe Widow.
She’s trying to hold on to her precious Nero Wolfe
collection and her life. Too bad she’s fired the only
person who might be able to save her: our resourceful and loyal sleuth, Jordan, who just might
still have the set of lockpicks she got for her Sweet
Sixteen. She’s going to need them. Let’s hope Archie can channel some advice.
Although this is written from the point of view of
Victoria Abbott, that shadowy figure turns out to be a
mysterious collaboration between the
artist/photographer Victoria Maffini and her
mystery-writing mother, Mary Jane Maffini. They can’t
believe their good fortune in writing the book collector
mysteries. They hope you have fun too. But just so you
know: Archie’s taken. The book collector mysteries are
published by Berkley Prime Crime.
www.victoria-abbott.com
On Killing Booksellers by Donna Andrews
I killed off a bookseller in Owls Well That Ends
Well, my sixth book.
It felt good.
I hasten to add that I don’t often harbor ill feelings against booksellers. Along with librarians,
they’re among my favorite people in the world.
Except for… let’s call him Gordon-you-thief.
Not his real name, but that’s what I called him in
my book.
It all happened years ago, long before I started
writing the Meg Langslow series. I’d recently discovered one of my favorite Golden Age mystery
writers, R. Austin Freeman, creator of the Dr.
Thorndyke series. This was before anyone had
begun to rerelease his books as trade paperbacks.
It was at least a decade before online booksellers
like AbeBooks came into being and made filling
the gaps in one’s bookshelves easier. In fact, it was
probably before I even had an email account or
Internet access. Back then, in the Dark Ages, finding a out-of-print book meant making regular
treks to all the local used book stores to rummage
through their dusty shelves for treasures.
12
Including the store owned by Gordon-you-thief.
Gordon specialized in mystery, fantasy, and
science fiction. I found some of my first few
Thorndykes in his shop—faded, dusty hardbacks,
with or without dust jackets, prices penciled on the
flyleaf. Usually in the ten to twenty dollar range. I
snapped them up, read them with glee, and went
out looking for more.
I began to notice that the prices were creeping
up. Instead of ten to twenty dollars they were rising to thirty, forty, even fifty. A bit pricy for someone only a few years out of college. I conferred
with a friend who was also collecting things Gordon tended to have. The prices weren’t just creeping up, they were soaring skyward. Was it because
we’d snapped up the easier-to-find volumes by our
idols and were getting into the rarer ones? Or was
it because Gordon knew we wanted them? We
suspected the latter.
That’s when my friend and I began calling him
Gordon-you-thief.
The last straw came when I ran into Gordon at
the Vassar Book Sale. For fifty-one years, from
Bibliomysteries
1949 to 1999, the annual book sale organized by
the Vassar Club of Washington, DC, was both a
major source of scholarship funds for the college
and a highlight of the local bibliophile’s year. By
the time I discovered it, the sale was held in a huge
space in the Washington Convention Center.
I was pushing my way through the crowds,
probably trying to make my way from the mystery
section to the science fiction and fantasy section,
when Gordon popped into view.
“I found something on the dollar table that
you’re going to want when you see it in the store,”
he said, by way of a greeting. At least that’s the way
I remember it. Gordon didn’t waste much time on
small talk. I can’t remember what I said, but I’m
sure I was polite.
A week or two later I was in the store, definitely
curious to see what treasures Gordon had found at
the sale. And sure enough, there in the mystery
section was a Thorndyke book that hadn’t been
there before.
I pulled it off the shelf, noted with pleasure its
good condition, and flipped to the flyleaf to see
what Gordon wanted for it.
$150.
Something in me snapped. But very quietly. I
pulled out a sheet of paper from my purse, pretended to consult it, and then shrugged.
“Already got that,” I muttered.
I didn’t already have it. It was one of the few of
Freeman’s Thorndyke books I didn’t own by that
time. And maybe it was worth $150. In fact, it
probably was. But knowing he’d found it on the
dollar table, I just couldn’t buy it.
I knew the life of a used bookseller was a rather
precarious one. I wasn’t ungrateful for all the wonderful books I’d found at Gordon’s store. I had
great respect for someone whose knowledge of his
trade allowed him to spot a hidden gem on the
dollar table, something he could sell in his store
for a more than a hundred times what he’d paid for
it.
But did he have to rub that dollar table in my
face? I knew every time I looked at that book, I
wouldn’t see a book I love. I’d see Gordon smirking
at his coup.
I stopped going to Gordon’s store so much. At
first, I figured I was allowing some time for the
Freeman market to cool off. Then I got out of the
habit of going. There were other used bookstores.
And other authors. And eventually AbeBooks, and
the used book dealers at mystery conventions.
But the whole incident still rankled. So in 2004,
when I was working on Owls Well That Ends
Well, which is set at a giant yard sale, I was casting
about for a suitable murder victim. I didn’t have to
look far.
“Gordon,” I said.
He was a perfect fit. I gave my Freeman experience to one of Meg’s husband Michael’s fellow faculty members. I was sure I could think up other
horrible things Gordon could have done to other
people in my fictional town of Caerphilly. I consulted a few booksellers to make sure I had my
bibliographic facts straight. Tom and Enid Schantz
helped me figure out which rare Freeman book
would make the best McGuffin—The Uttermost
Farthing, in case you’re curious.
And when in the course of my research I told
Maggie Mason about my encounter with Gordon,
to my astonishment, she recognized him immediately. With her permission, I added her into the
book as a bookseller shopping the yard sale, and
incorporated one of her experiences with the real
life Gordon into the book’s plot. An excerpt, in
which Meg is talking to Maggie:
“I take it you weren’t fond of Gordon-youthief,” I said.
“Gordon-you-thief!” she exclaimed. “That’s
perfect.”
“You’ve bought books from him, too?”
“Competed with him, actually,” she said.
“I’m a bookseller. Used to go on the occasional booking expedition with him, until I
found out what he was like. Do you know
13
MRJ Fall 2014
what he did to me?”
She stopped peering at the books and
turned to me.
“We were visiting a couple of used book
stores—the kind where they don’t really know
what’s valuable, and you can pick up something for a few bucks that’s worth much more.
In the first one, he told me the parking meter
was about to run out, but he could use some
more time—so how about if he fed the meter
another hour’s worth of quarters, and then
after that hour we could go on to the next
store, a mile or two away. But the minute we
walked into the second store, the owner said,
‘Gordon, what’s wrong—did you forget something? You just left a couple of minutes ago.’”
“Sneaky,” I said, shaking my head.
“That was the last time I went booking with
him.”
Of course, in addition to changing his name, I
changed nearly everything else about the real life
Gordon. My character doesn’t look like the real
Gordon, and I made him both an antique dealer
and a rare bookseller. I gave my Gordon a disgruntled ex-wife—I have no idea about the real Gordon’s marital status. I changed everything I could.
But I kept those skyrocketing prices, and his inability to refrain from boasting where he’d found
his latest treasure.
Strange to say, ever since killing off Gordon in
Owls Well That Ends Well, I’ve felt much more
mellow about his real life counterpart. That’s why
we mystery writers are so fond of saying, “Don’t
get even—just kill them early in your next book.”
Donna Andrews is the author of twenty-two mystery
novels, including eighteen in the Meg Langslow series
from Minotaur. Her most recent books are The Good,
the Bad, and the Emus (July 2014) and The Nightingale
Before Christmas (October 2014). She blogs with the
Femmes Fatales (femmesfatales.typepad.com), and
when not writing she can probably be found in her
garden, taking a picture of whatever flowers haven’t yet
been eaten by the deer. donnaandrews.com
Biblio-Burgling by Lawrence Block
So I was walking east on Eleventh Street, and
when I crossed University Place I started looking
in windows until I spotted one in which a cat lay
curled up and sleeping. I turned to enter Barnegat
Books, and found my favorite felon perched on a
stool behind the counter. He looked up from the
book he’d been reading, and I looked down to see
what it might be.
“Ah,” I said. “Refreshing our memory, are we?”
He closed the book, the Random House edition
of The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, and
we both took the opportunity to admire Manny
Schongut’s cover, which showed him in domino
mask and checkered topcoat.
“It just came in,” he said. “It’s a first edition, but
it’s ex-library, and at least as well-read as you or I
can claim to be. I wonder what happened to that
coat.”
14
“Don’t you still have it? You’re wearing it on the
cover of The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons.”
He let that pass. “This book,” he said, “was a real
turning point.”
“Your third adventure.”
“The third that you took the trouble to chronicle. I was around for a good many years before you
ever thought to write about me, you know. But
then you wrote Burglars Can’t Be Choosers and I
was suddenly a public figure.”
“With a very small public,” I said.
“That was just supposed to be a one-off,” he
remembered. “A hapless burglar caught in a murder plot, who has to solve the crime to save himself. And I did, and that should have been that.”
“Well, I liked you,” I told him. “I enjoyed your
company and wanted more of it.”
“And wrote The Burglar in the Closet, and
Bibliomysteries
made me a series character.”
“There are worse things to be.”
“I suppose so,” he said. “But what kind of a
character was I, anyway? Take away the mask and
the topcoat, and what would you have?”
“You lacked definition.”
“Exactly, and I was well aware of the lack myself.
So, when old Mr. Litzauer let it slip that he was
ready to sell out and retire, at a time when I was
flush with the proceeds of a night’s work—”
“Ill-gotten gains,” I suggested.
“Let’s make that well-gotten, shall we? I decided
it was time to carpe the old diem before I squandered the dough on necessities, and the next thing
anybody knew I wasn’t just a lawbreaker. I was an
erudite and literate burglar who daylighted as a
bookseller.”
“It made a difference, did it?”
“All the difference in the world! It got me a best
friend, because Carolyn Kaiser’s dog-washing emporium is just down the block. And it elevated my
third appearance in print to the rank of bibliomystery.”
“Rudyard Kipling,” I said. “H. Rider Haggard. A
wealthy book collector from the Subcontinent.”
“Key plot elements, but even before that the
tone was set. In the very first chapter, I catch a
shoplifter, charge him full price for the books in
his bag, then buy them back for a fraction of the
amount and send him on his way.”
“A sadder but wiser man.”
“In a handful of pages,” he recalled, “I became a
hero to booksellers everywhere. And readers
warmed to me as never before, because I was living
the life of which they’d always dreamed.”
“Stealing things?”
“I suppose some of them have that fantasy, but
not nearly as many as dream of owning and operating a bookshop. And why wouldn’t they? If reading is one of your keenest pleasures, and bookshops are where you spend some of your happiest
moments, why wouldn’t you entertain the notion
of having a shop of your own?”
“And to transform the dream into reality—”
“Would be a horrible mistake.”
“Oh? It seems to have worked out rather well for
you.”
He rolled his eyes. “My situation is rather special,” he said, “in that I don’t have to make my living selling books. A bit of breaking and entering
got me into the business, and further ventures in
the same vein help keep my financial head above
water.”
“So you’re a career criminal.”
“Some career. But yes, I guess it’s fair to call me
that.”
“And yet you remain endearing, even lovable.
And it’s all because of the corner you turned in the
third book, when you bought the bookstore. That
established you as sensitive and literate and general good company.”
“The sort of chap who could Study Spinoza and
Paint Like Mondrian, and talk it all out in the
most entertaining fashion with his best friend, the
lesbian dog groomer. You set it all up for me in the
third book, and that’s why I’m still behind the
counter at Barnegat Books all these years later.”
“And yet you haven’t aged a bit.”
“It’s a miracle,” he allowed. “But if Kipling was a
turning point, a defining moment, then Ted Williams put the icing on the cupcake.”
“The sixth book,” I said. “The Burglar Who
Traded Ted Williams.”
“Pivotal,” he said. “Seminal.”
I had to think about it. “The baseball cards,” I
said. “It brought in a whole new group of readers,
fans of the sport and collectors of the cards, and
—”
He was shaking his head.
“The Sue Grafton titles. The running gag
throughout the book, with you and Carolyn coming up with title after title. F is for Stop, G is for
Spot, H is for Preparation—I could go on.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. If they want more, let ‘em
buy the book. But that’s not it.”
“Then what? Oh, of course. When the book
15
MRJ Fall 2014
opened, Bernie was facing eviction. By the time it
ended, he’d put together enough capital to buy the
building. It’s no longer a challenge for you to come
up with the rent each month, and you get to collect
rents from the residential tenants. Um, why are
you still shaking your head?”
“All of that’s good,” he said. “But it’s not what
has served to establish me as a leading figure in
contemporary crime fiction.”
“Is that what you are?”
“It’s how some prominent critic was gracious
enough to label me. If you disagree, you can take it
up with him. And you know what won him over,
and so many readers along with him?”
I didn’t. He raised a hand, extended a finger,
and I followed its path all the way to the sunlit
window.
“Oh,” I said.
“Raffles the Cat, introduced into my life and my
bookstore by the aforementioned Carolyn, who
did a brilliant job of tricking me into giving him a
home. What’s a mystery series without a cat in
residence? This tailless tabby, this Manx manqué,
has made a world of difference.”
“The readers like Raffles, eh?”
“They love him,” he said, “and I’m damned if I
know why. He’s not like Koko, that Siamese of Lillian Jackson Braun’s, who solved one murder after
another. Oh, he’ll pounce on rolled-up balls of
paper if I fling them for him, but he generally tires
of the game before I do. And he uses the toilet, but
I’ve never been able to persuade him to flush the
damn thing. Don’t get me wrong, I like him well
enough, but I have to wonder at the way readers
seem to adore him. In the new book—”
“The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons.”
“Sure, never miss a chance to plug the title. As I
was saying, he doesn’t do a damn thing except rub
against my ankles to remind me to feed him.”
“But he’s in the book,” I said.
“Even as he’s in the hearts of readers everywhere. Well, what’s a bookstore without a cat? Or a
mystery series?”
We looked at each other, wondering who would
have the last word. As it turned out, it was to be
neither of us.
“Miaow,” said Raffles.
Lawrence Block has written eleven books about
burglar/bookseller Bernie Rhodenbarr, and 100+ books
about other people. His latest is Defender of the
Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf, just out
from Subterranean Press.
Through a Glass Fondly by Ali Brandon
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
—Chinese proverb
I don’t know about you, but one of my favorite
childhood memories is that of browsing in the tiny
independent bookstore in our neighborhood. In
that very special place, no one laughed at me for
liking reading more than playing with dolls or
participating in sports. No one thought it odd that
I could read far faster than any other kid in my
class. There, I could browse as long as I liked, even
hide behind one of the taller shelves and surreptitiously read a chapter from one of the grown-up
romantic suspense novels. And what a very won16
drous day it was those few times when I managed
to save enough of my allowance to actually purchase something.
Books were my life, a source of enchantment—my own secret garden, if you will—and the
bookstore was the place where all the magic originated. Even as an adult, I never passed up a chance
to browse anywhere that sold books. So when I
had the opportunity to write the Black Cat Bookshop mystery series for Berkley Prime Crime, I
told myself it was like returning home again.
Except that it wasn’t.
Time for a bit of true confession. I am a pragmatist, a literalist. I grew up believing one of my
Bibliomysteries
dad’s favorite sayings—you can go to hell for lying
just like you can for stealing—meaning that it’s hard
for me not to tell the unvarnished truth. I agonize
over the little things, like making sure my fictional
buildings are ADA accessible, or else are grandfathered in. And I hyperventilate when I can’t find
the proper technical term for the thingamajig that
goes on the doohickey. So, as thrilled as I was to be
asked to write a bookstore series, one part of my
brain protested that it might not be a good idea,
given the current state of the industry.
Because, let’s face it, we all know the dire situation that brick-and-mortar bookstores face these
days. Was it realistic to set my novels in an industry struggling to stay afloat? Even the bonus of a
cat mascot to help solve the requisite murders that
occurred in and around the store wouldn’t be
enough to offset the fiscal elephant looming in the
room. I couldn’t simply pretend that the neighborhood bookstore wasn’t an endangered species, not
without feeling I was insulting my readers’ intelligence.
But, on the other hand, wouldn’t writing cozies
that dealt with the unpleasant reality of bookstore
closures be a turnoff (not to mention likely being a
very short-lived series, indeed)?
I dumped all those doubts on my new editor
when I met her for the first time to do a little
brainstorming about the Black Cat Bookshop mysteries. And she, in turn, basically told me to quit
agonizing. Give the readers the sort of bookstore
they all remember and love, she advised me. They
know the reality; let them have the fantasy.
Can we have a halleluiah?
For my editor was right, of course. Fiction is
designed as an escape from the trials and boredom
of everyday life. Readers don’t crack open a cozy
mystery to get an author’s take on the economy.
They simply want interesting and engaging characters who live or work in interesting and engaging surroundings, and who will be like friends to
them for the few hours they spend together.
The readers want that garden.
Free now from my previous mental constraints,
I embraced my storyline and got to work plotting.
My first task was to establish Hamlet the cat—the
titular black cat of the series—and his guardian,
Darla Pettistone, as my main characters. Then it
was time to create their home base: the bookstore.
It should be cozy and inviting, I told myself, even a
bit quirky… basically, the sort of place you’d like to
hang out at in real life. Since the series takes place
in Brooklyn, it was a no-brainer that Pettistone’s
Fine Books was housed in a vintage brownstone,
the first two floors of which had been transformed
to a retail space. Of course, I left behind as much
of the original wainscoting and trim to keep that
antique vibe going.
As far as fixtures, I gave the store a maze of
bookshelves so Hamlet could rotate his daily naps
from section to section. I also furnished the place
with chairs scattered about in various little nooks
to encourage impromptu reading. Upstairs was a
lounge where book clubs could meet, along with
an area for storage. Add some nice rugs on the
wooden floor, and a cheerful string of bells on the
door to announce customers, and Pettistone’s Fine
Books was ready to start selling.
But, the nagging voice in my head wouldn’t
completely shut up, so I had to give a small nod to
reality. That’s why Darla never forgets that the
store’s revenue stream partly depends on the rare
and collectible book sales that her store manager,
Professor James T. James, conducts online and by
mail. She limits her clerk, Robert, to part-time
hours until an uptick in business warrants bringing him on full-time. And by the fourth book in
the series, Literally Murder, Darla decides to add a
coffee bar to the upstairs lounge as yet another
cash source.
So, that’s my bookstore… firmly grounded in
the past and in fantasy, but tweaked with just a
smidge of reality, and open to everybody. I hope
you’ll stop by Pettistone’s Fine Books one day soon
and see my not-so-secret garden for yourself.
Ali Brandon’s Literally Murder, the fourth book in the
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MRJ Fall 2014
Black Cat Bookshop series, was released September 30.
Under her real name, Diane A.S. Stuckart, Ali wrote the
popular Leonardo da Vinci historical mystery series.
Additionally, she is the author of five historical
romances which will soon be re-released as ebooks. A
native Texan with a degree in Journalism from the
University of Oklahoma, Diane a/k/a Ali now lives in
South Florida. Visit her at www.dianestuckart.com, and
be sure to “like” Hamlet on Facebook:
www.Facebook.com/blackcatbookshopmysteries .
My Cards on the Table by Eric Brown
I read my first book at the age of fifteen. I was
bored one summer, and when I complained of
having nothing to do my mother thrust a tattered
paperback into my hands: Agatha Christie’s Cards
on the Table. That book changed my life.
I’d left school at fourteen when I emigrated with
my parents to Australia; to say that I was not academic would be an understatement. I had no interest in books, reading, or affairs of the mind. I
was preoccupied with one thing: football.
However, Agatha Christie changed all that.
From the first page I was hooked. I was drawn into
the story, the mystery, of Christie’s complex, complicated whodunit. I finished the novel and immediately started reading it again from page one. For
the first time in my life I’d been dragged into the
mind of another person, privy to the thoughts and
feelings of invented characters. Over the course of
the next few months I devoured everything Christie had written. Soon after that, I decided to try my
hand at writing a crime novel, and succeeded in
producing three or four pages before setting them
aside.
And then I discovered science fiction, initially
the works of Robert Silverberg and H. G. Wells. I
took up the pen again and began a series of very
bad SF short stories—and then just as poor novels—which, some fifteen years later, resulted in the
publication of my first collection, The TimeLapsed Man, and a year later my first novel, Meridian Days.
Thirty years after first reading Christie, and
some fifty books later, I had the idea for a crime
novel, and it felt like a homecoming, a return to
my literary roots.
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Murder by the Book, my first mystery novel, is
set in London in 1955 and features the thriller
writer Donald Langham and his sidekick literary
agent Marie Dupré. Together they solve a series of
murders wreaking havoc on the London literary
scene. One by one, writers and editors are falling
victim to a vicious killer, and Langham is next on
the list…. One of the attractions of writing a
mystery set in this milieu was that I could utilise
my knowledge of the crime writing scene at the
time, the incestuous world of writers, editors and
agents all plying their trade in the booming market
of ’fifties London. Another attraction was that,
after writing science fiction novels set in the future, I found that I had a greater literary freedom. I
didn’t have to build the world from the ground up,
or to describe things in as much detail. Readers
would know of the world I was writing about because they lived in it from day to day.
I also found it liberating from a technical point
of view: I had much more freedom to use metaphor and simile, literary devices which are often
hard to use in SF. Have you ever wondered why
you don’t come across many similes in SF literature? It’s because when a writer likens something
to something else, the object he or she likens it to
must be familiar to the reader. If that object is familiar, of this world and of this time, then the hapless writer immediately undercuts the sense of
futurity he or she is attempting to maintain: “A
spaceship like a cigar-case entered orbit around
Saturn… “ is a crass example.
I noticed that I had more leeway in the crime
novel to invent eccentric characters, which don’t
often appear in SF, for reasons which were not at
Bibliomysteries
first obvious to me. It’s allied to the above example
of not undercutting the reader’s sense of futurity.
Eccentric characters are only eccentric in relation
to their environment, and as SF futures might be
described as ‘eccentric’ in themselves, it makes the
SF writer’s job of writing eccentric characters
which are eccentric to their settings very hard.
These characters can only be ‘odd’ in relation to
the setting the reader knows best—ergo, the here
and now… which immediately undercuts that old
sense of futurity the writer is trying to maintain.
Of course, there are difficulties inherent in writing about the London of 1955, namely the research
involved in getting the period detail right. I found
that one way to go about this was to read newspapers of the time, and of course the Internet was an
invaluable help. But, best of all, I gleaned vital information from novels set in the period. I read
novels based in the capital in the mid-fifties, the
works of Graham Greene, Rupert Croft-Cooke and
Robin Maugham being particularly helpful. Not
only did they deal in the day to day ‘business’ of
life at the time, but their rendition of how people
spoke at the time came in useful.
My second crime novel, Murder at the Chase,
due out later this year, is another mystery involving crime writers—in this case the impossible disappearance of a writer from his locked study, and
the possible involvement of the satanist Vivian
Stafford. It uses the usual tropes found in classic
whodunits: the country house, a locked room conundrum, vicars and tea parties, as well as a murder or two—but, I like to think, concentrates on
the characters and their motivations, and on the
developing romance between Donald and Maria.
As to the future: I have further ideas for more
Langham and Dupré mysteries, set in London and
beyond, featuring the literary crowd of the time,
skulduggery and even the occasional murder…
Eric Brown was born in West Yorkshire, and has written
over 50 books and published over 130 short stories. He
has been nominated for the British Science Fiction
Award five times, and won it twice.
Guidebook to Murder—The Bookstore Connection
by Lynn Cahoon
My main character, Jill Gardner, in my Tourist
Trap mysteries has my dream job—owning a
bookstore coffee shop combo. In my hometown, I
used to visit a small coffee shop called The Library.
The walls were covered with floor to ceiling bookshelves and the area cluttered with sofas and reading chairs along with small café tables scattered
through the rooms. Patrons were encouraged to
read or borrow a book, kind of a take one, leave
one policy.
Spending lazy Saturday mornings, laughing
with friends and drinking a lovely mocha was a
treat. The rooms smelled of coffee, people were
laughing and chatting, and some were even enjoying a new-to-them book.
So when I started writing a story about a
woman who gets divorced and decides to change
her life in a big way, Coffee, Books, and More
(CBM) was born. I wanted Jill’s shop to be a meeting place for the locals as well as a draw for tourists. The shop focuses on selling books, coffee
drinks, and now treats from Sadie Michaels’ Pies
on the Fly. But there’s also room for tourist
charms, like the local flavor books. One of my
South Cove townies, Bill Sullivan, writes historical
novels about the area.
CBM has become the place where the teens
hang out in the afternoon. Jill and her aunt run
book clubs in the evening and have even sponsored a mystery writer’s launch party. And the
mid-day barista, Toby, he’s the town ladies’ man. In
a very good way.
It’s a place I’d love to create in real life as well.
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MRJ Fall 2014
Someday, maybe.
I’ve been busy recreating myself all my life.
When I went to college, I changed my name (don’t
ask) and took a few chances. Then I became a wife,
mother, and government employee for twenty
years. After my own divorce, I decided it was time
to try my wings again and left my job to start my
own business. Then I worked for a non-profit and
a health care facility, finally landing in an administrative job in the transportation industry.
That’s where I am now, but when I started the
latest career, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
After a year of treatment from surgery to chemo
and finally radiation, I realized one thing. I wanted
to be a writer. No, make that two things. I wanted
to be a writer, and someday wasn’t promised.
I started writing. First essays, then short stories,
and finally, writing and finishing a novel. Five
years after my diagnosis, I was a published author.
That’s the fun of being an author. I can try out
new careers without giving up the security of the
current (real) day job’s paycheck.
I still don’t own a bookstore or a coffee shop,
but working with Jill and the South Cove gang
while writing the Tourist Trap Mysteries is the
next best thing. Besides, I don’t have to do the
dishes or clean out the pastry case at night.
Lynn Cahoon is an Idaho native. If you’d visit the town
where she grew up, you’d understand why her mysteries
and romance novels focus around the depth and
experience of small town life. Currently, she’s living in a
small historic town on the banks of the Mississippi river
where her imagination tends to wander. She lives with
her husband and four fur-babies.
Mistaken Identity by Laura Caldwell
Everyone was so excited when I first got published. But at signings and events for the book, I
often had to explain that no, I wasn’t that writer
named Caldwell. Only a year before Gail Caldwell
had won a Pulitzer Prize. A Pulitzer Prize, for
Pete’s sake.
But after that, I wrote a number of books myself, and I taught law school, and eventually, after
being a trial lawyer on a murder case, I wrote a
memoir. Simon & Schuster decided to call it Long
Way Home: A Young Man Lost in the System and
the Two Women Who Found Him. As the release
date approached, reports starting pouring in from
friends—they’d pre-ordered the book! They
couldn’t wait to read it! But just a few weeks before
publication, I started to get emails. They’d gotten
the book they pre-ordered, but it wasn’t mine. It
was some other Caldwell’s book. And it looked
good. They’d read mine eventually, they promised.
Subsequent online bingeing revealed that Gail
Caldwell had written a memoir, too. Let’s Take the
Long Way Home. And her pub date was three
weeks before mine. Three weeks. So once again, I
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got some Gail Caldwell fans at my signings. But I
wished her well, this other Caldwell. There was
room enough in this writing game for the both of
us, I told myself.
Not long ago when my Bark magazine came to
my new home, I saw it as a good sign. “Summer
2014,” the cover said. And below that, “Beach
Reads Top Picks.” I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt
the energy of the cooperative universe coursing
through me. Since my memoir had come out (reviewed and selling nowhere nearly as well as
Gail’s), I’d completed a mystery series. I had started
a law school charitable organization. I’d gotten a
puppy and thus fallen in love. The Dog Park, the
last book in my contract, was set to launch over
the summer. If we’d gotten coverage in Bark, as my
publicist and I hoped, it would be in this very issue.
My fingers scrabbled through the slick pages,
remembering the thrill of first being covered by a
magazine you loved. There it was! The summer
reading section! My eyes landed on the first book.
It was not unlikely, I told myself, that I’d gotten top
Bibliomysteries
billing. The Dog Park is about a Chicago couple
who share joint custody of their goldendoodle.
When the dog is in a video that goes viral, their
dog becomes famous, throwing their lives into
chaos. It’s a great summer read. Certainly a great
summer read for a magazine called Bark.
But no. There she was. Gail Caldwell. Out with
a book called New Life, No Instructions, about
her angelic dog Tula. Well, good on her, I said in
my head in an accent I felt was British-y. I was
certainly there in the list, and hey, now Gail and I
would have a reason to meet. We’re in the same
magazine! Charming!
But no. No, of course not. There were a whopping eight books featured, all featuring dogs. But
not The Dog Park. She’d won again. And she didn’t
even know we were in a fierce competition.
To this day, if I google the title of my own book
and my own last name, the page comes up replete
with her reviews (predictably stellar). But I wish
her well. I really do.
Selling Murder: Crime and the Popular Press in
17th-Century England by Susanna Calkins
The penny press played a powerful role in 17thcentury England. Unlike the leather-bound books
owned only by the educated elite, the far cheaper
ballads, broadsides, tracts and pamphlets could be
purchased and owned by anyone. Whether a sermon, merriment, advice manual, travel narrative,
or a “true account” of a strange event, collectively
these penny pieces entertained, edified and informed the everyday person about the world
around them. A person did not even need to know
how to read to enjoy these cheap books—there was
always a neighbor or family member who could
read them out loud. Besides, most contained
woodcut images, offering a form of cheap and accessible art that could be readily pasted on the
walls of people’s homes.
The printing and selling of these cheap books
form the backdrop for my historical mysteries, a
series featuring Lucy Campion, a chambermaidturned-printer’s apprentice living in 17th-century
plague-ridden London.
I first encountered these strange and fantastic
ephemera when working on my doctorate in early
modern English history. As I conducted archival
research on the gender patterns of domestic homicide in 17th-century England, I was drawn in par-
ticular to the manner in which murder was portrayed in ballads and true accounts of the crime.
Murder and other crimes were “sold,” alongside
recipes, political tracts, and spiritual narratives. In
the case of ballads, the murders were literally described in verse, sung by booksellers on street corners.
While sensationalistic and meant to entertain—much like modern tabloids—the pieces nevertheless contained elements of truth. I began to
wonder—in a time before modern forensics—could these printed tales of murder be mined
for real clues to the identity of a murderer? Could
someone find truth in these accounts?
Eventually, as I mulled these questions over, I
began to write A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate , the
first in my series featuring Lucy. When a fellow
servant is murdered and someone she loves faces
hanging for the crime, Lucy is compelled to discover the identity of the true murderer for herself.
Although at the beginning of the first novel Lucy is
still a fairly uneducated chambermaid, she manages to discover a very real clue hidden in some
ballads and true accounts of a murder. On a different level I used the device as an authentic way to
frame the larger social context of the crimes, as
well as to convey the community’s understanding
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MRJ Fall 2014
of the victim.
In the novels that follow, the printing and selling of cheap books becomes an even more prominent part of Lucy’s character development. For a
variety of reasons, Lucy has left her employment as
a chambermaid and has begun to work for a local
printer, a loud blustery fellow named Master Aubrey. Although Aubrey does not officially apprentice her, having no wish to run afoul of the printers’ guild, Lucy does learn to print and sell books.
In writing these books, I took a bit of creative
license, collapsing several book-related occupations and trades into one printer’s shop where
books were both printed and sold. In reality, different men might have made the ink, set the type
and run the presses, each one taking a specialized
role in the process. I thought it would work better
for my stories if Lucy, like Master Aubrey and his
apprentice Lach, could both print and sell books.
As a bookseller, Lucy now has the means to
sleuth while legitimately working. Unlike when she
was a chambermaid, Lucy can travel about hawking books, gaining access to a variety of locales, all
the while spying on others and speaking with people without attracting much notice.
However, I wanted Lucy to be more than just a
bookseller. I also wanted her to be directly involved in the creation of the penny pieces, experiencing the compelling relationship between
printer and press. Early printers seemed to view
their presses as living beings, having loving but
stern relationships with their machines. Indeed,
they treated their presses much as if they were
wayward children and they their parents, complaining when the presses “peed” and “bled”
(dripped ink), and “punishing” the press with
kicks and punches if they failed to work properly.
(Lucy is more the cajoling than the kicking type, I
should note).
Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, I wanted
Lucy to become an author herself, which I view as
an important step in her character’s journey. Lucy
strives to become a “petticoat author,” the term for
those scandalous women who took up the pen and
dared to express their ideas in print. Lucy of
course publishes anonymously, which I thought
was a useful way to adhere to the conventions expected of women in this patriarchal era, even as
the act of writing gave her some agency and voice.
I also wove the bookselling trade into my books
in another way. The title of each novel appears in
the story, but refers to a fictional pamphlet or ballad. For example, keeping with the style and length
of tracts from this period, the complete title of my
first novel’s namesake actually reads, A Murder at
Rosamund’s Gate, Or, a True Account of a Most
Horrible Murder of a Serving Girl that Did Occur
Before the Plague and Great Fire did Strike London.
Naturally, the author was S.C. (another little joke
on my part) and the printer was Master Aubrey.
The title of my second novel From the Charred
Remains refers to a collection of objects that Lucy
found, and then wrote about, in the aftermath of
the Great Fire of London. My third book, tentatively titled The Masque of a Murderer, as well as
the fourth yet unnamed book, will also be fictionalized “true accounts” that Lucy will write and
typeset during the course of each story.
When I started writing about an illiterate servant, I did not foresee that Lucy would become so
firmly planted in the world of printing and selling
books. But, after all, selling murder is what we do.
With a Ph.D. in early English history, Susanna Calkins
has long been fascinated with murder in the archives.
Her historic mysteries, set in 17th-century London,
feature Lucy Campion, a chambermaid turned printer’s
apprentice, and are published by St. Martins Minotaur.
An academic at Northwestern University, Susanna lives
outside Chicago with her husband and two sons.
22
Bibliomysteries
Reimagining History by Kate Carlisle
You’re in a bookstore. You can hear the murmur
of other shoppers, but the sound doesn’t register
because you’re doing your second favorite thing in
the world—browsing the mystery shelves. (Your
favorite-favorite thing is to curl up and read one of
those books.) An interesting title catches your
eye—The Book Stops Here, for instance—so you
pick it up and skim the back cover.
“Hm,” you think. “A book about books. The
protagonist is a professional bookbinder who
solves mysteries.”
Just that easily, that quickly, I’ve made a promise
to you. I have promised to entertain you with a
story that is smart. (The other promise I make is
that the book will be funny, but this article isn’t
about that. Just go with me on the “smart” thing
for now.)
Think about it. Hearing that the main character
restores rare books sets an expectation of intelligence. Mysteries are already smart fiction as a rule,
requiring a level of participation from readers that
other books may not, and when you add in a
highly educated main character in an intellectual
field, readers are drawn to the stories as much to
learn as to be entertained.
I’ve gotta tell you, it’s a lot of pressure!
In each Bibliophile Mystery, I attempt to fulfill
both the entertainment and the educational promises I’ve made to readers. One of the ways I like to
do both is to play with different periods of history.
Brooklyn Wainwright, my bookbinder protagonist,
is very much a 21st-century woman, but the books
she’s restored throughout the series have come
from as far back as 1678 and from as recently as
the 1940s. These books are each linked to a
present-day homicide, which Brooklyn feels compelled to solve. She is a seeker of justice, and the
idea of a killer getting away with murder sticks in
her craw.
To craft a mystery that will keep readers flipping
those pages (or clicking next, next, next), I must
learn everything I can about the time period in
which the rare book was written. And then… evil
laugh… I manipulate it to suit my nefarious purposes.
I. Change. History.
I’m feeling a little lightheaded at my own audacity, but yeah, it’s true.
In If Books Could Kill, the second Bibliophile
Mystery, Brooklyn is asked to authenticate a book
of Robert Burns poetry. The book may be an exceedingly rare and precious Cathcart binding,
which is exciting enough, but it also contains poems the world has never seen before. Imagine,
newly discovered work from one of the most celebrated poets of all time. These heretofore unpublished poems could prove that Scotland’s beloved
everyman rebel had a love affair with a daughter of
King George III. Even 200 years later, the implication fires the tempers of both Scots and royalists.
Since Brooklyn is attending the Edinburgh Book
Fair, her very life is endangered when she agrees to
authenticate the book.
So I researched Robert Burns, long a favorite of
mine, and then reimagined history for my own
amusement. And with luck, my reader’s enjoyment.
With A Cookbook Conspiracy, I moved back
across the Atlantic and put into Brooklyn’s hands
the journal/cookbook of an indentured servant
who may have been a spy in the American Revolution. During my research, I was fascinated to discover the role that women played throughout
those dangerous times, and I created a character,
Obedience Green, who was the cook for a British
general. I imagined the secrets a servant may have
overheard, no one taking notice as she moved quietly about the room. Spycraft in the 18th century
included the development of many secret codes, so
Brooklyn was delighted to discover mysterious
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MRJ Fall 2014
symbols written precisely in the margins of the
handwritten book. Then the cookbook’s current
owner is discovered dead, and Brooklyn’s chef sister is the prime suspect. Brooklyn has to decode a
240-year-old puzzle in the hopes of finding a killer
and saving her sister from life in prison.
When I started writing The Book Stops Here,
the latest Bibliophile Mystery, all I knew was that I
wanted Brooklyn to restore a first edition of The
Secret Garden, one of my childhood favorites. I
started out by immersing myself in the world of
Frances Hodgson Burnett. What fun, to explore
the early 20th century! Burnett lived in England,
America, and France. She divorced—twice—right
around the turn of the century, something that was
very uncommon at the time. The writer we may
have thought of as genteel and refined was perhaps
more worldly and more rebellious than we might
have expected. I looked more closely at her life and
realized that she lived in New York at around the
same time as a certain icon of American theater.
What if they had met? What if? What if? What if?
And then I changed history again.
My promise to readers is that I will write smart
mysteries that both entertain and educate… but
there’s an important codicil to that promise: I write
fiction. Readers should never rely on my so-called
facts to be true. History is my playground. Rather,
I hope my books will inspire you to do a little research of your own. Then you can solve the
mystery of what is true, and what comes straight
out of my imagination.
Kate Carlisle is the author of the Bibliophile Mystery
series and the upcoming Fixer-Upper Mystery series,
which will debut in November with the release of A
High-End Finish.
Haunted by Books by Cleo Coyle (Alice Alfonsi and Marc Cerasini)
Fictional characters haunt us. Like trusted
friends, some speak to us so powerfully that we
continue to hear them beyond their stories.
That simple idea—the power of a character to
come alive off the page—is what led Marc and me
to create our Haunted Bookshop mystery series
beginning with The Ghost and Mrs. McClure, the
first of five published entries.
The protagonist of our series is a young, widowed bookseller named Penelope ThorntonMcClure. Like us, Pen grew up loving books. Her
father, a small town cop, voraciously read detective
fiction; and as Pen grew up, she immersed herself
in the noir adventures of Philip Marlowe, Sam
Spade, and the hardboiled anti-heroes of the Black
Mask school.
One day, under the stress of dealing with a difficult author, Pen hears a voice in her head—a gruff
and angry voice. Being a polite, “do right” Jane sort
of person, Pen can’t imagine where this outspoken
voice came from. As a civilized, educated woman
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and upstanding member of her small town’s community, she would never use such blunt and colorful language!
Or would she?
Is this angry, masculine voice actually haunting
Penelope? Or is her alter ego expressing itself
through an iconic character like so many in the
detective novels she discovered in her father’s library.
The ghost in question is Jack Shepard, a private
investigator who was famously gunned down in
1949, in the very building where Pen now runs her
book shop. An acquaintance of Jack’s posthumously nabbed his case files and used them to
scribble a long-running series of detective novels.
The novels became international bestsellers, which
fueled a franchise that included TV shows and
motion pictures.
Whoever this voice is—an actual apparition or
the vivid imaginings of a stressed and lonely
widow—Jack Shepard becomes Pen’s steady (and
handy) companion. When perplexing crimes
Bibliomysteries
occur in Pen’s quaint little town of Quindicott,
Rhode Island, Pen seeks the counsel of the surly
gumshoe in bringing the culprits to justice, even if
he (and his license) expired more than sixty years
ago.
This unlikely duo of a prim bookseller and
hardboiled ghost has struck a chord with readers,
and we’re happy about that because it’s a series that
both Marc and I love to write.
One reason is because the focus is on books.
Growing up in less than perfect circumstances,
we found a comforting refuge in stories. They
opened up worlds beyond the hardscrabble industrial towns where we were raised.
Among the many novels and plays that I read in
my teenage years was The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
by R.A. Dick, the pen name for author Josephine
Leslie. I loved the book and looked into its origins,
learning that it was a bestseller the year it was published (1945), and Hollywood turned it into a classic film two years later.
What struck me most was the era in which the
novel and film were produced. World War II had
just ended, and many young widows were grieving
the loss of vital, loving husbands. Ms. Leslie’s novel
gave these women the story of Mrs. Muir, a young
widow like themselves, who is visited by the spirit
of a virile sea captain. Captain Gregg even becomes Mrs. Muir’s muse, dictating the tales of his
“shocking” past adventures, which she publishes as
a book.
I considered the comfort that novel must have
brought to war widows of the time. The Ghost and
Mrs. Muir made real the idea that spirits are looking after us. Whether the spirits are real or they
reside within ourselves—as imagination, passion,
or creative abilities that we have yet to tap—the
idea is an uplifting one.
Though my husband loved the movie version of
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, he was more drawn to
the hardboiled crime, thriller, fantasy, and horror
stories that appeared in the pulp magazines of the
1930s and ’40s. Marc admired tough crime-
fighting characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage, but he also enjoyed the rough-and-tumble
Black Mask school of crime writing, pioneered in
the legendary pulp magazine of the same name.
Black Mask was a product of the Great Depression, a bleak time in our history when everyday
Americans who worked hard and played by the
rules felt betrayed and abandoned. That generation’s frustration, helplessness, and disillusionment
spawned a new kind of edgy, proletariat fiction.
An unlikely fusion of idealism and existential
angst bordering on nihilism, proletariat fiction
played as well with young adult readers in the
1960s and ’70s as it did with their grandparents, as
both generations faced their own brand of social
chaos, their own war, their own economic hardships.
Two brilliant greats of mystery fiction emerged
from the Black Mask school: Dashiell Hammett
and Raymond Chandler, authors who inspired us
both and whom we take great pleasure in quoting
throughout our Haunted Bookshop Mysteries.
So now you see how the small-town ghostly
charm of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was fused
with the tough talk and hardboiled edge of characters brought to life by Chandler, Hammett, Mickey
Spillane and others to create our Haunted Bookshop mystery series.
But it didn’t stop there. Marc’s fascination with
pulp authors led to a couple of decades in the book
collecting world, and those experiences inspired
The Ghost and the Dead Man’s Library, a tale that
involves a rare edition of Edgar Allen Poe stories
and a code that leads to hidden treasure.
My love of hardboiled tales, iconic bad girls,
and my work experiences in the worlds of film and
television inspired us to write The Ghost and the
Femme Fatale, a tale of a real bad girl and a cold
case crime that goes hot at a film noir festival.
In The Ghost and the Dead Deb, Marc and I
explored our fascination with true crime books.
And in The Ghost and the Haunted Mansion, we
resurrected a nearly-forgotten pulp subgenre
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MRJ Fall 2014
called “weird menace” for a story about a ghostly
mansion.
Although our writing life has kept us busy with
other projects, we remain under contract for at
least four more mysteries in the Haunted Bookshop series, and we can’t wait to get back to writing
them. The stories allow us to celebrate not only the
books we love, but the characters that continue to
haunt us.
Cleo Coyle is the pseudonym of Alice Alfonsi and her
husband, Marc Cerasini. Together they write the
Coffeehouse Mysteries as well as The Haunted
Bookshop Mysteries for Penguin-Random House. When
not haunting coffeehouses, wrangling stray cats, or
hunting ghosts, Alice and Marc are also bestselling
media tie-in writers. coffeehousemysteries.com/
cleos_haunted_bookshop.cfm
Readaholics in Heaven by Laura Di Silverio
Most of us can recall stories that captivated us
early on. For me it was Dr. Seuss’s Are You My
Mother?, Curious George, and others. When I got
pregnant for the first time, they’re the books I
wanted to share with my daughter. (Some newly
pregnant women head for the onesies and the diaper pails; I made a mad dash for the children’s section of the bookstore.) As I reached elementary
school, my tastes veered toward mystery and I read
Encyclopedia Brown, The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy
Drew, Cherry Ames (and all the Black Stallion
books—horses were almost as entrancing as mysteries). As a high schooler, I loved Victoria Holt
and Mary Stewart, Dick Francis and Helen MacInnes, Alistair MacLean and Georgette Heyer. (Her
Regencies are still my “comfort” reads; one can’t
read only mysteries.)
Is it any wonder that people who have immersed themselves in books from infancy to
adulthood should enjoy books about books?
Whether it’s books in bookstores (as in Carolyn
Hart’s Death on Demand series) or book repair
(Kate Carlisle’s Bibliophile mysteries) or books in
libraries (Miranda James’ Cat in the Stack series),
or book collecting (John Dunning’s Cliff Janeway
books), we who love books and reading are endlessly fascinated by reading about books. There’s
something very “meta” about it, about reading
about reading, catching an author’s sly references
to other books or comments on the writing or
publishing processes.
26
It was probably inevitable that I would end up
writing about books in some way, specifically
about a mystery book club, the Readaholics. The
five women who make up the Readaholics debut in
April 2015, in The Readaholics and the Falcon
Fiasco (NAL). The book club’s founder, Amy-Faye
Johnson, is an event and wedding organizer in the
fictional town of Heaven, Colorado. (The town
was originally called Walter’s Ford, but the town
council re-named it “Heaven” when Amy-Faye and
her friends were in high school, hoping to capitalize on the destination wedding business.)
Besides Amy-Faye, the book club members are
her best friend Brooke Widefield, a former Miss
Colorado who married into the town’s richest family; another high school buddy, Lola Paget, who
owns a plant nursery and supports her grandmother and young sister; Kerry Sanderson, the
town’s part-time mayor who is in her late forties
and has a teenage son and a twenty-year-old
daughter with a baby; and Maud Bell, a sixty-yearold hunting and fishing guide who was an activist
during her California youth, and now has a conspiracy blog. Their sixth founding member, Ivy,
dies of oleander poisoning and the Readaholics
become involved in their first real murder investigation.
Amy-Faye refuses to believe Ivy committed suicide and energizes the Readaholics to look into
Ivy’s death. Along the way, she butts heads with the
town’s only detective (an intriguing newcomer
Bibliomysteries
from Atlanta named Lindell Hart), discovers unsavory activities at City Hall, and runs afoul of a
murderer who first tries to derail her event planning business, and then comes after her. Did I
mention that she’s also been hired to plan her exboyfriend’s wedding?
In each book, the Readaholics will be reading
and discussing a different classic mystery. In Falcon Fiasco, they’re reading—you guessed it!—The
Maltese Falcon. An element of the book they’re
reading will always play into solving the mystery. It
might be something to do with the manner of
death, investigation procedures, a type of clue,
characters, plot points, interview techniques, or
something more subtle. In the second book, tentatively titled The Readaholics and the Poirot Predicament, they’re reading Murder on the Orient
Express.
One of the best things about undertaking this
series has been the opportunity to read classic
mysteries I blush to confess I’d never read before.
In addition to the Hammett, I’ve read several
Agatha Christies, a Mary Roberts Rinehart and
some Dorothy L. Sayers. Many more sit atop my
bookshelves and bedside table. I’ve found it fascinating to study the progenitors of today’s private
investigator/noir mysteries and traditional/cozy
mysteries.
Books written in the first half of the 20th century are stylistically different from today’s crime
fiction, but at their heart are the elements that
keep crime fiction fan turning the pages today:
fascinating characters and a twisty mystery the
reader can’t figure out by the end of chapter one.
For those of you who are well-read in mystery
classics, please drop me a line (my contact info is
available on my website www.lauradisilverio.com)
and tell me about your faves. Maybe I’ll base a
future Readaholics adventure on the book you
suggest!
The President of Sisters in Crime, Laura is a retired Air
Force intelligence officer and author of more than a
dozen published mysteries. Upcoming titles include the
Book Club Mystery series debut (The Readaholics and
the Falcon Fiasco) and her first standalone suspense
novel, The Reckoning Stones. She plots murders and
parents teens in Colorado, trying to keep the two tasks
separate.
A Novel Idea! by Lucy Arlington (Susan Furlong)
I’d like to say Lila Wilkins, the protagonist of the
Novel Idea Mysteries, introduced herself to me in
my imagination. That we grew to become friends,
understanding each other’s idiosyncrasies and successfully navigating all the little twist and turns—
and potholes—along the pathway to a successful
partnership: me as the author, her as the main
character. It would also be great to claim I’d found
the ideal, quintessential location for where she
could live, gave her an intriguing job as a literary
agent and even a super group of pals to hang
with… not to mention her handsome love interest, Sean Griffith. But, that’s not how it happened.
Lila Wilkins, the starring character of the New
York Times bestselling mystery series, A Novel Idea
Mysteries, had been sleuthing through the book-
shelves long before we ran into each other.
Our serendipitous meeting was long in the
making, but still unexpected. I’d started as a writer
some twenty years ago, earning my way by freelancing, ghost writing and content writing. I’d even
worked as a translator, converting furniture assembly instructions from English to Spanish. (To
this day, I have visions of Spanish-speaking people
everywhere with wonky CD cabinets.) Eventually,
however, I broke into fiction with a couple of short
stories and then two mystery novels published by a
small press. Things were rolling along. I kept writing, kept creating, until one day I sent out an email
query proposing a new mystery series to a wellrespected agent. And she responded!
Yes, she liked my story but she had something
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MRJ Fall 2014
else in mind first. She wanted me to get to know
another literary agent—well, a fictional literary
agent—named Lila Wilkins who lived in rolling
hills of North Carolina and spent her days reading
mysteries and discovering new authors. Gee…
sounded like someone I could get along with just
fine. After all, Lila was not only a bibliophile, but a
champion of writers. We’d certainly find common
ground.
Aw… but there was a catch. Lila Wilkins was
the creation of Lucy Arlington, who was really the
pen name for two talented authors, Sylvia May and
Ellery Adams (whose real name, by the way, is
Jennifer Stanley). Confused yet? I was. But it
seemed the two original collaborators each had
their own series and needed someone to take over
their brainchild. And my new agent believed my
writing style perfectly suited the publisher’s need
for a writer to continue this already established
cozy mystery series.
So, I started reading the first three books in the
series, uncertain and undecided. And, you know
what? I really enjoyed Lila Wilkins and her assortment of friends and the quaint hamlet of Inspiration Valley, North Carolina, where all the shops
have bookish names such as The Constant Reader
Bookstore, Sherlock Holmes Realty and my personal favorite, the James Joyce Pub. It’s a bibliophile’s paradise! Then there’s Lila—a mystery lover
like me. I relished the opportunity to tag along
with her on the job at A Novel Idea Literary
Agency where she reads hopeful writers’ queries,
thumbs through intriguing manuscripts and helps
launch the careers of her authors by hosting fascinating events such as literary festivals and a celebrity chef cook-off. Not to mention solving crimes
in the process. Yes, Lila and I could become great
friends.
“So, are you up for the challenge?” my agent
wanted to know.
To be honest, I didn’t give her an answer right
away. The idea of continuing a bestselling series
was intriguing, heady, overwhelming and yes…
intimidating. I had big shoes to fill and there were
two pairs—that’s four shoes! In the end, however,
it was Lila who convinced me to take the challenge. Because the more I came to know this
plucky literary agent, who loves all things mystery—even real life mysteries—the more I realized
her own story simply must continue. You see, Lila
has more authors to discover, more mysteries to
solve, more fabulous events to plan and most importantly, more books to bring to readers.
Lucy Arlington was originally conceived by Ellery
Adams and Sylvia May, who collaborated on the first
three books in A Novel Idea mystery series: Buried in A
Book, Every Trick in the Book and Books, Cooks, and
Crooks. As their workloads grew, the two decided to
pass the baton to Susan Furlong. Played by the Book,
the fourth Lucy Arlington Mystery, will release in
February 2015. www.lucyarlington.com In addition to
writing as Lucy Arlington, Susan Furlong is the author
of an upcoming series called the Georgia Peach
Mysteries. www.susanfurlong.com
Why a Culinary Bookshop? by Daryl Wood Gerber
I write mysteries set in a culinary bookshop in
Crystal Cove, California. Where did I come up
with the idea of a culinary bookshop? A couple of
years ago, I was invited to a book signing for my
Cheese Shop mysteries at a culinary bookshop in
the quaint town of Occoquan, VA, and I fell in
love. What is a culinary bookshop, you ask? Let me
take you on the journey.
28
On that lovely day, we drove into town, which is
about two miles long and perhaps three blocks
wide. On each street were shops and cafés. Salt &
Pepper, the bookshop, was located in a charming,
all-white complex adorned with green shutters,
beautiful columns, and fresh flowers. On both
floors of the complex were darling shops that
every crafter would love.
Bibliomysteries
I entered the store and literally gasped. It was
tiny, but the owner had stocked shelves and more
shelves with cookbooks—not just cookbooks filled
with recipes, but cookbooks packed with personal
stories or artwork worthy of coffee table art books.
In addition, there were a variety of culinary mysteries (like mine and those of my blog mates on
Mystery Lovers Kitchen) and culinary fiction (like
Chocolat and Water for Chocolate). There were
even books about the origin of chocolate and the
history of aprons. In addition, the owner had
stocked the shop full of the most darling culinary
gift items, like saltshakers and peppermills, cutting
boards, decorative spatulas, and foodie jigsaw puzzles.
Needless to say, I had an aha moment. I knew
the store would make a wonderful setting for a
cozy mystery. Mystery lovers love books, and they
love bookstores, right? Not a big surprise, but
many readers also love food and mysteries that
include food. And if there’s a café nearby (which
there is in the series), perfect!
With the series concept chosen, I then chose my
favorite place to set the series—the coast of California. My protagonist, Jenna Hart, a former advertising executive from San Francisco, needs a
fresh start. Her husband died in a boating accident, and she has lost her smile. Tired of working
24/7, she agrees to move home to Crystal Cove to
help her aunt open the Cookbook Nook and Café.
Now, while Jenna is a foodie and adores books,
she knows nothing about cookbooks. She doesn’t
even know how to cook! Her mother did all the
cooking while Jenna was growing up. So Jenna is
on her own journey. She becomes enraptured with
cookbooks and is intent on learning how to cook. I
hope, through her eyes, my readers will come to
realize the value and wonder of cookbooks, and
hopefully they’ll enjoy a good mystery or two
along the way.
The third in the Cookbook Nook Mysteries is
Stirring the Plot. Halloween in Crystal Cove, California, is a big deal, involving a spooky soirée
where the Winsome Witches, a fund-raising
group, gather to open up their purse strings and
trade superstitions. But party magicians, fortunetellers, and herbalists are only the beginning of this
recipe for disaster. Jenna Hart has packed The
Cookbook Nook chock-full of everything from
ghostly texts to witchy potions in anticipation of
the annual fund-raiser luncheon. But there’s one
unexpected addition to the menu: murder. When
the Head Priestess of the Winsome Witches is
found dead, there’s plenty of blame to go around,
and Jenna will have to use more than just sleight of
hand to conjure up the truth…
This is not a paranormal story; it is a traditional
cozy mystery. Also, though I write a series, each
book is a stand-alone and can be read first, even if
you haven’t read the others in the series (although
personally I like to start at the beginning).
Daryl Wood Gerber writes the nationally bestselling
Cookbook Nook mystery series. As Avery Aames, she
pens the nationally bestselling Cheese Shop mystery
series. Upcoming titles: Stirring the Plot, Sept 2014 &
As Gouda As Dead, Feb 2015. Fun tidbit: as an actress,
Daryl appeared in “Murder, She Wrote” and more. Visit
Daryl/Avery at www.darylwoodgerber.com. She blogs &
shares recipes on Mystery Lovers Kitchen.
The Poet and the Private Eye by Rob Gittins
I moved to west Wales from Manchester at the
end of the seventies. I settled in rural Carmarthenshire, a few miles from Laugharne, and I wanted to
be a writer. It’s impossible to put those two things
together and not become interested by and in Dy-
lan Thomas.
But it was always one part of the Dylan Thomas
story that really fascinated me right from the start
and that was the American angle. I used to sit on
the wall at his old home, the Boathouse, and imag29
MRJ Fall 2014
ine what it must have been like to journey from
there at the start of the 1950s to New York and
beyond; the opportunities, the pitfalls, the possibilities—and the price.
So I read as much as I could about all that, only
to find that at the time, in the late 1970s, there
wasn’t a lot to read. His tour agent and friend, John
Brinnin, had written about his time in the US of
course, but that aside, Constantine Fitzgibbon,
Dylan’s original biographer, devoted just a few
pages in a three- to four-hundred page book to
Dylan’s final, American experience.
A handful of other biographers wrote more but
then I discovered that most had never actually met
many of the principal protagonists in the American story. They’d talked to some—like Dylan’s
American mistress, Liz Reitell—on the phone but
that was it.
It just seemed to me, at the time, that there was
a whole, almost forgotten—and largely unheard—group of people a few thousand miles away
who were obviously intimately involved in the
Dylan Thomas story but whose own story seemed
somehow excised from the general account.
So it all began in a simple way. I wanted to hear
what they had to say. I wanted to meet them. All
these names I’d read about—John Malcolm Brinnin, Liz Reitell, Roy Poole, Al Collins, Rose Slivka,
David Slivka—could I somehow get to them, speak
with them?
This was, now, 1983. And television companies
love anniversaries. November 1983 was going to be
the thirtieth anniversary of Dylan’s death. I went to
see a man who at that time was Programme Controller at HTV, Geraint Talfan Davies. Geraint’s
father had produced some of Dylan’s radio talks
and readings and I wanted to see if Geraint could
help persuade some of those people to meet us, to
talk with us.
As an aside, just before that meeting I read an
interview with John Brinnin who’d come over a
short time before for the unveiling of a plaque in
honour of Dylan in Westminster Abbey—and was
30
a little depressed to read his statement that this
‘closed the book on Dylan’ for him. I decided not
to mention that to Geraint.
We met, I explained what I wanted to do,
Geraint was dubious I think; it really all depended
on who would talk to us and if they hadn’t for all
this time, why would they now?
Nevertheless he contacted a researcher out in
New York and asked for feelers to be put out to all
the main parties.
John Brinnin said yes. All the surviving members of the original production of Under Milk
Wood said yes. Rose Slivka said yes. The key witness to those last days—Dylan’s lover, Liz Reitell—
said yes.
Rather than fly all over the States to record individual interviews—they were variously, at the
time, in Massachusetts, Montana, Arizona—we
asked if they’d all fly into New York for what would
then be a thirty-year reunion. They all said yes. So
that was it. We were going to New York and the
documentary film that came out of it all remains
something of which I’m very proud, a film that
won various awards, indeed, including Best
Documentary at the Celtic and the San Francisco
Film Festivals.
Then, over the subsequent years, various broadcasters and film companies, including the BBC,
talked to me about turning it into a feature film
and I tried, time and again, but could simply never
make it work. It just seemed grim. Dylan went to
America, he was in a bad state, he behaved more
or less badly and then he died. I gave back the
commissions I was offered.
Then, about ten years ago, I read back through
some of the notes I’d made for that documentary
film and came across a reference to the private eye
who was tailing Dylan throughout the whole of
that last trip. Dylan had sued Time magazine over
a profile of him they’d published and which he’d
decided was libelous. Time magazine, in return,
hired the private eye to try and collect dirt on Dylan in case his libel suit ever came to court.
Bibliomysteries
And all of a sudden—a decade ago now—the
way into this story, for me anyway, became clear.
Because this isn’t a story about Dylan Thomas. It’s
a story about a private eye. You don’t make Dylan
the hero, you make the private eye the hero.
This is a story about a man in crisis—the private
eye—who gets a job, a tail job. He’s never heard of
his mark, has never met a poet, hasn’t ever read a
single line of poetry and is in some considerable
crisis in his own life anyway.
But what happens over the course of his tail job,
changes him out of all recognition. He becomes
absorbed in the story of his mark. He even starts
reading poetry. Above everything, he begins to
find in one story—Dylan’s story—the means to
resolve his own. And Dylan’s poetry becomes a
route map, piloting him along the way.
Above all, it then becomes a story of hope—
which is what, personally, I was missing in just a
straight re-telling of the last days. We can’t change
history. Dylan will always die. But my private eye
doesn’t. And one of the reasons he doesn’t is the
fact he connects to the most important part of the
Dylan Thomas story—and that’s his work, as opposed to just his life.
In the end that’s his real legacy, of course. We’ll
always be fascinated by all Dylan did, but ultimately—and as with my private eye—we’re changed by
the work he produced.
Rob Gittins is an award-winning screenwriter who has
written for numerous UK top-rated television drama
series, including EastEnders, Casualty and The Bill. He
has also written over twenty original radio plays for BBC
Radio 4 and his drama series, Losing Paradise, won the
Gold Drama Medal at the New York International Radio
Festival. His debut novel, Gimme Shelter, was released
in 2013 and is available on Kindle.
Librarians Can Always Figure It Out by Karen Harper
I would not be a bestselling author of sixty books
without libraries and librarians. My parents could
have never afforded or recommended the hundreds of books I read from the West Toledo (Ohio)
Branch Public Library before I left home to head
for college—where I majored in English and more
reading.
Until recently, I had not really reflected in my
novels the good that librarians do. But in Shattered Secrets, the launch book for my new
romantic/suspense trilogy, the Cold Creek Novels,
set in rural Appalachia, a very traditional librarian
in a small town plays an important part. She is not
the heroine, but someone who mentored her and
her sisters when they were younger.
I must admit this character has a bit of the oldfashioned stereotype I knew and once loved. Etta
Falls has dedicated her life to getting people to
read. She has put heart, soul and some of her own
family money into the Cold Creek Library over the
years. It’s a classic place, with those heavy library
tables we might recall from our childhoods, but it
has modern touches too. Her library has revolving
displays of local items of interest in her edge-ofAppalachia area. She decorates with colorful, personable library posters with signs like we have no
doubt all seen: If you like Nora Roberts, you will
probably also like… . If you enjoy reading John
Grisham, you might also enjoy…
In this very poor area, Etta believes in reading
outreach. She has a table at the weekly farmer’s
market where she donates up-to-date magazines to
attract new readers to take out a library card. She
drives the bookmobile herself out on the hilly
country roads, recommending good reads. In a
small town, she knows a lot of people and can offer
suggestions on their preferences. So far, so good,
right?
But Etta Falls also allows me to highlight the
challenges of necessary changes in reading habits
and libraries. I must admit she shows a bent toward “real” books (print and paper) and worries
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MRJ Fall 2014
about people reading on “those little screens.” She
bemoans that her library sets of encyclopedias,
though they grow dated quickly, are now gathering
dust in a back room because many people just look
things up on line.
Also, this character highlights the shifts in reading and libraries that some people welcome and
others dread. She also serves to emphasize the tensions in town between the haves and the have-nots
—the Appalachian locals vs. the new breed of outsiders, with weekend condos and book clubs at
their party houses with books they “just order on
line.” Etta is one of the symbols of the struggles in
the small town that are the background for the
creeping crime in the area that my heroines and
heroes have to face.
The titles in the trilogy, Shattered Secrets, For-
bidden Ground, and Broken Bonds, highlight a
crime story and a love story, but they could also
refer to the forced changes in small town America
—and in Etta Falls’ little library. Are there secrets
in the stacks? Is all in little Cold Creek what it appears to be? Etta Falls—and Karen Harper—will
tell you to step inside the book to see.
And if you happen to figure out whodunit in
the novel, before the big reveal, please email me at
[email protected].
Karen Harper is a bestselling author of historical novels
and contemporary suspense. A former high school and
university English instructor, she is the winner of the
Mary Higgins Clark Award for her Amish-set novel
Dark Angel. She and her husband divide their time
between Ohio and Florida.
A Conference, Books, and Bronson by L. C. Hayden
As an author, I love to attend conferences. Mingling with old friends and making new ones fills
me with happiness.
As a reader, I also love to attend them. Imagine
the thrill of breathing the same air my favorite
authors breathe. Then there’s the excitement focusing on books. Which ones should I buy? What new
authors can I discover?
I had just returned from Malice Domestic or
from Left Coast Crime, and it was time to begin
writing the first book in my proposed Harry Bronson Thriller Series. Naturally, the amazing world
of books still filled my thoughts.
A feeling overpowered me. Share the experience
with Bronson. Luckily, I listened to my inner voice.
The end result was Why Casey Had to Die, Bronson’s first adventure. In this book, Arizona hosts a
well-known mystery convention where the participants are handed a scenario about a makebelieve murder. The team that first solves the
murder wins.
Bronson, a retired Dallas Police Department
homicide detective, is hired as their consultant. At
32
the convention, Bronson, for the first time, hears
the details about the crime the attendees are assigned to solve. It parallels his first case, a case he
never solved. Casey’s case.
In the mist of the book signings and right dab
in the middle of the mystery convention, Bronson
reopens the cold case and sets out to find out the
real reason Why Casey Had to Die.
Surprisingly, Bronson’s next adventure came as
a result of a book. My grandson and I were reading
a picture book. The picture of a bison captivated
his attention. I told him how in Custer State Park
in South Dakota, a herd runs loose and visitors are
allowed to drive into the herd. From their cars,
they can watch the wild life surround them. As I
spoke these words, it dawned on me, this would be
the perfect place to set Bronson’s second adventure.
In When Death Intervenes, Bronson clutches
with a powerful organization. That brings him
face-to-face with a deadly killer. The isolated
places of South Dakota increases the tension in
this book.
Bibliomysteries
Once Bronson solved that dilemma, he had to
find another one. I had the plot idea but not the
setting. Since this problem would deeply touch
Bronson, I wanted a special place, but had no clue
as to what that would be.
A book rescued me.
I posted on Facebook that I was looking for an
ideal setting and did anyone have any suggestions?
I received lots of answers to my post, but one in
particular hit home.
One of my fans sent me a book about a state
park in Pennsylvania that has a covered bridge.
That’s what I’d been looking for. Since this book is
a roller-coaster of emotions, the bridge would represent the conflict between the past and the present.
As I weave the Bronson stories and also now my
newest series, the Aimee Brent mystery series, I
can’t help but remember my love of books. I hail
their praise for giving me ideas and helping me
make decisions about settings and other things.
Just as I love books, Bronson does too. In fact, if
you’re reading the series, you know he’s writing his
own book. He’s just not very good at it. But he’s a
great detective, and that’s what really matters.
And Aimee Brent? She’s a reporter. Of course
she loves books.
None of us could live without them.
L. C. Hayden is the author of the Harry Bronson
thrillers, and most recently, the Aimee Brent mysteries.
She also writes other genres, including nonfiction
inspirational books about miracles and angels. See her
books at tinyurl.com/LCHayden.
Brought to Book by Tim Heald
The lunch was near Richard’s office at the bottom
of Drury Lane. It was Italian and Richard paid.
Succesful literary agents did, in London in those
days. ‘All heroes are named from the atlas’, he said
over a Campari. He had sold my first book to Alan
Maclean at Macmillan. Maclean’s brother was a
famous spy and Maclean enjoyed the book, but
didn’t think I had realized that my detective was
incompetent. A name change might help. He was
called Simon Villiers. Hence lunch. It was in the
early seventies and I was a young feature writer on
the Daily Express. ‘We’ll start with the map of England and go along the coast’, said Richard.
We began with Dover but there already was an
Inspector Dover, and so we moved gingerly westwards over the first course until we reached
Bognor. ‘Simon Bognor’, said I. ‘Simon Bognor’
said Richard. We smiled. And so Simon Villiers
became Simon Bognor. We sold that first book to
Harold Harris of Hutchinson and Day of the Jackal
and he published it a few months later.
The first book was based on a thesis I submitted
for a scholarship—which I did not get—sponsored
by British Steel. I came across this by chance—it
was set in Anglican religious communities—and
named it, with bad punning like many subsequent
titles, Unbecoming Habits (1973). This was because the actress Maria Aitken, a friend who had
first recommended the book to her boss, John
Frankau, subsequently head of drama at Thames
TV, was appearing in a series called The Regiment,
and her father-in-law, a former military man, had
commented apropos her outfit, ‘Unbecoming kit’.
Alan Maclean, one of whose favourite authors was
Muriel Spark, who had just experienced trouble
with her book The Abbess of Crewe, insisted that I
send the manuscript to the head man at the friary
on which it was obviously modelled.
He did not have a problem with the sex, nor
with the gambling, nor indeed with the murder
itself, but he took issue with my strictures on the
strength of the cocoa and the comfort of the mattresses. They had been fixed. Alan, however, objected, so we took the book away from him and
sold it to Harold instead. He published it a few
months later, but not until I had moved my friary
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MRJ Fall 2014
from Dorset—eagle-eyed readers can spot the one
anachronistic allusion to Dorset among the copious references—to Oxfordshire. The reviews were
adequate enough for Harold to take on Blue Blood
Will Out (1974), my second whodunnit.
My motto seems to be based on lack of waste,
and I had already helped Lord Montagu of Beaulieu with a book about how to make money out of
a stately home. There followed Let Sleeping Dogs
Die [aka Let Sleeping Dogs Lie] (1976); Deadline
(1975); and Small Masterpiece aka Masterstroke,
in which I cunningly (I thought) rewrote the world
of dogs—a non-fiction work serialized in the London Evening Standard, a Fleet Street gossip column
and Oxford University. Over the years I reworked
cruise ships on which I once lectured, a year in
Canada, and Tasmania. Bognor, who had started
life in a dirty macintosh, rose and rose, acquiring a
wife and a title, and eliminating sidekicks wherever he went. In the process I became quite fond of
the old boy.
He was modelled in part on me, so why not? I
had once been approached by the British Foreign
Office, though not by the tame college recruiter of
spies, the improbably named Bickham SweetEscott (compare my fictional creation Erskine
Blight-Purley, though my friend Maurice Buckmaster, ex-SOE, maintains that Erskine was modelled on him). Bickham had yellow eyes. I first
came across Bognor’s mac when being interviewed, for my old college contemporary Lord
Patten’s ‘positive vetting’, by a man who wore it. He
was from the Ministry of something, I forget what.
Simon is now head of operations at the Board of
Trade, and his wife Monica is now Lady M. I remember my interviewer tapping his nose and telling me in a whisper that there was another branch
of the FO. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
Genuinely.
So why books? I suppose all writers want to
murder their publisher, and the creator of Big
Books plc, killed in his own pornographic library,
stood for all publishers. That was at the end of the
34
1980s. Vernon Hemlock was his name, and his
mistress, Romany Flange, in Brought to Book
(1988), is one of my best inventions and names,
and I produced one of my least ghastly jokes for
the book. It is customary for authors to name their
characters after English place-names. I had two
friends, Miles Kington and Sheridan Morley. I
reversed the convention and named villages after
them. The result still makes me smirk, but for purists who like their crime flattish, the result was a
little too barbed.
The book was full of names and jokes of a similar nature, and when the jokes came into conflict
with the plot, the jokes won. Some didn’t like that,
but I’m glad to say that the world of whodunnits
has become more grown-up and catholic recently.
It was a satire on publishing. Still is. The pages of
my book have just fallen open and I have been
reading about Big Books plc’s rival Megaword
Universal. In among the hard core porn, the partworks, and all the other guff, Megaword even publish something called ‘old fashioned books’. Perish
the thought!
At one stage, some [stories], though not the
most bookish, were televised, and I learned to live
with the verdict ‘television damaged the sale of the
books’, which I thought was impossible. I suffered
from the illusion that all TV was good TV. I kept
Bognor going through ten books, but abandoned
him in favour of the Queen’s husband, whose biography I was commissioned to write. I did, too, and
wrote a trilogy of crime novels featuring an academic called Dr. Tudor Cornwall. And now Maud.
But although I sensed that I could write War
and Peace (Harold Harris was replaced by Hilary
Hale of Macmillan) without a skeptical publisher
greeting it with the revelation that a new Bognor
had arrived, I was missing him. He had assumed a
reality, become a real person. Why is it that crime
fiction deals in running characters such as Holmes
and Wimsey whereas literary fiction does not?
Bognor had become real. He always was, in the
sense that if I were asked where he was at school or
Bibliomysteries
what colour his eyes were, I would never make
something up but reply that I had never asked.
Even minor characters were real. Absurd or almost
non-existent ones such as Nimrod Herring came
to me, not from thin air, but fully fledged, from a
Civil War memorial in a cemetery in Richmond,
Virginia. I missed Bognor’s wife; I missed Bognor’s
boss; I missed Bognor.
I wished to learn more. So when yet another
reader asked whatever happened to that character,
had a funny name, begun with a ‘b’, I no longer
feigned indifference, I decided to find out in the
only possible way—I wrote and I wrote until I had
completed 60,000 words. And then I knew some of
the answers. But I never really understood pub-
lishing. For a start, why, when I knew so many
poor writers—in a financial sense—did I not know
a single publisher who was at least comparatively
well off? I have ended with Otto Penzler, daddy of
all crime publishers and the head man at Mysterious Press. He has reissued all the early Bognors in
e-form. I know little about Otto, and it’s time for
Bognor or Cornwall or even Maud to return to the
world of books.
You have been warned.
Tim Heald is a crime writer, biographer, journalist, and
raconteur. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, is fond
of cricket, and travels extensively. He has four children
and lives in Cornwall. www.timheald.com.
A Cautionary Tale about Book Groups by Maggie King
It took me many years to write Murder at the
Book Group, my debut mystery. I was constantly
revising the plot and the characters. Plus I thought
I had to be an English major and hole up in a garret with huge blocks of time in order to call myself
a writer. Alas, my background is in business and
IT. No garret. When I got serious, I started writing
before going to my day job. Now I write in the
evenings and on weekends. I write at lunch. I write
wherever and whenever I can. A lot of ideas come
to me via newspapers, radio, and old-fashioned
eavesdropping. Friends, family, and co-workers
give me tons of ideas. I once knew a woman who
had her apartment door bashed in by her, um,
unhappy boyfriend. I’m working a similar scene
into an upcoming story.
I have a strong need to see justice done and to
set the world right and mysteries are a perfect vehicle for that. Mysteries are about relationships—
relationships that have gone awry. I’m fascinated
by family dynamics and how my own family experience has popped up throughout my life, sometimes in good ways and sometimes in disconcerting ways. Love and obsession intrigue me to no
end, as does sin and how we’re impacted by it.
I’ve amassed a wealth of experiences from
knowing many people, living in a lot of places,
having numerous jobs. I bring, and will continue
to bring, all of these experiences to my writing. In
my twenties I lived on the edge, so much so that
I’m lucky I didn’t fall over. Now I live far from the
edge but, as a writer, I cherish those edgy memories that I might otherwise like to blot out.
Murder at the Book Group is not only a cautionary tale but it’s a what-if story—what if you ran
into someone from your past, someone with
whom you had a turbulent, emotional fraught relationship? What would you do? Would you run for
the hills? Would you pick up where you left off?
Would you share pictures of your grandkids, pets,
or your milestone anniversary? Would you get into
an animated discussion about your latest medical
procedures?
The Murder on Tour book group is the travelthemed group featured in Murder at the Book
Group, featuring amateur sleuth Hazel Rose. The
members each read a different mystery based on a
geographical setting and gather to “booktalk” their
selections—a fancy way of saying they give oral
book reports, reminiscent of grade school.
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MRJ Fall 2014
Years ago, when I lived in California, I belonged
to such a group and got acquainted with a variety
of authors. Aside from Agatha Christie, I hadn’t
read many mysteries up to that point. Our themes
varied from month to month—for example, one
month we’d read stories with journalist detectives,
one month settings in Alaska. I’ve been in many
book groups since, but I consider the one I left
behind in California when I moved to Virginia to
be my favorite.
Murder on Tour includes a librarian, a retired
English teacher, three writers, a historian, an ardent social conservative, and a personal trainer. A
love of books, especially mysteries, draws them
together. Mysteries not only challenge them but
offer justice and resolution in a world that often
lacks such satisfaction.
In chapter one the group gathers to “travel” the
state of Florida. Soon-to-be victim Carlene Arness
is pitching a fit about the poor writing that pervades Murder in the Keys by an Annette with a
last name containing a string of consonants. Out of
respect for my fellow authors, I made up this title
and kept the author name vague. I hope and pray
that an Annette with a consonant-laden last name
doesn’t up and publish such a title.
The other selections are shared without drama
or author maligning. Among them are The Paperboy by Pete Dexter, the dark story of a Florida
newspaper family during the late sixties; Raymond
Chandler’s classic Key Largo; and A Deep Blue
Good-By, the first in John MacDonald’s colorcoded series. Due to my runaway word count,
works by Carl Hiaasen, Nancy Cohen, Elaine Viets, and Edna Buchanan ended up on the cutting
room floor, to borrow film parlance.
By the evening’s end, Carlene is dead and the
very survival of Murder on Tour hangs in the balance. After all, how does a book group, or any
group, recover from the death of one of its own?
Despite a suicide note found near Carlene’s body,
the suspicion of murder looms large. And that
means that someone in the group killed her.
Will the group’s love of books keep them together? Will they even want to read mysteries after
being hurled into the pages of one? Can this book
group be saved? Maybe. If Carlene’s killer is
brought to justice. Founding member Hazel Rose
sets out to do just that.
Thankfully, murders have no place in my experience. I’ve never been involved in one or investigated one. But I keep alert and remember this:
book groups can be dangerous places.
And when my long-awaited retirement day arrives, I’ll see about that garret.
Maggie King’s debut mystery, Murder at the Book
Group, will be released in December 2014 from Simon
& Schuster. Maggie is a founding member of the Sisters
in Crime Central Virginia Chapter. Her short story “A
Not So Genteel Murder” appeared in the Virginia is for
Mysteries anthology.
The Good Know Nothing, and the Story Behind the Story
by Ken Kuhlken
I used to teach at California’s Chico State University. My office partner, Dr. Michael Baumann, had
fled Germany with his family during the 1930s.
Among Mike’s scholarly pursuits was the study of
the author B. Traven, whose first books were
originally published in German, though the distinctly American narrator of both The Death Ship
36
and Treasure of the Sierra Madre led readers to
presume the author was American.
Traven refused to make his identity or background public. So, the mystery surrounding him
intrigued literary scholars, especially following the
release of the film version of Treasure of the Sierra
Madre (”Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t
need no badges. I don’t have to show you any
Bibliomysteries
stinking badges.”)
Mike Baumann, after years of linguistic and
biographical research and analysis, concluded that
B. Traven began his public life as Ret Marut, a
socio-anarchist pamphleteer who, following WWI,
ran afoul of the German establishment on account
of his involvement with the short-lived Bavarian
Free State. Dr. Baumann’s books on Traven are Mr.
Traven, I Presume, and B. Traven: An Introduction.
Yet to Mike the question remained: how did this
fellow manage to so convincingly assume, especially as narrator of The Death Ship, a wholly
credible American identity?
The novel appeared in English during 1936. The
story follows Gerard Gales, an American merchant
seaman who loses his papers and passport during
a wild night in Antwerp, Belgium. Meanwhile, his
ship has departed. With no passport, he doesn’t
qualify for new seaman’s papers, and without seaman’s papers or other proof of citizenship, he can’t
obtain a passport from an embassy. So Belgian
authorities deport him, over the border to the
Netherlands.
The Dutch attempt to shoo him back to Belgium. He skips out and makes his way to France,
then to Spain for some misadventures that send
him back to France. At last, in Marseille, he discovers the Yorikke, an ancient tub upon which
none but the desperate set foot.
The captain of the Yorikke takes no interest in
such niceties as seaman’s papers. Rather, he prefers
that the crew be dispensable, as the ship’s mission
is to sink in the mid-Atlantic and thereby gain its
owners a hefty sum of insurance loot.
The Yorikke’s crew is as rough and picturesque
as any out of Melville or Stevenson. The story itself, though told by a hack, would be well worth
reading. And Traven, whoever he or they might
be, turned an outlandish tale into a masterpiece.
The book’s magic lies in the union of grim and
comedic, of a tragic sequence of events related by a
narrator who sees the humor in even the darkest
events and places.
Literary scholars still debate the author’s identity. Most plausible among theories is the one Michael Baumann held. He came to feel certain that
The Death Ship and perhaps other Traven novels
were in fact collaborations between Ret Marut and
an American expatriate Marut encountered in
Mexico after he had fled from a likely death sentence in Germany.
“Then what became of the gringo?” I asked.
“Right,” he said, “that’s the big question.”
Later, too late to share my discovery with Mike,
I found evidence in the story of Detective Tom
Hickey and family. The Death Ship is so vital, and
its authorship so mysterious—as was the disappearance of Charlie Hickey, Tom’s father—over
time I began to suspect a connection between
Charlie and the American. After all, they lived
concurrently, Charlie had reasons to hide his identity, and he too was a man of wit and generous
intelligence.
Which is another story. I call it The Good
Know Nothing.
Rest in peace, wise and kind Michael Baumann.
Ken Kuhlken’s short stories, features, essays and
columns have appeared in Esquire and dozens of other
magazines and anthologies. His new Tom Hickey
California Crime novel is The Good Know Nothing.
Get the whole story at www.kenkuhlken.net
Literary Discussions in My Novels by Marilyn Levinson
Like most writers, I love to read. It’s second nature
to me to analyze the underpinnings of a novel and
to analyze the characters’ development and motivation. Which is probably why I often provide a
platform for my characters where they can talk
about books. Occasionally, something in these
discussions will inspire my sleuth to go off in a
new direction that will help solve the murders she’s
37
MRJ Fall 2014
investigating.
Gabbie Meyerson, the sleuth in my mystery
Giving Up the Ghost (Amazon Digital Services,
2012), is starting a new life as a high school English teacher in the sleepy village of Chrissom Harbor, Long Island. Gabbie’s students are reading F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which takes
place on Long Island. Though she hasn’t taught in
many years, Gabbie is determined to make reading
this book an adventure for her students. After they
read a scene about one of Jay Gatsby’s famous parties, she has them compare this party with the parties in the Hamptons they’ve read about in the
papers.
Through questions and prodding, she helps
them to understand the various characters in the
novel and to see how the characters’ interactions
bring about tragedy. Motivated now, the kids are
eager to do their writing assignments. Later on,
Gabbie has them understand that Gatsby’s death
comes about as a result of cause and effect. As for
Daisy, one student wonders if Jay Gatsby really
loved her, or if she was an illusion he created based
on her beauty and wealth.
Book clubs exist for the purpose of group discussions—about the book and whatever topics the
book inspires. Being a mystery writer, I hold great
admiration for the Golden Age of Mystery authors.
That’s how my Golden Age of Mystery Book Club
Mysteries series came about. In Murder a la Christie (Dark Oak, 2014) Professor Lexie Driscoll is
conducting the club’s first meeting in her best
friend’s elegant mansion in upscale Old Cadfield.
She gives the group a brief bio of Agatha Christie
and has begun talking about Dame Agatha’s The
Mysterious Affair at Styles when another friend
becomes ill and dies. A heart attack, is the general
consensus, but Lexie suspects poison.
She investigates as more members are murdered. The book club discusses Murder on the
Orient Express, And Then There Were None, The
A.B.C. Murders, and A Murder Is Announced.
Parallels are drawn between the murders occurring in Old Cadfield and those in Dame Agatha’s
books. Their discussion arising from Murder on
the Orient Express concerns justice and the legal
system, and brings up painful memories for one of
the members. At the end of the novel, all suspects
are present when Lexie exposes the murderer as
Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would do.
In Murder the Tey Way (Dark Oak, fall 2014)
Lexie and her book club talk about some of Josephine Tey’s novels: The Daughter of Time, Brat
Farrar, Miss Pym Disposes, and To Love and Be
Wise. At one point, Lexie tries to determine someone’s guilt by employing Tey’s fondness for the
psychology of facial expressions that was popular
in her day. Tey employs this method of detection
in The Daughter of Time and Miss Pym Disposes. The subject of gender bending arises in To
Love and Be Wise, bringing about an interesting
exchange among the club members. The subject
leads Lexie and her friend to speculate about malefemale roles, which may very well have relevance
to the murders they are investigating.
A former Spanish teacher, Marilyn Levinson writes
mysteries, romantic suspense, and books for kids. All of
Marilyn’s mysteries take place on Long Island, where she
lives. www.marilynlevinson.com
Brain-Bangers by Peter Lovesey
When Otto Penzler, the owner of the Mysterious
Bookshop, emailed last year inviting me to write a
bibliomystery, the term was new to me. “I realize
this is a somewhat specific parameter for a story,
creating a substantial challenge,” Otto went on in a
38
rather alarming way. He was publishing a series of
bibliomysteries and a number of authors I admire
had already risen to the challenge, among them
Ken Bruen, Anne Perry, Jeffery Deaver, Loren
D.Estleman, Laura Lippman, Andrew Taylor, John
Bibliomysteries
Connolly, Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins.
I didn’t know whether to be terrified or honored.
Otto and I go back a long way—longer than either
of us would care to reveal—so I didn’t want to turn
him down. Fortunately he wasn’t asking for a full
novel, but a short story of 8000 words or more to
be published in a limited edition as a small book.
By happy timing I was about to embark on a
tour of US bookstores publicising my latest: a perfect opportunity to get an insight into the bookselling business. Better still, I now had a project to
while away the hours in airport waiting areas and
during flights. So I signed up. Out of it eventually
came Remaindered, the story of a bookstore in
jeopardy. Robert Ripple, the owner of Precious
Finds, is found dead, apparently of a heart attack,
hunched over a carton of Agatha Christie first editions. Closure for Robert, but will it also mean
closure for the much-loved shop? And was Robert
murdered? My little book was published under the
Mysterious Bookshop imprint in hard and soft
cover in 2014.
It dawned on me later, when I got down to writing my next novel, that I was at work on another
bibliomystery. In The Stone Wife, the curmudgeonly Peter Diamond tangles with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, from The Canterbury Tales. It
was written in the stars that at some point in his
career, the policeman from the city of Bath would
get involved with Chaucer’s most famous creation.
I just had to get it on paper. The wife of my title is
a stone carving offered for sale in an auction where
a determined bidder is murdered in full view of
everyone. For Diamond, who is not a literary man,
but was forced to read Chaucer at school, this requires a crash course in the Canterbury Tales from
his long-term lover, Paloma. Soon he is arguing
with university lecturers and local historians about
Chaucer’s life and work. And in a strange way, the
Wife begins to control events and turns Diamond
into a victim.
Now I think about it, Diamond is a bibliomystery veteran. The fourteen books of the series have
regularly featured writers and books. One of the
joys of my life—I’ll spare you the others—is digging out trivia I know I can use. The first of the
series, The Last Detective, had a sub-plot involving Jane Austen’s aunt, Jane Perrott, who was arrested and imprisoned for shoplifting—and it
really happened. The Vault was about a professor
who had learned that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein while living in a rented apartment within a
few yards of Bath Abbey. In Skeleton Hill, the literary figure is less well known. William Beckford,
the writer of the Gothic novel Vathek, was a brilliant 18th-century eccentric who made his home
above Bath, on Lansdown. His architectural folly
known as Beckford’s Tower is central to the plot.
Of all the books, Bloodhounds has the strongest claim to bibliomysterydom. In 1992 I was invited to speak to a Bristol University extra-mural
course on novels of mystery and detection. They
met on Tuesday mornings in the crypt of St Michael’s, a huge 19th-century church in the centre of
Bath. I was glad it was a morning event; I would
have hesitated about going down into that crypt
after dark. But there were no cobwebs, bats or
bones. Not even a coffin. The place had been
cleaned, carpeted and made into a pleasant meeting room. Even so, the idea of discussing mysteries
in a crypt was crying out to be used.
So the Bloodhounds of Bath announced themselves in my imagination; Polly, the Chair; Miss
Chilmark, who adored Umberto Eco; Rupert, who
preferred James Ellroy and Andrew Vachss; Sid,
who hid, but was an expert on locked-room mysteries; Milo, a Golden Age aficionado; Jessica, the
fan of female private eyes; and the new member,
Shirley-Ann, who reads them a Stanley Ellin short
story. Reporting their fevered discussions was a
joy. “Darling, if ever I’ve met a group of potential
murderers anywhere, it’s the Bloodhounds,” one of
the members announces. Inevitably a real murder
is committed and they become the suspects in a
genuine locked-room mystery.
Bloodhounds picked up awards in 1996: the
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MRJ Fall 2014
Macavity, the Barry and the Silver Dagger. The
New York Times called it “a real brain-banger.”
In the years since, I have from time to time met
people who sidle up and say, “I was one of the
original Bloodhounds who heard you speak in the
crypt.” Then there’s usually a pause, followed by:
“Do you ever use real people in your novels?”
“Never,” is the answer I give.
Peter Lovesey received the Strand Magazine Critics
Lifetime Achievement Award at a party in New York in
July. His latest book is The Stone Wife, the fourteenth in
the Peter Diamond series. www.peterlovesey.com
Crossword: If Books Could Kill by Verna Suit
ACROSS
1. __ Hoare, antiquarian bookstore owner in series by
Marianne Macdonald
5. Least restricted
11. “Sherlock” network
14. Gouda cousin
15. Baltic country
16. Book lenders’ professional
org.
40
17. Author of the Bookman series featuring collector Cliff
Janeway
19. Over there
20. Jane Curtin’s 1980s TV title
role
21. Guy’s square-dance partner
22. Madame Chanel
23. Crime start
25. Wig
27. Author of the Bibliophile
Mysteries, including this
puzzle’s title; featuring a
book restoration expert
33. Even (with)
34. Annoyance
38. Elevator inventor
39. Scoundrel
40. Whaling adverb
41. Big-billed birds
44. Cows
46. Author of the Booktown
Mysteries featuring a bookstore owner
48. Jeff __, author of mystery
series featuring librarian
Jordan Poteet
51. __ of Circulation, library-set
mystery by Jo Dereske (1997)
and Miranda James (2013)
52. Diving bird
53. Dien Bien __, Vietnam
55. Ragtime pianist Blake
60. File M __ Murder (2012), by
Miranda James; Cat in the
Stacks series set in a library
61. Author of Books by the Bay
Mysteries featuring a writers
group
64. Cold War prez
65. Chocolate dessert
66. Passing notice
67. Start to strangle
68. Talks back to
Bibliomysteries
69. Brings home
DOWN
1. __ vu
2. Fan’s fixation
3. Author Roald
4. Present or potent prefix
5. Winter malady
6. Stephanie Plum’s tutor and
frequent rescuer
7. Volcano in Sicily
8. The Problem of the __ Editor
(2000), by Roberta Rogow
9. Pages of __ (2012), by 27A
10. Graffiti signature
11. Louisiana waterway
12. Lawrence __, creator of book
seller and thief Bernie Rhodenbarr
13. Camp craft
18. Longtime record label
22. Author
24. Listener
25. Pro bono TV ad
26. Antiquity
27. Surgeon General C. Everett
28. Start the pot
29. Follow furtively
30. Fifth Greek letter
31. Tibet’s capital
32. Roadside bomb: abbr.
35. Jim __, Navajo tribal policeman created by Tony Hillerman
36. Carolyn __, author of series
featuring Death on Demand
mystery bookstore
37. Once, once
39. Wolf Blitzer’s channel
42. Tent furnishing
43. Museum pieces
44. Half a Kenyan rebel
45. “Coffee __?”
47. European stock exchange
48. Title role for Michael Caine
and Jude Law
49. __ Can Be Deceiving (2011),
by Jenn McKinlay; Library
Lover’s mysteries
50. Makes holes
53. Furthermore
54. Joan __, author of mystery
series featuring bookstore
owner Claire Malloy
56. Japanese soup noodles
57. Murder of a Bookstore __
(2011), by Denise Swanson
58. “There’s no one else but me!”
59. Ballpark figs.
61. Beginnings of murders and
mysteries
62. Mauna ___
63. Si or oui
Solution on p. 63.
© 2014 Verna Suit, all rights reserved
The Librarian, the Witch, and the Spell Book
by Joyce and Jim Lavene
”Can you see her? There’s no use in having
spelled binoculars if you can’t see anything.”
—Spell Booked
Plain, tall, and a little naive, Dorothy Lane is a
young librarian at the downtown branch of the
New Hanover County Library in Wilmington,
North Carolina. She doesn’t know that three older
witches are watching her as she walks to and from
the library each day. If she did, she might be a little
concerned.
Dorothy is a witch too—she just doesn’t know it
yet. The witches watching her know she’s a powerful earth witch. Olivia, Molly, and Elsie are looking
for three witches to take their places so they can
retire to Boca. They must also hand off their spell
book to those witches so their coven can continue.
Their plans are thwarted, however, when Olivia
is killed and their spell book is stolen.
The premise of this story hit us one afternoon
when we were visiting the old port city of Wilmington. We were at the edge of the Cape Fear
River where pirates like Blackbeard came to port
in relative safety for a few pints of ale at the local
tavern. The river has a long and sometimes dangerous past.
It seemed possible to us that magic might still
be rampant here.
Witches lived here two hundred years ago. They
plied their trade by selling talismans and love potions to sailors who arrived daily. If they were
found out it could be a death sentence. They were
very careful with their ceremonies and traditions.
There were stories about witches who took ba41
MRJ Fall 2014
bies and changed men into toads when the moon
was full. All of them were fanciful and mostly used
to scare anyone who might want to harbor a witch.
But like their European counterparts, North
American witches were never the evil creatures
they were portrayed. They were healers, followers
of the old religion that had been around for a
thousand years before Christianity. They gathered
to celebrate the phases of the moon and helped
farmers plant at the best times. Their magic was
that of the earth, air, water, and fire. They delivered babies and comforted those who were bereaved. Their magic was ritual, understanding the
cycles of nature—not sacrificial.
Our new series, the Retired Witches Mysteries
for Berkley Prime Crime, follows three witches of
the old religion as they try to make sense of their
lives. They are aging as gracefully as they can as
their world changes around them. They are part
Golden Girls and part Bewitched. Their magic extends to some amazing things but it’s all in balance
with nature. No twitching noses here, just some
basic spell work and good intentions.
Our witches operate out of their curio shop,
Smuggler’s Arcane, where all manner of magic is
to be found in books and in bottles. They have a
secret cave once used for smuggling where they
work on their magic.
Dorothy Lane, librarian, thinks her life is as
normal as pumpkin pie, with no surprises coming
to her as she shelves books in the children’s section
where she prefers to work. Finding out that she’s a
witch is a big surprise, and not always a pleasant
one. There are good witches, like anyone else, and
there are murderous witches. The problem is telling which one is which with limited new magic
and a healthy fear of anything she doesn’t understand.
But what Dorothy finds is a family and a sense
of belonging she has never known. She’ll help track
down Olivia’s killer and search for the missing
spell book, but secretly she hopes her new mentors
will stay in Wilmington with her for many years to
come.
Joyce and Jim Lavene write mystery fiction as
themselves, J.J. Cook, and Ellie Grant. They have written
and published more than seventy novels, along with
hundreds of non-fiction articles for national and
regional publications. They live in rural North Carolina
with their family. www.joyceandjimlavene.com
On Becoming a (Fictional) Librarian by Con Lehane
The first time I entered the majestic Beaux-Arts
flagship of the New York Public Library system,
the 42nd Street Library, I went there to meet a girl.
At the time, I was in high school—a boy’s high
school in Connecticut, where I lived. She went to a
girl’s school forty or fifty miles north of the city. I
don’t remember how it came about that I knew
she’d be in the reading room of the 42nd Street
Library on a certain day during the week between
Christmas and New Year’s. I don’t remember how I
arranged to find her there, or if I did. Knowing she
would be there would have been enough for me.
Remember the all-boys high school?
She had dark, fluffy, curly hair, and lots of it,
cascading over her shoulders when she took off
42
her furry cap, lively and dancing dark eyes, red
lips, and sparkling white teeth, which sparkled
often, as she had an easy and ready laugh with her
head tilted back and her mouth open a bit. She
wore sheer black tights under a flirty short black
skirt.
We met on the steps that led from Fifth Avenue
to the library’s opulent marble foyer, which is
where her fluffy hair cascaded down her shoulders
and chest after she removed her hat. She also unraveled her scarf and unbuttoned her coat, which
is when the sheer tights and short skirt and long
slim legs came into play.
We sat next to each other at one of the long oak
library tables in the massive third-floor reading
Bibliomysteries
room. She was working on a history project and
filled out call slips to request a number of books at
the central desk. I’d brought along an assignment
from my own history course, a list of books, including the Encyclopedia Britannica, that I could
easily have found by nosing through the shelves of
my library back home. The process by which one
acquired a book from the stacks of the 42nd Street
Library via call slips, pneumatic tubes, pages, and
such was entirely foreign to me. My friend—her
name was Jenny—showed me how to fill out my
call slips (I had a nodding acquaintance with the
card catalog, so I could get the title, author, and
call number). She did this patiently, with a flashing
smile and an occasional giggle, our heads bent
over the golden table, my cheek close enough to
almost brush hers.
The afternoon passed in a blur, as we worked
together on our separate tasks for hours, with the
afternoon sun through the cathedral-like windows
glistening off the golden tables, she diligently, me
less so, distracted every few moments as she
crossed or re-crossed her legs and her skirt crept
further up her black-stocking-clad thigh.
I don’t know what I expected to happen when
that glorious afternoon of scholarship (with some
distractions) ended. We left the library and walked
together the block or two along 42nd Street to
Grand Central Station and our respective trains
home, stood together speaking awkwardly alongside the information booth at the center of the
main concourse until the time for her train to
leave. She kissed me lightly on the cheek and I
watched her walk away.… I never saw her again.
I bring this up because it’s what I remembered
when I began to write this piece about how my
new mystery series—the 42nd Street Library Mysteries—came about. In the mid-2000s, I’d published three mysteries, variously described as hardboiled or noir—featuring a New York City bartender and man-about-the-mean-streets Brian
McNulty. I’d been a bartender for a number of
years—twenty-four stints in all, many of them in
New York—so, in tackling the world of bars and
barflies, I knew, more-or-less, whereof I spoke. But
despite some kind reviews, the sales of the books
chronicling McNulty’s adventures were not what
had been hoped for.
So that was that. But why then write a mystery
—probably more hard-boiled than cozy—featuring
a librarian? The short and honest answer is that
my editor told me I’d better if I want to keep getting published. That part worked out. Murder at
the 42nd Street Library is scheduled for Winter
2016 from Thomas Dunne Books/Minotaur with
the second book in the series due to my editor
next fall. And the fact is, I enjoyed writing the
book. Despite the false starts, an extra year of writing, and a lengthy revision process that’s still underway, I think it’s the best book I’ve written.
There was a difficulty, however. I’ve never been
a librarian. Much as I love libraries, and while I’ve
spent time in a good many of them—which I’ll get
to in a moment—I’ve spent more time in bars. For
me, in order to write about a librarian and a library, I needed to do more than read about it or
look at it; I needed to feel it. I’d been to the 42nd
Street Library hundreds of times since that memorable afternoon with Jenny. And since I was destined to write about New York City and its inhabitants (cf. aforementioned editor), the iconic structure at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue
presented itself as the logical place to house my
new protagonist Raymond Ambler. To do so, I
made him curator of the library’s (fictional) crime
fiction collection.
Next, I wormed my way into an appointment to
the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room at the
42nd Street Library. The Allen room at the 42nd
Street end of the second floor marble corridor is
designated for writers with a book contract who
are making use of the general research collections.
It requires a key card to enter and has a dozen or
so desk spaces that one uses on a first-come firstserved basis. It’s place where you can hang your
hat, so to speak, and leave your materials (in a
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MRJ Fall 2014
little cubby, desks are not reserved) overnight. The
fact of the matter is that, not unlike the first time I
visited the library, I had ulterior motives. My main
purpose was not to use the research collection.
This time, my aim was to absorb—to be and work
at the library until I could feel it, until I knew in
my bones what my new friend Raymond Ambler
knew and felt. To that end, I spent most of the
winter of 2011–2012 ensconced on the second
floor of the library writing the first draft of Murder at the 42nd Street Library.
Along the way, I’ve also relied on the support of
a number of remarkably generous librarians to
help me understand how libraries work and what
librarians do. But we all know that librarians are
generous, don’t we? Generosity is written into the
job description: helping a kid find his or her first
book; walking the unemployed novice internet
user through the maze of online job hunting; guiding the hapless college student through the research requirements of a twenty-page research
paper needing original sources.
My librarian friends—many of whom I’ve met
through the online discussion group DorothyL—
work in establishments that range from one-room
library buildings to the Library of Congress and, of
course, the 42nd Street Library. In addition, bits
and pieces of Murder at the 42nd Street Library
have been cobbled together at branches of the
Cape May Library system in Cape May Courthouse and Sea Isle City, New Jersey; the Greenwich, Connecticut, Public Library (the old Greenwich Library on Greenwich Avenue was where I
signed up for my first library card and took out my
first book); the aforementioned Lebanon, New
Hampshire, public library; as well as Dartmouth
College’s Baker Library, where I wrote surrounded
by the Orozco murals; the Newton, Massachusetts,
Free Library; numerous branches of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Library—Chevy
Chase, Aspen Hill, Rockville, Kensington, and
Bethesda; as well as the main Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza.
The most important parts of the book, though
were composed—and absorbed—where much of
the story takes place and where, if my memory
hold true, the story began on a long-ago winter
afternoon when I filled out my first call slips under
the gentle tutelage of my long-lost friend Jenny of
the cascading curls, dancing dark eyes, and flirty
black skirt.
My Amateur Sleuths’ Mystery Library by Ed Lynskey
When I began my Isabel and Alma Trumbo cozy
mystery series, I wanted to enable them to know a
few things about criminal investigations without
them always having to ask a cop friend. The two
septuagenarian Trumbo sisters have a shifting alliance with their local sheriff, Roscoe Fox, so they
can’t always rely on him to answer their sleuthing
questions. So, I hit on the solution of making Isabel and Alma into avid mystery readers who save
every book they have ever read. That way, they can
bring their extensive “book learning” to bear during the course of their investigations.
Isabel and Alma keep all their books shelved in
an unused large room they call their personal li44
brary. So far, they haven’t yet entered the digital
age and started using e-books. They still prefer
reading their books on the printed page. I suspect
they will someday purchase a Kindle or Nook or
whatever e-reader, but for the time being, they
remain fans of the printed page.
While working their current mystery, Isabel and
Alma will make frequent trips to visit their personal library. Either sister might recall something
they read in a mystery title that parallels their own
mystery. Tracking down the book and rereading
the plot aids them in unraveling their current
mystery. At least, they claim their old books are
helpful while doing their detective work, but I be-
Bibliomysteries
lieve they just like hanging on to their old books to
the point where they might be considered borderline hoarders.
Isabel and Alma often kid each other about
their favorite mystery writers, but they always
make a point of reading the same books, regardless
of which sister selected it. Their reading tastes
gravitate more to the classic mysteries written by
the gone but not forgotten notable and worthy
authors. I do a bit of name dropping, but it isn’t
excessive, and I like to give the old mystery authors
a shout out. Perhaps readers will be curious
enough to seek out and try their books.
Since Isabel and Alma are such big readers, I
expect the mysteries found shelved in their personal library will continue to play a big part in
their future sleuthing adventures. I hope Isabel and
Alma stick around for a long while because I like
writing their fun and lively stories to entertain
mystery readers.
Ed Lynskey’s latest mystery title is The Ladybug Song in
the Isabel and Alma Trumbo Cozy Mystery Series.
Reading for the Answers: Murder at the University
by Janice MacDonald
When I teach my short course in how to write
mystery fiction, titled “Getting Away with Murder,” I lead students through an exercise in creating
an amateur detective who has all the qualities
readers would find necessary and believable.
One of those necessary characteristics is curiosity. There is no point, given the amount of plot,
setting and general subterfuge you have to inject
into your manuscript, choosing a character who
spends his or her 9-to-5 hours in a job that would
offer no allure to a curious person. You’d have to
spend five or six pages of valuable real estate trying
to convince your reader that “Herman was distinctly curious about the human condition for a
watch repairman.”
The occupations that spring to mind the most
for students in this exercise are: journalist, photojournalist, scientist, archaeologist, research librarian, bookstore owner, professor, mystery writer,
and editor. Those are all professions where people
dig till they know the answer, and that is what a
detective of the amateur persuasion has to do. If
possible, danger and an answer lurk behind that
closed door; you or I might not risk opening it, but
our fictional detective would, and we would expect
her to.
That is why, when I began my Randy Craig
Mystery series, I made my amateur sleuth Miranda
Craig a graduate student, and then a sessional lecturer. (That and the age old admonition to “write
what you know.”) In the long out-of-print first
book, The Next Margaret—whose plot is being
revisited for the seventh university-homecomingreunion mystery—Randy is pretty sure that her
thesis advisor has murdered the writer she is researching for her MA. She is a sessional lecturer in
Sticks and Stones, when a student in her freshman
English class is murdered. Did she leave a hint as
to her murderer in her essay on the Great Gatsby?
Randy is teaching online courses in The Monitor,
and when everything is found in chatroom dialogue, including a killer for hire, it is hard to know
who to trust and how to read between the lines.
She branches into working for university foundations for a bit, writing website material for the
Department of Ethnomusicology’s and Smithsonian FolkwaysAlive! Collection in Hang Down
Your Head. An exploration of folk ballads leads to
the reasons for killing a well-respected builder. In
Condemned to Repeat, she finds clues to a murder in the historic home of the first premier and
builder of the university, in his wife’s diaries stored
in the provincial archives. Again, careful research
and reading is what leads to the solution. That and
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MRJ Fall 2014
inveterate listmaking!
And in the latest, The Roar of the Crowd,
Randy is involved with the local summer Shakespeare Festival, where during a production of
Much Ado about Nothing, the faked death of Hero
is made very real indeed. Investigating a murder in
the theatre scene is tricky, where people convincingly lie for a living. If only everyone could stick to
the script.
No matter how far Randy Craig gets from her
days of primary research, she is involved in mysteries that require careful reading, consideration of
context and connotation, and an unbearable need
to bring closure to the narrative. Her world is informed by the books she has read and the musicals
she has seen and heard. Fiction is her yardstick
and her experiences consistently prove to her that
everything you need to know you can find between the covers of a book. Like they say, write
what you know.
Janice MacDonald is a western Canadian writer. Her
Randy Craig Mystery series is published by Ravenstone
Books, an imprint of Turnstone Press.
The Epistolary Novel—Yay! Or Nay? by Lise McClendon
When the novel was dreamed up several hundred
years ago, it was very nouvelle, a shockingly new
way to tell a story. It started life as a series of letters
between people, stitched together. Aphra Behn’s
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
is an early example, published in several volumes
in the 1680s. Another is Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela, published in 1741 by the author (a
printer), and often referred to as the first modern
novel.
Today we have evolved. No longer are we a
bunch of well-educated but “middling” women,
sitting around writing letters to each other to improve our characters. Nor do we need to be
preached at about morality, as many early novels
did. Jane Austen cured of us of all that. Her novels
told complete stories, sometimes including letters
but mostly in a modern prose narrative that still
seems fresh. The French, Spanish, and Germans
also had epistolary novels in the 1700s, like Les
Liaisons Dangereuses, but by the 19th century the
pure epistolary novel of letters was on its way out.
I loved writing letters to my friends when I was
in high school, but sadly we don’t write many letters any more. (When was the last time you got a
handwritten anything in the physical mailbox?) In
modern novels, there can be other sorts of documents, though: emails, texts, newspaper articles,
46
and even blog posts. I am, I guess, a throwback in
that I love these “auxiliary documents” that shine a
light on some aspect of a character or situation.
The police report can be a concise way to deliver
the goods about a crime or criminal. A news report or article can offer different aspects of the
public interest in an event in the story. Bridget
Jones’ Diary entries were hilarious. These elements
are economical and get straight to the point. And
they can be very fun.
In my new suspense novel, The Girl in the
Empty Dress, I use blog posts from one of the
Bennett sisters to set the stage and further the
story. All five sisters are lawyers. The blog is called
Lawyrr Grrls so any of the sisters could have written it; figuring out which one is doing the deed is
part of the fun. The five sisters go on a walking
tour of France with one friend along. That friend,
Gillian, the titular girl, causes trouble from the
start. The problems snowball after she insists on
keeping an injured dog they find along a road.
The main character is the middle sister, Merle,
so much of the story is told from her perspective.
The blog offers another sister’s thoughts in a catty,
humorous way. There are also text messages back
and forth between the sisters and their parents.
This is my favorite, from a sister obsessed with
French cheese:
Bibliomysteries
• M&D: Why didn’t you tell me about Camembert? You’ve been holding out on me! Thinking of cheese biz. My friend Gillian is driving us
crazier than we are already. Must drink wine to
hold tongues! Sisters having fun!
• Remember, dear, cheese is very binding.
Mother.
I think epistolary elements add spice to the
modern novel, keeping it fresh and accessible to
readers. I hope I’m not alone.
Lise McClendon’s new suspense novel, The Girl in the
Empty Dress, is available now from Thalia Press. It’s a
sequel to Blackbird Fly, her bestselling novel set in
France. Check out her other books at her website,
lisemcclendon.com, and follow her on Facebook and
Twitter.
Look, There Are Books in My Book by Terrie Farley Moran
I admit I will read anything: magazines, books,
online story sites, flyers from the grocery store,
backs of cereal boxes, graffiti on walls. If you write
words anyplace, I will read them. I adore nonfiction as long as it has to do with history, and I
adore fiction of every style and genre. But my alltime favorite read is any story that has a bit of local
color and a lot of mystery.
Naturally when I decided to begin writing, I
plunged into the mystery world. Sisters in Crime,
Mystery Writers of America, Sleuthfest, Bouchercon, Malice Domestic. And I wrote short mystery
fiction, some crime, some paranormal, some cozy,
some noir. Many were published in a variety of
anthologies and magazines. But when it came to
novels, I wanted to write one thing and one thing
only, a cozy mystery novel with an unforgettable
setting, completely woven with books and food.
So it is no surprise that my new cozy mystery
series is set on the sunny island community of Fort
Myers Beach on Florida’s Gulf coast. The entire
west side of the seven- or eight-mile-long island is
covered with a wide beach filled with tiny grains of
white sand, the consistency of sugar. Then I invented the Read ’Em and Eat, a bookstore and café
with a very literary atmosphere. The tables are
each named after an author: Doctor Seuss, Emily
Dickenson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Agatha Christie, take your pick. Each highly laminated table top
is covered with pictures and odds and ends of the
author’s work, a quote here, a paragraph there.
And patrons can order tasty menu items like Miss
Marple Scones, Robert Frost Apple and Blueberry
Tartlets, Old Man and the Sea Chowder, Harper
Lee Hush Puppies, Agatha Christie Soft-Boiled
Eggs, and Catcher in the Rye Toast, even Green
Eggs and Ham.
And there are book club meetings. Lots and lots
of book club meetings. You can hang out with the
Classics Book Club, or the Books Before Breakfast
Club. Anyone who enjoys the Golden Age mystery
writers will love the Mysterious Madams Book
Club. And let’s not forget the very popular Potluck
Book Club, where foodie books abound and treats
show up unannounced.
In fact, the first novel of the Read ’Em and Eat
series, Well Read, Then Dead (Berkley Prime
Crime, 2014) opens in the midst of an argument at
a book club meeting. Who was the better writer—Anya Seton or Daphne du Maurier? Before the
combatants are drawing swords and sabers, moderator Sassy Cabot intervenes, and negotiates an
uneasy peace, only to have a battle erupt after the
meeting, concerning treasure ships sunk off the
coast of Florida centuries ago.
And then the café chef, Miguel Guerra falls in
the kitchen and breaks his leg. You may wonder,
with all this going on, how the proprietors of the
Read ’Em and Eat, Sassy Cabot and Bridgy Mayfield, have any time at all to solve a murder. But
when a favorite and much beloved book club
member is killed in her own home, and her cousin,
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MRJ Fall 2014
a crusty old time Florida gal, asks for Sassy’s help,
the challenge is well met.
Twice short-listed for Best American Mystery Stories,
Terrie Farley Moran’s cozy mystery novel, Well Read,
Then Dead, released by Berkley Prime Crime in 2014,
will be followed by Caught Read Handed in 2015.
Website www.terriefarleymoran.com
Bibliomystery Geek by Otto Penzler
When I was a boy, in the Dark Ages when brown
was all the rage and parchment and quill pens
were in common usage, I discovered I loved to
read, a sublime affection that has persisted to the
present day.
But more than read. I loved books, and still do,
especially mystery, crime, suspense, and espionage
fiction. There’s plenty of evidence. I own a collection of first editions that numbers nearly 60,000
volumes—which, I will quickly admit, tiptoes
along the very brink of insanity. I started a publishing company. Okay, several. And a bookshop.
Okay, several; those in California and London
didn’t make it, but what I like to think of as World
Headquarters is still here in New York after more
than thirty-five years.
After college, when I started again to read just
for the sheer joy of it, I gravitated to mysteries,
which I’d not read earlier, and books about books.
I read Vincent Starrett’s Born in a Bookshop more
than once, and most of his collected essays about
books, whenever I could find them. He invented a
word that personally applies these days: DOFAB
—Damned Old Fool About Books.
Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels and
The Haunted Bookshop should be required reading for anyone who has ever read more than one
book for pleasure. It’s not impossible that these
inspired my notion of one day owning my own
bookshop. The fact that Morley helped found the
Baker Street Irregulars didn’t hurt his standing
with me. And continuing the Sherlockian theme,
his colleague Starrett wrote a superb biography of
Sherlock Holmes, as well as a memorable pastiche,
The Unique Hamlet.
48
It should come as no surprise, then, that among
my favorite books are bibliomysteries, that nonexistent word that describes the combination of
the mystery story with the world of books.
Whether it is about a bookshop, a rare book, a
library, a bibliophile, a codex, a bookseller, or any
combination or variation, that novel or short story
qualifies as a bibliomystery.
When the Mysterious Bookshop was struggling
financially against the Amazon tidal wave, I had
the notion of publishing bibliomysteries as a fundraiser for the store. I commissioned (yes, I paid
every author) original stories that we published in
individual limited hardcover editions of one hundred numbered and signed copies for collectors,
and paperback copies for readers.
Thanks to some wonderful writers who are very
good friends, stories soon showed up from Ken
Bruen, Reed Farrel Coleman, Anne Perry, Nelson
DeMille, C.J. Box, William Link, Jeffery Deaver,
Loren D. Estleman, Laura Lippman, Andrew Taylor, Peter Blauner, John Connolly, David Bell,
Thomas H. Cook, Mickey Spillane & Max Allan
Collins, Peter Lovesey, F. Paul Wilson, Lyndsay
Faye, Bradford Morrow, R.L. Stine, and Joyce Carol
Oates, with others on the way.
They turned out to be more successful than I
could have imagined and the store is in black ink
again after struggling for eight years.
Readers and collectors demonstrated so much
interest in and affection for bibliomysteries that
they spurred me on to complete a project I’d begun
a few years ago. As a true research geek, I decided
that what the world needed was a bibliography of
bibliomysteries. In my spare time (which is a joke
line to my staff since it is well known that I work
Bibliomysteries
seven days a week—every week) I started compiling information about mysteries that involved the
world of books.
Working with my own collection but also lots of
research, I assembled what I would like to think is
a comprehensive list of every book in this subgenre that was published between 1849 and 2000
(when I cut it off, because, however well-written
they are, recent books are not very interesting bibliographically). In addition, if I tried to list every
bibliomystery as it came out, the book would never
be up-to-date.
I typed up the information, including author,
title, city, publisher, date, and a plot description
that highlights its book-related reason to be included. If there are issue points that describe how
to identify a first printing, I provided them. Then I
scanned the covers of about 130 rare or interesting
dust jackets (I bet there are some you’ve never seen
before), and worked with my printer to lay out
pages. I’d tried this as a Word document and, trust
this technical idiot, it can’t be done. It was proofread so often that I almost decided that I hated
bibliomysteries.
Although I know there’s a huge demand for
something as compelling as this, I rejected the
bidding war that was sure to develop between the
big houses and decided to self-publish, sort of.
Bibliomysteries: An Annotated Bibliography of
First Editions of Mystery Fiction Set in the World
of Books, 1849–2000) was published by the Mysterious Bookshop on August 1, 2014, in an edition
of 200 copies, numbered and signed by the author,
editor, and publisher. A lifetime supply, I reckoned,
but it sold out in less than two weeks. No one was
more surprised or confounded than I. As this is
being written, I await delivery of the second, revised edition. Yes, revised, because it wasn’t proofread often enough, so the greatest mystery bibliographer of all time, Allen J. Hubin, kindly e-mailed
me some emendations. You can only imagine how
thrilled I was to receive them.
Why would anyone, especially one with an
overfull plate, decide to do something as timeconsuming as write a bibliography, especially on a
somewhat arcane subject? I’ve been asked this
more than once. Why? Because I wanted to. And
because I could.
People of the Book by Neil Plakcy
One of the terms applied to Jews is “The People of
the Book,” or more specifically, the old testament
of the Bible, the five books of Moses. When I began writing The Noblest Vengeance, fifth in my
Have Body, Will Guard adventure romance series,
I reached back to the past to find the right “book”
to serve as one of its central elements.
Before the Nazis invaded in April, 1944, Ioannina, Greece, was the largest enclave of Romaniote
Jews, an offshoot whose roots go back to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
Much smaller and less known than the two main
branches of Jewish descent, the Ashkenazim and
the Sephardim, the Romaniotes had a long history
in Greece, speaking a Greek/Hebrew dialect and
observing their own unique traditions.
I began with an invented leader of the community, Rabbi Stathis Makis, guardian of a prized
scroll that had been handed down in his family. To
protect it, he sent it to his daughter Evadne, who
had moved to Istanbul. I knew that this scroll
would be encased in a cylindrical metal container,
called a tik, as was customary. A Torah, though,
was too bulky, so I settled instead on a megillah, a
separate scroll detailing the story of Esther, which
is read out at the holiday of Purim. I found photos
online of megillot (the Hebrew plural) in elaborate
metal cases.
As Rabbi Makis expected, the Nazis invaded
Ioannina and his people were decimated—only
about 90 members of a group of nearly 2,000 survived, including the rabbi’s youngest son, David.
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MRJ Fall 2014
From the camps, David was sent to live with his
sister in Turkey. What happened to their family
was a great burden to both David and Evadne. He
retreated into anger, and she sold the scroll, using
the money to help her husband build his business,
repudiating a God who could allow such terrible
things to happen.
In the present day, David is dying, and, not
knowing that the megilla in its elaborate case was
sold years before, he decides to retrieve his family
heirloom and take it back to Greece, where he
hopes to die in his birthplace. He approaches the
only child of his late sister, her daughter Meryem,
and asks for the return of the object. However,
David’s anger and his illiteracy confuse his mes-
sage, and his escalating threats cause the family to
enlist the service of a pair of bodyguards—the heroes of my series, Aidan Greene and Liam
McCullough.
Aidan is a tangential cousin to Meryem’s husband, and the book gave me a chance to explore
ideas of family and faith while cloaked in a thrilling plot with a side helping of romance. And even
though this scroll and its loss are merely a cover
for the real danger to Meryem and her family, I
think it’s at the emotional heart of the book.
Neil Plakcy is the author of three ongoing series: the
Mahu Investigations, the Golden Retriever Mysteries,
and Have Body, Will Guard. More at his
website, www.mahubooks.com.
Everyone Loves a Conspiracy Theory by Judith Rock
Fortunately for mystery writers, millions of our
fellow human beings relish fictional foul play and
its investigation and solution. Millions of people
also love conspiracy theories, which turn up fairly
often in the plots of mysteries and thrillers. In a
murder mystery, the body which usually sets the
plot going stays tidily within the covers of the
book. In a plot involving a fictional conspiracy
theory, so does the conspiracy theory. But when I
decided to use a real world conspiracy theory in
The Whispering of Bones (Berkley, 2013), my
fourth novel, I was immediately working on trickier ground. Real world conspiracy theories exist on
a seductively shadowy plain that stretches between
fantasy and the commonly acknowledged, more or
less provable, world of fact. The conspiracy theory
I used has thrived on that plain for four hundred
years. Before I could use it, I had to know several
things. Was the conspiracy real? Or was the conspiracy theory the only reality?
The central character of my historical mystery
series is a half-fledged Jesuit named Charles du
Luc. As I researched and wrote the first three
books, I repeatedly came across—and grew more
50
and more curious about—the persistent allegation
that the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was and is out to
take over the world. If you’ve somehow missed this
one, have a look at the internet fringe. Early in
2011, I discovered that at least one such site was
keeping a stern eye on my writing, because I was
writing about Jesuits without claiming that they
were conspirators. Finding myself on that site was
the beginning of the path that led to the Mazarine
Library in Paris in 2012.
My stories are set in 1680s Paris, in the Jesuit
school called Louis le Grand where my hero
Charles du Luc teaches. Charles and his adventures
are based on research that earned my doctorate
and was then published as a study of Jesuit theatre
history in 1996. More research has followed with
each of the Charles books. The Society of Jesus,
like every human institution in every age, was and
is far from perfect. Nonetheless, serious historical
research which began in 1984 had not, by 2012,
turned up anything dire enough to explain the
Jesuits-taking-over-the-world conspiracy theory or
its longevity.
Then I read the Italian scholar Sabina Pavone’s
recent book about the Monita Secreta (Latin for
Bibliomysteries
Secret Instructions). First published as the Monita
Privata in Poland in 1614, the document claimed
to be private instructions for gaining wealth and
power, given only to a small inner circle of Jesuits.
When the Monita appeared, non-Jesuit as well as
Jesuit scholars immediately recognized it as a forgery. Some thought it had been written by Calvinists, but others guessed that an ex-Jesuit, who
knew Jesuit organization and could reproduce the
style of Jesuit documents, had written it.
The author turned out to be Jerome Zahorowski, an ex-Jesuit who had failed his theology
exams and been given an assignment within the
order which he felt insulted his family’s social
rank. But, of course, fact rarely prevails against a
juicy conspiracy theory. The Monita, under a variety of names and in a variety of versions, quickly
became and remained the touchstone for antiJesuit writing.
1687, the year in which The Whispering of
Bones is set, was a time of conflict between Protestants and Catholics, and much criticism of Jesuits.
I needed to read a French version of the Monita
put together near that date, and I was sure I could
find one, because the Monita has been through 148
print editions since 1614. “New York Times bestseller” doesn’t even come close! Those 148 editions
represent many slightly altered versions, in many
languages and countries. The most recent edition I
know of was printed in Moscow in 1996.
In 2012, I was in Paris to speak and do research.
I went hunting for the edition of the Monita I
needed. The 17th century Mazarine Library is just
up the street from where I was staying, so I went
there first. One of the library staff climbed a beautiful laterally-wheeled wooden ladder, searched a
section of the floor to ceiling books that cover the
walls, and brought me Le Cabinet jesuitique,
printed in French in 1678, in Cologne.
As I held the little calf-bound version of the
Monita, I wondered who had read it three hundred
and thirty years ago, and why—and who had
smuggled it into France. It was definitely smuggled, because all versions of the Monita were outlawed in Louis XIV’s realm. For my story, I could
take my pick of possible smugglers: Protestants of
various sorts; foreign agents, especially English
and German; Frenchmen who, for political rather
than religious reasons, wanted all foreign influence, including the Pope’s, out of France.
When I reached the end of Le Cabinet jesuitique, I found startling evidence of the foreign influence issue. On one of the last pages was a “Jesuit” version of the Lord’s Prayer. It addressed the
King of Spain (often France’s adversary) as Our
Father and was meant to underline the supposed
Jesuit threat of foreign control over France.
Philippe, you’re king of everyone,
We won’t be mute, we won’t be dumb,
We’ll confess to all just who we are,
We’re your dear sons, to us you are: Our Father!
I read the doggerel lines and read them again.
Then I sat back and stared at the books lining the
walls, enclosing me like a nest…. And the plot of
The Whispering of Bones began to hatch.
Judith Rock has written historical mysteries, two
nonfiction books on dance, and many journal articles.
After twenty years as a modern dancer/choreographer,
she was briefly a police officer, then actress and
playwright, and now a novelist. When not writing, she
takes care of birds at a seabird rescue/rehab center in
Sarasota, Florida.
Book Wrap by Sheila Simonson
I love libraries. When I was small, my parents
helped found the public library in the town we
lived in. Later, when my father was taking a night
class at Eastern Oregon College, I used to ride to
La Grande with him and check out seven adult
books at a time from the public library, though I
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MRJ Fall 2014
was still in grade school. Bliss. I read through all
the fiction alphabetically and then reread it—from
Jane Austen to Leo Tolstoy by way of Zane Grey.
Nobody said not to. One consequence of that is
that I read very fast. (Another, some would say, is
that I have no taste.)
When I got around to writing my second
mystery series, the Latouche County series, I decided I needed at least two viewpoints: one professional, to provide a baseline of law and order, and
one to represent the community’s humane interests. For that role, I chose the head of the public
library. Meg McLean, my heroine, is a tribute to
librarians I have known. I like her a lot. I also like
the library system I invented for her to run when
she isn’t looking into local crime.
The Latouche Regional Library, Meg’s domain,
serves two fictional rural counties in Washington
state. Meg’s office is in the main branch in Klalo,
the Latouche County seat. The bookmobile docks
there, and the building houses administrative offices and community rooms as well as a large library of books. Like all good modern libraries, it
also gives room to audio books, CDs, and computers. The computers access the e-book collection
and provide WiFi service to the public, as well as
PC consoles and printers for local patrons, including school children who don’t own computers, and
for visitors to Latouche County. When I hung out
at the Stevenson and White Salmon branches of
the Fort Vancouver system to research my books, I
was surprised at the number of immigrants and
tourists, including foreign visitors, who were
served —not just with Internet connections but
with Spanish-language books as well.
I modeled the Klalo library building on the old
Fort Vancouver Regional Library main branch,
which embodied the worst architectural features of
the 1960s. (I loved that library. The new branch,
though much handsomer, is not nearly as cozy.) In
my books, the hideousness of the main branch
gives Meg ongoing anguish, as does her failure to
pass a levy. She has a good staff, but some of the
leftover librarians leave a lot to be desired and, of
course, have seniority. In the latest book, Beyond
Confusion, I murder one of them, an unpleasant
woman who wants Meg’s job. That book (third in
the series) is the first time I show Meg in action as
a library administrator, defending the bookmobile
from attack by the censorious.
It was the question of censorship that drew my
attention to the Vancouver system when I first
moved here. My boss at Clark College served on
the library board. The board and the head librarian worked out a procedure for dealing with challenges to library books that became a national
model of such procedures. It gave challengers a
way of making their opinions heard while protecting the public’s right to read freely. I gave the Latouche Regional Library a piece of the Vancouver
library’s history, in other words. In Beyond Confusion I was able to dramatize something of the
pressure libraries are under from people who want
to burn books.
I think public libraries are a cornerstone of
American democracy. They certainly played a role
in my own intellectual development, and I’m glad I
got a chance to express my bibliophilia in my fiction.
Sheila Simonson is the author of the Lark Dodge
mystery series and the current Latouche County series
from Perseverance Press. She lives in Vancouver, WA,
where she taught many years at Clark College. Now
retired, she writes full-time when not traveling around
the country with her husband looking for libraries.
Writing “See Also Murder” by Larry D. Sweazy
Most indexers I know didn’t intend to be indexers.
The profession was something that found them,
52
rather than a person aspiring to be a professional
back-of-the-book indexer. How many kids have
Bibliomysteries
you ever met that wanted to grow up and be indexers? It was the same with me—I didn’t intend
to be an indexer, but I’m glad I am.
I had been writing fiction for several years, after
work, trying to get published, getting nowhere,
collecting stacks and stacks of rejection slips, when
fate intervened, and I was transferred, doing building maintenance and janitorial work, to a building
that housed the technical division of a major publisher. It wasn’t long before I struck up a conversation with some of the editors, and the rest is history. They had some freelance spots that needed
filling, and it turned out that I had a knack for
indexing. With some training, indexing came relatively easy to me.
I have to admit to being highly organized, and
have been accused of having an encyclopedic mind
and a steel trap for a memory, all of which are
great qualities for indexers. I also love doing
crossword puzzles, read voraciously, and am curious about everything. It wasn’t long before I was
indexing fulltime in a freelance capacity. That was
sixteen years ago. Since then, I’ve written indexes
for almost 800 non-fiction books, for a variety of
major publishers, with subject matters ranging
from Egyptian economics to computer forensics,
and everything in between. It’s been quite the education.
Indexing and writing are similar in a lot of
ways, and completely different in others. In both,
you start off with a blank page, and go from there.
I don’t use index cards like they did in the precomputer days, I have a dedicated program that
provides an interface, but it doesn’t search and
specify entries, or create any kind of structure on
its own. Humans are still very much needed to
create indexes for print books (and some ebooks,
too).
There are rules for writing indexes, but no two
indexers will ever write the same index. They will
choose different subject matter they think is important. Same way with writing fiction—give two
writers the same idea, and they will come up with
two wildly different stories.
Of course, it wasn’t long into my indexing career before I started thinking that an indexer
would make a great amateur sleuth character. Especially after I joined ASI (American Society of
Indexers) and learned that most indexers are
trained either with a mentor, in-house, like I did,
or through a correspondence course provided by
the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). That was a head-scratcher, until further research told me why the USDA would provide a
course for indexing. It was designed to give farmers’ wives a dependable revenue stream, a skill and
task to occupy them during the slow times of the
growing and harvesting seasons, primarily the
winters. That made sense to me.
A freelance indexer could live anywhere, as long
as a postal truck could reach them and deliver
page proofs—at least in the days before email.
Now, most everything is sent and received electronically, though I still get an occasional box of
page proofs left on the doorstep. I immediately
signed up for the USDA course, even though I was
already writing indexes on a regular basis.
I have to admit that I didn’t finish the USDA
course. I got about halfway through it, before the
demands of a fulltime indexing career became
more than enough to handle. But I learned a lot,
and when I finally sat down to write my indexer
mystery, there was no doubt in my mind that the
main character would be a farmer’s wife who had
become an indexer via the USDA.
I live in Indiana, home to oceans of cornfields,
and that would have been a logical setting, but I
was stationed in North Dakota in the Air Force,
and the vast openness combined with the isolation
of both the land and the vocation of indexing,
seemed like a perfect match. So, Marjorie Trumaine came into being as a farmer’s wife in Dickinson, North Dakota—home, as well, to Dickinson
State College, offering a little conflict between academia and a correspondence course-trained indexer.
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MRJ Fall 2014
The first version of See Also Murder was in the
form of a short story. It was published on the nowdefunct Amazon Shorts in 2006, and went on to
gain a nomination for the SMFS (Short Mystery
Fiction Society) Derringer Award in 2007. It was
that notice and reception that gave me the confidence to consider the story as a novel.
Like indexing, writing Marjorie came easier to
me than I thought it might. I felt like I knew her
and her struggles, especially the isolation and pressure. Indexes are one of the last tasks in publishing
before a book is sent to the printer, a date that is
set months in advance. Anything that happens
along the way to the book is usually shaved off the
indexer’s schedule, so they have to be fast, able to
work under the gun, no matter what is happening
in their life. In Marjorie’s case, her husband, Hank,
is severely injured, and her closest neighbors are
found murdered, all under the heat of a must-meet
deadline. When the sheriff asks Marjorie to help
him figure what an amulet found at the crime
scene means, Marjorie can hardly say no. Her curiosity wouldn’t allow it. Nor would her desire to
make sense out of chaos, and put things in order
so that life is a little easier for the rest of us, just
like any indexer would.
Most back-of-the-book indexes are written by
indexers, not the author. I hope when you use your
next index, you’ll think of the person who wrote it
and consider the skill, thought process, and imagination that went into the work—and also consider
that that person, that indexer, just might make a
fine sleuth, too.
Larry D. Sweazy (www.larrydsweazy.com) has published
over sixty non-fiction articles and short stories, and is
the author of the Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger western
series (Berkley), the Lucas Fume western series
(Berkley) and a thriller set in Indiana, The Devil’s
Bones (Five Star). See Also Murder from Seventh Street
Books will debut in May, 2015. Larry lives in Indiana
with his wife, Rose.
The Book Shelving Workout by Elaine Viets
I’ve loved libraries from the day I got my first library card. I like their special perfume: the scent of
old leather-bound books, sunlight, dust, and vanilla mixed with the sharp tang of new books.
I like librarians: So quiet, smart, and eager to
answer questions. Tell a librarian that you like
books and you have a friend who will recommend
hours of good reading.
I like all those books in one place. They’re mine,
all mine, to have and to hold for at least two weeks,
absolutely free. I have a serious reading jones. I
devour four or five books a week. I couldn’t possibly afford this habit if I didn’t have a library.
Setting my fourteenth Dead-End Job mystery at
a library was a natural choice. To research
Checked Out, I volunteered to work at the Galt
Ocean Reading Center near my home. The reading
center is in a strip mall. It’s part of the Broward
County Library system in Fort Lauderdale,
54
Florida.
Galt Ocean Mile is a stretch of ritzy beach condos in Fort Lauderdale. Many of the residents are
older, well-educated New Yorkers. They used to be
mostly snowbirds, but more Galtonians now live in
Florida year-round. Galt is a reading center, so it’s
heavily stocked with popular fiction and biographies, and light on reference books and weightier
works.
I shelve books and DVDs.
Book shelving is a never-ending chore that
wears down the toughest librarians. I find it soothing. I like restoring order to the shelves; what are
Sandra Brown’s mysteries doing in the middle of
Rita Mae Brown’s cat cozies? I like putting books in
their proper places.
It’s also good exercise. Most novels weigh about
a pound. Shelving has lots of bending and stretching. I’m six feet tall, and some nights I’m tempted
Bibliomysteries
to leave the lower-shelf novels on the cart for the
shorter librarians, but I know my duty. I just hope
my popping knees don’t disturb the patrons.
It’s also rewarding. Librarians are grateful for
help and don’t hesitate to say so.
And it’s personally satisfying. It was an unforgettable thrill when my own mysteries showed up
on library shelves.
I’ve worked many of the Dead-End Jobs in my
mysteries, from shop clerk to hotel maid, but I’ve
rarely been praised as perfect for those jobs. Quite
the opposite, in fact. I’m an expert at jamming
cash registers, and I lack the true persuasive powers to sweet talk a woman into spending three
thousand dollars on a dress.
But I’m an enthusiastic shelver. Maybe too enthusiastic for my own good. Marlene Barnes, the
petite manager of Galt Ocean Mile Reading Cen-
ter, only lets me shelve for an hour at a time.
“We’ve had shelvers who do too much their first
day and never come back,” she told me. “An hour is
enough.”
So I was happily shelving novels at Galt when
Marlene stopped by and said, “You’re perfect for
this job.”
Was it my charm? My mastery of the alphabet?
Maybe. But here’s the real reason.
“You’re tall,” Marlene said. “You can reach the
top shelf.”
Elaine Viets’ new library novel, Checked Out, will be
published as an Obsidian hardcover in May, 2015. Elaine
is the author of twenty-eight mysteries in three series,
both hard-boiled and cozy: the Dead-End Job mysteries,
the Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper mysteries, and the
Francesca Vierling mysteries. www.elaineviets.com
Between the Lines by E. J. Wagner
The shiny, new, hard, slick ones that can be picked
up anywhere don’t excite me very much.
Frankly, I like them mature. I nurse a serious
fondness for the crinkles of experience. And I have
no objection to a bit of slackness in the spine or
softening in the middle.
If they exude a slight aroma of old tobacco or
brandy that’s fine with me.
I positively appreciate deep lines.
And what’s written between them.
I dig old books.
I’m a crime historian; researching, writing and
lecturing about old crimes is my job. That makes
old books my necessary and much-loved accomplices.
Mostly I’m enamored of antiquarian medical
books, law books, and cookery books, as they
abound with subtle hints of ancient criminal
events.
It was common in the past for readers to write
in the margins and between the lines of their
books, to enclose notes between the leaves. Offi-
cially known as marginalia, and traditionally
frowned on by parents and librarians, these often
provide me with signs of the sinister.
For instance, in an 19th-century book on cooking I find a note that water hemlock looks remarkably like parsnips, but smells like very much
like carrots. (The note is written, of course, in a
delicate ornate hand,)
It is tucked cozily next to a recipe for parsnip
and carrot soup. The directions say to cook the
vegetables in broth until soft, to puree the soup,
and then pass it through a sieve lined with cloth.
Finish by dusting with grated nutmeg.
Was this written by a careful good cook, or a
clever homicidal one?
A few pages later, a note in the same hand appears in the margin. It is for a tea to cure croup. It
includes hollyhock blossoms, sassafras, and four
grams of lobelia. The directions say to “administer
a large spoon every fifteen minutes until the symptoms abate.”
Considering that lobelia, also known in the ver55
MRJ Fall 2014
nacular as “puke weed” and “vomit wort,” is toxic
at that dose, I figure that the symptoms abated
pretty quickly.
Old medical books frequently close with a section entitled “lllustrative cases.” These are often a
wonderful source of macabre anecdotes, and as
they are annotated, easy to trace back to the original source and authenticate.
In C. M. Tidy’s 1882 text on Medical Jurisprudence, for instance, there is a tale from the Annals
d’Hygiene, 1847, of a mother who was accused of
pouring melted pewter (three parts tin, seven parts
lead, melting point 350° F) into the right ear of her
“idiot son” while he slept. Amazingly, the child
recovered. The fate of the mother was not stated,
giving us latitude to imagine.
Where does one find such historical riches?
The internet, it’s true, has a lot of offerings, but
that seems to me sort of like cheating. Anyway, it
spoils the fun of a hunt.
Antiquarian book shops and plain old used
book stores are rapidly disappearing, to my great
sorrow. I spent many happy dust-covered hours in
the Good Times Book Shop in Port Jefferson, Long
Island, and the many shops on Charing Cross
Road in London.
But there are still a few left, and there are book
fairs where the old time dealers gather. I always ask
for “reader’s copies,” as I am a not a collector but a
researcher. Reader’s copies are a lot cheaper and lot
more apt to have interesting marginalia.
Some “bookies” work out of their homes, where
books are often stacked on every reachable surface.
One of my most intriguing finds was stored under
the dealer’s bed—he’d run out of space elsewhere.
There, between the dealer’s bedroom slippers
and the mother of all dust mice, I discovered
Champion Text on Embalming, published in 1900.
Along with fascinating information on the
techniques of the funerary arts in the 19th century,
it contained a compelling photograph.
Labeled “Injecting the arterial system through
the radial artery,” the picture shows a corpse
flanked by two suspended articulated skeletons
and a few professorial-looking bearded men. The
deceased, who also sports a beard, is modestly
covered by a sheet up to his neck. His face is as
peaceful as that of a chap having a manicure.
Seated by the body, apparently injecting the
embalming fluid, is a woman, elegantly attired in a
mutton-sleeved embroidered dress, accessorized
by a pearl necklace. A wide-brimmed, lightcolored hat, adorned with flowers and leaves,
perches on her head. (A dove may also be involved
in the hat decorations—the photo isn’t clear
enough for me to be sure). A large light-colored
cloth carefully covers her lap, evidently to prevent
staining.
Who says women didn’t have professional opportunities in the Victorian age?
With such treasures available, is it any wonder I
am dedicated to searching for them—reading between the lines, finding murder in the margins?
E.J. Wagner is the author of the Edgar-winning The
Science of Sherlock Holmes. Her work has appeared in
Ellery Queen, The Lancet, and Smithsonian magazine,
among others. She frequently consults for television on
criminal history. www.ejwagner-crimehistorian.com;
ejdissectingroom.wordpress.com
Books and Book Lovers Who Run Amok by Sally Wright
When I decided I wanted to write about rare
books and those who collect them as a part of the
plot of the third Ben Reese mystery, Pursuit and
Persuasion (Multnomah, 2000), I had no idea how
interesting the research would be.
56
I first became intrigued by antiquarian books
and the people who collect them when interviewing the real university archivist and ex-WWII
scout, who worked for Army Intelligence in
Europe in WWII, on whom I’ve based Ben Reese.
Bibliomysteries
As we talked about collecting, I began to realize
I didn’t understand the urge to collect (which I saw
in him) that leads some collectors to pathological
obsession. Though, as I began studying books
written before and after the invention of the printing press, and the early important printers, I began
to realize how little I knew, and how overwhelming the subject was.
Then I read A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles,
Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
by Nicholas A. Basbanes, and was astonished by
the lengths to which collectors have gone in the
past, and are still going to today, to possess what
they covet—in quantity, and/or quality.
Take Don Vicente, a former Cistercian monk,
who in the 1830s committed at least eight murders
in the pursuit of his obsession. He left his monastery in Tarragona, Spain (where he’d been in
charge of the library) immediately after “thieves”
stole money, artifacts and priceless tomes—only to
open a rare bookstore in Barcelona minutes later
with a collection of rare books and manuscripts.
There, when selling an irreplaceable volume
(which caused him untold pain and suffering), he’d
follow the buyer to his residence, where he’d murder him sometime later, and repossess the book,
using the proceeds of these mercantile exchanges
to buy more books.
Or consider the English aristocrat who spent
every penny he possessed on the books and incunabula he coveted, until he’d stuffed so many
weighty tomes into his slowly disintegrating
manor house that the day finally came when the
third floor crashed into the second floor… which
collapsed onto the first… which in turn plummeted onto the ground floor—destroying his ancient ancestral home.
Of course, in researching Pursuit and Persuasion, I didn’t simply rely on what I could read. I
visited the British Library, the Library of Congress,
as well as other more obscure depositories, and
Samuel Johnson’s home in London (where he
wrote the first usable English dictionary virtually
single handedly with copying assistance from a
handful of scribes). There I touched the handrail
he’d handled running up and down those narrow
flights of stairs, and felt more than at any other
time in my life the presence of a former inhabitant
as I stood in the attic where he wrote.
When I interviewed two Samuel Johnson enthusiasts (husband and wife professors at the University of Michigan) at their home-librarybookstore-Samuel-Johnson-shrine in Ann Arbor, I
saw firsthand the results of lifelong scholarly obsession. They’d collected Johnson so ardently,
amassing so many books and materials, they’d
been reduced to having to sell their beloveds to
other collectors to keep their heads above water
and finance further purchases.
There I perused (and touched) a first edition of
his Dictionary of the English Language (1755),
and browsed first edition compilations of his
Rambler essays, while listening to collecting stories
by two who loved him well. We traded favorite
quotes and anecdotes from Boswell’s Life of
Samuel Johnson. And by the time I left, I’d been
exposed to more depth of specialized knowledge
than I’ll ever have in any subject, no matter how
long I live.
Someone—and I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember who—put me in touch with an enormously wealthy book collector in upstate New
York who agreed to speak to me on the phone, but
would not allow me to know his name, or what
business he was in. I’d realized by then that I don’t
have the collector gene. That I love books, but
don’t have to own them, and care not what edition
they are, or bindings they have, or who owned
them before.
He did. And as we spoke, this cool business-like
professional New Yorker’s voice warmed to his
subject, as he told me how he’d become obsessed
with his subject—let’s say it was voyages of exploration—and how he would collect a period, or a
country of origin, or a particular explorer, or area
explored—and end up having to have every exist57
MRJ Fall 2014
ing material that applied to whatever it was. The
chase could go on for thirty years—and had—with
rising levels of anxiety and determination to possess every single item that pertained to whatever it
was.
But when he’d filled what he called “the holes”
in that collection, he’d keep it together for a period
of time, then suddenly sell it off—in its entirety, or
piece by piece, whichever would pay more. If the
collection was as complete as it could be, the chase
was over. The thrill was gone. He had to move on
to something else.
He and I are cut from different cloth. But he
humored me, and bared his soul—as long as I
didn’t know who that soul belonged to.
I also read two books that I used in Pursuit and
Persuasion as well as in Watches of the Night
(Severn House, 2008) the fifth Ben Reese novel,
which takes place partly in Tuscany. Ben is an archivist at a small private university in the early
1960s, when archivists couldn’t specialize the way
they do today. He’d had to clean out the basements
and attics of all the university buildings when he’d
arrived at the school in order to sort through what
donors had given over more than a hundred years.
He had to work with books, and paintings, and
letters and diaries, with old coins and Native
American artifacts, with chandeliers that had hung
in the White House, with furniture that had been
commissioned by the court of Louis XIV.
He also had to do the bidding of the donors
who were contributing to his university, right then
in the ’60s—which meant he had to identify artifacts for them, and locate a collection of essays by
Seneca while he lectured in Italy in 1962. In writing that part of the plot, I drew on two books by
Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern (Old
Books, Rare Friends, and Old Books in the Old
World) who, after the Second World War, tracked
down and bought, and thereby saved, countless
books from great private collections that had been
damaged, or stolen, or sold in England and
Europe, during and after the fighting.
Their love of books, and their dedication, and
the breadth of their expertise made fascinating
reading. And it was reading them, and How To
Buy Rare Books: A Practical Guide to The Antiquarian Book Market, by William Rees-Mogg,
that helped me learn what I needed to learn to
write Watches of the Night.
That, and interviewing the real Ben Reese, who
helped me more than I can possibly explain to
anyone who hasn’t met him. He’s ninety-one now,
and not very well. But it’s Watches of the Night, he
says, where I wrote direct scenes from WWII, and
described in detail how he was actually wounded,
and rescued, and flown back to the States fast
enough that they could save his life—that’s meant
the most to him. He says that talking to me, and
then reading the book, finally gave him closure on
the war, and put an end to the nightmares he’d
suffered from since.
That made writing the series time very well
spent.
Sally Wright is the author of six Ben Reese mysteries.
Breeding Ground, Wright’s first Jo Grant mystery,
explores the stresses driving three family businesses in
the Lexington horse industry that tear those families
apart and ultimately lead to murder. Wright and her
husband live in rural northwest Ohio.
www.sallywright.net
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Bibliomysteries
COLUMNS
Mystery in Retrospect: Reviews
Reviewed by Gay Toltl Kinman
By Its Cover by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2014).
I love reading mysteries set in Venice, and Leon
is at the top of the list. She has such a sense of
place and knows Venice well as she has lived there
and nearby for many years. She uses the locale in
the story, so you know you are there. In this story,
her series character, Commissario Guido Brunetti,
is called to a research library because books and
pages from other books are missing. The Director
gives him the information about a reader who has
been there for three weeks and has now disappeared. Brunetti learns everything about the man
was fake—his letter of introduction from a US
university and his passport. Another reader was
there also, a man who has used the library for
three years reading the “Fathers of the Church.” No
surprise when Brunetti learns he was a former
priest.
Leon, in the persona of Brunetti, comments on
the laxness and corruptness of the Italian government, but this is a side issue. Brunetti wishes to
bring in the Art Police but it seems hopeless when
so much art—in this case, books—is being pilfered
with the help of the authorities. His focus changes
when one of the players is murdered and found
with several stolen books. But not all those that
were stolen.
Brunetti has a happy, stable home life, so no
angst or bed hopping cloud the story.
Reviewed by L.J. Roberts
The following three reviews are so much for bibliomysteries. However, every now and then you
read a book that is a true “Wow!” book. These
book-related novels definitely fall into that category. The other thing they have in common is that
I found myself both reading the physical books
and listening to the unabridged audio versions. In
all three cases, the narrators are exceptional. These
are definitely on my list of Best Books I’ve Read.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Knopf, 2006);
unabridged audiobook narrated by Allan Corduner (Listening Library, 2006).
First the colors.
Death tells us the story of young Liesel Meminger who watched her brother die, her years with
her foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann,
Max Steiner, the Jewish man they hid in their cellar, her best friend Rudy who wanted to be Jessie
Owens, and her life on Himmel Street in
Molching, Germany during World War II.
Although written as a book for young adults,
this is one of the most stunningly beautiful, heartwrenching tragic books I’ve read. It made me
laugh; it made me weep. Narrated by Death, the
astonishingly visual descriptions at times amazed
me. The characters are wonderful and tenderly
brought to life. It is a story of love, courage, friendship and loss. It is a story of a love of reading, of
stolen books and the power of words. It makes me
mindful of what is best, and worst, about us humans. It, most of all, makes me grateful for my
own passion for words, reading and books.
I first listened to the audio version of this book.
Allan Corduner did an exceptional job bringing
this story to life. I loved the story so much, I then
read it in hardcover. The physical style of the way
it was printed brought the story even more to life
for me, and I had Corduner’s voice in my head.
There are a couple of pieces of music that, when
I heard them for the first time, I happened to be in
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MRJ Fall 2014
the car and was so moved, I had to pull over, stop
and listen. I had the same reaction to this book, as
it started. The entire prologue of this book had me
sitting in my car, pulled over off a very busy road,
just listening.
I am haunted by humans.
What can I say; Death is haunted by humans. I
was haunted, in the most wonderful way, by this
book.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon,
translated by Lucia Graves (Penguin, 2004); unabridged audiobook narrated by Jonathan Davis
(Penguin Audio, 2004).
I still remember the day my father took me to
the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first
time.
Ten-year-old Daniel Sempere is taken to the
Cemetery of Forgotten Books where he is to adopt
a single book and promise to keep it alive always.
He is drawn to The Shadow of the Wind. When he
finds out that all the other copies of all the author’s
books have been burned, it becomes a quest for
Daniel to find out about the mysterious author,
Julian Carax. Over time, Daniel’s and Carax’s lives
become linked in frightening, and sometimes dangerous, ways.
I loved this book! There is humor, sorrow, love,
suspense, friendship, tragedy, brutality, revenge,
fabulous sense of time and place and a fountain
pen that connects the story together through time.
The language is flowery, and the pace sometimes
slow but I never wanted to put it down.
There was a twist I didn’t expect yet all the ends
are neatly tied into a perfect circle at the end.
The Shadow of the Wind is not a traditional
mystery, although there is a mystery within it, but
it is an absolutely wonderful book.
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (Atria,
2006); unabridged audiobook narrated by Bianca
Amato and Jill Tanner (Simon & Schuster Audio,
2006).
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All children mythologize their birth.
Margaret Lea is a young woman working with
her father in an antiquarian bookshop. She receives a request to write the biography of the famous author, Vida Winter. Although Ms. Winter
has been interviewed many times, each time she
gives a different story of her past. Now she has
decided to tell the truth. The story draws Margaret
into Ms. Winter’s life and she discovers tragic parallels in their lives.
Ms. Setterfield begins her writing career with a
completely mesmerizing, although not altogether
pleasant, story within a story within a story.
The top story is Margaret’s narrative. It is lyrical
and speaks to the heart of those of us who love
books. There is the story of Angelfield, which is
grim and rather unpleasant. There is third story
which is sad but is one of survival.
I both read the book and listened to the audiobook. The book is wonderfully written; the audiobook narration adds a richness and deeper emotion to the story and left me crying with its ending.
This book won’t be to everyone’s taste, probably
best for those of us who love gothics. Even though
it does become a bit grim, at times, don’t give up.
Reading to the end is definitely worth it.
Reviewed by Lesa Holstine
Murder in the Mystery Suite, by Ellery Adams
(Berkley, August 2014). Book Retreat Mystery #1,
paperback original.
Ellery Adams introduces her first Book Retreat
mystery, Murder in the Mystery Suite, with a
paragraph to delight the heart of any book lover.
There were books everywhere. Hundreds of
books. Thousands of books. There were
books of every size, shape, and color. They
lined the walls from floor to ceiling, standing
straight and rigid as soldiers on the polished
mahogany shelves, the gilt lettering on their
worn spines glinting in the soft light, the
scent of supple leather and aging paper filling
Bibliomysteries
the air.
And, after setting the perfect stage for a book
lover, she invites us into a resort dedicated to
books, Storyton Hall in Virginia. Who can resist?
Storyton Hall is home to widow Jane Steward,
her six-year-old twin sons, Hem and Fitz, and her
great-uncle and great-aunt. Jane’s the general manager of the resort for book lovers, a place where
people can escape to be pampered by a butler, librarian, chauffeur, and all the staff needed to run a
high-class resort hotel. But Jane knows even a
high-class resort needs to repair a roof and pay the
staff, so she suggests a Murder and Mayhem Week
so that mystery fans can dress as their favorite literary detective, participate in mystery scavenger
hunts, enjoy the delectable food, and relax and
read.
But before the week even gets underway, a runaway horse on the streets of Storyton Village leads
to death. And, when one of the participants in the
week’s scavenger hunt is murdered, Jane thinks her
mystery week may end in horror.
With each new series, the versatile Adams,
author of the Books by the Bay series and the
Charmed Pie Shoppe mysteries, manages to create
a new world and a cast of charming characters.
Murder in the Mystery Suite brings readers into a
fascinating world of books and secrets, literary
secrets known only to a select few. There’s an entertaining group of merchants who form a book
club, the Cover Girls. And, the members of the
support staff at Storyton Hall are intriguing, with
their own secrets.
What librarian can resist this resort, and Jane
Steward’s respect for books and all the libraries in
Storyton Hall? Jane tells Mr. Sinclair, the librarian
there, “You’re a librarian. To me, that makes you a
bigger hero than Saint George, Sir William Wallace, and all the Knights of the Round Table put
together.” There may be Murder in the Mystery
Suite, but Ellery Adams and Jane Steward manage
to welcome readers into their world. It’s a world of
books, wonderful characters, and secrets.
Poisoned Prose by Ellery Adams (Berkeley, 2013).
Books by the Bay Mystery #5, paperback original.
Most mystery series have a book or two that
aren’t up to par. Ellery Adams has never yet hit
that point with her Books by the Bay series. The
latest, Poisoned Prose, hits the mark in every respect, from the story, the characters and setting,
the careful words, to the final sentence. Even the
cover art by Kimberly Schamber is wonderful, just
perfect for this book.
When Olivia Limoges’ friend, bookstore owner
Flynn McNulty, asks for financial help to sponsor a
storytellers’ retreat, it only takes one evening listening to Oyster Bay residents spin stories to make
her say yes. Violetta Deveraux, a nationally recognized storyteller from the Appalachian Mountains,
captures the imagination of every listener when
she appears at the library. Olivia is particularly
struck by the power of Violetta’s words, and is fortunate to have a chance for a private conversation
with the reclusive woman. In fact, she’s very lucky,
because Violetta never shows up to accompany
Olivia to an interview. Instead, the storyteller’s
assistant finds her dead in the library.
Violetta had warned Olivia that she didn’t expect
to leave Oyster Bay alive, saying she had a treasure,
and she left clues in her stories. Olivia, Police
Chief Sawyer Rawlings, and the other members of
the Bayside Book Writers group piece together
news clippings, gossip, and stories to find a killer
who might be spinning a lie or two to cover the
truth.
The best village mysteries bring characters and a
setting to life, and invite readers back, despite the
occasional murder. Louise Penny does it with Armand Gamache and Three Pines. Ellery Adams
does it as well with Oyster Bay, North Carolina,
and Olivia Limoges and her friends. I always watch
for the next book in this series to welcome me
back.
Poisoned Prose is another outstanding mystery
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by Adams. However, it’s also a book about writers
and storytellers and words. So, I wanted to share a
few beautiful passages about the power of words.
One warning comes from a fisherman who responds when Olivia enthusiastically tells him of
the upcoming appearance by the storytellers.
“Sure, stories can be like a fire on a cold
night. But they can burn too. There ain’t
nothin’ can cut deeper or sting with more
poison than words can. You’d best keep that
in mind, Miss Olivia. Words have power, and
all things of power are dangerous.”
And, a final comment about words and stories in
today’s society, a powerful comment from the storyteller Violetta Deveraux.
“Every tweet, every post, every group of lines
that you type is a story. Human beings connect with other human beings through stories. That’s why you stare at the screen for so
many hours. You are looking for other people’s stories. And you want to share your
own. You want your voice to be heard among
all those other voices.”
I hope you have the chance to hear Ellery Adams’
voice in Poisoned Prose. Ellery Adams’ website is
www.elleryadamsmysteries.com
Well Read, Then Dead by Terrie Farley Moran
(Berkley Prime Crime, August 2014). Read ’Em
and Eat Mystery #1, paperback original.
Terrie Farley Moran strikes just the right note
with her debut mystery, Well Read, Then Dead.
Set in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, the author
evokes all the history, beauty and charm of southwest Florida with her knowledge of the area, her
research, and her use of local color. The tourist
area with its secrets and past comes alive on her
pages.
When best friends Sassy Cabot and Bridget
“Bridgy” Mayfield left Connecticut behind, they
moved to Florida, where they combined their
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dreams, opening a bookstore and cafe, Read ’Em
and Eat. The customers can enjoy meals with
book-related names, browse the bookstore, and
participate in a book club or two. The regular book
group members, though, are locals such as
Augusta Maddox, a woman with a large personality and voice, and her shy cousin, Delia Batson.
And all of Miss Augusta’s friends turn to Sassy
when Delia is found dead, murdered in her own
house.
Maybe the new lieutenant with the sheriff ’s department is smart as well as handsome, but Miss
Augusta demands some answers, and wants help
from Sassy. Where’s Miss Delia’s missing locket?
Where’s her missing cat? And, did someone kill
Delia because they thought there was treasure near
the island she owned in the Ten Thousand Islands?
A few too many people think Sassy is snooping,
and it isn’t long before she’s warned to mind her
own business, or else.
When an author chooses to set a book in an
actual location, a reader should feel as if they are
actually there. It’s one thing if the setting is imaginary. But, I took issue before when an author’s
mystery felt as if it could have been set in any island community. Terrie Farley Moran doesn’t
make that mistake. She capitalizes on the rich history of southwest Florida, stories of islands, treasures, pristine locations. She celebrates the local
characters, long-time residents with names that
resonate in the area, names such as Smallwood. All
of the local color creates a vivid backdrop for this
debut mystery.
There are a few weaknesses. At times, Bridgy
comes across as pushy, and seems an unlikely best
friend. Sassy has a few of the flaws I dislike. She
doesn’t always tell the police what she knows, and
she makes one of those “too stupid to live” mistakes, and even realizes it at the time. And I felt as
if the motive for murder was obvious. But, some of
the characters are quirky and interesting; Bridgy’s
Aunt Ophie who shows up to help in a pinch, Miss
Augusta, Skully, the reporter Cady. And of course,
Bibliomysteries
it’s always fun to read a mystery set in the world of
books, with the discussion of titles.
Terrie Farley Moran’s first mystery novel, Well
Read, Then Dead, is entertaining. The rich background sets the scene for this debut, and beckons
readers to enter a world with all kinds of possibilities for crime. What better location than a setting
already rich with stories of treasures, piracy and
murder, and, now, a location for tourists, treasureseekers, and fortune hunters? Welcome to southwest Florida and Read ’Em and Eat.
Terrie Farley Moran’s website is
www.terriefarleymoran.com
Read It and Weep by Jenn McKinlay (Berkley,
2013). Library Lover’s Mystery #4, paperback
original.
In Jenn McKinlay’s latest Library Lover’s
Mystery, Read It and Weep, she incorporates some
of my passions: libraries, theater, and an intriguing
mystery. And, since it’s a Jenn McKinlay book,
there are traces of romance. With a strong cast of
characters added, it’s no wonder this series has
landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The
latest mystery deserves to be right there as well.
The town of Briar Creek, Connecticut is all
abuzz. Violet LaRue, one of the residents, is also a
former Broadway star who is directing her first
play for the community theater. Library Director
Lindsey Norris isn’t getting much work from her
staff, as everyone—from the pages to Ms. Cole, the
dour woman who heads the circulation department—is trying out for parts in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. And, when handsome British actor
Robbie Vine shows up to play Puck, most of the
women in town are even more eager for roles in
the play.
But, with the kind of luck associated with the
play, maybe the town should be doing Macbeth.
Robbie brings baggage, an angry wife he has never
bothered to divorce, and a girlfriend he dumped.
And, it seems Violet has attracted some unwanted
attention. A sleazy theater critic is in town, hired
Crossword Solution
by Violet’s powerful ex, a multimedia mogul. He’s
there to review the play. When Robbie shows an
interest in Lindsey, it leads to trouble. She’s no
longer dating Captain Mike Sullivan, but he’s
building sets for the show. Lindsey only wants to
forget about “the angry wife, the smashed work,
the skulking critic and the frown on Sully’s face.”
But, it’s not easy to forget all the trouble when a
cast member is attacked, and later an actor is poisoned. Lindsey has to use her reference skills as a
librarian to dig up the truth. Who wants to shut
down the theater, and is desperate enough to resort to violence?
Jenn McKinlay uses her knowledge as a librarian, and her skills as a writer to bring life to the
Briar Creek community. The Library Lover’s
mystery series has a solid cast of supporting characters, both library staff and townspeople who
back up library director Lindsey Norris. Lindsey
has fun, supportive friends, matchmakers who
continue to bring up Lindsey’s personal life in
every book discussion at the library. And, in each
book, McKinlay offers just another glimpse at
Sully. Lindsey admits,
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Maybe she was a little mad. It was more selfpreservation after the realization that the
man was the original big, strong, silent type
which was lovely in the sense that he didn’t
talk her ears off, but it was annoying that she
had no idea what was going on inside of him
because he didn’t tell her.
McKinlay’s characters are multi-dimensional and
continue to surprise readers, and Lindsey.
And I promise there are surprises in Jenn
McKinlay’s Read It and Weep. She brings together
the best elements of a small town mystery in this
latest enjoyable entry in the series. Best of all, there
are hints and promises of more surprises when
Lindsey Norris, Sully, and the residents of Briar
Creek return in the next Library Lover’s Mystery.
So, read it and rejoice that there are more stories to
come.
Jenn McKinlay’s website is
www.jennmckinlay.com.
The Sayers Swindle by Victoria Abbott.
Victoria Abbott follows up the success of the
caper The Christie Curse with another fun romp
involving classic mystery novels. This time, Dorothy L. Sayers is in the spotlight as Jordan Bingham
tries to track down a missing collection in The
Sayers Swindle. “The crowd of uncles, friends,
colleagues, crooks, and cops” is fitting for the best
caper mysteries.
At twenty-six, Jordan Bingham is the first person in the history of her family to go straight.
While she tries to save money to go back to school
for her PhD, Jordan works for “noted book collector and grouch, Vera Van Alst.” This time, Vera has
Jordan tracking down a missing collection of first
editions by Sayers, books that were sold by a book
dealer who failed to check their provenance. And
now, after an accident, Karen Smith, owner of
Cozy Corpses mystery bookstore, has problems
with her memory. Jordan has her hands full as she
tries to press Karen for answers, but they finally
track down the buyer of the books. Randolph Ad64
ams, the customer, is an elderly man, who may be
trapped in his own nightmare with two strange
people watching over every move. Now Jordan is
worried that Randolph might be abused. When
Randolph and his family disappear, and a body is
found nearby, Jordan fears she’ll be out in the
street with no job and no roof over her head if she
can’t recover the Sayers collection. She can’t return
home to her uncles because her shady Uncle Kevin
is hiding from even shadier characters, with Jordan’s pink childhood bedroom as his refuge.
The Sayers Swindle is filled with black humor
in the midst of tragedy as Jordan searches for missing books and a killer. Adding to the Keystone
Cops atmosphere are Jordan’s uncles and Walter,
Karen’s pug, now adored by the uncles. As cops
disappear and reappear, another dog shows up,
and Jordan eats her way through the story, the
book just becomes funnier. Throw in zucchini, a
little romance, and Jordan’s frantic phone calls to
hospitals as she searches for missing men. Victoria
Abbott has a recipe for fun and mystery. And, over
and over again, as she grows puzzled, Jordan Bingham asks that magic question, “What would Lord
Peter Wimsey do?”
Victoria Abbott’s website is
www.victoria-abbott.com.
The Silence of the Library by Miranda James.
If you’re a mystery fan today, you may have read
teen detective series when you were younger. If so,
Miranda James’ The Silence of the Library will
take you back. James’ latest Cat in the Stacks
mystery is a tribute to all those books, and it’s done
in style.
Librarian Charlie Harris has been a fan of teen
sleuths since his beloved aunt Dottie first introduced him to her collection of Veronica Thane
books. He’s pleased that the Athena Public Library
is planning an exhibit to honor the one hundredth
birthday of Electra Barnes Cartwright, author of
the Veronica Thane series. But, he’s amazed when
the library director, Teresa Farmer calls to say
Bibliomysteries
Cartwright is still alive, and she may consent to be
interviewed for the celebration. However, the library’s announcement that EBC will appear at the
celebration brings all the fanatical collectors to
Athena. Suddenly the celebration of girl sleuths
becomes an outrageous observance of greed, and
then murder.
Charlie and his Maine Coon cat, Diesel, have
been in on a few murder investigations in Athena,
Mississippi, so it’s little surprise that people ask for
his help. Kanesha Berry, Chief Deputy for the
Sheriff ’s department, finds his name by the victim.
She no longer suspects him of murder, but his
knowledge of the collectors, the Cartwright family,
and others involved in the case will prove helpful.
However, it’s Charlie’s reference skills that will uncover the clue that leads to a killer.
If you grew up with girl sleuths or boy detectives, Miranda James’s The Silence of the Library
will bring back fond memories as James not only
tells the story of Charlie and Diesel’s latest case,
but also skillfully weaves in a Veronica Thane
mystery. James will have readers rapidly turning
pages as you relive the days of cliffhanger chapters
and roadster-driving sleuths.
As intriguing as the mystery is, it’s still James’s
characters that bring readers back. Who can resist
Charlie Harris, a kind Southern gentleman, a family man who loves his adult children, his boarders,
and his friends? And, as much as we love Charlie,
it’s even harder to resist Diesel, the Maine Coon
cat who warbles and chirps his way into hearts
while keeping his eye out for killers. Charlie and
Diesel are in fine form in The Silence of the Library as they find their way through the maze of
crazed book collectors.
Books, Cooks, and Crooks by Lucy Arlington.
Sometimes, despite the murders in cozy mysteries, it’s just wonderful to escape to the small towns
in these books. It’s hard to resist Inspiration Valley,
North Carolina in Lucy Arlington’s Novel Idea
mystery series. Who wouldn’t want to live in “A
tiny utopia of art and books and food”? But, as
much as she loves the community, Lila Wilkins
knows sometimes the town is disrupted by crime
as in Books, Cooks, and Crooks.
Lila Wilkins is a literary agent in her late forties,
working at the Novel Idea Literary Agency. The
agency is the major sponsor and host for the town’s
Taste of the Town festival. Lila is excited that
they’re hosting some of their authors, celebrity
chefs and cozy mystery authors. But, she doesn’t
realize how high maintenance those chefs are. “It’s
when the chefs all get together. The mix doesn’t
quite result in an explosion, but sparks do fly.”
But, someone’s explosion leads to murder. Lila,
dating a police officer, trusts the police to find the
killer. But she’s angry, and determined to help the
police. The “killer not only took the life of another
human being… They also affected the festival,
damaged the Arts Center, and cast a shadow of evil
over Inspiration Valley.” Lila has a valid excuse for
her involvement.
I’ll admit I knew who the killer was quite early
in the book. However, that didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this charming mystery. It’s a pleasure to
read about a mature amateur sleuth who doesn’t
hide information from the police; has realistic relationships with her mother, son, and the man she
loves; and loves her job. There’s also a mystery
about a romantic figure in this book, a mystery
that is solved in a beautiful scene.
And what lover of books can resist a community that celebrates books? Jay, the bookstore
owner says, “In whatever form it takes, the book
will never disappear. Stories are too important to
us. We can’t live without them.” Ellery Adams, who
teams with Sylvia May to write as Lucy Arlington,
has expressed that philosophy about story in other
mysteries. In Books, Cooks, and Crooks, a bookstore owner and a literary agent share that understanding.
Mysteries, books, and food just go hand-inhand. Lucy Arlington’s Books, Cooks, and Crooks
ties those elements together in a charming story.
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Lucy Arlington’s website is
www.lucyarlington.com.
Death at the Door by Carolyn Hart.
In April, when Carolyn Hart was honored as a
Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America,
they were honoring one of the best authors of traditional mysteries. Her latest Death on Demand
Bookstore mystery, Death at the Door, is just one
more piece of evidence that she knows how to
write a puzzle to keep readers guessing. In a small,
closed community, there should be a death that
tears at the community. Add in a likely suspect, a
doubting amateur sleuth, a cast of interesting
characters, a dangerous scene, and a resolution
with a surprising killer. There should be a satisfying ending in which justice is served. The sign of a
true Grand Master? She can take the formula for a
traditional mystery, make it original, and surprise
the reader. That’s Carolyn Hart with her latest Annie and Max Darling mystery.
When Paul Martin, a well-respected doctor in
the island community of Broward’s Rock, South
Carolina, is found dead, everyone is shocked that
he killed himself. And just a few days later, his
death is followed by the brutal killing of one of the
wealthiest women on the island. It takes Paul’s
sister to say that the two deaths are connected,
insisting her brother did not commit suicide.
Although Lucy can’t convince Police Chief Billy
Cameron that her brother’s death wasn’t a suicide,
she can convince Annie Darling, owner of Death
on Demand Bookstore. And Annie has allies. Her
husband, Max, owner of Confidential Commissions, will help, along with the Intrepid Trio, made
up of Max’s mother, a mystery author, and a
mystery authority. These five bring a knowledge of
the island community, and a determination to find
a killer. When a reporter’s story leads to arson,
they know they’re on the right track.
What does Carolyn Hart do well? Everything.
She gives us a likely suspect and a surprising killer.
There are twists and turns to the case. There’s a
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group of amateur sleuths who are not “too stupid
to live”. Although the police chief may not believe
them, they continue to turn all their information
and clues over to him. They don’t hide information
from the police. They keep each other informed as
to their whereabouts. And Annie Darling truly
cares about the victims. The victims are never forgotten in the search for a killer. Hart brings a satisfying conclusion to the case, for the reader, and for
the community.
Fans of traditional mysteries will have to appreciate the two cats, Agatha and DorothyL. And, of
course, there’s that wonderful bookstore, Death on
Demand, with the fun picture puzzles and the discussions of contemporary and classic mysteries.
Death at the Door is one more reason why Carolyn Hart is a Grand Master for all of us who love
traditional mysteries.
The Book Stops Here by Kate Carlisle
“Be careful what you wish for.” Brooklyn Wainwright’s mother had warned her, but that didn’t
stop the bookbinder for wishing for more work.
Now her latest job puts her in so much danger that
Brooklyn’s security expert boyfriend has to turn
bodyguard. The Book Stops Here is the latest intriguing mystery in Kate Carlisle’s fascinating Bibliophile mystery series.
Brooklyn Wainwright specializes in rare-book
restoration and conservation. With her passion
and enthusiasm for books, she’s the perfect expert
appraiser for the TV show This Old Attic. Then the
first book she is asked to appraise, a first edition of
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett,
hits the news. Vera Stoddard claimed to have
found the book at a garage sale, and paid three
dollars, so when Brooklyn informs her it’s worth
around twenty-five thousand dollars, it causes a
stir. It’s just not the right kind of attention. Instead,
Brooklyn is accosted by a man on the studio lot, a
violent man who assures her he’ll get that book,
and kill both her and Vera. Brooklyn and a studio
guard are battered enough that Derek Stone,
Bibliomysteries
Brooklyn’s boyfriend, decides to guard her at the
studio.
It’s too bad the studio itself is so unsafe. The
show’s host claims to be the victim of a stalker who
leaves him threatening symbols of dead animals
and dead flowers. Then Brooklyn is almost killed
in the backstage area. She knows she can trust
Derek and her new next door neighbor, but she
doesn’t feel safe on her own. How did one TV
show put her in so much danger? And who would
kill to get that copy of The Secret Garden?
Kate Carlisle’s books contain a wonderful blend
of book knowledge, romance, and terrific characters. It’s always been fun to catch up with Brooklyn, Derek, and Brooklyn’s eccentric family. Now
add Alex Monroe, a high-powered cupcake-baking
woman with a few secrets, to the cast. She’s a welcome addition. Even Brooklyn’s archenemy,
Minka, returns with her usual outrageous behavior.
A bookbinder as a sleuth? The guru for Brooklyn’s family has a theory that she stumbles across
dead bodies because she’s a soul that cares, and
will help find justice for the dead. Time and again,
Brooklyn teams up with Derek to find answers.
He and I were partners. We worked well together especially when it came to deciphering
the puzzle, fleshing out the motives, and getting to the truth of why someone had been
killed. It wasn’t like we were trying to play
detective, but it was a horrible thing to have
one’s life touched by violent crime and even
worse to be considered a suspect by the police.
Brooklyn’s detective skills in working with old
books serves her well when she’s involved in a
murder. And it doesn’t hurt to have a security expert at her side. In fact, that sets this series apart
because Brooklyn may end up in trouble, but it’s
not because she takes needless risks. She just has a
“penchant for finding dead bodies and facing
down their craven killers.”
For book lovers, Brooklyn Wainwright is a hero
who saves books, preserves their history, and faces
down craven killers. If you haven’t yet met Brooklyn and Derek, it’s time, in The Book Stops Here.
Kate Carlisle’s website is www.katecarlisle.com.
A Cold White Sun by Vicki Delany (Poisoned Pen
Press, 2013).
Vicki Delany writes standalones and the lighthearted Klondike mysteries, but my favorites remain the Constable Molly Smith mysteries set in
Delany’s Trafalgar, British Columbia. These mysteries combine the best of traditional village mysteries and police procedurals. If you add in the
fascinating setting and the wonderful characters,
these are books that should be better known than
they are. A Cold White Sun, the sixth in the series,
could be read without having read earlier novels,
but why would you want to do that?
In Trafalgar, it’s March, and school’s just out for
spring break. Cathy Lindsay, a high school English
teacher, takes off for her morning walk with her
dog, but never returns home. Instead, she’s found
lying in her own blood on the walking trail, the
victim of a shooter. Constable Molly Smith is the
first on the scene, but she’s soon relegated to guard
duty when Detective Sergeant John Winters shows
up. However, the Trafalgar police need help from
the entire department and the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police. Was Cathy Lindsay the intended
target? Or, is it a police department’s worst nightmare, a random shooting? As Trafalgar neighborhoods close down in fear, it’s up to the police to
find a hidden killer.
Trafalgar, BC, may be a small town, but it’s a
tourist town that attracts sports enthusiasts and
visitors. That always makes it more difficult for the
police to solve cases. The killer could be someone
Molly meets daily, or someone new to the community. One of Delany’s strengths is her ability to
connect random people and events, and bring
them together in a successful case. However, a
successful solution for the police doesn’t always
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mean it’s satisfactory. That means it’s realistic.
When Molly complains, Winters wisely answers.
“It’s not up to us to feel good, I’m sorry to say. We
did our jobs.”
It’s not always necessary to start at the beginning of a mystery series. As I said, you could read
A Cold White Sun as a standalone. But, it’s so
much more interesting to watch Constable Molly
Smith struggle with her identity as a police officer
in her hometown, to observe the changes in the
community itself, to get to know the people;
Molly’s family, Winters and his wife, the police
department. Start with In the Shadow of the Glacier. Anyone who likes small town traditional
mysteries combined with police procedurals will
not be sorry.
Vicki Delany’s website is www.vickidelany.com.
The Children’s Hour: Bibliomysteries by Gay Toltl Kinman
In my research I came across the biblioburro, pony
express librarians, and camel libraries—all ways of
bringing books to hinterland folk. A mystery how
they did it, but not a plot mystery, so you won’t see
them below. Also a story based on the life of a real
astronaut who wanted to borrow books from a
library which only lent to whites. And the story of
a girl in Afghanistan, also based on a true story,
who was not allowed as were any girls to go to
school after the Taliban took over in 1996, but her
grandmother showed her a secret library. Stories to
make you weep.
Early Middle Readers
Butler, Dori Hillestad; Aurore Damant, illus. The
Haunted Library (Grosset & Dunlap, 2014).
Kaz, a ghost, meets flesh-and-blood Claire at
the local library, as she lives above it. She can see
ghosts so Kaz is quite visible to her. In this story,
they try to find the “person” who is haunting the
library. To do so, they form a detective agency, but
they find ghosts in a neighbor’s house and in a
theater, so no more mysteries in the library as of
this writing.
Butler, Dori Hillestad; Aurore Damant, illus. The
Case of the Library Monster (Albert Whitman,
2012). The Buddy Files.
Told from the POV of Buddy, the dog, who
solves mysteries. In this story the kids take turns
reading a ghost story to him. He hears and smells
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things. Is it a ghost?
Brown, Marc. Locked in the Library (Little, Brown
Books for Young Readers, 2012).
Arthur, an Aardvark, who is eight and in the 3rd
grade in Elwood City, tells the tale. Francine is
mad at Arthur, but they have to do a project together, so they go to the library for research and
are locked in. In the library lounge they find
snacks, so it’s not too bad a time. They are ‘rescued’ by frantic adults.
Hayashi, Nancy. Cosmic Cousin (Dutton, 1988;
Skylark, 1990).
Eunice reads science fiction books from the
library. In one of them she finds a note recommending other books, signed “Cosmic Cousin.”
She writes a note and signs it “Solar Soulmate.”
They recommend books to each other and eventually meet. The mystery is who “Cosmic Cousin” is.
Levy, Elizabeth; Mordicai Gerstein, illus. Something Queer at the Library (Delacorte, 1977; Yearling 1989).
Gwen and Jill want to learn more about training
dogs, so they check some books out of the library.
Many of the pictures have been cut out. However,
there’s a clue on one page, and that gets them
started. The reader might be able to solve the
mystery before they do. They want to find out who
did it or they might be blamed.
Maifair, Linda Lee; Darcy J. Doyle, illus. The Case
Bibliomysteries
of the Troublesome Treasure (Zondervan, 1996).
Daring Detective series.
D. J. and her best friend follow clues in an old
library book that they think is going to lead them
to a buried treasure. They do find a treasure.
Morgan, Stacey Towle; Pamela Querin, illus. The
Belgium Book Mystery (Bethany House, 1996).
Ruby Slippers School series.
Hope and Annie, who are homeschooled, travel
with their family to Belgium. There they become
involved in finding out who is sabotaging the
printing press of their family’s friends. The author
has homeschooled her four children.
Murphy, Elspeth Campbell; Joe Nordstrom, illus.
The Mystery of the Book Fair (Bethany House,
1999). Three Cousins Detective Club.
Murphy is another prolific writer for children.
Cousins Sarah-Jane Cooper, Timothy, and Titus
wonder why several other people want the same
books they have just found at the Fairfield County
Library book fair. Is there something special about
the books? Will the trio find out what it is?
Roy, Ron; John Steven Gurney, illus. The Absent
Author (Random House Books for Young Readers,
1997). A-Z Mysteries.
Deak invites his favorite author, Wallis Wallace,
who writes mysteries, to Greenlawn. Wallace says
he’ll be there unless he’s kidnapped. He doesn’t
show up. Was he kidnapped? Josh and Ruth Rose
join the hunt.
Thompson, Colin. How To Live Forever (Knopf
Books for Young Readers, 1995).
After the library closes, the shelves come to life
with the books as townhouses. Peter’s home is a
cookbook and he’s looking for How to Live Forever.
He finds it but is persuaded not to read it. Some
adult puns such as The Guns of Macaroni, and
Kind Hearts and Cadillacs. The series continues
with The Second Forever.
Middle Readers
Avi (pseud. of Edward Irving Wortis); Derek
James, illus. Who Stole the Wizard of Oz? (Knopf
Books for Young Readers, 1981; Perfection, 1990).
Becky is accused of stealing a rare edition of the
Oz book which is now missing from the library.
She and her twin brother do a little sleuthing, find
clues in other books, and are able to find the person who really stole the book.
Grabenstein, Chris. Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s
Library (Yearling, 2014).
A rich man, Luigi Lemoncello, returns to his
home town and builds a state-of-the-art library.
Twelve 7th graders will be the first to stay overnight before the opening. Kyle Keelely wins one of
the spots. But the puzzler is that they must find the
secret exit to get our of the building and win the
prize. Lots of literary, word, and Dewey Decimal
references.
Gray, Genevieve. Break-In (EMC Corp, 1973). Her
Girl Stuff.
There are several books in the series. Gray is a
prolific children’s author in both fiction and nonfiction. In this story the heroines discover who
trashed the school library.
Gutman, Dan. Nightmare at the Book Fair (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2011).
Trip Dinkleman, 5th grade, hates to read, and
only wants to play lacrosse. He’s knocked out by
books that fall on him when the President of the
PTA asks him for help to set up for the book fair.
What follows is delightful. In each chapter he becomes a character in a different genre—meets an
alien, talks to animals, is in a haunted house. Written by an author who hated to read as a kid—but
grew up. Graphic description of violence is a criticism for this age group.
Hildick, Edmund. The Case of the Absent Author
(1975); The Case of the Secret Scribbler (Macmillan, 1978). W. A McGurk Mysteries.
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The McGurk Detective Agency is hired by the
literary agent of William LeGrand, who is missing.
At first the team thinks he has staged his disappearance, judging by the clues they find. But a cut
telephone wire and moldy food in the refrigerator
make them rethink this and suspect he has been
kidnapped.
In Scribbler, McGurk and the five members of
his detective agency find a clue in a library book
which indicates a crime is going to be committed
in three days. The crew search for the victim and
the guilty party.
Hildick, Edmund W. The Serial Sneak Thief
(Marshall Cavendish, 1997). Felicity Snell Mysteries.
This is another series by the prolific children’s
author who died in 2001. Felicity and the library
director plan a mystery detective project. The
Mystery Club Watchdog Squad is a library club,
and they become involved in the hunt for the master criminal, “The Chameleon,” who wants to disrupt the fun. And the valuable galley of an important book is recovered. “Witty and teasing,” states a
review.
Hughes, Shirley. Charlie Moon and the Big Bonanza Bustup (Bodley Head, 1982; large print
Macmillan, 1990).
Three children discover a plot to steal a valuable
work of art while they are at a book fair helping
Linda the librarian.
Hussey, Charmain. The Valley of Secrets (Simon
and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2005).
Stephen Lansbury, an orphan, inherits an estate,
Lansbury Hall, from his great-uncle Theodore.
There is unusual greenery all around. He reads his
uncle’s journals of travels on the Amazon River.
Someone is tending the kitchen garden and doing
other things, but Stephen doesn’t see the person or
persons. Did uncle bring back something else from
the Amazon? Much about deforestation, rubber
barons, missionaries, and disease.
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Judd, Frances K. (pseud. of Mildred A. Wirt Benson). The Sacred Feather (Harper Collins, 1985).
Kay Tracey Mysteries.
“A famous teenage sleuth unravels a secret of
ancient Egypt” proclaims the book cover. Think
about a book being stolen from the library. Originally published in 1940. Kay Tracey, 16, lives with
her mother Kathryn and Cousin Bill, a lawyer. Her
two companions, à la Nancy Drew, are twins Betty
and Wilma Worth. As in the Stratemeyer series,
there are reoccurring characters. Kay watches the
fire burn the Brantwood library, and sees two people stealing art. Is it Abou Menzel, the firebug? She
and the twins investigate, and discover a cult that
worships fire.
Keene, Carolyn. The Riddle in the Rare Book
(Aladdin 2012). Nancy Drew Mysteries.
“Nancy mounts an investigation into a criminal
plot full of dark turns & surprising twists,” the
book cover states. Blooms’ Bookstore & Coffeehouse in River Heights is missing some rare books.
In the story we learn that book collectors mark
their books to identify the book for themselves.
For example, a pinpoint on page 4, line 4, is a clue
that helps Nancy Drew. In this story Nancy finds a
clue in the handwriting of a dead woman.
Kinman, Gay Toltl, “The Mystery of the Missing
Miniature Books” and “The Secret of the Strange
Staircase” in Super Sleuth: Five Alison Leigh
Powers Mysteries (Amber Quill Press, 2004).
In the first story, Alison, 9, helps her mother, a
librarian and book conservator, organize a rare
miniature book collection. Some of the books are
disappearing. There are many suspects but Alison
sorts through the clues and zeroes in on the real
thief. The titles of the miniature books are all real
books in the Huntington Library near Los Angeles.
In Staircase, Alison, 11, and her friend, Mitty,
look for a secret room after seeing a book that
shows big houses and where their secret hiding
places are. Alison’s mother is cataloging a collection of rare books for the owner of the house
Bibliomysteries
which is an old mansion. She shows them a
journal she found which dates over a hundred
years ago. With the journal and letters they find in
a trunk, they piece together what happened to the
first owner’s wife, who disappeared.
napped by a gang of nonreading robbers. She escapes and also rescues the Robber Chief. “General
zaniness,” a reviewer reports. The author is a New
Zealander with many books to her credit as well as
many awards.
Krosoczka, Jarrett J. The League of Librarians
(Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2009). Lunch
Lady series.
A graphic novel featuring the Lunch Lady, who
is in reality a crime fighter, but not many know of
her avocation. Hector, Terrence and Dee know and
they want to help. They all notice the librarians are
no longer friendly. The Lunch Lady tries to stop
the league from destroying all video games. A fun
book!
Martin, Ann. Mary Anne and the Library Mystery
(Scholastic, 1997). Babysitters Club.
Always a good read. Set in Stoneybrook, Mary
Anne volunteers at the Readathon. Someone is
setting fire to the books in the library. Who? Protestors who want to ban some of the books—or
people who don’t like the Readathon? Nicky Pike’s
brother Mallory has some matches but he says
they aren’t his. Is someone framing him? The Babysitters Club, Mary and Kirsty, go into action to
find the culprit.
Landon, Lucinda. Meg Mackintosh and the
Mystery in the Locked Library (Secret Passage
Press, 1993). Solve-It-Yourself Mysteries.
A first edition Sherlock Holmes is missing and
Meg has to work fast before the culprit can get out
of the library with it. Questions are asked at the
end of the page to help the reader solve the
mystery. “Clues are hidden in different places.”
Lobdell, Scott; Paulo Henrique, illus. SHHHHHH!
(Papercutz, 2009).
Is this novel set in a library or what! It’s a Hardy
Boys graphic novel featuring Joe and Frank who
are looking after three children in the National
Library of Education in Washington. ATAC
(American Teens Against Crime), their employer,
has given them the assignment as the father of the
children is a diplomat there to sign a treaty. The
library becomes a place of danger when the brothers try to protect the children. It’s a lot of fun—for
the reader.
Mahy, Margaret; Quentin Blake, illus. The Great
Piratical Rumbustification & the Librarian and
the Robbers (Godine, 1986, 2001).
The short story “The Librarian and the Robbers” is combined with a novella in this volume.
Serena Laburnum, a beautiful librarian, is kid-
Sutton, Margaret. The Yellow Phantom (Grosset &
Dunlap 1933; Applewood Books, 2011). Judy Bolton Mysteries.
An oldie but goodie story when we join Judy
Bolton sleuthing. This one involves a mystery
writer and a girl who disappears.
Warner, Gertrude Chandler. Charles Tang, illus.
The Deserted Library Mystery (Albert Whitman
& Co. 1991). Boxcar Children Mysteries.
Another familiar troupe greets us with Grandfather Alden and children Henry, 14, Jessie, 12, Violet 10, and Benny 6. They learn about an old library in Rock Falls, a two-hour bicycle ride away.
It is slated for demolition but they try to clean it up
to save it as a landmark. Someone is undoing their
work.
Woodson, Jacqueline. The Book Chase (Bantam
Books 1994). Ghostwriter series.
The Ghostwriter detective team investigates the
theft of a rare book. In this story, a copy of Frederick Douglass’ autobiography disappears at a family
reunion. The series is about Brooklyn kids who
solve neighborhood crimes and mysteries with the
help of a ghost. The Ghostwriter of the title can
only communicate with the kids by manipulating
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text and letters to form words and sentences,
hence the name. All the books are on based on the
PBS children’s TV series. The stories and the series
are ethnically diverse.
Young Adult
Bellairs, John; Judith Gwyn Brown, illus. The
Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn (Puffin, 1997).
Edward Gorey, illus. The Dark Secret of Weatherend (Puffin, 1999).
Anthony Monday, 13, works for Miss Eells, the
librarian at Hoosac (Minnesota) Public Library. He
discovers clues there that a wealthy man named
Winterborn left a treasure in the library. He hears
his parents arguing about money and decides to
find the treasure. Miss Eells considers the clues to
be a practical joke. But Winterborn’s cruel nephew
is also on the trail, so maybe it’s no joke.
In Weatherend, check out the Gorey illustrations. Anthony Monday, now 14, again teams up
with librarian, Miss Eells, to try to stop a villain—J.
K. Borkman, who reveals in his diary that he plans
to take the earth back to the Ice Age. Maybe he
can, with the help of his fanatical son.
Campbell, Julie, Ginny Gordon and the Lending
Library (1954); Ginny Gordon and the Broadcast
Mystery (Whitman, 1956).
There are several mysteries featuring Ginny
Gordon. In the former, Ginny and her friends investigate a theft from the library. In the latter,
Ginny is doing a book review radio show and a
book disappears. Not just any book—it’s a valuable
Lewis Carroll edition.
Hobbs, Eric. Little Boy Lost (Kindle, 2011). The
Librarian series.
An e-book. Wesley Bates finds he can escape a
bully and other depressing parts of his boring life
by entering doorways in the Astoria Public Library. His friend is Taylor Williams. Together they
must fight a shady group—and they find the way
to do it.
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Nixon, Joan Lowery. The Name of the Game Was
Murder (Laurel Leaf, 1994).
A 15-year-old great niece solves the murder of
her great-uncle Augustus Trevor, who had written
a tell-all book. “Whoever can solve Trevor’s clues
can have his story removed from the book,” so he
proclaims. However, he can’t make good on that
promise because he is murdered.
Oppel, Kenneth. The Dark Endeavor (Simon and
Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2012). Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein series.
Twin brothers Victor and Konrad discover the
Dark Library of secret books of alchemy and ancient remedies. Their father forbids them from
entering the room again. Konrad becomes ill so
Victor goes back into the room to look for the
Elixir of Life. He joins with his cousin Elizabeth
and friend Henry to find the man who can make
the formula to save Konrad. Continues with Such
Wicked Intent.
Pascal, Francine. “R” for Revenge (Bantam, 1997).
Sweet Valley High Super Thriller.
Jessica Wakefield and Heather Mallone, cheerleading co-captains, find the perfect faculty advisor in librarian Nancy Swanson. But Nancy has a
dark past, as the girls learn when they start looking
into why cheerleaders are disappearing.
Skipper, David. Runners (Viking, 1988; Walker
1989).
In England, Jim Taylor, 15, finds a CD in the
sleeve of a record album he borrowed from the
library. But the disc doesn’t contain what the label
says—it contains drug records that the owners
want back—now! Casey was the runner who was
supposed to deliver the information. The CD has
been destroyed and the boys are in danger.
Whitney, Phyllis. Mystery of the Haunted Pool
(Westminster, 1960; John Knox, 1970).
Whitney always delivers a good story. This one
revolves around an old ship’s log that helps solve a
family mystery.
Bibliomysteries
True Crime: Books on Trial by Cathy Pickens
As we’ve explored in this column, lots of mystery
writers are inspired or pricked or prompted into
writing a novel by real crime. But what about real
criminals who are inspired or aided or caught by
books?
Books as Murder Prompts
In an earlier MRJ article on bibliomysteries
(“Biblio-Murder: When Life Imitates Art,” Fall
2005), we visited with Stella Nickell, whose fingerprint in a local library book on poisons helped
convict her in the poisoning death of her husband.
And we looked at another of my favorites: the convoluted 1881 locked-room murder of a family
where the plot was taken directly from the pages of
a German murder novel.
But what of B. F. Courvoisier, the valet who
murdered his employer, Lord William Russell, in
1840? Some suggest it was the first murder
prompted by a novel.
Employed only a month as 72-year-old Lord
Russell’s valet, Courvoisier confessed that he’d
been prompted to murder his boss by reading William Ainsworth’s serialized novel Jack Sheppard,
about a murderous thief. Plenty of people were
concerned that the popularity of “Newgate novels”
(named for Newgate Prison) were encouraging
weaker-minded readers to turn to a falsely glamorized life of crime.
Ainsworth later wrote that Courvoisier’s claim
of inspiration was false, but the story of the book
that prompted a murder stuck. Then as now, controversy spurred sales of the fictionalized crime
tales.
Charles Dickens, as both writer and editor or
serialized novels, was one of those concerned
about the public response to these popular novels.
Oliver Twist, with its tales of Fagan and his band
of thieves, was sometimes lumped with the Newgate novels. Coincidentally, Courvoisier’s hanging
was the first public execution that Dickens attended.
In another country, in yet another “trial of the
century” in yet another century, the link between a
book and a murder was even clearer in the infamous and still unsolved Hall-Mills murders.
In New Jersey, the Episcopalian lothario/church
pastor Edward Wheeler Hall had a married girlfriend as opposite from his daunting wife as imaginable. But among those who are sexually careful,
if not chaste, sometimes a little prompting down
the path is necessary—or at least it can provide an
irresistible excuse to do what was in any event going to happen. In this case, the reverend gave Mrs.
Eleanor Mills a book with a misleadingly religious
title: Simon Called Peter, a semi-autobiographical
story of a priest who has a wartime affair in
France—one of two salacious novels he gave to
Mrs. Mills to read, perhaps to give her ideas?
Probably not any ideas she didn’t already have.
The best-selling book was later publicly attacked for the intersection of its sexual and its religious messages. Secretary Sumner of the Society
for the Suppression of Vice said, “It is the kind of
book that certain men present with a smug expression in the hope that it will open up a field of conversation which is ordinarily forbidden.”
This “aid to seduction” seemed to work admirably for Rev. Hall, at least until a passerby discovered him and Mrs. Mills lying fully clothed, side by
side underneath a crabapple tree, murdered. The
love letters scattered around their bodies proved
only one of many details that made this “the crime
of the century” in 1922 New Jersey.
An inept investigation and a farce of a trial
(complete with The Pig Woman, who was rolled
into the courtroom in a hospital bed to testify and
who regularly changed her story to keep the tabloids in new fodder) resulted in a still-unsolved
case.
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For suspects, public opinion pointed to Mrs.
Hall, a large, domineering woman, and her brothers, who were eventually tried and acquitted.
Could the killer have been the quiet, cuckolded
husband of the class-climbing Mrs. Mills? Or was
it one of the random, outrageous bystanders or
passers-by? The case couldn’t have occurred at a
better time for the fledgling and competitive tabloid press in New York City. Even by today’s standards, when “talking heads” often offer little more
than mere speculation on 24/7 “news”casts, the
press coverage of this case was outrageous.
As Sarah Churchwell points out in her 2014
book, the Hall-Mills case had to influence F. Scott
Fitzgerald as he wrote The Great Gatsby. In one
scene, Nick Carraway even picks up Simon Called
Peter to read it. The Hall-Mills case would’ve been
plastered all over the tabloids and hard to ignore as
the Fitzgeralds settled into New York and he settled into writing his novel. On multiple levels, art
fed life fed art.
Books as Expert Opinions
In some cases, books have supplied “expert”
opinion that led to a crime of a different sort: a
wrongful conviction—its own peculiar crime. A
couple of examples raise the frightening question:
how often do the so-called scientific or medical
opinions of “experts” send an innocent person to
jail—and thereby let the guilty go free?
In the case of Dr. Roy Meadow, his “expertise”
on sudden infant death syndrome, as first published in the medical journal Lancet, made him the
Crown prosecutions’ go-to expert whenever a British baby died unexpectedly in 1996. Thanks to his
persuasive and certain testimony, Sally Clark was
convicted of murdering her two babies.
However, as another expert was able to show,
Meadow’s “expert” testimony was based on a math
error: an error simple in its form but horrendous
in its effect. Meadow multiplied a series of nonindependent variables and testified that having
both of Clark’s two babies die had a “1 chance in
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73 million that it happened by chance.” For his
work on child abuse and sudden-infant death syndrome, he was knighted in 1997. Trouble was, the
doctor’s math error was huge. By multiplying together related rather than independent elements,
he got 1-in-73-million as an answer, when the real
probability was closer to 1-in-8500. Not nearly as
rare and unheard of as he claimed—or as the juries
believed.
Even though later exonerated, Sally Clark never
recovered from the accusations or from her three
years in prison; she died four years after her release.
In another case of misguided expertise, Louise
Robbins, an anthropology professor in North
Carolina, literally wrote the book on footprint evidence. When a foot or shoe impression in the victim’s blood is found at a crime scene and linked to
a peculiar marking or defect in a shoe sole, it helps
build the case against a criminal defendant.
Dr. Robbins claimed, however, to carry the “science” a step further (yes, couldn’t resist the pun):
She didn’t need to link a print at the scene to a
shoe with unique markings. She just needed a
shoe, any shoe, from the defendant’s closet. She
said her research enabled her to link a suspect with
a foot impression, no matter which of his shoes
he’d worn at the scene of the crime! There was no
need to find a characteristic mark that could only
be left by a particular shoe; every step we take
marks itself as uniquely ours, and she could tell by
looking inside our shoes.
Trouble was, no other scientist or footwear impression expert could replicate her research or her
findings in criminal cases. William Bodziak, an
FBI expert, was called by the defense to testify
against Dr. Robbins in a growing number of cases.
FBI experts don’t often testify for criminal defendants; they’re typically on the other side. But as he
saw innocent men convicted in courts across the
country, Bodziak knew her claims of groundbreaking science were dangerous and unfounded.
Eventually, in 1987 (coincidentally, the year she
Bibliomysteries
died of a brain tumor), a 135-member panel, convened by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) to investigate her work, found it had
no basis in science. Easy to see why jurors could be
swayed by what looked like science when the “expert” had written the book, but hard to explain to
the twelve or more men who went to prison based
on her expert testimony.
Books as Murder Manuals
Perhaps one of the most chilling and stilldebated cases where a book prompted a crime was
the Hit Man murder case. In that landmark case,
James Edward Perry used a paperback book published by Paladin Press as an instruction manual
for how to carry out a professional murder-forhire.
The case attracted national attention and had
Constitutional law scholars debating whether a
publisher could be held legally responsible for
what a reader chose to do with the information in
a book. Wasn’t that an illegal restraint on our First
Amendment free speech protections?
As the legal scholars debated, though, a community had to deal with the aftermath. In 1993, a
friend found the bodies of mother Mildred Horn,
nurse Janice Saunders, and disabled 8-year-old
Trevor Horn in a Montgomery County, Maryland
home. Fortunately, the other two Horn children
were not home the night of the murders.
The heartbreak of the scene was compounded
when first the motive and then the plan for the
murders were uncovered.
Mildred’s ex-husband, record producer Lawrence Horn, had once worked for Motown Records
and now lived in Hollywood. It didn’t take investigators long to learn that the motive for the murders was likely the $1.1 million proceeds Trevor
had received in a medical malpractice case for injuries that left him quadriplegic.
Suspicion fell quickly on the father, but he
couldn’t possibly have gotten to Maryland from
California, come into the house, and killed the
three victims that night. It took dogged detective
work to link the father with James Perry, who had
served as the hired assassin. To prepare for his job,
the former two-bit con man from Detroit had used
a book called Hit Man: A Technical Manual for
Independent Contractors.
Reportedly ghost-written by a housewife, not by
a hit man named “Rex Feral,” the book provided a
how-to guide for a contract killer, and Perry followed the steps.
After the murder convictions of the father and
Perry, the victims’ families sued Paladin Press in
civil court. Rod Smolla, a noted defender of First
Amendment free speech rights, agreed to represent the families, but only after he read Hit Man.
Despite his staunch free speech advocacy, he felt
the book shouldn’t be published or protected; it
was too dangerous.
Paladin Press settled the lawsuit on the eve of
the trial and agreed to stop publishing the book.
The case still feeds a heated debate about the reach
of the First Amendment’s protection of free
speech.
As readers, we appreciate the verisimilitude
provided by good crime fiction writers. Sometimes, though, books don’t always stay bound by
their covers, and can become unexpected tools in a
criminal arsenal.
Bibliography
Churchwell, Sarah. Careless People: Murder,
Mayhem, and the Invention of “The Great
Gatsby”.
Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder
(2011).
Kunstler, William. The Minister and the Choir
Singer (1964).
Okonowicz, Ed. True Crime: Maryland (2009)
pgs 79–86.
Pool, Daniel. Dickens’ Fur Coat and Charlotte’s
Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of
England’s Great Victorian Novelists (1997), pg
32–35.
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MRJ Fall 2014
Robbins, Louise. Footprints: Collection, Analysis, and Interpretation (1985).
Schneps, Leila and Coralie Colmez. Math on
Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the
Courtroom (2013), pg 1–21.
Smolla, Rodney A. Deliberate Intent: A Lawyer
Tells the True Tale of Murder by the Book (1999).
Cathy Pickens’ mystery series started with the St.
Martin’s Malice Domestic-award winning Southern
Fried. Cathy is fascinated with how real crime informs
fiction and defines societies. In her other life, she is a
lawyer and business professor at Queens University of
Charlotte and teaches a popular course on developing
the creative process.
Crime Seen: Murder, They Wrote by Kate Derie
Bibliomystery movies, alas, are rather thin, but TV
shows with mystery writer protagonists offer binge
watching galore.
In Murder by the Book (1987), Robert Hays
(Airplane!) plays both Hank, a writer of hardboiled crime fiction, and his fictional protagonist,
Biff. Hank wants to start writing more upscale
books, but it’s Biff who coaches him through a
real-world mystery. A rich socialite (an incredibly
miscast Fred Gwynne) is trying to get away with a
lucrative art fraud, and a pretty girl with big hair is
trying to stymie him. Good enough for days when
you don’t want to think. Netflix & Amazon instant.
This Girl for Hire (1983) starts with a mystery
author who wants our cute female gumshoe to be
the model for his new detective series. Sound familiar? I’m sure the screenwriters (all seven of
them) intended an affectionate homage to old detective movies. Hammy P.I. voiceover? Check.
Zany actress Mom? Check. Loveable elderly confidante? Check. And everyone is chasing a “dingus”
that happens to be a manuscript. Another one to
save for a sick day. Amazon Instant.
The Hallmark Channel produced a series of
eleven “Mystery Woman” TV movies from 2003 to
2007, about a young bookstore owner (Kellie Martin) who falls into the role of amateur sleuth. Unfortunately, while they are still periodically shown
on the cable channel, they are not available on
DVD or streaming video. Meanwhile,
www.cozy-mystery.com/blog/mystery-woman-tele
vision-series.html has a nice review of the series.
At least three TV series over the decades have
76
featured mystery writers who solve crimes. In the
1970s, we got Ellery Queen, based on the 1940s
radio series, which was based on the 1930s books.
The TV version is set immediately after WW II
and is a great nostalgia trip. Episodes include a
couple of features from the books and radio shows:
the dying clue, and the challenge to the reader/
listener/viewer: Ellery (Jim Hutton) speaks directly to the audience and tells us that we now
have all the clues and should know whodunit. All
episodes are available on Netflix disc or Hulu Plus
streaming video.
I can’t even look at the title of Murder She Wrote
(1984–1995) without that maddening theme tune
playing in my head. But the episodes I watched
from the first season were better than I expected.
(I can overlook the total ignorance of crime scene
investigation—except for the critical footprint!—
as viewers’ expectations were lower back in the
day.) Angela Lansbury gave vim and vigor to the
role of Jessica Fletcher, the former teacher who
became a best-selling mystery novelist and
consultant-at-large for police departments across
the country. Despite the accusation of “Cabot Cove
syndrome,” she was nearly always out of town visiting one of her many nieces, nephews, old friends
or writing cronies when she stumbled across the
body of the week. Netflix has all twelve seasons on
streaming video. And if you want even more Jessica Fletcher, you can read her ongoing—forty-two
books and counting—mystery series, co-written by
Donald Bain.
The latest biblioseries gives us the engaging
Bibliomysteries
Nathan Fillion as Castle (ABC, 2009– ), who starts
out shadowing homicide investigator Kate Beckett
(with the NYPD’s blessing) so he can base his newest crime series on her. We know he’s a genuine
best-selling writer because in the first season we
see him playing poker with real-life authors James
Patterson and Michael Connelly. Detective Beckett, played by Stana Katic, at first finds Castle as
annoying as a blowfly, but gradually realizes that
his crazy suggestions are a significant contribution
to her team’s clear-up rate. Inevitably, the two inch
closer and closer together and, well, it’s inevitable.
Fortunately, the two leads have actual chemistry,
and supporting actors contribute to the appeal.
Plots range from wild and wacky to seriously suspenseful. Older shows play frequently on cable,
and Netflix offers the first five seasons on DVD.
Richard Castle’s two mystery series, Nikki Heat
(based on Kate Beckett) and Derrick Storm, currently five books each, are available from your
closest bookstore, library, or e-reading device.
In Short: Mysteries About Books by Marvin Lachman
This column is dedicated to the late Betty Parker,
a collector of bibliomysteries, a knowledgeable
antiquarian bookseller, and a good friend of the
Lachmans.
One of the most unusual titles of any mystery
short story is Anthony Boucher’s “QL 696.C9.” It
begins with the murder of a librarian at one of the
branches of the Los Angeles Public Library. Detective Lieutenant Donald MacDonald is stumped,
but fortunately he can call upon his alcoholic
friend Nick Noble to explain the meaning of the
title and find the killer.
One of the best places to find books is, of
course, a library. Jon L. Breen, master of the parody, was a librarian before becoming a professor of
English. Several of the parodies in his collection
Hair of the Sleuthhound (1982) involve books.
“The Dewey Damsel System” is not only a delicious take-off on the system librarians have long
used, but even a send-up of the private eye story.
The narrator is a librarian who says, as Bogart
playing Sam Spade might have, “When somebody’s
defacing library books, sweetheart, a librarian’s
expected to do something about it.” The story first
appeared in the Wilson Library Bulletin for April
1971, proving that other librarians beside Breen
have senses of humor.
Another crime facing libraries is theft of books,
though when a library book is overdue, it is not
clear if theft was intended. Since something must
be done about that too, a detective must be assigned. Hal Johnson, who is called “Library Fuzz,”
appears in nine short stories in EQMM by James
Holding. Among the more appropriately titled in
the series are “The Bookmark” (January 1974) and
“The Book Clue” (February 1984). In “The Mutilated Scholar” (April 1976), Johnson not only
comes across someone who keeps many books
overdue but also uses a book’s cover to put out her
cigarettes.
Most of William Brittain’s stories are about
Leonard Strang, a high school science teacher,
who’s an amateur detective. However, Brittain also
had a series about people who read mystery fiction, beginning with “The Man Who Read Ellery
Queen” and “The Man Who Read John Dickson
Carr.” Both appeared in the December 1965 issue
of EQMM. Later titles involved men who read,
respectively, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell
Hammett, and Georges Simenon. In May 1978
there was “The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov.”
There was also “The Woman Who Read Rex
Stout,” “The Boy Who Read Agatha Christie,” and
“The Girl Who Read John Creasey.” There was
even, in the May 1966 issue, “The Man Who
Didn’t Read.”
One of Edward D. Hoch’s two dozen series
characters is Nick Velvet, who steals objects that
77
MRJ Fall 2014
do not appear to have any intrinsic value. “The
Theft of the Rusted Bookmark,” about Velvet, was
printed in 1995 as a gift for customers of Otto
Penzler’s bookstore. In January 1998 it was reprinted in EQMM.
Though parodies seldom appear in the few
short story magazines currently being printed,
there still is the occasional pastiche, and one of the
best was a first story by Dale C. Andrews and Kurt
Sercu, “The Book Case,” in EQMM May 2007.
Many of us think of Ellery Queen as perpetually in
his thirties, but it is an elderly Queen in this story
whose solution involves knowledge of the Queen
Canon. Many of the Queen books are discussed,
and there is even an “in joke,” as Ellery speaks his
regrets over the books that were farmed out for
others to write as paperback originals, using the
Queen name, in the 1960s. Ellery says, “I never
should have let Fred and Manny talk me into those
licensing arrangements.”
Writing bibliomysteries is not a dying art, as
demonstrated by Kevin Mims’s intriguing mystery,
“The Gallows-Bird” (EQMM July 2013). The story
starts as the narrator, Andrew Lamont, an unsuccessful author, receives a phone call requesting that
he meet Grant Harrison, “America’s greatest living
novelist.” Harrison wants his latest novel to be
published under Lamont’s name. It’s a fascinating
premise, even if Harrison’s motives don’t always
make sense. What can Lamont lose? He is soon to
find out.
Marty, a young unpublished writer, meets his
idol, Theodore Mannerly, under strange circumstances in “For Dot,” by Brian Cox (AHMM May
2014). Mannerly is stealing his own books from
the public library! Marty invites Mannerly to his
home, where they both write books, while Mannerly begins an affair with Marty’s sister.
I haven’t been able to determine if Elizabeth
Daly ever wrote a crime short story. Probably not.
However, books are important in her sixteen crime
novels, the first of which was published when she
was 62. I hope that elsewhere in this issue of MRJ
someone will discuss her novels.
From the Editor’s Desk by Janet Rudolph
I’m Janet, and I’m a Bibliophile! This should come
as no surprise if you’ve been to my home, read the
Mystery Readers Journal, follow me on Facebook
or Twitter, or know me from some other incarnation. I love books, and I especially love Bibliomysteries: Mysteries about Books and the Book
World. We had an issue on Bibliomysteries in the
past, so if you’re missing essays by and reviews
about your favorite author, they were probably in
the last issue. Still, so much has been published
since that issue that I know you’ll enjoy the essays
and reviews in this issue—and isn’t it about discovering new books?
Thanks to everyone who contributed to make
this such a great issue. A special thanks to Kate
Derie for her terrific editorial skills.
Upcoming themes for Mystery Readers Journal:
2014 (Volume 30) #4: Scandinavian Crimes.
78
2015 (Volume 31) #1 & 2: Murder on the Menu; #3:
Scotland; #4: New York City.
We’re looking for reviews, articles, and “Author!
Author!” essays. Send me an email if you’d like to
contribute: [email protected].
As I write this, I’m gearing up for Bouchercon,
the World Mystery Convention, which will be
held in Long Beach, CA, November 13–16. Talk
about Bibliomysteries! This convention is going to
be fabulous! Over 2000 fans, readers, writers, editors, and publishers. It can be overwhelming, so if
you plan to go, check out the programming at
www.bouchercon2014.com to decide in advance
what you’d like to see. Spend time in the main
Lobby and Bookroom and Bar, too. Great places to
make new friends.
At Bouchercon, I’ll be facilitating the Kick-Off
to B’con: Author Speed Dating, at 8:30 a.m.
Bibliomysteries
Personal
Thursday, November 13. This is a frenzied event in
which authors in pairs circulate to tables of fans
and readers and pitch their books—2.5 minutes
each! I’ll also be facilitating Bouchercon 101 at
11:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 13 (Regency
A). All you need to know about B’con to get the
most out of the convention. On Friday, November
14, I’ll be on the panel “All about the Fans: Super
Fans and How They Got Involved,” 10–11 a.m.
(Regency D), with Al Abramson, Kerry Hammond, Dru Ann Love, and Doris Ann Norris,
moderated by Brad Parks. On Sunday, November
16, I’ll facilitate (not moderate) “Do You Write
What You Know? A Conversation with Jan Burke,
Barry Eisler, Laurie R. King and Elaine Viets.”
Please drop by. And, if that isn’t enough, I’ll be
presenting the Macavity Awards at the opening
ceremonies on Thursday night! That’s our award
for the best! FYI: Day passes will be available for
Bouchercon.
Can’t make it to Bouchercon? Left Coast Crime,
one of my favorite conventions, will be held in
Portland in 2015. I love this convention, and Tim
Hallinan will be one of the guests of honor, along
with Chelsea Cain. Toastmaster: Gar Haywood.
Crimelandia: Left Coast Crime, March 12–15,
2015. Don’t miss it. To find out more, go to
www.leftcoastcrime.org/2015/.
My company TeamBuilding Unlimited
(www.teambuilding-unlimited.com) is in the
throes of our busy season with Charity Challenges:
Bikes for Kids, Rocking Horses, Bears that Care,
Blankets of Hope, Wheelchair Building, Building
Blocks, and so much more. Lots of great events
that will reward teams, as well as the recipients of
these great donations! Murder on the Menu
(www.murderonthemenu.com), my other company, is still going strong. With over thirty years in
the business, our customized interactive mystery
events are unique and fun.
My garden is still in bloom… well, there are
some blooms. Transitioning from roses to camellias, but I’ll probably have a few roses into late December when I begin to prune. The drought has
changed how my garden looks, but I’ve been careful, and not much has died. If you like gardens,
friend me at my profile page on Facebook
(www.facebook.com/janet.rudolph). I post a
flower every day: Behind My Garden Gate.
Animals: We’ve added a new cat to our menagerie. Wellington is a Siamese teenager that we got
from Hopalong Rescue. He’s into everything.
Luckily the other cats don’t seem all that threatened by him. There’s some hissing, but nothing
like Belle au Bois’s initial reaction to Barclay, four
years ago. Bella now tolerates Barclay (the enemy
of my enemy is my friend). The dogs are fine with
the new addition. Photos of animals on Facebook,
too.
The days are getting shorter and the weather is
getting cooler, so light a fire, grab a Bibliomystery,
and start reading! See you at B’con! Be sure and say
hello!
79
Back Issues in Print and PDF
2013 — VOL. 29
No. 1: Environmental Mysteries
No. 2: Chicago Mysteries
No. 3: Murder in Transit
No. 4: Medical Mysteries
2012 — VOL. 28
No. 1: Mysteries Set in France
No. 2: Legal Mysteries I
No. 3: Legal Mysteries II
No. 4: Florida Mysteries
2011 — VOL. 27
No. 1: London Mysteries I
No. 2: London Mysteries II
No. 3: Animal Mysteries
No. 4: Shrinks and Other Mental
Health Professionals in Mysteries
2010 — VOL. 26
No. 1: African Mysteries
No. 2: Paranormal Mysteries
No. 3: Island Mysteries
No. 4: Hobbies, Crafts & Special
Interests
2009 — VOL. 25
No. 1: Crime for the Holidays
No. 2: Los Angeles Mysteries I
No. 3: Los Angeles Mysteries II
No. 4: Sports Mysteries
2008 — VOL. 24
No. 1: History Mysteries II
No. 2: Irish Mysteries
No. 3: San Francisco Mysteries I
No. 4: San Francisco Mysteries II
2007 — VOL. 23
No. 1: The Ethnic Detective, Part I
No. 2: The Ethnic Detective, Part II
No. 3: Scandinavian Mysteries
No. 4: History Mysteries I
2006 — VOL. 22
No. 1: Mysteries Set in Italy (Secondo)
No. 2: Murder in the Far East
No. 3: Academic Mysteries 101
No. 4: Academic Mysteries 202
2005 — VOL. 21
No. 1: Art Mysteries I
No. 2: Art Mysteries II
No. 3: Bibliomysteries
No. 4: Mysteries Set in Italy (Primo)
2004 — VOL. 20
No. 1: Religious Mysteries, Part 1
No. 2: Religious Mysteries, Part 2
No. 3: Gardening Mysteries
No. 4: Murder Down Under
2003 — VOL. 19
No. 1: Southern Exposure Redux
No. 2: Music and Mysteries:
Overture
No. 3: Music and Mysteries: Finale
2002 — VOL. 18
No. 1: Pacific Northwest Mysteries
No. 4: South of the Mason Dixon
Line
2001 — VOL. 17
No. 2: Partners in Crime I
No. 3: Partners in Crime II
2000 — VOL. 16
No. 1: Legal Mysteries
No. 2: Mysteries Set in France
No. 3: The Senior Sleuth
No. 4: Southwestern Mysteries
1999 — VOL. 15
No. 1: Cross-Genre Mysteries
No. 2: Chicago Mysteries
No. 3: The Short Mystery
No. 4: Florida Mysteries
1998 — VOL. 14
No. 1: The Big Apple: New York
Mysteries II
No. 4: Animal Mysteries
1997 — VOL. 13
No. 1: Medical Mysteries
No. 2: Mysterious Wilderness
No. 3: Murder in Transit
No. 4: The Big Apple: New York
Mysteries I
1996 — VOL. 12
No. 2: New Orleans Mysteries
No. 3: Sports Mysteries
No. 4: Academic Mysteries
1995 — VOL. 11
No. 1: Suburban Mysteries
No. 2: San Francisco Mysteries
1994 — VOL. 10
No. 2: Old Crimes
No. 3: Senior Sleuths
No. 4: Partners in Crime
1993 — VOL. 9
No. 1: Sports Mysteries
1992 — VOL. 8
No. 1: Environmental Mysteries
No. 2: Journalistic Mysteries
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