A month at home

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collage of people and places in Wisconsin
Sharon’s 2023 June pix and collage

For the first time in several years, I spent the entire month of June at home. And what do I have to show for it?

My biggest thrill since May is that I learned a short story I wrote was selected for the Sisters in Crime Guppy Chapter anthology, Gone Fishing: Crime Takes a Holiday. I have comments from the editor and I’ll be making changes before the book comes out next February. That alone makes this a great month to be home.

But I also have a bit more than 13,000 words in my novel rewrite. And I spent some time with visiting family and friends.

I also took a few more random drives than I normally do this month because I was itching to get out of the house and see places. There’s something about being on the road that always sparks my imagination.

Compared to last year, when I spent days doing research in the Driftless Region of the Upper Mississippi and visiting museums in Wisconsin and Iowa, all after meeting people and learning things at Cop Camp and Writer’s Police Academy, this June seemed pretty tame.

I still have to master the discipline of working on the road. Award-winning journalist and author, Hank Phillippi Ryan, told me last year that she retreats to her hotel room at conferences so she can maintain her daily writing schedule. No wonder she wins awards!

Still, travel is a way to widen one’s experience in a way that sitting with books or travel shows on TV just can’t do.

I feel the need for a short, research trip. Maybe — if I can get to 50,000 words on my novel revision — I should plan a short jaunt to another spot in the Midwest that I want to write about.

In the meantime, I should put my words toward that effort.

À bientôt!

More mystery

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(Photo courtesy Library of Congress)

Just about all I’ve been doing lately (apart from the two weeks I took off to visit my son’s family down south — where it was already spring) has been to research the history of the mystery. I gave the talk about it last week, and was surprised that my timing was as good as it was. It fit the two-hour time block just great.

I can’t speak to how good the talk was, but several people said they liked it. I know I had fun putting it together.

While I worked on it, and even as I gave the talk, I kept thinking I was covering 100 years of mystery.

But, in fact, I started briefly before Edgar Allan Poe, who introduced us to the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841. But my research convinced me I had to go back much further to set the stage. In fact, one source suggested that without Voltaire, who in 1748 divided people into two categories — those who observe and deduce versus those who intuit conclusions — we wouldn’t have either today’s detectives or mystery stories.

But from 1748, then 1841, and all the way to this year’s Edgar® and Agatha award winners gets us into the 200-year range. No wonder I felt a little rushed.

At any rate, I hope to give a couple more talks about mysteries. I think the first would focus on cozies. Another might just look at women’s contributions to mysteries. There are sooooo many!

Another possibility might include just “locked room” mysteries. Poe is credited with creating them in “The Murder of Marie Roget.” The “locked room” or  “closed room mystery is a puzzle based on a crime in a place with no apparent exit, yet somehow the perpetrator manages to sneak in and out, leaving, if not dead bodies at least mayhem in her or his wake.

A French mystery writer, Gaston Leroux’s most famous book isn’t really a mystery. He gave us The Phantom of the Opera. But in his 1907 book, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Leroux expanded on the notion of the locked-room mystery.

Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, set on an isolated island, is a “remote location” mystery, a variation on a locked-room mystery. She also gave us variations in Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in Mesopotamia, and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.

Gigi Pandian is another devotee of the locked-room mysteries. Her Under Lock and Skeleton Key (2022) is part of her Tempest Raj series of novels.

I might even consider doing a talk about Chicago and the mystery. That could be fun to put together.

À bientôt!

The woman in mystery

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Photo borrowed from NPR

Next month, I’m scheduled to give a talk on the history of the mystery for the Center for Learning in Retirement, part of the offerings at our local community college.

I gave a version of the talk in September 2022 for one of my bookclubs, but that was an hour among friends. This is supposed to be two hours for people I’ve never met.

But while I’ve been working on expanding the talk, I’ve been discovering just how vast is the legacy Agatha Christie left behind. I like to think of her as the young woman who began a lifelong career of writing, as she is in this picture I found in an NPR article about her. (I couldn’t find my way back to the original article, but here’s another about her.)

And here are just a few of the things I plan to include in my talk.

Among contemporary writers who write Christie-style mysteries is Lucy Foley, whose 2020 debut The Guest List. Her was a Book of the Month Club selection when it came out.

Lori Rader-Day, a Chicagoan by way of central Indiana, wrote her only – so far – historical novel when she was reading about Christie and learned that Christie’s country home in southwestern Great Britian was a shelter for children – babies and toddlers, actually – evacuated from London during the war. Lori immediately thought she wanted to read the book about that moment in Christie’s life. But she learned no one had written it. So she decided to do it herself. Her Death at Greenway has since won an Agatha Award.

Because Christie’s family is still in the picture, they have been pretty focused on maintaining their rights to her copyrights and characters.

There is one authorized successor, however, who has their blessing to continue the Hercule Poirot stories. Sophie Hannah, who was a recognized Christie expert and fan, was invited by the family to continue the Poirot stories. I believe she’s up to five now.

It was through Lori that I met Sopie, who was a guest at the Midwest Mystery Conference before COVID. Back then it was called Mystery and Mayhem in Chicago, organized by Lori and book publicist Dana Kaye. Since then, Tracy Clark, another award-winning Chicago writer, has joined the MMC team. (This year’s conference is Nov. 9. Check it out here.)

If you like historical fiction, you might want to look into Marie Benedict’s The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. The novel focuses on the eleven days that Christie disappeared just before Christmas in 1926.

If you’d like to compare the novel to an actual biography, there are several. Lucy Worsley’s Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, is probably the most recent. It’s not the one that inspired Lori Rader-Day, but I enjoyed reading it. I also enjoyed Worsley’s PBS series based on her research.

But, back to work on the talk.

À bientôt!

Short stuff

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(Photo by Jan van der Wolf, pexels.com)

March has blown by, hasn’t it?

But as it winds down, it the perfect time to offer kudos to my friends who are on the lists for short story awards this spring.

At Malice Domestic 36 — which begins with pre-conference activities April 25 and opens officially April 26 — there are five nominees in the Best Short Story category. There are links on the website’s Agatha Awards page if you want to read the short stories. There are also links at malicedomestic.net for general information (include late registration).

The Derringer Awards (could there be a better name for a mystery short story award?) came out on the last day of the month. Check them out on The Short Mystery Fiction Society Blog. The categories there are Flash, Short Story, Long Story and Novelette.

And in my own short news, I submitted a short story to an anthology. Fingers crossed, it gets picked. I’ll let you know.

À bientôt!

Happy New Year!

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(Sharon’s picture)

Today marks the Lunar New Year — the first day of the Year of the Dragon — a year I find personally auspicious. It’s my year, after all.

I was born in the Year of the Dragon — I’m old enough not to go into details — and I always look forward to my own year in the Asian zodiac. You might say, I’m “fired up” about the New Year. (Don’t groan too loudly.)

(Photo by braincontour: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-dragon-statue-during-night-time-6908252/}

This year, especially, since I effectively took January off for an extended visit with family and friends, I really feel like now is the right time to start a new year.

I’m ready to set some goals. Outline some projects. Block out time on my calendar. Start fresh.

Since Feb. 10 is also the feast day of Blessed Alojzije (Aloysius) Stepinac of Croatia (learn about him here), it seems fated that I should talk about some New Year’s traditions from my Croatian side.

Yes, the dragon represents the Asian year. But the pigs with their gold coins represent an old Croatian tradition.

First, though, you should know that in Croatia (a country known for its potent plum brandy), people believed that the way you behaved on New Year’s Day would set the tone for your entire year. Ideally, you should have a neat house and everyone in it should be quiet and well behaved all day. That may have been due to overindulgence in plum brandy the night before, but I can’t say for sure.

The main course, if possible, was pork on New Year’s Day.

They didn’t eat chicken, because chickens move their feet backward as they scratch the soil. Having chicken on your table could bury all the year’s good fortune.

They didn’t eat rabbit because the timid creatures run away, carrying good fortune with them.

They didn’t eat fish because they swim away from you, prosperity slipping away in their wake.

They did eat pork because pigs, when they root around for food, dig forward. As they uncover treasures to munch, they also uncover heaps of good fortune for the new year.

So put some pork on your table tonight and enjoy the fortune of fresh, new year!

À bientôt!