A Winning Partnership: Deborah, Gemma and Duncan

by Sandra Parshall

Leave a comment and you'll be entered in a drawing for an autographed copy of No Mark Upon Her.

When Deborah Crombie was growing up in Texas, she fell in love with the Britain she read about in novels and saw in imported TV shows on PBS. She wasn’t disappointed when she visited the UK for the first time following college graduation. After living in Scotland and England for several years with her first husband, she returned to Texas, but in a real sense she has never left Britain. She began writing about English police detectives Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid and published her first mystery, A Share in Death, in 1993. Since then she has made frequent research trips to Britain a part of her writing life.

Deborah’s series has been nominated for, or has won, every major mystery award. The fourteenth James/Kincaid novel, No Mark Upon Her, has just been published in the U.S. This time out, the pair are dealing with new upheavals in their ever-changing household while Kincaid investigates the death of a young female police officer who had been training for a spot on Britain’s Olympic rowing team. When Kincaid calls on Gemma for help in the case, they discover the answer to the crime lies closer to home and is more deadly than they could have imagined.

Deborah recently chatted with me about the characters who have shared her life for almost twenty years.
 

Q. Some of your books give more space and emphasis to Duncan, and others, like Necessary as Blood, focus on Gemma. Which of them gets the starring role in No Mark Upon Her?

A. I think No Mark Upon Her is definitely more Duncan's book.

Q. Do you alternate the primary focus deliberately, or does it naturally work out that way because of the kind of story you want to tell?

A. It's a combination of the two. The last two books, Where Memories Lie and Necessary as Blood, have given more emphasis to Gemma, both because of the arc of the continuing series story, and because of the plots and subjects of those particular books. But I never intend to permanently emphasize one of my leading characters over the other, and I really enjoyed writing more from Duncan's viewpoint in No Mark.

Q. Your books are as much about Duncan and Gemma’s personal lives as their work. Readers are watching their sons, Kit and Toby, grow up. In Necessary as Blood you introduce another child, a three-year-old orphan named Charlotte who captures the hearts of the whole Kincaid-James family. How does Charlotte figure in the new book, and how will she change the lives of the family members? Is Toby ever jealous because he’s no longer the baby of the family?

A. There are certainly both logistic and emotional issues here. Gemma, Duncan, Kit, and Toby have struggled to find stability as a family, and now, with Charlotte, they've introduced a traumatized child into the mix. Gemma has taken parental leave to help Charlotte adjust to her new home, and it's now Duncan's turn. His case in No Mark Upon Her threatens their carefully made arrangements, and possibly both their jobs. It's hard for the boys, too. Toby is ALWAYS going to want to be the center of attention! Kit, I think, has more empathy with Charlotte, both because of his age and his own history of loss, and because he's more sensitive by nature.

Q. You’ve been writing about Duncan and Gemma for a long time. How have they changed since the first book? Have they ever surprised you with their choices or the direction they’ve taken?

A. Duncan and Gemma have surprised me from day one! I didn't know until I was into the third book that they would have a relationship. I didn't know that Duncan had a son. I certainly had no idea in the beginning of the series that Charlotte would one day come into their lives. I've found, as I've grown into the rhythm of the series, that I'm usually thinking a book or two ahead about the story arcs of the continuing characters, but they don't always do what I want!

Q. What makes these characters so special to you that you can write about them year after year without growing bored (and without boring your readers)?

A. One thing I was very certain of when I wrote the first novel was that I wanted characters who grew and changed and developed, and that's certainly been the case for Duncan and Gemma. (And it was high time they got married, in my opinion. That's what people do, and I think it only makes their lives more complicated and interesting!!!) So there is always a sense of being on a journey with them.

And there are other things that keep me (and I hope readers) from getting bored with the characters. The series doesn't run in real time. Since the first book was published in 1993, only about five years have passed in series time. This requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but it's a decision that I think must be made in series unless it's historical or fantasy/sci fi. Some writers, like Sue Grafton, have chosen to keep their series fixed in time. I took the P.D. James approach. The first Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962. In the most recent, The Private Patient, Dalgliesh is finally contemplating getting married. If the series had run in real time, he'd be doddering off to the nursing home, and what a loss that would be to us readers!

I think that readers understand this device and are willing to go along with the writer if it's done well.

Another thing that keeps ME from getting bored is that I write from multiple viewpoints, and sometimes multiple timelines, so there are always new characters for me to explore. And the stories are very compressed--more like slices of life than a day-to-day narrative. We pop into Duncan and Gemma's lives for a few weeks every few months (their time...).

Q. Your books have beautiful, “literary” titles. How do you go about choosing a book’s name? Do you search for something appropriate each time, or do you have a cache of possible titles you can draw from?

A. Oh, titles are such a struggle! And I can't really get going on a book until I at least have a working title, because the title sets the mood and the tone, and sometimes even the theme of the book. And yes, I always try to find something that relates directly to a particular book. Some titles I've made up from scratch, some are direct quotes, some are slightly... adjusted... quotes. No Mark Upon Her, for instance, is taken from The Tempest, but the actual line is, "No mark upon HIM..." The titles always have multiple meanings or interpretations for me, and I hope they will for readers, too. And I'd be hard pressed to pick a favorite.

Q. Have you considered writing a standalone, as many series writers do? Would you like to write something set in the U.S., or does England have your writer’s heart forever?

A. This takes us back to the multiple viewpoints, I think. Because I introduce new viewpoint characters in every book, and often new settings, every book is to a certain extent a standalone. I always hope they can be read and enjoyed by readers not familiar with the series. I haven't yet found a story that I couldn't tell in the context of the series, but it's always possible that someday I will. I very much doubt, however, that I'll ever write a book that isn't centered in Britain. Britain does "have my writer's heart forever." And what a lovely way of putting it!

Visit Deborah’s website at: http://www.deborahcrombie.com

Leave a comment to enter the drawing for an autographed copy of No Mark Upon Her.

FRACTALS

by Sheila Connolly

A decade or more ago, I read a book from our local public library (which, BTW, had an extensive mystery collection) that I have never forgotten. Oh, I managed to forget both the author's name and the title of the book, but the gist of it struck a chord. I held on to only one word: fractals.

Benoit Mandelbrot 1924-2010

When I mentioned this over dinner one night recently, both my scientist husband and my literature-major daughter immediately said "Mandelbrot." After a little internet digging, it appears likely that the book in question was Benoit B. Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982). Apparently Mandebrot created the term "fractal" in 1975, in an earlier work, and expanded his concept in the 1982 book. According to one source, he meant it to apply to "an object whose Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension is greater than its topological dimension."

Uh-huh. The last math course I took was a summer school class in calculus, at a moldy high school somewhere in San Francisco around 1984, in preparation for applying to an MBA program. I understand about half the terms in that definition, including "is greater than."

So why did the memory of this book stay with me? I'm not sure why I pulled it off the library shelf, much less finished reading it, but I did. The single concept that struck me was the idea of self-similarity. To put it simply, as you zoom in on an image, from far to near, you will see the same pattern over and over, no matter what the scale. A view of a coastline seen from a satellite will have striking similarities to the distribution of sand grains on a beach in the photo, under a microscope.

This is a phenomenon found in a wide range of natural sources: sounds, blood vessels, trees (where the form of a branch is a replica of the whole).

All right, enough tech-speak. I freely admit I have only a shaky grasp on the concept. But what intrigued me was that there are patterns in the universe, many of which we didn't even know existed before the development of digital imaging, and they are internally consistent.

How does that relate to writing? Because for "pattern" you can substitute "style" or "voice." If you are familiar with a particular writer's style, at what level can you identify the writer? By a word, a sentence, a chapter? The whole book, the genre? That writer is unique, and his or her pattern should be too—and yet it fits into a broader universe of fiction writing. Think of contemporary computer programs that can analyze a document and, looking at the frequency of word use or the structure of sentences, can tell you if a manuscript was written by William Shakespeare. Can that be called a "fractal" application?

Or take it to the next step: if you wanted to forge a Shakespeare play, could you reverse the computer program and alter the structure of a play you had written to match his? With enough time and analysis, will we be able to reduce what we now label as "genius" to an algorithm? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Bathing Suits and Swimming Pools

Elizabeth Zelvin

Bathing suits have been on my mind as a blog topic ever since last November, when writer KB Inglee ended a long post on the Guppies e-list about the New England Crime Bake conference, how much she learned, and how the scheduled events were so much fun that, she wrote, “Next year I am not bothering to take my bathing suit.” The reason this leaped out at me is that I learned at my mother’s knee always to take my bathing suit.

Yep, among the pearls of wisdom (“Everything I need to know”) I learned from my mother was that winter or summer, rain or shine, you never know when you might need it to take the perfect unexpected swim. She wasn’t talking about just hotel pools. In my mother’s hierarchy of needs, a lake was better than a pool, a bay was better than a lake, and the ocean trumped everything. As far as I know, she never joined the Polar Bear Club at Coney Island (though she did grow up in Brooklyn), but even at the age of 95 she was still stroking away, her white rubber bathing cap bobbing. She needed a cane to get in and a helping hand to get out by that time, but she wouldn’t have missed her swim for anything.

I remember seeking out the pool when I arrived early at my very first professional conference (on women and alcoholism in the late 1980s, long before I started writing mysteries) and making two friends there, women who were also conference presenters, hours before the opening ceremonies. Conferences can be intense, and even when I’m too wrung out for the exertion of a swim, I can unwind in the Jacuzzi—for which a suit is also necessary in a very public hotel.

My favorite pool in the world is a huge, spring-fed pool at what is now called the Weis Ecology Center in Ringwood, New Jersey. It’s known as the Highlands Pool and is open to the public,

and if you think of pools as bright turquoise and smelling of chlorine, you have a surprise waiting if you ever visit it. Last time I swam there, the big drama of the afternoon for those with the stamina to swim to the other side, where the woods begin,

was a engrossing spectacle of a snake eating a bright green frog: “nature red in tooth and claw,” as the poet says. Cousins have had a house there since the 1950s, and I wouldn’t dream of visiting without a suit before October 1, when the pool is closed for the winter.

A memorable hotel pool is one at which I spent many hours hanging out at the Hôtel Ivoire in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Sixties. (There are gorgeous, palm-fringed beaches on the Ivoirien coast, but the ocean is too treacherous to consider swimming in.) I took my husband back there to visit in 1986, and they’d not only expanded the hotel but added a wraparound pool that allowed swimmers to circle the hotel’s two towers amid the tropical foliage.

At that time, our local Ivoirien friends liked to spend the afternoon at the pool at any of the resort hotels that had sprung up in the interim. Abidjan was considered a vacation destination for the French, who were very much into topless sunbathing. I remember my African friend’s tart comment: “They came and made us put on our clothes; now they come and take their clothes off.”

Côte d’Ivoire, which has suffered two civil wars in the past ten years, is no longer a paradise for tourists. But if I ever happened to get back there, would I make sure to take a bathing suit? You bet I would. You never know.

What to expect when you're having a book

by Sandra Parshall

Having a book is a life-changing event that no one should approach lightly, but it will be an easier and more joyous experience if you know what to expect every step of the way. Here, in condensed form, are a few pointers that I hope will be helpful.


Conception

You are madly, passionately in love with The Idea. It consumes you, heart and soul, mind and body. You want to set up housekeeping with The Idea and share every second of every day with it.

Together the two of you are going to make a baby more beautiful and brilliant than any the world has ever seen.

First Trimester

 It’s real. At the moment it is little more than a blob on the screen, but you feel it growing, blooming, becoming something substantial that will change your life forever.

Yes, you have those queasy mornings when the niggling doubts creep in as you face the day, and those middle of the night, staring at the ceiling moments when a voice in your head whispers: What the heck am I doing? I can’t handle this! I’m going to fail, I’m going to produce a baby so ugly that people will avert their eyes and ask each other how it’s possible that such a hideous creature has been inflicted on the world.

But most of the time you’re still excited, filled with anticipation. You start a list of possible names and dismiss with a weak smile the dreadful monikers suggested by family and friends. Your baby must have a special name, evocative and memorable.

Second Tri-mester

Of course you still love your baby. But now and then you don’t like it. The first kick was fun. Those that have followed, not so much. You don’t enjoy lying awake at night, worrying, while the baby acts up. You despair of finding a way to make it settle down.

And it’s getting bigger and bigger. Huge. Gigantic. Enormous. It’s not supposed to be this big, is it? But what can you do about it now?

The baby has taken over your life. You can’t think of anything else. But this is what you wanted, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?

Third Tri-mester

WILL THIS NEVER END?? You don’t care anymore what the blasted baby looks like. You don’t care whether anyone will love it. You’re not even sure you will love it. Just please, dear God in heaven, let this be over soon.

Post-partum

Oh, the agony, the wrench of separation. Your baby is no longer a part of you. It’s out in the world now, where any idiot is free to take a look and pronounce it the ugliest thing they’ve ever seen. You can glory in the compliments but you can’t shield your baby from the snarky comments and you can’t force indifferent people to pay attention to it. Your baby, like each of us, is alone in the world and will stand or fall on its own merits.

Whether weeping or smiling, you must turn away, point yourself forward... toward the next Idea that’s waiting to seduce you.

****************
My new baby, named Bleeding Through, is due in September.

11:53:18 (MST)

Sharon Wildwind

That’s the exact time last Thursday when I hit the Send button for the final edit of Loved Honor More to wing its electronic way to the publisher.

In case life has gotten away from you and you’d like a refresher, LHM is the fifth and final book in my Vietnam veterans mystery series.

The plot runs something like this:

If the first casualty of war is truth, the last is hope. Soldiers die even on the last day of a war. For Elizabeth Pepperhawk, one of those soldiers is her lover, Darby Baxter, a West Point graduate who loved honor more than life. Reeling from the emotional fallout created by the disastrous US withdrawal from Saigon, three Vietnam veterans are certain of one thing: people are lying about the Vietnamese infant Darby saddled them with. Whose child is it? Whose honor is at stake? Has Vietnam finally invaded Pepper’s North Carolina homestead?

This book was the most fun of the five to write, which is odd, considering that the time frame—the weeks immediately following the fall of Saigon—were some of the toughest I remember. The sense of having lost the war alternated, sometimes momentarily, with a relief that it was finally over, and an all-consuming anger that we had abandoned individuals who had worked with us and for us for the better part of two decades.

At least, unlike Pepper, I wasn’t saddled with personal grief and infant care.

What made this book fun was that all constraints were off. I could do anything that I wanted to my characters because I didn’t have to hold something back for the next book. At one point my husband asked, “Is the ending going to be like Hamlet?” I assured him that enough characters likely would be left standing to tidy up loose ends without intercession by a Norwegian crown prince.

Was it hard to say good-bye to the characters? Not really. I choked up at a couple of lines of dialog towards the end, but otherwise I’m happy to get on with my life without them. They seem to feel the same way about me.

Publication date?

Nothing official yet, but I suspect the fall of this year. November would be nice as it would tie in to Remembrance Day.

And now, onward, upward, and here’s to brand new characters.

--------

Quote for the week:

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

~General William Westmoreland, Time magazine, Apr. 5, 1982

The Legend of Zsa Zsa and the Rise of Undeserved Fame

by Julia Buckley

Today is the 95th birthday of Zsa Zsa Gabor, that once-famous Hungarian-American star and one of Hollywood's notorious elite, who forged a career on her appearance and her careless wealth. Nowadays, with the advent of reality tv and internet sex videos, this phenomenon is not at all shocking. Anyone infamous can also be famous, and their fame can rest on something as tenuous as their appearance. Looking back at the glamorous era of the Gabor sisters, I find those once-conroversial ladies quite tame.

I've always felt a certain loyalty to Zsa Zsa Gabor, mainly because she and my grandparents both emigrated from Hungary, and her accent, aside from the "dahlings" that she sprinkled liberally over her conversation, was reminiscent of the accents of my Hungarian relatives. Zsa Zsa and her sisters Eva and Magda were quite a force in Hollywood for a while. Zsa Zsa has the biggest filmography, and worked steadily; Eva is most famous for being "Mrs. Douglas" in the show Green Acres. Magda didn't act, but was often on TV talk shows, merely introduced as "one of the Gabor sisters." And so the Gabors have been defined as women who were "famous for being famous." (Magda and Eva have both died).

Zsa Zsa parallels Paris Hilton in some ways. Both were famous for no particular reason, and people both love and hate them for their ostentatious wealth, their excesses, their beauty. Both have served time in jail; Zsa Zsa famously slapped a policeman back in 1989. Both women have had very public and plentiful love affairs. Zsa Zsa had a head start, and has racked up nine husbands; she is still married to the ninth, although he is openly unfaithful to her and seems to borrow on her name for his own fame-mongering.

I suppose we can look at these women and say that they are the worst sort of social evil, people playing with their wealth and fame while others starve and die. But, for all her sins, or perhaps because of them, Zsa Zsa is a Hollywood legend, and somehow I want better for her than what happened a few years ago, when she, in a wheelchair, was carted to court because her husband was accusing her only daughter, Francesca, of "elder abuse." Francesca, in turn, was accusing him, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, of abusing her, as well. Poor Zsa Zsa. Even the rich and famous fall, and Paris, too, like all of us, will one day have to address her frail humanity.

Despite the parallels, I see some differences between the two women. Zsa Zsa's legend, for whatever reason, has lasted; I doubt that Paris's will (in fact, it already seems to be declining). Zsa Zsa's was invested with a glamour that Paris' generation, with its coarse language, overt sexuality, and blatant greed, simply cannot achieve. And though Zsa Zsa did not come from a poor background, she did come from a place of revolution; she also lost family members in the Holocaust, which means that she understood pain and suffering, and perhaps that explains why she was so grasping.

In the final assessment, I might be defending Zsa Zsa out of nostalgia, or because I find her current state sad. She was said to be different, more quiet and withdrawn, when her sisters died. Together they were a force, but Zsa Zsa alone had lost her sparkle, and she is now secluded and possibly in the throes of dementia, as well as facing increasing health problems since a hip replacement a couple years ago.

Still, I know that Zsa Zsa spirit is still there; I hope her life at this advanced age isn't as bad as it seems.

Florida as Character

Nancy J. Cohen (Guest Blogger)

Lil Gluckstern is the lucky winner of a copy of Nancy's Died Blonde.


Florida offers the writer a wealth of characters, settings, and issues to incorporate into a story. From killers to kooks, from seaside views to sinkholes, from voting snafus to violence, we’ve got it all.


I’m not an authority on the wide range of authors populating my home state, but I can tell you how living in Florida has influenced my writing. All of my mysteries are set here. Why? Well, obviously it’s easier to write about what you can find in your own back yard. I’ve been a Florida resident for over thirty years. My Bad Hair Day mystery series is set in Palm Haven, a fictional western suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Many of the folks who live here are transplanted northerners. If you hear a Southern drawl, you’ll wonder where that person originated. An accent might be common in Jacksonville, but not in South Florida. Our population is diverse as we’re a nexus for the region, drawing commerce from Latin America and travelers from around the world. This diversity contributes to the many colorful characters in Florida fiction.


Towns
My heroine sleuth, Marla Shore, runs a hair salon in Palm Haven but often chases suspects to other locales. Each section of the state has its own personality, and I like to showcase these distinctive qualities in my stories. So my series is peppered with visits to towns that make for quaint weekend getaways. Mount Dora, located northwest of Orlando. This hilly town boasts a train ride, restaurants and boutiques, a nature trail around a lake where you can spot alligators, art festivals, antiques and more.


In Died Blonde, Marla visits Cassadaga, northeast of Orlando. This spiritualist camp houses certified mediums who are happy to do readings for a fee. Stay overnight at the Cassadaga Hotel and learn what the word “spooky” really means. Or visit Tarpon Springs, home of the Greek sponge fishing industry on Florida’s west coast. Marla goes here to interview a suspect in Body Wave.


Each town in Florida has a unique history and personality, including the Keys and other offshore islands. These details offer a multitude of interesting settings for stories. I love exploring these sites and putting them into my books so readers in other parts of the country can enjoy them, too.


Tabletop Treats
Food specialties are another way to appeal to the reader’s senses. Whenever a character eats at a restaurant, the writer has an opportunity to bring the location to life. In Florida, this may mean conch chowder for a starter course, or perhaps gator fritters. How about grouper or snapper in citrus sauce for the main dish? Key lime pie for dessert in my favorite.


Certain towns may have events highlighting their regional specialties, like the strawberry festival at Plant City and the corn maze at Zellwood. I set a scene in a corn field in Dead Roots where Marla is chased by armed gunmen. She also interviews a tilapia grower in Body Wave. So as you see, food can work its way into plotting elements, too.


Tourist Attractions
Let’s not forget one of our major industries in Florida: tourism. Attractions abound beyond the beaches and theme parks. In Hair Raiser, Marla helps her cousin Cynthia with a fund-raiser for an ocean preservation society. Scenes here were inspired by Bonnet House, a historic estate in Fort Lauderdale by the sea. For Shear Murder, I based my setting on Harry P. Leu Gardens in Winter Park. This lovely botanical garden turned into Orchid Isle in my story. I love visiting Leu Gardens and hope my enthusiasm shows in the descriptions in my story.


Topography
We may not have mountains in Florida, but we have hilly terrain, beaches, the Everglades, strings of islands, forests, rivers, lakes, and more. Each region has its uniqueness and gives a story its distinctive flavor. As for weather, we can have cloudless blue skies, torrential downpours, and dangerous hurricanes. The varied ecology, insects, humidity, and heat are common elements recognized by anyone who’s made a trip here. They’re typical of background settings in Florida stories.


Mentioning the semi-tropical foliage is always a pleasure for me. Flowering red hibiscus, sweet-smelling jasmine, orange trees, hot pink bougainvillea, banana plants, and coconut palms are just some of the native plants in South Florida. Other areas of the state have their own types of vegetation. When you put these details into your settings, it helps bring the scene alive for the reader.


Topics
All we have to do in this state is look in the newspaper for inspiration. I’ve used news stories many times as a resource. So many interesting people and issues cannot help but appeal to the storyteller. In my books, I’ve dealt with illegal migrant labor, false psychics, citrus canker, melanoma detection, pet fur products, exotic bird smuggling, and more. These topics provide for fascinating research, plus I learn something new along the way.


Under these diverse conditions, the well of inspiration can be refilled daily here. Weird events transpire with wacky people, and where sizzling temperatures cause passions to ignite. What better place is there in which to set a mystery?


Leave a comment for Nancy and you’ll be entered to win a signed copy of Died Blonde. The winner will be posted on Monday morning. If it’s you, email liz(at)elizabethzelvin.com with contact info so we can tell Nancy where to send the book.


Nancy J. Cohen’s popular Bad Hair Day series features hairdresser Marla Shore. Several titles in this series have made the IMBA bestseller list, while Nancy’s sci-fi romances have garnered rave reviews. Her latest book, and tenth in her mystery series, is Shear Murder from Five Star. Nancy can be found at her website, www.nancyjcohen.com, her blog at www.nancyjcohen.wordpress.com, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

In Highlights to Heaven, Marla travels to

Is it any wonder so many mystery writers gravitate to the Sunshine State?

It's a Mystery!

by Sheila Connolly

My daughter has a friend who loves to prowl yard sales and junk shops for treasures, and then runs out of room and has to pass his finds on to his friends. One of my daughter's earlier "gifts" was a mink pillbox hat (anybody out there need one?). A more recent one was a children's book, The Kitten's Secret, by Margaret Gossett, illustrated by Mary Barton, and dated 1950.

It was a Wonder Book, from those halcyon days when mothers stayed home and kept house, and children were polite and well-mannered and played well together. Uh-huh. I was there, and that's not quite how I remember it, but we're talking about fiction here.

It's a charming little book, in which Pat and Molly (brother and sister) are given a kitten by the grocery man (the what?). It's an orange tabby with white markings, and they name her Butter because she came from the grocery store. I have two cats who look just like Butter (nice that some things don't go out of style).

I started reading the book aloud to my daughter (age 26), with sarcastic intentions, but about halfway through I realized that the book was actually a mystery. All the structure was there, ready to be imprinted upon inquiring young minds in the 1950s.

The plot centers on where the new kitten has decided to sleep. Pat and Molly are the primary sleuths, equal partners in the enterprise. The cat seems to sleep a lot, but then, so do the children (nap-time, you know). Butter is very good at concealing her favorite place, even though the children (for heaven's sake, Molly is running around the house in a dress! That no doubt required ironing!) are assiduous in analyzing the problem and seeking to solve it.

Thus begins the mystery. The youngsters tail the cat (there may be a pun in there, but ignore it). They observe carefully where the cat chooses to nap during the day—in a bowl, in a basket of muddy potatoes under the sink, on a mop—the list goes on. One might almost think the cat is deliberately misleading her pursuers (hmm, a pair of eager pre-school kids chasing you…wouldn't you hide, if you were a kitten?).

Ah, but the kitten leaves clues! Muddy pawprints on the window, a doll's hat on the floor, a lone sock (aha! We have solved yet another classic mystery: the cat took them all!), a single brown bean. And the author quite rightly makes each of these a true clue: some deduction is required to fit them all together and solve the mystery.

Mother (who the illustrator chooses not to show until near the end of the story) serves as a sort of voice from the gods, or maybe a Mycroft Holmes or a Yoda, gently nudging the youthful sleuths in the right direction. She may not know the answer, or she may be withholding it in order to impart some life lesson, letting the children figure things out for themselves. Her advice/mantra? Look for the little yellow hairs.

It's all here: the set-up, the puzzle, the collection of the clues (that takes up the majority of the text), and finally, the grand denouement, when the children make the critical deduction based on all the evidence collected —and find the kitten! Even Mother has an "aha!" moment there.

Perversely, after that the kitten abandons that secret hiding place (which obviously is secret no more), having played her pivotal role in the socio-psychological development of Molly and Pat, and sleeps where she is supposed to. And I hope Pat and Molly stop chasing her around the house and waking her up all the time!

Spoiler alert: the kitten was the mending basket! Which was about the size of a bushel basket, and full (before the kitten). Obviously Mother is falling down on her job.

I apologize that I was unable to find any additional information on the author, Margaret Gossett, other than a couple of other children's books she wrote in the same era. I'd love to know if she wrote any adult fiction.

The All-Important Cover

Elizabeth Zelvin

The cover of my new mystery, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, due out in April, is a collaboration between me and my publisher’s book designer.

When the book was accepted for publication, I was about to set off for Malice Domestic, which is one of the best places for an author of traditional mysteries to hand out bookmarks. Since it would be months until my manuscript reached the cover design stage, I did my own provisional cover and slapped it on a thousand bookmarks. Later, when I found this publisher invited authors to submit a possible image, I sent it along and was pleased when they used it. Not being a professional graphic designer, I never would have thought of using the fonts and colors of the text that they added to my photograph. Appropriately, it gives the impression of an old-fashioned postcard that you might buy at some beach boardwalk.


I’ve been creating images to represent my books and stories since the first time I needed a provisional bookmark. They’ve also come in handy to circulate an anthologized story in standalone chapbook form. I’ve given out hundreds at library conventions (ALA and PLA) and many more at fan conventions where I’ve had a story nominated for an award. When the advent of e-books created an ongoing need for covers supplied by the author, I already had a running head start.


Let’s talk about that severed hand on the cover of Death Will Extend Your Vacation. (You did notice it, I hope.) This is not the hand’s first starring role.

When I needed a cover for my short story, “Death Will Trim Your Tree,” I had a bright idea that sent me to my desktop to google “bloody hand.” You can buy anything on the Internet. I would have been happy with a whole arm, but I chose this severed hand because it looked realistic and the price was right. (The severed end is kind of disgusting, but I omit it from my photos. However, if I ever take to writing horror....)

It also works with my newest story, “Death Will Tank Your Fish.” I couldn’t work it into “Death Will Tie Your Kangaroo Down,” but for that I googled “kangaroo on couch” and found the perfect photo on the website of an animal refuge center in Australia, from which I received emailed permission to use it within an hour or two.

When I first started sending out my work and hobnobbing with published writers, I heard a lot about how important a good cover was to sales of a book and therefore to an author’s career. I also heard about publishers who changed book titles and provided hideous covers over the author’s dead bodies. The most memorable of these was a woman whose publisher threw a Halloween reference into the title—no Halloween in the book—and smacked a grinning orange pumpkin on the front, to the author’s horror when she saw the book in print. I heard a senior editor at the same publisher’s describe their cozy line as books of which “you can put a puppy or kitten on the cover, even if there are no puppies or kittens in the book.”


I was lucky to have my first publisher assign its top art director to my first two books.

David Rotstein (look at the back flap of any hardcover from Minotaur and you’ll probably see his name) had resources I don’t, as I learned when he told me he achieved the effect of a whiskey glass shattered by a bullet not through CGI, but by shooting an actual bullet at the glass and recording the impact with high-speed film. His cover for Death Will Get You Sober was nominated for an Anthony award, though it lost out to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as most award nominees did that year.


Now I have the rights back, I can’t use the original cover if I want to offer the book for e-readers. I don’t have a gun, so can’t shoot myself up a glass—and don’t really want to find out the hard way whether an imitating another image violates copyright. But I could lay a glass on its side with whiskey spilling out of it. Not real whiskey, since I couldn’t make it puddle. But maybe honey....

Manor House Lust

Sandra Parshall
 
No, the title of this blog entry doesn’t refer to Lady Mary’s unfortunate interlude at Downton Abbey with the handsome foreign diplomat. What I lust for is the house where the encounter took place.

Other viewers may devour Downton Abbey for its upstairs/downstairs intrigue. I just want to see the house where the series is filmed. I love every part of the upstairs (the downstairs, not so much), from the extraordinary library to the lavish saloon (below) to the cozy morning room and bedrooms. The real name of the house is Highclere Castle, and it is infinitely larger than the TV program makes it seem. The fictional Earl and Countess have fewer than a dozen servants, and some of those are personal maids, footmen, drivers, and the like, who have little to do with the running of the household. They seem to leave all the cleaning to a couple of young maids. Yet everything always looks gorgeously spic ‘n’ span.

The real house, Highclere, has roughly 60 bedrooms, plus all the general use rooms, such as a state dining room, a men’s smoking room, a morning room, a drawing room, that fabulous library, and so on. It’s kind of a big place. Although the Downton Abbey program frequently shows exterior shots, the story never acknowledges the sheer size of the house. When the Countess of Carnarvon turned Highclere into a hospital for wounded soldiers in 1914, I doubt she had the conflicts over allotment of space that we see in the TV drama. The whole family could have moved into one wing and carried on their lives quite comfortably without ever tripping over a soldier's crutch.

Highclere has a website with an array of pictures and a history of the house and its owners. If you love it as much as I do, you’ll want to peruse http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/.

I have books filled with photos of the chateaux of France and the manor houses and castles and palaces of Great Britain. I love almost all of them, whatever the architectural style or the era in which they were built. My favorite, though, outranking even Highclere, is the Chateau de Thoiry en Yvelines, 40 km west of Paris. 

The chateau, with its 370 acres of land, is remarkable in two ways: the architectural style of the house is Renaissance, with a lavishly decorated exterior on a solid foundation of symmetry and proportion; and 240 acres of the grounds are given over to a wildlife reserve. Many animals, from the big cats to elephants to little red pandas, roam the wildlife park, and visitors can ride 
through to observe them from the safety of vehicles. 

Thoiry’s website is at http://www.thoiry.net/.


Why do I swoon over places like these? I love their elegance and the echoes of history in their rooms. Imagine the labor and talent that went into creating so much beauty, the number of people required to make the wallpaper, the draperies, the carpets and furniture, as well as the ornate stone ornaments and woodwork. Unless I were fabulously wealthy, I wouldn’t care to live in such a house, although I might be happy in one little section with visiting privileges (but no responsibility) for the rest. I watch all British costume dramas eagerly in the hope of seeing a magnificent house. Films of Jane Austen books leave me cranky. Who wants to look at a vicarage? I’m a total snob when it comes to my vicarious house-hunting.

How do you feel about the house that subs as Downton Abbey? Would you like to live in it?