Edgars final

I meant to say, I had a meeting Thursday morning with my editor and publicist (who is the p.'s assistant but the p. herself is off on maternity leave.) We had breakfast in the private dining rooms of Random House, which is rather like eating your friut bowl in the board room. Planning goes ahead for the Martinelli, including a re-issue of the first four, whose disparate covers reflect the artistic whims of two publishers and a certain degree of literary uncertainty.

Thursday night was, as I've already written, the Edgars awards. I read my list of nominees, handed the statue to Don Lee, clapped for Jeff Parker, and went for a beer.

Friday I had to myself, and spent the day cruising up Madison avenue to the new MOMA, where my agent, Linda Allen, is a member and had given me a day pass so I didn't have to stand in line to hand over twenty dollars. I'm not so sure the museum is a huge improvement over the old one, although I've read praise about it. Certainly it's nice to be able to see Monet's lilies from across a room rather than right on top of them and turning a corner, but I'm sorry, I thought the light in that particular gallery made the lily pond look as if someone had been swimming in it and stirring up the mud.

I dropped in on one of my favorite shops, the Dahesh museum that has glorious textile and pottery products for sale, but didn't find anything I couldn't live without, and admired the new little Vaio laptops at the Sony store across the street, but for some reason, New York is not a shopping town for me. Maybe my taste is more Greenwich Village boutiques, and it's hard to schlep down to the village from midtown, but in any case I never do much in the way of retail therapy there.

So, sore-footed after four days of trudging the pavement, I took myself back down to Grand Central, bought my husband some fruit that he loves (called ground cherries, or husk cherries, or the proper Physalis) and my mother some chocolate, retrieved my luggage from the Library, and retreated to Kennedy airport.

The flight was smooth--the seat belt sign never went on once in the six hours--but for some reason the people around me were very restless, and every time I dropped off one of them jostled me back into staring at Nicholas Cage doing something bizarre with the declaration of independence and Ben Franklin's glasses. I made it home without falling asleep at the wheel, at half past eleven, and managed to get an entire six hours of sleep, more than I've had in a week. Tonight I will drop into unconsciousness by nine and pick up a few lost hours, but in the meantime I will wade through the week's mail, the 45 emails that accumulated while I was locked away by the Library's sulky machines, and reassure the Abyssinian that I'm not going away for a while, honest.

So daily blogs are over for the time, maybe I'll try again when I'm on the road for Locked Rooms in June/July. I will put a photo of Edgars night into the next mini-newsletter, sometime this next week, so if you aren't on our mailing list, you might like to sign up for it now.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled programs....

And the winners are...

Best critical/biographical went to my friend Leslie Klinger for his brilliant New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.
Best Paperback Original, The Confession by Domenic Stansberry.
Best First Mystery by an American Author (the committee I spent last year chairing and reading for) was Don Lee's Country of Origin.
And the Best Novel Edgar for the year 2004 went to California Girl, by T. Jefferson Parker.

There are, of course, lots of other winners in categories such as Young Adult and Television Series, which I recommend you look up on the Mystery Writers of America web site.

The Mystery Guild's Jane Dentinger did a superb job of making the event move along briskly (we were actually finished before ten o'clock, which has never happened in my eleven years of attendance) but keep us entertained (I won't say ditto to that, but certain events quiver in my memory, such as the year we watched a 45 minute movie about the history of Caroline Keene, or the atrocious amateur skits, or...)

But I digress. The Edgar awards ceremony for 2005 was a flat-out success. When I first got there, I collected my badge and went to the nominees' reception room, and managed to locate all six of "my" nominees there, nervously clutching their glasses and making sweating conversation with wives or agents. I brought them together, introduced them as the class of 2004, and let them talk. I've been there, you see; I remember all too clearly moving through a horrid crowd of absolute strangers, all of them dressed better than I and knowing what they were doing, certain that it was all a fluke and they would rise up and throw me out in public disgrace any moment.

There wasn't much I could do to put them out of their misery, like tell them who had won so the others could just go home, but I could try to reassure them that in truth, the nomination itself was the prize. And truly, although the Edgar award is a terrific honor and a great (if peculiar looking) thing to have on your shelf at home, it doesn't really translate into the ultimate success of its winner. Take a look at the MWA list of nominees over the years, if you don't believe me. A sobering experience, to see how many winners have never been heard from again.

But the evening went well, and I got to see a lot of those friends I see, well, once a year at the Edgars--Tom Cook (who beat my own With Child out for the Edgar, and rightly so) and Marcia Muller and Ed Hoch and Steve Hamilton and Margaret Maron and the stunning Laura Lippman and--well, you get the idea. Drinks afterwards with Barbara Peters and Rob Rosenwald (Poisoned Pen books and bookstore) and their author and Best First nominee Charles Benoit (Relative Danger) and wife. Then crawling back to my bed at The Library and managing to sleep until six thirty, wow!

For fear of losing this to the electronic gremlins, I will stop now and say something later about the rest of my day.

And for your recommended reading, the list of Best First nominees was:
Little Girl Lost by Richard Aleas
RElative Danger by Charles Benoit
Cloud Atlas by Lian Callanan
Tonight I Said Goodbye by Michael Koryta
Country of Origin by Don Lee
Bahamarama by Bob Morris

Enjoy!

Laurie

A rainy day in New York

Rain was predicted Tuesday, and it was a lovely day. Clearing was predicted Wednesday, and the sky opened. Life as usual.

Wednesday morning I enjoyed the coffee room at the Library Hotel for a leisurely breakfast and perusal of the newspapers--although the tables there are really not big enough for the New York Times, they suit the lesser stature of USA Today just fine. Then I actually got an hour of work done on the new book, 2006's Martinelli tale, which should make my editor happy, I must remember to tell her that when I see her for breakfast this morning (It's now about 5:45, I sleep so well in NY.)

Wednesday is the traditional day for the Edgars week seminar, an all day series of talks on a number of writing topics from When Do I Give Up My Day Job? to What the Critics Want. There's not a whole lot of surprises there for someone like me, who has been in this odd business for, Lord, thirteen years? now, but I like to listen to friends talking on their given topic, and I always learn something.

Best of all, however, I had lunch with SJ Rozan, whom I love as much as I admire, and now share an editor and publishing house as well. She too virtuously worked during the morning, and while we had lunch we caught up on the other's life, the state of the publishing world, and even brainstormed on a new book neither of us will have the nerve to suggest to our editor, but would knock Dan Brown's book off the chart if we but had the time. As the song says, "The door's not shut on my genuis but, I just don't have the time..."

Later on, SJ interviewed the reigning queen of mysteries, Marcia Muller, who wins the Grand Master award this year. Marcia was one of the three women who started the current movement towards women detectives during the 1980s, with Edwin of the Iron Shoes. (Who were the other two? A prize if you guessed Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton.)

I walked back to the hotel with Katherine Neville and her neuroscientist husband, had an hour to fight with my nonexistant email, and then changed for the evening outing at the terribly posh New York Yacht Club. Half an hour before the thing started, while we were all in our hotel rooms getting dressed, we had a powerful thunderstorm and the streets were suddenly drenched, but fortunately the worst of it was over before I, at any rate, had to set out. Events like this are notable not for the food or drink but for the chance of seeing people you don't see elsewhere, even at the Edgar pre-dinner cocktail party tonight, because there's such a crowd at that. I had nice talks with good friends HRF Keating and his wife Sheila Mitchell, Michael Connelly and Harlan Coben (anybody catch Harlan on the CBS morning show yesterday?), and a lot of others (the morning's fresh coffee hasn't been set out yet in the 24 hour room here, and I'm waiting for it, can't you tell?)

Today is another full day, from breakfast with Random House (the whole house, it's a busy time) and filming some kind of Internet thing I'll tell you about later, and of course, the Edgars themselves tonight. I was the chair of the Best First committee, so I get to present that award, which is always great fun.

Thanks for listening to the muttering lady, I hope your day will be less hectic than mine.

Laurie

from the Right-hand coast

Greetings, fellow earthlings! I was wondering for a while if I existed still, because nothing happened when I tried to log onto my server's web site to fetch email, and a plaintive request to look at the Laurie R King web site gave me similar results, or lack thereof. But Blogger seems to be working, so I shall talk to you, although I may not hear your responses until I get back to my own machine.

I arrived in New York Monday evening, and came to my favorite hotel, the Library, a block from the NY Public Library's lions. Each room has an arrangement of books on a given Dewey decimal system number (remember those? If so, your hair is going grey). I am based on the Philosophy floor, and the collection of books on the shelves in my room is an odd assortment indeed, including the (misplaced) novel by Ian McEwan that I was talking about the other day on this blog, Saturday. (That's the book, not the day I posted.)

Yesterday I had breakfast with my good friends Barbara Peters and her husband Rob Rosenwald, owners of the Poisoned Pen bookstore and press in Scottsdale and Phoenix. It's always good to talk to them because not only do they know all the publishing world gossip, they have thoughtful judgments to make on books and writers. Lovely to have a long and sensible conversation about what I do for a living.

I then made the rounds of bookstores, although since the next hardback won't be out for two months, there wasn't much but paper for me to sign. But it's always good to say hello to my friends at Mysterious Books (Otto Penzler assures me the Basketball collection I mentioned a few weeks ago will be out in the fall) and Murder Ink. Then to the hotel for a futile checking of email, and back into a yellow cab down to Greenwich Village to sign and greet at Partners in Crime. One of the people connected with the store, Maggie Griffin, used to work on my web site and now does my newsletter, and is one of crime's Good People. We had a quick bite and then went down to the docks for the Mystery Writers of America cruise, sitting on the upper deck and keeping our glasses and chairs from flying off into the water while talking books with Maggie and Marcia Talley, who edited Naked Came the Phoenix a few years ago.

Back on dry land (and unexpectedly, New York was dry yesterday, although this morning the predicted rain has arrived) I cabbed it up to 81st in time for the annual party spilling out, down the steps and onto the street in front of the Black Orchid bookstore. As I expected, many friends were there, but since I'd had two brief nights I didn't join a dinner party, just came back to the Library and ate at the superb Italian place downstairs, and went to bed early.

Today MWA is putting on their Edgars seminar, which I will attend in the afternoon. I have a lunch date with SJ Rozan, and hope to meet up with HRF Keating and his wife Sheila Mitchell, then another party at the NY Yacht Club, which is located about as far as you can get from the water on this island.

If this travelogue bores you, let me know on your responses, and I'll curtail such drivel in the future. Hope you're all having fun, and I'll let you know the next stage probably tomorrow.

In da apple

I will be in New York this week for the Edgars, and I will try, really I will, to write a blog-a-day. However, if I go silent the entire week, worry not, it will just mean that there was a technological glitch and I will return when I'm back in front of my Mac.

The Edgars, for those of you who haven't been there, are to the mystery world what the Oscars are to the film industry. Of course, taking into account that we're writers and publishers rather than actors and producers, the resemblance is more in our own minds than any objective eye would find, but we dress up and we have a good time bad-mouthing the banquet food and complaining about the format of the programming, and clap loudly and then go for drinks with friends.

But before that Thursday night gala, we have various parties and seminars, and those are what I will tell you about during the week.

If my laptop is amenable to such fripperies.

When a highbrow turns to crime

I’ve been on an Ian McEwan binge recently, after reading SATURDAY (sorry, it seems I am not permitted to underline or italicize in this program, so you'll just have to let me shout the titles at you. Complain to Google, they run Blogspot....) and loving it so much it added it to my very short list of Read This Again novels.

However, AMSTERDAM was a problem. I’m sorry if you haven’t read it, because the only way to get around spoiling the plot for you is for you to stop reading this blog now, which I don’t suppose you will do. On your head be it.

McEwan’s prose is the sort of texture you want to lick luxuriously off the spoon. If he has a flaw, it is in the coolness of his characters—for example, in AMSTERDAM, the plot hinges on a composer being so utterly, passionately wrapped up in a crucial piece of the symphony he’s working on that he turns his back on a woman in trouble. Except that, for this reader, the passion just wasn’t there. I could SEE why the man would retreat with his notebook, but I couldn’t FEEL it, it was just a series of facts that added up to an action, or rather lack of action. If we had just a trace of the man’s anguish, his actions would make sense. As it is, he impresses one as less passionate than peevish.

But what really troubled me was the ending. The book is called AMSTERDAM because that city is where matters come to a head, and because Amsterdam has (according to the story) the sort of suicide laws that allow for a convenient snuffing-out of the unwanted. His two main characters, the composer and his rival, a newspaper editor, make the independent and simultaneous decision to set up the other man’s suicide, and do so. Both succeed. Both die. The end.

AMSTERDAM is capital-L literary fiction, storytelling at its most highbrow. McEwan won the Booker for the thing, which is the very epitome of Literary. And perhaps I should add, the author is not employing some variation of Magical Realism, wherein characters survive drops from mile-high airplanes or carry on conversations with the dead. No, two law-abiding men who, granted, hate each other and are under a fair amount of personal stress, decide in the space of a day to murder one another, and set their plots (one of them rather elaborate involving, apparently, a couple of actors) into motion.

Now, crime fiction is often condemned for its slavish dependence on form, and indeed, a lot of whodunits are little more than the machinery of plot.

But for God’s sake, our stories are generally at least plausible.

An adventure story (2)

So, as I said in the last post, faced with the choice of security or a very dicey route home through the hills, I chose the latter.

If you’ve read A Grave Talent, you’ll have had a taste of what our storms do to the hills. And in fact, my friend Laura Crum used that very road in her novel Forged, although there it’s a nice day.

After the first mile, the paint crew had given up bothering with the pretense of center lines; after the second, there weren’t even very many guard rails at the drop-offs. The edges on both sides had that stretch-mark look that indicates some time soon large parts of hillside are going to head for the creek at the bottom, so I tried to stick to the center, except that there were an awful lot of landslides coming off the hills to my left. And waterfalls—where normally there is a trickle, and by June barely enough dampness to keep the moss from blowing away, now there were magnificent specimens that in summertime would have tourists standing around with their cameras, oohing and aahing, and the local kids setting up tables to sell soft drinks and T shirts. But this was not July, it was January, and I hadn’t seen another human being in three miles. I went slow, then slower; every time I came around a corner and saw a waterfall pounding and clawing its way out of a fold of hillside, I expected its culvert to have given way and the road to just stop in front of my tires. Lack of road is asking a lot, even for a Land Rover, and it was going to be a neck-breaking test of my driving skills to reverse to a wide spot and turn around, since there weren't any.

The sky grew darker. The occasional watermelon-sized boulder sat in the middle of the road, eyeing my underpinnings. I occasionally managed second gear and reached high speeds of maybe ten miles an hour on the brief straight-aways—I’m not really sure, because I didn’t take my eyes off the road long enough to look at the dashboard. I passed the first sign of human beings more animate than the opening to a driveway, namely, a truck parked (fortunately) off the road, the sign on its door saying “Mobile Mechanic.” The thing looked as if it had been swatted by God’s hand, or been pelted by a Roman catapult: the shaken mechanic must have had to climb out through the passenger door, because that driver's side door would never work again. In addition, its bed was scorched and blackened, as if someone had used the vehicle as a fire-pit. I began to hear the sound of banjos gently playing the duet from “Deliverance”.

I did not see another car for fifteen miles. The rest of the county was far too sensible to drive that road.

But I saw some spectacular waterfalls, of the sort you would never see otherwise, since they are so very seasonal. And although there actually was a tree down, it was still lying across the wires overhead, and I figured that if it hadn’t ripped them out of their sockets yet, it wouldn’t in the five seconds it would take me to slip under.

That tree was the beginning of civilization, marked in part by the presence of wires, but also by 1) a real live road crew, three men standing in their slickers gazing up at the precarious tree, and 2) a bicyclist. Yes, a man on a bicycle, straining uphill through the rain, around the boulders, and under the tree, as if the light racing helmet on his head would offer protection against twelve inches of redwood trunk. God, did I feel a wimp.

Those 15 miles took me the best part of an hour, but in the end, the road was more or less open all the way through, and I was home before absolute darkness fell, having had my nice drive in the country.

Who says adventure is dead?

An Adventure Story (1)

The storms seem to have stopped here for the time being, which means the central California coast is flowering in that brief period between the rain season and the fog season. Those of us on hills can do a survey (cautiously—the poison oak is out) to see if there are any ominous stretch marks in the soil; those living in the valleys below can shovel out the last of the winter’s deposited silt and put away their tools until November.

It being nearly May (our rainy season generally runs through March) perhaps it is now safe to write affectionately about rain without being blamed when it comes back for another round.

Remember when we were kids and it was the weekend and Dad used to suggest that the family go for a drive and we were actually in favor of the idea? Or is that a memory implanted by long-ago television programs? Anyway, I think it used to happen, that people would look upon a drive as an entertainment in and of itself.

My deep confession? I still do.

But before you visualize Laurie puttering off on a gently winding country road with her elbow on the window-frame, maybe I should describe what I mean by a drive.

I own ten year-old Land Rover. Some years ago, we were in England (where the beer is above freezing and the maps are works of art) for a period of six months, and hiring a car would have been absurdly expensive. So I bought a used Land Rover Discovery as an experiment, to see if I liked it. And off we would set, up to Oxford, down to Reading, or off to Dartmoor, and I would hand the appropriate map to whoever was in the passenger seat and say, Find me a road.

My kids know me well. They knew I wasn’t asking for a motorway, or the A road (which here we would call a highway) or even the slightly rougher but still civilised B roads. I was talking about the sort of track the Land Rover was designed for.

Once, my entire family got out and walked instead of driving into a bush-choked tunnel that may or may not have had an end. (THEY said they wanted to take a walk. Hah.) But dammit, it was on the map—a D road, o joy!—and Ordnance Survey Maps do not lie. So down the track I drove, grinning like a dog, and yes that cost me 40 pounds sterling to replace the ripped off antenna, and when I returned the car to the dealer for selling it wasn’t quite as pretty as it had been, but the road was there, and it was a drive to remember.

So last month, I was coming back from the Bay Area and, it being close to five o’clock, I knew that when I came down from the hills, I would be creeping for several miles (You’d think people would drive less, now that gas is nearly three dollars a gallon, but oh, no.) So I turned off the freeway onto the back way through the hills, only to find, eight miles down it, a sign saying it was closed. Had they put the notice up a little closer to the freeway it might actually have done some good, but the road crews were somewhat stretched at that point, as we’d had heavy rain for days and trees were dropping like ninepins.

So I, along with a string of cursing commuters, retraced my steps (or should that be, retraced my tracks?) to the main road's T junction, where all the other drivers turned left to return to the freeway. I, however, sat and thought for a minute.

I knew the road to the right went through, I had driven it seven or eight years before, on a bright summer morning with a car full of chattering family. Now, however, I was about forty minutes from darkness, the rain was still coming down, and the road was not what you would call a county priority. Meaning that if a tree came down, it would sit there until some resident wanting to get home would haul out his chain saw, or until the county finished with the more urgent roads, i.e., all of them. Major problems, rock slides or wash-outs, would just stay there until the county got around to it—not too many private citizens even in the mountains own heavy construction equipment. I really should get back onto the freeway with the others.

But of course, I turned right.

(to be continued)

To choose to listen

The Roman Catholics this week are choosing a pope, to replace the one who traveled the world talking to people.

Perhaps this time they might do well to choose a man who travels the world listening to people.

If there is any meaning at all in the Christian message (and because you are sure to wonder, Does Laurie King see any meaning? and because the answer colors what I have to say here, I will say yes, I find the Christian message at times difficult, but powerful), that meaning and authority must lie in the concept of Jesus of Nazareth as a conduit between humanity and the Divine. Those who pray to Jesus to save them are missing the point, that one can only ask Jesus to listen, and understand, because he too has been here, frightened, in pain, and despairing. This role of divine sympathizer was later largely transferred to Mary's shoulders, but the essential Christianity has the carpenter’s son in that position.

He preached, he scolded, he raged, but by God he listened. Perhaps the world’s most powerful religion might try a holy man this time, who knows how to listen as well.

Therapeutic Fiction

My friend Ayelet Waldman recently started writing a bimonthly column for the e-magazine Salon.com, opening with a chilling description of how her now-defunct blog (still up at Bad Mother) became a means of communicating suicidal thoughts. I have no wish to comment on that here, aside from noting that the very idea of being so open with the world makes my blood run cold. However, the essay, and the Feb 9th blog that spawned it, should be read by everyone who knows, suspects, or is, a potential suicide. That is, basically, everyone.

However, what interests me at the moment is in the latter portion of her column, where she writes:
“As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful. The fictionalized scene I ended up with was often unrecognizable from the actual event that had been its progenitor.
“But in the months I had the blog, I was spewing as fast as my family was experiencing. My initial idea, that the blog would act as a kind of digital notebook, was not panning out. Once the experience was turned into words, I found that it was frozen. The fertile composting that I count on to generate my fiction was no longer happening.”

All writers use their lives as raw material: how else? Some of us change a few more of the details than others, so the characters, the events, the places appear to be cut from the whole cloth of our imagination. When asked if I use family or friends in my writing, I always answer, “No, although I’ve borrowed one friend’s hair for the artist in A Grave Talent and used a friend of my husband’s as a basis for the English professor in To Play the Fool.” All this means is, the process of turning reality into fiction is more deeply buried in my subconscious mind, the composting process (to borrow Ayelet's imagery) thorough enough to leave fewer recognizable chunks.

However, on at least two occasions, I have deliberately and with malice aforethought written a piece of fiction precisely intending to clothe an event in the comforting gauze of unreality. One was a deeply troubling dream of being trapped in a narrow place, which kept me wincing for weeks until it made its way into the pages of (I think) A Darker Place. The other was the brief, horrifying glimpse of a cat about to die on a freeway, a sight that haunted me for months until eventually I gave it to a character and wrote it into a short story. (For an anthology on, of all things, basketball, edited by Otto Penzler as Murder at the Foul Line--it will be published this fall.)

The other day, I was driving that same patch of road, and remembered the image of the truck that had spilled the cat onto the road. I knew it had come from that story, and I drove on, thinking about writing Otto again to find out where the anthology stood.

Two miles later, I realized that it wasn’t a piece of made-up horror in a story spawned by a twisted mind. The thing had actually happened, but because I had changed it, worked it into a design towards an end, the power had gone out of its memory.

And when you finally read that story and it gives you the heebie-jeebies, I’m sure it will make you feel much better to know that I’ve successfully transferred the image from my basket of nightmares to yours.

Sons to Moloch

There are now so many segments on the evening news that I can’t bear to watch, I might as well just stay in the kitchen and see to whatever is on the stove.

The magazines and newspapers are no better: I close Time with half the articles unread, I turn briskly past the Smithsonian article about the display in Washington, DC showing artists’ renderings of dead Americans, I hurry past the picture in the San Francisco Chronicle of 1500 pairs of boots displayed before City Hall.

And beginning this week, every nondescript American car that comes up our driveway will make my heart stop until I see whether or not the person behind the wheel is wearing a uniform.

This week, my son deploys.

Housekeeping

Comments and questions that have accumulated on Post Its around the edge of my Mac until I can’t see the screen any more:

Yes, the launch date of Locked Rooms has been shifted back a week, to the 22nd of June, not the 29th. Sorry, everyone who used ink to write it on their calendar, and sorry too, Meredith, that you can’t make it.

And for those of you who wonder, yes, I read all your comments, even on the older posts, thanks to a magical little option that automatically shoots them into my email bin.

The survey is indeed closed, and the winners have received their copies of The Game. Those of you who took the thing and didn't get a book, you win my thanks instead. Thanks also to those who made comments on the blog itself. I’ll be putting together material for a May update to the site, and will keep your remarks in mind. And because you seem to like them (printing them off, even transferring them onto your Blackberry--making me feel so technological!) I’ll have some great additions to my Recommended Reading list, too.

The Keeping Watch movie for CBS is still alive and twitching feebly, but I won’t hear any more about it until the end of April or so, something to do with the network's planning sessions for next year. I'll let you know if it gets the electric paddles or the shovel.

And someone mentioned Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” a while back, the essay on how necessary it was to have a private space to be oneself. What people tend to forget when quoting that good lady is that she firmly included "and five hundred pounds a year” to her prescription. Remember, this was a time when an entire middle class family could live in comfort on that amount of money. As she puts it, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

I'm sorry, Virginia, this is a luxury few beginning writers have. And anyway, is it true? Wasn't it Jane Austen who scribbled quite happily in the corner of the family rooms? I’ve rarely had that kind of money to fritter on myself, and only in later years have I had the room. And furthermore, why only women? And, only fiction?

Sorry, just rubbed my fur awry.

And finally, for any of you who are re-reading your paperbacks of A Grave Talent, To Play the Fool, With Child, and/or Night Work in preparation for next year’s reappearance of Martinelli et al, could you keep an eye out for typos? I’ve found one or two over the years, but if Bantam decides to re-issue all four, it would be nice to have them clean. Thanks.

Black Armbands

I hope none of you mind awfully, but I have come to the realization that I need to do something different with my life, and “If ‘twere done, best ‘twere done quickly.” Thus I have the duty to announce that following the publication of Locked Rooms in June, I shall be working on the last Mary Russell, where she and her husband return to England just in time to meet a ship from Africa that carries a nasty contagion, sent there from the German colonies as a prelude to the upcoming conflict, that drives its victims insane with terror.

Russell and Holmes die in each others arms, I’m afraid.

Working title is, The Beekeeper’s Apprehension.

Have a good April.