Ladies of Intrigue Conference

Sunday, October 2, 2016 – LADIES OF INTRIGUE CONFERENCE 

The 3rd annual LADIES OF INTRIGUE event will be held on Sunday, October 2, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hotel Huntington Beach, 7667 Center Avenue, Huntington Beach. 

Aspiring crime novelists and mystery lovers alike will enjoy this day-long conference featuring more than 15 women mystery writers. Headlining the outstanding lineup is Carolyn Hart and Robin Burcell.

Carolyn Hart is the winner of the Agatha Award in 2003 and the Malice Award in 2007. She has also received the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Amelia Award from Malice Domestic. Past national president of Sisters in Crime, she was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2014. In her career event finale, she will be interviewed by author Rhys Bowen.

Robin Burcell is the award-winning author of the Kate Gillespie police procedural series and the Sidney Fitzpatrick thriller series. She currently co-writes with international best-selling author Clive Cussler. Their first co-written book debuts in September.

Other popular mystery writers including Kathy Aarons, Lisa Brackmann, Ellen Byron, Kate Carlisle, Donis Casey, Hannah Dennison, Kate Dyer-Seeley, Earlene Fowler, Daryl Wood Gerber, Naomi Hirahara, Linda O. Johnston, Carlene O ‘Neil, Laurie Stevens, and Pamela Samuels Young.

Tickets are $60 before August 15th and $65 after that date. Lunch is included. Free Parking. For registration and additional information visit us at: www.mysteryink.com

Carolyn Hart: Dead, White, and Blue

I'll be posting my Fourth of July Crime Fiction List later today or tomorrow, but in the meantime, I asked award winning mystery author Carolyn Hart to tell us about her new mystery Dead, White, and Blue. It's the perfect read for the holiday!

Hart writes the Death on Demand series set in a mystery bookstore on a South Carolina sea island and the Bailey Ruth Raeburn series featuring a lively redheaded ghost. She is also the author of several WWII novels, including ESCAPE FROM PARIS which is now available from Seventh Street Books. Letter from Home, a WWII novel set on the home front, received the Agatha Award for Best Mystery of 2003. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers. Hart has been nominated 9 times for the Agatha Award for Best Novel and has won 3 times. In 2007 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award at Malice Domestic.

CAROLYN HART:
DEAD, WHITE, AND BLUE

I loved writing Dead, White, and Blue because I tried something different. This is the 23rd book in the Death on Demand series, and I wanted to offer readers a different kind of puzzle. Instead of beginning with murder, we have a disappearance. The brash, sexy second wife of a very rich man walks into the pines as fireworks explode above the country club on the Fourth of July. She doesn’t go home. No one knows where she is or whether she is living or dead.

The husband doesn’t look for her. The only person who cares is a troubled teenage step-daughter who comes to Max Darling and asks him to find Shell Hurst the week after the Fourth.

Max, of course, can’t take a young girl’s money and this is obviously a family affair. He declines to get involved though he is upset when she runs from his office in tears.

Annie Darling insists no one can simply disappear into thin air and not be seen again. .

Max reminds her of Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa.

Annie decides to find out more about what happened the night of the Fourth. Who was Shell Hurst? Who loved her or hated her? Would she leave the island with a word to anyone? Was she the kind of woman to sail away on a rich man’s yacht?

Annie and Max were at the 4th of July country dance where Shell Hurst made a dramatic entrance - and exit. She taunted her husband, blew off a man who was infatuated with her, insisted on dancing with another woman’s husband who obviously wanted to disappear from view.

A waiter from the country club disappears.

Annie and Max follow a twisting tale of deceit, adultery, panic, and despair and ultimately only they can save an appealing teenage golf whiz from a murder charge.

Max’s mother, mystery expert Henny Brawley, and crusty mystery author Emma Clyde aren’t on the island but they follow Annie and Max’s progress and send challenging texts: WTB? (Where’s the body?)

My favorite part of the book was the deception involved in the trenching of two golf course holes by a stolen classic MG found wrecked on a bridge across a lagoon.

I hope readers are intrigued by DEAD, WHITE, AND BLUE and find it a twisty, unusual story as they celebrate the Fourth, picturing Shell Hurst striding triumphantly toward the pines as fireworks explode in the sky.

Read Carolyn Hart's guest post on Escape from Paris HERE.

Carolyn Hart: Escape from Paris

Today I welcome Award Winning author Carolyn Hart.

Hart writes the Death on Demand series set in a mystery bookstore on a South Carolina sea island and the Bailey Ruth Raeburn series featuring a lively redheaded ghost. She is also the author of several WWII novels, including ESCAPE FROM PARIS which is now available from Seventh Street Books. Letter from Home, a WWII novel set on the home front, received the Agatha Award for Best Mystery of 2003. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers. Hart was one of 10 mystery authors featured at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, DC, in 2003 for Letter from Home and again in 2007 for Set Sail for Murder, 7th in the Henrie O series. Hart has been nominated 9 times for the Agatha Award for Best Novel and has won 3 times. In 2007 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award at Malice Domestic. She was the International Guest of Honor at Bloody Words in Toronto in 2008. Hart is a native of Oklahoma City, a journalism graduate of the University of Oklahoma, and a former president of Sisters in Crime. She is also a member of Authors Guild, Mystery Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, and American Crime Writers League.

Today Carolyn Hart guest posts about Escape from Paris. Her original publication of Escape from Paris was cut from 95,000 words to 55,000. Now, this novel has been republished as it was written.

From: Escape from Paris
 
Linda handed her papers to the sergeant. Her hands shook a little but he didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps he was used to shaking hands. 
   He read the passes which permitted her to drive, to purchase 10 gallons of gasoline a week and to visit hospitals in a 75-mile radius of Paris on behalf of the Foyer du Soldat. 
   Linda was ready to explain why it was she and not her sister Eleanor making the visit today, but he didn’t ask. He merely nodded, handed the papers back and said, in his heavily accented French, “You may proceed, Mademoiselle.” 
   The sentry pacing back and forth between the hospital gate posts stood aside for the little car to enter.
   Linda slowly drove around the side of the hospital, trying, if she would admit it, to put off for another few minutes her entry into the hospital. She had not wanted to come. It was Eleanor who visited hospitals daily, taking Red Cross packages to wounded soldiers and airmen. Eleanor kept hoping, of course, that she would find some trace of her husband, Andre, who had been missing since Dunkirk. 
   Today’s visit to Douellens had been set up for a week or more so. When Eleanor was up all night with a tooth ache, Linda volunteered to go in her place. Linda hated sickness – and wounds – and hospitals – and she was dreadfully afraid of the Germans.


Carolyn Hart: 
A Long and Winding Road

Escape from Paris is the story of Linda Rossiter and Eleanor Masson, American sisters who risk their lives in Nazi-Occupied Paris to save British fliers from arrest. The Gestapo sets a trap and on the bleak Christmas Eve of 1940, death is only a step behind.

I was a child during WWII and the war dominated our lives. Family members served in the Army or Navy. We followed the faraway course of the fighting in huge black newspaper headlines. We depended upon newspapers and radio for information. One of my earliest memories was of huge black headlines reporting the invasion of France in 1944. Food and gasoline were rationed. Everything was spoken about for the duration. I was an adult before I realized that for the duration meant for the duration of the war. To a child, for the  duration was yesterday, now, and forever.

The war remained vivid in my memory and, as an adult, I wrote several WWII suspense novels. Brave Hearts is set in the Philippines after it fell to the Japanese and will be reissued in August by Seventh Street Books. Star-crossed lovers flee after the Japanese invasion, refusing to surrender. A Settling of Accounts is newly available from Oconee Spirit Press. Kay Emory returns to London some years after the war but her past as an undercover agent draws her into danger. Letter from Home reflects the summer of 1944 on the home front in a small Oklahoma town..

When I wrote Escape from Paris, the original title was Nineteen Forty as the book gives a sense of a world at war in a series of vignettes. I was unable to find a publisher in the United States. Finally. I agreed to cut the book from 93,000 to 55,000 words to see it to a small house in England. That version was published in 1982 and 1983.

I am thrilled that now the full, unabridged book just as I originally wrote will be easily available to readers, thanks to Seventh Street Books. I hope readers will share the struggles of brave men and women who defied the Gestapo during the bitter winter of 1940. They knew fear, found love, grieved loss. Their lives and deaths remind us that freedom survives only when the free are brave.

In 1940, England awaited invasion and the Nazis devoured Europe. I believe this book will appeal especially to book club readers, highly intelligent women often of a certain age, who will bring their own memories or memories of their parents into play. I hope Escape from Paris will be read by young adults who do not know WWII even as a distant memory.

Our world today once again faces the forces of evil and perhaps we can all take courage from the memory of those who dared to do what was right despite fear, hunger, despair, and heartbreak in the bleak year of 1940..

Crime for the Holidays: Carolyn Hart

Crime for the Holidays: Day III. This article by Carolyn Hart first appeared in the Mystery Readers Journal: Crime for the Holidays (Volume 25:1, Spring 2009). Mystery Readers Journal: Crime for the Holidays is available as hardcopy and as a .pdf download. Table of contents and ordering info.

Carolyn Hart is the author of 42 mysteries with the publication March 31, 2009 of DARE TO DIE, the 19th in her Death on Demand series. MERRY, MERRY GHOST, her 43rd mystery, was published in 2009 and is now available in paperback. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime.

Holidays, Holy Days, and Happy Days by Carolyn Hart

Until I saw Janet’s call for pieces on holiday mysteries, I’ve never paused to realize how many books I’ve written with holiday themes: Deadly Valentine (Valentine’s Day), Yankee Doodle Dead (Fourth of July), Sugarplum Dead (Christmas), Ghost at Work (Halloween), and, coming out in Fall 2009, Merry, Merry Ghost (Christmas).

I have particular memories about each book.

In Deadly Valentine, I created a character whom I first envisioned as a slut. By the end of the manuscript, I realized she was vulnerable and appealing. Her desperate hunger for love reflected the theme of the book: How love or its lack damages lives, including those of cats. Yankee Doodle Dead explored the impact of vengeance against a patriotic backdrop. Family stresses and strains formed the bedrock of Sugarplum Dead. Families gather at Christmas and the emotional trauma is often intense. Old hurts and disappointments and failures haunt the holiday table. The reappearance of Annie Darling’s long lost father brings to the surface all of her anguish at his disappearance form her life when she was small. Ghost at Work, the first in a new series with an impetuous red-headed ghost as the protagonist, seemed a natural to launch during the spooky time of Halloween. Bailey Ruth Raeburn returns to earth to help someone in trouble. Sometimes you see her and sometimes you don’t. Bailey Ruth’s first helpful act is to remove an unwanted body from a back porch to a nearby cemetery, surely sheer Halloween entertainment.

Of all my holiday themed books, the forthcoming Merry, Merry Ghost is my favorite. In the other books, the holidays form a backdrop. In Merry, Merry Ghost, the story is as much about the beauty and grace of Christmas as the family described.

I have a wonderful time picturing the bustle and eagerness of Christmas, the pleasure of shopping for loved ones and friends, the technicolor glories of yard displays, Christmas music from the majestic “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” to the lively and beloved “Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer,” holiday treats from Aunt Bill’s candy to Pfferneuse cookies, the delight of decorating a huge outdoor tree, indoor pine swags and mistletoe clumps, the ring of the Salvation Army kettle, and the ineffable grace of God’s love realized on earth.

Bailey Ruth (the late Bailey Ruth Raeburn) is dispatched from Heaven to her old hometown of Adelaide, OK. She arrives on a frosty evening shortly before Christmas at Pritchard house, the home of one of the town’s first families. On the front porch is a four-year-old boy with a battered suitcase. A woman gives him an envelope and tells him to hand the note to whomever answers the door. The woman rings the bell and disappears into the night. Gathered inside the house are the heirs of Susan Pritchard Flynn. Susan is unaware that she has an orphaned grandson, Keith. When Susan realizes Keith is her dead son’s child, she plans to change her will. A previous heir plans the perfect murder but Bailey Ruth is on the case. Despite car chases, a fatal encounter for a blackmailer at an open mining pit, and a handwritten will that disappear, Bailey Ruth brings a clever killer to justice and assures Keith’s inheritance.

I hope readers will enjoy reading Merry, Merry Ghost as much as I enjoyed writing it. And as Tiny Tim said, “God Bless us, every one!”

Carolyn Hart At Home/Interviewed by JoAnna Carl

Carolyn Hart was our guest at a real-time Mystery Readers International At Home Literary Salon many years ago. Since most of the readers of this Blog were not there, I asked JoAnna Carl aka Eve Sandstrom to interview Carolyn Hart for our continuing At Home Online series for the Mystery Readers website, posted here, too. An accomplished master of mystery, Carolyn Hart is the author of 19 Death on Demand novels that have won multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. She has also written 7 Henrie O mysteries, 2 Bailey Ruth Raeburn "ghost" mysteries, and over 20 non-series books, plus multiple short stories. Hart is one of the founders of Sisters in Crime.

JoAnna: When we were in college, all of your fellow J-school students thought you'd be the next Margaret Bourke-White. Do you ever regret that you passed up becoming a top Washington correspondent or a foreign correspondent?

Carolyn: It is possible to have the best of all worlds when you write fiction. I too thought I would have a trench coat, notebook and pen and travel the world. Instead, I married, had a wonderful family and turned to fiction. When I created Henrietta O’ Dwyer Collins (Henrie O), she had the life I thought would be mine. Henrie O is taller, smarter and braver than I am and a successful foreign correspondent, but she reflects my attitudes and interests.

JoAnna: Why do you write mysteries anyway? What appeals to you about this literary form?

Carolyn: I write mysteries because we live in an unjust world. Mystery readers and writers long for a world where justice is served, goodness admired, and wrongs righted. We don‚t find that world in our everyday lives and that‚s why we revere mysteries, both reading and writing them.

JoAnna: Did you ever consider writing anything non-mysterious? Fantasy? Scifi? A combination there-of? Biography?

Carolyn: I was fascinated by the plight of the nurses trapped on Corregidor and wanted to write a non-fiction book about them. At that time, the diaries and papers were not available so I wrote Brave Hearts, a World War II book set in London and the Philippines.

JoAnna: You're recognized as an authority on Agatha Christie. What draws you to her work?

Carolyn: Her brilliance, charm, creativity, and insight.

JoAnna: What mystery novel influenced your development as a writer? Or can you point to one? Or was it a book of another type?

Carolyn: Christie‚s works and those of Mary Roberts, Rinehart, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Mary Collins, and Josephine Tey. As for a particular novel, I will always be in awe of Christie's Ten Little Indians.

JoAnna: Mystery fans may not know what a great teacher you are. I've heard successful mystery writers say, "Oh, I'd never take a writing class." Did you yourself ever take a writing class?

Carolyn: No, but I have attended many writing conferences and always learned something new.

JoAnna: What should a potential student of mystery writing look for in a writing class?

Carolyn: A teacher who understands that styles and minds and attitudes and tastes differ. The teacher should offer insights into the creative process and offer criticism that judges a work against the objectives of the writer.

JoAnna: You had bunches of books published before you made a hit with the Death on Demand series. What encouraged you to hang in there?

Carolyn: I don’t think writers have a choice. They (and I) must write whether the work is accepted or rejected.

JoAnna: You've written three popular mystery series. What is the key to creating appealing, lasting series characters?

Carolyn: Respect. The writer must respect the characters and the readers.

JoAnna: Agents, editors, professors and other people who hand out advice on writing all urge the author to develop his or her "own voice." Then they say, "Voice is hard to define...." What's your take on this?

Carolyn: Every individual is unique. Each of us sees the world differently. A writer must relax and offer what they have and who they are without artifice.

JoAnna: Do you recognize recurring themes or ideas in your own books?

Carolyn: I almost always seem to write about the abuse of power in relationships or the overweening self aggrandizement that destroys relationships. The underlying theme is always a celebration of goodness. Goodness, decency and honor matter.

JoAnna: You were one of the founders of Sisters in Crime. Do you have any special memories you'd like to share about this organization's early days?

Carolyn: I think it was the spring of 1989, possibly it was 1988. I was in New York for Edgars and my editor told me there was going to be a gathering of women writers to talk about forming a new organization. She thought I might be interested in attending. The meeting was in Sandra Scoppetone's loft.

That was the first time I ever met Margaret Maron and Sue Dunlap. At one point, everyone was talking excitedly about what could be accomplished if women worked together. Sue Dunlap asked the people standing behind her to catch her. She toppled over backwards and they caught her and it was an illustration of how we had to trust each other and be willing to take chances. Everyone was incredibly enthusiastic and excited. The idea for SinC had first been suggested by Sara Paretsky at a Bouchercon breakfast with a few writers. This meeting in New York was to decide whether to form the group. the decisions was made and Sisters in Crime came into being in Sandra Scoppetone's loft.

I also remember walking into that room, filled with about seventeen women writers, and it was the first time I ever felt at home with a group.

We were amazed and touched by the generosity of our fellow writers and by the warmth of readers. Today the organization is more than three thousand strong here and around the world.

JoAnna: What are some of your personal likes and dislikes?

Carolyn:
My favorite things:
Family.
Children's laughter.
Friends.
Summer, sea, and sand.
The 1928 Episcopal Prayer Book.
Authors to reread: Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Constance and Gwenyth Little.
Chocolate.
Cats.
Kindness.
Baseball.
Car trips.
Having written.

Things I hate:
Rudeness.
Arrogance.
Snow.
Mountains.
Heights.

JoAnna: Do you have any predictions on the future of the mystery?

Carolyn: The mystery will always prosper. Readers seek goodness. They do not find goodness triumphant in the world as we know it. They will always find goodness triumphant in the mystery.