Duane Swierczynski Lit Salon August 3

Join Mystery Readers NorCal in Berkeley, CA, on Wednesday, August 3, at 7 p.m. for a Literary Salon with Noir Writer Duane Swierczynski. Swiercyznski is the author of several novels including the Edgar and Anthony-nominated Expiration Date, as well as Fun and Games, out now from Mulholland Books. He also writes comics, and thrillers with CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker.

Fun and Games is the first in the Charlie Hardie trilogy, and I can't wait to read them all.  The second comes out October 31, 2011, and the third in 2012. Fun and Games was a fabulous rollercoaster ride. Swiercyznski can really write!

FYI: His name's pronounced "sweer-ZIN-ski." Good to know! Swiercynski lives in Philadelphia, my home town, so this is a special stop and event for me! I asked for water ice, but that's too hard to transport. Maybe a soft pretzel?

I don't usually list an author's works, but here goes. I'm working through the fiction list, then on to the comics and non-fiction!

Fiction
Secret Dead Men (PointBlank, 2005)
The Wheel Man (St. Martin's Press, 2005)
Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir (Busted Flush Press)
The Blonde (St. Martin's Press, 2007)
Severance Package (St. Martin's Press, 2008)
Murder at Wayne Manor: An Interactive Batman Mystery (Quirk, 2008)
Expiration Date (Minotaur Books, 2010)

Charlie Hardie Trilogy
Fun and Games (Mulholland Books, 2011)
Hell and Gone (Mulholland Books, 2011)
Point and Shoot (Mulholland Books, 2012)

Comics
Moon Knight: Annual #1 (Marvel, 2007)
Punisher: Force Of Nature (Marvel, 2008)
Cable #1–25 (Marvel, 2008–2010)
The Immortal Iron Fist #17–27 (with Travel Foreman, ongoing series, Marvel, 2008–2009)
Immortal Iron Fist: The Death Queen of California (Marvel, 2008)
Punisher: Frank Castle #66–70, #75 (Marvel, 2009)
X-Men: The Times and Life of Lucas Bishop #1–3 (Marvel, 2009)

Non-Fiction:
This Here’s A Stick-Up: The Big Bad Book Of American Bank Robbery (Alpha, 2002)
The Big Book O’ Beer (Quirk, 2004)
The Encyclopedia of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, 1950 to Present
The Perfect Drink for Every Occasion (Quirk)
The Spy's Guide: Office Espionage (Quirk)
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Frauds, Scams, and Cons (Alpha)

RSVP (make a comment) with your email address for location!

A is for Airth: Rennie Airth

Mystery Readers Journal's latest issue focuses on London Mysteries II: Crime fiction set in London. This issue is available as a PDF and in hard copy. For more information and the table of contents, go HERE. This article appeared in the London Mysteries II issue of MRJ. Perfect for the Author Alphabet Meme here on Mystery Fanfare.   

A is for Airth: Rennie Airth

Rennie Airth's work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has been nominated for the Edgar Award in the US, the Historical Dagger award in Britain and won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France. Born and educated in South Africa, he spent his early years working in journalism, first for the Johannesburg Star and later for Reuters as a foreign correspondent. His postings included Washington, Havana and Saigon. Turning from journalism to fiction, he wrote Snatch and Once A Spy before starting work on the John Madden trilogy, an idea that came to him after he found a scrapbook devoted to an uncle of his who was killed in World War I. 

RENNIE AIRTH:

Although the books I've written in the Madden series are sometimes described as historical, I prefer to think of them as heralds of the modern age. Historical for me means men in funny hats and people travelling in horse-drawn carriages. Once women's skirts rose above ankle length the old world crumbled.

The idea of embarking on the Madden series came some years ago from an idle thought: how would the police have dealt with the problem posed by serial killers before they were recognized as such—before the very concept of forensic psychology had been developed? By chance, at around the same time I happened to be going through some old family albums and came across a scrapbook kept by my paternal grand-parents in memory of their elder son who was killed in the First World War. Paging through it I discovered something I hadn't known before: that the telegram they had received advising them of his death had arrived the same week as another from the War Office informing them that their second son, my father, who like his brother was an officer in the British army, was missing. Luckily he proved to have been captured, but I was struck by how appalling these twin blows must have been to them at the time and from that point on I began to read more about that terrible conflict and the scars it left on society. These two trains of thought came to-gether and eventually led to the first of the Madden books, River of Darkness, in which the psychological damage inflicted on both protagonists, hunter and hunted, by their experiences in the trenches plays a major part in the story.

I'd resolved from the start, too, that I wouldn't get trapped in a long series following the usual pattern of one case after another. Rather, I wanted to place Madden and those around him—his wife and family, and his colleagues at Scotland Yard—in the context of their time; to see them grow older and their lives develop quite apart from the mystery elements in each story. Hence the clear historical links which all three books have. The first, as I said, takes place in the shadow of the Great War, the second, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, against the rise of fascism in Germany and the looming threat of another war, while the third and most recent, The Dead of Winter, has the bombed-out ruins of London in the closing months of the Second World War as a backdrop.

Mystery writers are sometimes asked which they think is more important—plot or character; I would unhesitatingly plump for the latter. Of course it's necessary to have a good story; apart from anything else it prompts the reader to keep turning the pages. But there aren't that many plots when you think about it, only variations of them, while human nature is infinite in its variety. I set out from the start to give my characters lives larger than the stories they happened to be caught up in and to watch them as they developed over a period of time that now spans more than two decades.

That said, getting the atmosphere right, avoiding anachronism, is always crucial in books set in the past. The physical side is easy enough. It's not difficult to bone up on what people ate, how they dressed, what cars they drove etc. But what's more important is determining how people behaved to one another. At the time when my books are set, particularly the earlier ones, they were generally politer than now, more gentle. Set against that, however, was the hierarchical nature of society, a product of the notorious British class system. Certainly there was too much forelock-touching for our taste, too much deferring by the so-called lower classes. But all this was a necessary part of the books' atmosphere. Mostly it boiled down to how people spoke to one another and in that I was helped by my memories of my father, who grew to manhood in that period. Whenever I wrote a piece of dialogue I was uncertain about, I'd ask myself how it would have sounded to his ears. Or, better still, would he have put it that way?

To return to the question I started with—how the police might have hunted a serial killer then—I resolved early on to introduce a form of 'profiling' into my plots, while recognizing that this would have been resisted by diehard elements in the police force at the time, and for that reason I created the character of a Viennese psychoanalyst, Dr. Franz Weiss, who appears in the first two books. A pupil of Freud's, he is able to offer invaluable advice to the detectives investigating the series of murders, and being Jewish he also becomes a symbolic figure in the second of the two stories as the Nazi party comes to power in Germany. It was through the character of Weiss that I was able to explore the roots of Amos Pike's murderous impulses in psychological terms recognizable to a reader of today, though perhaps not to one of the time in which the book was set. He became to my mind like the dark figure in Yeats's poem, slouching not towards Bethlehem certainly, but perhaps into our modern consciousness.

Although this piece is included in a 'London Mysteries' issue, in fact the capital plays only a small part in the Madden books. True, there are periodic glimpses of Scotland Yard and readers of the series must be well used to the view of the Thames and the tree-lined Embankment it offers. And the third book does feature a London damaged by war and bone-weary of the long struggle. It's a city I never knew, of course, and barely recognizable in the present-day metropolis. But the image we all carry of London in those days, with the bombs falling and the searchlights piercing the night sky, is so familiar that even as I was describing them I half felt I'd been there.

However, most of the action in the books takes place in a still unspoiled countryside, and this is deliberate. The image of terror stalking the fields and quiet country lanes of England seemed a potent one, given that the books' overarching theme is the change brought about by the First World War: not simply to society but to the very way we think about ourselves. Still suffering from the after-effects of his experience, Madden is one of the few to understand the dire message of the carnage inflicted in the trenches. That now we truly know ourselves and the world will never be the same.

Philip Larkin summed it up best in a marvellous poem titled 'MCMXIV.' He pictured a crowd of men, moustached, good humoured, waiting patiently in long lines, happy to be setting out on what seems like a holiday. He doesn't say why they are there, but we're told what they are leaving behind—the familiar shops and pubs, children at play, flowering fields; and marriages that will last 'a little bit longer'—and we soon sense without being told that that this is 1914 and they are enlisting in the army. He ends the poem with a single, devastating line:

Never such innocence again.

***
Following this Mystery Author Meme? Be sure and check out B is for Block: Lawrence Block

Italian Mysteries I: Mystery Readers Journal

Mystery Readers Journal: Mysteries Set in Italy I (Volume 21:4) is now available as a .pdf. We still have hardcopy available, but it's so easy to click and download. To order this issue, go HERE. Mystery Readers Journal is a quarterly review with articles, reviews and Author! Author! essays. Here's an Author! Author! essay by Donna Leon from this issue (2005).

Donna Leon's latest Commissario Brunetti mystery is Drawing Conclusions (Grove/Atlantic). She is the winner of the CWA Silver Dagger award. Don't miss her latest non-fiction book, Handel's Bestiary: In Search of Animals in Handel's Operas (Grove/Atlantic); illustrated by Michael Sowa. Leon, is the patron of conductor Alan Curtis and his celebrated orchestra Il Complesso Barocco.

DONNA LEON:

"La Serenissima"

I first came to Italy in 1967, escaping from both graduate school and a copywriting job in New York. My family is the usual American mixture: Irish, German, Spanish: no Italian. I arrived speaking only the words and phrases I'd picked on the sea crossing, though once I arrived in Naples and then went on to Rome, I quickly realized that these were people I wanted to listen to and wanted to talk to. And as time passed, wanted to live among.

That took fifteen years to happen, for I kept taking jobs in odd places: Iran, China, Saudi Arabia. Finally, in 1981, after a terrible year in Saudi Arabia, I decided to move to Venice where I had, over the course of years, managed to acquire friends at the level of family. Thus my move was motivated by sentiment, not the rich cultural heritage of the city. The people I'd come to love lived there, and so there was no other choice.

After some months, I found a job teaching English literature for the University of Maryland, which had the contract for university education for the US Armed Forces in Europe. And so I whiled away fifteen years talking to our boys in blue about the changing moral order in the universe of Jane Austen's novels or the unreliable narrator in 20th-century fiction. They might perhaps have resisted Jane Austen, my students, but they knew a lot about changing moral orders, and they'd certainly encountered a large number of unreliable narrators.

In 1989, I had a conversation with the Italian conductor Gabriele Ferro, in which he and his wife talked badly about another conductor. There followed an "escalation," during which we discussed ways to kill him, and it occurred to me that it would be an interesting opening for a crime novel, to find a conductor dead in the dressing room where we were having the conversation.

Fifteen years later, I find myself still writing about the man who went to investigate that original crime, Guido Brunetti. He's Venetian, in middle age, married to a university professor, with whom he has two children, Raffaele and Chiara, both in their teens. He's a thoughtful man, much given to reading and reflection. His preferred authors are the ancient historians, for he feels great sympathy with their lack of illusion about humanity, politics, and society. Because his family has been Venetian for centuries and because he has lived in the city for most of his life, he has access to information that might prove difficult for a non-Venetian to obtain. Because he has a certain gentility and ease with people, they are prone to talk to him and often reveal more than they realize.

He is happily married, a man still in love with a wife who is strong-willed, politically disillusioned and cynical, suspicious of most organizations and theories, and given to verbal excess. Together, they are cultured Europeans, as at home discussing literature or history as they are assuming that life should be beautiful and filled with physical pleasure.

The cases in which Brunetti is involved often take him beyond the single murder or crime and lead him to investigate larger problems: industrial pollution, the traffic in women, the sale of nuclear material, illegal immigration. Other times, he concerns himself with crimes of a more local nature: murder, theft, blackmail. Through all these cases, he continues to lead his life, find pleasure in family friends and food, and consolation in books and conversation. He has few illusions and realizes that the powerful will usually triumph, the weak suffer.
***
To read other articles or to order this issue of Mystery Readers Journal, go HERE.

Island Mysteries: Mystery Readers Journal: Ann Cleeves

The latest issue of Mystery Readers Journal: Island Mysteries  (Volume 26:3) was just published. Check out the Table of Contents. To order this issue, go HERE. Scroll down to Volume 26:3).

If you're not a subscriber, you can still enjoy some of the essays. The Journal is packed with reviews and articles, including the very special Author! Author! essays. Here's a sampling from those essays by Mystery Author Ann Cleeves. Ann Cleeves lives on the northeast coast of England with her ornithologist husband Tim. Her latest Shetland novel Blue Lightning is being published by Minotaur in the fall of 2010.

The Bleak and Beautiful Islands by Ann Cleeves

I first went to Shetland more than thirty years ago. I'd dropped out of university and was offered a temporary job as assistant cook in Fair Isle bird observatory. At that point I wasn't even sure where Fair Isle was, though I'd heard of the famous knitting; I thought vaguely it was one of the western isles. But Fair Isle, Britain's most remote inhabited island, is part of the Shetland group and that's as far north as you can get in the UK, closer to Bergen in Norway than London. Fair Isle is a long way from anywhere—13 hours overnight by boat from Aberdeen to Shetland mainland and then three hours by mail boat into the Isle.

So I arrived on a stormy spring afternoon to be assistant cook in the bird observatory on Fair Isle, knowing nothing about birds and not being able to cook! I was twenty years old and looking for adventure. That summer changed my life. I met my husband there. I had the space and the time to read more widely than ever before. And I learned to cook. The next year I went back—only this time I was in charge of the kitchen.

Fair Isle is about three and a half miles long and a mile and a half wide. It has a permanent population of about 50 people, an airstrip, a natural harbour and a hill covered with heather, where the aggressive skuas breed. The cliffs provide homes for puffins, kittiwakes and gannets. Because of its position it attracts rare birds from east and west. The people live in a scattering of croft houses in the south of the island and are warm and welcoming to incomers. I spent my time off in gossip and listening to stories. I learned to hand milk a cow, clip a sheep and even to knit—never did quite get the hang of the intricate steps of the dances though!

Shetland itself comprises half a dozen or so inhabited islands. Shetland mainland is 60 miles from top to toe and the archipelago has a population of more than 20,000. Check out the map on my website for more details and to see where the books are set. There's a town, Lerwick. Oil came to the community in the 1970s bringing affluence, work and foreigners. All this makes it an interesting place to explore, imaginatively and in reality.

Since that first trip, my husband and I have been regular visitors to the islands. We have very good friends there. But I didn't consider setting a book in the place until 2005 when we made a brief mid-winter visit. A very rare bird had turned up between Christmas and New Year and Tim was desperate to see it. We arrived to snow and ice. There are few trees in Shetland so the landscape was bleak and bare. Looking across the frozen fields we saw three ravens against the snow. I'm a crime writer and I thought if there were blood as well it would be like a scene from a fairy story: powerful, almost mythical. That was how Raven Black was born.

I'm very grateful to Shetland. I'd been published for twenty years before Raven Black, to reasonable reviews but very little commercial success. The book went on to win the CWA Gold Dagger, be short-listed for the Martin Beck Award in Sweden and to be translated into nearly twenty languages. It's been optioned for television and adapted for radio in the UK and Germany. Shetland obviously caught the readers' imagination, just as it had caught mine.

Quite soon I decided that I'd write a quartet set in Shetland. The islands lie so far to the north that the seasons vary dramatically. Winter and summer are very different. In winter it's dark for most of the day. In summer it's light almost all night. In June you can read a newspaper outside at midnight. The sun slides towards the horizon in a strange kind of dusk and then rises again. Shetlanders call this the simmer dim. The autumn equinox brings storms and early spring can be wet and gloomy.

Raven Black, the winter book, is bleak and dark; the summer book, White Nights, is more playful. It's about performance and pretence and things being not quite what they seem. A stranger appears at the party to open an exhibition by a local artist, but seems not to know who he is or why he's there. The story also features a brilliant young fiddle player: Shetland is famous for its wonderful folk music. The character is loosely based on Fair Islander Chris Stout of the band Fiddlers' Bid. I went to his parents' wedding when I was first on the Isle and now he and I perform at festivals and gigs together and he's called his most recent album White Nights...

Red Bones is set in the spring, a time of mist. The story is about digging into the past—literally in an archaeological dig of a mediaeval merchant's house, but psychologically too. It's about greed and envy, set on Whalsay, which is the wealthiest island because most of Shetland's deep sea fishing boats moor there.

There's a series detective who appears in each book. Jimmy Perez is a Fair Islander—his exotic name comes from his Spanish ancestry. There is a real Spanish armada shipwreck off the island and there were survivors. I wanted my character to be an outsider, but also to utterly belong. His family has been in the islands for five centuries but still he's viewed with suspicion.

Now I'm preparing for publication of the fourth book. In Blue Lightning I go back to Fair Isle, where my passion for Shetland all started. I found it a remarkably easy book to write, because the landscape of the island is fixed in my imagination. I've created a fictional field centre in the lighthouse at the north of the Isle and one of my characters is the cook there. The autumn gales mean that no planes or boats can reach the place, and when a body is found, Jimmy Perez, on holiday with his parents, has to work the case without any technical support.

Now that the quartet is complete, will I return to Shetland in my writing? Of course! There'll be a gap, because one of my Vera Stanhope novels has been adapted for television and it makes sense to concentrate on her for a while, but Shetland is a very special place. It's impossible to stay away.

Paranormal Mysteries: Mystery Readers Journal: Chris Grabenstein

Paranormal Mysteries: Mystery Readers Journal (Volume 26:2) has some great articles, so I thought I'd post one of them here. To see the Table of Contents or to Order this Issue, go HERE. It's available in hardcopy and as a .pdf download.

This article is by Chris Grabenstein, Anthony and Agatha award winning author of the Haunted Mystery series of middle grades ghost stories for Random House Children’s Books: The Crossroads, The Hanging Hill, and The Smoky Corridor.

I HOPE GHOSTS ARE REAL by Chris Grabenstein

    I hope ghosts are real.
    I think that’s why I have written so many ghost stories. If ghosts are real then that means life goes on after death and we all get to hang around town a little longer and maybe catch a movie now and then, maybe grab a slice of pizza, because the thought of hanging out in the bright white light listening to angelic choirs doing Gregorian chants seems like it might be interesting for a couple hours, maybe even a week, but an eternity?
   But I digress.
   I’m not sure digression is allowed in the after life. Too many Gregorian chant rehearsals to attend.
   I write ghost stories because I don’t want this glorious story of life to end, in particular, my own life. Hey, it’s been a fun ride. Met some interesting people. You get to fall in love, eat food, drink wine. Ambrosia for eternity? Shredded coconut, walnuts, pineapple chunks, a can of fruit cocktail, marshmallows, and maraschino cherries all mixed up with nutmeg and cinnamon is not my idea of haute cuisine. I’d rather have the Mahi Mahi special.
   That said, I have never seen a ghost, except the older Boy Scouts who used to paint their faces with green glow-in-the-dark paint and come spook us in our tents after we’d all been sitting around the campfire listening to the story of Von Doon, this creepy guy who ended up drowning in a vat of radioactive waste while he was cooking up some sort of mad science project and now roams these very woods we’re camping in as a glow-stick type ghost, the kind that only exist in Boy Scout campfire tales.
   I think I once saw the ghost of Willow, our cat who used to like to hang out in a sunny spot in our living room, perched on the top edge of the sofa. One day, months after she “crossed over Jordan,” or whatever river cats cross over (probably the Nile, given that whole Egyptian-cat connection), I swear I saw Willow in her old familiar pose. Until I looked back and she was gone.
For the record, Willow did not glow in the dark.
   Many of the kids I talk to in Middle Schools, when I do author visits for my “Haunted Mystery” series, swear they have seen ghosts. They have very specific anecdotes to relate. The one in the room at their grandmother’s house. The other one who hangs out in the boys bathroom at school. Hearing their tales, I am reminded that once, I kid you not, I saw a six-foot-long ant crawling along the wall inside our garage in Buffalo, New York, where I lived at the time. Maybe it was a renegade mutant from the nearby toxic Love Canal. Maybe my mom was putting something extra in the Kool Ade.    Whatever. I never told anyone about the ant, or the scary devil I saw rise up out of an oil splotch on the floor of that very same garage some weeks later. That one I blame on the fact that, at the time, I was attending Catholic Catechism School.
   Do children see more ghosts than adults because they are closer to that side of life, having only recently departed that other world to come into this one?
   Or do they just like spooky stories. Interestingly, a few adults have asked me if I think THE CROSSROADS, THE HANGING HILL, and THE SMOKY CORRIDOR are too scary for children. No child has ever said they were. They love staying up late at night with a flashlight under the covers and gobbling up my thrills and chills.
   My wife and I are hoping to take some sort of ghost hunting vacation this year, to help me as I write the fourth book in the series. By the way, I hate those ghost hunter shows on TV. Lots of grainy video and people bustling about in the dark with shaky flashlights and meters and microphones saying, “Did you hear that?”
   Yeah. I heard it. It was someone banging their head on an overhead pipe because they forgot to turn on the lights down in the dungeon.
   I always enjoy hearing the historical ghost stories at the top of these shows, like the legend about the woman who was bricked up alive behind a castle wall during the middle gages and now haunts the catacombs. That would be a good reason to hang around and haunt the folks who “Cask Of Amontillado” -ed you.
   On the other hand, I hate the crew of intrepid Ghost Hunters with their ghost probing paraphernalia. Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray’s had cooler equipment and did a better job of exorcising the evil spirits than those dudes in the vans on basic cable.
   I want ghosts to exist, as I said, so I know death is not the end.
   However, having watched the last episode of Lost, I’m a little afraid of who might show up for “the concert” in the Unitarian chapel when it’s my turn to wait for the light. Who decides what was “the most important part of my life” and gets to cast my gang of fellow travelers? What if they decide it was that summer I sold hot dogs at a greasy spoon in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee? Or when I was a struggling actor and had a day job at Citibank helping rewrite The Country Risk Assessment Manual? I mean the people who survived the island on Lost may have gone on to do great things. Maybe they didn’t want to hang around waiting for Jack and Hurley when they passed over. Maybe they’d rather be remembering an Oceanic Airlines celebrity pro-am golf tournament they won or something.
   When I was researching the first book I ever wrote (it was called THE PRAYER CIRCLE and has never been published), I read a lot about near death experiences and what awaits us on the other side of the bright white light. Typically, your ancestors greet you first. I’m not so sure about this being a good thing. The one grandfather I actually knew was kind of a creepy old Greek guy who sat slumped in his chair when we visited him in Florida every summer. He mumbled in Greek, never put in his teeth, and kind of smelled like mothballs. Then again, he was ninety, I was six, and accustomed to seeing giant ants crawling around in the garage with Satan.
   My Greek grandmother, who was about twenty years younger than her husband (I think it was one of those Old World arranged marriages that awaited you once you made it past Ellis Island) was fun. At the end of those summer trips to Florida, she would always give us a bag full of pencils she had collected all year long plus an envelope stuffed with five bucks if we promised we’d keep getting good grades when we went back to school in the fall.
   She was a seamstress who survived the Great Depression (the old one, not the new one), even though the “Republican Banker” came and took away her sewing machine when she missed a loan payment, thereby also taking away her only means of ever repaying her debt. I remember, right before my high school graduation, my Yiya (that’s Greek for grandmother) said to me, “If you ever vote Republican, I wring your neck.”
   Her I wouldn’t mind seeing in the tunnel. And, yes, all these years later, I have still never, ever voted for a Republican. I do not have to fear neck wringing in the afterlife.
   Actually, I wish my Yiya were a ghost and would come by and give me more long-lasting words of advice like that again. It has made Election Day very easy for close to forty years.
   If I were a ghost, the first thing I would do is go to my own funeral. See who was there. See what people thought about my will and what I left them.
   But then, if I stuck around, I’d probably realize that life went on with or without me. And there I’d be, rattling chains, moaning and groaning, giving people goosebumps, having absolutely no effect on anything, except to make a few people scream or wet their pants.
   Not a very productive existence.
   I guess this is why Willow the cat never came back to our couch after that one visit, why ghosts, if they do exist, eventually move on.
   And that’s truly why I hope ghosts are real.
   It means we all have some new experience to move on to after we’ve put in our time “doomed for a certain term to walk the night,” to quote the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
   Yes, Shakespeare believed in ghosts. I wonder if his own ghost stuck around long enough to see any really awful productions of his work. Probably just one. And then he moved on.
   I wonder if Shakespeare still gets to write and make up stories where he is.
   I wonder they need more writers in that place we eventually move on to? If so, I hope, when I meet my Greek grandmother in the bright white light, she brings me some more pencils.

Mystery Readers Journal: 2010

Mystery Readers Journal (a review periodical) is entering its 26th year, and it continues to get better and better. Each quarterly issue of MRJ is thematic, and over the years, we've had issues focusing on Art Mysteries, Italy, Music, France, New York, San Francisco, Food Mysteries and more. See the list of back issues HERE.

Lots of changes in 2010. Themes: African Mysteries; Paranormal Mysteries; Island Mysteries; and Hobbies & Special interests. Great line-up.

Mystery Readers Journal includes reviews, articles and Author! Author! essays. Author! Author! essays are upclose and personal essays by mystery authors who set their books in the theme location or include the theme in their books. Each issue is between 72 and 90 pages hardcopy.

With 2010, Mystery Readers International is going green with the Journal, but it's only an option. Those subscribers who want to continue to receive hardcopy can do that, but there's an option to receive MRJ as a .pdf download.

To subscribe to Mystery Readers Journal, go HERE.

For a list of back issues of MRJ (and links to Tables of Contents), go HERE. I hope to have back issues available for .pdf download soon. You can continue to order most hardcopy back issues.

Thanks to everyone who has supported the Mystery Readers Journal for 25 years!