KATE MATTES: R.I.P.

From Hallie Ephron comes the sad news of the passing of Kate Mattes, proprietor of Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge, MA, and a big supporter of mysteries. I was privileged to meet her several times at Malice Domestic and Bouchercon. And, as I remember, she wanted to put in a Boston bid for Bcon, but couldn't find the right venue. That was all a long time ago. I will add to this post and link to tributes as they come in.

From Hallie Ephron on Facebook:

Sad news: Kate Mattes died yesterday. The news comes from her sister Emily McAdoo via Thomas Lyons: "Kate passed away yesterday in Vermont. It was a sudden cardiac event, and she had been in poor health and getting weaker all along." A memorial/reflection will be planned.)

Here's a bit from a blog I wrote when the bookstore closed: "Kate’s Mystery Books closed its doors after more than 20 years as New England’s premier mystery bookstore. Scores of authors and readers showed up to help Kate pack up, as in true Kate’s style she threw a packing party. It was as hard to get to an empty packing box as it was to get to the wine at one of her famous Xmas parties. I scored a cat at the yard sale.

"Every New England mystery author I know launches his or her books at Kate’s, and looking at the table of signed books (which we were specifically told NOT to pack), it was clear how Kate’s has been a stopping point for the crème de la crème of crime fiction writers. Just a few of the megastars I’ve met at Kate’s: Sue Grafton, Sarah Paretsky, Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, Katherine Hall Page, Jane Langton...."

HALLIE EPHRON: Lit Salon 8/21

Upcoming Literary Salon in Berkeley, CA

When: Wednesday, August 21, 7:00 p.m.

Who: Hallie Ephron

Where: RSVP for venue address (Berkeley, CA)

This is a free event, but YOU MUST RSVP to attend.

Space is limited. Venue address sent with acceptance.

Please make a comment below with your email address.

Hallie Ephron

HALLIE EPHRON (http://hallieephron.com) is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven suspense novels that reviewers call “deliciously creepy” and “Hitchcockian.” Her books are rooted in reality, and it’s no coincidence that her new novel, Careful What You Wish For, is about a professional organizer married to a man who can’t pass a yard sale without stopping.

She is a five-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel (Writers Digest Books) was an Edgar Award finalist. For twelve years she wrote an award-winning crime-fiction book review column for the Boston Globe. Her Never Tell a Lie was made into a Lifetime movie. A popular speaker and writing teacher, Hallie lives near Boston with her husband.

Read Hallie's essay on "Finding My Way to Crime Fiction" on Mystery Fanfare

To RSVP, send an email to janet @ mysteryreaders (dot) org

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Upcoming Literary Salons: Mark your Calendar

August 25: Naomi Hirahara, 3 p.m. Berkeley
September 18: Mark Coggins & Reece Hirsch

FINDING MY WAY TO CRIME FICTION: Guest post by Hallie Ephron

Hallie Ephron:
Finding My Way to Crime Fiction

When I’m asked what books inspired me to write mystery novels, sometimes I go on about how much I loved the Nancy Drew novels. I talk about graduating to the complete works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and P.D. James. But those authors’ works inspired me to binge read mysteries, not to write them.

Instead, I found my way by first trying and failing to write true crime.

It was the story of a double murder. Two men who worked at an insurance company were shot dead by a disgruntled client. The killer had come in gunning for another employee, a woman who was the sister of one of the men killed. The sister was (and still is) a dear friend of mine, and I wrote a book based on many hours that she and I spent together, talking about what had happened in the aftermath of the murders.

I called the manuscript Exit Wound because the book was about the aftermath of murder—the devasting aftermath for the victim’s children, spouse, parents, siblings, co-workers, and friends. The killer’s capture, trial, and life sentence brought my friend only a small measure of relief. It turns out that justice served does little to assuage grief and loss.

I finished writing that book but never tried to publish it because I realized that the story wasn’t mine to tell. It most certainly was not my story to profit from. I’d have felt like a carrion crow going on book tour and dishing the gory details of those horrific murders and the devastation that grief left in its wake. There are true crime writers who manage to make this work; I could not.

Since then, my stories are purely made up and inspired by experiences far removed from murder. Going to a yard sale and getting invited in to see the renovations inspired me to write a book (Never Tell a Lie) about a pregnant woman who goes to a yard sale, gets invited into the house, and never comes out. Doll parts (heads, legs, eyeballs) that a friend had to clear out from under the beds in her elderly dollmaker mother’s house inspired You’ll Never Know, Dear.

My new book, Careful What You Wish For, is about a professional organizer who helps people declutter their lives; she’s married to man who can’t pass a yard sale without stopping. Yes, I’m married to collector. And yes, sometimes I’d like to murder him for the stuff he drags home.

Sometimes there’s a murder in my books. Sometimes not. I think of them as whatsgoingonhere stories rather than whodunnits—on a good day, Daphne du Maurier with a twist of Patricia Highsmith. My touchstones are classic movies like Gaslight and Suspicion and Dial M For Murder and Wait Until Dark—stories about ordinary women who become increasingly isolated and besieged by doubts. If she’s an unreliable narrator, she’s not intentionally so.

In those movies as in my books, doubt and betrayal drive the plots. The fundamental question is always: Whom can she trust? I want my readers to feel the situation in the novel is utterly believable, and think, this could happen to me--at the same time knowing that that the story is made up will end with the kind of clarity and satisfying wrap-up that you’d rarely have in true crime.

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HALLIE EPHRON (http://hallieephron.com) is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven suspense novels that reviewers call “deliciously creepy” and “Hitchcockian.” Her books are rooted in reality, and it’s no coincidence that her new novel, Careful What You Wish For, is about a professional organizer married to a man who can’t pass a yard sale without stopping. She is a five-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel (Writers Digest Books) was an Edgar Award finalist. For twelve years she wrote an award-winning crime-fiction book review column for the Boston Globe. Her Never Tell a Lie was made into a Lifetime movie. A popular speaker and writing teacher, Hallie lives near Boston with her husband. 

Hallie Ephron: How the idea for You'll Never Know, Dear crept up on her

HALLIE EPHRON is the New York Times best-selling author of suspense novels including You’ll Never Know, Dear. She is a four-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, and her Writing & Selling Your Mystery Novel was nominated for Edgar and Anthony awards. She lives near Boston and was the Boston Globe crime fiction book reviewer for over a decade.

HALLIE EPHRON:
How the Idea for You’ll Never Know, Dear crept up on her


Usually my book ideas grow out of my own experience. Giving birth to my first child and going to yard sales inspired Never Tell a Lie. Watching my neighbor get carried out of her house in the dead of winter, and firefighters going in and finding a hoarder’s den inspired There Was an Old Woman. Growing up around the corner from an infamous Hollywood murder (Lana Turner, Johnny Stompanato…) inspired Night Night, Sleep Tight. I’ve always set my books in places I know well: New England, New York City, Beverly Hills.

My new novel, You’ll Never Know, Dear, is my first book inspired by someone else’s experience and set in a place I’ve barely visited.

The idea came from my friend Mary Alice who told me about helping her mother, Blanche, move out of their family home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Blanche had always been a talented crafts person. An artist, really. She made porcelain dolls, so her house had been full of supplies for doll making—modeling clay, molds, glazes and paints, a kiln, and of course a battalion of finished dolls with their little shoes and embroidered dresses and panties.

My friend told me that her kids refused to sleep in the bedroom where Blanche kept dolls. They said, “You’d wake up and they’d all be looking at you.” Blanche proclaimed those grandchildren of hers “little sissies.”

No sissy herself, Blanche slept with a pistol tucked into an eyeglass case (the kind you squeeze the top to open) under her pillow. Detail upon detail, I could feel Blanche turning into a character into my head.

As my friend was helping Blanche empty her house, under every bed she found boxes and boxes of doll parts. Arms. Legs. Bodies. Heads. Eyeballs.

 “Creepy,” I said when she told me that.

 “Put it in your next book,” she shot back.

And I did. Blanche is the inspiration for my Miss Sorrel, a 70-something doll maker who suffers no fools in You’ll Never Know, Dear. And those doll parts? They’re a key element in the plot.

The book opens with Miss Sorrel and her grown daughter, Lis, having sweet tea and egg salad sandwiches on the porch of their home. We meet Miss Sorrel for the first time.

Miss Sorrel rocked gently in the glider and sipped sweet tea from a glass dripping condensation. With her powdered face, spots of rouge on each cheek, and lipstick carefully painted on, Miss Sorrel was starting to look like one of the porcelain dolls she so prized. That, despite the un-doll-like creases that ran from the corners of her lips down either side of her chin, the crinkles that radiated from the corners of her eyes, and the skin that had started to lose its grip on her fine-boned skull. 

Forty years ago, Miss Sorrel’s younger daughter, 4-year-old Janey, was taken from their front yard. The special porcelain doll Miss Sorrel had made for her disappeared with her. I knew Miss Sorrel and Lis, the older sister who was supposed to be watching Janey, would carry a burden of grief and guilt over the loss.

In the book’s opening scene, Janey’s doll comes back. A woman who delivers it refuses to tell Miss Sorrel where she got it, interested only in the reward Miss Sorrel is offering. The doll is old and battered, creepy the way old dolls can be. Miss Sorrel is sure it’s the doll that was Janey’s. Lis isn’t convinced.

I wanted to set the book in Beaufort, South Carolina. I’d visited there twice, briefly, but a fresh visit convinced me that I’d have to fictionalize it. My prose could never match native son Pat Conroy’s. Plus, one of my characters had to be the sheriff, and Beaufort had a larger-than-life sheriff who served for decades, called himself a white witch doctor, and was so beloved that they named a bridge after him. Anyone who lives within a hundred miles of Beaufort would balk at my fictional sheriff.

So I invented “Bonsecours.” I hope, a ringer for Beaufort. Gracious homes, live oaks, camellias and wisteria; Spanish moss hanging indiscriminately from tree branches, phone wires, and fences. It’s got a charming downtown with a riverfront park, and shrimp boats (Forrest Gump was filmed there). The riverbanks are thick with sticky mud and the river has treacherous, nine-foot tides.

Writing Southern characters was another challenge. I had to slow down and kept telling myself: We’re not in Boston anymore. The narrative needed to be a bit more leisurely and my characters, bless their hearts, had to have southern accents and have mastered the art of the gracious insult.

After I wrote the opening scenes, I had no idea what happened to Janey. But I knew that doll parts would be the key to unlocking the mystery, and that the river would play a part as well. Somehow. It wasn’t until I finished writing the book that I figured out how

PHOTO: Hallie with one of Blanche’s porcelain dolls

California Crime Writers Conference

The California Crime Writers Conference is presented by the Los Angeles Chapter of Sisters in Crime and the Southern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. This is a great convention for both aspiring writers and established authors to mingle with agents and editors, to get inside information on the publishing industry, to hone skills, and revitalize your creativity.

June 10-11, 2017
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel
Los Angeles—Westside
6161 West Centinela Ave
Culver City, CA 90230

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: HALLIE EPHRON
New York Times best selling author Hallie Ephron grew up in a family of writers and a household filled with books. Her parents were Henry and Phoebe Ephron who wrote screenplays for classic movies like Carousel and Daddy Long Legs.

Hallie was the last of their four daughters (Nora, Delia, Hallie, Amy) to start writing or, as she calls it, succumb to her genes. Now Hallie writes suspense novels she hopes keep readers up nights. An Edgar Award finalist and a four-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, Hallie grew up in Beverly Hills where her new suspense novel, Night Night, Sleep Tight, is set. The story is inspired by Hallie’s experiences growing up there in a Hollywood family, and by an infamous Hollywood murder. Hallie's website

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER
Raised in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, William Kent Krueger briefly attended Stanford University—before being kicked out for radical activities. After that, he logged timber, worked construction, tried his hand at freelance journalism, and eventually ended up researching child development at the University of Minnesota.

He currently makes his living as a full-time author. He’s been married for over 40 years to a marvelous woman who is a retired attorney. He makes his home in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves. Krueger writes a mystery series set in the north woods of Minnesota. His protagonist is Cork O’Connor, the former sheriff of Tamarack County and a man of mixed heritage—part Irish and part Ojibwe.

His work has received a number of awards, including the Minnesota Book Award, the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award, the Anthony Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, and the Friends of American Writers Prize. His last five novels were all New York Times bestsellers. Ordinary Grace, his stand-alone novel published in 2013, received the Edgar Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition for the best novel published in that year. Windigo Island, number fourteen in his Cork O’Connor series, was released in August 2014 and was chosen by Amazon.com as one the best books of the year. Kent's website

NEW FACULTY MEMBERS

LAPD Detective Paul Bishop
Novelist, screenwriter, and television personality, Paul Bishop is also a nationally recognized interrogator and behaviorist. He spent 35 years with the Los Angeles Police Department where his high profile Special Assault Units regularly produced the highest number of detective initiated arrests and highest crime clearance rates in the city. Twice selected as LAPD’s Detective of the Year, he continues to work privately as a deception expert and as a specialist in the investigation of sex crimes.

His fifteen novels include five featuring LAPD homicide detective Fey Croaker and his latest novel, Lie Catchers, which is the first in a new series featuring top LAPD interrogators Ray Pagan and Calamity Jane Randall. The sequel Admit Nothing is due in 2017.

AGENT JILL MARR
Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Agency, graduated from San Diego State University with a BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing and a minor in history. She has nearly 15 years of publishing experience. She wrote features and ads for Pages, the literary magazine for people who love books, and continues to write book ads for publishing houses, magazine pieces, and promotional features for television. After writing ad copy and features for published books for years, she knows how to find the "hook" and sell it.

Jill is interested in commercial fiction, with an emphasis on mysteries, thrillers, romantic suspense and horror, women's commercial fiction and historical fiction. She is looking for non-fiction projects in the areas of history, narrative non-fiction, sports, politics, current events, health & nutrition, pop culture, humor, music, and very select memoir.

AGENT DANIELLE EGAN-MILLER
Danielle Egan-Miller is president of Browne & Miller Literary Associates. Over the past 15 years as an agent, she has sold hundreds of books with a heavy emphasis on commercial adult fiction. Her roster includes several New York Times bestselling authors and numerous prize- and award-winning writers including 2014 Edgar Award winner for Best Novel, William Kent Krueger. She is a member of the Association of Authors' Representatives, Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, and The Authors Guild.

Conference Hotel Reservations
There are a limited number of rooms at the conference hotel at the rate of $169.00 per night. Confirm your stay by calling the hotel at 866-819-5320. Mention that you are attending the CCWC conference, June 10-11, 2017.

Hallie Ephron: When a Character Needs a Shrink

The following article appeared in the latest issue of Mystery Readers Journal: Shrinks and other Mental Healthcare Professionals (Volume 27:4). This issue is available for purchase. Hardcopy or PDF download. See the Table of Contents here.

Hallie Ephron writes novels she hopes will keep you up nights. Her latest: Come and Find Me. She is also the crime fiction book reviewer for the Boston Globe and author of the Edgar-award nominated Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel.

Hallie Ephron: When a Character Needs a Shrink...

Agoraphobia. For many of those who suffer from it, the prospect of leaving the safety of home can generate a panic attack so severe that it feels like a heart attack. It's what Diana, the main character in my last novel, Come and Find Me, experiences whenever she tries to leave the safety of the fortress she's created within her home. There, she "lives" on the Internet and gets whatever she needs delivered to the house. She makes it through the average day with the help of Xanax and regular sessions with her therapist, whom she sees, of course, via Skype.

But even the arrival of the UPS man, whom she knows by name, can be traumatic.

Heart pounding, she peered through the peephole in the door. Wally's eyeball seemed to bulge back at her.

Opening the door can be terrifying.

As she opened the door, she felt as if an abyss opened in front of her, like an elevator door sliding open into an empty shaft. She grasped the door frame with both hands.

Fear keeps Diana in her house—until her sister goes missing. Then fear of what might be happening to her sister drives her out. In a sense, Diana is her own worst enemy; her own psyche is the villain she has to deal with before she can begin to confront her real enemies.

As I was writing the book, I need to learn as much as I could about agoraphobia. It helped that I was able to call on my former collaborator for advice, psychologist Donald Davidoff. Together we wrote a series of five mystery novels that were published by Minotaur. The books were set at a fictional version of Harvard's famed McLean psychiatric hospital where Don still runs one of the units. The powers-that-be have shown great restraint in letting Don keep his day job, even after we made the director of our fictional version of the MacLean an egomaniacal villain in one of the books. They understood that it was "just fiction." Really, it was.

It helps that the hospital has become accustomed over the years to being featured in books—The Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, and Mount Misery, to name a few examples. And it's the setting of one of James Taylor's early songs. Sample lyric:

Just knocking around the zoo on a Thursday afternoon,
There's bars on all the windows and they're counting up the spoons...

Those spoons would have been silver back when James Taylor was a teenage inmate. Back then the healing grounds of the very rich, the MacLean had its own golf course and served tea each afternoon on silver tea service to patients who might be there for years on end. Its massive Victorian buildings still look as if mad women could easily reside in their attics, though with the arrival of managed care, few patients stay there for more than a few weeks.

I miss having a resident shrink for my characters, but fortunately Don still takes my calls. So when I was writing Diana for Come and Find Me, I called Don for a crash course in agoraphobia. I learned about its symptoms and about the medication and therapy to treat it. I learned that agoraphobia usually isn't triggered by a single traumatic event. Its victims have often struggled with it, to varying degrees, throughout their lives.

Today I'm working on my third solo suspense novel. One of the inspirations for this new story is a possibly apocryphal tale that Don once told me about the McLean.

As the story goes, the members of a wealthy family, despairing of getting their demented matriarch to accept the care she needed, had an exact replica of her house built on the grounds of the McLean. In the dead of night, the old woman was spirited out of her house along with her furniture, belongings, and cats. When she woke up the next morning it was in a bedroom just like hers in the replica. She lived out her years in that house on the grounds of the MacLean, never realizing she'd ever left home.

I've always loved that story, though Don refuses to divulge whether it's true or not. And I won't say how I use it in the new novel because that would be a spoiler. Let's just say that the main character in the book is old, very old, but things happen that make her wonder if she's losing her marbles.

My friend Don happens to be an expert on memory and aging, so these days, once again, I have him on speed dial.

Hallie Ephron: Guest Blogger/Book Giveaway

Today I welcome Hallie Ephron as Guest Blogger. I knew I had to invite Hallie after reading an advance copy of her latest suspense novel, COME AND FIND ME (HarperCollins; March 22). I was fascinated with Second Life and the whole other world. I wanted to know more about how Hallie became involved and how she 'did her research.'  Come and Find Me tells the story of a recluse who works and lives online and must brave the “real world” when her sister goes missing.

Win a signed copy of Come and Find Me by entering a comment at the end of this blog. Just mention why you want to read the book. Winner will be chosen by random number selection and announced on this post with an update on March 21, so be sure and stop back by.

3/21/11: And the winner is: CPatLarge (Cyndi Pauwels). Thank you all for entering!

Hallie Ephron wrote her first mystery novel Amnesia with a good friend, neuropsychologist Donald Davidoff, and together they penned a series of five “Dr. Peter Zak” mystery novels for St. Martin’s Minotaur under the shared pen name G. H. Ephron. She made a splash writing solo when she turned to psychological suspense. Never Tell a Lie was published by HarperCollins in 2009. It was nominated for multiple awards, including the Mary Higgins Clark Award, and won the David Award for Best Mystery Novel of 2010. Never Tell a Lie was also made into the Lifetime film And Baby Will Fall. 
 
Hallie combined writing talent with a love of teaching in Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock ‘Em Dead with Style (Writers Digest Books). The book was nominated for Edgar and for Anthony awards. She also wrote The Everything Guide to Writing Your First Novel. Hallie is also is an award-winning book reviewer for the Boston Globe where her column "On Crime" appears every month. She lives near Boston with her husband and has two wonderful daughters. Hallie can be found at her website or blogging at Jungle Red.

Hallie Ephron:

For my new suspense novel "Come and Find Me" I created Diana Highsmith, a young woman so traumatized by loss that she's afraid to leave her home. She's a former hacker who was about to go legit, using her experience to help companies protect themselves, when the man she loved was killed in a climbing accident.

I knew just what Diana would do--she'd create a life for herself on the Internet while barricading herself behind locked doors, fire walls, and security systems. What I didn't know was whether that was possible. Did the world which I envisioned as 3-D virtual reality exist?

Like most everyone else who lives in Massachusetts, I'd worked in high tech and had tons of friends who still did. So I started asking around and I quickly discovered that there were a number of virtual worlds out there, and the one called Second Life seemed to fit the bill.

Could Diana make a living as a computer consultant, operating in the virtual world of Second Life, while remaining safely barricaded in her own house? Absolutely.  She would have created her alter ego, an avatar to represent herself. She could have bought an "island" in Second Life, as have real companies like Coca-Cola and IBM, where her avatar could meet with the avatars of real clients in virtual conference rooms. She could hang out with other avatars--friends she's never met in person. And she could shop for virtual clothes for her avatar or real clothes for herself--which immediately suggested to me the idea that she might buy herself the same outfit her avatar wears, and maybe, just maybe, wearing them would help her step out into the real world.

To create a world that felt authentic, I had to try it out myself. Armed with enough information to be dangerous, I created an account and logged into Second Life. First, I created an avatar. That was easy. Moving her around was not.

I'm not a gamer, so I'm pathetically ineffept at the fine art of using a mouse and arrow keys. I knew my avatar could walk, run, fly, sit, and teleport, but I couldn't keep her from bumping into furniture. Once I got her sitting on a chair I had to access HELP to figure out how to get her up again.

It was exhilarating when I finally got her aloft, watching like I was perched on her shoulder as she soared over the island at the entrance to Second Life. Not so exhilarating seconds later when she plunged into the ocean. I actually found myself gasping for breath, then panicking when I couldn't quickly get her out.

So most of what I learned about Second Life (in the book I call a similar place OtherWorld) was gleaned by talking to folks who play and work there, generous souls who let me ride shotgun while they went about their business in 3-D virtual reality. Among other things, I learned that a good percentage of men with accounts on SecondLife have female avatars. I learned that even bucolic corners of the virtual world could be infested by "griefers," mischief-makers who enjoy raining down toasters or flying phalluses or dropping cages to trap the avatars of unsuspecting players. The first time I experienced a griefer, even though I wasn't at the controls, I was genuinely terrified.

While in most places in Second Life, avatars can't get hurt, other places are "damage enabled." In combat sims, avatars compete against one another with awe-inspiring weapons. It's hard, but not impossible, for an avatar to get completely destroyed, but while I was writing the book I found a news article about a wife who managed to kill her ex-husband's avatar after he divorced her. I definitely had to use that. Somehow.

The more  I learned about Second Life, the more I started to feel like a kid in a playground loaded with new toys. I had to pick and choose (falling toasters or flying phalluses?) among them. I also had to sand down my geeky edges, realizing that most of my readers are not nearly as fascinated by technology as I am.

Incidentally, when I started writing the book, its working title was "Avatar."

Mystery Bytes: News

According to Inside TV, Robert Wagner will be playing the voice of Charlie  in an ABC production of Charlie's Angels. He will be replacing the late John Forsythe. When asked if he'll continue to use a speakerphone to communicate with the angels, he said, "I would imagine it will probably be quite different because the technology is quite different. I would imagine it would be on cell phones wherever these gals are." Though Wagner hasn't seen any scripts yet, he adds, "I could be tweeting them, I could be doing a lot of things with them, you know."

Hallie Ephron's Never Tell a Lie has been made into a Lifetime TV Movie as And Baby Will Fall that will air on 1/23 at 8 EST. Her new suspense novel, Come and Find Me, will be out on March 11 from William Morrow.

According to Andrew F. Gulli, Managing Editor of The Strand Magazine, an unpublished Dashiell Hammett story will appear in Strand Magazine. "So I Shot Him," a 19-page crime thriller written by Hammett will appear in the winter/spring issue of Strand Magazine. Gulli found the undated story, and 14 others by Hammett while looking through archives at the University of Texas in Austin. The Strand, a quarterly based in Birmingham, Mich., has recently published little known works by Graham Greene, Mark Twain and Agatha Christie.

For those of you in the Twitterverse, BV Lawson has put together an extensive list of Mystery Authors and related Mystery Folks on Twitter.  Go HERE.

January Magazine says that talks are under way over a TV detective series set in Bath during Jane Austen's time. 8 one hour episodes have been written and will be filmed next year in Bath. The Regency Detective has been created by Bath-based scriptwriters David Lassman and Terence James and is billed as showing the darker side of the period. It will be set in the period between 1800 and 1805 when Austen lived in the city, and the writer may make a cameo appearance in an episode. It will be directed by Giles Foster, whose previous credits includes Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the award-winning Hotel Du Lac and Four Seasons. The series revolves around ex-Bow Street Runner Jack Swann, who moves from London to Bath and each week confronts the city’s villains. Read more HERE.

Doug Levin explores the relationship between Academics and Hardboiled Detective Fiction with Megan Abbott, Ken Wishnia and Bill Crider. Great article on the Mulholland Book Blog.

By now, you've probably heard the sad news that the Mystery Bookstore Los Angeles will close at the end of the month. The Rap Sheet has put together a list of several tributes to the store. “The Mystery Bookstore Will Close,” by Carolyn Kellogg (Los Angeles Times); “The Mystery Bookstore to Close,” by Wendy Werris (Publishers Weekly); “Losing a Legend,” by Eric Beetner; “Some Mystery Bookstore Memories,” by Lee Goldberg (A Writer’s Life); “Somebody Kick the Fat Lady Back in Her Dressing Room,” by Stephen Blackmoore (L.A. Noir); “Grim-Lit Serial Killer Strikes Again in Westwood!” by Denise Hamilton (L.A. Observed).

Janet Rudolph on Jungle Red Writers Blog

Want to find out more about me (Janet Rudolph)? and about 6 fabulous writers? Go to Jungle Red Writers. Hallie Ephron interviewed me yesterday on this great Blog. O.K., I'm not all that interesting, but check out the other interviews and blogs and websites.

Hallie Ephron just got a starred review in PW for her new stand-alone Never Tell a Lie (HarperCollins 1/09). Rhys Bowen is Guest of Honor at Left Coast Crime 2009. Other members of Jungle Red Writers: Rosemary Harris, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Jan Brogan and Roberta Isleib.