Showing posts with label Historical Mysteries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Historical Mysteries. Show all posts

Sunday, March 22, 2026

News: ANNE PERRY'S FINAL DANIEL PITT MYSTERY

Completed posthumously by Anne Perry’s close friend and longtime collaborator Victoria Zackheim, DEATH TIMES SEVEN, the final in her Daniel Pitt mystery series, is a moving farewell -- rich in intrigue, moral complexity, and courtroom drama, and a fitting final chapter. Publication date in April 14.

About the Book:  Two violent crimes challenge the investigative skills of young Daniel Pitt and his wife, Miriam, in the final novel of iconic mystery writer Anne Perry's beloved Daniel Pitt series.

1913: Junior attorney Daniel Pitt must step in for his friend, fellow attorney Toby Kitteridge, whose parents have been brutally attacked. Toby's mother is dead and his father, a village vicar, is barely alive. With Toby returning to the family home in rural Ipswich, struggling with grief and disbelief, Daniel remains in London to substitute for Toby and defend Peter Ward, on trial for the sexual assault and murder of a young woman.

Daniel is convinced that Ward is innocent, yet the evidence seems to prove otherwise. Eager to assist, his pathologist wife, Miriam fford Croft, offers her forensics expertise and exposes a community of fellow pathologists who may have purposefully omitted information from their autopsy reports. Despite Miriam’s involvement in the case, Daniel finds himself distracted by his desire to help Toby, who is too distraught to investigate the attack on his parents. And when the evidence points to Toby’s father as the killer of Toby’s mother, Daniel faces two of the greatest challenges of his young career: proving the innocence of both Peter Ward and Reverend Kitteridge. One mistake in London and a blameless man will hang. One mistake in Ipswich and Toby’s father will go to prison for life.


Daniel is convinced that Ward is innocent, yet the evidence seems to prove otherwise. Eager to assist, his pathologist wife, Miriam fford Croft, offers her forensics expertise and exposes a community of fellow pathologists who may have purposefully omitted information from their autopsy reports. Despite Miriam’s involvement in the case, Daniel finds himself distracted by his desire to help Toby, who is too distraught to investigate the attack on his parents. And when the evidence points to Toby’s father as the killer of Toby’s mother, Daniel faces two of the greatest challenges of his young career: proving the innocence of both Peter Ward and Reverend Kitteridge. One mistake in London and a blameless man will hang. One mistake in Ipswich and Toby’s father will go to prison for life.

Death Times Seven, the seventh and final novel in Anne Perry’s Daniel Pitt series, was completed by Victoria Zackheim, an author and editor as well as Perry’s close friend. 

About the Authors
Anne Perry was the bestselling author of two acclaimed series set in Victorian England: the William Monk novels and the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels. She was also the author of a series featuring Charlotte and Thomas Pitt's son, Daniel, as well as the Elena Standish series; a series of five World War I novels; twenty-one holiday novels; and a historical novel, The Sheen on the Silk, set in the Byzantine Empire. Anne Perry died in 2023.

Victoria Zackheim is the author of two novels, including The Curtain Falls in Paris, and editor of seven anthologies. Zackheim is also an essayist and playwright and teaches creative nonfiction and memoir in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She is a frequent conference speaker and writing instructor.

Sunday, April 6, 2025

KERRY GREENWOOD: R.I.P.

Sad news. Australian Kerry Greenwood, author of the Phyrne Fisher mysteries, died on March 26, at the age of 70. I really enjoyed all of her books. She will be missed. 

Kerry Greenwood published the first Phryne Fisher novel, Cocaine Blues, in 1989 and went on to write 22 novels featuring the glamorous 1920s detective. An adaptation of the series, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (2012), starred Essie Davis in the lead role and ran for three seasons.

Kerry Greenwood, who was also known for the Corinna Chapman mysteries, was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2020.

Alongside her career as a professional writer, Greenwood worked as a legal aid solicitor in Melbourne, Australia.


From ABC Australia:
A new Phryne Fisher novel in the works. Greenwood's latest novel, Murder in the Cathedral — number 23 in the Phryne Fisher series — is due out late in 2025.
On March 18, in her last Facebook post, Greenwood shared an update about the forthcoming book.
"Murder in the Cathedral (the newest Phryne) is undergoing transformation from an extensively edited Word file into proper pages. This is a slow process, involving mysterious alchemy, scattering of rose petals, muttered incantations and the like, but it progresses," she wrote.


Monday, January 29, 2024

"Rough Cider" in the Making by Peter Lovesey

This article appeared in the Mystery Readers Journal: Murder in Wartime (33:2), Summer 2017. Check out the Table of Contents for this and other articles focusing on Murder in Wartime. Rough Cider is one of Peter Lovesey's favorite books...and mine! 
Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.

Rough Cider in the Making by Peter Lovesey

The book of mine closest to my own experience is Rough Cider, written over thirty years ago in 1986. It has remained in print and is often mentioned by readers as a personal favourite, a non-series ‘one-off’ written in the first person as if by a university lecturer, who is persuaded or compelled to recall traumatic events from 1943 in rural England during World War II. Much of it drew on my own memories of being made homeless and moved from suburban London to a farm in the West Country.

In 1944 my home was destroyed by a V-1 rocket, one of those pilotless planes that Hitler sent over from France. Miraculously, all my family survived while everyone in the other half of the semi-detached house was killed. My mother had gone shopping when the air-raid siren sounded. She had left two of her three sons in the house. I was at school nearby and our father was away in the army. Mother had told my brother John, who was 14, to make sure that if the warning came he took my younger brother, Andrew, who was 3, under the Morrison shelter—a cast-iron table that had been offered by the government to all houses within range of the rockets. The table held up under the weight of the rubble and the two boys were dug out alive.

Being homeless, we slept for a few nights on the vicar’s living-room floor until arrangements were made to send us to a temporary home out of London. So my mother and her three sons took a long train journey to Cornwall in the West Country and were found accommodation on an isolated farm. The farmer and his wife and grown-up son had no choice but to accept this family from miles away. We were ‘billeted’—to use the terminology of the time. With hindsight I can understand how our hosts must have felt to have a woman in a state of shock and three noisy kids foisted on them at harvest time, but for us it was difficult to understand why we were not more welcome. The farmhouse was dark inside and lit by oil-lamps, and had curtains across all the doors to keep draughts to a minimum. As an 8-year-old, I found it spooky. Good thing I wasn’t without my family, as many so-called evacuees had found themselves earlier in the war when they were sent to the country for their own safety.

We didn’t remain there long—perhaps as little as a month. My father, on compassionate leave, found us a temporary house back in London, and we returned, much relieved, to the bomb-infested suburbs. But the memory of that time is still vivid in my mind. When I came to write Rough Cider forty years later, it was easy to get back into the thought process of a child, watching events unfold without fully understanding them. I began the book with a sentence that plunges the reader straight into that world:

“When I was nine, I fell in love with a girl of twenty called Barbara, who killed herself.”

Of course, the writer’s imagination moves on from remembered things to events that didn’t happen in reality. There was no suicide on the farm, no murder and no cider that I can recall. But the novel is centered around a plot involving an American soldier posted to England, and as a boy I did get to meet GIs at the local American Army base. After our return to London, we Lovesey boys were invited to a party put on specially by the GIs for ‘bombed-out’ kids—and it was wonderful. I can still remember the silent films they projected onto a screen for us—Buster Keaton and Chaplin—and the magician, and the food! Food we didn’t know existed. I was one of the first British children to taste a Hershey Bar and chewing gum. No wonder I can understand how the boy Theo came to idolize the soldier called Duke.
So there it is. I mustn’t give away more of the plot. Rough Cider remains a personal favorite for reasons you will now understand.
***

Peter Lovesey has several series, including historical mysteries, as well as short stories, and stand-alone crime fiction. His books are fabulous reads.. all of them. 

Awards: Macmillan/Panther First Crime Novel Award, 1970, for Wobble to Death; Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award, 1977, 1995, and 1996, Gold Dagger Award, 1983, for The False Inspector Dew; Veuve Clicquot/Crime Writers Association Short Story Award, 1985; Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, 1985; Prix du Roman d'Aventures, 1987; finalist for Best Novel award, Mystery Writers of America, 1988, for Rough Cider, and 1996, for The Summons; Ellery Queen Readers award, 1991; Anthony Award for best novel, 1992, for The Last Detective; Mystery Writers of America Golden Mysteries Short Story Prize, 1995; Crime Writers Association Macavity Award for Best Novel, 1997, for Bloodhounds, and 2004, for The House Sitter; Crime Writers Association Cartier Diamond Dagger Award, 2000, for lifetime Achievement.

Monday, January 15, 2024

2024 Left Coast Crime “Lefty” Award Nominations


Left Coast Crime 2024 will be presenting four Lefty Awards at our 34th annual convention, to be held this April in Bellevue, Washington: Humorous, Historical, Debut, and Best
. The awards will be voted on at the convention and presented at a banquet on Saturday, April 13, at the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue. 

The Lefty nominees have been selected by convention registrants, and LCC is delighted to announce the 2024 Lefty Award nominees for books published in 2023:

Lefty for Best Humorous Mystery Novel. The nominees are:

 • Jennifer J. Chow, Hot Pot Murder (Berkley Prime Crime)
 • Lee Matthew Goldberg, The Great Gimmelmans (Level Best Books)
 • Leslie Karst, A Sense for Murder (Severn House)
 • Catriona McPherson, Hop Scot (Severn House)
 • Cindy Sample, Dying for a Decoration (Cindy Sample Books)
 • Wendall Thomas, Cheap Trills (‎Beyond the Page Books)

Lefty for Best Historical Mystery Novel for books set before 1970 (The Bill Gottfried Memorial). The nominees are:

 • Cara Black, Night Flight to Paris (Soho Crime)
 • Bruce Borgos, The Bitter Past (Minotaur Books)
 • Susanna Calkins, Death Among the Ruins (Severn House)
 • Dianne Freeman, A Newlywed’s Guide to Fortune and Murder (Kensington)
 • Cheryl A. Head, Time’s Undoing (Dutton)
 • Naomi Hirahara, Evergreen (Soho Crime)

Lefty for Best Debut Mystery Novel. The nominees are:

 • Lina Chern, Play the Fool (Bantam)
 • Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (Gillian Flynn Books)
 • Josh Pachter, Dutch Threat (Genius Book Publishing)
 • Ana Reyes, The House in the Pines (Dutton)
 • Nina Simon, Mother-Daughter Murder Night (William Morrow)

Lefty for Best Mystery Novel (not in other categories). The nominees are:

 • Tracy Clark, Hide (Thomas & Mercer)
 • S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron Books)
 • Matt Coyle, Odyssey’s End (Oceanview Publishing)
 • Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows (Mulholland Books)
 • James L’Etoile, Face of Greed (Oceanview Publishing)
 • Gigi Pandian, The Raven Thief (Minotaur Books)

The Left Coast Crime Convention is an annual event sponsored by mystery fans, both readers and authors. Held in the western half of North America, LCC’s intent is to host an event where readers, authors, critics, librarians, publishers, and other fans can gather in convivial surroundings to pursue their mutual interests. Lefty Awards have been given since 1996. 

In 2020, Left Coast Crime received the Raven Award from Mystery Writers of America, for “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing.”

The 34th annual Left Coast Crime Convention will take place in Bellevue, Washington, April 11-14, 2024. This year’s Guests of Honor are authors Megan Abbott and Robert Dugoni. Fran Fuller is the Fan Guest of Honor, and author Wanda Morris will serve as Toastmaster.

Left Coast Crime is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation holding annual mystery conventions in the West. Each LCC convention raises money to support a local literary organization, and is staffed entirely by volunteers.

For more information on Left Coast Crime 2024, please visit https://leftcoastcrime.org/2024/
Lucinda Surber & Stan Ulrich, Lefty Awards Co-Chairs


Tuesday, February 8, 2022

CWA DIAMOND DAGGER GOES TO CJ SANSOM

CJ Sansom
is the recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger. Congratulations!

One of Britain’s bestselling historical novelists, Christopher John Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh. He was educated at Birmingham University with a BA and then a PhD in history. After working in a variety of jobs, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer.

He combined both history and law in his debut novel Dissolution – a darkly fascinating novel of monastic murder and politics.

CJ Sansom said: “I feel so honoured to be awarded this year’s Diamond Dagger, and my heartfelt thanks to the CWA members and committee. Wonderful to think I now join such a distinguished group of authors. To think it all started with the idea that a novel set around Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries might make a good story. Thank you.”

Maxim Jakubowski, Chair of the CWA, said: “C J Sansom has proven himself to be the modern master of the historical thriller, regardless of periods. Equally at ease evoking sixteenth century England, Spain in the aftermath of its Civil War or even an alternate post-WW2 Britain, he weaves a web of compelling reality around his characters and brings the past to life like no other, making him a splendid and deserved addition to the prestigious ranks of Diamond Dagger winners.”

Published in 2003, Dissolution was an immediate bestseller, and critical success. Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter called it ‘extraordinarily impressive’, while PD James described it as ‘remarkable’.

This success sparked the bestselling Shardlake series, set in the reign of Henry VIII and following the sixteenth-century lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak.

Now running to well over four million copies in print, it is one of the most successful crime series of all time.

After Dissolution came Dark Fire, which won the 2005 Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger.

He has also written a thriller, Winter in Madrid, set in Spain in 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.

The CWA Diamond Dagger is selected from nominations provided by CWA members. The award recognises authors whose crime writing careers have been marked by sustained excellence, and who have made a significant contribution to the genre.

CJ Sansom joins icons of the genre who have been recognised with the accolade, including Ruth Rendell, Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Ian Rankin, PD James, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, Lindsey Davis, Peter Lovesey, John Le Carré and Martina Cole.

The Diamond Dagger is announced before the annual CWA Dagger Awards, dubbed the ‘Oscars of the crime genre’, due to be awarded this June.

Sunday, October 17, 2021

HISTORICALS: Stepping into the Past - Crafting the Historical Mystery: MWA NorCal

Mystery Writers of America NorCal continues panels and events celebrating Mystery Month. All events are free. Please register. 

Wednesday, October 20
HISTORICALS: Stepping into the Past – Crafting the Historical Mystery
Via Zoom; advance registration required
5 PM Pacific Time

Historical: of, relating to, or having the character of history; History: a branch of knowledge that records and explains past events.

How are readers transported into the past through novels? Join us, on Zoom, for this discussion to hear how historical mysteries are imbued with vibrant descriptions of the culture and consciousness of the past. How life was lived in a different time and place, and how crimes were solved using only wit, wisdom, intelligence, and the technology at hand – which did not include cell phones or GPS!

Moderator: Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of 28 novels and other works, including the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes stories. She has been a member of MWA since dinosaurs walked the earth, was president of the NorCal chapter for years, and is probably the only writer to have both an Edgar and an honorary doctorate in theology.

Panelists:

  • Catriona McPherson is a crime-fiction writer over many genres: modern psychological thrillers, 1930s detective stories with a gently-born lady sleuth (After the Armistice Ball is the first); and comedies set in California.
  • Ann Parker earned degrees in Physics and English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her award-winning Silver Rush historical mystery series is set in the 1880s silver boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, and features Silver Queen Saloon owner Inez Stannert. The first in the series, Silver Lies, won the Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction and the Colorado Gold Award and was a finalist for the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award as well as for the Western Writers Association Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. It was chosen a best mystery of the year by Publishers Weekly and the Chicago Tribune.
  • Michael J. Cooper immigrated to Israel in 1966 and lived in Jerusalem during the last year the city was divided between Israel and Jordan. He studied and traveled in the region for eleven years and graduated from medical school in Tel Aviv. Cooper now lives in Northern California.
  • Priscilla Royal is the author of several books in the Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas medieval mystery series, grew up in British Columbia and earned a BA in World Literature at San Francisco State University where she discovered the beauty of medieval literature.

Register Here

Saturday, July 10, 2021

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES II: Mystery Readers Journal (37:2)

Mystery Readers Journal: Historical Mysteries II
(Volume 37:2// Summer 2021) is now available as PDF and hardcopy. If you're a PDF subscriber, you should have received download instructions. Hard copy subscription copies should arrive soon. PDF Contributor Copies will go out tomorrow. Don't forget, Historical Mysteries I (37:1) is still available. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this issue.

Historical Mysteries II

Volume 37, No. 2, Summer 2021

Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARTICLES

  • Joe Gores’ Dashiell Hammett by Catherine Accardi
  • Ireland in the 1930s and 40s in Michael Russell’s Stefan Gillespie Novels by David Clark
  • History, Mystery & the Female Protagonist by Vinnie Hansen
  • Megan Abbott and the Evolution of Noir by Sean Day
  • Epochal or Historical? It’s Still a Mystery! by Chiara Giacobbe
  • Music Defines a Decade by Sandra Murphy

AUTHOR! AUTHOR!

  • Not Another 1920s Mystery by Saffron Amatti
  • The Primary Reasons I Like Primary Sources by Anne Louise Bannon
  • Keeping it Real: The Challenge of Writing a Strong Historical Heroine by Mally Becker
  • The Case of the Missing River-Map by J. F. Benedetto
  • Who’s Hiding In That Ancient House? by Cordelia Frances Biddle
  • Mysteries Set in Places with History by Suzanne J. Bratcher
  • Keeping it Fresh: Writing a Long Running Historical Series by Emily Brightwell
  • Searching for the Roots of History by Rebecca Cantrell
  • Hands, Hearts and History by Charles Colley
  • “And Put a Crime in It…” by Ruth Downie
  • Excavations of Violence: Why History Makes the Best Mystery by Mariah Fredericks
  • Should I Tinker with the Facts? by Jim Fusilli
  • The Art and Madness of Writing Historical Mystery Novels by Harald Gilbers
  • Pirates Make Unreliable Witnesses by Steve Goble
  • “Historical Fiction” Is an Oxymoron by Hal Glatzer
  • Writing the Stories I Love to Read by Anna Lee Huber
  • Travelling Through Time with Sherlock Holmes by Robert J. Harris
  • The Mystery Inside “The Baptism” by Gerald Everett Jones
  • A Lady and a Swordsman by Kathleen Marple Kalb
  • History as a Red Herring by Ron Katz
  • It’s Not My Fault I Write Historical Mysteries by Ken Kuhlken
  • Hunting Hitler in Hollywood by Susan Elia MacNeal
  • My Family Secret: An Eyewitness to India’s Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 by Nev March
  • What’s Really Inside the Carnival in Not Like Us by Darrin McGraw and Robert McGraw
  • Imagining History: Writing Death on the Homefront by Frances McNamara
  • Accidental Chronicler by Catriona McPherson
  • How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mystery by Timothy Miller
  • Writing What You Don’t Know But Can Research by Sandra Murphy
  • San Francisco’s Cliff House: The History (and the Mystery) by Ann Parker
  • The Art of Creating an Historical Heroine by Andrea Penrose
  • A Talking Snake and Other Mysteries by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer
  • Two Authors in Search of Ideas by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
  • Haunted by History by Erika Robuck
  • The Responsibilities of Historical Fiction by Kelli Stanley
  • The Thousand Piece Puzzle by Susan Tornga
  • Recreating the Past by Sylvia Maultash Warsh
  • Closer Than You Think by Clare Whitfield
  • An Unlikely Home to Criminal Debuts by Gabriel Valjan
  • Helen of Troy—Just Another Pretty Face? by N. S. Wikarski
  • The Past Isn’t Dead, It Isn’t Even Past by Kenneth Wishnia
  • From True Crime to Historical Mystery by W.A. Winter

COLUMNS

  • Mystery in Retrospect: Reviews by Benjamin L. Clark, Lesa Holstine, Peter Handel, Amy Renshaw, L.J. Roberts, Lucinda Surber
  • Children’s Hour: Historical Mysteries by Gay Toltl Kinman
  • Crime Seen: History Mystery Around the World by Kate Derie
  • Real History Mysteries by Cathy Pickens
  • In Short: History Mystery by Marv Lachman
  • From the Editor’s Desk by Janet A. Rudolph

***

SUBSCRIBE to Mysteries Readers Journal for 2021

Themes in 2021: History Mysteries 1; History Mysteries 2; Texas; Cold Cases. 

Call for articles: We're looking for reviews, articles, and Author! author! essays. Review: 50-150 words, articles, 500-1000 words. Author Essays: 500-1000 words, first person, upclose and personal about yourself, your books, and the "theme" connection. Deadline for Texas: July 20, 2021.  

Send queries to Janet Rudolph: janet @ mysteryreaders . org

Friday, October 30, 2020

GREAT EXPECTATIONS: Guest Post by Libby Hellmann

LIBBY HELLMANN:

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The most common question authors are asked about a new novel is: “Where did you get the idea?” At the beginning of my career, I used to answer, “At the Idea Store, of course.” But time mellows us, and I no longer try to be so sarcastic. Partly because I’m trying to be more courteous, but more importantly, I’m not sure it’s the most important question to ask. 

I’d rather be asked about my expectations for the novel. What do I want it to be remembered for, if at all? What will its legacy will be? Where do I hope it will end up, in the scheme of all things “book”? 

Much of that is unknowable when a book is first released. As an author, I’m still worried whether the plot and characters are well enough developed, whether the cover reinforces the book, and if I’ve smoothed out that passage on page 235. It’s only over time that the novel’s place in literature becomes clear. 

I’ve had a little time to think about A BEND IN THE RIVER, and what I hope its legacy will be, so that’s what I’d like to share. 

Emotional Involvement 

BEND was clearly a departure for me. While I have written four historical thrillers, they’ve pretty much adhered to the craft of mystery and suspense, where plot is carefully constructed. We anguish about where to put the red herrings or what obstacles the protagonist will face. Take those tasks out of the equation, though, and different issues arise. Will the story have enough emotional clout? Will readers identify with the characters more deeply? Will readers still want to follow them, even though their journey is less defined? 

Paradoxically, those questions freed me. One of my complaints is that I hate to write, but I love having written. This time I actually enjoyed the writing. Because I wasn’t as worried about the overall plot, I was able to concentrate on each incident and how it affected the two sisters. What were their fears when they confronted a new obstacle? What strengths did they bring to the problem? Were those qualities credible in terms of who they were? Did they succeed or fail? What did they learn or not learn? Most important, how could I show all of this rather than tell? For me the process was more natural and organic than writing a mystery. I could really focus on who they were. And when readers tell me they shed a tear here and there, I think to myself, “I got it right.” 

Education 

Two generations of Americans have grown up since the Vietnam War, and for most of them, Vietnam is just a cursory historical explanation squeezed in during the Cold War. Or a story told by a grandfather who was there or knew someone who was. 

Essentially, the Vietnam war was a civil war that began before the US got involved. After the French left the country (they colonized Vietnam for decades) the US justified our involvement as a fight against Communism and the “Domino Theory.” But that wasn’t the motivation from the Vietnamese side. They wanted their country to be unified. The problem was that the North was Communist, and the South was bitterly anti-Communist. 

Most of Western literature about Vietnam has, until recently, been written from the American point of view. Former soldiers and participants in the war have written some beautiful memoirs and books, even short stories. But until The Sympathizer, there wasn’t much written from the Vietnamese point of view. Recently, there’s been more, and I saw an opportunity to provide information and context for Westerners, even though I’m not Vietnamese. I wanted to offer a fictional account based on accurate research and facts. So you can imagine how delighted I was when one reviewer said, “It offers interesting nuance and added depth to a war we thought we knew but maybe did not entirely understand.” 

Themes 

Finally, I am drawn to stories about ordinary people in extraordinary times. It’s been the central premise of all my historical thrillers. In this context A Bend In the River joins the ranks. We are taught that in fiction there must be conflict on every page. Since I tend to go to extremes, a war or revolution becomes a vehicle through which many layers of conflict can be explored. Still, conflict is best illustrated by individual characters. Who becomes a hero? Who remains a coward? Why? What are the repercussions for them? Do the good guys win? I’m always eager to explore those themes, and I had the chance to do so in BEND

Will I write more historical fiction? You can bet on it. I love doing the research, imagining the characters who might have lived through the period, and the freedom I felt when writing about them. Still, there are new stories to be told in my crime fiction series. Georgia Davis tells me she has an idea for her next outing, and Ellie Foreman just handed over her most of her investigations to her daughter, Rachel in Virtually Undetectable. So I’m torn. What to do next? If you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

***

Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago 35 years ago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. Thirteen novels and twenty short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery writing community and has even won a few. More at https://libbyhellmann.com

Friday, May 18, 2018

HISTORY IS MYSTERY: Guest Post by Victoria Thompson

VICTORIA THOMPSON:
HISTORY IS MYSTERY

The twenty-first book in my Gaslight Mystery Series, Murder on Union Square, came out on May 1. When I started the series back in 1999, I never dreamed it would go on so long, and I have my faithful fans to thank for that. They apparently love revisiting turn-of-the-century New York as much as I do. Sometimes a fan will tell me how much they like the series and then add, “I don’t know why I like it so much. I hated history in school!”

Because didn’t we all hate history in school? Who enjoys memorizing dates and the names of kings and dry facts about wars and treaties and stuff? Nobody does, but don’t we all love a good, juicy piece of gossip? Learning about the Reformation sounds really dull until you know that King Henry VIII split England off from the Roman Catholic Church because he wanted to divorce his aging wife and marry his hot, young girlfriend!

I first became really interested in history when I was in Elementary School and picked up a book called Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada at the school library. I probably chose it because of the picture of Queen Elizabeth on the cover and because it’s about a queen instead of a king. I probably also thought an Armada was some kind of a ball. Getting to the part about the Spanish Armada (which was a bunch of ships and not a ball at all and which fought the British navy in a battle I never really understood) took a long time, though. The author spent the first half of the book explaining Henry VIII and his six wives and how his many marriages eventually resulted in King Edward, Queen Mary and finally Elizabeth, a new religion and a war with Spain. Talk about gossip! This story is loaded with it, along with jealousy, betrayal, and several beheadings. I didn’t even mind the part about the naval battle. If this was history, I was hooked!

I have been hooked ever since. I still hate memorizing dates and battles and treaties, but I love learning the story behind the dates and battles and treaties. Those are stories about real people doing things real people do that have real consequences. Kings and Queens aren’t very different from the rest of us except that lots more people care if they lie or betray their values or are unfaithful to their spouses. And everyone loves hearing a story that makes them say, in astonishment, “I didn’t know that!”

So this is why I love writing historical fiction. Most people cringe when they hear the word research, but the research is the best part of my job. I admit I skim a lot of it. I’m still not interested in the dates or the battles, but I love finding that tidbit that makes me say, “I didn’t know that!” Because I figure if I didn’t know it, you probably didn’t either, and you’re going to be just as excited as I was to learn about it. So that’s what goes in my books—all the good, astonishing stuff we didn’t know because history class was too full of dates and stuff.

Murder on Union Square takes place in 1899. Frank and Sarah Malloy are trying to adopt the little girl Sarah rescued from a mission, but they run into a snag. They need permission from a man they have no reason to trust, and when he turns up dead, Frank finds himself accused of his murder. The victim was an actor, and I found out some very interesting things about the theater in turn of the century New York. I might have called this book Murder in Times Square, except Times Square didn’t yet exist in 1899. I might have called it Murder on Broadway, too, but Broadway wasn’t yet lined with theaters. Have you said, “I didn’t know that!” yet? I hope you’ll say it a lot as you read Murder on Union Square (which was the heart of the theater district in 1899—bet you didn’t know that!).

And I promise you won’t have to memorize a single date.

***

Victoria Thompson is the bestselling author of the Edgar ® and Agatha Award nominated Gaslight Mystery Series and the new Counterfeit Lady Series. Her latest books are Murder on Union Square and City of Lies, both from Berkley. She currently teaches in the Master’s Degree program for writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University. She lives in Illinois with her husband and a very spoiled little dog.

Monday, April 3, 2017

I Didn't Want to Write a Mystery: Guest post by Michelle Cox

Michelle Cox is the author of the Henrietta and Inspector Howard series. The second novel in the series, A Ring of Truth (April 4, 2017, She Writes Press) is releasing a year after the release of A Girl Like You. Cox is the winner of the 2016 Beverly Hills Book Award and finalist in the 2016 USA Best Book Awards, Next Generation Indies and Chanticleer Mystery and Mayhem Awards.

Michelle Cox:
I Didn’t Want to Write a Mystery . . . 

I’ll admit it. Writing a mystery was not my first inclination when I decided to try my hand at a novel.

Originally I wanted to write a straight-up historical fiction piece based on the story of a woman I had met in a nursing home a couple of decades ago. At the time, I was the nursing home’s admissions director turned social worker, and one of my jobs was to collect stories. They were supposed to be only a paragraph or so, the basic facts of a person’s life, but I couldn’t help but expand them, taking my own notes and often spending several weeks with just one person, talking and listening and asking.

 One woman—I’ll call her Adelaide for now—took a particular shine to me after our lengthy interviews were over and would follow me about the home, often reminding me in a querulous voice that once upon a time, she had had “a man-stopping body and a personality to go with it!” It made me smile every time I heard it, imagining her as a buxom, auburn-haired young woman making her way in the 1930’s Chicago. Even then I could see this story had potential.

So when I did start writing my novel, A Girl Like You, almost 25 years later, I naturally turned to Adeline’s story and began to borrow many of the details: her exquisite beauty, her long string of strange jobs in Depression-era Chicago, her family history, the neighborhood boy that followed her around town to protect her, and even the gang of lesbians who befriended her at a burlesque theater. I put all of these real-life elements into the book and out of them sculpted my heroine, Henrietta Von Harmon, and a few other characters to boot.

But while it’s all fine and good to have great characters sketched out, they need a plot to drive them. And while a mystery was not what I had set out to write, it occurred to me that said genre would provide the perfect vehicle for the characters to have something tangible to do—solve a mystery! And as I examined my early outlines, I had to admit that I already had all the makings of a great thriller: a young, innocent girl trying to make her way in the Depression-era Chicago; a string of strange, seedy jobs; a burlesque theater; a neighborhood stalker.

All I needed was to add a few essential details:

The crime: Murder? Naturally. The dance hall matron obliged.

The suspects: The disgruntled band members? The foxy bartender? The creepy owner of the burlesque theater?

The motive: Blackmail? Robbery? Prostitution?

Check, check and check. Yes . . . these could work, I thought, rubbing my hands together with an evil grin.

But even as I was beginning to plot, I realized that something else was lacking . . . like a love interest, let’s say. And as Adelaide had not revealed this part of her life to me despite my questioning (another mystery?), I needed to invent one for poor Henrietta. Should it be the neighbor boy? Or someone older and more mature, like, say, the Detective Inspector? Yes . . . that could be interesting, couldn’t it? The older aloof detective who perhaps has some other interest in Henrietta beyond that of solving the case. Just what exactly are his motives, anyway? This could prove suspenseful in and of itself, I deliciously realized.

So I decided to proceed, structuring the story as a mystery but garnishing and gilding it with historical details, fitting the pieces together like a big jigsaw within a frame. It was intriguing (and dare I say, fun?) to rearrange them until I made them fit just right, shockingly discovering who the killer was along the way.

As I began to write the scenes in earnest, breathing life into the characters as they sifted through the clues and red herrings I cleverly (I’d like to think) sprinkled throughout the book, they became almost as real to me as the original Adelaide. I felt like I was stepping into their world with them and delighted in seeing Chicago in the 1930’s through their eyes—the smoky, corner bar where Henrietta works as a 26-girl, the grimy dance hall filled with taxi-dancers and lonely men, or even the church festival where Henrietta stumbles upon one of the suspects.

In fact, the characters became so real that I couldn’t bear to leave them, and I quickly deduced that the only way to stay with them would be to write them into a series. Hence, A Ring of Truth was born, in which Henrietta and the Inspector’s story continues to twist and turn around a whole new mysterious event, the loss of a servant’s ring on an estate on Chicago’s wealthy North Shore.

And so, as I typed “the end” on one story and feverishly began the next, I happily reflected that I had somehow managed to write both a historical fiction piece as well as a mystery and hoped that my readers would enjoy unraveling it as much as I enjoyed weaving it together. I also hoped that Adelaide, wherever she had gone to from this world, felt that I had done justice to her stranger-than-fiction story, giving her a slice of immortality in the process. Naturally, it was a woman with “a man-stopping body and a personality to go with it” could reasonably expect.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Priscilla Royal Literary Salon July 13

Join Mystery Readers NorCal for an afternoon Literary Salon in Berkeley, CA, with medieval historical mystery author Priscilla Royal.

Wednesday, July 13, Berkeley, CA 2 p.m.
Please RSVP for directions and to attend. Make a comment below with your email address.

Priscilla Royal has a degree in World Literature from San Francisco State University, where she discovered the beauty of medieval literature. She is a theater fan as well as a reader of history, mysteries, and fiction of lesser violence.

Priscilla grew up in British Columbia and until 2000, worked for the Federal government in a variety of positions, all of which provided a wonderful education in the complexity of human experience and motivation.

Her mysteries include Land of Shadows, Satan's Lullaby, Chambers of Death, Covenant with Hell, Favas Can Be Fatal, A Killing Season, Valley of Dry Bones, The Sanctity of Hate, Tyrant Of The Mind, Valley of Dry Bones, Forsaken Soul, Justice for the Damned, Sorrow without End, and Wine of Violence.

When not hiding in the thirteenth century, she lives in Northern California and is a member of the California Writers Club, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime.


Monday, May 23, 2016

Why All Writers Should Write Mysteries (at least once) by Martha Conway

Martha Conway’s  first novel was nominated for an Edgar Award, and her second novel, Thieving Forest, won the 2014 North American Book Award for Best Historical Fiction. Her short fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, The Carolina Quarterly Review, The Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Folio, and other journals. She teaches creative writing for Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program and UC Berkeley Extension, and is a recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship for Creative Writing. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she is one of seven sisters. She currently lives in San Francisco. Find Martha on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and her website: www.marthaconway.com  Her latest novel just launched: Sugarland: A Jazz Age Mystery

Why All Writers Should Write Mysteries (at least once)
by Martha Conway, author of Sugarland: A Jazz Age Mystery

Far be it from me to say that writers should try different genres—or write anything other than what they want to write—but I have recently heard myself say to two different writers that everyone should write at least one mystery, for the purposes of craft.

I’ve written in a few different genres now: mystery, historical mystery, and historical fiction. My earliest publications were literary short stories, and my first novel fell into the chick-lit category (I didn’t even know what that was when I was writing it). But I think I really began to understand plot when I set out to write a mystery.

Mysteries have to be built scene by scene, with each development causing its own set of consequences. You have to keep the characters’ state of knowledge or ignorance in mind at all times. But most importantly, you have to keep your reader in mind. Are you, the writer, giving enough information, but not too much? Are you encouraging their questions? Are you allowing yourself to feel your way with them, even though you know the all the answers, so you can anticipate what they might wonder and exploit that?

It’s easy enough to say: when you write a novel, any novel, you want each scene to address what is happening in the plot and move that forward. But sometimes writers think, Oh I have to establish that the character is sympathetic, or a hypochondriac, or afraid of mice, so that a later scene is understandable. In a mystery, it’s a given that you are going to show that fear of mice while your detective is searching around an abandoned basement for a clue. And he or she will find a clue—or find something. In addition to revealing this phobia.

What I have found, and what’s been most helpful to me no matter what I write, is that writing a mystery forces me to create characters whose inner lives direct their actions. This is especially true of the bad guy, sure, but it can be applied to every character (and usually with interesting results). We sift through traits and experiences just as thoroughly as we check all the alibis for the night of the crime. Character is fate, as the Greeks would say. And isn’t that what a good mystery is all about? When we get to the end, we want readers to say, Ah, of course.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Tony Hays: R.I.P.

From Meredith Phillips, Editor
Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Co.
 
Tony Hays: R.I.P. at the age 58. His mystery, Shakespeare No More, will be published by Perseverance Press in September.

The only information on his death is from the funeral home's obituary

http://www.jenningsandayers.com/obituaries/Thomas-Hays-2/#!/Obituary

Since last fall, Tony, a Tennessee native, had been living in Saudi Arabia, teaching English as a second language. He contacted us frequently by email concerning the editing, proofs, and cover of his book. The last time we heard from him was a few weeks ago, when he said he was going to Luxor in Egypt on vacation. According to the obituary he fell ill there and died.

I never met Tony in person, and knew him only through emails. He was charming, collegial, and very cooperative in doing anything possible to benefit the book, and make it the best it could be. He was quite a scholar on Shakespeare and various theories on his possible murder. This was the first in a projected series about Shakespeare's friend, a Stratford constable. Tony had written a previous four-book Arthurian mystery series that garnered nine starred reviews and an award nomination. He will be missed from the company of historical mystery writers, as well as by other colleagues, friends, and family.

***

Tony Hays was a novelist and journalist who has visited nearly thirty countries, while living and teaching in six of them, including three and a half years in Kuwait. While writing his Arthurian mystery series, set in Dark Ages Britain (Tor/Forge), Tony continued to teach and lecture both at home and abroad. The first two volumes of his series, The Killing Way and The Divine Sacrifice, have been released to critical acclaim. The Stolen Bride and The Beloved Dead are also part of this series. He also wrote the Who's Who Dunit Series that includes Murder on the Twelfth Night and Murder in the Latin Quarter, as well as the non-series novel The Trouble with Patriots.

In addition to writing fiction, Tony Hays is a working journalist who has covered topics as varied as narcotics trafficking (earning his newspaper the Tennessee Press Association award for Public Service in 2000), political corruption, Civil War history, and the war on terror.

Read a PW interview with Tony Hays HERE.