Spring is springing

by Carola

Spring is my favourite season, and here in western Oregon we get 5 months--February through June. Here's some of what's blooming in my garden at present:

The North of England is not generally so lucky, so when Daisy Dalrymple, my 1920s sleuth, heads to Cheshire to write about historic Occles Hall (based on Little Moreton Hall), she doesn't expect to see beautiful flower gardens. But the Winter Garden is sheltered by high brick walls and Spring arrives early there. Unfortunately, what Daisy finds is a buried body...

The Winter Garden Mystery has just been reissued by St Martin's Minotaur with a wonderful new cover, to match the later books in the series.

 That's not all that is coming out in March--Another month, another audiobook! Having finally got around to it, Blackstone is producing the Daisy Dalrymple audios at a great rate! The latest is the 10th in the series, To Davy Jones Below:

Daisy, newly wed to DCI Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, embarks for America. Their hoped-for honeymoon is disrupted by people falling overboard to starboard, port, and astern. Not to mention fog, and a gale that has Alec confined to his bunk with seasickness while Daisy carries on the investigation single-handed. Alec emerges just in time for a shipwreck and yet another mysterious death!

 Previous covers--which do you like best?

Original US hardcover

UK paperback

German first edition

German 2nd edition

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Polish

US paperback

THE CORPSE AND THE GEEZER BRIGADE is Finished!

by Jackie King

Book One

Writing a book is an onerous undertaking. I’m astonished that a cowardly woman such as myself, would even attempt such a thing. But the compulsion to express oneself on paper is a sort of madness—an urge that can’t be ignored comfortably. Ordinary chores such as dusting or tidying up your sock drawer, can be postponed until infinity. Or as my mother might have said, until the cows come home. And since I have no cows, there will be no interruption of that sort.

Book Two

An unfinished book, even one that yet has one word typed on a blank computer page, refuses to be ignored. This primal urge, for some of us, is like a mother hearing her child fussing in his crib, regardless of how high you turn up the radio, Mom will still hear her baby. And likewise, a writer must come back to finish that story.

At my age I often think, this book may be my last. Followed by, “Please God, let me stay healthy enough to finish this one.” And last week, when I sent the edited galley proofs to the publisher, I sighed a momentary breath of relief.

THE CORPSE AND THE GEEZER BRIGADE is now his problem. He will have to find the right cover (and please God, don’t let him suffer from color blindness), and get the thing ready to download and ready for the printers. (Book three--Cover as yet unavailable.)

Now I can take a deep breath and relax for a while.

Wrong!

Another story began crying out from its crib. This is an old one resurrected from years earlier, but now I know how to fix it. And that’s what I’m doing. I’m not sure yet what title to use; I have three in mind:

THE EDGE OF NOWHERE

GOOSE OVER MY GRAVE

NIGHTWIND (The Original Working Title)

So far I have one serious vote for The Edge of Nowhere. We’ll see. If you have a preference, let me know.

 

The view just outside of Tumbleweed, OK--An imaginary town in the OK Panhandle

The story is set in a small, fictitious town in the Oklahoma Panhandle named, Tumbleweed. Many of the inhabitants descended from pioneers who settled the land and built fortunes when there was nothing in sight but sagebrush, prairie grass and hardship.

In my novel this question arises: Will a later generation be strong enough to withstand a new kind of evil?

Suddenly it’s my job to spin that tale. The story is in my heart—strong as the wind that constantly whips across the plains. Now I must get busy.

Real people--by request

by Carola

I had an interesting meeting at Art and the Vineyard (a local outdoor art & wine show) yesterday.

Several years ago, I was asked to give a character in my next book the name of the person who bid highest at an auction in aid of the Eugene Opera (disclosure: I'm a classical music fan but don't care for opera). The winning bid was $800, a woman who want her husband's name used. Turned out his name was Polish, which made for complications, but I got him into Valley of the Shadow, my 3rd Cornish mystery, as a WWII Polish refugee-- If you've read the book, you may have wondered where Skipper Tom Kulick came from! (I had asked about him and learned he was in the US Coast Guard).
 

Yesterday, the Kulicks came to the Oregon Authors booth to see me, They were very happy with the way I wrote Tom in, brought copies to be signed, and asked if I'd be willing to attend a lunch for 12 opera supporters for this year's fund-raising. I'm still not keen on opera, but what could I say? I'll do anything for a free lunch (well, almost anything...)
 
Hope they can find 12 people willing to pay to have lunch with me!

Similarly, someone once paid $500 at a library supporters auction to have me put her sister (deceased) in a book. I asked for information about her and discovered that she had played a brass instrument and loved brass band music. Her name seemed to me more American than English, so I wrote her character as an American visiting England on her honeymoon, in A Colourful Death, the second Cornish mystery.

Nick Gresham, the artist neighbour of my protagonist, Eleanor Trewynn, meets the young couple while listening to and sketching a band playing "Land of Hope and Glory," at Horse Guards' Parade in London. They commission him to paint a picture of the band. Returning to Cornwall, and finding himself chief suspect in a murder case, he keeps humming snatches of the tune as he works out ideas for his painting.


The sister of the bride--so to speak--was thrilled that I'd woven the love of brass music into the story.

 

The only other time I've done something like this was a whole family, whom I put for free into A Mourning Wedding, one of the Daisy Dalrymple mysteries.  It turned out their last name, Walsdorf, is from Luxembourg. It was an interesting challenge to fit them into a book set in England in 1923.

I made them a family of poor relations, a refugee from World War I, when the Germans invaded Luxembourg, who had married an Englishwoman. Given the xenophobic feelings of many of the English at that period, they made a great addition to the cast of suspects!

20 years later...

by Carola

My first mystery just reissued after 20 years (and 21 more in the series). Read an excerpt here http://historicalfictionexcerpts.blogspot.com/2015/03/death-at-wentwater-court-reissued.html

Murder with Monsters

by Carola

My next Daisy Dalrymple mystery is going to start at the Crystal Palace.

This vast glass and iron building was first erected in Hyde Park in 1851, at the Great Exhibition. A couple of years later it was taken down piece by piece and rebuilt in Sydenham Park, south of the Thames, with two large wings added. It was in its way a precursor to Disneyland, but with an educational bent. As well as Roman chariot races (and racing automobiles in due time), it had displays of architecture from various time periods, art and sculpture, and other attractions too numerous to list. And the first public ladies' conveniences (loos/restrooms) ever.

The Crystal Palace burned to the ground in 1936. All that's left of the building is the foundations, stretching for hundreds of yards across the hilltop.

One exhibit was unaffected by the fire.  A sculptor, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, created huge models of prehistoric animals in the first attempt to show what the skeletal discoveries of the past half century might have looked like in life. He worked under the scientific direction of Sir Richard Owen, according to the latest scientific knowledge. They are so big that Hawkins gave a dinner party inside one of the sculptures before completing it. Inaccurate as we now know them to be, they are marvellous monsters, now restored and still lurking in natural settings in the park.

I simply can't decide whether to leave a body lying beneath one of the monsters or in the ladies' convenience. Or both.

Moors, mystery, and murder

by Carola

Moorland has provided a setting for a great deal of fictional (and some real) mystery and mayhem, at least since Wuthering Heights and probably before. The example everyone knows is, of course, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is set on Dartmoor.

Someone recently told me the stories she had read planted an image of moors in her mind that she found to be very inaccurate when she went to England and saw the Yorkshire Moors for herself. When I was in Cornwall last month, I hiked a corner of Bodmin Moor that I plan to use in my next Cornish mystery, so I'll share some pics of the hazards to be met there:

Animals, domestic and wild, and what they leave behind them

   Vicious plants

Rough country

Unexpected sink holes

 and mine shafts not guarded by restored pit-head buildings

Plenty of room for mayhem, methinks!