Mystery bird

by Carola Dunn

We had an amazing afternoon's birdwatching in my son's California garden. It's not huge about 1/3 acre, but it's a bit of a jungle. He's had a bees' nest under a shed for years. The bees are very busy pollinators, helping to produce wonderful harvests of avocados every year. Right now the avocado trees are smothered in blossom and his loquat tree is weighed down with fruit.

There's a dead palm tree that hasn't been cut down because a)something more urgent always turns up and b)a woodpecker has been busy trying to make a big enough hole for a nest. We went outside armed with binoculars and a bird book to try to work out what kind of woodpecker it is. It didn't take long to decide it's a Nuttall's. Now we're hoping it will succeed in nesting and bring up a family.

While we were watching the woodpecker we saw a pair of house finches, a common bird at my feeders in Oregon. A hummingbird zipped past. A phoebe, a small black and white flycatcher, perched on an overhead cable and darted out to catch flying insects, returning to its perch each time with its cry that sounds to some people like "Phoebe, phoebe," (more like Fifi, if you ask me).

Way high in the blue sky sailed two hawks, one pale, one dark, neither of which we managed to identify, though one came quite close before being driven off by crows. A mockingbird sang its beautiful, ever-varying song, until chased away by a rival.

Then we noticed a bird none of us had ever seen before. Several more of the same came to perch in a couple of palm trees. They were about the same size as the mockingbirds and had pale yellow undersides, darker backs. As we pored over the bird book, focused and refocused the binoculars, we realized that they were behaving like the phoebe, only instead of catching almost invisible bugs the intrepid creatures were picking off bees. The bees started to get angry and clouds of them buzzed up, not too close to us luckily. The birds were in a feeding frenzy. We still couldn't figure out what they were. It was a good half hour later that I flipped through the book one last time and happened to spot a photo that matched: the Western Kingbird.

What with one bird and another, they kept us amused half the afternoon.

Birds appear quite often in my books. In my Cornish mystery series, herring gulls are frequent visitors, as they're ubiquitous in Cornwall.  They're as much a part of the scenery as cliffs, moors, the ocean, and the wildflowers, adding to the sense of place. And then there are the buzzards, always on the lookout for dead bodies...

http://caroladunn.weebly.com/cornish-mysteries.html

Cornish mysteries on Amazon

Cornish mysteries at Barnes & Noble

(photos not taken by me--I'm hopeless at bird photography)

Going places

Detail of the exterior of the church of St Mary Magdalen in Launceston, Cornwall. This is the town where the police headquarters are, where my young detective, Megan Pencarrow, works. She's the niece of the main protagonist of my Cornish mystery series.

Having at long last succeeded in signing in to the blog, I'm still figuring out how to format, so excuse the confusion please! These pics were supposed to come at the end of my post...

A shop in Port Isaac. Eleanor Trewynn, the main character of my Cornish mysteries, has a charity shop on the ground floor of her cottage, though I haven't given her bow windows.

The tor on top of Rough Tor, second highest spot on Bodmin Moor, with the highest, Brown Willy, in the background. These landmarks make frequent appearances in the books.

Last Saturday, I was invited to give a talk to the Pacific Northwest Cornish Society. To be frank, I'd never heard of them. They're a group of people who have traced their ancestry to Cornwall, and they get together three times a year to talk genealogy and celebrate their heritage. Their president had read my Cornish mysteries, Manna from Hades and A Colourful Death, and decided the members would be interested in hearing about my Cornish roots.

Alas, as far as ancestry is concerned, I have none. My familiarity with and love of Cornwall come from annual summer holidays on the North Coast in my childhood, and visits to my sister on the other side of the duchy in the decades since she went to live there.

So, unable to interest them in my family tree, I resorted to showing pictures from both my childhood and my research. I'd like to share some of them with you, too.

Port Isaac

Boscastle

Port Isaac harbour

Boscastle Harbour

Boscastle and Port Isaac are the two small fishing ports I combined to create my fictional village, Port Mabyn.

Well, that's that for now, so now we'll see if it actually posts when I tell it!

Cheers,

Carola Dunn

Carola's Dunn's a New Murderous Musings Blog Team Member

by Jean Henry Mead

The author of more than 50 novels, Carola Dunn was reared in England, where the majority of her books have taken place. Still others have been set in Belgium, France, Spain and Russia.

Her first novels were Regencies but she later gravitated to mysteries. "The genre I started my writing career with, Regency romance, is basically very English, with an English setting for most books. So when I started to write mysteries, though I'd been living in America for a good many years, my mind had been dwelling in England at least part of that time. It seemed natural to continue with an English setting.

Her Daisy Dalrymple series, set in the 1920s, is intimately entwined with her story and characters, as is her new Cornish series. "My new series is set in Cornwall. I've never lived there but from about the age of eight, family holidays were always spent on the North Coast, every summer and often in the spring, too. My sister now lives on the other side of the county, on the bank of the River Tamar, so whenever I'm in England I return. Cornwall holds many happy memories for me. "

Her Daisy Dalrymple series is written against a backdrop of England’s social changes, which make for an exciting setting for murder and mystery. "So many young men had been killed in the First World War that women were able to keep the non-traditional jobs they had occupied during the war. There was a constant struggle between those who thought the world should return to the way it had been prewar and those who embraced the changes. The class system was still strong, but crumbling at the edges."

Her new Cornish series is set in the 1960s, also a time of change. Britain had more or less recovered from the Second World War. "The Empire was supplanted by the Commonwealth, the 'affluent society' was in full swing, and young people proclaimed their distrust of anyone over thirty. In my books, the setting, both time and place, is always intimately entwined with the story and the characters. They can't be separated. As times change, people act and react differently, so though the motives for murder may remain much the same, the results can be radically different."

Carola wrote her first book in 1979, sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of lined paper and a ballpoint pen. "I'd never taken any creative writing classes or read any how-to books, but I used to get good marks for essays at school and I've been addicted to reading since a very young age. As I was lucky enough to sell that first manuscript--once it had been typed--I thought I'd better strike while the iron was hot. So I wrote another, and just kept on at it. Which is not to say I've avoided various vicissitudes. The big one was when both the publishers for whom I was writing stopped publishing Regencies within six months of each other. But that was a great incentive to switch to a different genre, so I'm not complaining."

Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer were her role models when she began writing Regencies, "for the sense of the period and the sense of humour." Her mysteries have been compared to those of Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and PG Wodehouse,  who influenced her writing. She also lists Josephine Tey, Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, "and many other authors from between WWI and WWII. Perhaps the most significant way they've influenced me is in demonstrating that mysteries can be driven by character and motivation as much as by clues or detailed descriptions of bloodshed."

The novelist writes six days a week, with Sundays reserved for laundry and gardening. "I used to take an hour off for lunch but I discovered I never got much written in the hour after lunch, so now I take two and run errands. I usually quit around 5 pm--quit sitting at the computer, that is. My brain is on duty 7/24. Ideas are as likely to pop up when I'm walking by the Willamette or waking up at 2 a.m.

When asked whether characters or plot are most important, she said, "For me, characters, whether I'm writing or reading. A book may have a fascinating plot but if I don't care about the protagonist, I can't be bothered to read it. And as I spend 24 hours a day with my characters (yes, I do occasionally dream about them), I prefer to have my head inhabited by people I like."

She's never prepared a detailed outline, but most of her books have been sold on the basis of a 7-10 page outline. A few have had no outline or synopsis at all. and with her novel, Sheer Folly, she wasn't sure till the next to last chapter who the murderer was or how her protagonists could solve the case.
Carola advises aspiring writes not to take lists of rules too seriously. "Somerset Maugham said, 'There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.' (Or words to that effect.)

Second, to be a successful writer, you need three qualities, Talent, Luck and Persistence. You can get away with two out of three. But the only one you control is Persistence."

Carola's articles will appear here the first and third Wednesdays of each month.

Her website:  http://caroladunn.weebly.com/ where she occasionally blogs.

You can also find her on Facebook.

Words and Music

By Pat Browning

Once upon another life I lived in a Victory Hall. World War 2 was going full blast. The only men on campus were soldiers, sailors and flyboys. Frat houses had been turned into Victory Halls for female students.

Every evening before dinner, we trooped downstairs and gathered around the piano to hear one of our girls play boogie-woogie. She played by ear and I can see her yet, smiling and tapping one foot while she pounded out Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie Woogie.

Another time, another place. I don’t remember how I surfed into a smokin’ video by the Swiss pianist, Silvan Zingg, but I live on the Internet so whatever I was looking for faded to black when I found Zingg. His video “Dancin’ The Boogie” snapped me right back to college days. Great piano work and two of the best jitterbuggers – William and Maeva – I’ve seen in action since those wartime college dances.

Back then, I had never seen jitterbugs like the sailors from New York and New Jersey. Maybe it was the cute bellbottom trousers, but whatever it was – they had it in spades. My one regret was that I was too bashful to get out on the floor and give it a try.

Silvan Zingg is still working on his web sites. “Dancin’ the Boogie” is on YouTtube, but the video is of poor quality. The best quality video is on his BoogieGroove web site under Gallery. The tiny url is http://tinyurl.com/c7sgl6

One YouTube video not to be missed by boogie lovers is Zingg’s twin grand pianos duet with French pianist Jean-Paul Amouroux. It’s at http://tinyurl.com/c3kt3n

It’s not just free music you’ll find on the Internet. Short stories abound, as authors look for new audiences.

One example: two delightful short stories by Carola Dunn, free for the reading at http://www.belgravehouse.com

Both stories feature Daisy Dalrymple, Dunn’s character from her novels. In “Storm in a Tea Shoppe” there’s foxglove in the soup at Daisy’s favorite tea shoppe. In “Unhappy Medium,” Daisy and a friend go to a séance in a story with a surprise twist at the end.

Earl Staggs is writer with a short story to be read at Mysterical-E, a free mystery ezine. The Staggs story, “The Missing Sniper,” features Adam Kingston, a psychic who’s called in by a sheriff to figure out who tried to assassinate a state senator. You can read the archived story at http://tinyurl.com/apnnzy .

Adam is the kind of character you wish you could know personally. Staggs developed him further in his mystery novel, MEMORY OF A MURDER. The novel was first published by Quiet Storm in 2005, and republished with an intriguing new cover in 2008 by Cornell Maritime Press.

In the current issue of Mysterical-E you’ll find “Becalmed in Hell” by I. Van Laningham, the latest in Van Laningham’s long-running series of Andi Holmes short stories. Opening line: “Viet Nam, like alcohol, gets into your blood; death is the only cure.”

Set in 1971, this story finds Andi at Fort Monmouth, married, and about to end her army career. An old Viet Nam regular named Phil tracks her down and hires her to find his car, which was stolen by a “pretty boy” he picked up in San Francisco. A gritty, well-written story, you can read it at http://www.mystericale.com .

One of my favorite writers is Peter Abresch. We go back to 1998 when he wrote his first James P. Dandy Elderhostel Mystery, BLOODY BONSAI. I reviewed it for The Hanford (California) Sentinel, and have kept an eye on him ever since. He has written five Elderhostel mysteries, going through publishers Quiet Storm, WriteWay and Intrigue Press in the process.

His latest, NAME GAMES, is available through CreateSpace. I read it in a downloaded manuscript and liked it very much. To those who don’t know, Elderhostel is a travel/study program for senior citizens, so the Elderhostel mysteries are set in different locales.

But Abresch doesn’t stop there. Along with free writing tips on his web site, and a newsletter with his poetry (which is quite good and on the spiritual side) he has “founded” Sidewalk Books. You can hear two humorous stand-alone mysteries free on his podcasts – CAPITOL COVEN and IF THEY ASK FOR A HAND, ONLY GIVE THEM A FINGER.

Those two books are also available in print, on CD – oh, heck. Just go to http://sidewalkbooks.com and let the author explain it all to you.

Words and music. They’re part of our makeup – the need to create, to communicate. They started with jungle drums and drawings on cave walls, perhaps even earlier. They’re going strong, out into space and beyond … someone playing boogie woogie, someone writing a few good words