Summer Plans and Agatha Christie

I've lost track of my posting schedule, but I'm sure I missed last Friday. Mid-week I went down to New York City to do an interview for a documentary. That was fun. But the documentary won't be out until 2023, and I wasn't told I could talk about it. Since I could end up being left out of the final cut, I will wait to share the details.

Last weekend, I attended the Maine Crime Wave. I had intended to drive because there is no train or plane that would have taken me directly from Albany to Portland. But as it happened, the production company that asked me to come down to NYC for the interview flew me to Portland for the festival. Then I flew back to NYC and took the train back to Albany.

The festival was on the campus of University of Southern Maine. It was a wonderful gathering with great panels and guests of honor. Lovely weather. Highly recommended. 

But I was glad to get home without delays along the way. Penelope, the cat, was pleased to see me because -- although she'd had a sitter who came in twice a day -- she was in the house alone. Fergus, my bouncing boy, had spent the week boarding with the owner of his doggie daycare. We have been getting back to our regular routine this week as I try to finish an article for a special issue of a journal. The article is about Gothic literature, Edgar Allan Poe, and "haunting" in works by several African American mystery/detective writers. I'm aiming to have that out the door this weekend. 

Then I'm going to start my summer projects with fall in mind. I have a sabbatical coming up in this fall. I intend to savor every minute of it, and try to actually get some writing done. In the lead-up, I need to finish my book about gangster movies and get it polished and out to my publisher by the end of August. 

Then in September . . . a coincidence that Agatha Christie came up in the posts this week. I'm about to settle into a couple of months of reading/re-reading her novels and short stories. I'm scheduled to do a presentation during the International Agatha Christie Festival in September and seeing my travel agent next week. 

 https://www.iacf-uk.org/festival-2022/if-you-like-agatha-christie-then-you-ll-like-with-professor-frankie-bailey

I was first invited to present in 2020. Then came the pandemic. Last year, I was invited again and decided to wait one more year. This year, I want to go to Torquay and deliver my talk in person. I love England. My first Lizzie Stuart novel is set in Cornwall. That first book, Death's Favorite Child, was my tip of the hat to Dame Agatha. The victim is a young housekeeper in a private hotel. My sleuth and her best friend, a travel writer, are guests there. A friend had invited me to meet her for a week's vacation in St. Ives, and I began writing the book during that delightful week. 

My festival presentation will have an observation or two about Christie's 1939 And Then There Were None. I've already shared my thoughts about that novel in Out of the Woodpile, my book about black characters in crime fiction. Christie's plot itself is one that other mystery writers would love to pull off with such finesse. That's why every writer of crime fiction should read Christie's books and short stories. She was not only prolific, she has influenced us all. 

Personally, I also love the movies. My favorite is Death on the Nile  -- gorgeous photography and great cast. After I get my article done, I'm going to make a bowl of popcorn and watch it again. What better way to launch my summer with Agatha.

 

Type M Recipe Challenge

I know I said my November posts would be about doing NaNoWriMo. But I don't have anything else I want to say right now. I'll let you know how I did after it's over. Today, I want to accept Rick's challenge to share a recipe related to one of our books.

Here's the backstory for this recipe. My Lizzie Stuart mystery series is currently being reissued by Speaking Volumes. My original publisher was Overmountain Press, a small independent publisher specializing in Southern books. Overmountain added a mystery imprint called Silver Dagger, featuring Southern authors --  in my case a Southern-born author with a Southern-based character.

The Silver Dagger imprint was launched with a splash. The authors worked as a consortium, marketing together. We were asked to contribute a recipe related to our first book for a collection that  would be a giveaway. I turned to my good friend, Alice Green, for help. Alice was and still is the executive director of a community-based nonprofit. She is also an excellent cook. I asked her to come up for a recipe for "yummy balls".

In my first book in my Lizzie Stuart series, Death Favorite Child,

the victim has a peanut allergy. To satisfy her sweet tooth when she was a child, her aunt came up with a tasty treat that she called a "yummy ball". The dastardly killer substitutes ringer candy balls.

In the book, the about-to-be victim tells Lizzie what's in the yummy balls. Based on that description that I made up, Alice went into her kitchen and concocted a recipe. Her husband taste-tested several versions until she found the right combination. Yummy balls are so good that my publisher at the time served them at a holiday dinner.

I don't have to tell you (but I will) that you should not make or eat these if you have a peanut allergy. This is the version that did in my victim.

Alice's Yummy Balls

1 cup dark corn syrup
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp unsalted butter
1 cup crunchy peanut butter
1 cup finely chopped salted peanuts
3/4 cup chopped dates
11/2 cup uncooked oatmeal
2 cups Rice Krispies

Combine corn syrup, brown sugar, honey, and butter. Bring mixture to a boil. Remove from heat and stir in peanut butter until melted and smooth. Add peanuts, dates, oatmeal, and Rice Krispies and stir. Hand roll the mixture into balls about the size of a large walnut. Place in a dish. Keep refrigerated, but served at room temperature.

Writing as Continuing Education

Yesterday I was thinking about a book -- a hefty volume -- that I owned years ago and probably still have on a book shelf somewhere. The title, as I recall, was An Incomplete Education. I can't remember where I bought it, but I'm sure I was drawn to this book because of the title. In spite of the fact that I have a PhD, my education in some areas has been haphazard. One thing I always wanted as a child was to "know stuff". I wanted to be well-rounded. I ended up with a deep knowledge of some topics and only enough information to know how much I don't know about others. As I recall, this book was divided into categories, such as Music. The premise was that all "educated" adults should possess certain basic information.

I remember that I set out to work my way through the book, but I was soon bored with the process.  I am the kind of learner who learns best when I am following my nose. For example, I have no interest in baseball as a game. But when I was creating John Quinn, the  homicide detective that my crime historian Lizzie Stuart was about to meet in Death's Favorite Child, I wondered what he would be interested in. I pulled baseball out of the air -- maybe I was flipping by a game on television.

I filed the baseball idea away because it was irrelevant to the first book in the series. But baseball -- a sport I still know little about -- has weaved it's way into my writing over the years. When Lizzie goes to Chicago in You Should Have Died on Monday, the fourth book in the series, she goes to a sports store to buy Quinn a White Sox cap, and -- as a crime historian -- thinks for a few moments about the 1919 World Series.

Even if I don't feel inclined to rush to a stadium, I have pondered the arguments that a friend, who loves baseball, makes  -- that there is something magical about the game, that it is a "thinking person's game," that the rituals around baseball are worthy of note. So when a new friend mentioned that he collects the figures of baseball players from each team, my ears perked up. When I joined him and his wife for dinner, I had a chance to see his collection on display. And, suddenly I had another character who loved baseball -- a secondary detective in my Hannah McCabe police procedural novels.  In one scene, Pettigrew, my detective, recalls going to a baseball stadium with his father. He has a collection of baseball players.

I suspect that one day I will go to a baseball game because, as little interest as I have in the sport, it  keeps weaving its way into my consciousness. There are other topics that I've included in my books because they are necessary to time and place. Others that I've dug into because of something that I read or saw in passing. Some have been fun to learn more about, others disturbing. When possible I've done on-location research. Here's a short list from a couple of decades of writing:
--Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London
--the artist colony in St. Ives, Cornwall
--The conception of of King Arthur
--peanut allergies
--early 20th century drug addiction
--doll collecting
--brothel cuisine
--training for half-marathons
--gangsters in 1960s Chicago
--female blues singers
--New Orleans radio
--migrant labor on the Eastern Shore of Virginia
--how to escape from a car trunk
--peacocks and their habits
--voice-over acting
--soap opera writing
--the lobster industry in Maine
--West Point and cadet life in the 1970s
--Ranger training
--phenol poisoning
--Maine coons
--Lewis Carroll
--Characters in Alice in Wonderland
--Central Park in NYC
--The Wizard of Oz and the origin of the yellow brick road
--3-D autopsies
--virtual reality
--surveillance systems
--vertical gardening
--robotics
--seances
--World War II nurses
--parrots (care, vocabulary, and response to anxiety)
--upstate New York villages
--amateur theaters in the 1940s
--Somerset Maugham and Raffles Hotel
--how to make a Singapore Sling
--the lifespan and migratory habits of eels
--1939 New York City World's Fair
--Pullman sleeping cars
--the premier of "Gone with the Wind" in Atlanta
--Eleanor Roosevelt's newspaper column

The list goes on, but you get the idea. My education may still be incomplete, but I think I might be able to make a respectable showing on Jeopardy (a fantasy of mine).

How has being a writer contributed to your continuing education?

What I Learned About My First Book

I'm about to complete a tedious project. I thought it would take a few days. With interruptions to do other necessary tasks, it has taken two months. But what I've learned has been both eye-opening and rewarding.

I mentioned at the end of last year that a new publisher was about to re-issue my Lizzie Stuart series in both e-books and print. I was really excited when I saw the new cover and then the first book in the series, Death's Favorite Child, was available on Amazon.  And then we hit a glitch. I looked at the excerpt on Amazon and discovered typos that had occurred in the process. I contacted my new publisher. He asked me to send him the list of typos so that he could contact the company that had handled the conversion process. When he saw how many errors were in the excerpt, he decided the book needed to be redone.

Good news, the publisher really cared about the quality of what we were offering readers. I offered to proofread. That was when the publisher explained that the process worked best if we could use a Word manuscript. Even better news when I found the original manuscript -- and even though the book had been done in Word circa 2000, I was able to upgrade.

Minor bad news when I discovered that the upgrade had converted all the opening quotation marks to "A" and that apostrophes had also changed to another symbol. The apostrophes could be fixed with a change and replace. The quotation marks had to be done by hand. Still not a problem.

But then I hit the major "ouch". I discovered that the manuscript was missing the last chapter. That was when I realized that the only version I could find on a CD was the last draft. This was the version that I had sent out to my beta reader who had been with me in Cornwall, England when I was doing the research for the book. Our meet-up vacation as she and her son were en route to her academic fellowship had inspired the book that I had written as a "writing exercise." She had read the manuscript and liked it--except for the last chapter. She had been unhappy that nothing had happened at the end between Lizzie Stuart, my criminal justice professor, who was vacationing with her friend, Tess Alvarez, a travel writer, and John Quinn, the Philadelphia police detective. I had added a final chapter to deal with that and to set myself up for the next book.

And there was going to be a next book because opportunity had come in the form of a tip from a friend about a new imprint, and I had sold a book that I had written when all I'd intended to do was try my hand at moving my characters from another book to a new setting. Fast, forward to 2017, and my discovery that this was not only the unedited manuscript on the CD, but my next to last version.

That's where the tedious came in. I have been reading and correcting the Word manuscript with the published book in hand. The amazing part is that aside from revisions I seem to have made in the final version to add to the book, the three rounds of editing the book went through were about my writing quirks. My excellent editor had made my writing better, but not tampered with the plot.

Reading every word of my first published book left me feeling pretty good. Death's Favorite Child was the fourth book I had written--counting the two romantic suspense novels I had written years earlier and my first mystery that was intended to be the first in the Lizzie Stuart series (and eventually became the much revised second book set back home in Gallagher, Virginia). I could see the rewards of having spent four years when I thought I was only spinning my wheels as I wrote and revised what I thought would be my first book in the series. I had known Lizzie by the time we got to Cornwall. I could hear her voice in my head.

And -- having no expectation at all that the Cornwall book would ever be published -- I had given myself the liberty to write exactly the kind of book I would like to read. I had written a book that was my take on an Agatha Christie mystery with an African American female sleuth and a diverse cast of characters -- from a Philadelphia homicide detective who was dealing with a "bad year" to an famous artist, who was a lesbian who challenged stereotypes to a Southern-born teenager who walked in and set a pivotal twist in motion.

What did I learn?  That there were some things I got right in that first book. I also rediscovered a minor character who is now going to make a return as the catalyst for a short story that I promised to write for an anthology. Sometimes even a tedious task can yield unexpected rewards.

Real People and Fiction

I can't resist joining this week's discussion about the use of real people's stories in fiction. I have done it, too. Because my character, Lizzie Stuart, is a crime historian, she is often concerned with cases from the past. I draw on real life cases, most of them involving ordinary people who would have passed their lives in obscurity if not for their involvement in a crime. 

I use the stories of these real people as inspiration and starting point, spinning form fact (or what is believed to be fact) into fiction. For example, in A Dead Man's Honor, the book began with a real-life lynching. I changed the victim and the crime that served as the catalyst for the lynching. I made the man who was lynched innocent of the crime. I inserted Lizzie's grandmother into the story as a child who had witnessed what happened.

A teenager girl's life and death was the starting point for another book. She had killed a woman and she was executed by the state of Virginia. The true story was sad and frustrating. The girl, whose name was Virginia Christian, was a member of a sharecropping family. She worked in the home of the widow who owned the land. During an argument and a physical confrontation, she killed her employer. I went to the Library of Virginia to go through the documents related to the case. A page from the 1912 record of Christian's appearance in court and the discussion of the charges against her appears to the left. Christian's story and that of her victim became the starting point for Old Murders. In my version, Lizzie encounters Christian's lawyer decades after he had failed to save his client's life.

In the same way, real people have found their way into my Hannah McCabe books. In the McCabe books, these people have been better known. John Wilkes Booth (long dead, but not forgotten) plays a pivotal role in The Red Queen Dies.  But there is another story involving ordinary people and an abandoned school that I would love to tell. In my mind that story has become interwoven with a newspaper article that I read about an investigation of a boys' school in another state. I have a victim and a case I would love to have McCabe investigate.

I am always interested in the ethics that we bring to bear in writing about real people. In my Author's Note, I acknowledge the inspiration/starting point of real cases and the people I include (if they might be recognized). I explain that I did research to learn more about what happened. But then I turned down another path, spiraled off into make-believe, and what was true was now blurred into fiction.

In my 1939 book, I do have real people appear in cameos. But I'm trying to stay close to what they might have said or done. I want to make sure that J. Edgar Hoover wasn't in Florida when I have him meeting with my FBI agent in Washington, D. C. I also want what he says to reflect his attitude about the looming likelihood of war and the real-life people being investigated.

This topic sometimes comes up when I'm doing an event. Someone from the audience will come up after it's over and tell me about someone they know who has been involved in a crime as victim or offender or an old family story about an uncle or a grandfather. This person often wants to write a book about what happened and is wondering whether to try a novel or true crime. I tell him or her that if there are gaps in the story and people still alive who were involved, I personally would write a novel and change the facts. But that's because I write mysteries.

Anyone else have these chats with people about stories they'd like to tell?