Margaret Maron

Happy New Year

2012-01-05T19:19:00.003-05:00

Hope you all have had a wonderful holiday season and that 2012 is off to a good start for you.

As some of you know, I have not posted here since September because I was in the grip of deadline fever on my 2013 book. (Despite the desk mug that Dorothy Cannell gave me, I do take deadlines seriously!)

Additionally, I was posting on Facebook and with The Lipstick Chronicles, which has ceased to exist as of the first of the year.

Because I don't have the capability of allowing comments here, I shall continue interacting with those of you who wish it either through Facebook or by direct mail, which is what you get when you click on the Contact button over in the right column.

This site will be used mostly as a handy reference for my book titles, Deborah Knott's family tree, a media page, and any scheduled events.

Please come talk to me on Facebook.

Messages in a Bottle

2011-09-25T13:57:00.000-04:00

For the last few years, I have enjoyed writing (mostly) weekly essays for this website. I looked upon them as messages in a bottle for my readers, never knowing if they ever reached the metaphorical shores for which they were intended or had crashed against an ocean liner and sunk to the bottom unread.

Because of increased commitments (finishing The Buzzard Table, my 2012 book; preparing to teach a writing seminar in November; promoting Three-Day Town, which also comes out in November, plus an exceedingly crowded fall calendar), I am going to suspend these weekly posts for now.

I will continue to list any scheduled public events here and I will enjoy your comments on my Facebook page.

In addition, I blog for The Lipstick Chronicles (http://thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com/) on the 2^ndand 4^th Wednesdays of each month and love reading your comments there.

Hope to see you while I’m out and about and hope I’ll be back around Thanksgiving.

In Which I Become an Anniversary Gift

2011-09-17T18:03:00.009-04:00

On May 6, 2011, my friend Diane Chamberlain posted the following on her blog:

“A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Oliver in England. He wanted to surprise his girlfriend, Sam, with a signed book from me and asked if he could buy one from me. I can’t sell my own books (nor do I have many author’s copies), but I was so touched by his request that I agreed to send him one. I sent The Midwife’s Confession since I was certain she wouldn’t have that one–it won’t be released in the United Kingdom until mid June.”

Diane even posted a video that Oliver sent her of his girlfriend opening Diane’s present. I don’t know about you, but I can’t watch that video without tearing up. (http://dianechamberlain.com/blog/page/5/)

Fast forward to August. I had received an email from my local bookstore in which a young man wanted me to meet him and his wife somewhere for a cup of coffee or something. "It’s our first anniversary and she's a huge fan of Margaret Maron."

Yeah, right. I’m as sentimental as the next person, but I was on deadline. I'm supposed to get dressed and drive into Raleigh for a cup of coffee so he can look good? I told the store to turn him down gently and suggest that he bring her to my November signing.

Two days later, I got a snail mail letter from him. "She loves your books, she's read almost everything she can find of yours, so please, if there's any way . . ."

I called his cell phone: "Is this R?"

"Y-es?"

"Do you like Italian food?"

"Uh . . . yes."

"You want to buy me a pizza?" I asked, and then told him who I was.

His yelp of surprise was so loud I almost dropped the phone.

We agreed to meet at an Italian restaurant only five miles from my house. I got there first and when they walked in, the young wife had a very apprehensive and puzzled look on her face. He had told her they were driving out to the country to have lunch with someone who wanted to celebrate with them, but who was this stranger?

When I stood to wish her a happy anniversary and introduced myself, she burst into tears.

First Anniversary is paper and he had scoured the country for a copy of Bloody Kin. "I finally found a paperback in Iowa and they said they could overnight it, but it'd cost about a hundred and fifty." He lucked into one at a local public library. They had an extra backup copy and were willing to let him have it for a donation to the library.

They exchanged their presents at the table. He gave her the paperback copy -- "I told you it was just an accessory to your main present."

She broke into tears again. "I was so sure I was giving you the best one, but you've set the bar too high."

Actually, her paper gift to him was very imaginative, a recreated photograph of the night sky over Raleigh the night they were married—the quarter moon, Orion low in the sky, all the visible constellations for that date. Their story is a sweet one: they met and dated in high school, then went separate ways, married others, had kids; then reconnected after their divorces. They are so dear together, and I have a feeling that they'll be celebrating their golden anniversary one of these days.

I've never been anyone's present before and it still makes me smile to think of it.

Sisters in Crime Grant Winners

2011-09-12T14:09:00.003-04:00

I had hoped to return with a full rough draft of my 2012 book, but it finally dawns on me that I don't do rough drafts. Each chapter is polished to a high shine before I can move on to the next chapter. But at least the book is moving and I have high hopes of finishing on time.

I was in Winston-Salem this past weekend for the BookMarks Festival. It's one of the best-run festivals I've ever attended. On a 1-10 scale, I'd give it an 11 or 12. Writers are really pampered here and I got to meet lots of new readers.

Congratulations to the newest winner of Sisters in Crime's "We Love Libraries" $1000 grant. Staffers from the Southeast Regional Library in Garner, NC are holding up what I hope are some of their favorite books. Even though this is "my" library, I had nothing

to do with their entering OR winning.

Bloody Kin! - August 13, 2011

2011-07-31T09:56:00.006-04:00

I know I said I would be on hiatus and writing all month, but I'm excited to announce that BLOODY KIN, the prequel to my Deborah Knott series is now available as an eBook for Kindle or Nook. (Incidentally, I took the photograph that serves as the cover. Those are the pines near my gazebo, which is appropriate because I used the topography of this farm for the setting.) Deborah does not appear in this book, but Dwight does and so does a continuing character who first appeared in Death in Blue Folders from the Sigrid Harald series.

Gone Fishing - August 7, 2011

Actually, I've gone to my gazebo and hope to emerge after Labor Day with a rough draft of The Buzzard Table down on paper.

In the meantime, you might like a look at how a group retreat works:

The article begins on p. 60
August PineStraw 2011.pdf
viewer.zmags.com
August PineStraw 2011.pdf

See you after Labor Day! Y'all stay cool and watch out for hurricanes.

Yes, I Am a Mystery Writer - 31 July 2011

I am often asked why I write “mysteries” instead of “literature” – as if one were slightly disreputable and the other stamped with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

In the first place, it seems to me that all fictional writing falls into one genre or another. If you find a horse, dusty trails and handguns, then it’s a “Western.” If there are bug-eyed aliens, space ships or alternate universes, then it’s “Science Fiction.” If it’s witty, funny, and everyone goes shopping, then it’s “Chick Lit.” Ghosts and vampires and spooky woo-woo? “Supernatural.” Ghosts and spooky woo-woo and heroines running around in wispy nightgowns? “Gothic.”

Other genres are Romance, Fantasy, Historical....the breakdown into subsets goes on and on. Only if it doesn’t fall squarely in one of those easy categories is it called “Literature,” which is neither more nor less important than any other genre and usually partakes of aspects of the others. There is excellent writing in that category, there is also pretentious navel-gazing.

Same for all the other categories. Every subset has its classics that have stood the test of time as well as the duds that were remaindered two weeks after their pub date.

So why did I choose to write mysteries? Because I’ve always loved to read them, because I like stories where things happen, and yes, because mysteries have a discernible form. There is a crime (usually a murder), there is someone to solve that crime, and in the end, justice must seem to have been done. The guilty are not always punished, the innocent do not always triumph, but one usually closes a mystery novel feeling satisfied with the outcome.

I came to mysteries because I wanted to write and I had a facility with words. I also had a horror of taking off my clothes in public, which immediately precluded a coming-of-age novel that is often a writer’s first book, following that old saw, “Write what you know.” I did not want to cannibalize my childhood nor smear my parents and relatives nor exaggerate any hardships I might have experienced.

It is a terrible burden to want to write and find you have nothing to say . . . at least nothing you want to say in public. This is why the mystery form was so attractive to me. I could write a story and perhaps earn a living if enough people found it entertaining. Over the years, I have learned that there is nothing I can not say in this form. And because mystery novels are perceived by and large as entertainment only, this means mystery writers can fly beneath the radar and slip in social commentary, political ideas, and maybe even a little educational propaganda as I did in my last book.

Here in NC, where tobacco is slowly being phased out, some farmers would love to grow industrial hemp. As I wrote in Hard Row,

“Hemp is a wonderful source material of paper and cloth and our soil and climate would make it a perfect alternative to tobacco. If it had first been called the paper weed or something equally innocuous, North Carolina would be a huge producer. With a name like hemp though, our legislators are scared to death to promote it even though you’d have to smoke a ton of the stuff to get a decent buzz.”

Only three sentences tucked in between arguments for raising ostriches or shiitake mushrooms, but if enough readers get used to the idea that not all hemp is created equal, farmers may eventually be allowed to raise the industrial variety.

That’s why I don’t mind the “genre writer” label. As long as they are published and read, I’m going to keep writing them, no matter what they’re called.

Figs!

2011-07-24T12:43:00.003-04:00

This is our fig “bush.” Well, it started out as a bush several years ago. This is what happens when you don’t prune it back severely, but we’re rather delighted

with the way the branches look almost sculptured beneath the canopy of leaves. (Fig leaves are rather hairy and scratchy, by the way, and I can’t imagine why Adam and Eve chose them to cover up with if banana leaves were around. But I digress.)

Last night, I turned nine pounds of ripe figs, a very large lemon, and five pounds of sugar into these eleven pints of fig preserves.

I think I may have given the recipe before but it’s worth repeating now that figs are in season. Do not worry about exact measurements. As a friend once said, “There’s a Jesus factor in all these pinch-of-this, dab-of-that recipes,” which means that these recipes are very forgiving.

So! Wash and stem 8 – 10 lbs of fresh ripe figs. Dice one large or two small lemons, rinds and all after removing the seeds and stringy white core. Cover with 5 or 6 lbs of sugar and stir well. Some of the figs will be split open, but that’s okay. Refrigerate overnight, stirring once or twice to wet all the sugar. Next day, stir in two heaping tablespoons of pickling spice. (This is the secret ingredient and must not be omitted.) Bring to a boil, stirring well so that all the sugar on the bottom melts. Simmer until the fruits are translucent and the liquid begins to thicken. Immediately ladle into clean hot jars with canning lids and rings. Tighten lids. Cover with a dishtowel until cooled and sealed. Serve on hot breakfast biscuits or use as a glaze for roast meats.

What Things Are

2011-07-17T11:52:00.001-04:00

I’ve heard that seven moves are equal to one fire for turning over the entire contents of your house or apartment.

Not counting going off to college or moving from college to a furnished apartment, I’ve only moved a whole household three times. The last move was nearly forty years ago, so this house has had four decades to fill up with things and only a few of those things are older than that because my family was bad for burning down their houses [note: wood fires are very beautiful but very dangerous when an untended log rolls out onto a floor made of heart pine]. So it’s not as if I have antiques that have been carefully handed down through the generations. The oldest thing is a small round occasional table that was hand-crafted by my paternal grandfather around 1882 from an 18” pine board. From my maternal grandmother, a blue opalescent bowl that was a souvenir of her honeymoon in the early 1900’s.

Nevertheless, almost everything in this house has a story or a family connection and I’m sure it’s the same for your own home. When it’s time for your heirs to clean out your house and divide the things you’ve left behind, will they know that you’ve kept that tin cookie box because your grandmother used it as a catchall for her needles and thimble? Or that the heavy brass knocker on your bedroom door came from your first trip to Venice? Or that the worn copy of poetry represents the first book you ever bought with your own money?

Even if most of the furniture in your house would be turned down by Goodwill, would your daughter toss that mass-produced rocking chair into a dumpster if she knew that you rocked her through three months of colic when she was an infant?

I tease our son that perhaps he should just follow family tradition and drop a match somewhere after we’re gone. He already has his own full house so there’s no way he can keep everything even if he foists a lot of it onto his daughters. He knows why we give space to some of our possessions, but to be sure he knows about the rest, I started a file on my computer labeled “What Things Are,” and I’ve gone room by room to list the main items of monetary or sentimental value, along with any family stories that are attached to them.

This way, even if most of it does wind up in a dumpster, he won’t be like thedaughter of an elderly cousin who says “I really wish someone had told me that the stained ‘doll’ bonnet I threw away was actually my great-grandmother’s baby bonnet. I would have restored it and framed it.”

In the Seat of Justice

2011-07-10T13:02:00.010-04:00

One of the perks of being a writer is that we get to meet interesting people who do interesting things and who will give you a behind-the-scenes look at really interesting places.

I first met John William Smith when he was a district court judge down in Wilmington through Judge Rebecca Blackmore, who had come to a reading I did with Southern Discomfort, my second Deborah Knott novel. Judge Blackmore invited me to come to her court the next day and she introduced me to Judge Smith and Judge Shelly Holt. When I timidly asked if any of them would be willing to answer legal questions for me, all three volunteered. I still pinch myself for lucking out so fantastically. I could not have written the books I have without them. Through fifteen successive books and several short stories, they have patiently explained the law and courtroom protocols, and they have kept Deborah from making reversible judgments.

Over the years, I have teased them about their temperaments. Together they have helped educate me on the law’s flexibility. If I email the three of them a query, Judge Blackmore will get back to me within an hour or two with her shoot-from-the-hip ruling and an amusing courtroom anecdote to illustrate the point. Judge Holt often replies that evening with “What Becky said” or she will give the answer a slightly different spin. Judge Smith’s answer might not come till the next day, but it would be bolstered with two pages of legal citations.

His careful and measured approach to the law did not go unnoticed. His career has led him from ADA to district court judge to superior court judge and, two years ago, Chief Justice Sarah Parker appointed him to be director of the N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC). (And how cool is it that North Carolina has a female Chief Justice?) The NCAOC is based in a large complex on the western edge of Raleigh and it provides administrative services to help the state's unified court system operate as efficiently and effectively as humanly possible. After the justices, he's one of the most powerful legal figures in the state although he is too modest ever to claim that position.

In addition to overseeing a large and multi-faceted organization, he works closely with our state’s Supreme Court and the General Assembly. Yesterday, he invited me to come down to court across the street from our state capitol for a personal guided tour. I was allowed to go up to the bench. This is what the justices see from their seats:

Too often our public spaces are stripped-down modern, and informality rules. I am comforted to see this stately and formal courtroom where so many of the laws that inform our society are ruled upon and implemented.

Judge Knott has never argued a case here, but it’s not totally unlikely that she will never sit on this bench. After all, I am a fiction writer!

Happy 4th of July Weekend!

2011-07-03T11:03:00.006-04:00

When I walked down to the gazebo this morning, I switched out the flags I fly whenever I’m “in residence.” It lends an official touch to my working days. Hey, if the Queen of England can fly her flag over whichever palace she happens to be, why can’t I? It doesn’t have to be the Fourth, but it’s always more meaningful when the flag goes up then.

But as I wandered back up to the house, I realized that the farm was putting on its own 4^th of July show: red and white zinnias and blue hydrangeas.

Red geraniums, white petunias, and best of all – BLUEBERRIES!!

Earlier in the summer, some of the baby berries had splotches on them that made us fear that the crop wouldn’t amount to much this year. Ha! On the kitchen counter at this moment, there’s a quart bowl full of plump sweet berries that were picked this morning. I had some on my cereal and I shall make a cobbler for tomorrow.

If you don’t already have your dessert planned, here’s an easy cobbler adapted from a recipe my book club friend DeEtta shared with me:

In a 9 x 13 ovenproof casserole dish, put down a layer of blueberries, about 2 cups. Smooth on a large can of crushed pineapple (about 2 cups - this recipe has a lot of leeway.) Pour over this a box of yellow cake mix (I use a Duncan Hines butter cake.) Drizzle over the dry mix a melted stick of butter. Sprinkle on a cup of coarsely chopped pecans. Bake at 350° for 45-60 minutes until the nuts are toasty brown. Let it sit for 20-30 minutes before serving with vanilla or cherry ice cream.

Do not worry about calories. The Fourth is about freedom and no calorie will try to take you prisoner. (Would I lie to you?)

Unexpected Results

2011-06-26T23:48:00.002-04:00

It's been a busy weekend—houseguests, dinner parties, drop-ins, dragging hoses to try and save the flowers because it just won't rain, and trying to get in a few hundred words on the new book before someone misses me—you know how it goes in the summertime. But I am so, so pleased with the zinnias. In January, after the ground was turned, I laid down a layer of newspapers four pages thick and covered them with leaves and pinestraw. When the zinnia seedlings I'd started indoors were big enough, I poked through the paper and stuck in a seedling. I've been so pleased with their colors and their vigor. I particularly like that I haven't had to do much weeding.

The problem though is that I thought I was going to get short plants with small flowers and stems long enough to cut. What I have is short plants, big flowers and stems less than 5" long. But I've transplanted some into my planter boxes and they do brighten the dooryard:

But maybe some of you remember how I grumbled last summer that the mixed zinnia seeds that I planted came up mostly pink and purple? Well, guess what's volunteered in the waste space at the end of the official zinnia garden? You guessed it. And guess which have stems long enough to cut to bring inside?

Now if only I could get the manuscript pages to blossom like this!

THE RIGHT JACK IS BACK!

2011-06-19T09:56:00.002-04:00

The Right Jack is now an eBook on Kindle and Nook and I’m so happy to have it available again. It’s the fourth book in my Sigrid Harald series. The title is a cribbage term, but you don’t have to know this card game to enjoy the book even though it takes place at a cribbage tournament in an exclusive Manhattan hotel.

In brief, six cards are dealt to each of the two players. Each contributes two cards, facedown, to the “crib,” which will belong to the dealer of that hand. Then the cards are cut and one card is turned up on the deck. Say it’s the five of hearts. If either hand contains the jack of hearts—i.e., the “right jack”—that person gets to peg an extra point on the cribbage board between them. Both players may use the turn card when counting up their points. The winner is whover pegs out first.

When one of the boards explodes and two people are killed outright, Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD must discover which was the intended victim—their “right jack.”

As noted before, I began this series more than twenty years ago, which means that subways took tokens, telephones were tethered to the wall, and a police investigation could take shortcuts that would not stand up in today’s courts. Smoking was everywhere allowed and rotting piers still lined Manhattan’s western edge.

Nevertheless, human emotions are timeless and a young Navy officer is the unwitting catalyst that brings the coolly detached Sigrid Harald closer to artist Oscar Nauman.

Gazebo Days

2011-06-12T11:26:00.003-04:00

With the deadline for my next book only three months away, I’ve been taking my laptop down to the gazebo to work. What the gazebo has: full screens, a ceiling fan, comfortable chairs, an adjustable table, and a plug for the battery charger.

What the gazebo does not have: a telephone, a doorbell, and that biggest distraction of all—access to the Internet.

You know how it goes, right? You’re just going to do a quick check for mail? Believe me, there’s no quick way to get in and out of your mailboxes. Or you only intend to look up a single fact and the next thing you know, you’re six links deeper in, totally off subject, and nearly an hour has gone by. In the gazebo, I type “CHECK ON THIS” in all caps and keep going.

This is not to say the gazebo has no distractions. We have posted signs to keep out hunters and the four-wheelers that tear up our walking paths, but that doesn’t deter the trespassers who can’t read and who ignore our signs.

Yesterday, I watched a doe munch her way through the lower meadow, followed by an adolescent fawn. Twenty minutes later, two more whitetails bounded across like two women who’ve just heard there’s a sale on their favorite shoes.

A magnificent red-tail hawk perched atop one of the bluebird boxes to watch for careless voles, much to the discomfort of the wary bluebird parents who have babies inside that box. As soon as the hawk flew off, I watched through binoculars as both adults swooped in with beaks full of bugs.

Later in the morning, I saw a young buck emerge from the tree line. He was so newly antlered that they looked like two question marks between his ears and they were still covered with “velvet.” I watched him meander along a line of cedar trees until he disappeared into a thicket of wild plums that are just starting to ripen.

When I put down the binoculars and turned back to the screen, I realized that I’d wasted a good twenty minutes watching Bambi.

I worked steadily for another hour till I leaned back in my chair to decide what should come next. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something moving along a nearby path and I sat motionless as a fox passed only fifteen feet away. I hoped he wasn’t on the trail of a rabbit I saw there yesterday.

Back to the keyboard for another half-hour until a trio of raucous crows suddenly erupted in the pine tops. They’d just spotted the hawk and had no intention of letting him linger near their nests. I watched until they’ve driven him out of the area, then my binoculars caught the circling flight of buzzard. So graceful. He could hang there forever, floating on the thermals that eventually took him out of my view. Another twenty minutes gone.

Hmmmm. If I’m to finish this book on time, I guess I’m going to have to take the binoculars back to the house . . . sigh.

Leaving Hyacinths Behind

2011-06-05T11:16:00.003-04:00

If thou of fortune be bereft,

And in thy store there be but left

Two loaves — sell one, and with the dole

Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

James Terry White (1845-1920)

Some 80 or so years ago, one of the women in my family impulsively squandered a dime on a packet of flower seeds. The flowers sprouted, grew, produced exuberant blossoms, then set seeds that exploded and flew everywhere. Next spring, they came up not only in her flower garden, but along the edge of the garden that wasn't cultivated. In four or five years, they were sprouting in the yard.

Today, they have claimed a whole meadow. I think they may be in the dianthus family, but we have always called them "pinks" even though they range from white to deep crimson and freely hybridize so that the petals may be rounded or deeply spidered. This time of year, the whole meadow has a pink glow to it and I send a silent "thank you" to the woman who squeezed a dime out of a tight budget to feed not only her soul, but mine.

I have written before of the pleasures of living with the flowering trees and bushes the women before me had planted in this arid sandy soil — a great-aunt's miniature roses, my grandmother's gardenias.

I may wish I had the lilacs of a cooler zone, but I would not trade the gardenias for them.

When we built our house here, in the bare field immediately behind the burned-out homeplace, we dug dogwoods, oaks and maples from the woods, rooted more of the gardenias, planted figs and blueberries and pears. Whoever lives on this land after we are gone will have the pinks and the gardenias. They will eat the fruits we have left and rest in the deep shade of trees that now meet overhead.

And they will fill vases with blue and purple hydrangeas and enjoy the day lilies and turk's cap lilies. And I selfishly hope that these will feed their souls, too.

How Are You Spending the Weekend?

2011-05-28T00:39:00.005-04:00

The 30^th of May used to be called Decoration Day and was a time for putting flowers on the graves of those who had died in service to the country. From its inception immediately after the Civil War up to Vietnam, it inspired thoughts of bravery and sacrifice coupled with despair that we continue to war with each other.

Albert Einstein: “So long as there are men there will be wars.”

Frederick Moore Vinson: “Wars are not acts of God. They are caused by man, by man-made institutions, by the way in which man has organized his society. What man has made, man can change.”

John Lennon: “When we say ‘War is over if you want it,’ we mean that if everyone demanded peace instead of another TV set, we'd have peace.”

In 1971, when, by an act of Congress, Memorial Day went from the 30^th of May to the last Monday in May, the day lost much of its solemnity. Politicians will make speeches, of course, and flags will be placed on graves in our national cemeteries, but let’s face it: for most of us, it’s the first three-day holiday of summer and we will spend more time reading the ads for holiday bargain specials than reflecting on the original reason we get an extra day off.

Still, the day marks other, more frivolous traditions, too.

In the South, it was always permissible to wear white shoes from Easter on. I’m told that in theNorth, women traditionally wait till Memorial Day.

Memorial Day also signals the beginning of picnics and patio parties and for me, deviled eggs and fresh tomatoes are the taste of summer meals under the trees. You do have a deviled egg platter, don’t you? I myself have only one but many of my friends have three or four, depending on the occasion.

I'm no gourmet cook, but I usually get high marks for my deviled eggs. First thing to remember is that “hard-boiled” doesn’t mean “boil till they’re tough.” You want the yolks barely firm and the whites still tender. Too long on high heat destroys the egg’s delicacy.

● So! Put one layer of eggs in a saucepan. Cover with water an extra inch deep. Cover and bring the water to a quick rolling boil. Immediately remove the pan from heat, let the eggs sit 15 minutes, then transfer them to ice water so that the yolks won't darken. When they’re cool enough to handle, gently crack them all over and peel them in the water. The shells will slip off smoothly if the eggs are at least a week old.

● Slice in half and tip the yolks into a flat bowl.

● Hollow out the whites until they are an even thickness all around, like the sides of a canoe. Add the trimmings to your yolks.

● Give the white “canoes” a light sprinkle of salt.

● Mash the yolks and trimmings with the tines of a fork until they are almost a paste.

● Add mayo and a dab of mustard and continue mashing till the yolks are smooth and creamy. Proportions will vary according to taste.

● Add a little freshly-ground pepper and a dash of celery seeds. Mix well.

● Fill the egg-white canoes generously. I myself would never sprinkle paprika over those fresh golden orbs, but if you like the look, go ahead. I'll avert my eyes.

Like potato salad, deviled eggs are best eaten soon after making and before they have to be refrigerated.

And if you’re picnicking outside this weekend, pause to give a thought as to why you have this three-day weekend.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “With the tears a Land hath shed / Their graves should ever be green.”

HOW DOES HIS GARDEN GROW?

2011-05-22T11:13:00.001-04:00

Remember when I posted this picture of our—okay, my husband's— newly-plowed garden back in late February?

Here's what it looks like now.

Thanks to that pile of manure that you can see in the shade on the upper right (much smaller than when it began), everything is flourishing organically.

We have been pulling up onions and eating fresh salad for more than a month now. And we’ve enjoyed stuffed squash blossoms all week. For supper last night though, we had the first tender garden peas and my husband robbed the cradle for a small bowl of baby potatoes.

No French chef could have produced a better-tasting meal.

Now if those tiny green tomatoes will just hurry up and mature!

Where's Waldo?

2011-05-19T10:00:00.007-04:00

I'm finally back home tostay for a while, but it's been a busy month. In case I was missed, I spent last weekend down in Columbia, SC at the South Carolina Literary Festival, a gathering of readers and writers that left me juiced up for the summer. I don't know how to tag pictures so that names are revealed when you run the cursor over them, so in this first picture, starting with me on the back right and going clockwise: Cathy Pickens, Carla Damron, and our moderator for "Women of Mystery" Debby Johnson.

Earlier in the month, I moderated a panel of Best First Novel Nominees at Malice Domestic in Bethesda. Here we all are. L-R - Avery Aames, who won with The Long Quiche Goodbye; Laura Alden, Murder at the PTA; Amanda Flower, Maid of Murder; Sasscer Hill, Full Mortality; and Alan Orloff, Diamonds for the Dead.

Although this next picture was also taken at Malice, it could have been taken in Columbia this past weekend because they were there, too. Ann Woodman and Lynn Pixley are delightful sisters who adore mysteries. (I adore them!)

I had pictures of Diane Chamberlain's book launch from earlier in the month, but they don't seem to want to load. Nevertheless, these may give an idea of why I haven't been diligent in keeping this page updated every Sunday. Now that I'm home, I should do better.

White Roses

2011-05-08T10:28:00.005-04:00

I remember my first Mother's Day. By that, I mean the first second Sunday in May that I was a mother myself. I was in an obstetrical ward in a Brooklyn Hospital. Our son was five days old—yes, ladies, there was a time when birthing a baby gained you a few days of hospital rest—and I was so excited about going home that the significance of that May 10th had completely slipped my mind. But when our food trays arrived, each one sported a little ceramic bud vase with a red rosebud.Mother’s Day? I really was a mother? Responsible for another life?

I felt totally inadequate as most new mothers probably do. I hadn’t diapered a baby since I was ten and I was so unorganized in those days that I was terrified that I’d run out of clean ones, or muddle the formula proportions or not hear him when he cried or just turn out to be plain no good at this whole mothering shtick.

My own mother was five hundred miles away, but my mother-in-law was just around the corner and already a grandmother three times over. She was my rock through those early days. She never gave advice unless she was asked, but how I did ask! She showed me how to fold my son’s diaper, burp him, and give him his first bath. She came over late one night and helped me give him an alcohol sponge when he got a fever, and most of all, she kept reassuring me that babies were resilient and that sometimes they just have to cry. She gave me the confidence to rely on my own common sense.

Six weeks later, we made the trek to North Carolina and my mother took him from my arms before I could get out of the car. Her mother was there, too, and I still have a faded picture of the four of us. I wish now I could ask my grandmother what she was thinking as she looked down into that small face, yet, having looked down into the small face of my first granddaughter, I have a good idea.

All through my growing-up years, I wore a red rose to church on Mother’s Day. A red rose symbolized a living mother, a white rose . . . well, we all knew what that meant and we felt sad for the ones, especially the young ones, who wore them.

I was with my mother that Mother’s day when she pinned on a white rose for the first time. Her eyes misted over for a moment, then she straightened the red rose on my own lapel. “You’ll wear a white rose some day, too,” she said. “And so will your son. It keeps going.”

Hug your mother if she’s still there. Hug her even if she wasn’t always perfect or always there for you. Or if you can’t hug her, hug the woman who was there.

And think about white roses.

Meet Mike Ripley

2011-04-24T20:31:00.010-04:00

A few years before the Internet, Ask Jeeves or Google, I started an information-sharing network for Mystery Writers of America. My premise was that everyone was an expert on something. Mystery buffs wrote to tell me that they had deep knowledge about fly-fishing or hand grenades or esoteric poisons or NASCAR and were willing to share that knowledge. I created an alphabetized index and it was offered to MWA members for nothing more than the usual SASE. (By the time the internet made it superfluous, us, it ran about 45 or 50 single-spaced pages.) I first “met” Yorkshireman Mike Ripley when he applied for MWA’s associate membership and offered to answer questions about beer or brewing, two subjects which he knew intimately, being a spokesman for the British Brewers Society in London at the time.

I soon learned that Mike had begun a crime series starring Fitzroy Maclean Angel, who owned a grumpy black cat named Springsteen and an ancient black cab named Armstrong.

(That last was a stroke of comic genius. What better vehicle to trail a suspect through London streets?) When he wasn’t playing a mean trumpet at a seedy club, Angel could be found up to his ears in dangerous and darkly funny situations. Unfortunately, they were not available in America, but we began a correspondence that soon included my husband who had recently started brewing his own beer and ales. Letters flew back and forth with recommendations and suggestions for hops and malts and various yeasts.

Then came the London Bouchercon and a chance to meet. I remember it was at a panel of American writers who set their books in England. After one particularly fatuous remark from the podium, Mike leaned over and growled in my ear, “I’m so tired of England being treated like a bloody theme park!”

As a Southerner who’s winced through many bad movies with stereotyped rednecks and hillbillies, I could sympathize and we soon repaired to the nearest pub. Later, in the book room, I was finally able to put my hands on the first two or three Angel novels and took them back to my room with trepidation. More than once, I’ve met and really liked someone and then realized that their books don’t appeal to me.

At all.

Happily, this was not the case with Just Another Angel. It was fresh and funny and written in a cheeky first-person voice that immediately captivated. Indeed, Angel Touch and Angel in Arms both won the Crime Writers' Association Last Laugh Award for Funniest Novel of their years. I came home singing his praises and wondering why he hadn’t found an American publisher. St. Martin’s Press published some of the titles, but did nothing in the way of promotion or publicity and they never really found the following they deserve here. One editor thought it was because they were “too British” and “used slang and language that was incomprehensible to the average American,” which struck me as both condescending and problematic.

Now though, the books are once again available to us on this side of the Atlantic. Go to Amazon.co.UK and click on their Kindle store for all the Mike Ripley titles that are now in electronic format. Best of all, you won’t have to pay for transatlantic shipping. If you like British humor mixed with mayhem, this may be your new cup of tea.

(PS - Don't forget to read last week's post and enter the drawing for a copy of Death in Blue Folders.)

And Then There Were Three . . .(Plus a Contest!)

2011-04-17T23:40:00.013-04:00

Three eBooks, that is.

Death in Blue Folders, the 3rd Sigrid Harald novel, joins One Coffee With and Death of a Butterfly on Kindle and Nook.

The title refers to some secret files kept by an attorney who was planning to retire when someone decided their secrets weren’t safe as long as even one person knew. From a long-dead movie star, the owner of a trendy art gallery, and an Algonquin Roundtable personality to a senile resident in a nursing home and a broken-down cleaning woman, Lt. Harald must figure out who hated or feared Malcolm Gladwell enough to shoot him. The investigation is not made easier by a hotter-than-usual August and her need to find a new apartment by the end of the month. Nor does it help that artist Oscar Nauman has badgered her into attending a formal charity ball when she doesn’t even own an evening dress.

Fortunately she is able to borrow one from a cousin's wife, a former model, and here's where the contest comes in.

It was this character's first appearance, but not her last because she has become a continuing character in my Judge Deborah Knott series. If you think you know her current name, which book brought her to North Carolina and why she stayed, click my contact button to enter a drawing for a signed paperback copy of Death in Blue Folders. (Be sure to write "contest" in the subject line. Only one entry per email address, please; entries from duplicate addresses will be discarded. The contest will close at 11 pm EDST on May 10, 2011.)

"PHYSICAL" BOOKS IN MY ATTIC

2011-04-09T10:35:00.009-04:00

Over the years, many of you have asked how you can acquire print-and-paper copies of my backlist without spending a fortune.

Recently, my husband and I finally got around to cleaning out the attic where I found several boxes of books that I had almost forgotten about. See, what happens is that writers are entitled to a dozen or more free copies of every edition. We give them to family members and close friends or we hand them out to reviewers and and interviewers as promotional pieces. Even so, we often get many more copies than we need, which is how they wind up stacked behind the suitcases and Christmas decorations in the attic.

When the owner of Quail Ridge Books and Music heard that I wanted to clear the attic and thin out my extra copies, she came right out and took a large assortment back to the store, which will be offering them for sale over the next few months. If you're missing a particular title, eMail them with your wish list (QuailRidgeBooks.com) and they will get back to you with quotes. Some are large-print, some are British editions, some are only in paperback, but they will have most of the titles that have been unavailable for years.

If you've been wanting a hardback copy of a missing title, this may be your chance to get it. And if you want it signed, let them know.

Good luck!

(PS: That's a bottle of Terro Ant Killer from Southern Discomfort in the top picture. It's not for sale!)

Where's My Rose?

2011-04-05T17:19:00.009-04:00

“A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.

All tenderly his messenger he chose;

Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still

wet -

One perfect rose.

. . .

Why is it no one ever sent me yet

One perfect limousine, do you suppose?

Ah no, it's always just my luck to get

One perfect rose.”

I know just how Dorothy Parker felt. It’s not that I’m greedy or expect unearned riches to shower down on my head, but over the years, I’ve heard stories. A writer mentions Godiva chocolates in his book and the company sends him a big box of assorted bonbons. Another states that her character wears a certain perfume and a FedEx truck rolls up with a quart of it. The character of yet another is a huge fan of a certain rock group and the group’s manager sends tickets to the next show that plays in her city.

Are the stories true? Who knows? But I can’t help wondering if this is why so many writers fill their books with brand names—Manolo Blanik, Calvin Klein, Louis Vuitton, Birkin, etc.

I have mentioned Jaguars, Cadillacs, and T-Birds in my books. Has anyone ever sent me one? Ha!

The only time my books have ever triggered a freebie is when I mentioned that Colleton County barbecue enthusiasts lace their barbecue with Texas Pete. About six months after that book was was published, a member of the Texas Pete family sent me a dozen bottles.

My next book mentioned diamonds. Could a Tiffany bracelet be far behind?

Yes. (Way behind!)

Oh, but wait! I’m forgetting. I did get a car from one of my readers.

The Christmas after High Country Fall came out, a black sports car arrived, a replacement for the one Deborah wrecked up in the mountains. It was a present from my mountain guide and ur-mystery enthusiast Kaye Barley.

Okay, it’s only three inches long, but it looks perfectly adorable on our Christmas tree and it means more to me than any full-size car could.

But if Godiva wants me to keep plugging their chocolates . . . just sayin’.

Last Lessons of Summer

2011-03-21T17:35:00.005-04:00

Index to study guides/ book club questions / background:

Bloody Kin – 9 January 2011

Bootlegger’s Daughter– 16 January 2011

Death’s Half Acre – 23 January 2011

Hard Row — 6 February 2011

Last Lessons of Summer — 21 March 2011

One Coffee With – 30 January 2011 (Now on Kindle and Nook)

Background:

Several threads went into the plot of this book: (1) Years ago, I read that A. A. Milne’s son, the real Christopher Robin, was resentful that his dad had co-opted his childhood stuffed animals and imaginary world so I gave an exaggerated situation to a little girl named Maxine, Maxie for short. I made her parents a failed poet and a gifted illustrator who were so wrapped up in each other that they had little affection left for the child; (2) my own fascination with Argiopes, the common orb-weaving “writing” spiders; (3) a lovely “recovered memory” triggered by my first full-body massage; and (4) the realization that not every family clings to its ancestral land and that many are more than happy to sell the family farm to developers.

Last Lessons of Summer is a standalone novel set in “Colleton County,” the fictional home of Judge Deborah Knott. The crimes are investigated by two men close to her, SBI Agent Terry Wilson and Major Dwight Bryant of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department, yet she herself does not appear in this book.

Instead, this is a coming-of-age story about New Yorker Amy Steadman, a children’s book illustrator, who has inherited from her grandmother the controlling interest in a merchandising and publishing empire centered in Manhattan. She has also inherited the house where that grandmother was murdered and where that her own mother committed suicide when Amy was only a toddler.

An outsider with no sentimental ties to the land, Amy comes down to North Carolina to dispose of the house and her grandmother’s papers. In reconnecting with the relatives who still live on the farm, Amy hopes to learn why Maxie killed herself and whether her grandmother’s death was a robbery gone wrong or deliberate murder. Her cousin Curt tells her, “You have the right to ask those questions but you might not like all the answers you’re gonna get.”

Discussion points:

● How does the myth that has grown up around the origin of Pink and Blue differ from the reality of their first appearance at that 1938 baby shower?

● One of Frances’s coworkers declares that she’d rather have a tugboat for a husband than a dreamboat. Discuss.

● How does this baby shower foreshadow the rest of the book and even affect Frances’s granddaughter years later?

● At one point, Amy asks her stepbrother why he got to call her father Dad, but she was never allowed to call his mother Mom. How did that simple difference affect the dynamics of the blended family?

● Amy’s younger sister Beth unwittingly causes Amy to recover a crucial memory. Has something similar ever triggered your own memory of something you had completely forgotten?

● Beth tells Amy, “You’ve never had to worry about money. What’s pocket change for you might be a fortune to someone else.” One of the sub-themes of the book is power and money—who has it and who wants or doesn’t want it. Did you find the final division of PBM’s labor and power logical and fair?

● In the end, has Amy chosen her future or has she settled for it?

Daylight Saving and Small Beginnings (3/13/11)

2011-03-07T12:30:00.007-05:00

The calendar turns, the sun rises earlier and sets later, and suddenly here we are back on Daylight Saving Time. I, for one, wish we’d stay on it. I resent the twice-yearly resetting of my internal clock and I recently read somewhere that efficiency and mental acuity both drop off during this period of readjustment. Why can’t we just move the clocks a half-hour ahead once and for all and leave it there?

Or we could emulate the ancient Romans and divide the daylight hours into 12 equal parts. Our daytime hours would be 75 minutes long in summer and only 44 minutes long in winter, which seems fair to me.

In the meantime, a dozen green seedlings sit here in the east window of my office with their promise of ripe red tomatoes to come as the daylight hours turn from spring to summer.

Hard to think that each spindly plant is going to turn into a four- or five-foot tall bushy vine.

On the other hand, I’ve just written the first 500 words of the 79,500 words that should come before we turn the clocks back again. Deborah’s nephew Reese has just scooped up a dead squirrel from the highway and put it in a Tupperware bin in the back of his truck. I’m not totally clear on what he plans to do with it, but knowing Reese, you can be sure it’s not quite what you might expect. I just hope that these 500 words produce as much fruit as those seedlings will.

Come over to my Facebook page and tell me what you think of Daylight Saving Time.

*************************

Death of a Butterfly (3/7/11)

Death of a Butterfly is the second in my Sigrid Harald series. Out of print for years, it is now available as an eBook from Nook and, by the time you read this I hope, from Kindle. The new cover was designed by Paper Moon Graphics in Raleigh. Although it can be read as a standalone, it does follow on the heels of One Coffee With and uses characters introduced there.

Synopsis:

Artist Oscar Nauman continues to insinuate himself into Sigrid Harald’s personal life but their idyllic Saturday morning outing is cut short when she is called to a homicide scene. A beautiful young mother has been struck down in her sunny upscale apartment and lies on the tiled kitchen floor like a crumpled butterfly pinned for display. Sigrid soon discovers that Julie Redmond’s fragile beauty hid an amoral character and that there were many who will not mourn her, including her toddler’s surrogate grandparents, her ex-husband, her thieving brother, and a former lover that she was blackmailing.

Although Sigrid tries to keep it professional, she finds herself emotionally pulled by those whom the dead woman had hurt. To her absolute dismay, she is also asked to assist in a home birth and to provide shelter for a temporary roommate. To cap her discomfort, her building is going condo and she’ll have to buy or move.

For someone who has always kept her personal life on the back burner and totally separate from her work, Sigrid is suddenly plunged deeper and deeper into relationships that threaten her equilibrium.

Halfway through the book, one of my writer friends shook her head in amusement. “Poor Sigrid,” she said. “You put her up a tree and then you throw rocks at her.”

First time around, most people didn’t see the humor in these books. This time, I’m getting delightful comments as my readers catch on and realize that Sigrid’s prickly nature is a not very protective armor when it comes to life and love.

Even though she’s quite different from Judge Deborah Knott, my North Carolina protagonist, this New Yorker has slowly gained a partisan readership. Hope you’ll try one of the books to see why.

What Men Really Want

2011-02-27T18:07:00.008-05:00

Nothing says spring like a freshly plowed garden ready for peas and potatoes to be planted.

Freud was pretty sure he knew what women wanted. Most women I know think he was full of it. So men are welcome to argue when I say I'm pretty sure we know what every man with more than an acre of land wants:

(1) a pickup truck

and (2) a red tractor.

(Or a green one in a pinch.)

We celebrated #1 granddaughter's birthday yesterday with a gathering of the extended family. Minutes before the cake was to be brought in with the requisite number of lighted candles, a neighbor arrived to run rows for our garden. Immediately, all the men piled outside to watch as if it were the Superbowl.

To me, tractors are like beach cottages and sailboats. I don't want to own one, I just want good friends who do. Like our good neighbor who came and ran us half a dozen rows now that spring is almost here.

Deborah and Sigrid

2011-02-20T13:26:00.006-05:00

For many years now, people have commented on the differences between Lt. Sigrid Harald and Judge Deborah Knott. “It’s as if they were created by two completely different writers,” is the usual comment.

Now that I’m making the first series available again on ebooks, readers have been leaving comments on my FaceBook pages about those differences. Some prefer the cooler New York art setting to the warmer (in all senses) North Carolina settings, while others say they’ve never been able to warm up to Sigrid.

My usual explanation—the short answer— is that hot-headed and impulsive Deborah was created to be the antithesis of cool and prickly Sigrid. Metaphorically speaking, Sigrid is a

butterfly forced to fly before its wings were fully inflated. If you’ve ever watched a swallowtail emerge from its chrysalis, it looks like a loosely-furled wet umbrella.Those limp wings are shorter than its body. It pulls up onto a twig, rests a few minutes, then slowly begins to pump up its wings until they are dry and fully expanded. Only then does it try to fly. If it is menaced before this process is complete, it may be able to fly, but it will never soar.I tried to write Sigrid from that cramped perspective. The ugly duckling child of a beautiful Southern mother and a charismatic father who died when she was almost too young to remember him, she has to overcome her feelings of inadequacy. It was like writing in clothes that were tight, seated on a chair that was too small, with only a glass of water at hand.

Writing Deborah on the other hand felt as if all the governors were off after two shots of bourbon. I’m happy that she’s been so well-received, but I’m even happier that Sigrid may finally reach an audience that will like her, too.

ONE COFFEE WITH

2011-02-14T10:38:00.005-05:00

I've just been informed that ONE COFFEE WITH,* my very first book, is now on sale for Nook readers, too. This has been a steep learning curve for all of us, but with a little luck, the rest of the out of print Sigrid Harald series will soon be available. We're also investigating procedures for the iPad, too. O Brave New World!

* Incidentally, the "with" does not refer to sugar and cream, but potassium dichromate, an acid used to etch copper plates.

Hard Row Study Guide

2011-02-06T11:34:00.005-05:00

Index to study guides/ book club questions / background:

Bloody Kin – 9 January 2011

Bootlegger’s Daughter– 16 January 2011

Death’s Half Acre – 23 January 2011

Hard Row — 6 February 2011

One Coffee With – 30 January 2011 (Now an eBook in the Kindle Store)

Irrelevant factoid: This was the first time that birds appeared on one of my covers. All successive books have had them as well. These are supposed to be crows, although a Canadian reader told me she thought they were ravens, not crows. Not being an expert on bird silhouettes, I can’t argue with her.

Background:

Warning — Major spoilers in this section. Skip directly to the discussion points.

Several strands came together when I was thinking about this book. Our local newspaper, The News and Observer, had carried many stories about legal and illegal immigration issues, living conditions for migrant farm workers, domestic violence, and yes, able-bodied drivers parking in handicap spaces; but one story in particular so resonated, I knew I would have to fictionalize and use it. The picture showed a migrant mother playing with her beautiful baby boy. Latino. Big brown eyes, a radiant smile, and a look of happy intelligence on that little face. No arms. No legs. The mother had been in the first crucial stage of pregnancy when she went into the tomato fields that day. She was told to keep working while the tomatoes were sprayed with a chemical insecticide. She came out of the field covered in green poisons that the company claimed would not harm humans. Nine months later, her son was born armless and legless. The company denied responsibility. It was found negligent and a fairly large settlement imposed. After the headlines died down, the company appealed and the large settlement was reduced to something appallingly minimal. No amount of money could ever compensate, but money will be needed to make that life livable. Cheap food does not come cheaply. There is a human cost.

Several readers have complained that this book is more violent and gory than any of my others. Anger will do that, I suppose.

DISCUSSION POINTS:

1. Margaret Maron has often said that if she were not a writer, she would like to be an attorney (and eventually a judge) like her protagonist, Deborah Knott. If you could choose any other career, what would it be?

2. Hard Row draws on Margaret’s own background and observations about the way migrant labor is considered in today’s global economy. At one point, Deborah comments that “To claim that they do the work Americans are unwilling to do ignores the unspoken corollary—‘unwilling to do it for that kind of money.’” Without getting too much into the rights and wrongs of such heavy dependence on undocumented workers, how do you feel about that comment?

3. The owners of Harris Farms have made a lot of money growing vegetables. What does their daughter mean when she says, “You think I don’t know the real cost of growing a bushel of tomatoes?” Agri-businesses claim that competition forces them into certain practices. Would you be willing to pay a few cents more for your tomatoes or chickens if it meant better working conditions for laborers or are the growers right?

4. As more and more migrants obtain green cards and eventual citizenship, there will be more and more relationships such as the one that Deputy Mayleen Richards has begun with Miguel Diaz. What sort of culture clashes are they apt to encounter? Do you think they have a happy ending in store?

5. Among the recurring cases that come before a district court judge, the most troubling are those that concern the well-being of children and the safety of women threatened with domestic violence. If you were a judge, how would you try to prevent the death of woman like Karen Braswell?

6. In addition to balancing a judicial career with a new husband and a large gregarious family, Deborah now finds herself a stepmother. What advice would you give her the next time Dwight’s son Cal tells her that she’s not his mother and he doesn’t have to obey her?

One Coffee With

2011-01-29T21:35:00.007-05:00

Index to study guides/ book club questions / background:

Bloody Kin – 9 January 2011

Bootlegger’s Daughter – 16 January 2011

Death’s Half Acre – 23 January 2011

One Coffee With – 30 January 2011

Up until recently, once a writer’s book was officially declared “OP” (out of print), that was pretty much it. No more new copies. One by one, seven of my eight Sigrid Harald novels have gone OP and readers who were late to discover her have had a hard time collecting all the titles. Only Corpus Christmas has remained in print. Some of you have told me poignant tales of finding the books in used book stores, library sales, or on-line from wickedly expensive collectors’ sites. Now, with the advent of Kindle, Nook, the iPad, etc., etc., these OP books can live again and I am absolutely delighted to announce that by the end of the year, I expect to have all of mine available.

One Coffee With has had several different covers over the years. Some I’ve liked, some I’ve hated. This one, created by Jacky Woolsey, a local Raleigh designer, I really like. Come over to Facebook and tell me how you like it.

In the meantime, what follows is the introduction that accompanies the electronic version, which can be downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle. (This was the test case and we hope to move onto other platforms soon.)

Background to One Coffee With

Up until the late 1970s, I thought of myself as a short story writer, and by short, I meant nothing longer than five or ten double-spaced pages, or 1500-3000 words max. Although the glory days of magazine fiction, when writers were paid four or five thousand for a story and could live on that for a year, were over, a short story for the “slicks” could still earn at least two thousand and there were a dozen or more markets. The mystery magazines—the “pulps”—paid by the word and usually capped out at 8¢ a word. Clearly I was not expecting to earn a living with my writing.

On the other hand, those sporadic checks were very nice and I had started to sell almost everything I submitted when the bottom dropped out of the market. Magazines began to fold left and right and those that survived discovered that non-fiction articles could be written in-house, more cheaply, and that only a few subscribers would cancel because there was no fiction.

Instead of six or eight mystery magazines, we were suddenly left with only two: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. That’s when I first toyed with the idea of writing a novel even though the thought of filling up that many pages with a single story quite intimidated me.

I had written a longish (for me) short story set in a college art department and I had created a homicide detective with a Danish background, named Bohr in honor of Nils Bohr, whose biography I had recently read. I sent it off to AHMM.

It came back.

In those days AHMM ran a “novelette” in each issue, so I doubled the word count and sent it off.

It came back.

By now, I was getting more into the plot. I had worked as a secretary in one of the NY City University art departments and had been fascinated by the cavalier manner in which etching acids and photography chemicals were left unlocked. A poisoner could have wiped out half the college with very little effort.

This was also when women were starting to move up in the ranks of the NYPD. Female lieutenants and captains were still a novelty and resented by many of the rank and file male officers. The problems a woman would face intrigued me and the male Bohr morphed into the female Sigrid Harald (still of Danish descent.)

Because I enjoy series characters, I knew from the beginning that she would be one, and I gave her what was to me an interesting back story—a Southern mother and a NY father who had been killed in the line of duty shortly after making plainclothes detective. The mother would be a beautiful career photojournalist, the father tall and handsome and slightly egotistical. Their daughter would be the proverbial ugly duckling: uncomfortable in her skin, ill-at-ease in social situations, but thoroughly competent professionally. I knew most of the back story, which arcs through the eight books of this series, an arc which I will not discuss here because I do not want to spoil it for first-time readers, but each book gives a little bit more information about her dead father and his former partner.

Eventually I doubled the magazine-length novelette to make it a book novelette of about 30,000 words and sent it to an agent someone had recommended. The agent said he liked the characters, liked the setting, liked the story, “But it’s too short. Nobody’s buying novelettes. Now if you could double it . . .”

After much thought, I interpolated the Karoly subplot, which did not exist in the first three versions, and I finally had a book-length novel.

Having done it once, I entered in on a second, then a third. As I write this, I have just finished writing my twenty-seventh novel. I remain slightly astonished.

Each of my books is written in what is (and was then) the current “now.” In the late 70s, books (and police reports) were written on typewriters. In One Coffee With, Lt. Harald and her squad typed all their reports. Telephones were tethered to the handset with a curly cord and numbers were manually dialed. No one had a cell phone. By the time Fugitive Colors, the eighth and final book of the series, was written, typewriters were a thing of the past, and Sigrid wrote up her reports on a computer. If she owned a mobile, I was not aware of it.

You have downloaded this book to a device that was science fiction in 1979. Novels printed on paper are beginning to be referred to as “the physical book” as opposed to the electronic one.

For me, fourteen years had passed between the first book and the last. For Sigrid, it was only one short tumultuous year.

Try not to let technology and societal norms get between you and the page. Suspend your disbelief. Enjoy!

Margaret Maron / January 2011

Death's Half Acre Study Guide

2011-01-23T15:41:00.005-05:00

Death’s Half Acre Readers Guide:

Background:

My “Colleton County,” named for Sir John Colleton, one of the royal proprietory lords, is a fictional amalgam of three or four counties a little southeast of Raleigh where the sandhills meet the coastal plains. We are now about 120 miles from the coast, but shark teeth have been found nearby. I grew up and still live on a farm similar to Deborah’s, on land that’s been in the family over a hundred years. This is not very long by standards of the original coastal colonies, but considering my family’s yeoman roots, not surprising.

My original NC ancestor was the son of a Virginia planter. He arrived in the county around 1766, having acquired a land grant of three or four thousand acres. He came with six or seven sons. Each of those sons had seven to ten children, and so on down the line. When you divide the land fairly for several generations, not much is left. Indeed, when my great-grandfather came home from the Civil War, it was to a sharecropper’s hardscrabble life and he died when my grandfather was twelve. By dint of hard work, my grandfather and his three unmarried siblings managed to acquire this farm and to hold on to it despite the Depression, boll weevils, and tobacco wilt. When his two daughters died, the farm was divided five ways. My cousin and I are the only two left here, the others live “off” and there is no more commercial farming on the place, just kitchen gardens and fruit trees.

At the moment, I can sit on our back verandah and look out over fallow fields to stands of oaks, sweetgums, and pines in the far distance. Deer come out to graze in the evening and we still hear roosters crow every morning. Once the housing industry regains its values and land values start soaring again, I’m afraid these fields will sprout orange surveyor’s ribbons. My cousin Shelby, who still lives on a tiny sliver of the original 18th Century land grant a few miles away, shakes his head and says, “They’re farming houses right up to the creekbanks now.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in a different context: “. . . I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”

Nor am I.

Which is why I wrote Death’s Half Acre.

Reading Group Guide/Questions for Discussion

1. It is often said that a Margaret Maron book is “a mystery and more” in that she puts serious economic and social issues into the traditionally-plotted whodunnit. Home Fires and Storm Track examined lingering racial problems. In Hard Row, it was migrant labor and domestic violence. What are some of the issues in Death’s Half Acre?

2. The south is still referred to as “the Bible Belt.” Do you think the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal is typical of the area or an aberration?

3. Is there significance in the fact that the church has no widows when the book opens, but will probably acquire windows soon after the book ends?

4. Dee Bradshaw is a spoiled slacker who identifies with her father’s patrician background rather than her mother’s quite plebeian origins. Does she come to understand and admire Candace? What changes her perception?

5. What did the dollhouse symbolize for Candace? For Dee? For Cameron?

6. Deborah sits in judgment on two main cases: two women who came to blows over a dog and a chicken, and three adolescent boys and their four-wheel ATV’s. What are the larger issues behind these cases?

7. At one point, Deborah says, “Confession may be good for the confessor’s soul, but it can play havoc with the heart and soul of the person forced to hear that confession.” Discuss.

8. Someone once said, “The mission of the modern newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Deborah attributes part of the problems of local government to the lack of an effective newspaper to play watchdog and ombudsman. Is she right? How effective is your own local newspaper in rooting out corruption?

Bootlegger's Daughter Study Guide

2011-01-16T15:01:00.007-05:00

[Beginning last week with comments about Bloody Kin, I will be devoting this space to study guides for my books. If you have particular questions about any of the books, please click the contact button and let me know.]

This book introduces Deborah Knott, Attorney-at-Law and candidate for district court judge in eastern NC’s Colleton County. She is the youngest child and only daughter of Kezzie Knott, once a notorious bootlegger who ran white lightening up and down the eastern coast from Canada to Florida. She has eleven older brothers, all of whom have been married at least once, some three times.

When the book opens, she and her father are estranged. He was not happy that she studied law and he thinks a district court judge has to hear too many sordid cases to make it a fit career for the daughter he always wanted to shelter from the world’s harsh realities. As the primaries approach, though, Deborah’s campaign takes a back seat when a teenage girl asks her to discover why her mother was murdered eighteen years ago.

Local politics vie with small-town rivalries and long-buried secrets. This book was the first (and so far, only) to win an Edgar, an Agatha, an Anthony, and a Macavity in the same year.

QUESTIONS FOR MARGARET MARON

Q: What was the inspiration for Bootlegger's Daughter?

A: I had written a series of mysteries based on my NYC experiences and I wanted to set a separate series in my native state. To do that, I had to try to make the new Deborah Knott character as different as I could from Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD. Reporters and attorneys had been done to death, but no one had written about a woman judge before. Because Sigrid was a loner with only a mother, a grandmother, and a handful of cousins, I gave Deborah a large rowdy family. Sigrid liked art and music and was fairly intellectural. Deborah likes Willie and Waylon and the boys. Sigrid is uncomfortable and awkward with interpersonal relationships, D is comfortable in her skin and has never seen a tight pair of male jeans she didn't like, etc.

Another reason to make her a district court judge was so that I could send her across the state and look at various aspects of North Carolina as it transitions from rural agrarian to increasingly urban high-tech.

Q: Is Deborah Knott's character similar to someone you know?

A: Not really. There may be stray aspects of many of my friends and acquaintances, but she really is a composite.

Q: If you were a member of our club what questions would you like to discuss about Bootlegger’s Daughter?

A: Since the book also focuses on grassroots politics, in light of the last election, just how much attention did club members give to any of the judicial candidates? Especially now that more and more judges run as "non-partisan" candidates. Did anyone look to see what their previous party affiliations were?

DISCUSSION POINTS

1. What roles do Deborah’s internal Preacher and Pragmatist play? Why does she think of them as male instead of female?

2. How does the Knott clan contrast with the Vickerys?

3. Running for a local office means going out and meeting voters one on one. How would you handle being questioned about your religion or your views on alcohol?

4. What role does religion play in this book?

5. What are the family values?

6. There seem to be many secrets in this story, especially about sexual/romantic relationships. Why is that?

7. Do you think this book accurately reflects current Southern culture?

Bloody Kin

2011-01-09T17:29:00.007-05:00

Bloody Kin ismy first "Colleton County" novel and a sort of prequel to the Deborah Knott series. This book is out of print at the moment, but cheap copies can be found if you look hard enough.

BLOODY KIN

I had written two novels in the Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD series when I had a huge longing to set a book in North Carolina. My then-agent, a elderly and delightfully urban man, came down to see for himself what was diverting me from beginning another book set against the New York art world. It was winter. He stood at my living room windows and looked out across the fallow fields, the scubby pine woods, the nearly flat landscape and shook his head in bewilderment. "Why in God's name would you want to set a book here? You don't have the ocean. You don't have the mountains. You don't have virgin forests or even a decent raging river. Why here?"

I looked out over those same fields that the men of our family had plowed, at the trees and bushes that the women in my family had planted for spring blossoms, at the sandy loam where we hunted arrowheads after every heavy rain, and all I could say was "It's home. My home. Where I grew up."

He sighed and told me I might as well get it out of my system. So I wrote Bloody Kin, set it right here on the land that's been in our family for over a hundred years, and thought that I had indeed gotten it out of my system.

Except that I hadn't. Five books and seven years later, I gave in to my love for North Carolina and wrote Bootlegger's Daughter, the book that introduced Judge Deborah Knott.

Bloody Kin does not have a single member of the sprawling Knott family in it, but it does have a deputy sheriff named Dwight Bryant. It has his mother and brother and Kate Honeycutt, a character first introduced in Death in Blue Folders, one of the Sigrid Harald books.

Synopsis:

Ex-model and fabric designer Kate Honeycutt sublets her Upper West Side apartment to come live on her late husband's Colleton County farm while she awaits the birth of their baby. Jake Honeycutt died in a hunting accident--or so everyone thinks--but after another body turns up from Jake's army days, Kate begins to suspect that his death was murder, not carelessness. Before she can make peace with the past though, she must come to terms with Jake's resentful uncle and her own ambivalent feelings.

(Discussion questions to come)

I Did Make a List, But . . .

2011-01-02T01:21:00.005-05:00

Happy 2011!

Our Christmas tree came down this morning and I’m ready to finish clearing the decks for new projects.

When last I posted, my busy season had barely begun. I had a big long list of things I needed to do before ringing in the New Year. In addition to going back through the manuscript of Three-Day Town, my 2011 book, and responding to my editor’s thoughtful comments and suggestions, we needed to find a perfect tree, unpack the household decorations, wrap the presents, cook lots of food, polish silver, dig all the old stubs out of the candleholders, etcetera upon etcetera so that everything would be “perfect.”

I’ll bet your list was just as long if not longer, right?

Did you get it all done?

Me, neither.

Did you have the perfect Christmas?

Neither did I.

I told myself that tarnished silver has a lovely patina and that if you light the old candle stub and wait for the wax to melt a little bit, you could jamb a fresh candle on top and it will stay in place. A little crooked, maybe but who’s going to notice? (Okay, perhaps you have a female Adrian Monk in your extended family, too . . . but when she left, all your candles were straight, right? Mine, too.)

I didn’t find some of our favorite ornaments until we were putting away the ones that did make it onto the tree and I’m really sorry that the 3-D cards various friends have sent us over the years seem to have gone missing, but surely they’ll turn up by next year?

One of the sink drains clogged and stayed clogged for two days.

The Yorkshire pudding came out a little soggy in the middle, the gravy wasn’t as flavorful as in times past, and it took half a box of toothpicks to keep the “limb” of my Yule log from separating from the rest of the cake. (I also forgot to decorate it with the meringue mushrooms I had made.)

I had promised myself that this was the year I would gift my husband with a photo album/ scrapbook detailing a trip we took five years ago. I badly misjudged how much time that would take and, indeed, had to wrap and give it to him with the last five pages missing.

Perfect Christmas?

Hardly.

Yet somehow, as we were taking down the tree, we agreed that it was our best Christmas ever.

Bet yours was, too.

Happy December, Okay?

2010-12-04T23:26:00.008-05:00

Long before Moses

....before Jesus

and before Mohammed

Before Rome, before Wiccans and pagans, back to the dawn of man, mankind turned its frightened yet hopeful face to the sky and recognized that something wondrous happened in the dead of winter. We call it the winter solstice now—the shortest day of the year, the day when night stops its steady swallowing of the sun and the sun hangs in the sky just a few minutes longer, day by day, promising another year, another seedtime, another harvest. Most historians agree that the winter solstice is precisely why so many religions that originated in the northern hemisphere have major celebrations around this time.

To me, it’s both silly and intolerant for any one group to object to a joyful and sincere “Happy Holidays” as if they own December and no one else has any right to it.

So happy Hanukkah everyone! Spin a dreidel for me.

Joyous Kwanzaa! May everyone grow stronger with the seven principles for guides.

Merry Christmas! Peace and love to all mankind.

And for those of the Seinfeldian persuasion (you know who you are), Happy Festivus!

Finally, in the spirit of the season, I’m passing along the greetings sent out this year to the clients of a West Coast law firm (click here 2010 or on the 2010 below. Be patient. It takes a 60-90 seconds to load). Hope to see you back here in January 2011!

2010

BEFORE AND AFTER

2010-11-28T08:48:00.004-05:00

Because of the car wreck earlier this month, I haven’t felt up to tending to my usual fall gardening chores. As October wound down, I brought in all the geraniums, cyclamens, and kalanchoes I planned to save and I had lugged in the twenty-year-old Boston fern that I was sure was reptile-free because I had chased two lizards off the drooping fronds after hosing it down outside. (Next day I discovered two little green anoles had managed to hunker down in the center and are now living contentedly in that ferny, sunny corner of the living room . . . sigh.)

I had pulled up the extra geraniums, shaken off the dirt and hung them upside down in the utility shed, dug up the tuberose bulbs and stored them as well.

Nothing was left to do except to pull up summer’s weedy petunias, zinnias, and marigolds in the planter boxes and switch them out for winter’s pansies.

Then came the wreck and all I wanted to do was take another pain pill and huddle on a recliner.Happily, someone told me about a young woman who would not only sell and deliver flats of pansies, but plant them as well. She came out and cheerfully pulled out the old, then tamped in the new.

I’m feeling more cheerful myself now and am finally ready to get back to the rewrite of my 2011 book. My editor has been wonderfully patient and understanding, but she raised some valid points that I need to tackle, so I’ll be pulling up clumps of weedy verbiage and start switching it out for fresher, more vibrant narration. At least that’s my plan.

In the meantime, my warmest thanks to all of you who have cheered me through this past month with your flowers, cards, Cheetohs, and eMails. I’m convinced I have the best, most caring readers in the world. You really did lift my spirits.

GROWTH MARKS

2010-11-21T11:19:00.005-05:00

Every family seems to have its special holiday traditions. One of ours is this wall between our kitchen and sitting room. Sooner or later, every child who visits in the next month or so will remove socks and shoes, place heels against the baseboard and stand up straight and tall to be measured. Name and date will be written beside each mark and then a ruler will be brought out to measure the difference between last year’s mark. “I grew an inch-and-a-half,” one child will crow. “And don’t I know it,” his proud and exasperated mother will say. “Seems like we had to buy new jeans and sneakers every month this year.”

My contemporaries and I are starting to shrink (sigh), but we love watching the next two generations shoot past us.

I bet most of you have a place in your own house for measuring the kids, which is what inspired this short story. It’s not a crime story per se, but enough of a puzzler that Nancy Pickard included it in her 1999 anthology, Mom, Apple Pie, and Murder. Hope you enjoy it.

Growth Marks

Sun., Feb. 9th-- Ted & Abby have finally left. It's 90 min. by the interstate back to Winston & I persuaded them to leave early so I wouldn't worry about them slipping & sliding on dark icy roads.

Not that she would, thought Grace Currin as she re-read what she had just written in her journal. Ted approached driving like everything else in life: safely, cautiously. That was a terrible thing to say about one's own son and Grace knew she should be down on her knees giving thanks for his thoughtfulness. On the other hand, he didn't have to come running down here today as if one day without hot water would trigger a massive heart attack or something.

Just because her heart had started giving a couple of irregular stutters in the last year didn't mean she wasn't perfectly capable of managing till tomorrow when her usual fixit man could come. Nevertheless, as soon as Ted called that morning and she mentioned the problem, nothing would do but he and Abby had to drive down with his plumbing tools and spend the afternoon tearing out the innards of her water heater.

Just like Hank used to be, she thought. Couldn't stand to let things go unfixed five minutes.

Abby didn't seem to mind helping him either. Grace knew she should be grateful for their solicitude but it had meant running out in the rain to the grocery store so her refrigerator wouldn't look as if she didn't eat properly and then hurrying back to freshen up the whole downstairs so they wouldn't know that she spent most of these short winter days either in the kitchen or holed up in her bedroom.

So of course that had left her a little breathless, which meant she'd had to listen to yet another round of how the house was too much work and much too big for one woman alone. Never did have an ounce of imagination, Ted. Not like Will, who--

"Oh, no, you don't, Grace Currin!" she scolded herself out loud. "Stop whining for what you've lost and be grateful for what you still have."

Quickly, almost superstitiously, she counted her blessings: a sensible solid son and pleasant daughter-in-law who seemed to love each other, adequate income, good friends--though Sally was remarried and involved with step-grandchildren and Jan had moved to Florida--and, above everything else, reasonably good health (if you don't count the arrhythmia, and I don't, thought Grace) which allowed her to continue living on her own.

So the house calls up lonesome memories sometimes, she thought. So what? "You should be glad you've had people, things, a whole life worth feeling lonesome for," she told herself sternly.

When she and Hank first moved in and began restoring the house themselves, the inside was scarcely habitable: crumbling plaster, rotten roof, bare lightbulbs dangling at the end of frayed cords--what the classifieds used to call a real Handyman's Special. Will was three, Ted eighteen months, and she was blissfully pregnant again. (Even though they'd gotten a late start, she and Hank were going for four.)

Hank always blamed the paint-remover fumes for her miscarriage and it nearly broke their hearts at first when the doctor said there would be no more babies, but Will and Ted kept them hopping: cub scouts, little league, swimming lessons, the big house filled with friends and family.

Even now, all these years later, when she wandered through the wide halls and spacious rooms, she could still hear echoes of running sneakers, doors slamming, boyish laughter. She could pass the scarred newel post and remember how Will's baseball bat always banged it as he swung around the corner and took the stairs two at a time. Forever in a hurry. As if he'd known that he--

"There you go again!" Grace fumed, annoyed that she was letting old memories overwhelm her. "If you can't write a proper journal entry without turning into Poor Pitiful Pearl, then you should clean up the kitchen, read a book, or go watch a rerun of Murder, She Wrote up in your bedroom."

Sat. March 6th-- I could absolutely spit! That mouthy Sally Massengill. Spends so much time minding Martins's puling grandbabies that her brain's turned to mush. After I specifically swore her to secrecy, what's the first thing she says to Ted when she sees him out pruning the shrubs that have overgrown my driveway?

(I'd come back in to stir up a Brunswick stew so Abby won't have to cook tomorrow. She didn't feel well enough to come this morning. Nothing serious, T. says; just that she's been working hard lately & can't seem to catch up on her sleep.)

Anyhow, soon as S. got through breaking her solemn word & had pushed that baby stroller on down the sidewalk, T. burst into the kitchen, all excited because some idiot with more money than brains made that ridiculous offer for my house last week. Now that this neighborhood's been designated a historical section, we get more sightseers driving through & the minute that man saw the eight-sided corner turret, the porch & eaves dripping with gingerbread, & the leaded glass windows on either side of the front door, he'd slammed on his brakes & marched right up to ring my bell.

"Did he really offer you that much money?" asked Ted.

"What price dreams?" Grace asked tartly, adding a dash of red pepper to the savory stew.

Ted looked puzzled.

"He said when he was a poor boy growing up in Buffalo, there was an old Victorian house near his school and he promised himself he'd have one just like it someday."

Despite barging in on her like that, the man from Buffalo had been charming. She'd given him a cup of coffee, a slice of her apple pie and, because his story had disarmed her, a tour of the house.

"Great!" said Ted. "I was afraid this place might be a white elephant."

No imagination at all, thought Grace. Ted and Abby and their friends moaned about mortgages, but they really did think suburban new was worth more than restored urban old. Against her better judgment, she told him what Jan and Bill got for their 1922 brick house on its quarter-acre corner lot when they moved to Florida last August.

Ted's first reaction was shock, his second was to ask how soon her lawyer could draw up the papers.

"You forget," Grace said crisply. "When your father and I were living over our first store in Boylan Heights, this was our dream house, too."

####

Tues. March 22nd-- Like it or not, it seems I'm going to give the man from Buffalo exactly what he wants.

After Hank's death, Grace had resumed her girlhood habit of keeping a journal. It was company somehow, a way of coping with loss and a hedge against loneliness now that the last store was sold and she was officially retired these past two years. She didn't write in it every day, only as the mood took her, which was usually of an evening after looking back over the last few days or week. But today, she was still so shaken that as soon as Abby left, she found herself needing to set down the words that had flown between them.

Abby had taken off from work at lunch for a doctor's appointment and afterwards had driven straight over to tell what Grace knew she probably should have guessed two weeks ago--finally there was to be a baby.

Abby blurted it out as soon as Grace opened the door. Downstairs was so chilly that Grace had bundled her right up to the bedroom and tucked her into a blue velvet chaise lounge with the fleecy white afghan Hank's mother crocheted many long Christmases ago. With hot water bubbling over an old-fashioned spirit lamp, Grace soon had her daughter-in-law's hands around a steaming cup of tea.

Abby had never been inside that room unannounced and Grace was embarrassed by its untidiness: the heaped up pillows on the bed, her robe draped across the foot; newspapers and murder mysteries piled on the night stand; yarn spilling around the rocking chair before the fireplace where gas logs flamed warmly beneath a mantle cluttered with family pictures. (Grace hadn't the patience to become an expert knitter, but it seemed to keep the arthritis in her fingers at bay so she made herself do it while she watched the evening news every night.) On a tray beside the door, used teacups waited to be carried back to the kitchen. A jug of spent pussy willows dropped pollen on the wide window ledge, but she'd always had good luck forcing spring bulbs so crocuses bloomed brightly in their shallow bowls and a dozen hyacinths made the room smell like springtime.

Abby took it all in with interest and before Grace could apologize for the mess, she snuggled deeper into the woolly afghan. "What a cozy hobbit-hole. I don't blame you for wanting to stay."

Grace smiled warily, pushed the knitting out of the rocker, and sat down with her own cup of milky tea. "Maybe now that Ted's going to have you and a baby to worry about, he'll quit trying to make me leave."

"If you really think that, then you don't know Ted very well," Abby said, more bluntly than she'd ever spoken to Grace in the six years she and Ted been married.

It was good to discover Abby had some backbone but Grace was so surprised to have it jabbed at her that she could only stare at the younger woman with her mouth open.

"Ted's afraid that your heart--"

"My heart's perfectly fine," Grace said stiffly. "Dr. Lemmon says as long as I take my pills and don't overdo, I can live with it stuttering along like this for another twenty years. Ted knows that."

"Just the same, he feels responsible for taking care of you," Abby said.

"Nobody asked him to," she snapped impatiently.

"Hank did." Abby's voice was quiet. "A month before he died."

I should have known, thought Grace, and abruptly lifted the cup to her lips to mask her sudden emotion.

Dear steady Hank! Hers might be the flair and imagination that attracted customers to their three office supply stores, but his was the service and reliability that kept them coming back. And Ted was his child, just as Will was always hers; so of course he'd absorbed that sense of responsibility. As children, Will was totally enchanted by helium balloons and sparklers, but ephemeral wonders brought Ted little joy. He was usually so worried that the string might break or that a hot wire might burn someone that he seldom lost himself in rapture.

"Poor Ted," she sighed.

"I know you think he's dull and stodgy--"

"I've never said that!" Grace protested, guilt sharpening her tone. "I adore Ted."

"Not as much as you adored Will." Abby set her empty cup down on the low table between them so hard that her teaspoon rattled on the saucer.

"That's not true!" Rattled herself, Grace filled the teapot with more hot water but Abby waved away her offer of another cup.

"You never met Will," Grace said defensively. "I didn't love him more. Just differently."

"Ted thinks you wish he'd died instead of Will."

Grace was so stricken by that accusation that she couldn't reply.

At least Abby was perceptive enough to recognize genuine shock. She reached across the table and, in a rare gesture between them, clasped her mother-in-law's hand. "I thought he was wrong," she said. "I told him he was, but he's always blamed himself, you know."

"Yes." Being Ted, how could he not? Grace thought, anguished. It was never Ted's fault though. Will was older and should have realized the danger. Diving into the moon he called it, forgetting how dry the summer had been, not noticing in the moonlight how low the lake level had fallen beneath the rock they used for a diving platform.

"Anyhow," said Abby, "Ted worries about you. Your heart, this house. That's not going to change, Grace. And I don't want him to change," she added fiercely.

"No," Grace agreed, still shaken.

"So it looks like we have two options." She spoke bravely enough, but Grace could hear the tremor beneath her bravado. "Ted and I can give up our jobs in Winston and move here near you, or you can sell this place and move to Winston, because once the baby comes, I'm not going to watch Ted keep tearing himself apart racing back and forth on the interstate every weekend and feeling guilty because he can't give his mother and his child equal time."

"My dear, don't give it another thought," Grace told her briskly. "Of course I'll sell now that there's a real reason to. I wouldn't miss the opportunity to babysit with my very first grandchild for all the houses in the world. Now what are you hoping for? A boy or a girl?"

Perceptive though she might be, Abby was too newly pregnant not to be diverted by Grace's questions; and if she were a little puzzled by her easy victory, she didn't risk losing it by asking any questions.

Numbly, Grace uncapped her pen and continued writing.

Part of me dies every time I think of what I've agreed to, but fair is fair. I owe Ted this, if nothing else, if I really did let him see-- Not that I ever thought it again after that first wild grief. I didn't! I swear I didn't.

###

Mon. Apr. 18th-- We signed the papers this morning. I've agreed to vacate by the first of June. My last spring to see in bloom the dogwoods & azaleas we planted, the drift of daffodils on the west lawn, Aunt E.'s yellow jasmine twining through the pines at the back of the lot. I'll be gone before my hydrangea blooms beside the kitchen door.

Will and Ted had given it to her for Mother's Day the year they were ten and eight, proudly lugging it up to her bedroom in a foil-wrapped pot that was top-heavy with two huge blue pompons.

"Will says they're the same color as your eyes," said Ted as he crawled into bed with Hank and Grace and put his solemn little face up to hers for a closer look.

"Why, so they are," Hank had said, looking from the flowers to her eyes to confirm the claim.

But Will had known without needing to compare, thought Grace, and her heart was sliced anew by his senseless death.

Fri. May 13th-- For a while there, began to think I'd have to put everything in storage & camp in on Ted & Abby.

With the first of June hurtling down on them, Grace had diligently read the classifieds, listed herself with two different real estate agencies and trotted in and out of dozens of condos, townhouses and duplexes without finding anything remotely suitable until three days ago. The ad appeared in a biweekly newspaper published in a small town outside Winston, only seven minutes by back roads from Ted and Abby:

Starter home. 2 bdrms, l bath, din.rm, fireplc, mod.kit, nice garden, many extras. Reasonably priced.

Their idea of reasonable certainly wasn't Grace's and the many extras seem to include a quick-stop convenience store at one end of the street and a volunteer fire department at the other end. The floors needed refinishing, the master bedroom was currently papered in nursery rhymes and Ted thought both the roof and the heating system would probably have to be replaced in the next three or four years; but after some of the places Grace had seen those past few weeks, this "starter home" was a house she could end in and she had signed the papers that day.

Anyhow, it's a location I've bought, she wrote in her journal, not a home, so what difference does it make?

At least Ted was pleased.

Sun. May 29th-- The movers will come on Tues. Ted & Abby both volunteered to come back & help pack the smaller, special things tomorrow, but Sally & I did most of them today. They seem a little shocked by how much I'm willing to part with.

After Grace had tagged all the furniture she planned to take with her and told the children to keep or sell whatever was left, she realized that Ted had begun to feel guilty because she wouldn't be able to fit ten rooms of furnishings into the new house. As if that mattered! Thirty years old, she thought impatiently, and he still didn't understand that things in and of themselves had never meant much to her.

Silver, crystal, porcelain, even the few valuable antiques that had come to her through the years had always been treasured more or less in direct proportion to their personal associations. The cane-bottom rocking chair her grandfather made with his own two hands was infinitely dearer than a period Sheraton drop-leaf table bought to fill a troublesome space in the front parlor, so the rocker would go in her new bedroom while Abby and Ted were given the table. Her nieces were delighted to get the Bavarian crystal chandelier and the mahogany breakfront they'd always admired; but Grace kept the ceramic lamp her sister Meg had made in her first pottery class.

"Oh Grace, are you sure?" squealed Sally when Grace took over a dozen brass candlesticks to add to Sally's own collection.

"We use things, we enjoy them, and then we let them go," Grace told her. "Why make complications out of something so simple?"

What wasn't simple were the things she could neither keep nor give away, the instances where she had no choice. She would not let herself get morbid about it, but there was a certain slant of light across her bedroom ceiling that always woke her early on summer mornings, the satin smoothness of the bannister as she pulled herself around the top step, an autumnal winelike fragrance that drifted over from Sally and Martin's yard when their scuppernongs ripened, the patterns cast by the full moon when she visited her hibernating garden on a chill winter night.

Dry-eyed she watched the Goodwill people cart away Hank's den: the old rug worn threadbare beneath his desk, the rumpsprung leather couch where he used to stretch out to watch ball games, the boys piled on top of him like two puppies. The man from Buffalo had four young children and she did not flinch when they pulled from the garage outgrown bicycles, skateboards with missing wheels, and other relics of her sons' separate pasts. Those were only things.

The only time it got really tricky was when Abby and Ted were helping her clear the kitchen and she opened the pantry door and saw the growth marks. She wondered if many houses still had them? Her grandparents' house had, and all her aunts and uncles'. "Oh my! Look how you've grown!" they'd exclaim; and before the visit was over, they would make her pull off her shoes and stand up as straight as she could while someone laid a pencil on her head, drew a short line on the inside jamb of the pantry door, then labeled it Grace, 5½; Grace, 14 yrs.

The lowest mark on her own pantry door jamb belonged to her brother's first grandchild, just five months old at the time. (The last time they measured him, he was still a fraction under six feet.) The oldest mark, though, was Will's, caught in mid-flight as he darted through the unfamiliar rooms joyfully exploring every new cubbyhole. It was neatly labeled the day they moved in. Next day, feeling vaguely historical, she and Hank solemnly measured each other and Ted, too.

Through the years it became almost a logbook as visiting relatives, close friends, the boys' first girlfriends removed their shoes and stood up tall to be measured, each mark identified by name and date. Tipsy with New Year's Eve champagne, someone would herd the whole party out to the kitchen. "Let's see if anybody's grown this year!"

Abby's mark was dated the night she and Ted announced their engagement.

No matter how many times she and Hank redecorated, that inner door jamb was left unpainted, and part of each birthday celebration was the ritual measuring: Will at 9, Ted at 7; Will at 14, Ted 12; Will at 19--after that, Ted's marks went on alone, passing Will's, passing his father. Grace remembered how proud he was the day he caught up to Hank. Proud and yet a little anxious, too, not to hurt Hank's own pride.

Soon the man from Buffalo would send the painters through, she thought. Two layers of fresh white enamel and it would be as if none of them had ever stood there flushed with laughter, self-conscious, barefooted.

Ted paused behind her on his way out to the hall with a carton of dishes. "Something wrong, Mom?"

"No, no," she said brightly. "Why in the world do you suppose I accumulated so many cans of mushroom soup? Packing canned goods is such a bore. Why don't we just leave this pantry for the movers?"

###

Sat. Aug. 20th-- While looking through my knitting bag for some patterns (I'm going to try my hand at a fancy crib blanket for the baby as soon as the weather turns cooler), I unearthed this journal. Couldn't think where in the world I'd stuck it in all the last-minute confusion of packing.

To catch up: The man we'd hired to paint & re-paper here at the new house turned out to be slower than molasses & it took an extra week before the place was ready.

Grace leaned back in her chair, remembering how the movers had agreed to hold the furniture and how, rather than make a further nuisance of herself with Ted and Abby, she had decided it would be just as easy for her to drive down to Wilmington with the things she wanted her sister to have as it would be to box and ship them.

Her brother's wife said she'd drive up from Charleston and at that point, two Atlanta cousins said well, if it was a party, they'd come, too. There were things Grace wanted each of them to have, so in the end she'd driven off into the sunrise feeling like a gypsy peddler with her car jammed full and a small rental trailer tagging along behind.

That week at the beach was just exactly what she'd needed. The five women had known each other since infancy, through childbirths and deaths, and now with sagging breasts, flat-heeled shoes, hearing aids and the first walking cane. They talked and laughed and talked and cried and then talked some more until Grace finally felt that she was in control of her life again.

The movers had already delivered her things under Ted and Abby's supervision the Saturday morning that she returned, and Abby had gone out for sandwiches so that Ted was there alone when she pulled into the drive.

The first thing she noticed as she went up the walk to the open front door was her hydrangea bush, drastically pruned and a little wilted around the edges, but not bad considering all it had recently gone through.

"I know June's a bad month to transplant things," said Ted from the doorway, "but I think I cut it back enough to make up for root loss and I've watered it every night. We can plant it somewhere else if you'd rather."

"No, this is perfect," Grace said, absurdly pleased to see that scraggly bush again and picturing how pretty it would look once it regained its full spread. "How on earth did you sweet-talk the man from Buffalo--?"

"Mr. Heit," said Ted, looking almost as happy as the day he'd helped Will lug that pot of blue flowers up to her bedroom. "He's going to build a brick terrace at the kitchen door, so he was glad for me to take it."

Her old furniture looked strange in their new positions but as Grace walked through the little house, she knew time would soon make everything familiar.

Ted followed her out to the kitchen where he and Abby had been unpacking pots and pans and all those cans of mushroom soup. Without a pantry, the new cabinets were going to be hopelessly crammed, but Grace assured Ted that everything was fine, just fine.

"We did your bedroom first," he told her, "so if you'd like to lie down for a few minutes—"

Grace sharply reminded him that she was only sixty-four, not ninety-four, and certainly not in need of a morning nap after a mere three-hour drive.

The cheerfulness faded from his face. "Okay," he said and went back to unpacking dishes while she stepped into the bathroom to freshen up and give herself a good scolding in the mirror.

She decided it was all the newness that had set her nerves on edge. Everything sparkled and gleamed and the very air smelled of new paint, new paper, new grout. Once she'd been eager for new experiences, but this house had no history, this house--

It's because Hank was never here, Grace told herself bleakly. And there was no mark on any ceiling where Will once bounced a ball too hard, no chip missing from the sink where he dropped his first bottle of aftershave lotion, no lingering echo of his excited "Hey, Mom! Guess what?"

She splashed cold water on her face, took a deep breath, and opened the door in time to see Ted shut the closet at the end of the hall. He had a guilty expression on his face.

"I wondered if you were all right," he said.

Will could always look her in the eye and spin the most outrageous and totally believable lies. Poor Ted couldn't shade the truth by a hair without giving himself away.

Grace walked down the hall. For such a small house, the closet was rather large: four feet deep with wide shelves above the clothes pole and narrow shelves running from floor to ceiling on the left wall. Two storage bags hung from the pole and boxes of Christmas ornaments had been stacked above. Nothing to make a grown man apprehensive.

Puzzled, she started to close the door and then she saw the marks pencilled on the freshly painted inner jamb, marks that began less than two feet from the floor and stair-stepped up past six feet, each neatly labeled with a familiar name and a date.

"I traced them off on tissue paper," Ted said. "You don't mind, do you? I know you're not sentimental, but with the baby coming, I thought it'd be fun to watch--" He hesitated. "And besides, it was like bringing along something of Will."

Even as a small boy, he'd always saved the real truth for last.

"Mom?"

Blindly she turned to him--the sturdy son she had loved yet never properly valued--and at the sight of her face, his crumpled, too.

They held each other wordlessly for a long moment, then Grace heard Ted's choked voice say, "I did try to stop him, Mom. Honest I did."

"Shh, honey," she murmured brokenly. "I know you did. It wasn't your fault, Ted. I've never blamed you for Will's death. Never."

She looked him straight in the eyes and said it again and this time, unlike thirteen years ago, she saw that he finally believed her.

How stupid and selfish of me, she thought, and, yes, how unimaginative, too, to think I was the only one with grief still green after all these years.

###

Well, that was June and this is August. I won't say there aren't things I still miss but the library's within walking distance, the fire engines add excitement, & now that I'm practically living in his pocket, Ted's quit worrying about me so much & spends more time worrying about Abby. He'll always be a worrier, I guess. "Just like his father," I tell Abby.

"If I'm as lucky as you," she says.

The End

Christmas Is A-Coming!

2010-11-14T00:50:00.004-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, CHRISTMAS MOURNING was finally and officially launched at Quail Ridge Books and Music in Raleigh. The only reason my signing could be rescheduled so quickly after my accident is because three of the major colleges in the area had football games and QRB’s canny events coordinator knows that can mean snarled traffic on I-40.

Despite the games, there was a good turnout and we served small nuggets of fruitcake and steaming cups of coffee. There were the usual snide remarks about fruitcake, followed by questions about Kezzie’s peach brandy that Deborah’s Aunt Zell uses to keep her cakes moist. I observed that rum or bourbon could work too. “So is yours drenched in rum or bourbon?” store owner Nancy Olson asked.

“Not rum,” I said. It took a moment for my answer to sink in amid the laughter.

Until now, HIGH COUNTRY FALL has occasioned the most requests for recipes, but I have a feeling this book is going to get its share. So many people have already asked about the chocolate covered fried pecans and for the bourbon balls that I’m going to give the recipes here so that those who want to can go ahead and make the bourbon balls now and let them ripen.

Bourbon Balls

Pour ½ cup bourbon over 1 cup finely chopped pecans in an airtight container and let soak overnight. Next day, thoroughly combine 3 cups of crushed vanilla wafers, 1 cup powdered sugar, 1 stick of softened butter.

Add pecans, bourbon and all, plus another ½ cup of bourbon.

Stir well and form into balls about half the size of a golf ball. Chill until hardened.

Melt together a 12-oz bag of chocolate chips, a half-stick of butter, and 1 oz. of bar paraffin.

Working quickly, dip the chilled balls in the chocolate and place on a cookie rack over a sheet of waxed paper. Drips can be scraped up and remelted as needed.

Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for at least a week.

Makes about 45.

Chocolate-Covered Fried Pecans

Melt half a stick of butter in a large iron frying pan. Add 2 cups pecan halves. Over moderate heat, stir constantly. Remove from heat before the nuts are completely toasted because they will continue to coof for another minute or two. Salt and chill.

Melt together chocolate chips, butter, and a tiny bit of paraffin. (Amounts depend on whether you want to thoroughly coat the nuts or use just enough to get the full contrast of sweet and salt, my preference.)

Line 2 large baking sheets with waxed paper. Spread the pecans on the waxed paper, one layer deep, and drizzle the chocolate over them. Chill. When hardened, break up into chunks and store in an airtight tin.

* * * *

And for what it’s worth, if you don’t have an Aunt Zell to bake you a fruitcake, almost any good commercial cake will improve with age if you wrap it in cheesecloth four or five weeks before serving and keep the cheesecloth well-moistened with bourbon or rum or—if you must—even apple juice.)

Retronyms

2010-11-07T00:41:00.009-04:00

When I was a child, we called it a “television” and everyone knew you meant a boxy wooden cabinet that sat on the floor, had black-and-white pictures, rabbit ears, and only four or five channels that were manually changed by walking over to the set and turning dials. Later, more well-to-do neighbors bought the first “color” television, but “television” itself meant the B&W version. Soon color was so common, that one started saying “a black and white set” if that’s what you had because it was taken for granted that “television” meant color. These days, “television” means dozens of stations, color, cable or satellite, and can range from portables with screens no bigger than a playing card to those huge plasma monstrosities. (And how long before we quit saying “plasma” because “plasma” will be the new standard?)

First there were typewriters, then it was “electric” typewriters, and suddenly it was “manual typewriters” to indicate the originals.

Remember when the only mail there was came delivered by the US Post Office? Now we call it “snail mail” because “mail” is pretty much understood to come through the internet.

A watch was simply a watch. It had a dial, twelve numbers, and had to be wound by hand. We call those round dials “analog” now to distinguish them from digitals.

You never heard the term “acoustic guitar” until electric guitars became common.

Diapers didn’t become “cloth diapers” until disposables came along.

Whoever heard of a “rotary phone” or a “land line” until a few years ago? (I showed my granddaughters my old Ericofone that was James Bond cutting edge in its day. “That’s a telephone? How does it work?”)

The saddest retronym of all has to be “World War I.” Whoever thought there would be a World War II?

(to view a video interview with me on Christmas Mourning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k08wEGekzkI)

CHRISTMAS MOURNING Is Finally Here!

2010-10-30T23:30:00.003-04:00

November 1 is the official launch party for Christmas Mourning at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books and Music, 7:30 p.m., although it has been available for at least a week. If you are on my eList, you received the following excerpt a couple of weeks ago. This link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k08wEGekzkI) should take you to a short video that was made in my home. If not, go to YouTube.com and enter “Margaret Maron’s Christmas Mourning” in the search box. Hope it whets your appetite for the whole book!

Excerpt from Christmas Mourning

This scene takes place a few days before Christmas. As a surprise gift for Deborah and Dwight, her nieces and nephews have rigged up colorful lights for the pond. When they get home that evening, they find most of her family around a bonfire down by the pond:

The colored lights that shimmered on the surface of the water must have revived ancient memory because when there was a lull in conversation, Daddy said, “I ever tell y’all about the first Christmas after my daddy passed? The tangerines?”

There was a chorus of noes from his grandchildren and calls of “Tell us” from my younger brothers and me. Robert, being the oldest, smiled as if he knew the story and already anticipated our reaction.

“Well,” said Daddy, “the way it was is that I was still three months shy of turning fifteen when my daddy died and left me the man of the family. There was Mammy, and Sister and Rachel and the twins . . .”

His voice always trails off whenever he mentions his younger twin brothers, Jacob and Jedidiah. Jacob had drowned in Possum Creek when the two were sixteen and Jed immediately ran away, lied about his age, and joined the army. He was killed in a training exercise at Ft. Bragg before he ever got out of the state.

“Anyhow, it was getting on for Christmas and we was poor as Adam’s housecat. Mammy’d already told the little ones that Santa Claus probably won’t gonna be able to find our house, but they didn’t believe her and just kept talking about what they was gonna find in their stockings. Mammy’d made a rag doll for Rachel outten a flour sack she’d bleached white and did its hair and pigtails with tobacco string. Sister’d used pokeberries to dye a sack purple and stitched up a little doll dress and bonnet. I whittled out new slingshots and whistles for the boys and Mammy’d sent me over to the store to trade some eggs for a little poke of Christmas candy, but all the same, it was looking like a mighty thin Christmas.”

Tenderhearted Ruth, who was seated on the tarp nearest him, squeezed his wrinkled hand and said, “Oh, Granddaddy, you must’ve felt just awful.”

Cal was solemn-faced, as if trying to get his mind around a Christmas with nothing plastic or electronic under the tree.

“Now right before Christmas, there come a rain like I ain’t seen in no December before nor since. Was like a hurricane only not no wind, just a hard, hard rain coming straight down like water outten the pump in our kitchen sink. Possum Creek flooded something awful. Getting on toward nightfall next day, a truck drove into the yard and it was a man up from Florida looking to buy a couple of jars of whiskey from my daddy. Said he had two more deliveries to make over in Cotton Grove and he needed something to keep him warm on his trip back home, ’cause he was freezing to death up here.”

Daddy paused and gave a foxy grin. “He must’ve finished off a jar of something a little earlier though, ’cause it struck me that he was well on his way to being right warm already.

“Well, he left when we told him Daddy was gone, but it won’t thirty minutes till here he come again, walking this time. His truck’d got stuck trying to cross the creek and he wanted me to help him get it out. See, the road won’t paved back then and the bridge was down almost level with the water, so mud was up to his axles before he ever got to the bridge. He said he’d give me fifty cents if I’d help him. Back then, fifty cents was like five dollars now, so I went right out to the lot and hitched up ol’ Maude.”

“Who was ol’ Maude, Granddaddy?” Cal asked.

My heart lifted at his unconscious use of that name because it meant that he felt himself a part of my family.

Best mule we ever had,” Daddy explained. “Strong as a Cub tractor and biddable as a dog.”

High praise indeed.

“When we got down to the creek, we unloaded the back of the truck to lighten it some and I seen he was carrying a pile of Florida fruit. Wood crates of oranges, tangerines, and some big yellow things I ain’t never seen before. First time I ever laid my eyes on grapefruit.

“We stacked them boxes up on the creek bank and I tied a rope from Maude’s traces to the back of the truck, then that man heaved on one side and I heaved on the other and little by little we could feel it start to pull loose.

“The thing was though that Maude was a-straining so hard that just as the truck come free, she let loose with a load of her own and the man stepped right in it. Well, sir, he jumped back and when he did, his feet slid out from under him and he flailed back into that pile of crates. ’Fore you could say Jack Robinson, two crates of them tangerines tipped over and went tumbling down the creek bank where they busted open on the rocks and the high water just carried ’em right away.

“That man was cussing Maude and cussing me and even though I helped him load the truck back up, when I asked him for my fifty cents, he told me I oughta be a-paying him fifty cents for them tangerines and he just drove off without a thank-you or a kiss-my—”

At this point, Daddy broke off and lit a cigarette to cover his chagrin at nearly using a crude expression in mixed company.

“So what’d you do, Granddaddy?” asked Annie Sue.

“Won’t but one thing I could do,” he told her. “I took Maude back to the mule lot and got my dip net and a gunnysack and went down to the fish trap I had rigged up a little further down the creek. Sure enough, when I got to it, there was all them shiny orange tangerines bobbling around in amongst the brush that’d got backed up from my trap. Took me almost a hour to fish them all out and lug that gunnysack back up to the barn. I give Mammy enough so everybody’s stocking got tangerines, even mine and hers. Then I lugged the rest of ’em to Cotton Grove and traded for some store-boughten stuff Mammy’d been needing. Thanks to ol’ Maude, it was a real fine Christmas.”

Before You Vote . . .

2010-10-24T01:34:00.005-04:00

I don't know when I've seen an election season so filled with this much hatred and plain old mean-spirited lies. I don't care how you're registered. But north, south, east, west, Republican, Democrat, whether you're one of the Haves or one of the Have-Nots, a brand new citizen or someone whose people came over on the Mayflower, we're all Americans. When we go into our polling places over the next couple of weeks, could we all just take a deep breath and think about others for a change before we mark our ballots? This poster by John Kinsey expresses what I think so many of us are feeling (and my thanks to The Occasional Bitch website for sharing it.)

Keeping Them Straight

2010-10-16T19:36:00.010-04:00

This is a weird time of year for me when I have to try to keep three of my books straight in my head.

Sand Sharks, my 2009 book, came out in paperback this past week. Christmas Mourning, the 2010 book comes out the first week in November.

I've been trying to remember all the plot lines and plan what I'll read and talk about at the launch party on 1 November at Quail Ridge Books and Music at 7:30. (Come by for a glass of wine and some brie and crackers if you're in the area.) All this while I'm trying to write the last few chapters of Three-Day Town, the 2011 book. (And let's don't even talk about the 2012 book which doesn't yet have a title, a killer, or a victim, but does have a few stray thematic strands.)

Christmas Mourning is the 16th to feature Judge Deborah Knott, and, as may be guessed, has a holiday theme that draws on my own past and present memories of Christmas. While Halloween trick or treaters may be ringing the doorbell on the night of October 31, I'll be selecting Christmas passages to discuss the following night.

Really, shouldn't there be a turkey somewhere in here, too?

Everyday Quilts

2010-10-10T00:30:00.006-04:00

These cooler nights have made me think about blankets and flannel sheets and quilts.

When I was growing up, the women in my family were not into fancy patchwork quilts. Oh, they made quilts, but those were inspired by necessity, not art. The women used scraps left over from making dresses and aprons or from squares salvaged from their menfolks’ work pants. They pieced the squares with a treadle sewing machine and the backings were feed sacks that had been rejected as too ugly to make dresses. (More than once a wife would send a scrap of cloth off with her husband when he went to town to buy feed for the hogs or chickens. More than once he would come home with a load of feed bagged up in the ugliest sacks imaginable, claiming that this was the closest he could come to matching “that blamed ol’ scrap.”)

No, our quilts were never elaborate stars and circles or intricate geometrics, just small plain squares of cloth. Yet they were every bit as warm and comforting as any quilt and in many ways better. You wouldn’t put an artistic hand-stitched quilt out on the grass to lie and watch for the Perseids. You wouldn’t use an heirloom quilt to cushion a splintery porch swing or to soften the floor for children with dirty bare feet when they played “Go Fish” in the summertime, but no one minded using a simple workaday quilt.

And in the winter, when you were too sick to hold a book and there was no television in your room, you could amuse yourself by trying to remember where all the scraps came from: that this block of red strawberries was from the skirt you wore the first day of school or that this green plaid was from your mother’s Christmas apron. You found a piece of your sister’s favorite dress, your brother’s work shirt, the dress your grandmother was wearing when she showed you that new litter of barn kittens. And you would drift off to sleep wrapped in a warmth that came from more than feed sacks and cotton scraps.

CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER

2010-10-03T00:05:00.001-04:00

Outside, leaves are beginning to show a faint hint of fall’s changing colors. My summer flowers are still blooming profusely, roses are still sending out new buds, and even the magnolia has decided it could get in another few fragrant blossoms.

Inside, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Or so I hope.

A videographer is coming this morning to film a trailer for Christmas Mourning, which is due out in November. I will talk about Christmas in Deborah Knott’s Colleton County and I’m hoping I’ve scattered enough candles and greenery around to set the mood. I’m trusting that the camera’s eye will not stray to the windows where trees in full leaf can still be seen nor note that there is no fire burning on the hearth.

But I do love Christmas and even though it’s October, I will enjoy talking about the holiday season and getting a small preview of December. I may tell how tangerines will always be the smell of Christmas morning for me. That was the only time we had them when I was a child. My mother used to put at least two in each stocking because they took up so much space she hoped we might not notice how little Santa had left us. In the book, Kezzie Knott has his own memory of Christmas tangerines and it involves the best mule he ever owned. I hope it will make you laugh and call up your own holiday memories.

Pet Names

2010-09-25T11:25:00.009-04:00

After blogging about losing the skink with whom I shared my office for three years over on Lipstick Chronicles (and isn't "blogging" one truly ugly word?), many of you came to my Facebook site and told me wonderful stories about your own pets—stories both funny and touching, especially when it was time to say goodbye to those beloved animals. You also shared some interesting names you'd given to those pets.

It reminded me of a short story I wrote several years ago. It appears in my second anthology, Suitable for Hanging (Crippen and Landru, 2004).

Readers frequently ask me, "Where do you get your ideas?" I don't always know myself, but for this story, "What's In A Name?" I can remember the genesis quite clearly. A friend of mine who owns horses told me that she had renamed her last horse after acquiring it. The new name used an identical first syllable, but had a much prettier ending. "I had to keep the first part because horse are like dogs," she told me. "They recognize their names when you call them."

The story falls fairly early in the Deborah Knott series, back when she was still single and unattached; and can now be found in the Etcetera section of this website.

David Thompson (1971-2010)

2010-09-19T00:05:00.000-04:00

[Photo by Gary Fountain]

Even if you have only a marginal connection to the mystery world, you cannot have missed hearing that David Thompson died this past Monday, just a few weeks short of his 39^th birthday.

I don’t remember which book I was touring with the first time I visited Murder by the Book, the mystery book store in Houston, but David was already working there as a part-timer. He was a slightly nerdy, goofy-looking, book-loving kid and I remember how he was almost shy because he so admired published authors.

Through the years, I watched him fall more and more in love with mysteries as he matured, became a full-time employee of the store, then manager after Dean James left. He finally married the new owner, McKenna Jordan. He started Busted Flush Press to bring back books he thought should never have been allowed to go out of print and he only recently merged the press with Tyrus Books.

We saw each other at conferences and were friendly, but I would be claiming too much if I said we were close friends. Happily—or so I thought— that was starting to change. We were in negotiations about my out-of-print Sigrid Harald series and my first standalone, Bloody Kin, was already in production, due to be released next spring in time for Malice Domestic. Only last week, we had sent emails back and forth about the new cover. When I thought the first concept was too gory, he immediately sent a more appropriate version and I thought how much fun it was going to be to work with someone this sensitive to nuances.

He leaves a huge hole in the lives of his close friends. The pain and ache expressed in their tributes is enough to tear your heart out. What can’t be measured is the size of the hole he would have filled in years to come as his influence spread: the books he would have published, the writers he would have discovered, the service he would have rendered to the mystery community. I can almost hear the speech he would have made when the Mystery Writers of America awarded him a well-deserved Raven twenty years from now.

38?

He was still a kid, dammit, with a kid’s enthusiasm for all that was still to come and now will never be. We’ll never really know just how much we’ve missed by his early leaving.

9/7-9/2001

2010-09-12T11:08:00.010-04:00

All weekend, I’ve been thinking about the Friday, Saturday and Sunday before 9/11. I had been invited to Washington to take part in the very first National Book Festival on the Mall and in the Library of Congress.

As many of you know, I have a weakness for Washington. It was my coming-of-age city. I met my husband at the Pentagon. I had enjoyed the city’s parks and museums.

But this was the first time I had been backstage, so to speak, at the Library of Congress. Thanks to Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press, I was part of a small group that included Nevada Barr and Sue Grafton, a group that was given a private showing of several rare books: a 14^th century Book of Hours on vellum, a 20^th century copy of Roualt’s Circus, a unique copy of William Blake. I had chill bumps when I reached out to touch a book that Gutenberg himself had once touched.

That night, a hundred or so writers came back to the Library after closing hours for a cocktail reception in the rotunda and a formal dinner on the mezzanine level under that stained glass dome with its gilded frescoes of the greats of literature.

Afterwards, my dear agent and I strolled back to our hotel on that cool, early autumn night with stars blazing overhead. From my hotel window, I could see the clean white shaft of the Washington Monument bathed in floodlights.

Next day, all the authors and their spouses or friends were invited to the White House for breakfast. Dogs sniffed the buses for explosives and we had to go through a security check to prove we were on the invited list but it was all rather routine.

Later, our buses took us back to the LoC where we were issued badges that would get us past any security checkpoints, but that seemed even more pro forma. If you mislaid your badge, all you had to do was walk up to a docent, say you were an author, and you would be handed a badge that said “Author.” Tents had been set up on the Capitol grounds and readings, signings and panel discussions went on all day long. It was a blue sky, white marble day.

After dinner that night, we walked over to the Folger Library Theater for a production of The Pirates of Penzance and a lovely romping performance it was. As Barbara put it, “It was the perfect end to a perfect day—mindless, but not stupid.”

Next morning, it was back to the airport where I discovered John Hope Franklin at the same gate. He was gracious enough to pretend he remembered meeting me at an event in Durham and we had an interesting half-hour talk till they called our plane. He told me he was up to the mid-50’s in his autobiography and was writing about the time he tried to buy a house near Brooklyn College. (The white man who opened the door took one look at Dr. Franklin’s black face, went into the kitchen and took a good belt of whisky, then came back and asked if he’d like to see the house.)

That Sunday morning encounter felt like the capstone to a lovely, civilized celebration of literature, freedom of the press, and American democracy.

On Tuesday, our world changed forever.

Summer Hiatus

2010-08-08T09:00:00.003-04:00

My weekly blog entries will resume after Labor Day. Until then, come talk to me over on Facebook (I somehow seem to have about 3 -- can't delete the unused ones [sigh] -- but you'll recognize which is the active one when you get to it.)

I'll also be posting essays on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays at http://thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com/ And you can always read some of my earlier posts by clicking on the achives at the bottom left of this page.

I'll be responding to email and Facebook comments. Otherwise, see you in September!

Craquelure

2010-08-01T00:10:00.004-04:00

This beautiful painting, "Madonna and Child" (circa 1320-1330), is by Segna di Bonaventura and is in the permanent collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art. It was the inspiration for one of the paintings in Fugitive Colors, the last Sigrid Harald, NYPD, novel. To celebrate the museum's fiftieth anniversary, various North Carolina writers were asked to pick a painting and write a response, I decided to use my research in a further piece of fiction.

You can read the story by clicking on the "Etcetera" button to the right.

You can also visit the museum's splendid collection of Madonnas on line: www.NCArtMuseum.org

Puzzles

2010-07-25T07:34:00.002-04:00

As I may have mentioned before, I have always loved puzzles—jigsaws, cryptoquotes, double crostics, the New York Times’ diagramless, and even Sudoku in the last year.

As a child, I would knot up my shoelaces for the pleasure of unknotting them and if you handed me several yards of tangled twine, I could be happily absorbed for hours. When friends began to knit or crochet, I was the go-to for getting the knots out of threads or yarns. In school, diagramming complex-compound sentences was like unknotting language.

Then came high school and algebra. Kids today begin algebra in 7th and 8th grades. In our country school, we didn’t get it till 9th. I had always been pretty good at arithmetic, especially long division, and I loved the way the numbers fell in orderly patterns in the multiplications charts, but that first week of algebra was a nightmare.

Our teacher was also the boys’ basketball coach and math was not his first love. With no explanation at all, he had us open our books to the first page of simple problems and began going down the row: “If 2x equals 10, what is x?”

“If 3c = 12, c = ?” and “2a – 7 = 3, therefore a = ?”

I didn’t have a clue.

Our class included several sophomores who had flunked Algebra I and were taking it over again, so they seemed to know all the answers. I was a straight A student, yet I didn't have the foggiest idea what was going on. It was a frustrating and humbling few days of stumbling around in a fog. How could those “dumb” kids mysteriously rattle off the correct answers? How had they managed to memorize what all those letters stood for?

On the third or fourth day, the teacher casually mentioned that x (and therefore y and c and every other letter of the stupid alphabet) weren't fixed quanties but were variables. It was like the rising of the sun. How logical! What a thing of beauty was a quadratic equation! What fun to prove the Pythagorean Theorem!

Sometimes I think I became a mystery writer because my brain is hardwired to solve complex puzzles. For the past week or so though, I’ve been feeling like that long-ago freshman. Day before yesterday, however, I finally worked out the main knots in my plot and solved for x. The rest of the plot seems to be falling into logical place. It’ll be another few days before I’m sure, but for now I’m as happy as when I learned that x was a variable.

In the meantime, pass me that bag of tangled electronic power cords!

Yes, It’s the Heat. And the Humidity, Too!

2010-07-18T09:13:00.003-04:00

[While I’m finishing up the 2011 book in which Deborah Knott meets Sigrid Harald, I’m going to reprint some articles that have appeared in other places.]

It’s been brutally hot here this past month with several straight days of the temperature hovering near 100° and no rain to speak of. Our grassy lawn is so dry and burned, you could bale it for hay. An hour ago the thermometer outside my window read 99° and the muggy air was like a wool blanket. Just going to the refrigerator for a glass of ice water was enough to break a sweat.

Right now, after some menacing thunder-boomers, the mercury is sitting at a delicious 74 and there’s a real rain falling that just might last for an hour. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

When the temperature hits 95 and the air is so humid that you could squeeze a handful of air and get enough water to wash your dog, people look horrified to hear me say that we don’t have central air conditioning. (There’s a small unit in my office but I don’t turn it on more than one or two days a year.) As long as I don’t have to do stoop labor in a field, the heat and humidity are an integral part of what I love about North Carolina summers. That soft languid air makes me take a glass of sweet iced tea to a rocking chair beneath a ceiling fan that stirs the air just enough to ruffle the pages of my book. I smell newly-cut grass, my grandmother’s gardenias, the basil I’ll pick for supper. Through the open windows and screen doors, I hear crickets, wrens chirping to their nestlings, the drone of a tractor in the far distance. The heat slows everything down. It ripens tomatoes and green peppers and okra. It makes the magnolia buds swell. It builds into a late afternoon thunder storm that cools and freshens the air. You can smell rain on the air several minutes before it arrives.

Step into an air-conditioned, hermetically-sealed house and you can’t tell if you’re in Maine and Florida. Step into my house, though, and for better or worse, you know you’re in North Carolina.

The Things We Do for Love

2010-07-11T00:03:00.009-04:00

[NB: This first appeared elsewhere a few years ago. It's still true.]

As a teenager, my son used to keep my mother’s grass cut all through the long hot summers. She had a friend whose own grandson couldn’t be persuaded to touch a mower, so the friend asked my son if he would mow her grass, too. Now my son has never liked getting hot and sweaty so he turned her down even though she offered to pay him generously. “There are things I’ll do for love that I would never do for money,” he said.

I’ve thought about that often over the years –the things we do for love. We’ll wipe a baby’s bottom, we’ll clean up disgusting sickroom messes and empty the bedpans of people we love without the least expectation of monetary reward. Vegetables are cheap to buy, yet we’ll grow our own for the love of gardening.

We would rather have our own raggedy, sweet -smelling roses crammed into a dimestore bowl than a florist’s elegant arrangements because the rosebush was given to us as a housewarming gift from a dear friend. We’ll cook split pea soup for a husband homesick for his mother’s cooking even though the very thought of actually eating split pea soup makes us gag. And yes, we will spend years writing poetry and short stories. We will fill journals with our hopes, dreams and aspirations. We will labor on a novel that may never see publication, we will send out manuscripts over and over again even though no one pays us a dime for our words.

Professional writers love to quote Samuel Johnson —“None but blockheads ever wrote except for money”—because none of us can live on air. If we intend to make our living by our writing, then of course we must be paid enough to live on. But it is equally true that “none but blockheads—and hacks—write solely for money.”

No, we write out of love. A love affair with words and ideas and visual images made permanent, like catching a butterfly and pinning it to the page so that others can inhabit our minds and feel the pleasure we felt when the precise word, the precise turn of phrase was captured. We write to memorialize a beloved parent, a bittersweet romance, a heartbreaking loss. We write for catharsis and for confirmation. Plato wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living. Writers examine every aspect of their own lives and then they go on to examine the lives of everybody around them. What is character and motivation if not the result of that examination? Nothing is off-limits. As E.L. Doctorow wrote, “A novelist is a person who lives in other people’s skins,” which is similar to my favorite Walt Whitman quote: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

Even if we’re writing nonfiction, we still have to capture the reader’s imagination and interest, and make him care about the things that drew us to write about this subject to begin with.

In my own case, I was fascinated by the possibilities that language held— how a certain combination of words could move me to tears or laughter or start adrenaline flowing through my body. I began to look at the printed page more analytically, trying to understand precisely how the magic worked. Why did the characters created by one writer rise up gracefully off the page while the characters of another just lay there in wooden awkwardness?

Yet even though I knew I wanted to be a writer, I did not immediately know what it was I would write. After flailing around in several different genres, I discovered that I was most comfortable with writing mysteries.

In one of my NY novels, Lt. Sigrid Harald and her housemate are discussing his plans to write a mystery novel and he says he thinks he can do it in three months.

“Three months?” Sigrid asked dubiously. “I thought a book took at least a year.”

“That’s for serious writers,” he told her.

“And you’re not?”

“My dear, I’m forty-three years old. I have a certain flair for the English language, a certain facility, but depth? I fear not. . . .Writers with something profound to say write poetry, writers with something serious to say write novels, but writers with nothing to say write genre fiction. I shall become a mystery writer. . . .And don’t look so sad. I shall try to be a very good mystery writer.”

I have occasionally—with my tongue tucked firmly in my cheek—declared that “it’s a great handicap to want to write and then to discover that you have nothing to say. Where does one go from there?”

This, of course, was never strictly true. I had lots to say but I was also a very private person. I could not write the usual coming-of-age novel wherein the closet doors are flung wide and all the skeletons trotted out for the bemusement of a jaded world. I could not take off my clothes in public. Fortunately, the mystery has allowed me to say anything and everything while still remaining private. There have been no limitations. And because I happen to believe that the mystery contains vestiges of the old morality play with its examination of good and evil, I do have a chance to present my version of how things are or ought to be in this flawed and messy and endlessly intriguing world.

I love that.

And so we come back to the things we do for love.

Born on the 4th of July!

2010-07-03T23:48:00.010-04:00

Do you remember how the Declaration of Independence ends? "...we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." If you have a few minutes today, look up what happened to those brave men. Several did lose their lives and their fortune, but not their sacred honor. They truly were giants and I think about them every time I raise our flag.

Here are my two favorite quotes for the Fourth of July.

The first is by John Adams, who wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776: “The second day of July, 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.”

He was wrong about the date. Although a resolution for indepence was drafted and adopted by his committee on the 2^nd, the official declaration was not signed until the 4th. But he was right about the rest of it: “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

My other favorite quote is from humorist Erma Bombeck: “You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.”

Lift a hot dog for me, my friends, and Happy Birthday, America!

Kitchen Memories

2010-06-27T13:48:00.009-04:00

On today’s Lipstick Chronicles (TheLipstickChronicles.typepad.com/) Elaine Viets’s reminiscence of watching her grandmother cook and trying to emulate her light touch has called up memories of my own grandmother’s kitchen . . . or rather, her sister-in-law’s kitchen.

The household that Nellie joined in 1903 included his invalid mother, two deaf-mute bachelor brothers and a nearly illiterate spinster sister who was a fabulous cook. The kitchen was Sue's province, so Nellie taught school, gardened, sewed, and tried to keep her husband’s unmarried siblings from spoiling their two daughters. When Sue died in 1927, Nellie took over the kitchen and even though she was never more than just an adequate cook, she jealously guarded the business side of that big room and seldom allowed anyone else to work there.

It’s too late to ask any of the players now, but I do find myself wondering if the sisters-in-law even liked each other. Sue probably felt inferior to my educated grandmother, who dropped enough uncharitable comments over the years to let me know that she resented never being able to cook for her new husband.

As a result, my mother learned to cook on a cast iron woodstove at Sue’s elbow and most of our family food stories come from Sue’s practices. (Imagine cooking on a woodstove in the summer!)

Sue’s pies and cakes were legendary and her specialty was a six-layer yellow cake with chocolate icing. She would bake it on a Saturday for Sunday “dinner” when the preacher or other church friends might be expected to come take potluck. Throughout her whole long life, Mother regretted that Sue would never cut the cake while it was so warm and fragrant.

Because of Sue’s inflexible rule, Mother swore that she would never torture her own children like that and my brother and I have lovely memories of digging into a freshly made chocolate cake that was so warm, the ice cream would melt down into the layers before we could eat it all.

Mother also picked up Sue’s finesse with pie crusts, but she never managed to pass that skill on to me. Whenever I’m forced to bake a pie, I use Mrs. Smith’s crusts, not Great-aunt Sue’s. But I make her biscuits, her cornbread, her smothered pork chops, and her fig preserves—a recipe passed down from Sue through Mother’s sister.

Now my older granddaughter comes out to the kitchen to watch me make gravy from the meat drippings. And she’s mentioned wanting to make biscuits.

And so Sue’s legacy continues.

Thanks for the good memories, Elaine.