Month: August 2015

Guest Author – Kathleen Kaska

~ patyjag ~ 2 Comments

Inspirations from Long Ago

Typewriter, newspaper, glasses and a cup of coffee on desk, high angle view, close up
Typewriter, newspaper, glasses and a cup of coffee on desk, high angle view, close up

As soon as I graduated from college, I packed two bags and my dog and left Austin to
experience life in the Big Apple. I’d grown up in a small town, worked my butt off to get
through college, and after receiving my diploma, headed straight to New York City. No job
awaited me there; I had no place to live and very little money; and I knew hardly anyone.

But adventure called. Miraculously, everything worked out and I stayed for eighteen months. That was thirty-five years ago. At the time I had no aspirations of becoming a writer. I just wanted to experience life in one of the most thrilling cities on the planet. Little did I realize that my time in NYC would become valuable to my future writing.

I’m now working on a new mystery series; this one is set in 1945 in Manhattan. Mickey
Spillane, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler were inspirational in my
decision to try my hand at hardboiled crime fiction. Once I began writing, memories of my time in New York came flooding back; the jazz club on Seventh Avenue where I bartended; the homeless woman who went by the name of Rooster; an elderly woman who lived in Hell’s Kitchen who believed the entire state of Texas was responsible for assassinating JKF (and since I was a Texan, I was part of that conspiracy); my apartment on 30th and Madison; the Dubrovnik Hotel down the street; a dark, eerie bar I happened to walk into one day; and the deli near my apartment where I learned to order cream cheese with my bagel by asking for a schmear. All these find their way into my new book.

I am glad I took time to visit some of Manhattan’s other institutions while living there, and not just the popular venues on every tourist’s list like the Empire State Building, United
Nations, Statue of Liberty, and Central Park; but places frequented by locals: Carnegie’s Deli in Midtown (famous for corned-beef and pastrami sandwiches); Sardi’s Restaurant in the theatre district (known for the caricatures of show-business celebrities displayed on the walls); and what became my favorite Italian restaurant in Little Italy, Luna’s on Mulberry Street. All these establishments have become my down-and-out detective protagonist’s regular hangouts. He also moves into the Dubrovnik Hotel after his apartment is ransacked and most of his positions destroyed. Rooster and the elderly woman are regulars on the street corners of Hell’s Kitchen where he lives in an apartment over Frank’s Place (based on that eerie bar).

But what really helped me develop a sense of place were the sounds and smells I vividly recall: I loved hearing the staccato chatter of short-order cooks behind the deli counter on the first floor in my apartment building; those early morning, marshy smells wafting in from the East River as I strolled down Water Street, damp with dew, in Lower Manhattan; the noise of food purveyor trucks rattling down the street on their way to make restaurant deliveries—all come alive in my story. I’m only halfway through the first draft, and am eager for more tidbits to pop up from the treasure trove of memories I’d stored up more than three decades ago.

300_Murder at the Driskill_mockup01About Kathleen

Kathleen Kaska is a writer of mysteries, nonfiction, travel articles, and stage plays. When she is not writing, she spends much of her time with her husband traveling the back roads and byways around the country, looking for new venues for her mysteries and bird watching along the Texas coast and beyond. Her latest mystery is Murder at the Driskill (LL-Publications). It was her passion for birds that led to the publication The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story (University Press of Florida).

Buy Link: goo.gl/lnf2WU

http://www.kathleenkaska.com

http://www.kathleenkaskawrites.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/kathleenkaska

https://twitter.com/KKaskaAuthor

Guest Blogger – Lea Wait

~ patyjag ~ 5 Comments

Old houses have always fascinated me.

I’ve lived in old houses – in fact, I’ve never lived in a home or apartment built after 1920. I’ve even bought old homes that needed a lot of love (and money) to give them amenities like plumbing and heat.

The house I live in now was built in 1774 on an island in a Maine river. In 1832 it was moved across the frozen river and pulled up a steep hill to where it is today. My family has only owned this home since the mid-1950s, but I often think of the people who lived here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I’ve actually included them in some of my historical novels.

The history of the house itself was the basis for Shadows on the Coast of Maine, the second in my Shadows Antique Print Mystery series. (And – no – the mystery is fictional. We didn’t find THAT when we uncovered the original fireplace.)

I’ve loved the homes I’ve lived in. But I’ve always had a special fascination for old deserted, dilapidated, houses.

Victorian farmhouses crumbling next to their barns on land that’s now fallow. Elegant mansions that became too expensive to heat, or too easy to tax, that were abandoned, perhaps eventually to become office buildings, or apartments, or turned into nursing homes or bed and breakfasts. Or, sadly and too often, bulldozed to make way for more modern, more cost-effective, buildings.

I love books centered around mysterious houses, too. I can’t resist books by authors like Mary Stewart and Daphne du Maurier and Kate Morton. I love mysteries by Linda Fairstein because, although they’re not exactly about large houses, they do incorporate the hidden history of famous New York City landmarks.

I even dream of immense houses full of rooms. I dream of walking through corridors and planning how I’m going to fix up the rooms for people in my family, or for people who are homeless. The houses in my dreams are always in poor condition, but I know they can be brought back to life. The empty rooms can become a home.

I’ve been having dreams like that since I was a child. (Any psychoanalysts out there?)

So it probably isn’t a surprise that my latest book is about – guess what? A large nineteenth century estate on the coast of Maine that, in 1970, was the place a teenaged girl died.

No one has lived in the house for years.

No question. It’s my kind of house.

THREADSOFEVIDENCELea’s latest book is THREADS OF EVIDENCE. The old Gardner estate in Haven Harbor, Maine been deserted for years. Folks in town thought it should be torn down. But now a famous Hollywood actress has bought it. Does she have a special reason to come to Haven Harbor? The small village is full of old secrets. When needlepointer Angie Curtis is asked to restore a series of old needlepoint pictures found in the Gardener house, she finds clues that may lead to discovering what really happened in 1970, when seventeen-year-old Jasmine Gardener died there.

Amazon link:

http://www. amazon.com/Threads-Evidence-&pebp=1433544126655&perid=OTJPND2814N6ZJ8AS7F1

DSC01566Lea Wait writes the Shadows Antique Print mystery series, the Mainely Needlepoint series, and historical novels for young people. As a single parent she adopted her four daughters from different Asian countries. She’s now the grandmother of eight, and lives on the coast of Maine with her husband, artist Bob Thomas, and their black cat, Shadow. To learn more about Lea and her books, see http://www.leawait.com and friend her on Facebook and Goodreads.

Mystical Mysteries

~ Amber Foxx ~ 3 Comments

Mystical Mysteries

If I could channel the spirit of any author to mentor me, it would be the late James D. Doss of Los Alamos, New Mexico. I discovered him through a review in New Mexico Magazine and read all seventeen of his Charlie Moon mysteries, some of them more than once, and I know I’ll read the whole series again. Though I don’t attempt to write like Doss—no one else could—he influenced me greatly as a writer of unconventional and mystical mysteries, where the ordinary and the spiritual meet.

Here’s a short list of the things I love about Doss’s books:

  • Characters. Complex and eccentric, they surprise the reader. I love the ongoing characters and the unique, colorful people introduced in each of the books. My favorite one-book character is six-year-old Butter Flye in The Night Visitor. Doss wrote child characters with unsentimental realism. Butter is tough and strange and yet likeable, and I have never laughed louder or longer reading any book, let alone a mystery, than I did when I read the encounter between Charlie’s irascible aunt, the shaman Daisy Perika, and Butter in the back seat of a truck.
  • Spirituality. The visionary experiences that Daisy and her ward Sarah Frank have are written in a way that makes me feel as if I’ve taken the shaman’s journey with them. The spirit world is integrated seamlessly with earthy realism and humor that says Doss understood this aspect of Indian culture: the sacred and the comic are not opposite or incompatible. He mixed Catholic mysticism into the books as well with beauty and sensitivity, another Southwest truth. Many people adhere to both Native religions and Catholicism at the same time. My favorite character for expressing that unique blend of spiritual worldviews is Nahum Yacitii, the old Ute shepherd who apparently ascended to heaven in a windstorm and comes back to visit the few who can see him.
  • Language. I read a Doss book and I am in the place. When he takes us for walk in the Canyon of the Spirits with Daisy, I hear every step and smell and feel the air. Even the description of the nervous, jerky second hand of a ticking clock is a marvel of observation that sets the mood of a scene perfectly. (I leave you to find this treasure, also in The Night Visitor.)
  • Mastery of the omniscient narrator. Most writers can’t pull this off, but Doss could show the thoughts of every character in a scene without causing the slightest confusion or disorientation in the reader, often to humorous effect. He could even use the point of view of an animal—a bird, a deer, or a prairie dog—as the only witness to an event, and make it work.
  • Hanging out with the guys. Doss wrote real, not hyper-masculine, male characters. Charlie often fails to understand the women around him, but he does it so sincerely I like him for it. The friendship and repartee between Charlie and Scott give me a sense of hanging out with the guys in a way a woman doesn’t often get a chance to in real life, even when some of her best friends are men.
  • Humor. I get a kick out tall tales Charlie Moon tells just for the fun of it, pulling people’s legs. While the essence of each book is serious, dealing with life and death and love, there is a layer of humor as well, coming from the genuine interactions between characters and from their various eccentricities. Daisy is a spiritual visionary and also a quirky, cranky old lady.

Doss resolved the tangles of Charlie’s love life finally in the last book. I wonder if there were more books in his mind when he left this world, though. Daisy was the oldest living member of the Southern Ute tribe, and Sarah Frank, a young adult by the end of the series, was trained—somewhat—as Daisy’s shaman’s apprentice. Was Sarah destined to inherit all the spirits in the canyon, and the ancient little spirit-man living in a badger hole, the pitukupf? I’ll never know. It’s the sign of a good series, though—I still think about it. The characters live on.

This is revised from a tribute to Doss originally posted on http://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com.

Introducing my Next Deputy Tempe Crabtree Mystery

~ marilynm ~ 4 Comments

Since this is also my wedding anniversary, it’s a good time to announce that I have a new Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery–Not as it Seems.

NotAsItSeems-lg

Tempe and her husband, Hutch, travel to Morro Bay to attend their son’s wedding. This is also the first time they’ve been able to meet Blair’s fiancee, Amaresh.

I did some new things in this mystery. Usually, the setting in my Tempe mysteries are fictional though based on real places. This time I used one of my favoirte places on the California’s Central Coast. Doing so, my fictional characters also visited some great and very real restaurants as well as other attractions including the San Luis Obispo Mission, Montana de Oro, and Pismo Beach.

What isn’t new is Tempe is thrust into the supernatural world of the local Indians, in this case, the Chumash and Salinans.

My husband I have visited all these places many times and it seemed natural to have Tempe and her husband visit them too. Friends who live in the area I’ve written about helped me too.

The main plot of the story is centered around the missing maid of honor.

Like with most of my mysteries, some of the ideas came from my experiences, others came from new things I’ve learned. Being an author is so much fun. Memories from the past pop up and give me ideas for plot twists. Sometimes I read something that immediately says, “Use me!”

I hope that others will chime in and tell where some of their ideas for their mysteries come from.

Marilyn Meredith

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

~ casojka123 ~ 2 Comments

casojka

copyHave you ever read a book in which the characters’ names don’t seem to fit them? Or the names don’t stay in your mind, and you have to keep looking back to find out who it was who just appeared in a scene? When I write, characters’ names are as important as their physical descriptions and their personality quirks.

Almost everyone I know who has read the great Russian novels complains that she can’t keep track of the characters because the names keep changing. You’re not likely to refer to Levin as Constantin Dmitrich in the middle of your story, but don’t start calling John Smith Johnny or Smitty if you don’t want to lose your reader.

Charles Dickens came up with some truly appropriate names for his secondary characters, names so fitting that they are identified with their characteristics: Uriah Heep for the unctuous clerk in DAVID COPPERFIELD and…

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