Mystery
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Murder, He Shelved
Two and half years ago, on October 1, 2020, I began outlining Death Due, a library cozy mystery that took place in 1985, at the fictional Fir Grove Library, featuring a hero para-librarian named Meg Booker. I finished the first draft around Valentine’s Day, 2021, and immediately dove into rewriting it. Two months later, I realized it didn’t work. After a four-month break over that summer, I came back to it in the fall and by early 2022 knew what I had do in terms of writing a cozy mystery that worked. Back early 2023 I had a new, much longer draft for the novel, now titled A Shush Before…
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Perry Mason and Me, Part II
Returning to the series as an adult It wasn’t until the start of 2022 that I returned to the Perry Mason television show. A good friend who loved the show kept telling me how entertaining it was, and how clever and compelling the mysteries were. I decided to watch a few episodes on Paramount + with my wife and see how it stacked up to my childhood memories. I was in for a shock. My childhood memories of a grim, implacable Perry Mason, were at odds with the good-hearted, jovial attorney, who was serious and implacable when his client’s fate was on the line, but enjoyed teasing private detective Paul…
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Perry Mason and Me, Part I
Part I—Watching the series as a child My mother watched the classic 1950s and 1960s Perry Mason TV series at noon every weekday when I was a child during the early to mid 1970s. The show was in syndication on Channel 12, our local independent television station here in Portland. She would make lunch for us, and we’d sit at the dining room table with Perry Mason running on the TV in the living room of our small ranch home. Los Angeles Attorney-at-Law Perry Mason, fictional scion of justice from the late 1950s and early 1960s, brilliantly played by Raymond Burr, an implacable figure to young Dale, relentless in defending…
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Hello 2023
Happy Belated New Year! I ended 2022 with two screenings of Glass Onion, the follow-up to Knives Out. If you enjoyed the first film featuring the world’s greatest detective, Benoit Blanc, definitely catch the second, now streaming on Netflix. An eccentric billionaire and his group of friends on a sunny and luxurious Greek isle present Blanc with a twisty mystery to solve. To say more would be spoiling the fun, so I won’t. It’s taken me a while, but A Shush Before Dying is coming together at last, and I’m having an absolute blast putting this library cozy mystery together. It’s scheduled to be published later this spring. I am…
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Puzzling Out an English Village Murder
A quaint little village in the Cotswolds, or the Lake Country, or somewhere in Oxfordshire. A place where everyone knows your name and what you’ve been up to. The public house is the center of community activity and the place to escape the troubles and worries of daily life. There’s a manor house, the hoary old church, the classic English cottages. But there may be the new development, causing tension in the community. Long-held grudges and long-festering feuds suddenly boiling up in the face of change, with murder the result. Fertile and deadly ground for thousands of mystery novels, and countless television shows. It’s also the inspiration for Murder in…
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Jessica Fletcher is my hero
I’m very late to the Murder, She Wrote party, but now that LeAnn and I are watching the show, I realize what a wonderful character Jessica Fletcher is. Wise in the ways of the world, kind to everyone she meets, and filled with empathy for all. Her previous career as a high school teacher and her upbringing as a Mainer both come out in her down-to-earth manner. Like all great detectives, she’s curious, always asking questions, fearless once she’s on the case in pursuing leads wherever they take her, and relentless in investigating. She’s also persistent in her writing, always working on the next book, wishing she could focus more…
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Some favorite mystery shows
Living in the current golden age of digital streaming, we mystery lovers have a lot of wonderful mystery shows we can watch, old and new. Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order. Midsomer Murders. I love this delightful cozy featuring police as the main characters, set in the fictional English County of Midsomer. Twenty-two season and counting of light-hearted, sometimes outlandish, and always enjoyable mystery spinning. Only Murders In the Building. This fable-like series on Hulu blew me away when it premiered last year. The trio of sleuths have fantastic chemistry, balancing in the wacky oldsters in Martin Short and Steve Martin, and Selena Gomez’s twenty-something…
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Feeding My Mystery Muse
After returning from a visit with a friend yesterday, I watched two more classic Perry Mason episodes, and marveled again at the storytelling and dialogue, and the skilled way a mystery was laid out and solved in under an hour. The series is very much a product of its time, and yet feels fresh and modern in many ways. Good conflict is timeless, and Perry’s never-ending quest to help those in need is as relevant today as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. I’m also reading James Scott Bell’s entertaining “Neo-Pulp” mystery collection, Trouble is My Beat, featuring pulp writer and Hollywood studio troubleshooter Bill Armbrewster. It’s a cracking…