Malice: A Forethought

By the time you read this, I’ll be on a train to Washington DC, sleep-deprived, but ready to commit (to) Malice. 

The Malice Domestic writer/fan convention celebrates the traditional mystery, giving the “Cozy” its due in a world that sometimes seems to think that the darker and more inaccessible a mystery is, the better it must be.

This year, for the first time, I’m headed down on Thursday at a reasonable hour. 

For years, Malice competed with the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards (the Oscars of the mystery world), which were held on Thursday night. So, if you went to the Edgars, you missed part of Malice. Unless you stayed up and took the 4am train.

I did that once, when Death in Her Face came out. I was lucky enough to get a spot in the Malice Go Round, which gives authors who’ve had books published since the previous Malice a chance to meet a few hundred readers in a sort of speed-dating for authors.

There was not enough Refresh in the world to get the red out of my eyes. I looked like a character in a paranormal. 

This year however, the Edgars were held on Wednesday night. I think there might have been some confusion about dates on the part of the hotel. It would explain two bottles of free wine on each table.

The Edgar Awards are the culminating event of Edgar Week, which kicked off Monday evening with the launch of the Mystery Writers of America Cookbook at Mysterious Bookshop. 

“Wickedly good” recipes from dozens of celebrated writers. Here are two. From left, contributors Alafair Burke and Chris Pavone, with editor Kate White, and administrative director of MWA, Margery Flax. 

And here is non-contributor me, catching some cool air and outdoor conversation with the legendary Otto Penzler, Charles Todd (contributor), Judy Bobolik, Ruth Jordan and Crimespree Cats. 

Tuesday, it was the MWA Symposium, panels of really famous writers and the Edgar nominees (some of those are the same people) with cogent insights on the craft, business and heart of writing. That’s followed each year by a cocktail party for MWA members, with agents and editors as guests. That's followed by going out and staying out late in NYC with friends you haven't seen in months!

Then the Edgars. Repeat last sentence above.

Hence, my sleep deprivation.

But I'm looking forward to Malice, especially my panel.  Although there was a frisson of anxiety about that late last week.

The moderator had to bow out suddenly, and moderating is not a job just anyone can step into. It’s not simply coming up with a few questions that fit the topic and asking each panelist the same thing, and hope interesting discussion magically occurs. Not if you do it right.

But – sigh of relief – the excellent Marcia Talley, the author of the Hannah Ives series, agreed to step in. Here’s Marcia with her Agatha for Best Short Story a few Malices ago.

Actually BIG sigh of relief. I know I'm in excellent hands. And this has not always been the case.

I’ve attended dozens of different conventions all across the country and have had largely very enjoyable panel experiences. But I've had a few bad ones, and they haunt me and can cause nervous tics to develop just upon entering a hotel ballroom. Let me give you two examples.  

Second-worst panel I was ever on, the moderator let one panelist hijack the whole show, allowing him to go on and on for about 10 minutes to each question, while the rest of us politely confined ourselves to the 3 minutes that were the alleged maximum. I was halfway into answering only my second question when the timekeeper at the back of the room held up the Time for Q&A sign.

The worst was the one in which the moderator gave us no idea what she was going to do with the topic because she liked to “wing it” and thought that was a great way to encourage spontaneity. I think it's a great way to encourage stuttering and half-considered answers that can make a person look addled. Her focus and the panel topic bore no resemblance to each other. She talked about what interested her, not what the organizers thought might appeal to the readers. In addition, she apparently paid no attention to the bio I sent her, as her introduction got my series wrong; she had confused me with another convention attendee named Sheila.

So you can see how relieved I am that at 10:00 Saturday morning, I will be with Marcia and Alice Loweecey, Sara Paretsky, Lane Stone, and Elaine Viets chatting about “Cozy Noir?: Private Eyes”.

Cozy Noir? I can’t wait to see what we do with that one. 

"Traditional mysteries" – by Malice's definition – are "...mysteries which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence."  For cozies, one would certainly add “no profanity". 

My best friend Kathy once described extreme noir as "never love; never hope."

So, we have quite a spectrum here, and I started thinking about where my series would fall on that spectrum from Cozy to Noir?

I don’t write explicit sex, though you can certainly guess what might have just happened or is about to between Lauren and Peter. It never felt right to make the sex explicit. Lauren’s a lady, a lady of the 1940s, circumspect about her personal life. She’s the first person narrator. I can’t imagine her suddenly being graphic with the reader about sex. 

I don’t do gruesome violence. A couple of people have been shot on the page, and plenty of bodies have been found after the killer was through with them. But my on-page violence is more like the time Peter took the security chief of a major studio and put him headfirst into a file cabinet because the guy had put Lauren in danger, and Peter thought it was a good idea to point out to the guy that he shouldn’t ever do that again.

My series does have some profanity. Occasionally characters who are the kind of people who would swear, do. Though nobody does it very often.

However, my series’ view of the world is considerably darker than a cozy. While the killers are always caught, I'm keenly aware while I’m writing of the difference between justice and the world being put right again. People die, and the lives of those left behind will be changed forever. Those who loved the victim and those who cared about or were betrayed by the killer. And there are some recurring unsavory characters (including one based on the most dangerous gangster in LA in the mid 1940s) who will never get their just desserts.

But I hope Lauren’s wry humor keeps the tone from ever settling in too dark a place.

Speaking of a darker place…  I was going to include a picture here of me and fellow panelists at last year’s Malice.  But I was sitting right under a super-harsh florescent spotlight. Turned to the sky, it could have signaled Batman. Photoshop doesn't seem to have an option for "Make top of subject's head look normal."

Note to self: This year, pick a seat more on the noir end of the spectrum.  

Sheila York

Add Some Mystery to Your Summer Vacation: The Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Part II

At the Edgar Awards on May 1, I was by pure chance seated at the same table with two charming representatives of the mystery world: Jaime Fawcett & Chris Semtner — respectively Executive Director and Curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. I could hardly believe my luck. The Edgars — The Oscars of mystery writing, named after the writer who invented the detective story — and I get to sit with two of the people who know the most about him. I asked them if they would guest blog, and they enthusiastically accepted.

Chris guest-blogged with us last month (May 29).

Today, it's Jamie's turn. 

Elmira Royster Shelton's Albumen Print Carte de Visite. Elmira was one of Poe's early loves.

The Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, tells the story of Poe’s life and legacy.  For over 90 years, hundreds of thousands of visitors have visited the museum, seeking inspiration and motivation from the largest collection of Poe memorabilia and manuscripts in the world.  The museum is a popular place for mystery writers, poets, and academics, including such notables of the past as Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller and H.P. Lovecraft.

A first edition manuscript of The Purloined Letter from the museum's collection.

Poe is easily one of the most recognizable authors in the literary world.  As an iconic image, admirers feel they “know Poe”.  

What we find, in fact, is that most visitors are originally attracted by Poe’s dark caricature.  Popular culture has portrayed Poe in hues of black, purple, and gray, while images of sinister black cats and dilapidated mansions usually fill the mind’s eye.

Certainly Poe’s real-life circumstances lend themselves to gloomy interpretation.  To say Poe led a difficult life is an understatement.  He was orphaned at three years old.  He lost his mother, foster mother, brother and wife to tuberculosis.  He was in constant financial distress.  He even died in tragic and mysterious circumstances, adding an ironic end for the Master of Macabre.

But as visitors to the Poe Museum soon discover, Poe’s historical figure is far more intricate than Poe’s caricature.  To really understand Poe’s genius, one has to appreciate the balance between “historical Poe” and “Poe the legend”. 

Poe’s real genius is that he was a brave writer.  Poe explored every human experience and emotion, and he expressed his observations with such resonance that his readers are left emotionally immersed in the story. 

He tried to live entirely by his craft, though he was largely unsuccessful due to the lack of international copyright laws.

Of Poe’s 70 short stories, only 15 actually fit into the gothic horror genre upon which his caricature is based.  Often drawing on current events and scientific achievements of the time, Poe pushed the boundaries of 19th century literature into the arenas of detective fiction, natural science, satire, and science fiction.

The Poe Museum’s Memorial Building is dedicated to Poe’s writing legacy.  Copies of first editions and manuscripts are on display, and visitors can explore the variety of Poe’s influence in American literature in depth.   

One exhibit explores Poe’s influence as the Father of the Detective Story. Through his character, the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, Poe introduced new methods of analysis and deduction.  Calling it “ratiocination,” Dupin creatively solves crimes by putting himself in the mind of the criminal in a series short stories, “The Mystery of  Marie Roget,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the “The Purloined Letter.” 

This innovative technique laid the groundwork for the detective fiction genre we know today.  Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, credited Poe as a writing inspiration – and Poe even earns a mention in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.

To round out Poe as a historical figure, Poe’s clothing, trunk, and walking stick are also on display, providing guests with a sense of who Poe truly was.  

The Poe Museum is the perfect place for the aspiring mystery writer.  Find your own literary inspiration at the Poe Museum this summer.  Check out our website at http://www.poemuseum.org.  








Virginia’s first literary museum, the Poe Shrine (the original name of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum) opened in 1922 with a weekend of events held in what was then its newly planted Enchanted Garden. Two years later, the Poe Shrine commissioned the London firm Raphael Tuck and Sons, Publishers to the King and Queen, to immortalize the garden in a series of postcards. The artist S. Shelton produced the series pictured here.

The Garden Club of Virginia has begun a restoration of the Enchanted Garden based on these cards.

Jaime at the Edgars with Dan Stashower, who won an Edgar Award that night for Best Fact Crime for The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War

Sheila York

Copyright 2014

Add Some Mystery to Your Summer Vacation: The Edgar Allan Poe Museum

At the Edgar Awards on May 1, I was by pure chance seated at the same table with two charming representatives of the mystery world: Jamie Fawcett & Chris Semtner — respectively Executive Director and Curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. I could hardly believe my luck. The Edgars — The Oscars of mystery writing, named after the writer who invented the detective story — and I get to sit with two of the people who know the most about him. I asked them if they would guest blog, and they enthusiastically accepted. 

Chris is going first. I'll hand this over to him now. Jamie will be writing a blog of her own for us in June.

-- Sheila York

Late one October night, a phone call awoke the director of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. The anonymous caller said he would reveal the whereabouts of the missing bust of Edgar Allan Poe if the director would read to him Poe’s poem “Spirits of the Dead.” 

The missing bust had sat on a brick pedestal in the Poe Museum’s garden pergola for nearly 60 years. Then one morning, it was gone.

The director recited the poem. The caller said, “It’s at the Raven Inn,” and hung up. That’s where the police would find it, resting on the bar in the Raven Inn, a rather seedy biker joint on Richmond’s Southside. 

Next to the bust were a mug of beer and a scrap of brown paper with some lines from “Spirits of the Dead” written on it. When asked how the 80-pound bust came to be there, the bartender told police a man in a cowboy hat had carried it into the bar, saying, “I met my friend in the alley, and he’d like a drink.”

Twenty-seven years later, the bust is still on display, though safely in the Poe Museum’s highly secure exhibit gallery. The abductor was never found.

This is just one of the enigmas lurking around every corner of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. It is only fitting that the inventor of the detective story should have lived a life haunted by unsolved mysteries, and his museum invites the sleuths of the world to try their hand at solving them. 

[Sheila's note: The picture at right is the original bust, now in its secure location. Below, a replica that sits on the pedestal in the museum's pergola. Chris told me that they have to regularly wipe visitors' lipstick off replica Edgar's cheek.] 

One of the first conundrums is the death of Poe’s father. 

The museum’s Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building houses dozens of scripts and reviews of the plays in which Poe’s father, David Poe, Jr., performed. These documents help trace his whereabouts in the months leading to his disappearance. Poe’s contemporaries and today’s scholars still debate when David Poe left his wife, where he went, and when he died. But the best evidence leads us frustratingly to the conclusion that he simply vanished from history somewhere between New York and Norfolk sometime between 1809 and 1811. Even Edgar Poe wasn’t quite certain.

Another whodunit involves a murder Poe tried to solve. 

In the museum’s library is the first printing of Poe’s serialized detective story “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” Poe based his tale on newspaper accounts of the unsolved murder of New York cigar girl Mary Rogers, and he boasted that his story provided all the clues the police would need to identify the murderer. Regrettably, they apparently did not follow up on his theory, and the case is still open.

Then there is the question of whether someone was trying to kill Poe. 

The museum owns a letter from his friend John Sartain in which the latter describes a troubling visit from the author, who was convinced that people in Philadelphia were conspiring to kill him. In this note, Sartain expresses his certainty that Poe was not the least bit intoxicated at the time. Sartain found Poe “measured and deliberate” in everything he said, although he later recanted his story. Scholars are uncertain who might have wanted to murder Poe or if he had just imagined the whole thing. Considering he would die under suspicious circumstances a few months later while on his way to Philadelphia, some authors suspect he might have had good reason to fear for his life.

Museum guests can see the walking stick Poe left at his doctor’s house the night before the author left Richmond for the last time. Poe took the doctor’s sword cane along in its place. Why Poe exchanged walking sticks is still unknown, but we do know that Poe was planning a return visit to Philadelphia where, a few months earlier, he had feared someone wanted him dead.

Of course, Poe never reached the City of Brotherly Love. He died in Baltimore nine days after leaving Richmond. The cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery. He disappeared for five days before a Dr. Snodgrass found him semi-conscious and wearing someone else’s clothes, and took him to Washington College Hospital. Over the course of four days in the hospital, Poe was unable to tell anyone either where he had been for the past week or what had become of his luggage.  

That luggage, Poe’s trunk, is now in the Poe Museum along with its key, which was found in his pocket after his death. 

Neither the trunk, the walking stick, nor the museum’s lock of Poe’s hair Snodgrass clipped from Poe's head after he died, provide any answers to the mysteries about Poe’s final days, but there have been a dozens of published theories about what could have happened to him.

These are just a few of the puzzles guests are invited to explore at the Poe Museum, the perfect vacation destination for mystery lovers.

If you are interested in learning more about the inspirations for Poe’s detective stories, the Poe Museum is the perfect place to uncover the truth behind “The Gold-Bug” or “The Purloined Letter.” Visitors learn how Poe, as a writer for Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger, used his own amateur sleuthing skills to expose a fake chess-playing automaton five years before he wrote his first detective story.

This summer, try solving a mystery at the Poe Museum. The museum’s four-building complex boasts the world’s largest collection of Poe personal items and memorabilia.

Finding us won’t take much detective work. Just visit our website at http://www.poemuseum.org.

Chris Semtner

Curator

Edgar Allan Poe Museum

With Chris at the Edgars

Copyright 2014 Sheila York & Chris Semtner

Ordinary Grace, Reviewed

I have attempted here to review Ordinary Grace without giving too much away, though there is one spoiler. Perhaps I should just say it's one of the best mysteries I've read in years and you should all read it.

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I always come to William Kent Krueger novels expecting to be instantly engrossed. A friend lent me Iron Lake years ago at a time when I was facing some serious surgery and as long as I had my eyes on the pages of that book the hospital stay to come was never a distraction. Even my husband’s observation that I would not understand the problems inherent in driving a truck across a frozen lake didn’t dent my enthusiasm. After the surgery any discomfort was kept at bay by a reading of Boundary Waters. Any author who can draw me out of my world into one that is totally unfamiliar has me as a lifelong fan.

Ordinary Grace is a wonderful novel and I was thrilled that it won an Edgar. Kreuger's rendering of the daily struggles of this family, of the natural world and the details of life in the 1960s (yes, I remember watching Disney's Wonderful World of Color on a black and white T.V. set) frame the action of the novel perfectly.

Frank Drum says as the novel opens, that though terrible things happened that summer he doesn't think of it as depressing. One of Kreuger's great gifts is his ability to make this novel and the things that happen in it both stark and cozy. Yes, tragedy strikes, but life goes on and people experience contentment and happiness again. (The scene in which Frank realizes he has not thought about his murdered sister all day and has actually laughed is perfection.)

If I have any quibble it's that Nathan Drum seemed a touch too good to be true. He gives off a faint whiff of Atticus Finch. But any novel that can remind you of To Kill a Mockingbird has a lot going for it.

© 2014 Stephanie Patterson

Malice & Mr. Poe

For the last decade, since my first novel was accepted by a publisher, the last days in April and first days of May have been reserved for the Edgars and Malice Domestic.

The Edgar Awards — yes, named for Mr. Poe — are sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America, and are the Oscars of the mystery world. Each of 9 categories is judged by a separate committee of mystery writers. The awards are great fun in a laid-back and witty evening. And you don’t have to show cleavage and be under 40 to get your picture taken! 

Caroline Hart (center) was named a Grand Master this year (along with Robert Crais, far right). 

She gave me my first cover blurb, saying of A Good Knife’s Work “Sheila York combines glamour, humor and the late 1940s in a clever and challenging mystery.” I was a total newbie and she gave me a blurb. It was so kind of her. 

See the full list of this year’s nominees and winners here.




By happy accident, at my table were two of the staff of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia: Jaime Fawcett, the executive director, and Chris Semtner, the curator. They're young, eager, and super enthusiastic about their jobs. I snapped a picture of them, but while it looked great in the darkened banquet room, I had cut off half of Chris’s face (a Poe-esque touch). A new cell phone. I hate learning curves. 

Then a group of us went to the after-party hosted by the legendary editor Otto Penzler, also owner of the famous Mysterious Bookshop, and after that, slid over to an Irish bar across the street. 

That's Reed Farrel Coleman at the left end of the table with his wife, Roseann. Reed will continue the Robert B Parker Jesse Stone series. The new book, Blind Spot, comes out in September. 

I collapsed into my hotel-room bed about 3:00am, then was back up at 7:00am to catch the train for Washington DC and Malice Domestic.

Malice Domestic is a writer/fan convention dedicated to traditional & cozy mysteries.  

Here’s a shot of me and my cohorts on the panel It’s Alive! Mysteries that Bring History to Life. I wish we’d had more time. I was just getting revved up on the subject of how much the Great Golden Age of Film might owe to the censorship of the Production Code when time ran out.

Congrats to my buds Charles Todd (actually Charles and Caroline Todd, who write as a team) and Chris Grabenstein for their Agatha Awards wins — respectively, Best Historical Novel and Best Children's/Young Adult Novel.  

The best moment for me might have been on a quiet ride up in a packed elevator. Just as she got out, a woman turned to me and said, “I just love your books.” And the doors closed. In unison, everybody else in the elevator turned to me and examined my name tag to see who the heck I was. 

Way too quickly, it was time to go home. Red Caps are the best-kept secret (and let’s keep it that way, all right?) in travel. You check in at the Red Cap station, then when the train is ready, you’re escorted (unencumbered by bags) to the train, boarded before the other passengers. Your bags are stowed in a convenient and empty space — no elbows, no fisticuffs — and then you get to pick your seat (mine’s always in the quiet car). You settle in, relax. Let the other people search, dragging their bags behind them, for the last empty seat on the train. All for a tip. I’m $5 a bag, unless it’s full of books that I’ve greedily acquired at an awards celebration and a convention, then the Red Cap gets hazardous duty pay. 

But may be best to avoid asking Amtrak's virtual chat lady for any help. Last month, when I was making my reservations, I typed in "Senior Discounts" and I got hits on how to get information in Spanish. Golly, I hope that was a tech glitch. 

Sheila York
Copyright 2014

Open Pores

I introduced myself to Tom at the 1992 MWA Edgar Awards Dinner. I’d read Dark Maze and believed it the best crime novel of the year, so I brought it to the dinner for Tom’s autograph. It got the Edgar and I made a friend. Ten years later, Tom was in L.A. waiting to be discovered when he persuaded his buddy, the late David Mills, to buy our pilot script, ‘The System,’ for Aaron Spelling-TV Productions. That got us two free weekends in Hollywood working with Mills in his trailer on the set of his then ill-starred ‘King Pins,’ a gory Mexican cartel melodrama, as we revised and blackboarded our script. Spelling flew us from NYC to the Coast First Class. On arrival, the agent Tom had arranged as our representation said words to us I’ll never forget. “You’re hot in this town,” she said.

In the end, NBC passed on filming our opus, and flew us back home—Coach. We’d cooled.

Robert Knightly

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Thus begins a fog-bound Thursday in the life of Yours Truly, mystery writer of yore:

I awake, scratch myself, consider the merits of shaving (or not), drink up the newspapers and a pot of coffee, wonder where I might find a spot of cash, decide who among the people in my head are quick or dead, and wonder about a cryptic e-mail.

A decade ago, my place in the demimonde of crime literature, as I prefer to call the noble genre, still flickered, if weakly. Two decades ago, I established myself in that world on the wonderful April evening of ’92, when I collected an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Now in the year 2013, you have likely never heard of me. My last crime novel, Grief Street, was released in 1997. Its forerunners—Sea of Green, Dark Maze, Thrown-Away Child, Drown All the Dogs, and Devil’s Heaven—have been promoted to Glory, to employ the Salvation Army eulogy. There are two ways of looking at this: negatively, or positively. Which is to say, Nothing recedes like success—or, To everything there is a season.

My comrades in the writing dodge—scriveners like me, whose claims to fame are now mainly down the drain—frequently blame publishers for their plight. (To be sure, publishers deserve a measure of ill repute. As a species, they are unlovely, possessing all the imagination, romance, and élan of—pigeons. Yet they are not so beautiful against the sky.) But just as often, and to their great credit, my comrades recognize a time to move on.

A few of us, having moved on and aged with some degree of grace, harbor the hope of one more of life’s rewards before we croak—perhaps one more book that we may set upon the brag shelf. Such is how it is with me.

Presently, I compose essays for a daily online journal of literature, music, and politics—the Berlin-based CulturMag. My usual dateline is “New York, near America,” and my stuff usually involves the absurd behavior of a fading empire. I am a foreign correspondent in my own country. Besides this, I slowly labor toward completion of Lovers & Corpses, which I think of as a novel with murder. The book involves a minimum of shaving, what my German colleagues call Gesäß aus Eisen (buttocks of iron), and a number of choices regarding who shall live to tell a tale and who shall die trying—and more importantly, why.

The tale concerns a burned-out cop who evolved as a burned-out journalist. Since I came within inches of becoming a cop as a young man, I am able to imagine myself as the former character. And having spent several decades in American corporate media, I know whereof I speak as regards the latter.

Should Lovers and Corpses sound rather downbeat, I hasten to add my happiness on discovering that I retain the Writer’s Soul: still, I have need of fiction’s ingredients—a cast of characters, a ripping plot, an alter ego—to sort through the chapters of my own true life.

Good cops, good journalists, and good writers walk around with their pores open. That way, everything gets under the skin. Most people don’t like feeling itchy all the time; as mentioned, though, I scratch a lot. In true life, things much stranger than fiction will occur. This very drab Thursday morning, for instance, I opened an e-mail message under the subject line, “GET BACK TO ME ASAP.” It reads, word for mangled word—(and I swear, I am not making this up):

…Someone you call a friend wants you dead by any means and the person have spent a lot of money on this. The person also came to us and told me that he want you dead and he provided us with your name, picture, and other necessary informations we needed about you. So I sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation on you, and they have done that but I told them not to kill you that I will like to contact you and see if your life is important to you or not since their findings show that you are innocent…

If Lovers & Corpses ever sees the light of a publication day, and should you be willing to plunk down twenty-five dollars or so for your very own copy, you will recognize the foregoing as an excerpt from a larger fulmination of menace.

And know that beyond the obvious grift, the e-mailer’s lie could be a truth somewhere in time.

Thomas Adcock