We’re all suffering these days from this neverendingly wretched economy and the Virginia state government is no exception.  Still, our General Assembly wants to cut funding for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, host of the festival and many other fine projects during the year, possibly eliminating ALL funding.

Last year’s festival drew more than 20,000 people for the sixth straight year and many of those came from outside the state and spent lots of money while they were here.  The foundation receives some generous donations from private citizens and corporate donors but, without state funding, which is 40% of its total funding, it just can’t offer the festival or, at least, not in its current form.  I know we, the taxpayers, have to find ways to reduce state and local expenses but we will pay a terrible cost if we lose such a fine literary event that appeals to all ages and does so much to encourage reading and literacy.  Not only that, but the foundation fosters tourism throughout the state and helps make our communities attractive to businesses and their employees.

Virginia is certainly not the only state facing unpopular budget cuts in cultural programs but I think we need to remember that, without literacy and the arts and music and dance, we’re all very much poorer as a society.  I’m a believer in less government, not more, and I can understand the need to reduce some of the public funding for the Foundation but ALL of it??  In the boom times, we (through our representatives) spent like drunken sailors and that clearly has to stop but we need to find a way to keep such a fine event as the Virginia Festival of the Book.

With the ridiculous weather we’ve had this winter, we all need to treat ourselves to something fun and RavenCon is just the ticket.  Coming up the weekend of April 9th, this is an inexpensive way to have a good time, whether you’re a single, a couple or a bus-sized family.  Geared mostly to fantasy and science fiction fans, it also appeals to horror and mystery afficionados, and you don’t have to be a regular con-goer to enjoy participating.

We’ve been the new book dealer in the Dealers Room since  RavenCon started (hard to believe this is #4) and we’re thrilled to be part of it again even though we had to close our storefront last fall.  This year, we have a crop of great returning writers and some nifty new ones, especially one of our favorite adult/young adult crossover fantasy authors, Guest of Honor Rachel Caine.  Ms. Caine has three current series as well as numerous other novels and short stories in some of the urban fantasy world’s most popular anthologies.  If you’ve never tried her, you’ll love her!

In the author realm, besides those published by the bigger houses and thus easy to find, you’ll also see many who are self-published and with small independent publishers.  You’ll come across old favorites as well as the newly published; perhaps the best is the author who has been visible to you for years while she or he has been working on that novel that is now, FINALLY, published.   The excitement rolling off that writer is palpable and infectious.  Just think, you can say “I knew her when she first started out.”  That copy of her first book you just bought at RavenCon 2010 will someday be a collectible and you’ll be able to talk about the time you spent with her while she signed it

RavenCon is one of the best small cons because it IS small.  You’ll run into everybody you want to see sooner or later and, in the meantime, have a great time at the panels, in the gaming room, at the masquerade, on and on.  An added bonus—this year is the first at a new location, the Holiday Inn Koger Center.  I know from conferences during a past career that this hotel knows how to host something like this and I’m really looking forward to being there.

Don’t Miss It!

RavenCon 2010

Ilene can be found at Rabbi Aviva Cohen Mysteries and at www.facebook.com/rabbi.author

I have a lot of pet peeves: young women in spiked heels and miniskirts who park in handicap spots; spiked heels; miniskirts; young women who can wear spiked heels and miniskirts; clothes that need to be ironed; toilet paper that rolls under instead of over; spending a lot of money to see a critically acclaimed movie only to realize partway through that I wouldn’t watch it for free on TV; finding out that the shipping and handling charges cost more than the item I want to buy; clothing in petite lengths that still need to be hemmed; mosquito bites; exercise; trying to figure out Amazon’s rankings; discovering that Trader Joe’s has stopped carrying one of my favorites. You know, the usual.

High on my list of things that irk me is poor grammar. “He don’t,” “between you and I,” and “different than” set my teeth on edge. (I also dislike clichés, but in this case, my teeth really do clench.) In writing, the confusion between “it’s” and “its,” and “their,” “there,” and “they’re” (hard to distinguish when spoken) drive me up a wall. (Okay, that’s a cliché that I can’t justify using, but it is descriptive.)

Then there are the inaccuracies that have been known to make me stop reading a book. If I’m near the end of a mystery and still haven’t figured out whodunit or why, I keep reading, although I’ll flip back to the offending passage every few minutes and reread it, in case it has changed in the meantime. On my website, I listed a few of the more egregious errors that I’ve read in books by well-known bestselling authors:

* In one book, the author describes the character’s navel ring by using the exact words (something like “her belly button winked”) several times. The first time was cute, the second was an error. By the third and fourth times, it was just annoying.

* A first person narrator approaches a victim who has been shot in the chest and is lying on his back. The narrator then describes what is on the back of the victim’s jacket.

* A woman is hit on the back of the head and falls backwards.

* A Jewish writer describes the holiday of Sukkot as occurring a month after Pesach and lasting two days. (Sukkot is in the fall, after the High Holy Days, and lasts eight days; Shavuot is seven weeks after Pesach and lasts two days.)

I am not infallible. There were several errors in my first book, a cozy mystery called Chanukah Guilt, which escaped the careful readings of a manuscript editor, a copy editor, and the author. Some were caught before publication, but one is still in the book. In fact, I didn’t even notice it until I had read the passage out loud at a book signing – three or four times.

But I do try to be accurate. One of the first rules of writing, according to the ubiquitous they, is “write what you know.” And I did. My protagonist is a rabbi in Southern New Jersey. She is short, beyond zaftig, has unruly red hair, was born and raised in Boston, and is in her fifties (all of which describes me, except I’m now quite a bit older than I was when I first created Rabbi Aviva Cohen; I’ve also learned how to tame my hair somewhat, as will she eventually). Want to know what Aviva looks like? Just look at me. People who know me say they can hear my voice when they read the book.

But there are differences, too. Aviva is a pulpit rabbi; I have mostly worked in Jewish education or non-profit organizations, serving in a part-time pulpit for a few years only when I returned to school for a doctorate in education. She has been married and divorced twice; I have been married to the same man, my first husband, for almost thirty-four years. She has no children; I have two sons. Her father died several years earlier and her mother, in her nineties, lives in an assisted living facility in Boston; my parents are in their early eighties, considered the “young elderly” these days, and live independently in a single-family house in Florida. She has an older sister; I’m an only child.

I try to avoid the kind of errors that bother me when I read them in other books. Chanukah Guilt takes place when Chanukah began right after Thanksgiving. The last time this confluence of dates occurred was in 2002.  I needed a snow storm. It is not unheard of (or even usual) for there to be an early winter snow storm in the Philadelphia area. So I checked http://www.wunderground.com/history/ and, yes, it did snow on the date I needed. And if it hadn’t snowed then? I would have written the scene anyway, but someone might have noticed the error and . . .  horrors! . . . stopped reading. And never read a book of mine again.

I also keep the International Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) on my favorites list, so I can make sure Aviva isn’t going to a movie that hadn’t yet premiered or watching a TV show that had already been canceled. (I really keep it on my favorites list because I’m a movie geek, but saying it’s for research is more intellectually pretentious.) For the second book, Unleavened Dead, Aviva has little time to do anything but go to a conference, prepare for Passover, try to clear her niece’s partner from suspicion that she had murdered her new boss (who had fired her) in a hit-and-run accident, and wonder if carbon monoxide leak that had killed a couple in her congregation had really been an accident. But just in case she has insomnia and decides to watch late night TV, I can check to see what was being aired in late March-early April, 2004. Or I can forgo the research and have her watch a DVD instead.

The moral: if you can’t be accurate, be plausible.

Some of my favorite parts—

Tallahassee’s eternal search for Twinkies
The homage to the shoot-out at the OK Corral when Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson)
The shout-out to Stephen King with Columbus’s fear of clowns
Columbus’s claim that he had sex in the back of a FedEx truck with a girl named Beverly Hills
The twanging of “Dueling Banjos” in the grocery store, again in the search for Twinkies
Abigail Breslin and Emma Stone as a 12-year-old con artist and her sister
Thank God for rednecks!
Puppy love
Sister Cynthia Knickerbocker and her zombie kill of the week
Bill Murray playing the part of…Bill Murray
Bill Murray’s death rattle–inhale–death rattle
Double Tap
An apparently endless supply of ammunition
It had to be a clown, a zombie clown at that
The continuing search for Twinkies
A little sunscreen never hurt anybody

Now, I ask you—how could the powers that be not nominate this for an Oscar?  At the very least, shouldn’t it get one for visual effects or makeup? And, hey, what about the writers?  At least it was nominated for Best Comedy movie by the Broadcast Film Critics Association.  See, even the critics loved this movie!

Modo is an abandoned child in Victorian London, a child with such a fearsome appearance that no one could possibly care for him.  Mr. Socrates, though, a mysterious gentleman of means,  takes Modo in and raises him in a somewhat aloof fashion but with a purpose in mind.  A governess and a man with martial skills are his only companions and teachers but the approval of Mr. Socrates is of utmost importance to Modo.

Besides the education and training he has received, Modo has learned to develop and control, to a certain extent, his unusual physical powers.  Unwilling to let the world see his face, he wears a mask, but he also has the ability to transform his appearance for brief periods.  This ability is of special importance when he is suddenly forced to fend for himself as a test of his readiness to take his place as a spy at the age of 14 for the Permanent Association, secretive defenders of Queen Victoria and Great Britain.  Fend for himself he does, finding that he can support himself as a detective, and thus he meets a client, Miss Octavia Milkweed, and embarks on a most unusual case.

The Hunchback Assignments UK Cover

Technically, this is young adult fiction, but many elements make it very appealing to an older reader who will recognize many of the literary shout-outs.  A combination of steampunk, fantasy, mystery, espionage and action adventure lead to great fun and the villainous Clockworld Guild, with the mad scientist Dr. Hyde and his dastardly invention, may prove to be an ongoing adversary for Modo, Octavia and the Permanent Association.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and will look forward to future installments; I wish Mr. Slade would write faster.   I do have to say he has a terrific website (see the link above) and this is one time I think the UK and US covers are equally cool.   Also, Jayne Entwistle, already one of my favorite narrators, has done a great job again.

Very highly recommended for young adults and adults.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor.

A Square in Savannah

In Savannah, we took the trolley tour around the old town area.    Brought back memories of when I went to Savannah with 2 other ladies and 12 12-year-old Girl Scouts way back in the Dark Ages.

Savannah City Market

Our trolley was the

automotive type, not the horse and carriage.  Maybe we’ll do that next time.  Great food in Savannah, by the way, at Tapas by Anna and at Molly MacPherson’s Scottish Pub & Grill.  The latter had a sandwich to die for.

Indian River, Jensen Beach

Jensen Beach was the prettiest part of that section of Florida but we were not impressed by the beach road.  We’re used to actually being able to see the ocean from a beach road, not one high-priced mansion or highrise condo building after
another.

Then there was St. Augustine.  Now, I have no idea what it’s like to live and/or work there but it was just as cool for a

Old St. Augustine

tourist as it was when I was a teenager all those many moons ago.  It was cold and rainy the day we walked around the Old Town so we didn’t see it all and the return trip on the open-air trolley was pretty nearly pure misery but we survived.  We had taken the full trolley tour the day before when it was sunny and were glad we’d done so.

Never got to see the beach at St. Augustine so that’ll have to wait for another trip, hopefully when it’s much warmer.  Another surprise (to us)—there’s a vehicle fee to get to the beaches.  Not a stiff fee and you can get a season pass but still… The beaches in Virginia and North Carolina, the ones we’re so used to, are free to everyone.  Then again, maybe if our mid-Atlantic beaches did charge a fee, they could afford to re-sand more often, a continuing necessity.

And St. Augustine has this, perhaps the most spectacular example of a live oak  in the whole southeast—the 650-year-old, + or -, glorious tree in the middle of a Howard Johnson’s parking lot.  Awesome piece of nature.

Old Senator

Travis Chase has a past, a prison sentence served for deeds that deserved the conviction, although some might say he had justification for his behavior at the end.  Whatever the case, he has come to the Alaskan wilderness for the solitude that may help him make some decisions about the direction the rest of his life should take.   He’s not alone in the backcountry, though, and the sounds he wasn’t sure he heard three nights earlier have crystallized at the sight before him, the crashed Boeing 747 in the valley below.   This is not just any 747; this one is full of executed people and carried a very special passenger who left an ominous message before she died.

Paige Campbell has a past, too, as an member of an agency charged with protecting possibly the biggest secret in mankind’s history.  Spared the bullets of the executioners, she has spent hours being tested physically and psychologically and her resistance means time may be running out.  Paige holds the key to everything that has happened on the plane and to what the future might hold.

A book club I belong to discusses mysteries based on themes rather than choosing a specific book each month.   Not long ago, the theme was “Kept You Up All Night”, meaning you were compelled to keep reading to the end.  I had no trouble coming up with a choice once I started The Breach.  The sheer intensity of the story literally kept me up all night and Patrick Lee has, in my opinion, established himself with his debut as a premier thriller writer.  Few have grabbed my attention the way he did and the tension on nearly every page is memorable.  Fans of thrillers, suspense and science fiction should run to the nearest bookstore to get this.

The Breach will be on my list of best books of 2010.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor.

Lou Allin is the author of the Belle Palmer mysteries set in Northern Ontario, ending with Memories are Murder. Now living on Vancouver Island with her border collies and mini-poodle, she is working on a new series where the rainforest meets the sea. On the Surface Die and She Felt No Pain feature RCMP Corporal, Holly Martin, in charge of a small detachment near Victoria. In 2010 Lou will debut That Dog Won’t Hunt, a novella in Orca’s Raven Reads editions for adults with literacy issues. Her website is www.louallin.com and she may be reached at louallin@shaw.ca.

On a purely personal note from this blog owner, sincere congratulations to the Canadians for their outstanding performance in the 2010 Olympics!

At dawn on June 5, 1955, my tenth birthday, my mother shook me from innocent sleep. “Wake up, Louise. Georgia’s been shot.”

In a pedestrian but poignant gesture of hospitality, she sent me on my fat-tired Schwinn bike to the store for a pound of bacon, a special treat. Georgia’s parents would be arriving for breakfast.

Georgia Babcock was a kindergarten teacher at my mother’s school. Leonard, a nurse, was her husband. A suspicious profession for a man in those benighted days, but perhaps he had been a medic in the Korean War. They came for dinner once, had a demure drink each, and gave us an heirloom silver cream-and-sugar set that had been in Leonard’s “old Southern” family.

But Leonard and Georgia were heavy weekend drinkers, and the upcoming visit of her elderly parents from South Carolina sparked fatal violence. Lakewood, Ohio, our “safe and serene” tree-lined suburb of Cleveland, hadn’t had a murder in living memory.

My parents and the school principal hurried downtown to the Terminal Tower, where the  train was arriving at ten, Georgia had said. The father had retired from the railroad, and they had free seats, but no sleeping compartment. In the distance stood the old couple, exhausted but hopeful, lost in the echoes of the terminal. “Georgia sent us,” the principal said, and my father took aside the old man and whispered the tragedy. “Let my wife get up the stairs before you tell her,” he asked. “Her heart is weak.”

During breakfast, I stayed in my room reading comics. Everything happened quickly. The pastor of the Babcocks’ Baptist church stepped in and collected enough money to send the heartbroken pair home by plane.

As for the forensics, Leonard had shot his wife, then for some bizarre reason, stabbed her in the same wound with an icepick. He had thrown the pistol on top of his apartment building’s garage, but lacked the heart to flee. Apprehension was immediate.

My mother waited for days to be called as a reluctant character witness, but she ended up knitting a sweater in the anteroom. Plea-bargaining, Leonard was sentenced to life imprisonment in an era when sentences meant business. Either he died in prison or he’s over ninety now.

I couldn’t pick them out of a photo line-up, but I  recall Georgia’s soft southern accent. Never real to me, the murder had been filtered through my parents’ experiences. Once my mother told me that Georgia jumped into her car one morning when they carpooled, and said, “Leonard has a gun.” After that, my mother stopped giving her rides. Did she offer Georgia any advice? Spousal abuse was not a dining-room topic. The very fact that the couple had “met in a bar” meant “end of story” for my conservative family. The sugar and creamer traveled with me to Northern Ontario for thirty years and then to Vancouver Island. I have never polished them, but they keep Georgia on my mind.

That summer, I began writing my first novel, THE MYSTERY OF THE SECRET PASSAGEWAY. Lazy even then, I added to it in desultory fashion until I printed “The End” in the blue exam book five years later, my printing turned to cursive. The plot revealed my dream elements. The brother-and-sister (romance, never!) sleuths ride horses to the police department, find no one (because they are all out searching for the an escaped felon) and then commandeer police motorcycles to drive to a “detective agency.” Amateur sleuth was my sub-genre even then. Don’t ask about the illustrations. The boys all look like Fabian. Who? Elvis with a super pompadour.

Murder nipped at my heels. Doing doctoral work on the murdered Christopher Marlowe, I lived in the basement of a rambling four-story frame building on a hillside in Athens, Ohio. I loved that little apartment, roaring brute of a gas furnace below like the maw of hell, dry rot in the bathroom and the claw-footed tub threatening to plummet to the basement. Looking over that Appalachian valley, I could see the lights winking like the view from Mulholland Drive. When I moved to Sudbury in Northern Ontario, not long after, the apartment was the scene of a brutal murder. A man had killed his girlfriend. A friend sent the picture of my front door with crime scene tape.

In the early nineties I turned to crime writing at last and began to make things happen. In MURDER, EH? I set the final scenes over a hundred miles into the bush. My sleuth and her young friend, trapped in the middle of nowhere, had to follow the pole line, the only means of travel in rough country. A set of topographical maps helped me chart every river, stream, and swamp. The map was of Thor Lake, so remote that only the tiny Bud car train stopped there once a week. Not long after the book was finished, the bush camp at Thor Lake became the scene of a murder suicide, despite having no access roads.

My thoughts turned to old boyfriends in MEMORIES ARE MURDER. This time I set the book south of Sudbury in a swampy hellhole called Burwash, site of a  former penal colony from which no one could ever escape, not even Steve McQueen. The fall the book came out, the wife of a prominent local gynecologist went missing, her van located in a parking lot, her purse  a hundred miles away at an old mine site. Then two rabbit hunters in the spring found her body not five hundred yards off the main highway….at the Burwash turn. I had done it again, and to this date, no one has solved the mystery. Her unfaithful husband had an ironclad alibi. Rumors abound that a cousin from a mountain town in India flew in to do the deed, but the case remains open. It is a testimony to the scarcity of specialists in Sudbury that a friend of mine still had him perform her hysterectomy.

Now on Vancouver Island, looking down my peaceful street of retirees and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, I’m wondering about my neighbours. Be careful looking for murder. It may find you first.

Sandy herself tells the tale in her blog post How Mr. Piggles Rewrote My Book on Poe’s Deadly Daughters (which, by the way, is a blog you ought to read on a regular basis if you’re into mysteries).  Animals played a significant role in the writing of the story and our own wonderful Hamilton, furry lord of  all he surveyed, was part of that.  Sandy has a great picture of Hammie on her post, a picture I have lifted so I can share it with you here.

Isn’t he just the handsomest fella?

Now go get Broken Places so you can enjoy Hamilton’s foray into fiction—not his first but certainly his most intriguing—and add Sandra Parshall to your list of must-have authors while you’re at it.

I’ve been thinking lately about some folks I’d like to interview for Buried Under Books, authors but also some other folks like agents and publicists.  It might also be nice to interview some people that have nothing to do with the book world except that they are readers—that’s practically a must or they wouldn’t even know who we are, you and me, book addicts extraordinaire.  So, I’m throwing the question—questions, actually—out to you.

1.  Who would you like to have me interview?  Be reasonable, please.  Stephen King is not going to while away an afternoon with me.

2.  What are the questions you’d like to have answered?  You can suggest as many or as few as you’d like.

3.  Think of someone else who’s been interviewed before but the one question you were dying to know about wasn’t asked.  Who is that person and what is the question?

4.  Would you like to be an interviewee?  Why? (Don’t be shy; everybody is interesting in some way!)

Leave your comments below or, if you prefer, email me at cncbooks1@gmail.com and we’ll see what mayhem we can cause