Born Elizabeth Cochran in Cochran Mills, Pennsylvania, the real life protagonist adopted the name Nellie Bly when she began working as a journalist. In the late 1880s, it was improper and unladylike for a woman to write for a newspaper, therefore, her true identity could not be revealed. At the time, newspaper women in America were reporting gossip and news about weddings; one had be a man to investigate crime and corruption or be a foreign correspondent responsible for sending dispatches from other parts of the world.  After trying unsuccessfully to report from the male – dominated Wild West, Nellie relocated to Manhattan where she attempted to see Joseph Pulitzer and get a job at the New York World newspaper.  While initially Nellie was not granted an audience with Mr. Pulitzer, she was nearly flat broke and was determined to see Mr. Pulitzer and convince him to give her a job. This time Nellie was successful in meeting Mr. Pulitzer and told him of her idea of a newsworthy report she had in mind: She would write an exposé on the scandalous conditions at Blackwell’s Island, a notorious insane asylum for women.  Mr. Pulitzer replied that every newspaper in town had already done a story on Blackwell’s Island. Nellie’s response was yes, but she intended to have herself committed for 10 days (10 being Mr. Pulitzer’s lucky number). Success ! Nellie got the job ! On her first night at Blackwell’s Island, Nellie became aware of the murder by a Doctor Blum of her roommate, Josephine. When Nellie made the connection, Dr. Blum also tried to kill her.

Her next assignment was to do an exposé on cruelty to servants. This was followed by an assignment to go undercover as a prostitute. The next assignment was exposing the unfair treatment and working conditions of women in factories. She wrote about the practice of women doing the same job as men, working the same hours while only the men got raises and promotions. Circulation of the New York World climbed and Nellie’s success and fame climbed with it.

Soon a series of crimes took place in London. A murderer who called himself “Jack” killed women of the streets, mutilated them and extracted body parts with such precision that the police suspected he was a doctor. In Nellie’s mind, Dr. Blum was alive and well.  Nellie was off to London to investigate.

Next, mutilation murders in Paris had Nellie going to Montmartre, a city full of prostitutes and known for scandalous behavior among the artists and writers. To complicate matters, there was an outbreak of Black Fever. The World’s Fair was taking place in Paris and the police didn’t want to hear about murder since news like that would threaten the revenue from the Fair.

During her investigation, Nellie met Oscar Wilde and Louis Pasteur, famous for the discovery of a treatment for rabies and the pasteurization process by sterilization, as well as science fiction writer, Jules Verne. She visited the Moulin Rouge, saw the girls dancing the cancan and met the French artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

The Alchemy of Murder has many of the elements that are particularly interesting to me. While I read many different genres, my favorite is historical fiction. I often read cozy mysteries and I enjoy them but I prefer a more complex plot and characters. I like strong, proactive women, not whiny, dependent characters. Not one for much romance, this book had just the right amount (very little).  I’ve always been interested in medicine (my foray into nursing school ended when I discovered I loved the book work but hated the patient care !), so the historical details of the Black Fever pandemic were fascinating to me.

Now this is where my discussion should end because what I am about to tell you will date me and you will wonder if I lived during the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth !  When I was a child and way before movies were rated, I lived around the corner from a movie theater. I remember seeing a movie which I believe was titled “Moulin Rouge”. I remember the ladies dancing the cancan in their beautiful, brightly colored dresses and I remember the character of the artist Henri de Toulouse. This book transported me back to my childhood and that movie. In addition, there was a certain amount of French used by the author which took me back to high school French class.

My walk down “Memory Lane” notwithstanding, The Alchemy of Murder is a fabulous book and a phenomenal first novel ! According to the blurb about the author, Carol McCleary is busy on the next Nellie Bly novel. It can’t come out soon enough for me!

Reviewed by Jean Tribull Harris, August 2010.

Leslie Wheeler is a transplanted California who has lived in the Northeast for many years and has strong New England roots. A graduate of Stanford University with a master’s in English from UC/Berkeley, Leslie has taught adult education, worked as an in-house writer and editor for Barron’s Educational Series, then as a free lance writer specializing in history and biography for both the school and trade markets.

A trip to the living history museum of Plimoth Plantation with visiting relatives from California led to Murder at Plimoth Plantation, the first book in her “living history” mystery series-books set in the present-day at historic sites, and featuring amateur sleuth and history textbook writer, Miranda Lewis, whose determination to uncover the truth often gets her into trouble. Murder at Plimoth Plantation was an Editor’s Choice Selection in the Boston Herald. A second mystery, Murder at Gettysburg, was released in May, 2005. Murder at Spouters Point will be published in October 2010.

Writing “living history” mysteries enables Leslie to combine a passion for American history, an enjoyment of the mystery genre, and a lifelong love of storytelling in all forms. Leslie lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read more at www.lesliewheeler.com

For me, time is just as important as place in a mystery. My books are not only set at specific places but at specific times of the year. Murder at Plimoth Plantation takes place in November, before, during, and after Thanksgiving, because that’s the holiday most closely associated with Plymouth and its Pilgrim settlers.  Murder at Gettysburg takes place over the Fourth of July Weekend, because that’s when the historic battle was fought and also when the major reenactment of the battle is held every year.  I’ve been able to use this time-specific element of my books to my advantage when doing book talks.  For example, when I do an event on a day when something important in the book happens I can tell my audiences this, and it gives my story a sense of immediacy that they appear to enjoy.  The holiday tie-in has also been helpful in getting newspaper publicity, as journalists often look for this kind of angle.

The third book in my series, Murder at Spouters Point, is set at a fictional Rhode Island seacoast town in the month of August, because an important event occurs then.  That event is Schemitzum, the Mashantucket Pequot-sponsored feast of green corn and dance, which is held near the tribally owned Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.  Schmeitzum is the largest powwow east of the Mississippi and the richest with over a million in prize money.  Why Schemitzum?  Because I decided to make a key character in the book a champion fancy dancer.  He competes at Schemitzum in the hopes of winning big bucks in prize money that will help pay for a special therapeutic program for his severely disabled son.

Schemitzum (called Sequan in the novel) takes place over four days in the latter part of August.  In New England, this is usually the time when the summer heat breaks, and the mornings and evenings are significantly cooler.  But not the year that I attended the powwow with my then eleven-year-old son.

We were overwhelmed by the intense heat of our first day at Schemitzum.  The competitive dances were held in a tented pavilion that reminded me of a gigantic sweat lodge filled with steaming bodies, which is also how I describe it in the novel.  Around us, people fanned themselves with pieces of regalia (the native word for traditional clothing worn for ceremonial occasions), used small portable fans, and sprayed themselves with water from squirt bottles. My son and I consumed enough water to fill a small wading pool.  Finally, in the late afternoon, after sitting through four hours of dance contests in different categories, we took a break and drove back to our air-conditioned motel room. While my son played video games, I collapsed on the bed.

We returned in the early evening for dinner and more dance contests. Powwow food is tasty but fattening.  Think buffalo burgers, corn dogs, various types of game and seafood breaded and deep fried, curly fries, and fry bread topped with strawberries and whipped cream.  Sated, we staggered back into the sweltering pavilion.

The last contest of the evening, the men’s fancy dance, which, as the name suggests, is characterized by both flamboyant regalia and flamboyant dancing, was the most exciting. It’s also crucial to my novel. So despite the oppressive heat and the threat of a possible thunderstorm or even a tornado, which drove away many viewers, we stayed until the very end.  I’m glad we did, because the contest was truly spectacular.  One dancer in predominately red-and-yellow regalia caught my attention. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, just as my main character, Miranda, is mesmerized by a fancy dancer in the book.

In the novel, the fancy dance contest leads to murder and mayhem.  Of course, this didn’t happen in real life.  But as we drove back to the motel, echoes of Native drumming and chanting, along with the deafening hum of millions of cicadas filling our ears, while heat lightening flashed on the horizon, I couldn’t help thinking what a perfect August night this was for a murder.

Thanks, Lelia, for having me as a guest on your blog.  I’ll be back on November 16.  Meanwhile, I hope other authors will comment on what they consider to be good months for mysteries and/or share a memorable research experience.

Olivia Limoges is a wealthy resident of Oyster Bay, North Carolina, and is a bit of a loner with a mysterious past in this beach town where she lived as a child.  Her wealth gives her an air of entitlement, despite a very sad and troubled childhood that makes her the target of much gossip, but she would like to fit in better.   Unfortunately, her social graces are somewhat lacking or, at least, well hidden, and she spends most of her time with her standard poodle, Captain Haviland, and works on an unfinished novel.

Then Olivia meets Camden Ford, a gossip hound and would-be tell-all biographer who is in town digging up dirt on a celebrity staying nearby. Camden is a member of the Bayside Book Writers, a critique group, and invites Olivia to join.  His motives in doing so are not entirely altruistic—the group needs a better place to meet and Olivia has the space—but his charm wins her over with a little push from Dixie, a waitress with her own kind of eccentricity.

Olivia discovers that she actually does like these people and is settling in to the critiquing routine when one of her new friends turns up dead.   For a couple of reasons that actually make some sense, the local police chief welcomes a little sleuthing by the group and they do indeed come up with some useful information.  Along the way, a side story involves the town’s reaction to proposed development that could change the character of the town, causing a good deal of anguish.  Then another body is found.

Having been published early this summer, this mystery set in a coastal town is an obvious and worthy beach read.  Ms. Adams, who has written three other mystery series under two different pen names, has created a very likeable group of characters who have been given enough depth to make the reader engage with them and care what happens to them. This is true not only of the primary characters but also the secondary and that’s refreshing.   Olivia herself is NOT immediately appealing and learning what makes her who she is strengthened my enjoyment.   I found one of the book group members to be a bit irritating but it was in the sense of knowing she’d drive me crazy if I had to spend too much time with her in real life; in fiction, my annoyance level was moderate—and I wouldn’t particularly care for a cast of characters that are unrelentingly likeable.  That would be more than a little boring, I believe.

The mystery itself is well-plotted and I didn’t guess who the killer was.  The only difficulty I had was I thought the killer’s motive was a little far-fetched but not unreasonably so.   There is also a hint of romance that the author offers in a light-handed way.  This first in the Books by the Bay series is a very good start and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Note:  I have known this author for several years, having met her through my bookstore and hosted signings.  Having read all her other books, I can honestly say this is the most intriguing and my opinion is not influenced by the fact that I know Ms. Adams.  I would feel the same if it had been written by Jane Doe.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, August 2010.

Two young women are missing in Eugene, Oregon, and there is no apparent connection between them, one a single mother of a baby and the other a wealthy local heiress.  Danette could have gone off on her own, suffering from postpartum depression, but Detective Wade Jackson isn’t so sure.  He begins to look into her disappearance before the usual waiting period for missing persons because he’s dating the baby’s grandmother and his gut tells him something isn’t right.

Soon after Danette’s vanishing, Courtney is reported missing, having failed to come home after going to a nightclub.  Courtney had run off for a couple of days some months earlier and the missing persons detective in charge thinks she has probably done so again.  Reflecting her family’s influence and position in the community, as is so often the case in today’s world, the media pays much more attention to Courtney’s case than to Danette’s.

Then the first body is found and it looks as if the death might be the result of a make-believe kidnapping arranged by an adventure company.  Seemingly serendipitous connections between the two women begin to come to light and yet one of them is still missing and Jackson is more and more sure that she did not run away.

Early on, a thought of one of the bad guys caught my attention:

This was only his second pickup of a live person, and he thought it would be easy.

Something about that struck me as chilling.

Not having read the first two Detective Jackson books,  I missed out on some backstory but Ms. Sellers is a very good writer and is adept at giving enough of that backstory without letting the newest book get bogged down in rehashing the past.  I enjoyed the secondary characters, especially Jackson’s colleagues, and want to get to know them better.

I thoroughly enjoyed Thrilled to Death and will go back to read the first two in the series.  My only quibble is with the physical product in that the gutter (the space between the print and the binding) is too shallow, making the book a little difficult to handle without breaking the spine.  Still, that did not prevent me from getting caught up in a very good story and I applaud the author and the publisher for high-quality editing.  Ms. Sellers is an author with talent and I’m happy to have “discovered ” her.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, August 2010.

The school year is kicking into every student’s hard drive forcefully and without welcome. All we get to say is, “Hey, what?!” before the education life is back in the system and running all of its crazy gizmos and whirs and such. It’s half a wonder if a few of us students even get a summer vacation considering the plans we have, but most of that is our own fault!

Excuse me.

[A few minutes of grumbling time before the writer became well enough to return to his post. We hope we may never again have to read anything so rediciulous as this current status, and he better be getting back here soon.]

Okay! A bit better. On to the happy stuff, things like… Hold on a minute I gotta think about this one…

[A few grumbling thoughts later.]

The new lockers! Oh yes! And the uh… oh, the wide loads, it’s so fun to careen down the school hallways haphazardly, with three bags of paper, work books, text books, and sweaty cross-country clothes. There’s some happy stuff for me to smile at, so I’m gonna go ahead and do some happy day-dreaming in regard to the upcoming fun.

At seventeen, Katniss has survived the arena twice and has become the reluctant rallying point of rebellion.   Now living in District 13 since the Capitol destroyed her District 12 homeland, she acknowledges the refuge but can’t be entirely grateful.   Her best friend, Gale, and her sister and mother have also survived the destruction but she has no idea whether the captured Peeta is alive or dead and so many more have been lost.

The rebel side wants much more from her—they want her to be the actual face, the embodiment of the revolution, the Mockingjay.    All Katniss wants to do is to run away, to escape the terrible memories, but she is caught by the question of Peeta.  As long as he might still be alive, she doesn’t really have a choice.  And so it begins.

Her training for war does not go smoothly and, along the way, there are many reasons for Katniss to abandon her apparent destiny.  One goal keeps her focused—the chance to kill President Snow, the man she holds responsible for all the tragedy in her young life.  This will carry her, and her companions, through events no teenager should have to face.  That’s the point, though, isn’t it, that young people are the ones who lose the most in times of war and rebellion.

With the first two books of the trilogy, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins raised the bar incredibly high for young adult science fiction, and readers of adult science fiction have been just as captivated by Katniss and the horror of the Hunger Games.  This third and final book does not disappoint in any way and, for this reader, the long wait was well worth it.  There were any number of directions the author could have taken with the ending of Katniss’s story but she did not take an easy way.  Some of the events in Mockingjay are shattering and unexpected but, having read it, I have to say I think this is what had to happen.

Ms. Collins brings her secondary characters, even a cat, to life every bit as much as the central figures and  there is much sadness as well as joy in their stories.  Katniss, Gale and Peeta are heroic and tragic and, until the very end, the reader can not be sure how, or even whether, their feelings for each other will be resolved.  As a side note, I must also say that, while I normally detest first person present tense, it works for this trilogy, enhancing the excitement and intensity as no other point of view could do.

Mockingjay will be in my Top 5  for 2010; it’s the first time this year I have cut off the phone and TV and computer and stayed up all night to finish a book, and the entire trilogy is among my favorite series of all time.  I cannot recommend it highly enough for young adult and adult readers.  It is a shining example of how good science fiction can be but it also has strong elements of mystery and fantasy.  In a word, WOW.

P.S.  Now, I’m going to listen to the audio book—Carolyn McCormick has been an outstanding reader of the first two books and I expect no less in this one.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, August 2010.

Donna Fletcher Crow is the author of 35 books, mostly novels dealing with British history.  The award-winning Glastonbury, The Novel of Christian England, is her best-known work, an Arthurian grail search epic covering 15 centuries of English history.  A Very Private Grave, book 1 in the Monastery Murders series is her reentry into publishing after a 10 year hiatus. The Shadow of Reality, a romantic intrigue, will be published later this summer.

Donna and her husband have 4 adult children and 10 grandchildren.  She is an enthusiastic gardener and you can see pictures of her garden, watch the trailer for A Very Private Grave, and read her international blog at www.DonnaFletcherCrow.com

Click on any picture to see a larger image.

Now that scientists have decided that in the chicken-or-the-egg question the chicken came first, I suppose the answer would have to be that the Rose came first.  I was set on this not-particularly-helpful course of thought when Lelia asked me to blog on how my garden has affected my writing.  Upon reflection, I think it’s more a matter of my writing affecting my garden.

I’m certain that’s true when it comes to having an excuse for the flourishing weeds and the general overgrownness of it all.  “But,” I quickly point out,  “This is an English cottage garden.  They’re supposed to be overgrown.  Think Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.”  It sounds good and I believe it most of the time.  And then, of course, I can always fall back on the crowning excuse, “I have a deadline to meet.”

As to the ultimate influence, however, for both writing and garden, it has to come down to my obsessive Anglophilism.  When asked why I have set most of my 35 books in England, when I live in the Idaho desert, I rather quickly discovered that replying, “What else is there?”  wasn’t much of an answer.

So next I played around with theories of genetic memory.  What good is it having an English great, great grandmother if I can’t blame my predilections on her?  (And I did use some of Eliza Fletcher’s backstory in my family saga series The Daughters of Courage.)  But at the end of the day, I’ll have to say that the answer comes down to that indefinable matter of “calling.”  The thing I mean when I advise beginning writers to “Follow your passion.”

That is certainly what I have done in my lifetime of reading, beginning with the Brontes and Jane Austen; in my 35 years of writing beginning with my very first genre romance The Desires of your Heart in which an American heroine follows many of my own experiences on my first trip to England; and in my garden style which features a rose garden filled with David Austin English Roses, a curving stone path leading to a rose arbor, and sweeps of such English favorites as Alchemilla mollis (Lady’s Mantle), hostas, perennial geranium, and Valerian.

Many of these choices were growing in my daughter’s cottage garden when she and her husband went to Yorkshire to study in a theological college run by monks in The Community of the Resurrection. On my frequent visits I regularly worked in her garden and the year my son-in-law was appointed college gardener, I had the fun of gardening beside my favorite monk Fr. Dominic.

Well, A Very Private Grave, Book 1 in my Monastery Murders, hasn’t been released yet in North America (it was a June release in the UK, but we have to wait until late September on this side of the pond), so I can’t expect any of our readers to pick up on the clues I just dropped.  Let me explain that the jacket blurb reads something like this:

Felicity Howard, a young American studying theology at the College of the Transfiguration in Yorkshire, is devastated when she finds her beloved Fr. Dominic brutally murdered and Fr. Antony, her church history lecturer, soaked in his blood .

A Very Private Grave is a contemporary novel with a thoroughly modern heroine who must learn some ancient truths in order to solve the mystery and save her own life as she and Fr. Antony flee a murderer and follow clues that take them to out-of-the way sites in northern England and southern Scotland. The narrative skillfully mixes detection, intellectual puzzles, spiritual aspiration, romance, and the solving of clues ancient and modern.

Felicity does take passing note of the local flora as they race from place to place, but you’ll understand that chasing and being chased by a murderer doesn’t allow much time for gardening.

Ah, there— I’ve just come up with another excuse!

Please visit my website http://www.donnafletchercrow.com/ to see the trailer of A Very Private Grave on the home page and click “Come into my Garden” in the menu to see a slide show.

Willis Gidney grew up rough.  He grew up homeless, no parents in sight.  A smart kid, he didn’t let that stand in the way of his survival.  Along the way, he ran into a guy named Shadrack Davies, a captain in the D.C. police department.  Davies takes Willis as his foster child, and tries to raise him right.  Willis learns a lot from him, although not enough to keep him out of trouble.

Willis is now an adult, trying to make a living as a P.I.  One of his friends, a jazz musician, wants Willis to track down his daughter, who has been missing for a quarter of a century.  Even a P.I. with a lot of practice might have a tough time with this one, and Willis finds this out very early on.  But it’s his friend asking, and so he won’t let go of the case, although there are lots of people trying to persuade him otherwise.

Kaufman has written a wonderful mystery.  He’s also taken the “character-driven mystery” to a whole new level.  This is a well-written novel, with great setting and plot.  Kaufman’s writing credits make this an exceptional first novel.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, August 2010.

“There’s one lady, Nellie Wynn, you know her?” Ronnie asked one day. “Lives over near the post office?”

“Yeah,” Skinny said. “That’s my parents’ old place she lives in.”

“Oh,” Ronnie said. “It’s a nice house. Every day she offers me a cookie out of this enormous Aunt Jemima cookie jar. Blackface and everything, polka-dotted kerchief, big gummy smile. You pull her head off and there’s cookies inside.”

“She gives you cookies?”

“They’re not homemade, like yours,” Ronnie said. “It’s the Aunt Jemima jar. It’s so strange. And then she wants to talk about Pocahontas, how she was raped, and I just sit there.”

“My mom was stuck on Pocahontas too,” Skinny said. “Matoaka, she called her. She said it meant ‘naughty one.’ I guess in hindsight she probably shouldn’t have stepped in like she did. Then my mom would talk about how she broke her father’s heart, running off to England to get put on display.”

“You think she was trying to tell you something?” Ronnie said.

“What do you mean?”

“About women,” she said.

“Hell,” he said. “Where’ve you been all my life to translate this shit?”

—   from “It Won’t Be Long”

I had not intended for my next review here to have so much in common with the last one I wrote, but I could not put this off. Like The Toughest Indian in the World, Belle Boggs‘ debut is a collection of short stories, several of them about Indians. The Indians in Mattaponi Queen, however, are members of the Pamunkey and Mattaponi tribes in eastern Virginia, and they and their non-Indian neighbors, friends, and relatives live in King William and King and Queen counties, near the confluence of the Matta and Poni rivers. It’s an area I’m familiar with, having grown up in Richmond, but do not know well. It was the title that initially caught my attention while browsing at Barnes and Noble earlier this summer. After reading that it had been shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O’Connor Award (according to The Guardian, the world’s richest prize for short story collections), I moved it to the top of my TBR stack. As soon as I started reading, only the demands of nature could induce me to put it down.

What impressed me most about Mattaponi Queen was how effortlessly Boggs introduces her characters. Some appear in only one story, while others are recurring, sometimes in the background and sometimes in a featured role. Skinny Littleton was particularly memorable, and if Boggs decides to return to this area in future works I hope we’ll get to see more of him.

With a few finely-crafted sentences Boggs sketches a portrait of each character that makes it seem as if we’ve already known them all our lives. It’s only a sketch, however, and so she uses the rest of the story to flesh them out, adding shading, contour, and color to bring them vividly to life. By the end of the book, it’s almost as though you’ve acquired a set of new friends without realizing it. In addition to Skinny, the recovering alcoholic gourmand trying to reconnect with his children, there’s Loretta, who’s invested her income from caring for an elderly white woman in a riverboat; Melinda, cheerleading coach, coping with a marital crisis no one could have prepared her for, who finds insight in an exhibit of priceless Fabergé eggs; and Marcus, come down from New York to live with his grandmother after his mother is arrested on a drug bust, who learns that small-town life isn’t quite as uncomplicated as he expected, to name only a few.

In sharing these characters and their stories, Boggs does not indulge in psychoanalysis or pass judgment on their actions, but lets the actions and their consequences speak for themselves. She is empathetic, but not condescending, to either the characters or the reader; she respects their (and our) integrity and autonomy, and does not try to impose foreordained conclusions on the events she narrates.

The apparent effortlessness in Boggs’ characterizations extends to all her writing in Mattaponi Queen. She doesn’t resort to parlor tricks to tell the story, but rather patiently allows it to unfold at its own pace. The stories are streamlined, without a lot of excess baggage, but they’re not spartan; the emphasis is on the story and the characters it reveals, rather than Boggs’ talent as a writer. That said, she is enormously talented, as the accolades she has already received indicate (in addition to being shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award, Mattaponi Queen won the 2009 Bakeless Prize).

There’s a gracefulness to Boggs’ prose that I don’t think I’ve encountered for a long time. Reading Mattaponi Queen was like going for a bike ride after studying for finals, or a long-steady rain after a protracted heat wave, or the sight of a great blue heron wading in a nearby creek: refreshing, cleansing, thrilling—the kind of experience you tuck away for later, to pull out when you wish to remember the way it made you feel the first time. I cannot recommend Mattaponi Queen strongly enough, and eagerly look forward to more from Boggs.

They made their way together down the steps, careful in case of ice. He held her leather-gloved hand in his bare one as she boarded the boat, and she took her time inspecting it as he waited on the pier. She started the engine on the first try. The boat came to life at once, vibrating slightly as blue-white plumes of smoke floated out over the water. She came back out on deck, smiling.

She thanked him, smoothed a shawl over her head and shoulders, and tied it in a loose knot to keep out the wind. The water was dark gray, the brown, leafy shore lacy with ice. How much longer would the river even accommodate boats like this? They said the reservoir would take five feet of the river’s depth, but that wasn’t something to take up with a woman who’d spent months paying off an old and outmoded thing like the Mattaponi Queen. She had lasted, though—the men who made her must have never imagined she’d be running today.

Instead Mitchell said, “Loretta, do you think women and men both need each other, or is it just men that need women?”

—   from “Mattaponi Queen”

Reviewed by Laura Taylor, August 2010, on Beyond the Blurb; reprinted here with permission.

Lorie Ham has been singing gospel music and writing since she was a child.  Her first song and poem were published when she was 13 and she has gone on to publish many articles, short stories and poems throughout the years as well as write for a local newspaper.  Lorie continues to sing and 4 of her 5 mystery novels feature gospel singer Alexandra Walters and are set here in the San Joaquin Valley. Her new project is an animal rescue mystery, another area where Lorie has experience. Recently she became the publisher of a new online magazine called Kings River Life.  Lorie is married to Larry Ham, who works for a Christian radio production company.  They have 2 children, Jessica and Joseph, 5 cats, 4 dogs and several rats.

I began writing when I was seven and started out writing short stories about my stuffed animals.  I guess you could say that was my first taste of writing what I know.  Write what you know is something you can hear often from writing classes, conferences and authors, but does it really work?

My first publishing credits were poems, written from my heart and my experiences.  So again, I was writing what I knew.  I went on to publish several articles, and again they came from my own experiences.  However when it came to writing fiction I was hesitant to follow this same trend.  I couldn’t find anything within my own life that I thought would make a good story. As a teenager I tried to write a Star Trek book, and while I’d always been a Trekkie it still wasn’t writing about something I knew from personal experience.

Soon after failing at that, I became interested in mysteries thanks to my brother, Chris, who introduced me to Sherlock Holmes. So from age 15 through 21, I tried my hand at writing several different types of mysteries again without success. I never managed to finish a book.  However, I did manage to continue publishing poems and articles and I got involved in writing as a stringer for the local paper—again writing about what I knew.

In my early twenties I joined the local chapter of Sisters In Crime.  When people there found out I was a gospel singer, they began telling me I should write a mystery featuring a gospel singer.  In the beginning I laughed it off.  Why would anyone be interested in what it was like to be a gospel singer?  I mean it had been my life ever since I was a kid and to me it was just ordinary.

Finally I gave it a try.  I created Alexandra Walters, a gospel singer living in Donlyn, a fictional version of my hometown Reedley, California. She is also a single mother of a little girl named Jessica. Now I’m not a single mother, but I did base little Jess on my own daughter (who is now 17).  The first book, Murder in Four Part Harmony, took five years but it did get done. In it Alex’s old love comes to town along with the group that her family used to tour with.  Finally, everything had clicked.  The book was finished and published by a small publisher.

Book two, The Trouble With Tenors, took place at a gospel music convention and was finished within a year. Book three, Out of Tune, brought Alex’s singing family group back together and took place at a fictional version of a local Blossom Festival.

The latest book and last one in the series, The Final Note, came out this past April and sees Alex on a reunion tour with her family while being stalked.  Stepping a little out of writing what I know, in this book I take Alex to the California Coast to a town called Ayr where her stalker is killed, she is blamed, and then the stalker begins again from the grave. In this book Alex also finally chooses between the two rival loves in her life, PI Stephen Carlucci and police Detective Will Knight.  This book can be found in independent bookstores and on Amazon and is my first book available on Kindle.

So I’d say that writing what I know has definitely worked for me and I would highly recommend it especially to those not yet published.  But perhaps more than anything writing what we know is a training ground for being able to reach beyond that.  Now it’s time to move beyond Alex and the world of gospel music I know so well, though she may still live in short stories. My new series will feature Roxi Carlucci, who is introduced in The Final Note.  There’s still a bit of “write what you know” in it as she is an animal rescuer which I’ve also done a bit of, but she’s completely different from me and lives on the coast of California.  I’m also trying my hand at writing a mystery play, a vampire novel, and I’ve started an online magazine called Kings River Life.

If you would like to check out what I’ve been up to, and watch for these new projects you can check out my website www.LorieHam.com (which is between webmasters but has all of my pre 2010 stuff), my blog mysteryratscloset.blogspot.com, Kings River Life Magazine http://KingsRiverLife.com where I’m serializing my one stand alone book Deadly Discrimination and includes some book reviews and author interviews, or follow me on twitter @mysteryrat