Research
Family Reunion
In the summer of 1914, two branches of a powerful and affectionate family came together in the Black Sea resort of Costanța. It was a summer day in the middle of July, and this would be both a family holiday and a meeting of the heads of two neighboring states. One family travelled down from…
Read MoreMeeting the characters
I’m working my way through the final proof pages of Castle Shade (out in three months—hooray!) …which means reading every word aloud, watching for mistakes and, more important, listening for oddities. I can only manage 50 or 60 pages a day, but I am finding small errors on nearly half the pages, even though it’s…
Read MoreThe Bronze Pour
One of the joys of writing crime stories is the wild variety of research projects that come along. In Riviera Gold, that includes bronze casting. And what do you know—there’s a foundry right here in Santa Cruz. Sean Monaghan and Courtney Scruggs of Bronze Works made me welcome, let me poke around, and invited me…
Read MoreSara and Gerald Murphy: the art of the family
One of the great pleasures I have in researching books—okay, I admit, it’s not quite as much fun as the travel side of research…but a pleasure nonetheless—is getting to know some of the true-life characters of the time and place the book is to be set. Take Sara and Gerald Murphy. I knew of them,…
Read MoreDEADLY Pub Day!
Deadly Anniversaries comes out today! (And congratulations, Ellen, Richard, and Pat—you’ve won the hardback!) When the Great War began, in August of 1914, the British Army had about 250,000 regulars. It took time to train new troops, and in the Kaiser’s first push, the Brits would have been hard put to hold fast, but within…
Read MoreTravel and Monte Carlo
Remember travel? Remember getting in the car and going to the airport and walking onto a plane and sitting down SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WITH STRANGERS and breathing their air for hours and blithely drinking things you took from the ungloved hands of the flight attendants and— (Okay, calm down, breathe now, just maybe pull up…
Read MoreTender is the Prose
As part of my general research on the next Russell & Holmes novel, I re-read the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender is the Night. And frankly, I found it very hard going. Meandering plot, puzzling metaphors, characters distorted to fit into the roles he needs for them. Start with his take on women. The book…
Read MoreOh to be in England
I’m back in England for a few days, where the fields are considerably greener than they were when I was here in July and August. And the cricket players seem happier about it, too.
Read MoreThe Writer/Library Admiration Socie
MWA NorCal joins forces with the Oakland library this Saturday for: Loving the Library If you’re a regular reader of Mutterings, you know that I love libraries. This Saturday, I get to interview Emily Weak, the adult services librarian at the Rockridge branch, about how writers and libraries make for a mutual admiration society. I’ll…
Read MoreLaurie King, poet: slightly above the others
The kind of books I write are always a compromise. If I did the kind of research I feel they deserve, a novel would take me three, four, six years and stretch to eight hundred pages. This invariably leaves me with a dozen areas where I’m spreading a small amount of research very thin, and…
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