“Echoes” is coming

This just in from Publishers Weekly about (next month’s!) Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: King and Klinger’s strong third Sherlockian anthology (after 2014’s In the Company of Sherlock Holmes) features 17 stories from leading authors who draw on Conan Doyle’s work for inspiration. The end result is a rich variety of entries, including Tony Lee and Bevis Musson’s “Mrs.…

Read More

No hand-bag clutching in NOLA

The first mystery conference I ever attended was in London, in 1990. At the time, I had a separate agent for the English/Commonwealth market, and she happened to mention that there was this conference that I might go to… Because it coincided with family stuff, I went. And found it interesting, and informative, and more…

Read More

The 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 More

Naming a not-so-new baby

Hey, friends–I’m in the process of making a new web site with just that things on it that readers have contributed–the art, writing, crossword puzzles, etc that we’ve done in various contests and promos over the years, along with pieces that I’ve done for events and such. So my question for you is: what do we call…

Read More

Bundling Russell & Holmes

There’s a bundle of Russells, waiting to slip into your e-reader or cell phone: It’s probably inevitable that the first book in any series is the biggest seller, even if readers loved it. Confronted with a list of a dozen titles, people tend to skip over numbers two through ten or so, I suppose because…

Read More

A deal on Murder!

The Murder of Mary Russell is going for a rapid paddle down the Great Brazilian River today. Yes, a special offer. You get the whole book, all the words, for just $2.99 [STOP THE PRESSES IT SEEMS TO BE $1.99 WHEE!] (yeah, it’s the e-book and probably just the US, sorry) so you can tuck…

Read More

The craft of crime

One of my favorite of the year’s mystery get-togethers is not a fan conference (although I love BoucherCon, and Left Coast Crime, and…) but one on the craft of writing. The Book Passage conference has a great track record with getting new writers published, and it’s a great place to meet your community, both in…

Read More

Love for Echoes

PW chose it as one of their top ten mysteries for the fall, and now Kirkus reviews loves them some Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, too: “Inspired” is the key word here, for contributors have been encouraged to interpret their remit even more broadly than in the editors’ previous two collections (In the Company of Sherlock Holmes,…

Read More

Laurie 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…

Read More

The Somme (4)

I’m giving away a copy of Joe Sacco’s The Great War, what NPR called a “panorama of devastation,” an accordian-fold book, 24 feet long, about day one of The Battle of the Somme. Scroll down to enter. Today is the centenary of the death of Alan Seeger. Seeger was an American poet, an uncle of…

Read More