Posts by Laurie King
Sheep; gorse: Sussex
I spent a few days in Sussex recently, and… In my seven weeks of peripatetic reading amongst the sheep (which tended to move out of my way) and the gorse bushes (to which I had painfully developed an instinctive awareness) I had never before stepped on a person…
Read MoreBook fest!
There’s a new Fest in town: the Bay Area Book Festival (first annual?) blows into Berkeley this weekend, and I’ll be there on Saturday, to chat about, well, books. And writing and crime and stuff. So if you’re in the Bay Area, come and play! Kids stuff, adult things, Grateful Dead and John Scalzi (no,…
Read MoreMichelham mysteries
The English countryside is as studded with gems as a royal tiara. It would be a lifetime’s work to see all the castles, manor houses, religious houses, garden follies, historical buildings, and the rest—and that’s before one adds gardens, archaeological sites, and actual natural beauties onto the list. Now, I appreciate the big names on…
Read MoreThe real straw-berry
I spent thirty years of my life in a part of the world dedicated to the strawberry: Watsonville, home of Driscoll berries. However, it was not until I came to England that I met the true berry, the English berry, pale and acidic and short-lived. When you buy a packet of them here, the label…
Read MoreThe Museum of Fabulousness
On Friday I made the trip back into London from the city’s Western Reaches, headed this time to my favorite non-grandmother’s-attic museum, the Museum of London. From the Stone Age river-side village to Roman Londinium to Victoria’s smoke-choked London, the museum uncovers the city’s layers as archaeological digs have done– brilliantly presented to prove…
Read MoreLove for Victoria (& Albert too)
Wednesday we (ie: self and daughter’s family with two small persons) reluctantly extracted ourselves from the farmyard near Thame where we’ve been talking to cows and magpies the past couple of weeks and flung ourselves at London, to insert said daughter’s family onto an aeroplane Thursday morning. A process that proved rather more troublesome than…
Read MoreWaterperry gardens
My mother made precisely one trip out of the westernmost coast of the United States. In the summer of 1984, I took her to England for three weeks: all her lifetime’s travel in less than a month. We were mostly in Oxford, where she reveled in the sound of the bells, the boats on the…
Read MoreShipshape & Bristol fashion
Crime Fest is an annual conference held in Bristol, England. This Con has been running for eight years now, although it actually started a couple of years earlier, in 2006, when the indefatigable Adrian Muller had the idea of running a Left Coast Crime on the left coast of, well, England. This year’s guests included…
Read MoreThat damp English crimate
Thursday I set off for London…in the rain. I got to London in the rain, wrangled my wheelie up many steps from Paddington (the tube side) and sploshed to my hotel, checked in, dried out, then crossed London in the rain to have tea with Val McDermid, whom I haven’t seen in far, far too long.…
Read MoreEngland events
One an interesting difference between the UK and the US, from a writer’s point of view, is that bookshops in the UK look upon events with mistrust, and the offer of a passing writer to sign their books on their shelves receives a look of befuddlement. “Why,” these good people clearly wonder, “would readers want you…
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