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Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle, and Same-Sex Marriage
This month, I’m celebrating the equality of marriage. The Art of Detection is a Kate Martinelli novel with two timelines, one of which is in the spring of 1924, when (according to the Mary Russell memoirs) Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell spent some time in San Francisco. But maybe they didn’t. Maybe the story of Sherlock…
Read MoreBeginnings: a Kate Martinelli story
Only five weeks after I’d hoped to finish it, I now have this: Beginnings A Kate Martinelli story by Laurie R. King Please note: story, not novel. See the thickness of that stack of pages? This is a 115 page novella, not a full-sized book. I don’t have a pub date for it yet. But…
Read MoreCalifia’s Women
Califia’s Daughters is one of the most unique, inventive, thought provoking, dark, disturbing, pseudo-violent, feminist-based, post-apocalyptic/dystopian novels I have read in a long time, if ever. (Goodreads review) I wrote Califia’s Daughters back in the 80s and 90s. My original impetus for the story was, as I’ve said here before, to push back against Margaret Atwood’s dystopian…
Read MoreKilling off My Friends (Califia’s Daughters 2)
A novel of the future needs to feel familiar and plausible even as it presents a face we have never imagined before. I wrote Califia’s Daughters in part because I did not find that familiarity in the more famous dystopian tale by Margaret Atwood, which had been published two years before I started writing. Time has…
Read MoreThe Future (Califia’s Daughters 1)
I wrote Califia’s Daughters more than thirty years ago, but its meditations on the male/female relationships may be even more pertinent now than they were at the time. It’s a futuristic novel, although whether or not it is also dystopian depends on how you feel about today’s world. Our future is both set in stone and malleable as…
Read MoreCalifia and Her Daughters
Five hundred years ago, a popular novelist named Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo came out with a rousing adventure about a black queen who raises an army and sails away to join the Muslims doing battle in Constantinople. With her go hundreds of trained griffins —but unfortunately, it turns out that they cannot tell a Muslim…
Read MoreCalifia’s Daughters: women rule
This past weekend, a lot of women (and yes, men) came together to reiterate their commitment to the sort of fair behavior that is not being found in our government. As my minor contribution to this discussion, my publishers agreed to put into special offer a book I wrote some years ago in which most…
Read MoreLefty nom for Island of the Mad!
Thanks to everyone who nominated Island of the Mad for a Lefty Award! Left Coast Crime is such a fun conference, I’m looking forward to zipping north to Vancouver, BC in March. And you? See the rest of the great nominees here.
Read MorePuzzles from the past
For the story I’m working on—a novella, in which SFPD Inspector Kate Martinelli revisits her past—I needed to have her look at some high school yearbooks. To remind myself what they looked like, I dug out my own. Now, I graduated in 1970. Ever since I bought the thing, I’ve wondered what the hell a “Micopacen”…
Read MoreRIP, Sherlock Russell
I received a photo today from Our Lady in the Bahamas, Marcia Talley, that gives a tantalizing glimpse of some hitherto unsuspected case… Let’s see, January, 1926. Shortly after the matters of “Stately Holmes”. Hmm…
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