Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries
Say, would you like a little something to help nudge you into that old holiday spirit? What about a copy of Mary’s Christmas?
This is a pdf to download, so you can print it off, use it to create an illuminated manuscript, send it to a friend, you name it. Plus, this is an all-new illustrated version, which the original was not, so that’s fun too.
The download is here. May Mary’s tale make you just a little bit merrier.
Ho! from Laurie
The other day I did a Halloween reading for a fund-raiser lunch, which reminded me of this, from Lockdown. Happy all hallow’s week…
107 DAYS AGO
OCTOBER 31
Olivia
When the call came in, Olivia thought it was just another Halloween prank.
Olivia hated Halloween—and had long before she become a cop. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she’d lived in a more white- bread town, but having the Anglo holiday of candy and costumes smack up against Día de Muertos made for an orgy of sugar and disguises and trouble.
When she was a kid, white makeup scared her and she was allergic to the pungent marigolds that were traditional to the holiday. As a teenager, she’d had some bad experiences at parties. As an adult, she hid in her darkened house as the neighborhood dogs worked themselves into a frenzy. And as a cop . . .
As a cop, she’d seen too much. The mix of manic kids and whimsical death—Día de Muertos has a particular focus on the death of children—made her stomach knot as October wore on.
Her first season in the Department, eleven years ago, an old- timer had warned her that worst of all was when October 31 fell on a Monday. She’d laughed, thinking this was like Friday the 13th or craziness under a full moon, but she wasn’t laughing long: a Monday Halloween followed by the two days of Día de Muertos meant the lunacy began at dusk Friday and didn’t let up until Thursday morning.
This year was her third Monday Halloween on the police force. The Department’s overtime budget for the month was already blown, with two drunken crashes, a house fire caused by a jack-o- lantern, a shoot-out, and eleven brawls: four in bars, one in the bowling alley, two in grocery stores (the bloodiest one over the last package of bargain candy), and the rest in neighborhoods over smashed pumpkins. The movie theater shut when its late-night horror film sparked a little too much audience participation.
She’d told herself all day that by the time darkness fell everyone would be sick of it all—sick, or under arrest—but she didn’t believe it. Once dusk gave way to darkness, the adolescents would come out and gang rivalries would mix with the wildness in the air. If only it would rain! If only Thursday would come. She was tired and cranky and she’d eaten two of the three sugar skulls the desk guy had brought in.
That’s why, when the phone rang Halloween evening, she thought it was a joke.
Not a lot of people can count play as part of the job. I’m very lucky this way, since doing fun things goes under the header of “building community” and that’s what authors do, right?
So when I buy some sparkly flapper dresses and drag the family into climbing into them for photos, that’s the job, right?
And when I spend a day making Italian cookies and trying out different drinks and meatball recipes and taking snaps of them all, that’s a writer hard at work, isn’t it?
And when I have seventy-seven different shots of the same cookies and I spend an hour trying to choose which one is best, that’s hard labor, surely?
After all, book trailers and illustrated book club kits are what you guys want as a side with your Island main dish, aren’t they?
So what do you think: which is the best shot of those zaletti for the book club kit? Or should we just eat them and be done with it?
“Salute!”
(If you’d like to receive the book club kit when it’s ready, the week of publication, the Random House page is here. You’ll need a transaction number from your receipt for it, although the kit will go public, too, after a bit.)
To mark the three-month countdown to Island of the Mad, and to give away a few of the bound galleys my publisher sent me–
–we’re running a contest admirably suited to a book set in Venice: a jigsaw puzzle.
Venice is a tightly-fitted set of pieces literally built up in the marshy lagoon over many centuries. And Team LRK has done another map for this book, as we did for Garment of Shadows, Dreaming Spies, and others. The puzzle is of that map.
And it’s online.
That’s right, an e-jigsaw puzzle. 
Don’t worry, it’s only 35 pieces. You click-and-drag the pieces into place (literally–they click when they go together. Isn’t that fun?) Here’s what you do:
Feel free to share on social media—#islandofthemad.
The contest closes March 19, when we’ll draw five names from the correct entries.
Enjoy your puzzle!
Pour you a beer?
I’ll be working this great event along with Jonathan Franzen, Karen Joy Fowler, and Elizabeth McKenzie, raising money to support our local Planned Parenthood. But since this is a fundraiser, and you might live somewhat outside the driving area, you could just make a donation (…and we’ll owe you a beer.)
Bookshop’s donation page is here.
The gorgeous collection of songs to the glory of bookstores has come out in paperback!
Eighty-one of the country’s top writers wrote essays, stories, and words of praise for their favorite shops, which were then illustrated with charming drawings, in My Bookstore. I talk about my local, Bookshop Santa Cruz, and how a damaged town came to life because of them. If you’d like me to sign a copy, you can get one from Bookshop, or from your own favorite local.
[A letter, to those of you who don’t see my News.]
I’m not sure if you, my dear Friends and Readers, have all just been super busy with the new academic year, or too swept up in the election to focus on anything but else, but the deadline is fast approaching for a contest that so far has only generated one response. And although it’s a lovely entry, I was really really hoping to have some new panels to put into the new, professionally-created video of The Travels (Travails?) of Russell & Holmes. (Here’s Sabrina’s, of Dreaming Spies. Gorgeous, no?)
There are prizes!
GRAND PRIZE:
A complete set of signed Russell & Holmes paperbacks,
including Mary Russell’s War & Other Stories
FIRST RUNNER-UP:
Four full-sized broadsheets for framing
(“A Venomous Death,” “Birth of a Green Man,”
Pirate King movie poster, and “Dreaming Haiku.”)
FIVE RUNNERS-UP:
A collection of 8½ x 11” art from
“The Illustrated Russell & Holmes” (including the four above)
Any scene, any book, from The Meeting in Beekeeper’s Apprentice to the balloonist uncle or Christmas tales in Russell’s War. Acrylic or needlework. Photoshop or Pastels. You simply need to have your image meet the colors of the frame like Linda has done here:
And truly, you don’t need much artistic talent, which I proved by printing off a bunch of Japanese art and taking out my scissors and glue stick:
Please, let’s make this a really fun project that can become a proper video on YouTube, showing the world how the Friends of Russell know how to have a good time!
The deadline is now October 20th. Instructions and the frame to print off are here.
And please, please tell all your Russell-loving friends!
Many and many a year ago, in a (LR)Kingdom by the sea, we started celebrating various events (new books, Library Week, St. Swithun’s Day) by running contests.
Some of these involved art, others words. We did crossword puzzles, pirate haiku, Russellscapes, “My Dream Library”—you name it, we’ve done it (next up: videos.)
When we moved the web site this past spring, one of my demands was that these “fan” contributions be preserved. Despite the huge number of bytes all that art took up, despite the need to find high-res files for some of the older pieces, despite the hair-pulling of any number of programmers, developers, and (yes) authors, we kept our hands on all that art.
And now it’s there. Most of it anyway (let me know if we’re missing yours!) and more of it will be added as we locate missing files or fiddle with those we have to make them less minuscule. Take a look at our new FUN STUFF tab on the web site, 
beginning with the soon-to-be-reinvented Maryorama (the art piece formerly known as Russellscape.)
Some of the art is by Team LRK (ie, me and the Photoshop Guru, Robert). Much of this (my web people had to shift me to a bigger, faster server) is of a printable size, in case you feel like framing a Pirate King movie poster for your wall
or printing off some Dreaming Haiku sheets
for your book group.
There are also printable crossword puzzles, some samples of fan cosplay and tattoos, and even the original proposed cover for Beekeeper’s Apprentice that caused the author to quit before Russell’s memoirs even got underway.
And of course, the Maryorama (Russellscape), with a (yes!) contest, for prizes of a complete set of Russells (including the mouthwateringly gorgeous Mary Russell’s War) or some of those printable posters in full size. The contest is in its last days, since it closes the 15th, so sharpen those pencils, run your mind over your favorite scene from the Memoirs, and get yourself creating.
Or puzzling, or printing, or just enjoying the amazing work of the Russell & Holmes community. Start here.
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 with each publication day, I hold my breath, thinking this will be the time Someone Who Knows will wheel out the Big Bertha of scorn and blast me to smithereens.
Take, for example, Dreaming Spies. Parts of the story involved haiku.
I used haiku in discussing the culture, I put it at the center of the book’s mystery, and, to add a touch of flavor, I plunked one at the top of each chapter.
Sweet city of minds
Her spires dream, wrapped in earth’s folds
June gilds the lily.
Now, I am no poet. And I know just enough about the subtleties of this form to know that I know nothing. The haiku I wrote for the chapter heads are by way of a jest.
So it tickled me considerably to find my childish efforts taken…well, maybe not seriously, but with serious attention, by a man who knows his haiku. Michael Dylan Welch teaches the form, he wins contests, he’s literally written the book(s) on haiku. And to my astonishment and thrill, not only did he leave his heavy critical artillery unloaded, he is polite about my haiku efforts! I mean, he likes the story itself, calling it a terrific read, but instead of lowering a weighty boot on these silly and puerile encroachments on his area of expertise, when it comes to my (ie, Haruki-san’s) definition of haiku, he calls it “accurate and informed, although basic.” And of my haiku themselves, he says, “Occasionally, one rises slightly above the others in quality.”
Woohoo! I feel as if the kind gent gave me a three foot tall silver trophy when he says, “…we can give the author credit for trying.” His full review (which is attached to a marvelous web site) is here.
Ah: my blushes, Watson!
Neck deep as I am in a first draft, nonetheless I’m due to extricate myself this week from the blizzard of paper scraps that is my study to appear in public, face scrubbed and carrying on normal conversation (as opposed to muttering vague bits of dialogue under my breath.)
Thursday night I’ll be in San Francisco, at the Ferry Building Book Passage, to talk about The Murder of Mary Russell. One of my favorite bookshops, with a Peet’s next door and every flavor of ethnic takeaway you could desire a short stroll away.
And on Saturday I’ll be manning (yes, I regard the verb man as gender-inclusive) the Mystery Writers of America NorCal booth at the second annual Book Festival in Berkeley.
I’m only scheduled to be there in the afternoon, but in fact I’ll probably be there most of the day, so come down and see us, at #4 Writer’s Row, and join a whole city of people who adore books!
In the meantime: back to my mutterings…