Left Coast Laurie

Saturday (Feb 27) is a day-long celebration of great mysteries from Left Coast Crime. LCC is one of my favorite conferences, intimate and exciting, and I HATE that I can’t meet up in the bar.  Left Coast was my last outing before the world shut down last year…sigh. Here’s your chance to spend the day…

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The Senses and Riviera Gold

A recent discussion about my next contract (and how long it would be before I could jaunt off to Paris, sigh…) had me reflecting on how dependent I am on the use of the senses to provide what writers call the “telling detail.” I have a scene in Castle Shade (no, I’m not going to give…

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The inspirations of travel

I recently had The Conversation with my editor.  You know, the one about, What comes next? And the answer was tough because, well, my last trip to Europe gave me two books and a short story, but for the next one, I’ll need to travel again and…. So anyway, we’re working around the possibilities, but…

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A RussellKing Twitter chat

Miss Mary Russell and I (her editor, of course) had a conversation on Twitter over the weekend, which a mutual friend kindly transcribed and rearranged so it goes from start to finish, rather than having to scroll down to the bottom for the start (as happens when you follow the conversation hashtag, #RussellKingChat ): MRH:…

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The Feisty Old Ladies

(This blog post was originally written for my friends at Jungle Red. They were interested in how, in Riviera Gold, housekeeper Mrs. Hudson is living amidst the millionaires and retired party girls in 1920s Monte Carlo.)   I once knew a pair of aged anthropologists, man and wife, known for their detailed and subtle reports…

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Publication Day!

HAPPY PUB DAY! May Riviera Gold bring you some simple pleasures in a complicated world. Today I’m over with the Murder is Everywhere crowd, talking about using beautiful little Monaco as a place for murders. And The Dark and Stormy Book Club has me chatting about all sorts of mysterious things. (the Apple link is…

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Riviera Gold events

Well, this has been a week. Ten days ago, I wrote a post here about pouring bronze (a key element in Riviera Gold) but when I went to do a follow-up, marking a week before the publication date, well… I wrote about it on my newsletter this week (here, if you didn’t see it) so…

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The 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…

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It never gets old

I’ve had a lot of my own books hit my hands. With 28 novels and dozens of books containing my shorter contribution, I’ve received a lot of hardbacks with my name on the cover. But in case you’re wondering, no: it never gets old. I still open the box or envelope and pull the weight…

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Sara 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,…

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