One Character - Two Views by Mary Jane and Victoria Maffini aka Victoria Abbott

Pen M won the Walter the Pug tote.

That shadowy figure known as Victoria Abbott is a collaboration between the always very funny and creative artist, photographer and short story author, Victoria Maffini and her mother, Mary Jane Maffini, award-winning author of three mystery series and two dozen short stories. Their first book in the series, The Christie Curse, has received excellent reviews and the second, The Sayers Swindle, hit the shelves in December. They are hard at work on the third installment: The Wolfe Widow(September 2014) and haven’t killed each other yet.

You can keep up with their characters on the thirtieth of the month over at www.killercharacters.comand their culinary adventures at www.mysteryloverskitchen.comor by signing up for their newsletter at www.victoria-abbott.com or www.maryjanemaffini.com. MJ also blogs at www.cozychicksblog.com

One character – two views

By Mary Jane and Victoria Maffini

                First let us say how glad we are to visit Meanderings and Muses today. Thanks so much, Kaye, for inviting us. Now, we’ll segue into our little ‘situation’. Perhaps you can help us out.

                We are at the end of book three in the book collector mysteries, our mother-daughter collaboration using the name Victoria Abbott.  With The Christie Curse and The Sayers Swindle already on the shelves and doing well, you’d think we really knew what we were doing. People keep asking us about our process.  They want to know how we write together.  We try not to stare at them blankly or to make things up, such as, an alien told us what to write or we write in our sleep. The truth is that we’re not entirely sure how it all comes together, as we seem to be using different approaches in each book. Still we usually sing from the same hymn book. We talk, we plot, we discuss.  Sometimes we compromise.  We love what we’ve created with our young protagonist, Jordan Bingham, a grad student and the first person in her very large family to go straight. We agree on everything about her curmudgeonly employer, Vera Van Alst, the most hated woman in Harrison Falls, NY. We cherish the world of book collecting we’ve created for them, the stately old home and the quirky folks who inhabit it. We both love the classics from The Golden Age of Detection (Christie, Sayers, and Stout) that we draw on for our stories. We are equally fond of Walter the Pug and Cobain the whatever.

                However, every now and then, we realize that Victoria Abbott is not a single entity and we can have very different views of the same character.

                This came to our attention when we were reworking a scene in The Wolfe Widow (book three) just as Jordan saw her Uncle Kev show up bringing chaos and danger in his wake, as he so often does.

                One of us added ‘his pudgy face’ to the narrative. 

                The other gasped. “Pudgy? What pudgy? He has cheekbones that could cut glass and he has a chiseled jaw.”

                “Pudgy.”

                “Chiseled.”

                “No, listen to me, definitely pudgy.”

                “What? Pudgy? This is the man that all women seem to fall for despite the fact he’s a disaster in the making. Only chiseled could explain that.”

                “I’m pretty sure his face is pudgy. Nothing’s going to change my mind.”

                “Seriously, Victoria?”

                “Really, Mum, really?

                And so it went.

                The thing is, neither of us owns Uncle Kev or any of the other characters in the series. Nor does either one have the right to tell the other what to do, write or think.  Occasionally, the mother finds this a bit hard, but never mind.

                So what did we do?

                We considered possibilities: pudgy in one book and chiseled in the next? Pudgy on one side and chiseled on the other? Pudgy cheeks, chiseled chin? Obviously, no solutions there.

                It was a bit tricky as Uncle Kev had already appeared (and caused quite a bit of trouble) in The Sayers Swindle. Was he pudgy or chiseled?  We’d have to go with whatever we’d said, despite our different visions and memories of Kev. Apparently, there was a bit of pudginess and some chiseled as well in The Sayers Swindle, but neither was connected to Kev’s face.

                At least we agreed on the ginger hair and wild eyebrows that all the Kellys attribute to their Viking ancestor, Olaf, who washed up in Dublin sometime in the ninth century and made his own kind of trouble. But we digress.  

                So, now we have to decide. And soon.

                How about you?  Given Kev’s appeal— his ginger hair and wild eyebrows, not to mention the frenetic disposition and attention deficit thingie—which would you vote for?

                We may need you to break the tie.  Or we could just see who does the ultimate set of edits …

                Of course, you’ll have to wait until September to find out. Maybe we will too.

In the meantime, leave a comment here and we’ll put your name in the draw for a Walter the Pug tote bag.  At least we all agree on Walter.

                If you had fun with us today, please visit us at www.victoria-abbott.com or www.maryjanemaffini.ca to sign up for our newsletter!

Note:  COMMENT MODERATION SETTINGS HAVE BEEN ACTIVATED DUE TO SPAM AND ROBO COMMENTERS - MY APOLOGIES FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

Meet Victoria Abbott

I tried to raise her to do the right thing, but then my little girl grew up to kill people. She does it with a light touch of course, but even so.  Who would think that could happen? Of course, I must have read two hundred mysteries when I was expecting her, so I guess I’m lucky she only kills on the page.

You see, some mothers and daughters make cookies together, take a trip or join a choir,  but we decided to see if we could bump off the unsuspecting for fun and profit.

That’s what happens when you agree to collaborate with your daughter on a mystery series.  Now we’re over on the dark side together.  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I’m having too much fun.

We used to be Vic and Mum, now we’re Victoria Abbott.  We used to read mysteries, now we write them. We used to love and collect books, now we try to get inside the world of book collecting. We used to get annoyed with people, now we can turn them into characters that come to a bad end.  Crime writing: there’s no life like it.

 

But what of this collaboration?  How does it work?  Everyone wants to know. Sure, we’d like to know too. For us, the biggest mystery is how the first book came together.  Two different people, vast difference in ages (don’t ask) and different speaking, writing and working styles. How could that possibly succeed? Yet it did and we are very proud of The Christie Curse: the first in a book collector series hitting the stands on March 5^th from Berkley Prime Crime.  The protagonist, Jordan Bingham, is a grad student in desperate need of funds who accepts a job as a research assistant to a reclusive and difficult book collector. Her task is to track down a previously unknown play by Agatha Christie. Much as she loves her attic accommodation and the wonderful food served by the cook, Senora Panetone, she’s not so happy to hear that her predecessor died mysteriously. 

The strange part is that as we near the completion of book two: The Sayers Swindle, we still don’t know how or why the collaboration functions. We just know that it does.  We’ve tried all the variations: sometimes alternating scenes, or having each one write from the point of view of a certain character and most frequently working on the telephone, acting out scenes. As weird as it may sound, that seems to be the most effective way.

It was during these phone calls that the extensive cast of Jordan Bingham’s larcenous uncles first showed up in their small kitchen behind Michael Kelly’s antiques. Uncle Mike immediately started cooking, if you can call it that. KD, anyone?

And it was during a phone call that the secret of the bi-polar cat was revealed to us.

If we are tracking the benefits of this collaboration, laughter must be the first one.  Victoria is the taller, funnier one and she continues to crack me up as she introduces whimsy and humor into the story.  She’s also the pro on vintage clothing and antiques. I am in charge of the bad food that the Kelly uncles specialize in.  

Of course, there is much pussyfooting around. Mother/daughter relationships might be full of love and hugs, but they are also fraught with peril.

Like any creative endeavor, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. We’re not sure how we got there, but we like the world we’ve created for Jordan Bingham, we get a charge out of the crotchety employer Vera Van Alst and her bag lady wardrobe. We enjoy watching Jordan squirm as a certain police officer becomes very interested in her. She’ll never be able to introduce him to that particular family of crooks.  Most of all, we’re keen to see how Jordan’s life changes and how she grows in expertise and value to her book collector boss. Naturally, we have to put her in danger and then let her use her considerable smarts to get herself out again.

We are rolling with the challenges: finding the right time to work together, keeping up the story energy, homogenizing our voices and, as always, having fun.
 

Victoria Abbott is a collaboration between the always very funny and creative artist, photographer and short story author, Victoria Maffini and her mother, Mary Jane Maffini, award-winning author of three mystery series and two dozen short stories. As you can see, their four miniature dachshunds are understandably outraged that a pug and some Siamese cats have wiggled their way into the series.

The Christie Curse: a book collector mystery, by Victoria Abbott
First in a new series!  Coming March 5, 2013
Victoria Abbott is Mary Jane Maffini & Victoria Maffini
www.victoria-abbott.com
www.maryjanemaffini.com

 

 

 

 

 

December Photo A Day Challenge - Day 9

Topic of the Day

 

is

 

"Hot"

 

In Honor of Veteran's Day - Sharon Wildwind

WINNING NAMES HAVE BEEN DRAWN OUT OF THE PINK WILLIE NELSON BASEBALL CAP.

AND,  THE WINNERS ARE PAT BROWNING, MARY FEATHERSTON (WHO LEFT A COMMENT AT FACEBOOK WHEN CAPTCHA WOULDN'T COOPERATE HERE), AND CARLEEN.  SEND ME YOU MAILING ADDRESS, PLEASE (BARLEYKW AT APPSTATE DOT COM) AND I'LL FORWARD YOUR ADDRESSES TO SHARON SO SHE CAN MAIL YOUR ARC OUT TO YOU.  AND THANKS, EVERYONE, FOR PARTICIPATING.  I HOPE YOU'LL GIVE SHARON'S WORK A TRY IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY.  AND LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK, PLEASE!

The Long, Long Trail Ends

by Sharon Wildwind

 

There’s a long, long trail a-winding

Into the land of my dreams,

Where the nightingales are singing

And a white moon beams.

 

There’s a long, long night of waiting

Until my dreams all come true;

Till the day when I'll be going down

That long, long trail with you.

~ Stoddard King and Alonzo (Zo) Elliott, December 1913

 

It’s been a long haul.

 

Even good things—maybe especially good things—come to an end. In three days, my publisher ships Loved Honor More, the final Elizabeth Pepperhawk/Avivah Rosen Viet Nam mystery. Five books in seven years isn’t exactly burning up the mystery world, but I’m very proud of the run, especially since I had a day job, family events happened and the publishing world got really crazy. In short, it was life as usual in the writing lane.

 

 

 

 

People ask me, won’t you miss your characters? Maybe a little, but it’s time they get on with their lives without me looking over their shoulder. When writing the final book, I faced different questions that in the other four. Did I want all of my characters to survive or was I going to polish off one or more? Was I truly finished with the series, or did I want to plant a few seeds in case I wanted to write #6,. #7, etc.?

 

The hardest thing was taking a dispassionate look at the fall of Saigon and the weeks that preceded it. Thirty-five years out, it still appeared to me to be an unmitigated disaster. Reading and thinking about it still inflamed old passions that I thought had died a natural death. They haven’t.

 

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same)

~ Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808 – 1890), French critic, journalist, and novelist

 

The most fun thing was including a character named Kaye Barley. Yes, I did this with Kaye’s full permission. She said I could do almost anything I wanted, as long as the character got to wear cowgirl clothes at some point. She does.

 

One thing I’ve thought a lot about lately was the age span of Viet Nam veterans. At one end of the scale I imagined a grizzled supply sergeant who finished his thirty years in the military doing a tour of duty with the initial U.S. Military Assistance Advisor Group (M.A.A.G.), which, in 1956, assumed responsibility from the French for training South Vietnamese forces. My imaginary sergeant would have been about 48 when he was in Viet Nam, which would make him 104, were he still alive.

 

At the other end of the time span is the eighteen year-old Marine who was on the last helicopter out of Saigon on April 30, 1975. He’d be a spry 55 today.

 

Smack in the middle would have been a young Captain who led troops, flew helicopters, or worked in a field hospital during the late 1960s. His or her age today would be between 65 and 75. This includes my characters, and me.

 

We’re all a lot older, and a lot tougher than we were back in the day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s a lot of water under the bridge, a lot of marriages, families, divorces, university degrees, second and third careers, dream vacations, hobbies, moves, and just plain survival because the ones of us who are still alive are, in every sense, survivors. Thanks to that pesky social media, we’re reconnecting with one another. In the past three years I’ve been contacted by and found information to contact more of the people I served with than I did in the previous thirty years. It’s a good feeling to get caught up on what’s happened since the last time we saw one another.

 

So my last advice to my characters is when computers come along, get one. Learn to use it. It’s going to come in really handy in about thirty-five years. Maybe on your journey to look up your old Army buds, you’ll look me up as well. I’ll be right here, waiting, and more than a little interested in how you’ve gotten on over the decades.

 

My last advice to you is that I have 3 Advanced Reading Copies of Loved Honor More that I’d love to send to 3 people reading this blog. I’ve left it up to Kaye to determine how those three people are chosen. So do what she tells you. And in the words of Bob Hope, “Thanks for the memories.”

 

 

Final quote:

You have never lived until you’ve almost died. To those who fight for it, life has a flavor the protected never know.

~ sign over a Mike Forces bar, Pleiku, RVN

 

 

A Footnote:
Sharon asked me to tell y'all how to win a copy of an Advanced Reading Copy of her latest and last Elizabeth Pepperhawk/Avivah Rosen mystery series.  I'm going to put the comments in our famous pink Willie Nelson Baseball cap and I will draw three names.  I'll do this on Monday, Nov. 12 and I'll come back here and post the names at Meanderings and Muses, so be sure you check back (and to be really really for sure for sure - include your email address with your comment).

I had to wait a day to post this (and only with Sharon's consent) because after eading Sharon's post I had a very long cry.  For a number of reasons - not least of which is the fact that Sharon showed a personal side of herself here.  That's a rare thing for her to do, being an intensely private person.

Sharon wrote, "Five books in seven years isn’t exactly burning up the mystery world, but I’m very proud of the run . . . "

But damn it, this is a series that SHOULD have been burning up the mystery world.  It should have and it still should.  No one has written about the Viet Nam war the way Sharon Wildwind has from the point of view that she has.  Not many people could.  And many who could have chosen not to, for a wide variety of reasons - many of them heartbreaking.

Many of us were here at home while loved ones fought a war that confused us all, including many who were fighting.

It was, and remains today, an emotional time in our lives. 

I first heard about Sharon's series was from my buddy Mary Jane Maffini.  She mentioned the books to me because A) she loved them, and B) because Sharon mentions Boone, NC.  Well, boy howdy, that was reason enough for me to pick up the first in the series.  Reading about Boone always just tickles me pink.  However - this time - I was hooked.  Seriously hooked.  And as I am wont to do when a book touches me, I dropped Sharon an email to tell her so.  And squealed about it at DorothyL where I learned I was far from her only fan.  Sharon Wildwind is one of those authors that just simply has not, for whatever reason, received the attention that this series and her talent deserves.  I've been an advocate of this series since I read the first chapter of the first book - and I will continue long after I've read the last chapter of this last book.  I urge each of you to give this series a try.  And, especially, if you're of an age that remembers Viet Nam the way I remember Viet Nam, you'll thank me for the introduction.

I've been lucky enough to have been a character in a few books.  Lucky and honored to have been in some acknowledgements.  These things are always a thrill.  But I have to say - this honor is going to live in my heart till the day I die.  Thank you, Sharon.  Not just for the honor of being a character in your book (which you know I love!), but for all you've done - I salute you, with great honor and great admiration.

NOTE:  Because the Blogger captcha thing is such a massive pain in the neck, anyone leaving a comment under my status about Sharon at my Facebook Page will also have their name tossed into the pink Willie Nelson baseball cap.  Thanks much!

Strong Women by Mary Jane Maffini

Lapsed librarian and  former mystery bookseller Mary Jane Maffini rides herd on three series: Charlotte Adams is a professional organizer in upstate New York; lawyer Camilla MacPhee snoops around Canada's capital; and Fiona Silk is the most reluctant sleuth in West Quebec.  She’s now collaborating with her daughter on a book collector series from Berkley Prime Crime (2012), writing as Victoria Abbott.  She’s also turned out nearly two dozen short stories, including the Agatha nominated “So Much in Common” from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.  You can read the entire story on the website at www.themysteryplace.com/eqmm/excerpts/excerpt4.aspx

MJ lives and plots in Ottawa with her long-suffering husband and two princessy dachshunds.  You can also find her at www.maryjanemaffini.com or blogging regularly at www.killercharacters.com, www.mysteryloverskitchen.com and www.mysterymavencdn.blogspot.com
 

She’s really excited that The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder, the fifth Charlotte Adams book will hit the shelves Tuesday, April 5th!

 

STRONG WOMEN

by Mary Jane Maffini

Mystery fiction is populated by strong, determined women. Oh sure, there’s the occasional bubble-head, but really, female protagonists tend to be the kind of women you can count on in a crunch, say if someone you love is staring down the wrong end of the barrel of a gun. I’m talking about women who do what needs to be done to solve a crime, save a life, bring a villain to justice. The whole shebang. Women who remind us readers that we are, as individuals, often much more powerful than we realize.

Where do these fictional women come from? What do we writers draw on when they come up with the somewhat larger than life (but still usually slender) female characters who live in our favorite books?

Sometimes we model characters on our friends, women who are passionate about their jobs and committed to their families, but still always there for us in a crunch. Sometimes, we look to public figures who are worth watching. Recently, there have been a few heroic women who’ve stepped into terrifying situations to whack at mass murderers with their handbags. Now that takes guts. Other times, a courageous protagonist may represent the person we wish we were. But often our heroic characters are based on early influences. I know that’s true in my case.

Our family legend has it that my grandmother, the splendid Louise Ferguson, walked twenty-five miles, mostly uphill, on Sunday to teach in her small school in a mountain village. At the end of the week, she walked down that mountain road and home.  It was 1900 in rural Quebec. Stranger things happened. Was it true? Who knows. It certainly may have been and her grandchildren wanted it to be.

Louise Ferguson loved poetry and telling stories. She was tall and slender and had great dignity. She could rattle off a dozen stanzas of any Tennyson poem faster than a speeding train. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that she was courted by and married the very handsome William Ryan who was doing well with his logging business.  Louise kept her figure despite eleven babies in fourteen years. When William died after a logging accident, Louise was left on her own with nine children under fourteen, including year-old twins and another on the way. She lived with her in-laws in the Ryan homestead.  This was not such a happy situation with William gone. And Louise wasn’t one to let people tell her how to live her life, it seemed. She liked to run her own show. She knew who she was. She had a spine of steel. Soon she was on her own looking for a new place to live.

 

Louise’s brothers built her a farmhouse on a hill overlooking her beloved Restigouche River and she raised the children on her own. They were a tight knit family, all attractive and not without their dramatic moments. As far as I could tell, they all inherited her sense of humor.

I remember her best in her eighties, with great posture, dignity and a wicked sense of humor. Although she was always busy knitting, writing letters or reading, I never spotted her doing a tap of housework. I planned to emulate that lifestyle when I grew up. Once, when I was moping about some boy, she took me aside and whispered, “Men are like buses. There’s always another one coming along shortly.”   I made sure this made it into my fiction!

I loved her for many reasons, but especially her spellbinding ability to tell stories. In her stories tiny rabbits, sneaky foxes, bewildered woodchucks and larcenous squirrels lived lives full of romantic escapades, dark forest politics and daily dangers. We would hold our breath as small children. Would Daisy Rabbit escape the clutches of Reddy Fox?  Would that chattering squirrel lead to more trouble for the chucks?  Would all the trees be cut down, ruining the habitat? And where was Peter?  Had something happened to him? The suspense practically did us in.

She never ran out of stories or spirit or her sense of mischief.  She valued her friendships all her life. It amused her to suggest to her tall, elegant daughters that she was contemplating a walk to her friend Mina’s house. As Mina Adams lived three miles along the highway, the ensuring dramatics always made good watching, maybe because Louise was eighty-four and the highway was full of hairpin turns and careening logging trucks.  Shortly after, she’d be chauffeured up the road to Mina’s in style. Of course, she could have merely asked any family member to drive her, but where would be the fun in that?

I owe her a debt for humor, loving to read, seeing the healing value of a story and for hitting her eighties with her humor and intelligence as sharp as ever. I am absolutely certain that she would have been level-headed, brave, clever and resourceful if she’d come face to face with a villain with nothing but a handbag, a knitting needle or a volume of poetry.

I know she lives on in the character of several of my characters, including Violet Parnell, from the Camilla MacPhee mysteries, who has just hit her eighties and has no plans to slow down.  But there’s something of Louise Ferguson Ryan in my younger female characters, like Charlotte Adams. Charlotte’s not a quitter either and in every book she must walk up the symbolic mountain in the pursuit of the mystery and then walk down again. Charlotte knows who she is, has a spine of steel and relies on her sense of humor and her friends. She had a great role model.

Thank you, Louise Ferguson Ryan, for everything. May you influence my mysteries for many years to come!
 

 

What was the secret in that mysterious battered box in my father's closet? by Mary Jane Maffini

Mary Jane Maffini is a lapsed librarian, a former mystery bookstore owner, a previous president of Crime Writers of Canada and a lifelong lover of mysteries. In addition to the four Charlotte Adams books, she is the author of the Camilla MacPhee series, the Fiona Silk adventures and nearly two dozen short stories. She has won two Arthur Ellis awards for best mystery short story as well as the Crime Writers of Canada Derrick Murdoch award. She is having fun with the fifth Charlotte Adams adventure: *The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder* (Berkley Prime Crime 2011) and says she’s grateful for all the tips she gets from Charlotte. Mary Jane lives and plots in Ottawa, Ontario, along with her long-suffering husband and two princessy dachshunds. Visit her at www.maryjanemaffini.com

What was the secret in that mysterious battered box in my father’s closet? 
by Mary Jane Maffini 

  
Charlotte Adams is always trying to get us to clean out our closets. Usually we find too much clutter. But sometimes that closet yields a treasure worth keeping. After my father’s death, my brother and I discovered a small, battered cardboard box on a high shelf in his closet. Luckily it didn’t get tossed away in that distressing activity of clearing out. Inside the box, we found a collection of yellowed letters my father had written to my mother while they were courting from 1939 to 1941. People sure didn’t leap into marriage back in those days. They had weathered the Great Depression and were heading straight into World War II. After my parents met in New Brunswick, my father had returned to his home town of Sydney, Nova Scotia to help his father run the family retail business. My mother returned to her home town to manage the ladies’ wear

section of Eaton’s department store (A big deal if you are Canadian!). At that time, everyone wrote to keep in touch. Daily letters weren’t uncommon. People even wrote to make an appointment for a phone call.

A few years passed, before I could bring myself to sit and read those letters without unleashing more emotion than I could deal with. But when I did, I found insights into my parents as beautiful young people and also a treasure trove of heartwarming moments, and many chuckles. My dignified and elegant white-haired aunt -- mother of seven, grandmother of umpteen -- was portrayed by her brother as a spoiled and willful teenager. Abby, who would become my mother’s best friend, was then a vivacious young court reporter about to be surprised at a wedding shower held by my aunts. She bought a lot of hats too! My father was happy to announce all that. He regales my mother with details about the dances and parties he, his sisters and friends went to. The meals, the family skirmishes the parties, the outings and the trips to the beach. He asks about her family and friends, tantalizing tidbits for me after all these years. He talks about the movies:

I’ve been to see Rebecca, a very good movie. Have you had a chance to see it?

It was such an innocent time. Canada had entered the war, but no one had any idea of the tragedy and horror that lay ahead. In one letter Dad wrote: They’ve had to cancel the hockey tonight. That darn Hitler!  I never learned exactly how Hitler caused the game cancellation, but I am guessing a blackout.

My father had no idea of the terrible, tragic and incomprehensible times that lay ahead, that he would serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force and that his brothers would go overseas. While his brothers came back, cousins and friends and one brother-in-law didn’t. Other uncles languished in POW camps until 1945. Everyone’s lives changed.

This look into the daily doings of the surprisingly optimistic and cheerful young people in an era with no television and no computers had a big impact on me. I loved the mood and the surprising optimism. Later, I was able to mine those letters for *The Dead Don’t Get Out Much*, a Camilla MacPhee book set partly during World War II (where the vivacious Abby got a role as Hazel, and some nice hats)

I also learned that’s the thing about closets: you have to know what to toss and what to keep. Dad’s letters didn’t go back onto a high shelf. I gave that correspondence a new home in a beautiful new box. It has a place of pride in my office.

My dad was a quiet man, so the biggest surprise was getting to know him as a lively man about town. I learned how much he admired and respected his own father, how he was involved in his community, and more to the point, how much he missed that beautiful, elegant lady who would become his wife. Years later, they adopted me and later my brother, John David. Good news for us. We continue to thank them for the gift of history, laughter and the value of family and friends. 

 

Isobel Ryan and John Merchant were married 69 years ago today. Happy anniversary, Mum and Dad, wherever you are.

The Passing of a Great Talent - Ernie Barnes

I was going to post something about the Edgars today. The Edgars are, after all, a very big deal in the mystery world and deserve to be celebrated and honored. So I started browsing around the internet to see what everyone else had to say and it occurred to me that I didn't have a thing to say about the Edgars that hadn't already been said. And since most of what was interesting had been said by people who were actually there, then what was the point in my adding my two cents? Especially since it would be me rehashing what already been said, and said well. And as usual - Sarah Weinman says it all best in her "Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind."

Anyone who is interested already knows who won, and if they have an opinion, they've already shared it. The list of winners can be found at the MWA Edgar webpage, and I offer each of them my sincerest congratulations. And to those names on the list who did not win the coveted award this year - I'm betting we'll see many of them back in years to come.


What I did run across during my browsing that I found to be of interest, other than the Edgar winners, also saddened me. Included in my list of favorite blogs is The Crime Sistahs. The women who make up The Crime Sistahs are Angela Henry, Patricia Sargeant, Gammy L. Singer, and Persia Walker.

I first became aware of Persia Walker at the Baltimore Bouchercon last year. I sat in on a panel session my friend Mary Jane Maffini was participating in - “Otherside: Keeping it Plausible." I wrote this in my Wednesday, October 15, 2008 blog - Bouchercon 2008 - My First B'Con -
"Another Saturday panel I attended was William Kent Krueger moderating Judy Clemens, Mary Jane Maffini, Kit Sloane, and Persia Walker on “Otherside: Keeping it Plausible” Loved this one too (why, of course), and was blown away by Ms. Persia Walker who I was not familiar with. I found this young woman to be major impressive and am quite excited about discovering this bright talent."

Since then, I have read Ms. Walker's Harlem Redux and Darkness and the Devil Behind Me. And I recommend them both quite highly. If you haven't discovered Ms. Walker yet, you're in for a treat. And if she's an indicator of the talent included in the Crime Sistahs Blogspot, then there is yet more talent for me to discover and enjoy.

But that's not what I came here to talk about today. Let me meander back to the subject at hand . . .

being sad.

What made me sad at The Crime Sistahs Blogspot was learning that Ernie Barnes had died. Immeasurably sad. I don't know if you're familiar with Ernie Barnes' art and murals - however, you might be even if you aren't aware of it.

Do you remember watching the old TV show Good Times? Do you remember that the character JJ became, as the show went on, a bit of an artist? That wonderful work shown as JJ's was, in fact, Ernie Barnes' work. And I love it. And I am saddened that there will be no more.


Enjoy these few and say a little prayer for Mr. Barnes and his lasting talent.

Sugar Shack




Solid Rock Congregation



Singin' Sistahs



Anniversary



Room Full A'Sistahs



The Maestro

Obituary here