The Orphan Scrivener: 2013

Sunday, December 15, 2013

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # EIGHTY-FOUR -- 15 DECEMBER 2013

This issue is being hammered out in one of the earliest deep freezes we can recall. Today for the first time this winter we got up to no power. And heavy snow. Not that a fair-sized portion of the country isn't also contending with bone-chilling cold, snow, sleet, and ice. Sir Walter Scott summed up many a weather-weary person's thoughts at this time when he declared this dark month glooms the days, taking away autumn joys.

And speaking of gloomy days, with the arrival of this latest Orphan Scrivener today may well be turning darker for those readers who insist on perusing these words. If so, we suggest they turn the light on and continue!

ERIC'S BIT or HEADLESS IN BROOKLYN

Today's got off to an exciting start as mentioned above.

Next week we shall have another exciting day: taking the rubbish down to the road for pickup. Luckily it's only one plastic bag full. Two weeks worth.

With the car snowed in at the bottom of the grassy slope we use for a driveway, I'll have to haul the bag down the hill by hand. Hopefully I'll avoid throwing my back out, or breaking a leg by slipping on ice.

The descent reminds me of trash day when I lived in a fifth floor walk-up in a Brooklyn brownstone, only the stairs weren't icy or nearly as steep. And I was younger.

Back then I was going to school, even more impecunious than I am today. Sometimes trash went up the stairs too. Other people's trash, that is. Treasures to me. A lopsided box that became a little bookcase. A chair that stayed upright quite comfortably if you shifted most of your weight to one side.

When I was still younger certain trash days were even more exciting. Sometimes my dad took things to the dump. Oh how I loved visiting the dump.

From the main road a dirt track ran into the woods. Our big red station wagon rattled along the ruts, heading into the wilderness. Then came the smell, a sour, acrid stench. Wisps of smoke rolled across the windshield and we broke though into a clearing which sloped down into a shallow pit that seemed to my seven year old eyes enormous.

Smoke rose up or billowed from craters and hillocks of this desolate landscape. A pile of scorched brick, heaps of torn trash bags spilling their unidentifiable contents, lengths of charred wood jutting up into the eye-watering haze that hung over everything. Here I could see the rusted top of a car half swallowed up in the refuse. There, along the edge of the wasteland sat several doorless refrigerators. An office chair perched incongruously atop a blackened hillock. Above it all, borne up by the heat from flickering fires, drifted flocks of ashes of all shapes and sizes.

It gave me a cold thrill to look upon the ultimate fate of familiar things, the final destination of the old and useless and worn out. Not exactly a vista of the underworld but perhaps a back door to hell where demons had set out their garbage.

While my father dispatched our junk, my gaze wandered to the nearer confusion of rubbish, searching for what secret things strangers had sought to rid themselves of. Look! An alarm clock with a smashed face!

One time, years later, in Brooklyn, I found a severed head propped up by the curb. Not just any severed head either. The head of none other than John the Baptist, served up by Salome. Why anyone would throw away a three-foot tall reproduction of a Gustav Klimt painting I'll never know.

This week's trip with the trash is not likely to result in any such excitement. For me. Maybe for any crows, or stray cats, who find my bag before the waste disposal truck arrives.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

December is a busy month for most of us, and the ticker echoes that with a fair amount of news to impart. Read on!

NEWS OF TENFER or A CORKER OF A COVER

Ring out, glad bells! We returned the corrected ARC to the press a couple of days ago and the beautiful blue cover for Ten For Dying is a real corker! It will start appearing hither and yon soon and it's well worth an advance peak at Eric's blog http://journalscape.com/ericmayer

And in other news, Tenfer is now available for pre-ordering from Poisoned Pen Press http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/ten-for-dying/ as well as from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Dying-Chamberlain-Mystery-Series/dp/1464202273 and the usual suspects.

AHOY UK, EUROPEAN, & COMMONWEALTH READERS or JOHN IN A BOX

British publisher Head of Zeus has just issued Death In Byzantium, a boxed set featuring ebooks of the first four novels about our protagonist John, comprising over a thousand "pages". Talk about a bargain! Point your clicker here:
http://headofzeus.com/books/Death+in+Byzantium+-+Box+Set?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781859063

Head of Zeus is also offering an e-edition of the second short story about John, reworked and twinkled up a bit. The Body In The Mithraeum is currently discounted, so hasten ye to: http://headofzeus.com/books/The%20Body%20in%20the%20Mithraeum

Our co-written December blog, which goes live on the 18th and can be reached via the link at http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/category/news-and-blog/ when that day dawns, is entitled The Morning The Coffee Pot Broke and, as readers have no doubt deduced, deals with the awful horror of, well, the coffee pot breaking. Especially on a cold and snowy day, which is where we came in...

MARY'S BIT or THE ROLLING RS

There are always one or two teachers we recall with particular affection, are there not?

Most of my teachers were women. At grammar school level except for two the staff was largely comprised of elderly spinsters who dressed in cliches -- sensible lace-up shoes, a cameo brooch at the throat, longish skirts, iron disciplinistas. Infringe school rules such as not wearing a hat or beret while abroad in school uniform or running in the hallways and you were instructed to "sign up" on the corridor notice board list. Three signings a term and there was a stern comment from the headmistress on the next report card. I only ever had that dubious honour once, I'm happy to say. And speaking of hats, local urchins took great delight in grabbing ours and running off with them so you had to be ever alert in the street.

But my word, could our teachers teach! It would be unthinkable to them, and indeed us, for someone to leave school functionally illiterate.

I say they could teach, but in my case must exclude certain subjects. Alas, I was the despair of Madam D, our French teacher, for I never could grasp the use of different genders for objects and quickly got lost in the thickets of moi-il-elle. So I left with little grasp of the language, though such few sentences as I could construct were considered pronounced, as were those of my classmates, with a decent approximation of the French accent, given, so we understood, our Tyneside dialect caused us to speak with rolling rs. We'll overlook all our glo'all stops.

At the same school, our music teacher was Mrs J, a motherly woman who played the piano for the interpretive dancing I mentioned in Leaps, Foot and Leaves in the October 2005 issue of Orphan Scrivener http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/tos35.htm#leaps Mrs J was very patient but could never get me to grasp how to read music. Give me a couple of seconds to listen to the others singing and I could generally wing it by following the rise and fall of written notes, more or less, whereas my younger sister could read on sight. Said sister inherited my musical gene as well as her own and played in school orchestras, usually first violin. She plays other instruments equally as well, whereas the only one I can play is the kazoo, and that badly.

However, when the Queen Mother visited Tyneside, a number of pupils from each local school were chosen to form a mass choir to serenade her. To my amazement I was one of those recruited from mine. We sang local songs -- Bobby Shaftoe, The Water of Tyne, and Keel Row -- and it must have been a magnificent sound with all those rolling rs.

This particular occasion was the first time I had seen a Royal Personage in person as opposed to cinema newsreels. My main impression was how small and delicate she was -- and how interested in her visit. Especially the sudden rattle of stiff cards when a fellow standing in front of the choir and behind her majesty pulled out his hanky, a signal to those sitting in the balcony to hold up coloured cardboard oblongs to form a representation of the Union Jack. It all sounds very quaint but it was, well, a royal visit and no doubt the mayor, all done up regardless with his chain of office, was relieved it went smoothly.

At this same school we had only one male teacher. Mr R replaced our science teacher when she retired -- one of her parting gifts was a sixth-former's painting of the small Victorian building in which lived the science lab, set well away from the main school -- and we were terrified of him. He was no doubt a very nice man but somewhat gruff in manner to say the least. In that mysterious way schoolchildren have, we learned he had previously been at a boy's school so perhaps that explained it.

I wasn't very good at science either.

Nor did I shine at domestic science.

The nadir of cookery lessons at my next school was a doomed attempt to make brandy snaps. For the benefit of those who have never tried, my advice is don't. It's a tricky business whipping the snaps off the baking tray and winding them round a wooden spoon handle. You have to get it done before the snaps cool and become very brittle. Then follows the piping in of the thickened cream filling. My effort resulted, basically, in a plate of filling with bits of blackened snap floating in it. Everyone in the class laughed.

My favourite teacher, however, was on the staff of a school I attended after we moved. Shrouding his identity with secrecy, for he was nicknamed Bugsy by us heartless teenagers due to the size of his family, he taught English. He used to say that if he marked our work higher than seven out of ten we should go home and lie down. He obviously loved teaching and taught it with imagination. For example, giving out the current choose-one-of-three-topics for essays one week, the third announced was A Week In The Life of Dracula. Evidently he had got wind of the fact three of us had cut art class one afternoon the week before to see the Hammer film starring Christopher Lee. I don't know what marks my co-skippers received but mine were fairly high, though not high enough to go home. Then there was Macbeth. When studying it we read it out in class, taking turns to act as characters. His interpretation of First Witch would have torn up the carpet, had the classroom been fitted with it. Talk about a wonder to behold! Such gusto!

So, since I was no good at music, science, cookery, or languages, I suppose I was fated to eventually write novels. I like to think Bugsy would have approved.

AND FINALLY

The gate of the new year will open in a couple of weeks, reminding us of the Latin proverb to the effect that a beginning is a writing tablet scraped clean. May our subscribers' tablets be inscribed with nothing but good things in 2014!

And speaking of tablets, subscribers may wish to have headache remedies handy on February 15th when the next issue of Orphan Scrivener scrapes into their in-boxes.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

who invite you to visit our home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, our bibliography, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit our shadow identity M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/ And just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # EIGHTY-THREE -- 15 OCTOBER 2013

A reminder that winter is creeping up the pike came on a recent morning, when a backing-up bell and a loud rattling announced the delivery of a consignment of coal to a neighbour, in the process waking us at an ungodly hour.

Wordsworth was likely not thinking of the sound of coal deliveries when he talked of wild autumnal music in faded woods, which is just as well since our fall colour has been slow in starting and the woods are not yet noticeably less bright. However, after cooler nights this past week more trees have begun to change colour, particularly maples just starting to turn that beautiful scarlet so beloved by landscape painters and our northern neighbours, and whereas Orphan Scrivener might not be described as beloved by some, unlike advancing winter it's actually here so why not read on?

MARY'S BIT or A-MAZE-ING MUSINGS

I must confess mazes have an eerie fascination from me, and I've loved them since the first one I saw at Saltwell Towers http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/70553 in Gateshead, north-east England.

With its titular towers, red brick walls with yellow detailing and bands of patterns and built to an eccentric design displaying Elizabethan and Gothic elements, what a magnificent sight the gas-lit house must have been in its heyday when the family entertained and carriages rolled up to disgorge local bigwigs and captains of industry!

William Wailes, the prominent 19th stained glass manufacturer who commissioned the house, had the maze planted to entertain his children, though they would have aged somewhat by the time the hedges were fully grown and thickened out enough to disguise the route to the centre http://isee.gateshead.gov.uk/Local%20Studies%20Photos/Jpgs/GL003106.jpg

In the 1870s the mansion and its extensive grounds were bought by Gateshead Corporation and became a public park, from which time the hoi polloi have been able to wander round it. As a visiting representative of same, I had one or two adventures in Saltwell Park as a child. Once I fell into the lake but despite fairly deep water and the unwelcome interest of a number of exceedingly vexed swans, as you see I got safely back to land. On another occasion I was almost trapped in the Towers overnight. By then the house had been turned into a museum and still had its original arrangement of rooms, now alas no longer the case. Being upstairs wandering through what would once have been bedrooms, I did not realise the place was in the process of being locked up for the night. A promising start for a ghost story, no? But Saltwell Towers was always a favourite destination despite a long walk from where we lived near the far end of Coatsworth Road as it featured such arcane delights as a scale model of a pit head, a collection of stuffed birds and small animals, and the display at which I spent most of my time on every visit, a magnificent recreation of a Victorian living room viewed through a glass wall.

Getting back to the maze, to my eye any maze projects an other-worldly air, tinged with a touch of the sinister. Is it because it's easy to get lost in the labyrinth and an instinctive feeling of panic arises or because the arrangement of hedges changes the landscape, disorienting the treader of paths?

You might liken mazes to the intellectual puzzles of mystery fiction. Or if you won't, I will. Indeed, in Six For Gold, wherein John investigates sheep committing suicide in the Egyptian village of Mehenopolis, we present the small settlement as boasting an extensive underground maze playing a major part in the plot. So there's two mazes for the price of one. Talk about generous.

However, offhand I can only recall a couple of short stories in which mazes appear. M. R. James (pause for customary declaration that MRJ roolz!) treats of Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance, which includes a circular yew maze with a globe in its centre and lettered tiles stored in a temple in the garden. Suggestive matters indeed, ladies and gentlemen! Then there's In The Walls Of Eryx, a collaborative effort by H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth J. Sterling, featuring an invisible maze on Venus. Needless to say, it all ends in tears.

Given my declared love of mazes, it will be no surprise to learn I chuckled when recently reading Warwick Wroth's Cremorne and the Later London Gardens. In passing he mentions a maze at Camberwell's Flora Gardens, the proprietors of which helpfully provided a guide. At the centre of the maze there stood a hermitage where lived what was described as a Chaldean astrologer. Naturally, I immediately thought of Alfie Bass in Help! playing an Indian restaurant doorman claiming to be from the mysterious east -- of London, that is.

Subscribers interested in Victorian mansions will enjoy perusing photos of the Towers at http://isee.gateshead.gov.uk/info.php?s=Saltwell+Towers&type=all&t=objects The interior view shows an elaborately carved high-backed sofa-cum-settle -- I would not care to have to dust all those ornamental incrustations -- partially blocking a small fireplace. It almost looks as if the residents, or rather their servants, were in the process of moving the furniture around when the photo was snapped. Given the obvious weight of sofa and table, I suspect more than one involved in wrassling with them would rather be lost in the mansion's maze -- or even consulting a Chaldean astrologer.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Only a short ticker tape this month, but it's all good stuff if we say so ourselves!

AN ANNOUNCEMENT or TENA KOE, TENFER

A blasphemous ritual and the theft of a holy relic by demons kicks off Ten For Dying. Matters go rapidly downhill from there, and ambition, intrigue, treachery, and murder soon take centre stage. With John sailing into exile in Greece, will he be able to assist Felix's investigations from afar? One thing at least is certain -- we're happy to announce Tenfer is now available for pre-order from PPP http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/ten-for-dying/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ten-for-dying and Amazon http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/191-8864269-7896028?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Ten%20For%20Dying%2C%20Reed%2C%20Mayer as well as the usual suspects on and offline.

THREE FROM SEVEN or EVERY BIT(E) HELPS

Notices of John's adventures occasionally pop up in unexpected places and such was the case of Hygienists In Print, Lois Hirt's column for the Los Angeles Dental Hygienists' Society. Lois focuses on references to teeth and related matters in fiction and non fiction, and three quotes from Seven For A Secret appear in her September column. Point your clickers to http://ladhsociety.org/hygienists_in_print for links to her column as well as previous entries.

HANDY LISTINGS or HERE THERE BE NOVELS

Want to a handy listing of John's adventures? Fortuna smiles as that handy info may be conveniently consulted at the website of Poisoned Pen Press at http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/?s=Eric+Mayer&cat=104&x=0&y=0 and for overseas readers at the page devoted to our shadow identity M. E. Mayer at Head of Zeus http://headofzeus.com/books/One%20for%20Sorrow

In passing, HoZ has also published Three Great Historical Mysteries, a compendium composed of MEM's One For Sorrow and novels by fellow PPP authors Bruce Macbain (Roman Games) and Priscilla Royal (Wine of Violence). Details at http://headofzeus.com/books/3%20Great%20Historical%20Mysteries

ERIC'S BIT or ON THE CAT TRAIL

Our backyard, pressed up against the woods, does not seem to be on any wildlife routes, or at least not on the routes of wildlife that travels by daylight. Who knows what may pass by our door in the darkness -- raccoons, possums, bears, skunks? Well, occasionally a skunk leaves its redolent calling card. And we did once see a black bear in the middle of the afternoon.

Generally, we have only sporadic visits from our forest neighbors. This autumn several turkeys blundered briefly out of the shrubbery, scratched the moss a bit before vanishing again. Then we saw a family of deer, six in all, does, partially grown fawns and a young buck, with just nubs on his head, who stood watch near the house while his charges nibbled at bushes.

Mostly we see squirrels and chipmunks and cats. For years there was, in particular, a white cat with black spots. There's nothing like glancing out the back window and seeing a cat with the squirming hind legs of a chipmunk hanging out of its mouth. Now we often see the neighbor's cat, a flabby, disreputable looking black creature with dirty brown blotches.

We are definitely on the Cat Trail. They nearly always follows the same route: across the back yard, behind the shed, along the perimeter of the yard next door where the grass meets the woods, then through a gap in the pines, onto the next property and down past the side of the house there, vanishing from our sight in the direction of the road. She returns along the same route exactly. There might as well be cat road markers pointing the way.

I wonder has this been the cat highway since time immemorial? And why? Because it takes them past the best hunting spots? Does it intersect a chipmunk thruway? If the cats are merely on the way somewhere, it would be faster to simply cut straight across all the yards. Then again, even in a house cats like to skirt the edges of things. Maybe that's why I like cats since I too prefer to stick to the periphery rather than plunging into the center.

When I was growing up there were ant paths worn into my grandparents' front yard. They had obviously been located intentionally. In several places they led from the flagstone walk to the big, partially hollow maple trees in front. The paths were no wider than a child's finger, but distinct. How many ants and how many years does it take to wear a tiny rut from which no blade of grass emerges? The paths were always busy. The ants hurrying toward the sidewalk were unburdened, those returning to the maples, where they must have had colonies, carried bits of leaves, or maybe a dead aphid or even a cracker crumb. If you dropped a twig on their road the ants would quickly congregate to remove the obstruction.

I once lived in a house where generations of mice had gnawed a gap in the corner of a plank door. An indentation had been worn into the floorboards where a procession of mice had scurried through the gap on their way along what was no doubt a well established route.

I suppose most of us tend to take familiar paths. Do we do so for a reason or from habit? It's comforting to have a path to follow. Whether it is always good or not is another question. Sometimes the path ahead looks obvious. Other times less so. It depends on where you are going and what you are about. Cats are looking for chipmunks, ants need to carry aphids home, writers think about writing.

AND FINALLY

Speaking as we were of leaves, we'll now take ours and fade away quietly after reminding subscribers the next Orphan Scrivener will fall out of the aether into their inboxes on December 15th.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

Thursday, August 15, 2013

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # EIGHTY-TWO -- 15 AUGUST 2013

Summer proceeds apace and that sure sign of advancing autumn, the back to school sale, is becoming more widely broadcast across the land every day. There's no stopping the passage of time and, to misquote Charles Cowden Clarke, its vast wheel now drags subscribers to the dreadful sight that is this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener. Whirl on...

ERIC'S BIT or JEEPERS CREEPERS

Here at Casa Maywrite the creepy crawlies continue their summer offensive although so far the summer has not been as memorable as one a few years ago.

One morning a monstrous black beetle was hiding in ambush next to the washing machine. I grabbed the first weapon to hand -- a can of insect spray -- and blasted the invader with enough poison to peel the paint off the linoleum.

The horror shook the poison from its mandibles and scuttled under the washer. I bent down to investigate and it came at me from the other side. I shot it again. This time I kept my finger on the button.

The poison was designed to take out flying nasties, but a bug's a bug, and I was using the heavy duty spray, with enough muzzle velocity to knock a white-faced hornet out of the air at a range of five feet. The force of the blast lifted the beetle up and threw it back against the side of the washer. It slid down and finally lay still. Maybe it broke its carapace. Maybe it drowned.

These bugs were getting to me. A few days earlier, on the way to the shower, I was greeted by a huge spider. Just what you need to see when you walk into the bathroom naked -- an arachnid as big as your thumb.

This terror was at least four inches end to end, with a obscenely huge, bulbous body. I'd exchanged pleasantries with his great grandfather a couple of years ago. Which is to say, I'd had to hammer him five times with my shoe. The present spider could've put up a good fight against a tarantula. As for a skinny, naked guy without even a shoe...

I backed away, found my trusty bug spray, and soaked the intruder. He sauntered out of sight. There are few sights more hideous than an eight-legged saunterer. However, the poison must have taken effect, because he didn't return that evening. Or the next.

Maybe, with his dying breath, he'd sent the black beetle after me.

Probably it was just my imagination. But I was jumpy. Next morning I sprayed a menacing scrap of lettuce leaf on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Stopped it in its tracks too.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Only a short length of ticker tape this time around but carrying some big news...

NO NEED TO BE ON TEN-TERHOOKS or TENFER'S ON THE WAY

We're happy to announce Ten For Dying has officially entered production with the appearance of its page on the Poisoned Pen Press website http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/ten-for-dying/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ten-for-dying

While there's as yet no cover image, it will unveiled soon and it's a corker!

This latest entry in the series begins on a hot summer night at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople with an attempt to raise Theodora from the dead as demons vanish into the night with one of the city's holiest relics, a fragment of the shroud of the Virgin.

John's friend Felix, captain of the excubitors, is ordered to investigate the theft, but becomes suspected of murder himself, thanks to an anonymous corpse left at his house. If only John were still in the city and could assist him!Unfortunately, the former Lord Chamberlain is on his way to exile, having sailed away the morning after the theft. It isn’t easy solving a mystery in Constantinople while aboard a ship on its way to Greece.

A former madam turned leader of a religious refuge, a wealthy and famous charioteer, a general’s scheming wife, and a superstitious man who wears so many protective charms that he jingles when he walks, all play their parts in a story of misdirection and murder.

AND WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT or ALL IN ON PLACE

Information on John's adventures may be consulted at the websites of Poisoned Pen Press at http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/?s=Eric+Mayer&cat=104&x=0&y=0 and the page devoted to our shadow identity M. E. Mayer at Head of Zeus http://headofzeus.com/books/One%20for%20Sorrow

HoZ has also published Three Great Historical Mysteries, a compendium composed of MEM's One For Sorrow and novels by fellow PPP authors Bruce Macbain (Roman Games) and Priscilla Royal (Wine of Violence). Details here: http://headofzeus.com/books/3%20Great%20Historical%20Mysteries

MARY'S BIT or BUDGIE IN A BOX

One of my brothers in law once remarked he kept changing his locks, but his grown children still managed to get back in.

Doubtless this is not quite what Thomas Wolfe had in mind when he opined we can't go home again.

Sometimes it's just not possible for reasons other than different locks. On one occasion after some years away, I returned to Gateshead to see family and while there went to visit our old street. Imagine my consternation when I turned the corner and the street had disappeared. There was only an asphalted space where it had been, and -- even more sinister, in my opinion -- the streets framing it were still there and still inhabited.

What was also remarkable was the space originally occupied by a row of terraced houses facing another across the narrow street looked so tiny it seemed impossible fifty or so families had lived in that street at one time.

Another street where the Reeds lived across the river in Newcastle had also disappeared some years before, but its passing was not unexpected given at the time we left the city the wrecking ball had almost reached it as slum clearance efforts got under way. My spies tell me new housing was built on the site, set horizontally to the river rather than at right angles to it as the original street had been. Unfortunately, after storms water rushing down the very steep slope caused flooding so the new housing had to be taken down and rebuilt in the same configuration as the old.

Of course, when you can't go home again you're usually either living in, or on your way to, your next dwelling, which reminds me of one of my mother's more eventful moves, which involved a journey from Oxfordshire back up north to Gateshead not that far around the corner and down the main road from the street mentioned earlier. Various of the family assisted, loading up a large van with furniture and rolled up carpet and other household goods, including four wardrobes from a three-bedroomed house -- they are so useful for storage was one of my mother's mantras. A large box was punched with for transporting the budgie north, the reasoning being if he perched on the swing in his cage during the journey the continual wild oscillations caused by the vehicle's movement would not be good to the little fellow and so far as we knew no avian tranquilizers were available.

The last items to be put aboard were two sacks holding mother's remaining stock of coal, for she was determined not to leave it behind.

It was almost midnight and everything was in the van except the budgie, leaving only these two sacks of coal to be loaded. The ladies were in the kitchen making tea when all of a sudden two family gents rushed in, one with blood running down his face and both chanting a registration plate number. They'd been loading the sacks when a car stopped, a man leapt out, assaulted one because he thought a sack of coal lying on the shadowed pavement by the garden hedge was a body -- or so he claimed -- and then raced off.

With the aid of the number, the police tracked down the car and were round at the owner's house within a short time. He claimed he hadn't set foot out the door all night but, as we later learned, his car bonnet was still warm when the police arrived. But there was nothing to be done.

In any event, tea gulped, mother, a couple of family members going north, and the budgie left for the journey, driving past numerous illuminated windows from which peered neighbours who had got out of bed on hearing the police car siren howling.

To this day I am convinced they thought a moonlight flit was in progress and we had been caught in the act.

Happily the budgie suffered no ill effects and not long after she settled in mother purchased another wardrobe, making six in a two bedroom flat. But then they are so useful for storage.

AND FINALLY

As Tennyson pointed out, seasons too flower and fade and although this newsletter arrives in high summer, autumn will beginning when the next issue of Orphan Scrivener escapes from the wardrobe of time and manages to get into subscribers' inboxes on September 15th.

See you then!

Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit our home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/

Saturday, June 15, 2013

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # EIGHTY-ONE -- 15 JUNE 2013

This newsletter is scribbled to the sound of rain, not dropping as the gentle dew from heaven but rather the merciless full blast sheeting of a frog-strangler. Yes, rain is slashing down like the proverbial stair rods. As for this issue of Orphan Scrivener, subscribers should read on to establish if it's could be considered a wash-out or no...

MARY'S BIT or WITH A HOPPER, A SKIP, AND A JUMP

The trouble with my unfortunate ever wandering and wondering gaze is that some things it lights upon can never be resolved. I am thinking in particular of a Cornish calendar in which one page featured a photo of a sunny beach, but my eye was drawn to a house in the background where an upper window was open and part of a net curtain billowing out. I still wonder now and then who lives there and what they were doing when a photographer wandered by to immortalize their window and ultimately allow someone thousands of miles to ponder nosy questions about a stranger's household.

That imponderable question is by way of introducing works by Edward Hopper, a favourite artist. I have long held four of my particular favourites would make wonderful covers for noir works, based on similar musings suggested by their content.

Consider his Early Sunday Morning (1), depicting a row of red brick shops with flats above. Its long shadows created by a sun not long out of bed suggest not the quiet peace of a day and time when most would still be asleep but more a brooding silence fraught with possibilities. Notice the variety of positions of the blinds in the upper row of windows, indicating some residents are already astir despite the hour. You may say it's workers getting up for the early shift, and yet to my eye there's a sinister aspect to the scene. It's easy to imagine dark plots being hatched behind one or two windows. Well, easy if you view the painting through my eyes.

Skipping now to Drug Store (2), another night scene. Here's Silber's Pharmacy, a chemist's shop set on a corner, its brightly lit window featuring various wares for sale and the traditional pair of large bottles filled with coloured water. There's a glimpse of darkened housing of the same type as Early Sunday Morning and again there's nary a sign of life. At the very least there ought be a stray cat sitting on the chemist's doorstep. But who last entered the upstairs floor via that door with the long panels, half shadowed by light spilling from the chemist's window? I imagine illegal gambling going on upstairs at the very least.

Jumping now to the couple talking on a porch one Summer Evening (3). Perhaps I do them an injustice, but they strike me as being up to no good. It's obviously a hot night -- the girl's clothes -- and very late, for it's pitch black outside their oasis of light and summer evenings stay light a long time. Everyone else in the house is surely asleep. The positions of the figures suggest the man is trying to persuade the woman to do something she is uneasy about, but she's wavering. What could it be? I suggest, ladies and gentlemen, it not just getting up to a bit of mischief but something to be spoken of in whispers.

Perhaps the best known of Hopper's works, Nighthawks (4) speaks of the loneliness of city living. It has a melancholy air and there's little warmth in that small gathering in an all night diner. The clothing has something of the noir style, with suits and fedora hats for the men and the red-headed girl's scarlet blouse or dress. But she does not appear to have a coat and the work has the air of being very early in the morning. Is she talking to the man next to her? If she is, what are they talking about? One might speculate...and again there's the sleeping red brick row on the other side of the street.

Subscribers have doubtless noticed three of my favourites are night scenes. Perhaps that's not surprising because, as Eric can confirm, I am a night owl, the English equivalent of the nighthawk, and would far rather be up all night and sleep a fair bit of the week days, not just Sunday mornings.

(1) http://whitney.org/Collection/EdwardHopper/31426
(2) http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2007/hopper/fullscreens/nighttime/229-002.jpg
(3) http://uploads7.wikipaintings.org/images/edward-hopper/summer-evening.jpg
(4) http://uploads3.wikipaintings.org/images/edward-hopper/nighthawks.jpg

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The ticker has been assiduously tapping out news with an international flavour this past two months. Read on for the skinny!

TENFER TURNED IN or GOING

We celebrated May Day not by going a-maying but rather by a-mayering. In other words, we turned in the ms for Ten For Dying on May 1st. This tenth entry in the series is slated to sail on the good ship Poisoned Pen Press next April so a few words about it may (that word again) be of interest.

On a hot summer night in 6th century Constantinople at the Church of the Holy Apostles, an Egyptian magician tries to raise Empress Theodora from the dead and demons vanish into the darkness with one of the city's holiest relics, a fragment of the shroud of the Virgin. As if Felix, Captain of the Palace Guard, didn't have enough problems already between his gambling debts, political maneuverings, and an ambitious new mistress, Emperor Justinian orders him to find the missing relic.

But before he can begin investigating the theft, he becomes suspected of murder thanks to an anonymous corpse left at his house.

A former madam turned leader of a religious refuge, a wealthy and famous charioteer, a general's scheming wife, and a superstitious man who wears so many protective charms that he jingles when he walks, all play their parts in misdirection and murder. It seems as if half the city has reason to wish to possess the relic, see Felix dead, or both.

If only Felix's friend John were still in the city and could assist him. Unfortunately, the former Lord Chamberlain is being sent into exile, sailing away the morning after the theft. It isn't easy solving a mystery in Constantinople while aboard a ship on its way to Greece.

Felix is left to fight for survival in a situation where he can't be sure who his enemies are, or even whether they are all human.

ANTIPODEAN AMAZEMENT or HOZ IN OZ

We heard last month from a ex pat friend in Australia, who declared he got the collywobbles when he spotted British publisher Head of Zeus' edition of One For Sorrow in the Swansea, New South Wales, public library. That's about as far off as John has sailed, and we'd like to thank our collywobbled informant and the antipodean library concerned!

MORE INTERNATIONAL NEWS or A MEMO ABOUT MEM

Speaking of Head of Zeus, they publish John's adventures under our shadow identity M. E. Mayer as the Death In Byzantium series. Their literary bailliwick is Britain and the Commonwealth countries (except Canada, which is covered by Poisoned Pen Press), and we'd like to mention for the benefit of subscribers in those countries that HoZ editions up to and including the current entry, Nine For The Devil, are available in various formats. Point your clicker here for more info http://headofzeus.com/our-books?&field_series_name_value=Death%20in%20Byzantium&sort_by=field_number_in_series_value&sort_order=ASC

But wait, there's more! HoZ has also published a Three Great Historical Mysteries collection, wherein One For Sorrow shares covers with fellow Poisoned Pen Press historical mystery authors Bruce McBain (Roman Games) and Priscilla Royal (Wine of Violence). Details at http://headofzeus.com/books/3+Great+Historical+Mysteries?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781855393

ANOTHER FOREIGN DESPATCH or UNO PER IL DOLORE

Newton Compton http://www.newtoncompton.com issued an Italian edition of One For Sorrow in April, with Two For Joy to follow next February. Siamo estremamente grati! And a tip of the cappello to Newton Comptom for their interest in John and his adventures.

NOMS DE TWITTER or BOTHERING THE GENERAL PUBLIC

Our noms de Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales and so far we've managed not to wreck the joint. Meantime, Mary continues to bother the general public on the 18th of each month over at the multi-author Poisoned Pen Press blog. May's entry was the strange tale of A Lone Daffodil http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/19165/ and in April she challenged readers to sum up Classic novels In Twelve Words http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/classic-novels-in-twelve-words/ The topic of her June post remains shrouded in mystery at this time, being as none has occurred as this newsletter is written, but we'll all find out what it is on the 18th.

ERIC'S BIT or STICK FIGURES TO SCHIELE

One of the great things about the Internet is the amount of artwork on display. I could never afford coffee table books full of reproductions and rarely had the opportunity to visit museums or galleries, but today, thanks to endless web galleries, my computer desktop displays a rotating art show featuring paintings by Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Pierre Bonnard, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and many more. Yes, I admit that I even have some non-classical works such as Weird Tales covers by Margaret Brundage.

My taste in art, like my taste in literature, is rather conservative -- some might say backward looking. I prefer figurative to abstract. I like impressionism. I enjoy the realistic tour de forces of Alma-Tadema and other Victorians. The work of the Pre-Raphaelites fascinates me. I prefer a picture that tells a story, which is probably why I never aspired to be an artist.

Not that I haven't dabbled in art. I was always well supplied with paper and crayons, not to mention pencils, pens, paints, pastels, and charcoal. As a kid I spent almost as much time drawing as playing in the backyard. Often my friend from next door would come over and instead of re-enacting the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral again we'd sit on my grandparents' porch and draw endless cartoon stories -- featuring plenty of guns and bombs -- on the rolls of adding machine paper my grandfather brought home from work. Those stories would keep getting longer and more exciting and violent until the long strips of uncoiling adventures began to flap in the passing breezes.

I had drawn stories long before I learned the alphabet. When I became proficient at writing I added captions to my drawings or word balloons. Instead of learning the multiplication tables I'd sit in the back of the classroom and draw cartoons for my buddies, including plenty of guns and bombs.

There were periods in my youth when I thought I might be an artist but I was never much good at drawing, nor was I inclined to work at it very hard. I have always liked drawing birds because they don't have those dreadfully complicated hands (now let's see, looking at the hand like that, which side should the thumb be on?) or even mouths to get wrong. For a couple of years I produced stick figure "mini-comics'. (More than twenty-five years ago -- long before XKCD -- amateur comics enthusiasts were employing stick figures, which allowed even those who couldn't draw to make comics.)

I came to realize that I was not interested in visual art for itself but only as a means to say things that were better -- and in my case more easily -- expressed in words. I was better served practicing my writing rather than my drawing.

There is a lot written about the "meaning" of books and paintings and other art forms, as if the works themselves are a sort of complicated shell within which the artist has concealed what he wants to express in such a way that it needs to be winkled out by experts. But if the purpose of a novel or a painting was to say something that could be said in a paragraph then the author would have written that paragraph instead of the novel and the painter would have placed himself in front of a keyboard rather than an easel.

Paintings are in large part about what we see -- form, color, light. Just as music is about sound. Writing about a painting in words gives the impression that the painting is about something that could have been expressed in words, which is misleading. Abstract paintings are purely visual, which is probably why I prefer paintings with some lingering attachment to real objects. In a Hopper I can find a bit of the literal element -- the story -- that attracts me, to go along with the visual. I cannot enjoy a visual experience much when it is entirely unhinged from any literal interpretation.

I have read psychological analyses of Hopper's works, often stressing the sense of loneliness and isolation, and while there is likely some truth to this I suspect Hopper was much more concerned with shapes and light, even in those paintings which feature human figures.

Probably I project more literal meaning onto the works of Hopper and other figurative painters than they intended. That's because I am literal minded. I am story oriented. Had I chosen to pursue art I could only have been an illustrator and the role of the illustrator is diminished in these days of cameras and computers anyway. Deciding to write was a good choice. But I think that my artistic upbringing and inclinations sometimes help me visualize the sixth century world Mary and I write about. Or at least I hope so.

AND FINALLY

We complete this issue to heavy rain from a sullen sky dark enough to need the light on at 2.45 pm. But as Longfellow observed, some days must be dark and dreary, our cue to remind subscribers that the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will darken their inboxes on August 15th.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

who invite you to visit our home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/

Monday, April 15, 2013

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # EIGHTY -- 15 APRIL 2013

It gave the ink-stained wretches at Casa Maywrite pause to recollect the first Orphan Scrivener appeared in February 2000. Well, the ubiquitous they do say thirteen is lucky for some, if not our subscribers, for here we are still slogging along.

Looking at that initial newsletter took us back to when we were writing John's second adventure. Eric spoke of our delight when we spied Allen Davis' rendition of our Mongolian detective Dorj in the illustration for The Ladyfish Mystery in the just-published March issue of EQMM, for Allen's Dorj looked just as described had we described him in greater detail than we did. Mary's Please Do Not Send Elephants related the ghastly tale of a near-miss when a light fixture fell off the ceiling and the manner in which it was all downhill from there for the unfortunate cat.

Newer subscribers will find both essays in the newsletter archive on our website, but poor old Dorj has still to make his novel debut -- though we confess to having had a plot idea for him simmering away for years -- and meantime we begin this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener with a renewed plea not to send elephants if you please.

ERIC'S BIT or SOME MITE LIKE IT

After one of our typical home heated-up dinners I noticed that the ingredients included gorgonzola. Neither Mary nor I like to cook. To us, ingredients aren't things you measure, chop, or mix, but reading matter on the back of packages.

"Gorgonzola. That's cheese, isn't it?" I said, immediately activating the useful auxiliary brain called Google. Quicker than I can remember my Social Security number, I learned that gorgonzola is indeed a cheese, with bluish green veining.

"Whoa," I muttered, not quite turning to stone. "Blue cheese. And look at this, the varicose veins are caused by -- you're not going to believe this -- mold spores growing into hyphae."

Mary frowned. "It doesn't really say varicose does it?"

"Gaaa," I replied sensibly. "I ate mold spore hyphae!"

In case I'm not being clear here, I don't care for blue cheese.

"Tasted all right to me. At least it's not the kind of cheese where you have to scrape the cheese mites off before you eat it."

"Cheese mites! Don't say that when I've got coffee in my mouth," I choked, frantically wiping off my keyboard. "You're kidding?"

"Look it up."

Unfortunately I did. According to Wikipedia, mites clinging to the rind of Milbenkäse are consumed along with the cheese, which has a 'distinctive zesty aftertaste'."

"Well, I can believe it has a distinctive taste!"

Mites are also help age Mimolette, the grayish crust being the result of cheese mites intentionally introduced to add flavor by their action on the surface of the cheese.

"I guess we can be sure that frozen pizza is never topped with Milbenkäse or Mimolette," I observed hopefully.

"If it were, the mites would have frozen to death."

"Maybe, but a mouthful of crunchy hard-frozen mite doesn't appeal to me."

I really should have stopped researching, but you know how it is with Google and the Internet and Wikipedia. You start out looking for information on the most innocent subject and a half hour later you are deep in the realms of things man was not meant to know.

Such as casu marzu, otherwise known as "rotten cheese".

Found mainly in Sardinia casu marzu contains live insect larvae. To be exact -- although "insect larvae" seems all you really need to know -- the larvae of the cheese fly. These larvae resemble translucent white worms about one third of an inch long. (So they say, and I'm willing to take their word for it and leave it at that.) A typical cheese contains thousands of these larvae -- known to the non-cheese lovers amongst us as maggots.

Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I've never been into eating maggots. In fact, I was always been pretty much against eating anything while it was still alive. When my family went out to eat, the "very rare" (i.e. bleeding) steaks my mom ordered looked to me as if they were going to moo when you stuck them with a fork so I always demanded my steak be well done and then burned to a crisp, twice, just to be on the safe side.

Once, I admit, I ate a raw oyster at a street fair in Brooklyn. What can I say? I was young and stupid, the sun was hot, I'd had too much sangria. Sometimes when I remember it I can still feel the slimy mollusc sliding down...

Okay, so when it comes to food I've always had delicate sensibilities. I had to avert my gaze every time I passed the Rochester restaurant with the big sign announcing Tripe Pizza. Mary told me she liked tripe but I couldn't force myself to go there, not even when we were first married. I did however try to please her once by preparing another of her favorites, liver and onions. (Yes, we did try to cook once in a while until we gave up.)

As a child liver had revolted me and I had revolted when it was served for dinner. But, I told myself, now I am an adult. Surely I am mature enough to consume a few token bits of a cow's internal organ?

So I forked up a chunk and chewed, and chewed, and chewed. It was like trying to chew a sponge. I couldn't grind it up, nor could I swallow it down. Every time I tried to gulp my throat balked with an instant gag reflex.

Yes, as an omnivore I am a dreadful failure.

But not even tripe or liver can match the aforementioned rotten cheese.

Apparently connoisseurs of the finer things in life enjoy spreading the stuff on bread. But then they have to hold their hands over the bread to eat it because those living maggots can jump as much as six inches! Holy leaping larvae, Batman! You wouldn't want a maggot up your snout when you were trying to get your tasty treat down your gullet, would you?

Now I think I'll go and have some tasty Pepto-Bismol.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

After a fairly quiet period, the ticker is merrily clacking away. Read on!

WHAT WE'RE BEEN UP TO or TEN FOR A BLANK

Our work in progress remains anonymous since as yet it sports no title. We are, however, closing in on completing the first draft and hope, all going well, to see it published next year. It's something of a departure for the series but we best not say too much at this point given the plot keeps wandering off in a different direction than was expected. So perhaps we may instead be permitted to mention that collected information on earlier entries in our Byzantine series may be viewed on two handy locations: at the Poisoned Pen Press website http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/?s=Eric+Mayer&cat=104&x=0&y=0 and over at Head of Zeus http://headofzeus.com/our-books?field_series_name_value=Death+in+Byzantium&sort_by=field_number_in_series_value&sort_order=ASC

ANTHOLOGIES, PRO OR CON? or HOW A SERIES WAS SPAWNED

Our protagonist John made his debut in an extremely short short story in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley. Thus when we read SPAWNews, an online monthly newsletter issued by the Small Publishers, Artists and Writers Network, was seeking comments on the pros and cons of contributing to anthologies, it was a natural topic to tackle. The April issue of SPAWNews appears at http://www.spawn.org/blog/?p=2478 and includes not only Mary's contribution but also thoughts from Miles Archer, Teel James Glenn, and Gail Farrelly.

A NEW COLLECTION or GAMES, WINE, AND SORROW

Subscribers may be interested to hear about a themed mini-anthology presenting novels by three Poisoned Pen Press authors has now appeared from Head of Zeus. Three Great Historical Mysteries offers Bruce McBain's Roman Games, Priscilla Royal's Wine of Violence, and our shadow identity M. E. Mayer's One For Sorrow, revised just last year. Details here http://headofzeus.com/books/3%20Great%20Historical%20Mysteries?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book

THE GREAT BLOG-O-RAMA CONTINUES or AN OCCASIONAL BIT OF SPICE

While Eric runs his own blog http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ Mary only shows up on the Poisoned Pen Press multi-author blog on the 18th of each month. Most recently her March mutterings dealt with the fact Justinian Says You Can't Do That, while in a couple of days she will be presenting Classic Novels In Twelve Words. In addition, there's our joint M. E. Mayer blog lurking about at http://memayer.blogspot.com/ In its current incarnation it's a confection largely devoted to reviews of mystery novels published in the Golden Age of Detection or earlier, with an occasional bit of spice in the form of blogs. But who knows what it may feature any day now!

MARY'S BIT or ALL CREATURES GREAT AND GHASTLY

Having grown up in large cities, I've shared space with mice -- one fell down the bedroom chimney but got away though sooty -- and a colony of back yard ants that could not be eradicated in a location once visited by a rat, though I did not hear about the latter at the time. But until I came to live in a rural area I had not made the acquaintance of wells, septic tanks, and certain of the wilder types of wild life.

As my young niece once observed on seeing squirrels "There's an awful lot of nature here." And indeed there is. We've been boggled with sightings of groundhogs, seen a family of deer led by a majestic buck passing by at twilight as well as stragglers cropping the back lawn, and noticed a large flock of wild turkeys tearing up the same stretch of grass, moss, and large stones. The most striking creature in the great category was a fully grown back bear which made its stately progress across the front lawn and round past the front door. It was an awe-inspiring sight.

But all these creatures had the common courtesy to remain outdoors.

Oh, the odd wasp, moth, or fly pops in now and then at Casa Maywrite as they do for everyone and happily the one death's head moth who came a-calling only peeked at us through the kitchen window. But on the other hand, we've had occasional visitations -- fortunately few -- from several smaller but more ghastly creatures, for example bright green flying insects emitting a distinct grassy smell. The jury is out on whether these are western conifer seed bugs or not. Their colour seems wrong, but then again creatures evolve in strange ways and who knows what goes on in Mother Nature's laboratories in the surrounding woodland?

We did manage to identify the handful of recent drop-ins as wood cockroaches. Looking them up, we learned they dine on decayed organic material and lay eggs in the bark of dead trees. Our devout wish is they would stay outdoors. There's plenty of trees out there, but these outriders seemed to favour our bathroom, possibly because its window is only a stone's throw from the edge of the woods and they are drawn to lights.

We've also weathered a couple of invasions of ants both great and small, not to mention visits from one or two earwigs and a lone centipede, while the house shelters at least one wolf spider. It lives in the office and it may be it takes performance-enhancing drugs or has brought in a couple of buddy bugs working on overtime rates because I have never lived in a house where so many webs appear so often. Other than the odd fly forming a spider meal on wings we have no idea what the heck the wolfies could be living on, unless it's each other. And there have been one or two larger egg-shaped spiders of an unknown variety. No mercy for them: they're sucked up by the hoover on sight.

But the most ghastly creature who's popped in was the very large spider of the sort that lives in or near the garden shed. While we would like to know what they are since they may be the adult form of the hoover spiders, we did not care to get close enough to examine it. But would subscribers really want to do that when I state (Little Miss Muffet and other arachnophobes should perhaps skip the rest of this paragraph or else prepare to scream) that without exaggeration the nasty thing, if including the span of its legs, was as wide as the palm of the hand that grabbed a running shoe and smashed it toot sweet? Thank heavens it was spotted before it could hide and then creep upstairs to visit us at night....

On the other hand, all is not lost. We can guarantee there are no cheese mites in the fridge, and for the nervous reader we are happy to confirm that those ticking sounds at night are caused by the heating pipes cooling down, rather than death watch beetles, traditional foretellers of death and disasters.

AND FINALLY

Speaking of disasters reminds us of their sibling calamities, which Ambrose Bierce reckoned were of two kinds: misfortune for us and good fortune for others. Further, he defined misfortune as the kind of fortune that never misses, thus agreeing with Samuel Johnson, who, possibly after examining his cheese too closely, declared misfortune should be expected. So in the spirit of fair play we'll close by reminding subscribers the next Orphan Scrivener will crawl into their inboxes on 15th June.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/

Friday, February 15, 2013

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # SEVENTY-NINE -- 15 FEBRUARY 2013

Poetess Eliza Cook bid us sing a welcome to drifting snow, but on the whole many of us on the east coast would much rather drink something piping hot and to heck with William Cobbett's demand we free ourselves from our slavery to coffee and similar slopkettles. What a marvelous word is slopkettles, quite on the same level with gandydancer and lollygag in the opinion of one of the scribblers residing in Casa Maywrite.

And speaking of interesting words, while tradition has it those born in February, provided they wear pearls, will have peace of mind and level passions we cannot promise the same to subscribers who insist on continuing to read this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener...

MARY'S BIT or MASKING A MYSTERY

Last month an American hamburger chain kicked off a five-week promotion in the UK offering books with its boxed meals for children. A brilliant idea to be sure, although it seems currently there are no plans to do the same over here.

Reading the announcement today brings to mind a recent conversation at Casa Maywrite about breakfast cereal giveaways. At one point Eric recalled his delight when, having saved up enough box tops to send for a 3D Mighty Mouse comic and the special glasses needed to read it, they finally arrived in the post.

Other cereal freebies he remembers with affection include small dinosaurs, figures of The Lady and The Tramp, and miniature plastic submarines. When loaded with baking powder and launched, the latter would, by some mysterious process of reaction between water and its cargo, dive up and down under its own, er, steam. There were also, I believe, frogmen figures which worked on the same principle, but neither of us have ever seen them.

We never had anything half as interesting as baking powder powered subs in science lessons at grammar school, though I have to say the most striking demonstration we had was when our teacher showed us the effects of gravity by removing air from a tin container akin to a small, flat jerry can, which suddenly went clang-thwang and collapsed in on itself.

But you cannot repeat that startling trick without a jerry can and they never showed up in cereal boxes.

The ever helpful Mr Google informs me that in the early 1900s an oatmeal company offered coupons swappable for deeds to tiny lots of land in Milford, CT. Naturally these lots were individually useless for building but what fun for children to own! Then in the mid 1950s the same company ran a similar promotion, this time deeds to Klondike land in connection with the TV show Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

It has no connection with cereal or land, but my favourite freeby -- apart from the trinkets, daft hats, and groanworthy jokes in Christmas crackers -- was the plastic daffodil given away with a British detergent. I only managed to get hold of one such artificial bloom and I regret to say there exists in the old country a short bit of film of me dancing around a back garden, plastic daffodil in hand.

In mitigation I can only plead my extreme youth.

Years before my floral dance there was the vexed matter of the masks. At this particular time, cereal boxes appeared with life-sized masks printed on their backs and such was my interest in collecting a set that when the first box came home I took it apart and gleefully cut out the mask.

The problem was, as so many malefactors have discovered before and since, how then to dispose of the evidence, which in this case was a very large pile of cereal?

Not to mention there were only two possible suspects in the case: myself and my sister.

So I piled the cereal into a couple of bowls, placed them on a shelf near the top of the cupboard next to the kitchen fireplace, and went and hid in my attic bedroom, for too late I had realised my mother would have plenty to say about my providing free lunch to passing mice.

Perhaps it's not surprising to learn my planned collection consisted of only one item.

At least I didn't try to mask my guilt by blaming my sister.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

After a quiet period the ticker has suddenly leapt into action, tapping out a rush of revelations, and here they are...

FROM ITALY TO ENGLAND or INTERNATIONAL WANDERINGS

A few years back a British friend visited Ravenna, home of the beautiful mosaics featured on our stunning Poisoned Pen Press covers. While there he made a point of reading a paragraph or two from one of John's adventures. However, next time he's in Italy he'll be able to peruse one of the first three novels in the native language, given we've just learnt the trio will be published in Italian in both print and ebook form. Further details as they arrive!

Meantime, John's adventures are now appearing from British publisher Head of Zeus, with One For Sorrow http://headofzeus.com/books/One+for+Sorrow?field_book_type_value_1=Hardback hardback and ebook editions issued in December and the paperback scheduled to be published on 1st April (no comments from the back row, if you please). Ebooks of the other eight novels also appeared on 1st December, and paperback and hard cover editions of the octet will leap forth in due course.

FIRECRACKERS AND FISH or A CELEBRATION IN ULAAN BAATAR

We've just entered the Year of the Snake, with the Chinese New Year celebrated on February 10th, complete with dragon dances and firecrackers. To mark the occasion, the Mystery Readers Journal website listed mysteries set during the Chinese New Year or in China, and we were happy to see included The Lady Fish Mystery, an Inspector Dorj story set in Ulaan Baatar and published in EQMM's September/October 1996 issue. Our thanks to Janet Rudolph, whose list can be seen by pointing your clicker to: http://www.mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-new-year-crime- fiction.html

NOT ALL GRANDMOTHERS HAVE WHITE HAIR or THOUGHTS ON MINOR CHARACTERS

Mary contributed a few thoughts to Not All Grandmothers Have White Hair: Making Minor Characters Fresh, Chris Eboch's article in the recently published The Writers Guide To 2013 http://www.writersbookstore.com/Writers_Guide.htm The Guide features 40 feature articles on the craft, business, and markets for writers. Chris, http://www.chriseboch.com/ who's published many books for children {including The Eyes of Pharaoh, a mystery set in ancient Egypt) and writes romantic southwestern thrillers as Kris Bock, http://www.krisbock.com/, also quotes authors Joanna Campbell, Sandra Levy Ceren, Jaden Terrell, and Kathleen Shoop in her article.

FLYING BYZANTINES or THE LATEST BLOG-O-RAMA

Murder on an express and several suspects! Thus begins not Agatha Christie's classic novel but rather The Rome Express by Arthur Griffiths, recently reviewed on the blog of our British alter ego M. E. Mayer http://memayer.blogspot.com/ Reviews, mainly of Golden Age works, scattered among the essays over there include thoughts on such works as John Buchan's ripping yarn Greenmantle, Anna Katharine Green's suspenseful The Circular Study, John Kendrick Bangs' fun-poking R. Homes & Co., and -- speaking of snakes and gems as we have been -- Fergus Hume's tale of The Opal Serpent.

Meantime, Mary spoke of a time When Byzantines Flew on the Poisoned Pen Press multi-author blog on January 18th. Her contribution reveals how we reasoned John could briefly take to the skies in Four For A Boy http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/when-byzantines-flew/ At the time of writing she has no notion of the topic of her next blog on February 18th, so to find out interested parties may care to visit the PPP blog page http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/category/news-and-blog/ on that date. In the meantime, why not slip over there anyhow and give some of our PPP stablemates' recent entries a whirl?

ERIC'S BIT or THE SCENT OF ... WHAT?

The olfactory sense is not well served by language. Smells are not easily described beyond linking them to their customary sources. The smell of a rose is easily distinguishable from that of a wet dog, but how does one delineate the particular characteristics of each without reference to the rose or the dog?

And yet odors are probably more important in our lives than we realize, influencing us at non-verbal, subconscious levels. They seem to form strong associations in our minds. A few days ago unseasonable temperatures caused a brief thaw and as soon as I went outside to the car I thought, "It smells like spring."

Does anything recall autumn and summer like the smells of burning leaves or newly mowed grass? The scent of pine boughs indoors brings back memories of childhood Christmases when our trees scraped the ceiling, pine branches edged the mantle, and pine-cone studded wreaths decorated every door.

So I wasn't surprised recently when Mary used a new all-purpose cleaner on the kitchen sink to find myself borne into the past by the oddly familiar smell, a memory from a young man's life, the scent of...what?

Not nostalgia for some long-lost spring cleaning certainly. Every time the cleanser came out the odor teased my memory. I knew it. Remembered it well. However, I couldn't quite put my finger -- or perhaps I should say my olfactory lobes -- on it.

It was maddening.

"The bottle says it's scented with lavender," Mary told me.

Lavender? Yes. Of course! The mystery fragrance did suggest an exotic perfume, didn't it? Now I realized there was something bittersweet about the hidden memory. Had my mind suppressed an event? Had someone in my past worn lavender? I recalled feelings of both longing and ultimate disappointment. Is it possible to hide an important relationship from oneself? Perhaps, if the shock of its ending is too much to bear?

Then, as recollection often does, it all came back in an instant, a light going on in a dark room, illuminating the blood, the severed head, the corpses. The trio of bestial, murderous hamsters I'd briefly owned. Three went into the aquarium but only one came out alive. What I remembered was the smell of the hamster bedding. The smell of the rodent section of every pet store and department in which I had stood, nose pressed to glass, longing for hamsters of my own. I looked it up on the Internet. Indeed, at least one leading brand of rodent bedding is lavender scented.

We're going to have to change our all-purpose cleaner.

AND FINALLY

Speaking of changes, US timepieces spring forward an hour on 10th March, bringing subscribers that much closer to the next issue of Orphan Scrivener, slated to pop into subscribers' in-boxes on 15th April.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

Sunday, December 15, 2013

ERIC'S BIT or HEADLESS IN BROOKLYN

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

NEWS OF TENFER or A CORKER OF A COVER

AHOY UK, EUROPEAN, & COMMONWEALTH READERS or JOHN IN A BOX

PARTNERS IN CRIME OR OTHER MYSTERIES, OTHER ERAS

WORKING CLOCK ROUND or YOU CAN'T BEAT IT WITH A BIG STICK

INVENTING A RELIGION or NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

AND SPEAKING OF TWOFER or THE LATEST PPP BLOGS

AND FINALLY

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

AN ANNOUNCEMENT or TENA KOE, TENFER

THREE FROM SEVEN or EVERY BIT(E) HELPS

HANDY LISTINGS or HERE THERE BE NOVELS

AND FINALLY

Thursday, August 15, 2013

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

NO NEED TO BE ON TEN-TERHOOKS or TENFER'S ON THE WAY

AND WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT or ALL IN ON PLACE

AND FINALLY

Saturday, June 15, 2013

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

TENFER TURNED IN or GOING

ANTIPODEAN AMAZEMENT or HOZ IN OZ

MORE INTERNATIONAL NEWS or A MEMO ABOUT MEM

ANOTHER FOREIGN DESPATCH or UNO PER IL DOLORE

NOMS DE TWITTER or BOTHERING THE GENERAL PUBLIC

AND FINALLY

Monday, April 15, 2013

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

WHAT WE'RE BEEN UP TO or TEN FOR A BLANK

ANTHOLOGIES, PRO OR CON? or HOW A SERIES WAS SPAWNED

A NEW COLLECTION or GAMES, WINE, AND SORROW

THE GREAT BLOG-O-RAMA CONTINUES or AN OCCASIONAL BIT OF SPICE

AND FINALLY

Friday, February 15, 2013

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

FROM ITALY TO ENGLAND or INTERNATIONAL WANDERINGS

FIRECRACKERS AND FISH or A CELEBRATION IN ULAAN BAATAR

NOT ALL GRANDMOTHERS HAVE WHITE HAIR or THOUGHTS ON MINOR CHARACTERS

FLYING BYZANTINES or THE LATEST BLOG-O-RAMA

AND FINALLY