The Orphan Scrivener: 2017

Friday, December 15, 2017

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT -- 15 DECEMBER 2017

This issue of Orphan Scrivener is written to an accompaniment of the constant howl of high wind gusting around Maywrite Towers, bringing with it single digit wind chills and snow rather than playing celestial symphonies such as Longfellow heard at a time of similar meteorological conditions. No, hereabouts his downbent branches representing instrument keys are booming out a dirge for warmer days. And on the theme of dirges, subscribers may consider such aeolian lamentations appropriate as they continue reading....

ERIC'S BIT OR SANTA CLAUS AND MR HYDE

Christmas has always been a mixed bag for me. Or perhaps I should say a mixed stocking, remembering the big red ones I hung on the fireplace as a child. Come the great morning and they'd be filled with treats. There were delightful candy canes and chocolate pieces of eight covered in gold foil. But valuable space in the toe would inevitably be filled with a sour, seedy tangerine.

Is it any wonder Christmas -- as usually practiced -- is such a Jekyll and Hyde when it demands we go on an annual spending spree to celebrate the birth of a man who preached poverty?

I loved my advent calendar with the little doors you opened to read about the story of the birth of Christ in twenty-four gradually revealed snippets. What suspense! To be honest, the calendar mostly served as a countdown, not to the Nativity, but rather the arrival of Santa Claus.

Nothing about Christmas is quite right. All the colored lights are gorgeous and cheering but the holiday colors red and green just don't go together. They grate on me. The music can be as beautiful as Silent Night and as maddeningly horrible as Little Drummer Boy. It's exciting to tear gift wrap off presents, but the wrapping and the disposal of the paper isn't so thrilling.

Then there were those weeks of delicious (well, okay -- greedy) anticipation (maybe too many...) and the blissful orgy of piling up new toys under the tree. Still, I never did get that amazing Cape Canaveral launch center with the gantries, rockets, control tower, technicians, astronauts, and utility vehicles. Everything moved and there were lights that probably flashed and maybe bells, and buzzers, and I'll bet the rockets took off too and had parachutes for re-entry. Somehow. I remember that toy more vividly than most of the gifts I actually received.

Come to think of it I never got a handcar for my model railroad either!

That HO railroad setup was a holiday highlight. We'd hike the woods finding moss and appropriate ferns to cover the tunnel in realistic greenery. Great fun. Except my feet froze from stomping around in the snow.

Christmas trees posed a similar problem. There's nothing merrier than a festive pine all tarted up in blinking lights and tinsel. However, I've always favored natural trees and, in my experience, there's no place on earth colder than a Christmas tree lot in early December. Whenever I venture out to buy a tree you can bet that the temperature will be below that at the North Pole. A brisk wind will be whipping the snow off the rock-hard ground into my face, freezing the tears running down my cheeks as I dig blue spruce and scotch pine out of the drifts with numb hands.

Don't remind me about trying to vacuum up the needles that fall to the floor either. I can never find them all. By July I'm still stepping on them. At least the dead tree is gone by then. Although if you miss the pickup date in many places you've got a problem. I've had to saw up the tree with a hacksaw and burn it in the fireplace. That isn't very festive. Plus, next year I needed to ask Santa for a new hacksaw.

Speaking of Santa, he's the worst problem of all. At some point [CAUTION. SPOILERS AHEAD] we all have to endure the disappointment of discovering he doesn't exist. Even if he did eat the cookies and drink the milk I set out for him. In my case, I also went from the magical fantasy of free toys delivered by a reindeer-drawn sleigh to the miserable reality of trying to play Santa, trudging around crowded malls with maxed-out credit cards.

With Christmas you never know what's going to happen. One year I got a bicycle from my parents. Another year I got a draft notice from Uncle Sam.

Perhaps the biggest Christmas inconsistency is how it can make you appreciate those you share it with while at the same time missing those who are gone.

For me what counts, in the end, is that Mary and I will be celebrating our 25th Christmas together this year. And that at least has no downside.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

It's not drawing our bow at much of a venture to guess many readers have pets and so our sole bit o' BSP this time around deals with that very topic in a December 13th interview conducted by Heather Weidner and published on the Pens, Paws, and Claws blog. Its tag line is Writers And The Animals They Love and so Heather's questions included the most unusual working animals we've created (hint: see Three For A Letter), a favourite book featuring an animal as a central character, how we have used animals in our writing, and more -- including the revelation one of us may be the only mystery writer whose first childhood pet was a budgie with a Geordie accent. Point your clicker to

http://penspawsandclaws.com/meet-mary-reed

MARY'S BIT or STILL A FAVOURITE MANY YEARS LATER

When strings of street lights sprang up in yellowish necklaces dotting along the busy roads and another sooty night began to fall upon Newcastle-on-Tyne, my sister and I would go up to our attic bedroom and draw curtains patterned with castles, ships, and jesters with curly-toed shoes to shut out a darkening urban landscape of slate-roofed dwellings marching down in regular lines to the river. Ungraced by gardens or trees or any growing thing except whatever took root in the cemetery at the top of our street or on bomb-sites left uncleared for years after the war, those long grey terraces of houses stretched away out of sight in all directions, sheltering the inhabitants of the northern English industrial city known proverbially for its coal, not to mention shipyards and factories that in those days rang with the noise of machinery around the clock.

As bed-time approached we'd read for a while before the light was put out -- and for a lot longer afterwards by torchlight under the covers. Books aplenty were available to us between the city's free libraries and Christmas or birthday gifts, for we always received a book to mark each occasion. So it was that at about l2 or l3 I discovered Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and later on her other novels about the March sisters' adult lives.

One thing about Little Women was rather puzzling. Like us, they lived in financially straitened circumstances and yet had a servant, Hannah, who had been with them for years. As a daughter of the working class, this seemed very strange to me, the more so as my mother had been a parlour maid and the notion of us having a servant was so alien as to be unthinkable, despite the fact that I was always being told that I had too much imagination. One of my favourite scenes is Beth's reaction to the beautiful piano given to her by elderly Mr Laurence, for her expression upon seeing it must surely have been the same as that displayed by my musically gifted sister when our parents managed to get hold of a second-hand upright piano for her. This piano subsequently lived in our scullery next to the copper where the original tenants boiled up their washing, our street and those surrounding it having been built for industrial and pit workers when Queen Victoria still ruled. Graced with high ceilings, picture rails, and ornate iron fireplaces, they are now sold for fabulous sums as artisans' dwellings. When we lived there, there was still a working gas light in our bedroom but the entire place was also extremely damp and the only plumbing was a cold tap in the scullery, the necessary offices being in the back yard -- about as far as you can get from the brown stone March house which, although old and a little shabby, had a garden with roses and vines and stood on a quiet street in the suburbs.

Yet as thousands of readers from numerous countries living in all sorts of housing have discovered, there is much emotional common ground with this delightful tale of a family's ups and downs and its tears and triumphs. I loved Little Women the first time I read it and every year or so I re-read it. The four March sisters -- gentle and ailing Beth, artistic but vain Amy, quiet, dependable Meg, and the tomboy bookworm Jo -- have become old friends. We see them shepherded by Marmee while their father, not strong enough to soldier and too old to be drafted, serves as a chaplain in the Civil War. Then there's their dashing next door neighbour Laurie, his grandfather Mr Laurence, Laurie's tutor John Brooke, the girls' rich but demanding Aunt March with her huge library and disrespectful parrot, plus a bevy of supporting characters, most of them types familiar to us all. Time has made Little Women as familiar and comfortable as a favourite pair of slippers, while that strong sense of the March family's love and emotional support for each other remains as striking as the first time I opened the book and began reading.

It is Jo, generous and good hearted although hasty in her speech until she learns patience, who has always been my favourite of the four sisters. She is the only character with whom I have ever identified and as a youngster I firmly declared that like her I was going to be a writer and furthermore intended to live in a garret. In fact, I said it so many times that it became family legend, one of those humourous stories trotted out whenever we'd gather for celebrations, like the saga of when my brother-in-law lost me at a tender age in the London Tube system.

Now, years later, I live far away from Newcastle-on-Tyne. But I still have my battered old copy of Little Women and I did finally achieve that long-held ambition -- only I scribbled in a basement rather than a garret!

AND FINALLY

Samuel Johnson once remarked that the business of life is to go forward. Doubtless many of us won't be at all sorry to slam the gate on the difficult twelvemonth that has been 2017 with the fervent hope that next year will be better. Only fly in the ointment: the next edition of Orphan Scrivener will buzz into subscribers' inboxes on February 15th.

See you then!râ€¦ Mary R and Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, to be found 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, a bibliography, 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! Our joint blog is at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales Drop in some time!

Sunday, October 15, 2017

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN -- 15 OCTOBER 2017

This issue of Orphan Scrivener is written on a day of dead calm, featuring glowering grey sky against which now advancing fall colour flares. Colder nights this past week have brought out the foliage-painting elves to wield brushes loaded with yellows of various tints in lemon, gold, canary, and even that shade of a person's hair known as flavicomous. Red, scarlet, and ruby will follow if leaves hang on long enough, so while subscribers wait to see the full display they may care to continue reading this latest newsletter....

MARY'S BIT or LIMBURGER OR LAPPI?

It was just a couple of months ago when we stood on the quay waving our hankies and tossing confetti as the good ship Ruined Stone sounded its siren and sailed off to meet its fate.

Once a new book disappears from view over the horizon, we are invariably anxious about its journey -- until we see the first review. However, like the proverbial cheese, once out in the world every book must stand alone. And the first to the cheese board are reviewers. Will they judge our latest literary offering to be akin to lappi or to limburger?

But every time, after that first review appears, whether it's complimentary or critical, we are freed from worry and return to lurching along on our usual erratic course. Others have mentioned this same anxiety until the first review appears. Why it should be so we have no notion, but so it is.

Yet critical reviews are not always necessarily as difficult to cope with as might be thought. They are sometimes useful to the writer if they include a few words dealing with why the reviewer did not care for the work in question. It may sound contradictory at first blush, but those type of comments form a yardstick both for readers who don't share the reviewer's taste in mysteries as well as those who do. The first may well think twice about buying the book in question, not caring for it, and returning it to the seller (is there any other profession where it is possible to sample the goods and then return them for a refund or store credit?) whereas the second will hopefully rely on agreeing with the reviewer's preferences yet again and order it. Sadly, it is been our observation that such constructive criticism, while gold to be mined, tends to be uncommonly found just as in nature.

Perhaps we just don't write the right kind of books?

Of course writers must be able to handle rejection although it may never be an easy task, not least because they will have laboured for months -- or in many cases even longer -- to produce the work under discussion. Going by anecdotal evidence it's usually the memory of a scathing review that lingers much longer than one praising a novel to the skies. Indeed, if any of our subscribers talks to a writer at a conference or book signing, they shouldn't be surprised if they are able to remember and ruefully relate at least one such review.

A well-known anecdote concerning this topic, although concerning a different type of artistic endeavour, involves Morecambe and Wise, who ultimately became what many consider the most popular English comedy double act of any era. Early in their television career they were panned by a writer for The People newspaper in a review defining a TV set as "the box in which they buried Morecambe and Wise." Morecambe (the one with the glasses) is said to have carried that review around with him for the rest of his life.

Like everyone else who's put kalamos to parchment, we've had less than stellar reviews on more than one occasion. So long as the content sticks to the writing that's fair enough. But when a review turns into a personal attack it's a different pan of potatoes and demonstrates a clear attempt to accomplish what H. L. Mencken once described as prejudice made plausible.

Let me mention -- no, I insist! -- an instance of which we are personally aware. Several years ago, a reviewer unknown to us spent most of what he or she had written about one of John's adventures to attack another author, who subsequently revealed to us this was not the first time it had happened. Our collective deduction was whoever was responsible obviously had an axe to grind, although what it could be and why we should have the dubious honour of being chosen as its latest handle none of us ever found out.

Still, our favourite critical review was a classic one-liner emailed directly to us. It stated in total "And for what it's worth, you're writing sucks". As an insult it struck me as weak tea given it's one peculiar to this country, so since it does not form part of my cultural background it was nothing about which I could get in a bate, while my worthy co-writer found it comical on the grounds if you are going to insult someone, it's always a good plan to check your spelling first. We can only suppose our correspondent was cheesed off.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Speaking of reviews, a few more for Ruined Stones appeared during this last month or two.

A mystery with dark and dangerous undercurrents that will keep you turning the pages. A "Must Read" for any serious fan of historical mysteries. Doward Wilson, Kings River Life News

...a sharp picture of working class life and of criminals flourishing amidst a lack of police...One to enjoy without haste. Ward Saylor, Crime Thru Time

[The authors] mention the selection of Newcastle as a conscious choice as a balance to the London-centric tendency for Blitz stories. The cold and fog makes a suitable adjunct to the chill coming off the old ruins to help sustain the atmosphere of a modern ghost story. The lack of heat or other comforts in a poor area of the city and the need to spend nights underground in cold and damp shelters also does much to create an atmosphere. Chris Roberts, Crime Review

The tone and sense of time and place are near perfect. The town suffers from despair and loss, of plodding ahead because the past is ruined...With this so-cool it chills suspense novel, they may have another success on their hands. Blogger Martin Hill Ortiz

ERIC'S BIT or A WALK TO THE GRAVEYARD

At this time of year, when there aren't many nights between now and Halloween, it's natural our thoughts turn more often to graveyards and those at rest there.

Years ago I considered it a treat to walk with my grandmother to the cemetery a block from where our family lived. When you're six, the end of the street is a long way and the cemetery on the far side of a road you aren't allowed cross by yourself seems even further.

The small cemetery might have been another world, enclosed by a painted, wrought iron fence with a gate that creaked as we entered. Inside was quiet. The sounds of passing traffic did not penetrate the shadows under the old, overgrown yew trees. There we heard only bird calls and the buzzing of the honeybees in the luxuriant clover which half concealed flat grave markers. I'd be thrilled and horrified to find I had set my sneaker, unknowingly, on a slab of polished granite.

At the oldest end of the place, lichened stones leaned against the fence and sat in neat piles, inscriptions too eroded to identify. I was awed by their age. What inconceivable vastness of time would it take to wear away the names and memories of the living?

The family plot was at the edge of the newer end in the sunlight, just beyond the yews. In early summer there were sweet, wild strawberries to be found in the grass.

The night after I watched my grandfather's coffin lowered from view I lay in bed and thought about him out there in the dark, in the cold, alone, so close I could have heard him shout for me.

Then it was different when my grandmother and I walked to the cemetery. Then I was old enough to read the dates on the gravestones. I helped my grandmother tend the geraniums by the grave. When she fussed with the flower bed I saw her straightening my grandfather's tie.

A few years later I watched an aunt buried and in twenty years I returned again -- this time not from the end of the street but from another state -- to see my grandmother join them.

I noticed that the cemetery had expanded but the rusting fence hadn't been extended to replace the vanished trees which had edged the yards beyond. There was no longer any demarcation between house and cemetery lawns. The graves simply petered out a few feet from a children's swing set.

There is room in the family plot still. My instructions, though, are firm. I will be cremated and my ashes scattered far away, perhaps over water, some place no one can walk to.

AND FINALLY

We spoke of leaves at the beginning of this issue and now, having reaching its end, the time has come to take our leave from subscribers until the next Orphan Scrivener, which will appear in in-boxes on 15th December.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND SIX -- 15 AUGUST 2017

Here we are in mid August and the soundtrack of summer is in full cry. Crickets chirp loudly in an invitation to the ladies to dance, and whatever insect it is that sounds like a demented sewing machine operator treadles the day away. If Orphan Scrivener were fitted with a soundtrack, it would probably be screeching violins. Fortunately it is mute, so we hope you'll leap in and see what's going on...

ERIC'S BIT or LIGHTS IN THE DARKNESS

When I was thirty and writing about my so very recent childhood, I remarked on how summers between school years seemed to stretch on forever as if that was something that anyone who'd ever gone to school or been a child needed to be told. Recently I've come to realize there is a different kind of truth to the old cliche. In fact, those summers have lasted forever for me.

The detail and persistence of my memories of living at a lake have permanently shaped the mythology of my life and my interpretation of everything that has happened to me since. This is true of all my recollected past, but those summers, early and filled with fresh, vivid experiences, have had an especially strong effect.

Just the other evening as I started up the stairs to the office I paused to glance out the back window into a gray twilight, already thickening into night under the bushes and ferns at the border of the woods. At the edge of my vision a flash of green appeared high in the air, vanished, then reappeared closer to the center of the yard for an instant. My mind wanted to draw a dim line of imagined luminescence, a stop-action animation, joining where the flash had been to where it was.

On an another July evening, over fifty years ago, around the edges of a big lawn at a lake, in the dark massed brush between the cottage and the creek, in the shadowy bergamot, beneath the black, drooping boughs of hemlocks, a thousand fireflies flashed in and out of existence. Our brains do not like randomness, particularly when it is too big to grasp so almost immediately, practically before the last pale line of sunset had faded from above the rolling mountains, the insects appeared to have synchronized, like a neon sign, shattered into innumerable tiny pieces yet still blinking in unison. No longer tiny, individual fliers, but a huge, mysterious pattern beating against the darkness.

After that, how could I ever be satisfied with a single firefly or even a few? Right then there was fixed in my mind the ideal summer night, against which all summer nights would be judged.

Marilyn Meredith's blog 3rd & 4th July. Concerns the layout of Newcastle maisonettes aka Tyneside flats. The Reed family live in maisonettes when Mary was growing up, and Grace Baxter's lodgings mirror the one in which her older sister began married life.

https://marilynmeredith.blogspot.com/2017/07/ruined-stones-by-eric-reed.html

Patti Nunn's Breakthrough Productions 10th July. Viewing the Ravenna mosaics of Justinian's court resulted in an admittedly wild idea: paper dolls as a promotional tool for authors. Instruction links included!

https://bookbrowsing.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/character-paper-dolls-for-promotional-use-by-mary-reed/

Lelia Taylor's book blog 18th July. We met the Bagpiper On The Beach and the tale of how this led to his playing the melody of the British national anthem. Illustrated with a photo of the elusive Reed and Mayer.

https://cncbooksblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/18/the-bagpiper-on-the-beach/

Bonnie Stevens' blog 25th July. Bonnie's First Two Pages feature deals with the challenges of those brutally difficult -- and vitally important -- pages. Our contribution analyses the first two of Ruined Stones, which as it happens form a complete chapter.

http://www.bkstevensmysteries.com/2017/07/the-first-two-pages-of-ruined-stones/

Chris Eboch's blog 26th July. Mary's Cinematic Disappointments. If only she could have told her younger self one day she would talk to Mr Mohair Sweater Who Lived Up The Street again and not skip a single heartbeat!

http://swarmchairtraveler.blogspot.com/2017/07/reed.html

Lois Winston's Killer Crafts blog 11th August. An interview in which is revealed among other things the quirkiest quirk one of our characters has displayed, the three must-haves when stranded on a desert isle, and the worst jobs we've ever had. http://anastasiapollack.blogspot.com/2017/08/book-club-friday-guest-author-eric-reed.html

MARY'S BIT or THE GRIM REAPER'S LAWNMOWER

We all know how the Grim Reaper is depicted, right? As a skeleton wearing a hooded cloak and carrying a scythe he uses to harvest a life when the time comes, for as is said all flesh is grass. Compared with the shears with which Atropos cuts the thread of life, scythes have a much larger cutting edge, a fact Ray Bradbury used to telling effect in his short story aptly entitled The Scythe. *

Perhaps it's as well Grimmy appeared in the collective unconsciousness wielding one of these extremely sharp agricultural implements before lawnmowers were invented, which Mr Google tells us was by Edwin Budding in Gloucestershire in 1830.

Because sometimes a lawn mower can be difficult to start and Grimmy is a very busy skeleton.

This train of thought came about when reflecting we've had problems getting the mower going the last couple of times it was hauled out. We eventually deduced the difficulty (you know my methods, Watson) was due to either meteorological conditions, mower machinery problems, or, if I may lapse into dialect for a second, manky petrol. Our reasoning was the petrol was purchased just a short while ago so should be usable and the mower must be in order given it attempted to start up a couple of times but could not continue. So the culprit must be meteorological conditions, and why not? They were much as the same as the last time we had attempted to start the mower, given damp air has lingered this past couple of weeks after several frog stranglers arrived between outbreaks of gully washers.

The disappointing thing is our mower was purchased only a couple of years ago, whereas we never had this sort of bother with its two predecessors, one of which was third hand and the other second hand. They built them tough in those days. Our third hander was struck down by a galloping case of rust making it dangerous to operate (a condition which also did in two of our buggies) and the second hander died when its innards failed for reasons unknown.

In any event, yesterday the mower was cutting capers the same way as it did last time. First it would not start at all and so, repeating what worked to get it going when it previously refused to (co)operate, we gave its spark plug a goodly blast of WD-40 and then moved the mower into a patch of direct sunlight to help dry it out. However, this treatment had to be repeated a couple of times even though the mower struggled valiantly to start. Then the starter string got itself messed up and hard to pull to get things moving. After that was untangled, more WD-40 and another pull or three to start the mower revealed, if it came to life at all and the starter string was let out slowly, the engine would continue working.

So our hanky sized lawns are now cut, and since the grass was rather long the occasional lines of heaped grass suggest miniature hay fields.

Which is pretty much where we came in.

* The Scythe was originally published in Weird Tales and has been reproduced at http://www.unz.org/Pub/WeirdTales-1943jul-00046?View=PDF

AND FINALLY

In the last newsletter we spoke of our engagements in the red-headed woodpecker war. We're now able to give an update but alas, it resembles the curate's egg, which had both good and bad parts. The good: our avian friend's visits ended not long after we attached iridescent streamers to the gutter. The bad: his departure coincided with the end of the nesting season, so it may have been merely coincidental and we shall see him again next spring. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will fly into your in-box on October 15th.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

Thursday, June 15, 2017

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE -- 15 JUNE 2017

There's an old observation about a person hurrying to get away from something that describes him or her as being as nimble as a cat on a hot bakestone. At present any unfortunate feline wouldn't need to even consider jumping on a bakestone because once outdoors on a concrete surface the current heat wave would scorch its paws almost as much. Then, in a variation of the oft-quoted wisdom of checking which way the wind is blowing before taking a decision, we'd see which way the cat jumps! And speaking of decisions and jumping, now's the time to decide to leap into reading this latest newsletter....

MARY'S BIT or TORMENTED BY A RED-HEADED DEVIL

Of late we've been involved in the Great Red-Headed Woodpecker War.

There have been noticeably more woodpeckers announcing they are working in the woods this year than is usual, and for the past six weeks or so one has been engaged in announcing his presence too close for comfort.

It seems the wretched bird -- a red-headed woodpecker -- has taken it upon himself to serve as our avian alarm clock.

There are thousands of trees around us, but oh no, he has to flap over this way and bang his beak on our front gutter at ungodly hours in the ayem. Plutarch recorded it was said tigers go wild at the sound of beating drums. A persistent banging on the gutter waking one up when it's not even fully light is certainly annoying, the more so as we'd be happy to live in harmony with him if he would just carry out his morning exercises far enough away so as not to be so loud.

That nice Mr Google informs us the technical name for this beak banging business is drumming, and its purpose is to advertise for a mate or to mark territory. We'd hoped it would be the former and some lonely female would respond to his call and fly off with him, but the usual time when Mr Lonely Heart would be drumming for that reason is, not surprisingly, during the spring. Here we are in mid June and still he persists. So with the plethora of 'peckers this year it seems it may well be a demonstration of his territorial rights.

On the principle of if ya can't beat 'em ya gotta join 'em, we started our opening engagements by trying different loud noises to persuade him to go elsewhere for his daily performances of Gene Krupa solos. Banging on the wall succeeded in scaring him off a couple of times, but he returned. Rattling a metal spoon inside an aluminum saucepan every time he started up didn't work either. Obviously the bird is a heavy metal (gutter) fan. Taking this cue, we played loud music at him on the theory if raucous Rolling Stones or Ramones recordings cranked up to ear-bleeding levels wouldn't do it, what would?

But it was no good.

Back to Mr Google for further suggestions, leading to Eric shinning up a ladder to get on the sun porch's flat roof, there to suspend a set of chimes from the middle of the gutter. Their gentler music worked for one day, but that may have been a coincidence because it rained and we have noticed the feathered fiend doesn't care for wet mornings and sometimes won't show up in such weather.

Onward, we muttered through gritted teeth. The next attempt involved a hundred feet or so of iridescent ribbon of the type that emits flashes when flapped to and fro and up and down by the breeze. On particularly sunny days from afar the gutter presents the appearance of a very thin white Christmas tree fallen on its side as multi-coloured flashes appear along it. With one streamer hung near the office window, on particularly windy days its lower end flaps past the glass, sending splashes of coloured light around the walls. When that happens we got our own disco, man!

The glittering streamers worked to keep the woodpecker away for a day or so but then he came back -- he actually returned to give a dozen or so performances last week. Strangely, the last few days he hasn't visited, so it may be the red-headed devil has succeeded in attracting a mate, despite the lateness of the hour, or alternatively the flashing tapes finally persuaded him to depart and bash his beak elsewhere.

Which is not to say he may be lulling us into a false sense of success and by the time this issue arrives may have resumed tormenting us.

NECESSARY EVIL

A fair bit of news this time round, so no messing about and straight to it...

THE FIRST REVIEWS or RUINED STONES CONSIDERED

With Ruined Stones to be published next month the first reviews are starting to appear. Here are a few snippets

"...handles the wartime setting (rife with paranoia) and the woman-in-a-manâ€™s-world theme with equal skill. A fine period mystery." David Pitt, Booklist

"An in-depth look at what it was like in England during World War II and how women took over menâ€™s jobs, leading to a social revolution that continues today." Kirkus Reviews

"Reed hits all the high notes with a spunky, savvy heroine..." For The Love of Books blog

PW FEATURES PPP or TWENTY YEARS ON

Publishers Weekly recently featured an article about Poisoned Pen Press, including interesting background information on the press and its thoughts about publishing. See

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/73894-poisoned-pen-press-celebrates-20-years.html

SPEAKING OF WHICH or JOHN'S LATEST ADVENTURE

Bound By Mystery, a short story collection with contributions from over thirty of Poisoned Pen's authors, was published earlier this year to mark the twentieth anniversary of the press. Time's Revenge, John's latest adventure, was one of them. More info about the collection here:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1464208328?tag=fictiondb-20&camp=8641&creative=330649&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1464208328&adid=1HMNAQ2NBVQHDVX9WY7Y&

SHORT STORY REDUX or INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY MONTH

May was International Short Story Month and our contribution to the festivities, linked via the Short Mystery Fiction Society blog on May 26th, was Waiting. A Halloween story, it was originally published in 2016 by King's River Life. And here it is

http://kingsriverlife.com/10/22/waiting-a-halloween-short-story/

THE TIME HAS COME or OUR BLOG TOUR'S KICKED OFF It seems only fitting the first blog published for this year's blog tour was an interview of Grace Baxter conducted by Terry Odell on 30th May. Among other topics, Grace talks about whether she gets along with other characters in Ruined Stones and the one thing she wished her creators had done differently.
https://terryodell.com/character-interview-eric-reeds-grace-baxter/

RENAMING OUR BLOG or A NEW NAME AND AN OLD PHOTO

We've boldly changed both the name of our blog and the photo at the top of its front page, which now shows a old view of the Tyne Bridge in the city's bad air quality days, when we all had lungs resembling kippers and front door paint blistered within a year or so of its application. Now named Retiring Writers, the location remains the same at

http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/

CALLING GOLDEN AGE LOVERS or UPDATES TO THE MAYWRITE LIBRARY

We recently updated our library of free Golden Age of Mystery etexts, so it now includes over twenty additional titles, including several by Ethel Lina White, a favorite author of Mary's. Care to glance over the list? Point your clickers to

http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/golden.htm

ERIC'S BIT or SOME IDEAS GOT BROKE

This month Mary and I started writing our next mystery in earnest. During the winter we tossed ideas around (most of them fell and broke) and eventually came up with a detailed outline. But a couple of weeks ago playtime ended and we got down to the hard work of putting our ideas into a form which will bring them to life -- we hope -- for those outside our little family circle.

Writing a novel is kind of like building a snowman. It goes slowly at first but as you continue to roll the little snowball around it gets bigger and picks up snow faster. (I don't know if that's good analogy but it's ninety degrees today. Think cool.) Last Saturday was our best writing day yet. In the morning we had 6,400 words. That evening there were 2,800.

We threw out the first two chapters.

And don't think that wasn't difficult! It would have been easier to write 4,000 more words. However, the book is the better for cutting to the action.

We keep track of how many words we've written as a measure of our progress, but there really is so much more to writing a novel than stringing together enough sentences to reach a certain word count. Back when we started, I didn't realize how much more. Like many beginning novelists what daunted me was the challenge of cranking out 60,000 or 70,000 words. I would have been horrified at the notion of throwing whole chapters away.

As it turns out reaching a word count is the least of a novelist's problems.

Mary and I learned as we went along. Neither of us ever took a writing class or attended a writing workshop. I've read three books on writing: Dean Koontz's Writing Popular Fiction, Stephen King's On Writing, and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. The first two were fascinating but only the third was actually useful.

The only writing lessons we've had were from editors to whom we'd already sold fiction.

Could we have learned the formula for assembling a bestseller type thriller if we had chosen to do some study? Who knows. We never wanted to do that. We both believe that writing can't be taught, apart from the nuts and bolts. Either a person can write or they can't. After all, the ideas are the most important ingredient in fiction.

If you have interesting ideas then all it takes to write is practice.

So now I've got to get back to our fourteenth book and keep practicing.

AND FINALLY

We close with our usual reminder of the date of the next issue of Orphan Scrivener, which will fly into your inbox on 15th August.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

Saturday, April 15, 2017

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR -- 15 APRIL 2017

Despite recent record snowfall, flooding rains, and now unseasonal heat, spring has finally arrived. For as this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener was written, the ants have returned -- or at least finally become visible. Like the swallows of Capistrano, their emergence into view is as regular as well-oiled clockwork. Swarms of wasps have also shown up from wherever they hide in winter and yesterday we had our first in-home visit from a field mouse. Shakespeare opined time's whirligig brings revenges, reminding subscribers two months have passed since our last newsletter and the whirling hands of time mean this issue just appeared in your in-box....

ERIC'S BIT or BEFORE CHICKS WORE MINIS

My memories of Easter go way back, to before chicks wore mini-skirts, back to when they gave chicks away at gas stations. Those were the days.

Easter was what you get when you substituted a magic rabbit for a magic fat guy from the North Pole and a basket of candy and some dyed hard-boiled eggs for great heaps of brightly wrapped presents. That's right, a sort of second-rate Christmas. On the holiday scale Easter rated below Halloween. My trick-or-treat bag held more candy than my Easter basket and although some spoilsports gave out apples at least no one plopped any hard-boiled eggs into the sack. Even the tangerines that took up so much valuable space in the Christmas stockings were preferable to eggs. What do you do with dozens of hard-boiled eggs? I recall choking down egg salad sandwiches until the Fourth Of July (a holiday that barely deserved a ranking because fireworks were illegal in Pennsylvania and school was out for the summer anyway).

I did enjoy coloring the eggs and hunting for them Easter morning after they'd been hidden by the bunny, even if it wasn't quite as thrilling as roaming dark streets in weird costumes. My family was lucky enough to have a big lawn where eggs could hide behind tree trunks, in clumps of weeds, amidst the stones in the rock garden, up in the crook of the huge maple tree in the front yard, in the corner of the sandbox, underneath a flower pot by the back door, up in the latticework of the rose arbor.

One early Easter it snowed. Four or five inches of heavy wet snow. My gloves were soaked through as soon as I poked around the shrubbery in front of the house. I guess the rabbit must have carried out its task in the small hours of the night because there were no tracks leading to the eggs. Those eggs were a sorry sight after they'd been hunted down and carted inside. Between sitting in the snow and my wet gloves, their colors were runny, the designs smeared. And after I'd worked so hard dipping them into the different pots of dye at various angles, blocking out patterns with a clear wax crayon.(Turned out to be good practice for the glories of tie-dye).

The dyed eggs were left out for the Easter Bunny to retrieve and hide, you see. Which also served to prove the reality of the bunny, just as the absence of the cookies and milk set out for Santa proved that he had, indeed, visited.

There was more to the holiday than colored eggs, but not much that enthused me. I've never been fond of Easter candy. The big, candy eggs are so overly sweet they make my teeth ache and plain chocolate is...well...plain.

The fluffy chicks were more appealing. Not to eat, mind you. Although since my grandparents' chicken coop never got overcrowded, despite the traditional influx of Easter chicks....well, that's something I prefer not to think about. I suppose it taints my memory. That and pondering the fate of all those chicks they used to give away at gas stations. Sure, the ones we brought home had a coop to go too (and never mind the chicken that showed up on my dinner plate months later. I prefer to think I was eating fowl with whom I was not acquainted, that I had not romped with in the grass).

So the egg hunt was the big thing. Mysteriously, almost every year, there was an egg which eluded the hunt, only to be found weeks later, while I was mowing the lawn, or weeding, a thrilling find, a faded artifact of the past nestled somewhere I must have neglected to look. Best of all, you wouldn't dare use a month old egg in a sandwich.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP STICKER

Our ticker's devoted to publication news of one kind or another, so let's get to it....

RUINED STONES or GRACE OOP NORTH

We're pleased to report on behalf of our shadow identity Eric Reed that a review of his WW2 mystery Ruined Stones (set in Newcastle on Tyne) has just appeared over on the For The Love of Books blog. The site is owned by a librarian whose name is not given but who opines this novel "hits all the high notes with a spunky, savvy heroine, small town idiosyncracies and a tumultuous time in world history."

https://cayocosta72.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/ruined-stones-by-eric-reed-published-by-poisoned-pen/

Ruined Stones will appear in July but is already available for pre-order via the usual suspects on- and off-line as well as the Poisoned Pen Press website. Like to read an excerpt? Point your clicker to

http://poisonedpenpress.com/books/ruined-stones-author-guardian-stones/

JOHN RETURNS or A NEW LORD CHAMBERLAIN SHORT STORY

It's been a while since one of our short stories appeared, but readers could not hope to escape forever. Time's Revenge is our contribution to the newly published anthology Bound By Mystery: Celebrating 20 Years of Poisoned Pen Press. Edited by Diane DiBiase, the collection offers over thirty short stories by authors published by the press -- the irony of the collection's title and that of John's new adventure has not escaped us. A list of contributors, along with mini biographies, is to be found here

https://www.amazon.com/Bound-Mystery-Celebrating-Years-Poisoned/dp/1464208328

MORE GAD REVIEWS or A DIFFERENT SORT OF LOCKED DOOR MYSTERY

We've uploaded a few more Golden Age reviews to our blog since the last newsletter, to wit one dealing with the mystery half of Conan Doyle's Tales of Terror and Mystery, not to mention Locked Doors by Mary Roberts Rinehart (a novel Constant Reviewer particularly enjoyed, especially the explanation behind all the truly mysterious shennanigans going on), Anthony Rolls' Scarweather, and The Winter Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine. Links to each here:

http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/

MARY'S BIT or I'VE HAD A FEW

Regrets, that is. But not too few to mention since I intend -- we appended our signatures to the Fair Warning Act -- to speak of things I never got around to doing. But it's not all gloom. Brooding is not good for us, and so being a glass is three quarters full type of person, even so there are ways of dealing with regretful remembrances.

Take for example the fact I was amused recently on hearing Elle King's Good To Be A Man, a song I am informed led to her recording contract. Her tongue in cheek lyrics are directed at her notion of traditional male thinking, but what I found particularly attractive was her banjo playing, give one of my regrets is never learning to play that particular instrument. I can toot along on a kazoo and that's about the extent of my musicianship but a banjo, now that's really neat. On the other hand with all due modesty I can say I have a reasonable singing voice. On a good day. Indeed, I once sang a duet with Judy Collins at the Albert Hall. Honesty compels me to admit over five thousand others were singing Wild Mountain Thyme with us at the same time, but still.

Long time subscribers may recall that a couple of our short mystery stories featured our protagonist Herodotus investigating strange goings-on in Egypt, as set forth in Chosen of the Nile and the Oracle of Amun. It's likely my interest in Egypt was sparked by my father's stories about his WW2 adventures in the Western Desert, not least the snake discovered in the latrine -- the unfortunate reptile wound up being transformed into a belt -- and daytime heat so intense it was possible to fry eggs on the bonnets of RAF lorries. That spark was fanned into a blaze by subsequent extensive reading about Egyptian mythology. Sad to relate, I have yet to set foot in Egypt although (it's that shining glass again) I did see the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum on my second try.

As part of a well-rounded grammar school education our lessons included French, geometry, and algebra. I didn't do too well with the first and last subjects. A few years later, Mr Pittman's shorthand was a similarly closed spiral notebook to me until suddenly one day there was a mental click and it began to make sense. If only French and algebra had fallen into place as suddenly but alas, it was not to be. I've never really had any need for French or algebra since I left school, but on the other hand geometry has been very handy at times when cutting pizzas or pies into three equal parts. As for French, I may not be able to read Simenon in the original but I do speak three languages: British English, American English, and Geordie, my native dialect. (May I whisper at this point we've included a Geordie glossary in Ruined Stones?)

Embroidery is another skill I'm sorry never to have acquired, though it's not for want of trying. As a result, my sideboard runner has been a family joke for years. Without exaggeration, I started work on it decades ago and it's still not finished. I didn't bring it with me when I came to America and I believe it's in the possession of someone in the family in the old country but I've made no enquiries about its whereabouts as then it might turn up in the post and I should feel obliged to take a stab at finishing it. But should it appear and I never manage to complete it it would at least be handy for polishing a banjo, even if I never get round to learning how to play one.

AND FINALLY

Humorist Dave Barry once described the internet as a world-wide network exchanging data that allows a computer modem to emit a noise such as would be made by a duck choking on a kazoo. We emphasise no water fowl were harmed in the writing of this newsletter as, with a quick burst of syncopated tooting on what was once dubbed a southern submarine, we close with a reminder of the date of the next Orphan Scrivener. Which, through the wonders of the intertubes, will arrive in subscribers' in-boxes on June 15th.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # ONE HUNDRED AND THREE -- 15 FEBRUARY 2017

Emerson characterised the sky as daily bread for the eyes, but during the last few days our sullen skies suggest the loaf in question more resembles the greyish National Loaf of wartime Britain. Got a while to spend loafing around for a while? Then feel free to continue perusing this new issue of our newsletter....

MARY'S BIT or SHOULD ACCUMULATIONS OF BOOKS BE AVOIDED?

It's no secret I enjoy classic tales of the supernatural and while E. F. Benson and E. & H. Heron are particular favourites, for me M. R. James roolz. I especially love his mannered, atmospheric ghost stories for the way in which he integrates everyday situations into truly unsettling plots, wherein a seemingly harmless event opens the door to a truly dark place.

As James notes of A Neighbourâ€™s Landmark, "Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment."

We've all been there, right? I certainly have and, while recently re-reading James' fiction, jotted down a few things learnt while doing so, more by way of warnings to the curious than entertainment as such.

* Shun books in which pieces of paper are shut up.

* The same applies to diaries with a small piece of patterned cloth pinned to one page.

* Ditto scrap-books containing leaves from illuminated manuscripts, especially if compiled by eminent ecclesiastical gentlemen.

* Don't lose your music concert programme. If you do, don't accept anyone else's.

* Purchasing antiques, say a mezzotint depicting an unknown manor-house or an attractive doll's house, will likely bring trouble in their wake.

* Flee a hotel room wherein the number of its windows change at a time when no structural rehabilitation is being carried on.

* The same caveat applies to a room in which crumpled linen bedsheets will not behave.

* Under no circumstances pick up a whistle and tootle on it. Policemen will not appear as a result, but something else might.

* Open air seaside entertainments may turn sinister at the drop of a hat, so watch from afar.

* Don't attempt to find out why an inn room or an old press are always kept locked.

* Never investigate wells too closely. Especially if the well in question happens to be located in a clump of trees.

* Deciphering a code is an excellent intellectual exercise, but it's best not to follow up what you discover from it.

* It's unwise to stroll around a playing field after dark or down a certain country lane at any time.

* Leave archaeological digs to archaeologists.

Fortunately readers are able play it safe by reading James' supernatural collections from a distance, which is to say by perusing them online via http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2768 With no physical presence there can be nothing nasty lurking between their leaves, which is where pretty much where we came in.

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Speaking of an old press, an announcement relating to one such starts this month's ticker a-going....

A LORD CHAMBERLAIN SHORT STORY or A REMARKABLE DOUBLE COINCIDENCE

Bound By Mystery: Celebrating 20 Years of Poisoned Pen Press will be published next month. Edited by Diane DiBiase, the collection offers original short stories from thirty-five of its authors. A list of contributors, along with mini biographies, is to be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Bound-Mystery-Celebrating-Years-Poisoned/dp/1464208328

The cover features PPP's new logo, depicting a man literally bound up in mystery. At first glance it resembles the Mithraic Kronos, representing infinite time (such as the figure at http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/mom/mom07.htm#page_106) Why do we mention a remarkable double coincidence in connection with the collection? Well, the reason for its publication is connected to time -- twenty years in this case -- plus our contribution is a Lord Chamberlain investigation entitled (flourish of trumpets) Time's Revenge.

Stop press: PW's review of the collection has just appeared online at

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4642-0832-4

AND SPEAKING OF TIME or GRACE IS OFF TO GEORDIE LAND

Eric Reed, our not so secret shadow identity, time-travelled back to December 1941 when writing Ruined Stones, sequel to The Guardian Stones. ARCs are going out even as we type. As is noted in our afterward, a number of World War Two mysteries are set in London -- often during the Blitz -- so it was decided to send protagonist Grace Baxter up to Newcastle-on-Tyne at the opposite end of England. Her arrival coincides with the discovery of the body of a young woman, curiously difficult to identify, at the still existing scanty ruins of a Roman temple in the Benwell area of the city, not that far from where Mary grew up. More details at

https://www.amazon.com/Ruined-Stones-author-Guardian/dp/1464208344/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486499966&sr=1-1&keywords=Ruined+Stones+Eric+Reed

GADZOOKS! MORE GAD REVIEWS or GADDING ABOUT THE GOLDEN AGE OF DETECTION

Since our last issue we've added four more Golden Age mystery reviews to our blog, being Death of a Viewer by Herbert Adams, John Bude's The Lake District Murder, Agatha Christie's classic yarn And Then There Were None, and S. S. Van Dine's The Scarab Murder Case. Details may be detected by pointing your clicker at

http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/

ERIC'S BIT or ICE-BOUND LUCIFER

Mid-February. "Is winter ever going to end?" time in the Northeast. The pines beyond our windows bend away from a frigid wind that coats their trunks with snow. We're in for fifty mile an hour gusts according to the weatherman. I wouldn't be surprised to look out and see Lucifer up to his waist in ice, flapping his leathery wings in our direction. Before long we'll be subsisting on instant macaroni and cheese and tinned soup because I can't get the car to the road through the snow and ice. At least I haven't yet had to crawl into the Ninth Circle annex under the house to thaw a water pipe. What fun. Three A.M. and zero degrees. Stygian darkness conceals frosted cobwebs and huge spiders brittle with cold. Not to mention there's not enough room to swing a frozen sinner.

No, I don't like winter. And the older I get the longer and colder the winters get.

To find some good memories of winter I need to look back, past those thirty inch snowfalls in Rochester, past the face-numbing gales shrieking through the New York City skyscraper canyons, past winter commutes to college in an old busted heater Plymouth made of rust and holes held together with fiberglass patches. The tires were bald as an octogenarian skinhead just back from the barber. Twice I executed a 360 degree spinout climbing the steep, sharp, curve by the power station. Luckily none of the gravel trucks that frequented that stretch of highway were coming. My worries about winters would have been over.

I have to go back to early childhood to find a time when I had any use for winter. Like all kids I loved building snowmen. My mittens were soaked through and my hands stung with cold before I finished -- you need wet snow for a decent snowman. Still, there's nothing like giving your own creation a carrot nose and two eyes. My grandparents, who lived next door, heated with coal so my snowmen always had 100% authentic coal lump eyes.

There was also sledding on the big hill that was part of the local college campus. Everyone in town headed there after a snowfall. That was another era. The public is banned these days when we're all in thrall to lawsuits and insurance premiums. I guess we wouldn't have been allowed to ride our flying saucers on the wooded hillside just down the street either. We weren't sure who owned those woods. Whoever it was never warned us off. We dug and banked snow to construct runs that wound in and out through the trees. I got more than one mouthful of snow when my flying saucer overturned or left the track. But that was fine. Eating fresh snow was another of winter's pleasures.

Most of the winter activities I enjoyed would be forbidden today. No farmer would allow kids to skate on the frozen pond in his cow pasture. I quickly lost feeling in my feet and ended up gliding around the ice -- or falling on my butt mostly -- on empty skates. Or so it seemed. But the warmth of home was only a block away. There was something magical about the pond. Glinting beneath our skates, embedded in the ice, were goldfish. We liked to pretend that come spring they thawed out and resumed swimming.

Now I sit here and shiver despite the space heater which doesn't quite drown out the wind. What I imagine is that the wind and the growling of trucks on the highway and creaking of the house is the sound of ice-bound Lucifer masticating Cassius, Brutus, and Judas Iscariot not far away.

AND FINALLY

We've reached the point where we remind subscribers of the date of the next issue of Orphan Scrivener. That day of distant misery (chapeau tip to Edward Gibbons) in this particular instance is April 15th.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

Friday, December 15, 2017

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

AND FINALLY

Sunday, October 15, 2017

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

ERIC'S BIT or A WALK TO THE GRAVEYARD

AND FINALLY

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

NECESSARY EVIL

JOHN'S NEXT ADVENTURE or GENERALLY SPEAKING

IN PHYSICAL INK or HIS DEBTS WERE SETTLED AT LAST

IN ELECTRONIC INK or WINDING DOWN OUR BLOG TOUR

AND FINALLY

Thursday, June 15, 2017

NECESSARY EVIL

THE FIRST REVIEWS or RUINED STONES CONSIDERED

PW FEATURES PPP or TWENTY YEARS ON

SPEAKING OF WHICH or JOHN'S LATEST ADVENTURE

SHORT STORY REDUX or INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY MONTH

RENAMING OUR BLOG or A NEW NAME AND AN OLD PHOTO

CALLING GOLDEN AGE LOVERS or UPDATES TO THE MAYWRITE LIBRARY

AND FINALLY

Saturday, April 15, 2017

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP STICKER

RUINED STONES or GRACE OOP NORTH

JOHN RETURNS or A NEW LORD CHAMBERLAIN SHORT STORY

MORE GAD REVIEWS or A DIFFERENT SORT OF LOCKED DOOR MYSTERY

AND FINALLY

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

A LORD CHAMBERLAIN SHORT STORY or A REMARKABLE DOUBLE COINCIDENCE

AND SPEAKING OF TIME or GRACE IS OFF TO GEORDIE LAND

GADZOOKS! MORE GAD REVIEWS or GADDING ABOUT THE GOLDEN AGE OF DETECTION

AND FINALLY