ERIC'S BIT or THE FABRICS OF MY LIFE
Earlier this year we retired my Race with Grace 10K T-shirt. Even by my lax sartorial standards (mismatched white socks) the poor old thing was unwearable -- faded, discolored, a hole or two. It was almost thirty years old, so it had a good innings for a T-shirt.
Digging through our clothing cache for a replacement, Mary came across a number of shirts I'd forgotten. Since leaving the corporate necktie world to work freelance my favored attire has been T-shirts and jeans. Which means I've rarely had to buy a shirt thanks to my collection of such shirts from road races and orienteering meets in which I participated.
Last week I sported a drawing of a tank from orienteering at West Point. The military academy owns thousands of acres of rugged land in New Jersey used for training and recreation and every year it hosted such an event to take advantage of its steep boulder-strewn terrain. I went out into the woods several times and avoided getting totally lost (orienteers are never lost, only "disoriented") and now it's fun to remember being up to the challenge, more or less. Strangely enough, my usually bad memory holds a thick album of snapshots showing the terrain I navigated in parks around the Northeast and even Canada.
I can remember details of road race courses too. Well, it isn't surprising that the leopard-decorated Jungle Jog shirt jogs my memory of running though a zoo. Even I couldn't forget that. My most memorable race T-shirt might be for the Green Mountain 10K Road Race sponsored by the Summit Ski Lodge. Running Times magazine (then the main competitor to Runner's World) paid me to travel to Killington, Vermont, to cover the race in part by running in it. The course was unforgettably hilly (not to say mountainous) but I did pretty well, probably because I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of all the competitors I'd interviewed for my article the night before. Oh, I said that "might" be my most memorable shirt because it seems to have been mislaid over the years. Maybe one day it will turn up.
There are some T-shirts for creative endeavors. One year I had an entry in the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition for computer games in the tradition of 1980s text-based games like Colossal Cave Adventure. In my game -- The HeBGB Horror! -- the player searches for a mystical lost chord in and around a (highly) fictionalized version of New York City's CBGB rock club. I finished in the middle of the competition, same as my road races. Not bad, considering I'd never even seen a computer program prior to my writing the game. The T-shirt lists all the entrants.
My Deadly Ink T-shirt was from the 2000 conference in Mount Arlington, NJ, where I appeared on a panel to promote our first Byzantine mystery novel One for Sorrow.
Mary also came across a T-shirt produced to raise funds for New York Post staffers who were fighting the newspaper's sale to a notorious NY slumlord. The shirt features a spiffy graphic of the paper's founder, Alexander Hamilton, with a single tear rolling down his cheek. The Post is best known as a tabloid with headlines like "Headless Body in Topless Bar".
The earliest surviving shirt dates back to my law school days. Our Entertainment Law professor gave the class "tour" T-shirts at the conclusion of the course. Professor Silfen knew what he was talking about since he represented many bands, including Aerosmith, REM, and Blondie. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein showed up one day to describe the evils of the music publishing industry to us.
I guess I could write an autobiography in T-shirts.
I hated having to discard my Race with Grace T-shirt. The race was named for George Grace, pastor at the Rochester First Bible Baptist Church, who organized the event and ran in it. The race took place on Thanksgiving Day and the T-shirt featured a pumpkin. One long sleeve displayed a Bible verse that runners, writers, or anyone else could take for their motto: "...let us run with patience the race that is set before us..Hebrews 12:1-2".
NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER
Hark! The ticker clicks merrily away, delighted to be bringing a soupcon of news to subscribers....
BEHIND THE SCENES or EVERYDAY MONSTERS
We're happy to announce Jenny Milchman, Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning author of seven psychological thrillers, has contributed Everyday Monsters, the latest entry in our Behind The Scenes series. See
https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/p/weve-thrown-ornamental-iron-gates-of.html#monsters
YET MORE REVIEWS or BUTTERFLIES AND BLACKMAIL
Mary reviews a pair of J. J. Connington Golden Age of Detection novels.
In Death At Swaythling Court Colonel Sanderstead investigates a murder whose trimmings include an allegedly undetectable death ray, blackmail, a profane parrot, and a butterfly collection.
https://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/2026/10/review-death-at-swaythling-court-by-j-j.html
Nemesis at Raynham Parva deals with the murder of a man whose actions would have devastated three families, including that of investigator Sir Clinton Driffield.
https://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/2026/10/nemesis-at-raynham-parva-aka-grim.html
Eric reviews Georges Simenon's Maigret at the Coroner's (its full title for the edition read) wherein the French inspector observes a case in Arizona during his tour to examine the methods of American police departments
https://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/2026/10/review-maigret-at-coroners.html
TOO EARLY FOR CHRISTMAS or BUT JUST IN TIME FOR HALLOWEEN
We've been busy bees of late as we've also added more entries to our library of free links to supernatural stories and uncanny tales in honour of the traditional telling of ghost stories at Halloween as well as on Christmas Eve. Check them out at
https://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/p/stories-of-supernatural.html
We'll also be so forward as to point out a trio of our ghost stories to be found via the Free Stories links at
https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/
MARY'S BIT or SHE SOMETIMES RINGS THREE TIMES
We're occasionally asked how we broke into publication. Our reply is we arrived there sideways by storming the castle around the back, taking advantage of an overlooked ladder to a window carelessly left open. We say this because Fortuna arrived at the postern of Maywrite Towers on three occasions, bringing unlikely and indeed almost unbelievable assistance on our journey to appearing in print .
It is the tragic fact acceptance of my first solo short mystery story was indirectly connected to terrible events on the world stage. When the hostage crisis in Iran began, a friend who accompanied her husband when he took a job there had to leave for Dubai with their children. Their relocation led to her meeting a BBC employee at a jamboree such as expats often organise and from her learning the BBC World Service short story programme accepted submissions from the public. On hearing this I asked myself why not have a bash at it? And thus it came about Aunt Ba's Story was accepted and duly transmitted. Since I cannot leave subscribers wondering what happened to the family mentioned, I'm happy to report they were reunited in Dubai in due course, followed shortly thereafter by their household effects, and returned safely to England.
Fortuna rang a second time some years later when Eric and I began writing short mystery stories together. Since then, if questioned on the matter he inevitably says he couldn't avoid getting involved since we were married. Several other short mystery stories appeared before John sprang in spritely fashion into the literary arena. His first appearance came about after an unexpected call from England It was from editor Mike Ashley to consult us about contributing a story to an anthology to be devoted to historical whodunnits. Naturally we grabbed his hand off. The problem was it had to be written to an extremely tight deadline. As it happened, Eric's interested in Byzantine history and had a number of books devoted to it sitting right there on our bookcase. Justinian and Theodora -- two powerful and colourful personages even if you don't believe half the scandal penned about them by Procopius -- were a natural choice as major characters so we were off to the Hippodrome races in short order. Using the resources mentioned and burning much midnight oil resulted in John's debut in A Byzantine Mystery in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. There is no doubt we couldn't have met our deadline without those books and now, when quizzed how the Lord Chamberlain short mystery stories came into existence, we smile and reply it's all Mike's fault.
Comes the day when, after the fashion of films in which youthful friends decide to put on a show in the family barn despite inexperience in musical matters, we began to consider writing a novel with John as protagonist. We already had a ready-made cast of supporting actors and at least part of their histories from several of these short stories relating John's investigations and possess imaginations we are not afraid to use.
But hold on! After One For Sorrow was completed a ghastly thought struck us. As mapless newcomers wandering at midnight in the dense forests of novel-length fiction, having no agent meant long odds against our finding a publisher.
Luckily for us Fortuna rang again. Poisoned Pen Press was a new publisher at the time. It had recently released AZ Murder Goes Classic, a collection of papers presented at a conference on the topic of what makes a mystery a classic. When it was nominated for an Edgar Award in the Best Critical or Biographical Work category we jotted the press a note of congratulations and in passing, somewhat cheekily in retrospect, asked if they would be publishing fiction. After all, the French have a saying Fortuna holds out her hand to the bold and as it turned out, editor Barbara Peters had only recently commented on the lack of Byzantine mysteries and was willing to consider ours. We confess it was a Herculean struggle to get the first chapter suitably situated but, as my mother used to say, patience is a virtue and One For Sorrow eventually launched John on his full length literary voyage as the first original mystery published by Poisoned Pen Press.
Not being among those who, as they say in the old country, consider themselves all that and a bag of crisps, we acknowledge we were lucky to be standing at the right literary crossroads at the right times. Our theory is it's as well to be ready to leap into action should Fortuna comes a-calling with an unexpected opportunity. Unlike the postman, she sometimes rings more than twice. Still it's best not to complain about the racket but to answer her summons immediately, because being a flighty sort of gal if you don't she'll doubtless cross the street and ring someone else's door bell.
AND FINALLY
We just added a new entry to our collection of colourful sayings after stumbling over mention of stick season, used in parts of the north-east for the weeks from late this month to the first snowfalls when trees have been stripped bare. So we'll leave with a reminder the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will fall into subscribers' in-boxes on December 15th, bang in the middle of that chilly period of naked timber, at least for some of our subscribers.
See you then!
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 https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including a bibliography of our novels and short stories and libraries of links to free e-texts of classic mysteries and tales of the supernatural, not to mention a couple of our short stories of the latter persuasion, as well as archives of contributions to our Behind The Scenes series and the Orphan Scrivener essays. Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our names on the site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time!
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