The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundred and Sixty-One -- 15 October 2026

As this issue is written, volunteer wood asters have returned on their annual visit to edge the lawn as if planted there deliberately, the cricket choir is busy serenading the fading year with boisterous stridulations, and darkness shrouds us earlier every night. Soon we shall look out to a dreary landscape of leafless trees accompanied by wind gusts howling and prowling around Maywrite Towers. To add to the general melancholy of the month, here's the latest issue of Orphan Scrivener, so feel free to toss another lump or two of coal on the fire and read on...

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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".

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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/

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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.

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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!

To unsubscribe from this newsletter jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.

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The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundred and Sixty -- 15 August 2026

While in north Africa years ago, a member of the family demonstrated it is indeed possible to fry an egg on a vehicle bonnet although whether you'd want to eat the result is another question. Our equally unspeakable heat has begun to subside a little so our horse-drawn computers are struggling less than hitherto. Which means that, all going well, not only will the curfew bell not ring tonight but this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener won't be delayed by electronic difficulties as appeared possible most of this past week. And here it is.....

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MARY'S BIT or EVEN ROYALTY S0METIMES DO THEIR OWN LAUNDRY

Since we last showed up, we've managed to finally tame our front-loader washer, an advanced appliance which weighs the contents of its drum and then supplies the amount of water it reckons should be used for the load . One disgruntled owner declared online his opinion was that front-loaders just dampened clothes and chucked them around a bit and at times we were tempted to agree with him.

Laundering has certainly trundled many miles down the pike since a time.when the traditional Monday wash day involved wash tubs and poss sticks, stiff-bristled scrubbing brushes, yellow laundry soap, and a mangle aka known as the poor man's piano. Drawing a bow at a venture, I suggest this is because fingers of necessity get close to the rollers -- and hopefully no further.

Mr Maywrite remembers how as a child he watched his elderly aunt assist his grandmother to make laundry soap. Its ingredients included lye and fat and the process involved boiling them together. When the witchy mixture cooled into solid form, it was cut into chunks and stored in a bucket in his grandparents' cellar until wash day rolled around again. Buying a jug of detergent these days is so much easier. .

We have yet to see The Odyssey but I for one am interested to see how it handles the sequence where, following a dream, the soon to be wed princess Nausicaa of Phæacia and her attendants hie themselves off to washing cisterns near the mouth of a river. It transpires the royal personage has brought along not only her own clothing but also that of her family members. Well, after placing their laundry in the cisterns the assembled company -- including Nausicaa herself commence trampling on the wet garments to cleanse them, a homely touch in a narrative devoted to high adventure, extensive travel, a touch of magic, and an absence from home for twenty years.

As we all know, moggies may look at monarchs but this scene clearly demonstrates, despite assumptions to the contrary, even royalty sometimes do their own laundry. Sadly, when we recently viewed the mid-fifties cinematic presentation of Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn the laundering sequence was not included. Instead, it depicts the immediately following scene where Nausicaa meets shipwrecked Ulysses nearby.

It is therefore only right that the princess stands on one side of the coat of arms of the Worshipful Company of Launderers.* To my delight, the heraldic device depicts a mangle as well as three flat irons and a laundress with a dolly, an advanced form of our old poss stick**. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of a cat, that well-known cleaner of self.

Subscribers may recall an essay relating how we toiled mightily to remove an old top-loading washer from Maywrite Towers. While it was an epic struggle between us and the Harvest Gold appliance, we were sorry to see its departure For one thing it was happy to employ any old detergent you cared to put into it whereas the instructions for our current appliance, a front-loader controlled by mini-computer, sniffily declares the machine was specifically designed to use High Efficiency detergent and only that type. Using the wrong sort might, among other horrors, lead to malfunctioning components, cycles taking longer, and over-sudsing. Home-made detergents are included in the warning and we have to wonder what Grandmama Mayer would have to say about that.

Mind you, our opinionated appliance provides an unexpected bonus. Watching clothing circling and twirling in a fantastic fandango past the washer door's window allows thoughts to wander hither and yon, occasionally leading to inspiration for newsletter essays.

As you see.

* Figure 15 depicts the coat of arms of the Worshipful Company of Launderers

https://www.theheraldrysociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Goddard-Coat-of-Arms-2018-1.pdf

** Dolly on the left, poss stick on the far right. Our long since retired poss stick had a shorter handle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posser#/media/File:PuckMuseum24.JPG

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The ongoing heatwave has slowed everything to a crawl, including the ticker which sadly has only one item to offer this issue. However, if you enjoy Golden Age of Detection novels you may care to point your clicker at Mary's latest review. It deals with Molly Thynne's The Crime at the Noah's Ark, which relates criminous doings after a number of travellers are forced to take shelter at the titular hostelry when a blizzard closes down all roads..

https://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-crime-at-noahs-ark-1931-by-molly.html

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ERIC'S BIT or REMEMBRANCE OF FINNEGAN'S PAST

Amateur sleuths are a staple of mystery fiction. From little old ladies with a talent for sleuthing, to bored aristocrats looking for recreation, to today's entrepreneurial types who somehow make a living selling chocolate muffins and still have time for investigations. Quite a few authors have decided that if fictional amateurs are good, amateur detectives who are historical figures are better. Machiavelli, Groucho Marx, Jane Austen, Teddy Roosevelt for instance. it might be easier to think of someone who hasn't been conscripted into the fictional gumshoe brigade. I admit this trend irritates me even more than the proliferation of cats in mysteries. The occasional feline or famous person is fine, but isn't enough enough?

The trend might have gotten out of hand in my opinion, but it isn't new. In the 1938 The Gracie Allen Murder Case S.S. Van Dine had George Burns' wacky sidekick help out detective Philo Vance. The very first mystery to feature a real historical person is arguably Mademoiselle de Scuderi: A Tale from the Times of Louis XIV by E.T.A. Hoffmann, published in 1820. The German author imagined the titular 17th century French poet trying to uncover a band of murderous thieves plaguing Paris.

As with Gracie Allen, Mademoiselle de Scuderi merely assisted the actual detectives. More recently we've seen a spate of mysteries in which usually highly unlikely personages team up to solve murders. I mean, the Bronte sisters? Really? Arthur Conan Doyle, perhaps, but with Oscar Wilde? It seems authors are currently competing to come up with the most freakish, outlandish, and implausible teams of historical figures as detectives.

With that in mind, I offer the following suggestions:

Murder on the Pequod
(A Captain Ahab Mystery)

Queequeg is found pinned to the main mast with his own harpoon. Is the culprit the quarrelsome young chief mate Starbuck, fellow harpooner Tashtego, or the sailor who wants to be called Ishmael (but may be someone else entirely)? It could be anyone on the ship. It's up to Captain Ahab (and the ship's cat) to find the murderer before he can strike again. Before time runs out, Ahab is forced to team up with his adversary the Great White Whale himself, Moby Dick.

Tricky Dick and the Pelvis Investigate
(A White House Mystery)

Elvis visits the White House to receive an honorary FBI badge but soon becomes a real investigator as he and President Richard Nixon (and the White House cat) race against time to find out who did in the First Lady, in the Oval Office, with the tape recorder. Their efforts put the sleuths in perilous situations. Will Elvis-the-Pelvis be able to avert a nuclear holocaust when the red telephone in the Oval Office rings? Can Tricky Dick cover for the KIng's absence from a D.C. stadium concert by performing Hound Dog? The fate of world may depend on it!

A Rat to Remember
(A Titanic Mystery)

Is the Titanic's collision with an iceberg a clever pretext to disguise the killing of someone aboard? Famous mystery writer Jaques Futrelle teams up with two rats -- a roguish ship's rat and an aristocratic little girl's demure pet -- to bring the murderer to justice. Rather than fleeing the sinking ship, the trio race against time to bring the murderer to justice. A thrilling tale told from the point of view of Mollie Brown's cat.

Remembrance of Finnegan's Past
{A Famous Authors Mystery)

Who killed Finnegan? And how was it done? Faced with a case no one can understand, The Royal Irish Constabulary call in those bloodhounds of bafflement, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Could it have been something as simple as a poisoned madeleine? Probably not. Assisted by several of T.S. Elliot's Jellicle cats, the perplexing private eyes wander through an incomprehensible wasteland of clues and suspects, taking their time in twelve thrilling volumes.

And that's not even mentioning Mickey Spillane and Bennett Cerf (My Pun is Quick) or Arthur Conan Doyle, assisted by a band of fairies, the supernatural equivalent of the Baker Street Irregulars. Which I can't believe hasn't already been done but I don't have the heart to look it up.

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AND FINALLY

The year having passed its midpoint, subtle hints of impending autumn are starting to appear. The dark hours are noisy with insects singing their farewells, here and there a yellow or scarlet leaf drifts to the ground, and dusk arrives a little earlier each evening. Fall is on the way and with it the next issue of Orphan Scrivener, which will creep into subscribers' in-boxes on October 15th, in keeping with that month's mists and melancholy air.

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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our names on the social site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time! To unsubscribe from this newsletter jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.

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The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundred and Fifty-Nine -- 15 June 2026

The noiseless feet of time have been marching in double-quick cadence this last couple of months since in retrospect it seems only a few days have passed into eternity since we trundled out the April edition of Orphan Scrivener. We are therefore seizing the transient hour to launch this latest issue into the wild and here it is...

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ERIC'S BIT or THE SCENT OF EARL GREY TEA

This time of year I always think about long ago school vacations when my family moved to a cottage at the lakeside picnic grove they operated during the summer months. Just about everyone remembers how the last school bell of the year heralded what might as well have been an eternity of freedom even though it was less than three months. And though that was an illusion, in retrospect it sometimes seems like those summers, filled with new experiences, did last longer than entire decades later on.

Life at the lake was different than life in the suburbs. To begin with, there was the tiny cottage with electric lights but no indoor plumbing. A hand pump in the yard supplied water that was ice cold and pure, without the chemical taste of the town water to which I was accustomed. There was an outhouse a short walk from the cottage. It reeked sharply of the pink disinfectant cakes sitting here and there. A small ragged hole at the base of one wall showed where a porcupine had gnawed to get at the salt in the wood.

Yes, even going to the bathroom could be an adventure, especially at night, following the flashlight beam along the flagstone walk, alert for prowling porcupines.

The frogs in the creek were exciting too. The creek ran behind a bed of bergamot which filled the air with the aroma of Earl Grey Tea. Hummingbees (as we called them -- actually sphinx moths) hovered around the red flowers looking so much like hummingbirds they didn't trigger my usual aversion to large buzzing insects. I'd make my way through the flowers and hunker down on the bank learning to spot the twin bumps of amphibious eyes poking out of the water like periscopes. I mastered my frog catching technique, positioning my open hand so that I could close my fingers around the frogs' extended legs when they sprang towards safety.

Not that they had anything to fear from me. No frogs were harmed in the making of this memory. I always released them.

The stream was a whole world of wonders. Crayfish rocketed backwards in clouds of mud when I lifted the rocks they hid beneath. Numberless minnows glittered in the shallows and in the slow moving water near the lake floated black clouds of baby catfish. Sticklebacks built pebble nests while water striders skittered across the stream's sun flashing skin and dragonflies darted through the air.

There was plenty of non-aquatic life. A chipmunk made a habit of rambling around under the family picnic table looking for crumbs while we ate. At night bats squeaked and swooped so close you could feel the rush of air as they flew by your face but never colliding with you, and never eating the lightning bugs that twinkled around the edges of the yard like an out-of-season Christmas display. The bats knew the bugs were toxic.

Four-leaf clovers for luck were to be found in the lawn but I found more honey bees with my bare feet, which was not lucky at all. Worse yet were the blood sucking leeches in the lake, undulating alien horrors resembling elongated bits of raw liver. (I found liver almost as horrible as leeches.)

The natural world didn't have a monopoly on amazing new experiences. I hunted along the roadside and amid the tables in the grove for empty soda bottles discarded by careless picnickers. They were returnable and the few cents I redeemed each for added up to more than my allowance every week. The general store where I took the bottles featured a remarkable display of dead and dying flies stuck to coils of flypaper that hung from the ceiling, twisting slowly in the breeze from several large fans.

One summer, the Purple People Eater was another unforgettable novelty. My parents were under strict orders to call me whenever that Sheb Wooley number popped up on the radio and I'd come running even if I was catching frogs by the creek. I'm not sure any other song has affected me as deeply.

Nor have I ever experienced a quest as exciting as my successful effort to collect every Davy Crockett trading card, the card completing my set being, memorably, "A Bullet Finds Its Mark."

And that barely touches on the fascinating new world those ancient summers offered to a grade schooler. I didn't mention Fudgsicles, Fourth of July sparklers, thunderstorms, tadpoles, grilling

No wonder summers seemed so long.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The ticker, frog-like, leaps into action again!

HELPFUL HINTS CORNER or NEWS WRANGLERS AHOY!

Last month's issue of the Writers and Publishers Network's newsletter included our article aimed at writers contemplating setting up a newsletter. Offering examples and advice on content and publication calendars from four mystery authors issuing these useful dispatches as well as our thoughts on the topic, should anyone present be contemplating taking the plunge, we trust they will find it useful. :

https://tinyurl.com/zck8492s

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MARY'S BIT or THE TELL-TALE TRUNK

According to a song popular with children, Nellie the elephant packed her trunk before running off to join a circus, a very poor career decision if I may say so. By contrast, when the time arrived to pack my scarlet trunk for carriage to these shores, difficult decisions had to be made. Ultimately rather than practical items such as clothing, which could be purchased on arrival if necessary, its eclectic contents meant I had managed to squeeze part of my old home into its confines. Take that, Dr Who!

On reflection, just as bookcase shelves demonstrate their owner's interests, the tell-tale trunk clearly indicated what was important to me.

For example, among the number of items packed into a space seemingly too small to contain them, consider the brown pottery vase with a slight list and the silhouette of a cat applied to its front. Made by my younger sister, it became known as the Jean-Paul Memorial Vase. Jean-Paul was a half Siamese tabby supposed to accompany me to these shores but sadly due to a careless driver he departed permanently a week or two before I set off for the New World. *

There was also a large green jug painted with orange flowers pretending to be chrysanthemums, paired with two similarly decorated flat back wall vases so popular at one time. Apparently the jug held pride of place on the hall windowsill of the cottage to which my family was evacuated during the war but where the vases were hung remains a mystery. My trunk also held examples of cabbageware comprised of two bowls masquerading as half-cabbages and a snack or relish server formed of three cabbage leaves meeting in a wishbone shape with a tomato knob at its centre. If such a category exists I would nominate these items as prime examples of the jolie laide school of china.

I must not overlook mention of a charming china toast rack with floral decorations, equally useful as a letter rack, and the elegant cake trowel with its pattern of blue flowers. The small scarlet non-stick saucepan still in service at Maywrite Towers is not only practical but also a reminder of day trips to London to visit friends. It was purchased in the Tottenham Court Road, still a prime location to find beautiful and stylish home wares.

At the other end of the colour palette, Dad constructed piggy banks in the shape of benches painted beige for me and my sister. These money boxes accepted coins through a slot in their seats and the official method of retrieving our cash involved undoing the screws holding their bases in place. We found it easier to get our pennies back by holding a bank upside down and wiggling a thin-bladed knife in its slot to coax our pennies out into the open, thus demonstrating children are ever inventive.

Speaking of inventive, along with family letters and photos, some of my early scribbles found their way into the trunk as did the novels devoted to the lives of the March family. They were a gift when I was eleven and I still re-read these popular stories every couple of years. Jo was my favourite character and I've noticed a number of writers have made the same declaration.

I should also mention my collection of penguins, including a heavy blue glass example in modernistic style (an excellent paperweight) and an egg timer guarded by a penguin, which I felt was unkind. Two plastic Christmas ornaments from long before I was born also made the trip -- a dark red star and a leaping blue deer sporting antlers, reminding me of the running deer mentioned in the Christmas carol. They accompanied a fairy doll tree-topper. She had suffered somewhat over the years, poor thing, having lost one of her red high-heeled shoes and most of the gold glitter from her tulle dress and magic wand. Despite the damage to her wardrobe she still majestically ruled the Christmas tree every year.

When I went to Port Canaveral to retrieve my trunk the official who examined its contents asked more than once if there was anything else to declare. Perhaps he noticed its glaring lack of apparel but all the garments I possessed arrived in two suitcases already dealt with when I passed through the customs hall at Miami Airport. The inspector involved was a charming fellow who asked me out to dinner that evening so I have no doubt more than one marriage has resulted from a meeting over someone's rummaged luggage!

* See Jean-Paul's Memorial Tombola at https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/p/our-essays.html#jean

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AND FINALLY

To borrow the closing lines of Ms Alcott's Jo's Boys, let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall on this edition of Orphan Scrivener, with a reminder the next issue will appear in subscribers' in-boxes on 15th August.

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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our names on the social site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time! v To unsubscribe from this newsletter jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.

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The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundred and Fifty-Eight -- 15 April 2026

Our daffodils are finally blooming so their golden coronae are trumpeting forth spring is finally here after the coldest winter in thirty years. We've noticed other indications of spring's arrival. A ladybird recently appeared in the porch, the first of those large bugs with a liking for clinging to the shower curtain arrived, and a scout for our annual invasion of ants was spotted in the bathroom not long ago. A day or so back a woodpecker arrived and started briskly tapping out telegrams on a nearby house, so this year at least our gutters will be spared his dawn attentions. Time flies, like all these harbingers of the changing season, so we'd best get this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener winging off to subscribers. Here it is...

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MARY'S BIT or A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF DRACULA

When I was in my mid-teens my favourite teacher was the fellow who taught the English class.

Given our age group, my classmates naturally considered it the height of wit to refer to him as Bugsy, due to rumours he had several children. Since he may well still be alive, I shall therefore cover his possible blushes by referring to him as Mr H. He didn't present the traditional portrait of a teacher, often visualized as garbed in trousers slightly baggy at the knees and a chalk-dusted tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. He was slight and otherwise average in appearance but he was certainly brilliant in his way of engaging the attention and interest of his class. His teaching was more in the mould of Mr Thackeray (the educator known as Sir in the Sidney Poitier film, not the author of Vanity Fair, whose pseudonyms included George Savage Fitz-Boodle)

At the start of our first class he told us he was a strict marker and rarely awarded, if memory serves, more than a middling grade. But if perchance he did, he went on, we should go home and lie down. The phrase will be familiar to long-time readers of various of my compositions because I pinched it, adding "with a damp cloth on your forehead" to round it out a bit.

When the topic was Shakespeare. members of the class took roles in the play under discussion and though remaining at their desks presented the chosen extract as a read-through. Of these miniature theatricals, one springing immediately to mind was from The History of The Life and Death of King John, which the toilers in the Maywrite Research Bureau inform me is one of the least performed of the Bard's creations.

On thus particular occasion, Mr H selected a conversation in which Philip Faulconbridge, a pivotal character in the play, takes part. Commonly known as Philip the Bastard, he claimed to be an illegitimate son of Richard the Lionheart, John's predecessor on the throne. As mentioned, the class was composed of teenagers, regarded by some who should know better as young savages whose language would shock a fish wife. However, the young lady chosen to take part in this excerpt refused to use Faulconbridge's nickname. Even tearaways have good hearts and her classmates did the right thing, nobly sparing her embarrassment by not sniggering whenever other characters used That Word.

Mr H usually presented us with a choice of homework essay topics. He possessed a robust sense of humour as demonstrated by the memorable afternoon when A Week In The Life of Dracula was on the list. I can only surmise he'd overheard a friend and I talking about how much we liked Hammer Films' presentations of such sanguinary tales of teeth and terror because I doubt he knew we'd stolen out of the building the previous Friday afternoon to catch a matinee screening of one such extravaganza at the local cinema, It was the only time we braved our formidable principal's wrath by decamping early but really teenagers must rebel at times, is it not so?

In any event, my colourful account of seven days in Transylvania received the best mark of any essay I wrote for Mr H. For reasons now forgotten I was unable to skive off and go home early in search of a cloth to dampen and apply to my forehead. Just as well perhaps, for as Demosthenes (the orator, not the actor) cautioned unexpected success often leads to extravagant acts, or as we would have said then "Don't push your luck, mate."

When my first short mystery story was accepted -- it was Aunt Ba's Story, broadcast on the BBC World Service -- I was so thrilled I wrote to Mr H at the school address to tell him and received a really nice congratulatory letter back. It meant a lot to me and still does. So Mr H. if you should happen to stumble over these reminiscences, a doff of the chapeau to you for your kindness in encouraging an apprentice writer and an all-round good egg to boot.

And that's no yolk!

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The ticker obstinately continues to be silent so we're thinking of renting this space out...

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ERIC'S BIT or OBELISTS AHOY!

Years ago I purchased a Dover trade paperback edition of C. Daly King's 1935 novel Obelists Fly High. Dover's catalog featured a few old and obscure -- to me -- authors and titles like The Thinking Machine by Jacques Futrelle and The Old Man in the Corner by Baroness Orczy. The sort of thing you can find easily online today at sites like Project Gutenberg but which were harder to come by years ago.

C. Daly King and his mysteriously named novel (what the heck is an obelist anyway?) were unknown to me. However, I was fascinated by the murder mystery set on a passenger plane making a cross country flight during the 1930s. Unfortunately there were no more King books to be found, at least by a non-collector like myself. The author and his work, although highly rated by critics, had dropped out of sight. Even during the 1930s his six novels had struggled to find American publishers which, perhaps, is why he virtually abandoned detective fiction after 1940 and returned to writing psychology books.

So I was delighted when I ran across The Complete Curious Mr Tarrant, a collection of a dozen stories, mostly published during the 1930s. Ed Hoch ranks the original edition of this book as one of the three greatest locked room mystery collections along with Carter Dickson’s The Department of Queer Complaints and G. K. Chesterton’s The Incredulity of Father Brown. I'd disagree. The locked room collections I've read by Mr Hoch himself struck me as clearly superior. But anyone who's ever met Ed Hoch would know he'd never blow his own trumpet.

Not to say I disliked C. Daly King's short stories. They were intriguing and entertaining in their own eccentric way. Like many amateur sleuths of the period, Trevis Tarrant is a gentleman of independent means with apparently unlimited time for investigations. Unlike most he is assisted by a valet, Katoh, who is a Japanese doctor and in his spare time, a spy. Tarrant is particularly interested in bizarre cases, which usually means cases that appear to involve the supernatural. In fact one case does turn out to be supernatural, a nice touch. I'm reminded of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost Finder stories in which Carnacki sometimes fails to find mundane explanations for strange events.

Tarrant encounters a house that is purportedly haunted and a highway where headless corpses keep showing up. An Irish harp, an ancient codex, and a famous actress are all seemingly spirited out of locked rooms. Maybe best of all is the motor boat which causes its occupants to jump overboard and drown themselves.

As you can imagine, the weird and puzzling events make for fun reading. My problem was with the solutions. The first story, in particular, featured an explanation so obvious, even to me, that I'd have to call it the worst locked room story I've ever read. There's at least one other solution which seemed unsurprising and another whose mechanics didn't appear to be very workable but then I'm not very mechanically inclined.

Although the stories are certainly worth reading, I'd caution you to enjoy the rides but be prepared for some disappointing denouements.

Did I mention C. Daly King is an eccentric writer? Consider that word obelist, used in titles for three of his books. Way back when I read Obelists Fly High I looked the word up in the dictionary. No luck. Over the years I never did find a dictionary definition or anyone who knew what it meant. Not until the all-knowing internet came along did I discover that obelist was an authorism, that is to say a word coined by an author. In this case, King invented obelist to mean one who harbors suspicion, for example an amateur sleuth.

With the renewed popularity of Golden Age of Detection fiction C. Daly King may be emerging from undeserved obscurity but I doubt his authorism (another new word to me!) is going to enter common use.

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AND FINALLY

We recently discovered April 15th has been named National Griper's Day, on which everyone is encouraged to air complaints of all kinds and not just the obvious grievance given the date. Speaking of which, we'll remind subscribers the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will arrive at their in-boxes on June 15th, Magna Carta Day. Take that, Bad King John!

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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our names on the social site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time! To unsubscribe from this newsletter jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.

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The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue One Hundred and Fifty-Seven -- 15 February 2026

News items about Arctic weather covering a wide swathe of the country this last couple of weeks brought memories of an English friend who always wore a balaclava during unusually cold periods because, as she put it, she would rather be laughed at than develop earache. We can certainly sympathise with her in these flash-frozen frog days as we all cope with hellish (in the Dantean sense) cold. Even so, local town criers are out and about ringing their bells and declaiming "Hear ye! Hear ye! Another issue of Orphan Scrivener has escaped into the wild!" And here it is...

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ERIC'S BIT or THE CRUELLEST MONTH

“April is the cruellest month….” wrote T.S. Elliot in The Wasteland. Which just goes to show he should've got out more. Specifically he should've got out today, when the wind is gusting, there's a foot of snow on the ground, and temperatures are plunging towards zero. If he were sitting on the porch roof outside our office window right now (and what an image that is) I'll bet he'd admit that the cruellest month is February when we've already suffered through more winter than we can endure and there's no relief in sight.

As for Mr Elliot mixing up his cruel months, I can hear him taking the Star Trek defense through chattering teeth. "Dammit Jim. I'm a poet, not a weatherman."

To which I can only reply, "Off to the Heaviside Layer, sir! And take those frozen cats with you!"

Outdoors everything is white and silent and stiff with cold as if the landscape has died and rigor mortis set in. Or maybe that's just the way I'm feeling. But when the sun struggles up from behind the mountains its thin icy light reveals new tracks in the snow where the local wildlife has been quietly going about its business all night long. The backyard is crisscrossed with dainty lines of deer tracks and twisty little ruts where smaller creatures -- rabbits, squirrels, mice -- have plowed through the drifts. There are also footprints leading to the propane tank after my Arctic expedition there to check the gauge a couple of days ago.

It could be worse. I've known worse. While living in different places I've experienced snow storms that buried the world in nearly three feet of the white horror and bouts of freezing rain that brought trees crashing down, limbs glistening with an inch and more of ice.

I'm discounting the monster snowfalls I remember from my childhood because everything looks bigger when one is smaller. Besides, heavy snow meant a day off school. I was never a big fan of cold but bundled up sufficiently I still enjoyed sledding and building snowmen and, of course, simply not having to go to school. I understand that today, thanks to the Internet, schools call for virtual days when the weather is bad, forcing students to work from home via computer. How unutterably cruel is that?

As I write this I'm chugging down pots of coffee, which is what I do in cold weather. I've always drunk coffee but the colder it gets the more I drink it. Lately that's a lot since temperatures haven't gotten up to freezing in weeks with the thermometer falling into the single digits nearly every night. For half my life I drank tea. As a teenager I lived on hot dogs and tea with sugar and lemon. How I don't know. I doubt there's enough nourishment in a hot dog to support a sparrow, which might be why sparrows don't eat hot dogs. Anyway, count on teens to choose the most unhealthy diet possible. I switched my allegiance to coffee after Mary and I got married. Since she was from England she should have been the tea drinker, shouldn't she? Life is strange. I actually don't care what I drink so long as it's hot and loaded with caffeine.

Sometimes I can warm up by writing. Rubbing words together to make a fire.

The wind's begun to howl.

I haven't seen two riders approaching...yet.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The ticker is tapping away in a positive tiz-woz at the prospect of announcing news again...

A ROUNDABOUT ROUTE or HOW A WHO'S WHO OF TUDOR WOMEN CAME TO BE

In the latest contribution to our Behind The Scenes feature, Kathy Lynn Emerson relates the long road leading to the publication of her three volume set A Who's Who of Tudor Women. Point your clickers here to read how it came to be:

https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/p/weve-thrown-ornamental-iron-gates-of.html#emerson

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MARY'S BIT or SLUDGE OR SLUM-GULLIAN?

I collect unusual words and recently learned a new one: slum-gullian, courtesy of a gent we know in Virginia who also provided a photo of a large pot of same simmering on his wood stove. The ingredients: hamburger, tomato paste, and several vegetables. It immediately struck me as essentially the same recipe as that for a dish we call sludge, made from cooked mince stirred into spaghetti.

Investigation of slum-gullian uncovered more than one theory as to how it got its name. The most common explanation of this prime example of a portmanteau word is that it's composed of slum, in the sense of an area with poor housing conditions, and gullian, said to be English dialect for cesspool or mud. Not exactly the most enticing dish to appear on a menu but its culinary cousin sludge provides equally hearty vittles in the sort of weather Mr Maywrite writes about.

According to those who know about these things, the first literary reference to "slumgullion" occurs in Mark Twain's Roughing It, published in 1872 *, The dish shows up when the proprietor of a stagecoach stop serves it to the latest batch of travelers passing through, Twain among them. Though it bears the name, it's been argued it's not the genuine article since Twain refers to it as a beverage pretending to be tea "but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler."

Admittedly naming our culinary invention sludge hints at nosh almost as awful as that served to Twain but in its defence it is both warming and filling while also attractive to us for another reason.

Why? Because sludge requires only three items: a tin of mince, spaghetti sauce, and a packet of pasta, meaning its ingredients don't take up much storage space, This is important for us because we don't have much room to spare after stocking up the pantry in late autumn against those days or weeks when due to local geography and stretches of brutal winter weather our buggy cannot roll to town. Thus we purchase enough comestibles we calculate as sufficient to provide sustenance for 77 days, the longest period -- so far at least -- when grocery shopping was just not possible. The most difficult time we've had in that regard was several years ago when we almost ran out of coffee. The horror! The horror!

Whatever way you spell it slum-gullian is a word to gladden wordsmiths' hearts, just crying out to be used in a limerick. Here's my attempt at

Boarding house owner Miss Mulligan
Claimed to serve genuine slum-gallian
Her paying guests cried
You stand there and lie!
Where's its bacon-rind scraps, you rapscallion?

Perhaps Miss Mulligan would have been better served by providing her boarders with a hearty helping of the stew whose name she shared.

* Twain describes this entertaining travelogue as a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing. It's available on Gutenberg at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3177/pg3177.txt

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AND FINALLY

As mellifluous troubadours Simon and Garfunkel sang in the sixties, April *will^ come and on the 15th of that month the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will spring with a hey-nonny-no into subscribers' in-boxes. 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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our names on the social site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time! To unsubscribe from this newsletter jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.

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The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundred and Fifty-Six -- 15 December 2025

The Clock of Time advances inexorably towards the hour when 2026 will arrive. Of frigid necessity the new year is advancing on skis, laboring up our snow-covered hill to commence rapping at our door. However, before its foot is on your threshold there's still time to read this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener....

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MARY'S BIT or POPPING A PENNY IN YOUR PUDDING

We weathered another Attack of The Household Appliances in mid-November when the oven conked out for the third time so we were without its culinary assistance for a couple of weeks. Thus it was we discovered cooking using burners only was possible to the extent of creating a simulacrum of breakfast buns or a biscuit somewhat resembling a ginger snap by cooking them in a frying pan. Now repaired, the oven's been behaving itself so we are in fine shape for Yuletide cuisine.

So far.

Speaking of festive cookery, for me one of the most memorable passages in Dickens' Christmas Carol is his description of the Cratchit family's Christmas pudding as it was about to be brought to table:

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry cook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding!

This homely scene is a favourite because the scullery of a childhood home was equipped with a copper of Victorian vintage such as Dickens mentions. A brick cube holding a tub for laundry with water heated via a small built-in fireplace, we didn't use it for its intended purpose nor yet to heat Christmas puddings so the black beetles had it to themselves. No, our puddings were boiled for hours in a basin wrapped in a tea towel so we were familiar with the steamy aroma Dickens so poignantly describes.

Naturally Christmas puddings prepared for high society were elaborate concoctions. Consider Mrs Beeton's "mode" for her Christmas Plum-Pudding, which she modestly describes as "Very Good". As well it should be, given it contained one and a half pounds of raisins, half a pound apiece of currants and mixed peel, three-quarters of a pound of bread crumbs and the same amount of suet, eight eggs, and a wine glass of brandy. The result was boiled for five or six hours and again for two hours the day it was served. Mrs Beeton considers this princely pudding sufficient for seven or eight persons.

Admittedly it could not provide as many helpings as Mrs Beeton's magnificent creation but the two-serving tinned Christmas pudding a British friend sent some years ago worked well for us. It may be those who look askance at tinned cranberry sauce as an acceptable side dish for holiday meals would not agree on aesthetic grounds, given these festive puddings traditionally should be shaped like cannonballs rather than cylinders. But it's the thought and the taste that matters, right?

There's a old custom my family and many others kept up albeit in a modified way. In the Victorian era silver charms said to foretell their finders' fortunes were included in the pudding and I gather it's possible to purchase similar festive folderols these days . However, when our pudding was served it was inevitably accompanied not only by piping hot custard but also a maternal warning to watch our teeth. This was necessary because a silver sixpenny bit would be lurking somewhere in the pudding although on one occasion a copper penny well wrapped in greaseproof paper was substituted. Whatever the denomination, whoever found the coin in their portion could expect good luck during the following year.

As to the Crachits' pudding, given their difficult financial circumstances, it seems unlikely they would be able to pop a penny in their pudding but there's still a pleasing Yuletide connection between their copper cookery and our cooked copper coin.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The ticker awakens and leaps into life with a couple of notices concerning recent doings at Maywrite Towers.

THE SELLER OF FAUX CAT MUMMIES or EVEN MINOR CHARACTERS HAVE LIVES TOO

Our theory is although minor characters may appear only once or twice, making them more than cardboard cut-outs adds interest to the narrative while also providing our sleuth John with information moving the plot forward. We recently contributed an essay on this topic to Kevin Tipple's popular blog, Point your clickers here

https://kevintipplescorner.blogspot.com/2025/11/guest-post-minor-characters-have-lives.html

A TALISMAN, A MAZE, AND NINE SOLUTIONS or GUESS THE CONNECTION?

Our question's the type of conundrum found in Christmas crackers along with the customary paper hat. Did you guess? If not, we've recently returned to occasionally reviewing novels from the Golden Age of Detection on our blog. The latest batch appear next to free e-texts for J. J. Connington's The Case With Nine Solutions, The Dangerfield Talisman, Murder In The Maze, and Tragedy at Ravensthorpe, John Rhode's The Murders in Praed Street, and The Dream Detective by Sax Rohmer. See the Maywrite Library page at

https://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/p/the-maywrite-library.html

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ERIC'S BIT or THE APPETIZER TO THE YULETIDE FEAST

Thinking of Christmases past I can remember the merry jingle of sleigh bells. Not in the snow but the ones my grandparents hung on the living room door. There was also a tree ornament that dated to long before my time, a thin, severe looking Santa who hadn't yet put on weight and become jolly. If I were an elf I wouldn't apply for a job at his workshop.

Although I don't date back to the era of those artifacts, the holidays f my childhood were a lot different than today's. For starters you couldn't sit comfortably at home ordering online from Amazon. Indoor shopping malls had barely been invented. To buy presents you went downtown, exposed to the elements, seeing your frosty breath (in the Northeast at any rate) as you hiked along crowded sidewalks. It took some gumption to put a gift under the tree.

Speaking of Christmas trees, you didn't have a choice between a real tree and a tree that looked real. Artificial trees were made of shiny aluminum.

One thing I suppose hasn't changed -- kids couldn't wait to rip the wrappings off packages. I was cruelly forced to consume scrambled eggs and orange juice before I was released to tear into the living room and start tearing. As far as what youngsters today find once those boxes are open, that's a different story.

But let's start with Christmas stockings. They were the appetizer to the Yuletide feast. Are they still packed with a tangerine, some walnuts and that little mesh bag of chocolate coins covered in gold foil? One thing that won't be found are the white candy cigarettes with red tips. Conversely third graders wouldn't make clay ashtrays to take home to their parents.

When it comes to the main menu in 2025, electronics are doubtless a must. You probably know what I mean -- those devices kids all have that beep and light up and who knows what. Well, I had a Robert the Robot. He rolled around, made noise, and his eyes flashed. He was battery powered. Does that make him electronic? I also thought about my metal bulldozer that drove around spewing sparks from its smokestack. Then I remembered winding it up. No electronics there.

I'm not sure if books are a big item these days. They were for me. There were always several thick, liberally illustrated volumes about nature, astronomy, dinosaurs and the like. Most of what I read in them is obsolete now. There were thirty-one planetary satellites in the solar system, most of which I could name. Now close to nine hundred have been discovered. It impressed me that Jupiter had an astounding twelve moons, not just the four I could see through my telescope, another Christmas gift. Today Jupiter has ninety-five moons and Saturn two-hundred seventy-four. And Saturn isn't the only planet with rings, having been joined by Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. There aren't even nine planets, Pluto having been demoted. On the other hand astronomers have identified dwarf planets and planets circling distant stars.

So even the science books I got for Christmas are as obsolete as Robert the Robot.

I also received fiction, usually the newest Tom Swift Junior books. Yes, even my Swifts are sadly dated. Oddly, those have aged better than the factual tomes. Diving Seacopters and Atomic Earth Blasters are as unreal today as they were back then.

Our imaginations and memories remain while the past slides away from us. I wonder what became of those sleigh bells my grandparents brought from the farm or the Santa ornament my great grandparents carried from Germany? Can Christmas survive in anything like its present form? Is it possible for children to believe in Santa in the Internet age? One can only hope.

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AND FINALLY

We'll be greeting the new year a few hours earlier than many of our subscribers because celebrations at Maywrite Towers break out at 7 pm Eastern Time, at which time it is midnight in England and 2026 has arrived there. For now, however, we'll close this last issue of 2025 with a reminder that, like the proverbial bad penny, we'll turn up in subscribers' in-boxes again on February 15th.

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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our names on the social site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time! To unsubscribe from this newsletter jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.

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The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundred and Fifty-Five -- 15 October 2025

In a couple of weeks, as elsewhere, the ancient horologes at Maywrite Towers will be set back an hour. It always seems five minutes after this annual rite that the tinsel-draped festive season comes knocking at the door, reminding us of the classic Christmas cracker squib asking what flies but has no wings? The answer of course is time and enough has passed for another issue of Orphan Scrivener to be sent winging off to subscribers. So here it is...

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ERIC'S BIT or THAT TIME BATMAN DANCED IN A DISCO

Have you been appreciating bats the past couple of weeks? If not there's still plenty of time. October is Bat Appreciation Month according to Bat Conservation International, which urges us to celebrate the importance to our ecosystems of those furry flying mice.

To me bats are a mixed bag. On the plus side they eat flying insects and I don't like flying insects. They are scarier than bats. On the other side of the ledger Dracula flies around as a bat and they get in your hair. The bat, that is, not Dracula. He just raises your hair.

This might be a good time to watch some old Christopher Lee movies. He is to Dracula what Basil Rathbone is to Sherlock Holmes. Mystery readers might want to read The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, the novelization of the stage play which was based loosely on Rinehart's novel The Circular Staircase, or watch one of the three movies adapted from the stage play. It's all very complicated.

I hate it when people pose as experts by spouting Wikipedia so I will admit that along with the information above it was from Wikipedia I learned that comic-book creator Bob Kane stated that the villain of The Bat Whispers (the 1930 film adaptation of The Bat) was an inspiration for his character Batman.

Now there is something I can celebrate. Batman was my favorite superhero back when comic books were badly printed and cost a dime. Unlike most superheroes he didn't possess magical powers. He depended on technological gadgetry and athletic prowess. Being more human, he was more interesting.

That Batman wasn't as grim as the modern version. He was a lighter shade of noir but still darker than other costumed crime fighters of the era. I liked the idea of a spookily attired avenger prowling dark alleys at night. I guess it appealed to something dark inside me, just as the novels of writers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and James M. Cain do.

Imagine my horror when I tuned in to the first episode of the Batman television series and found him portrayed as a campy buffoon! Never mind the black little corner of my personality that enjoys murder mysteries and the like, when I saw Batman busting a few awkward dance moves in a disco * I felt like I had a Thompsonesque Killer Inside Me ready to burst out!

I suppose at the time mature minds were thinking you couldn't actually depict a cartoon character seriously. Movie makers since than have proved them wrong.

Although bats are associated artistically with darkness and fear I don't find them frightening in real life. They are too much like mice with wings. At least the sort we have in the northeastern United States.

At the end of the street where Mary and I once lived there was a barn. In the evening bats would pour out into the twilight like spilled ink. On summer nights, living at the family cottage, I'd stand in the yard, in the middle of a maelstrom of swooping, diving, tumbling bats and chiropteran chirping. Hey, if I run across a new word I have to use it. They flew so close I could almost feel the draft from their wings but they never blundered into me. I found the creatures fascinating rather than frightening.

The mother of a friend of mine was terrified of bats. She didn't trust their "radar" or their intentions. Forget about the importance of bats to ecosystems, to her bats existed for no reason except to fly into her hair. Which was unfortunate since the family house had a huge attic filled with bats and they often found their way downstairs.

As soon as a winged intruder got loose in the house, my friend's mother would put her hands on top of her head and run screaming from room to room, much to the amusement of my friend and I. (Let's face it, kids find the spectacle of adults acting like children hilarious.) Not being, as we put it, "scaredy cats", let alone "yellow bellied sap suckers", we rushed to the rescue. Our method? We chased the bat with a vacuum sweeper until we were able suck it up. It might sound cruel but when we took the vacuum outside and opened it up the bat invariably flew off, apparently unscathed, and no doubt ready to return to the attic.

So there is my Bat Appreciation Month tribute to bats (without even mentioning that I liked the Bat Masterson television show). Not that I can tell you what gives Bat Conservation International the right to declare such a month. I suppose anyone can declare a month or a week or a day or anything they like. I could call today International Orphan Scrivener Day or how about Name Your Own Day Day?

* Batman dancing the Batusi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsYA8Gr5NTY

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

We're happy to report after last month's mushy knob problem the ticker's been repaired and has a news item to pass along.

CHILDREN AT PLAY or SWINGING ON A LAMP POST AT THE CORNER OF THE STREET

When The Street Lights Came On is Mary's nostalgic look at childhood street games, illustrated by a marvellous photo that could have been taken in her street. Point your clicker to author Christina Waldman's blog:

https://christinagwaldman.com/2025/08/29/when-the-street-lights-came-on/

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MARY'S BIT or THE FATE OF DOCTOR FOSTER

Before Mr Maywrite and I took to tramping down the dark and dangerous alleys and hidden courtyards of fiction featuring murder, mayhem, and malfeasance we both wrote non-fiction. His field was legal articles while mine were often devoted to such off-beat topics as Doctor Merryweather's leech-powered Tempest Prognosticator, swan upping, cheese-rolling, weather forecasting goats, and the disappearance of Doctor Foster.

Years later and with more experience in unravelling mystery plots I've decided to revisit the case of Doctor Foster to speculate further on what happened that rainy day in Gloucestershire. Let us examine the information we have as preserved in the nursery rhyme:

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain
He stepped in a puddle
Right up to his middle
And never came home again

I put it to the jury that, as I shall demonstrate, Doctor Foster was not on his way to attend to a patient in crisis even though he was out walking in what was obviously a downpour.

This demonstrates he did not have a wealthy practice, indicating he resided in the country. To argue the point we must consider if he possessed a carriage. Given he did and he was not riding in it the day he disappeared strongly indicates it must have been at the blacksmith's smithy for repairs to a broken spring or axle. Further, the presence and depth of the puddle clearly demonstrates the local council was not doing much of a job keeping roads in good repair and safe for the passage of carriages, carts, and other conveyances lends weight to his walking to Gloucester. It also supports his being a rural practitioner on the grounds if he lived in town there'd be transportation methods other than shank's pony available to him.

Why didn't he see the fatal puddle? Was his eyesight not all it should be? Doubtful, considering his profession. However, given the puddle was half his height, flooding from the downpour must have been high enough to conceal a pothole deep enough to engulf him to the waist, another indication of the parlous state of the thoroughfare he was travelling.

The cautious investigator should not rule out the role his umbrella played in the tragedy. What do we do with our gamp when it's stotting down? We position it to keep rain off our head and shoulders. Was his umbrella tilted at such an angle as to obscure his view of the tell-tale indication of a pothole by a dip in the flow of the current?

The next question is why was he going to Gloucester in the first place? It is large enough to be the home of numerous doctors so his travel there in such foul weather is intriguing. But consider: Gloucestershire is known for its cheeses. I posit he'd developed a fancy for toasted cheese sandwiches after a discussion at his local hostelry the previous evening concerning the annual cheese-rolling race held each spring at Cooper's Hill, about five miles from Gloucester.

Alas, both his larder and the village grocer were bereft of this particular dairy product so, next morning, Doctor Foster, a true turophile, braved the weather and started off to town to purchase the necessary amount of Double Gloucester cheese with which to cook this excellent snack. It may not have been raining when he got up but his tempest prognosticator indicated an imminent storm so he naturally took his umbrella.

Mystery readers would be inclined to deduce from these points that the good doctor met his end by foul play. Given known weather conditions, it's unlikely there'd be anyone out and about to give him a lift or help him out of the pothole. But somebody reported his dilemma as otherwise it would not be documented in the nursery rhyme. Could it be the road was in such bad condition that Doctor Foster was rescued from one pothole only to step into another just as deep after his good Samaritan left the scene? Was there a gentleman of the road, one of evil intent, passing along the road to Gloucester that fateful day? Sadly, history has shown there are those who would drown a trapped man for the sake of a pocket watch and an umbrella.

We now have motive, method, and opportunity. Based on this conclusion, Mr Maywrite is of the opinion the authorities should have been on the lookout for a tramp with a gamp, to which I add one in possession of a pawnbroker's ticket for a handsome timepiece.

Since the record does not show any arrests related to this case, the jury would be justified in bringing in a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown.

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AND FINALLY

As we conclude this email an occasional breeze is blowing stray leaves about, each one marking another moment bringing us closer to the next Orphan Scrivener flapping into your inboxes on December 15th. Since it is the same date as the Atlanta premiere of one of the most famous movies of all time, we can fittingly say that until next issue we are Gone With the Wind.

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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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 ilk. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our names on the social site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time! To unsubscribe jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.

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The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundred and Fifty-Four -- 15 August 2025

As with much of the country we continue to cope as best we may with the ongoing heatwave. Fortunately we have yet to reach the type of high temperatures Mark Twain experienced in India where, according to the locals, he'd arrived in what they described as cold weather. In his opinion it was a phrase invented for use when it was necessary to distinguish between temperatures that would melt a brass door knob and those that would only make it mushy. On the other hand, proverbially we're advised to strike while the iron is hot, so we ask subscribers to steel themselves and leap into this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener....

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MARY'S BIT or I ALWAYS WORE MY SCHOOL BERET AT A TRULY RAKISH ANGLE

A couple of years before I left England I went to a fancy dress party disguised as a penguin, complete with beak hastily constructed from orange cardboard and string. A colleague from work was the hit of the evening when she sauntered in dressed in a gymslip, white shirt, striped tie, and black stockings, an ensemble immediately identifying her as a sixth-former attending St Trinian's School For Girls.

Not being certain if the series is as well-known in this country I shall scribble a line or two about their content. Here I am talking about the original films, not the remakes, so if you know the former, talk among yourselves until the next couple of paragraphs end.

Why does the British public have such affection for the St Trinian's films? Inspired by Ronald Searle's cartoons, they are set in a boarding school where anarchy rules and pupils run wild, tormenting teachers, each other, the residents of a nearby town or indeed anyone unfortunate enough to cross paths with them Perhaps the appeal is to that little bit of wildness in all of us when we see chaos let loose in an educational setting, where traditionally (To Sir With Love notwithstanding) all is expected to be orderly and quiet and fourth-formers do not concoct spirituous liquors and create explosives in the lab, not to mention constructing deadly traps for the headmistress and staff. Drinking, smoking, and gambling are routine and so are melees during hockey matches. Indeed, the school song brazenly celebrates trampling on the weakest and declares might is always right. Whichever form was involved, however, there was some hope of reform -- none of the girls ever swore.

Every member of staff is depicted as not on the up and up and almost certainly involved in shady doings past and present while the fourth-formers (aged around fourteen) are spectacularly untidy with holes in their stockings, wild hair, and disreputable straw hats. They are capable of and glory in criminal behaviour -- one of Searle's cartoons shows a teacher grilling her class on who had burned the school's east wing down the previous night. Pupils are violent, their weapons of choice being various types of sports equipment, with hockey sticks a particular favourite. On the other hand, the seventeen or eighteen year old sixth-formers are more interested in higher matters, especially the opposite sex, having bloomed into bosomy young women wearing thigh-length gymslips, revealing glimpses of their suspenders. Note to young 'uns: you should know suspender belts and stocking tops were considered as racy as all get when the original films were made.

By contrast, the all-girl grammar school I attended had a strict dress code. Gymslips had to reach our knees and the hem of shorts worn for sports were required to touch the ground when we knelt. Observed on public byways eating or not wearing a school hat or beret while in uniform merited punishment. Urchins at a school lower down the hill from ours had discovered this and attempted to grab one or the other off our heads and run away with it on many occasions. Worse transgressions while abroad in uniform were smoking or talking to a boy. One year a rumour swept the lower forms claiming a pupil had been seen in one such conversation on the street and was punished for it. Even though the fellow in question was her brother -- or so it was said.

The only thing we had in common with St Trinian's were prefects, sixth-formers with the power to hand out penalties for breaking the rules of conduct. Generally they were tasks such as learning an extract from Shakespeare or writing a hundred lines declaring the miscreant must not do whatever it was they'd done. The only time I had to submit lines was because of running in the corridor. I still claim I was just walking fast and everyone else was slow-poking along. A touch of irony enters the picture at this point, given when I took my lines up to the sixth-formers' common room under the eaves of the Victorian building in which the school was housed, the opened door revealed a haze of cigarette smoke.

However, at this remove I feel it is safe to reveal I was guilty of a little bit of wildness myself since I always wore my school beret at a truly rakish angle. Provided of course one of the young hellions from down the hill had not made off with it.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

We're sorry to report our lengthy run of above average temperatures has resulted in the ticker developing mushy knobs. We expect to have it fitted with new ones by the next tune we're in touch.

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ERIC'S BIT or THE CAT WHO SAVED A LORD CHAMBERLAIN'S LIFE

I'm reading a book by Georges Simenon, author of the Inspector Maigret mysteries. The Cat, however, isn't a mystery. It's one of Simenon's psychological novels. I'm pretty sure Maigret never had a cat (unlike so many modern detectives) although he might have seen a feral feline or two slinking through the alleys in the dark underbelly of Paris. He encountered stray dogs certainly, as evidenced by his novel Maigret and the Yellow Dog.

Our own detective, John the Lord Chamberlain, didn't own a cat either but our two cats, Rachel and Sabrina, made cameo appearances in our Byzantine mysteries. Both are gone now, having lived to ripe old cat ages.

I took Rachel in when he came to my door one bitterly cold November day. Yes -- Rachel was a he. My two children named him. I could never be sure of his age but he was a glutton until the end, thanks to his having nearly starved out in the wild. How could I forget the time he stole a pork chop off the kitchen counter? (In One for Sorrow "Rachel's" tendency to pounce frantically on food saves John's life...you'll have to read the book...)

Sabrina, our final cat, lived to be twenty-two. (Final because at some point you don't want to take responsibility for pets who might outlive you.) There's no doubt about her age. I rescued her as a kitten from a neighbor's garage during my first marriage and she stayed with me after the divorce. She bridged two very different phases of my life. A new marriage, new work, a move to another state. During twenty years of change, Sabrina was the only connecting thread so it was particularly upsetting when she died.

Unlike "final girls" in movies, our final cat didn't spend her life battling homicidal maniacs. Quite the contrary. She was a coddled house-cat. During her last few years she stuck to me like a barnacle. Well, a warm, furry barnacle. I suppose I was the only constant thing in her life and she became more clinging as she aged. She wouldn't let me out of her sight. She insisted on curling up on my lap when I sat at the computer. Which was a real show of loyalty since skinny as I am I offer very little in the way of a lap. I altered my way of sitting to accommodate her. When I got up to go downstairs for a cup of coffee she'd wait for me at the top of the stairs.

Eventually it got to the point that she couldn't make the leap from floor to lap and would sit by my chair and meow piteously until I lifted her up. Weirdly, this attachment was solely to me, and not to Mary although Sabrina had lived with her for nearly twenty years. "Sabrina's a one person cat," Mary said. "If I passed out and was lying on the floor she'd walk over me to get to you."

As the end approached, Sabrina found it difficult to walk so before going to bed we'd put her in the little nest we'd made from a fuzzy toilet seat cover placed on the bottom shelf of a bookcase. We daily expected she'd be gone overnight but instead one morning we found her sprawled part way out of it on the floor. I carried her the rest of the way to my chair and put her on my lap. It wasn't long before she gave a quiet sigh and died there.

It seems as if she managed to get through the night so she could die where she wanted to be. I can't say I am deserving of that kind of devotion.

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AND FINALLY

We've been from hats to cats and now it's on to our last bit of chat this time around, reminding subscribers the next Orphan Scrivener will track into their in-boxes on 15th October

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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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 ilk. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our handles on the site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time!

To unsubscribe jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.

The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundred and Fifty-Three -- 15 June 2025

We hear June is National Lemon Month, according to Those Who Know, Who, being knowledgeable, are doubtless also aware lemon is rhyming slang for time via the popular refreshing drink lemon and lime. Enough yellow citrus has rolled past Maywrite Towers for this latest edition of Orphan Scrivener to be published. We trust subscribers will not recall common colloquialisms concerning lemons as they read on...

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ERIC'S BIT or AUTHOR AS HISTORY

A generally accepted rule of thumb is that a novel can be considered historical if it is set at least fifty years in the past.  That seems quite recent.  I've always felt that "history" was what happened before I was born.  On the other hand, in the news these days I read about things I can't imagine happening even twenty or thirty years ago. We are indeed, by some measures, living in a different era.

Mary and I have never had a problem classifying our fiction.  The Eastern Roman Empire during the sixth century when John tackles murders amidst the intrigues of Justinian's court is far removed from the present day and our two Grace Baxter books take place during World War II which while fairly recent is commonly accepted as historical.

But fifty years ago? I have T-shirts that old. Well. almost. You think I'm kidding?  Mary recently dug out from some deep geological strata of clothing, my Entertainment Law T-shirt dating back to the late seventies. At the end of his course each year -- which focused on recording artist contracts -- our professor gave out the equivalent of the traditional tour T-shirt. The highlight of that course was a visit from Debbie Harry, one of the prof's clients, who railed against the iniquities of the music industry. Is she a historical figure now like Empress Theodora?

I can remember the 1950s and they are well into accepted historical novel territory. What I remember best, though, are not for the most part earthshaking events but little ways in which everyday life and my state of mind differed. For example, as a child who gorged on Tom Swift Jr books and science fiction juveniles by Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein, a moon landing was a dream of the future to look forward to, not something that happened a long time ago, and didn't lead to moon colonies or change the world as the books I read imagined.

Okay, so a dream of the future that is now obsolete is sort of tenuous, but there were plenty more concrete things that have vanished from our lives since then. Important things. Fizzies. Don't laugh, being able to drop a tablet into a glass of water and have instant bubbly soda was magic, or like something from a science fiction novel.  As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Sure, Fizzies tasted like flavored Alka-Seltzer but I kind of liked Alka-Seltzer.

Then there was chewing gum. This may be personal to me. As far as I know, people still chew gum but I don't notice it as much as I used to.  When I was a kid it was a big part of my life. My friends and I all chewed gum all the time.  We wouldn't be without a pack of gum in our pockets any more than adults would be without a pack of cigarettes. There were flavors that aren't generally available today: Black Jack, Clove, Beemans, Teaberry. You weren't supposed to chew gum in school but funnily enough the undersides of our desks were covered with fossilized gum. And this isn't even mentioning Bazooka bubble gum, which came wrapped up with a Bazooka Joe comic execrably printed and never slightly funny even if you could decipher it. And why did Joe have a patch over his eye? Had that bubble he was blowing burst violently? Still worse were the hard sticks of gum packed with baseball and other trading cards. Now you can just buy the cards. You don't have to endure that gum. Kids today have it so easy.

There are many more important changes of course: instantaneous communication between all parts of the earth, the home computer, the Internet. It is a wonderful thing to have the largest library in history available on your desk top. When my computer crashes the loss of knowledge is magnitudes greater than happened when the Library at Alexandria burned but luckily it can all be restored again by reconnecting to the Internet. No longer does answering a question require a hike to the local library to consult its Encyclopedia Britannica. Unfortunately modern technology comes with a price. The Internet has spawned mobs of angry loudmouths who spread hatred and divisiveness. Would society be better and kinder without the Internet?

So, I'm not sure the world has changed enough in fifty years for 1975 to be considered historical. But the fifties...yes, that was another world.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The ticker has returned from its annual recalibration and is happily tapping out our news.

FURTHER PROJECTS or IT'S A SHAME ABOUT THE ELECTRIC CORSET

We're currently seeking a publisher for a murder mystery with a supernatural element. Set in late Victorian London, the necessary research was fascinating. Much of the info we discovered was used though we still regret we could not find a way to include a reference to Dr Scott’s Electric Corset. We've also mapped out another WWII mystery set in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne but with a different cast than our Grace Baxter novels.

SPEAKING OF THE SUPERNATURAL or MORE READING MATTER

We've just added the recently discovered Weird Tales Magazine archives to our library of links to free classic supernatural stories. However,  presumably for copyright or other reasons, some content is not present though included in individual issue content listings. Still, if like us, readers enjoy the genre there's plenty of choice reading matter there.

https://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/p/stories-of-supernatural.html

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MARY'S BIT or A TRIO OF TEAS

During the last couple of weeks my eye was drawn to three stories with a common though unlikely element linking crime, WWII, and funeral catering.

Tea.

Last month I read about a scam whereby victims were tricked into purchasing Scottish-grown tea. The culprit made over £500,000 by selling foreign-grown tea under such names as Highland Green and Scottish Antlers plus other blends supposedly grown on the Wee Tea Plantation, located on a former sheep farm in Perthshire. As a sideline he also sold tea plants said to have been grown in Scotland to entrepreneurs who fancied trying their hands at growing materials for the cup that cheers but does not inebriate.

Scotland's Food Crime Unit brought him to justice last month. I'm now wondering if before too long we'll see an investigator from a similar unit as the protagonist in a mystery series. After all, with the current raging popularity of mysteries involving shops offering various kinds of comestibles it would seem a natural pairing, like a cuppa with a ginger bikky to dunk in it, Especially if it turned out the edibles were poisoned. We could call it Tart Noir.

Not long afterwards I stumbled over an unusual story from 1941. In occupied Holland RAF planes arrived one night and dropped hundreds of miniature parachutes carrying unexpected but most welcome cargoes -- small bags of tea. 75,000 of them, each containing an ounce of tea, a gift to the populace from unoccupied plantations in the Dutch East Indies. The message on their labels: "The Netherlands will rise again. Greetings from the free Dutch East Indies. Have courage." *

The third leaf of my tea-related trio of articles is my discovery of the what appears to be the newish custom -- at least to me -- of giving teabags in decorative envelopes to mourners at post-funeral gatherings. The minions of the Maywrite Research Bureau tell me traditional blends such as Earl Grey or Orange Pekoe are popular choices for these occasions, while special blends or herbal teas are also available if preferred. We'd have liked to include such remembrances for the funeral tea in Ruined Stones, had such offerings been practised at the time. However, even if it had, it would have been difficult to mention in that particular chapter due to wartime rationing. The novel is set in 1941 and the adult allowance per week at the time was two ounces, reckoned to be enough for 30 cuppas.

Speaking as a long time javaphile I was happy to subsequently learn that coffee, though sometimes difficult to obtain, was one of the few items not rationed in the UK at one time or another during the war.

* Photo of a parachute with a (presumably empty) teabag at https://x.com/PotteriesMuseum/status/962667786999910401

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AND FINALLY

We'll close with a reminder the next Orphan Scrivener will parachute into subscribers' in-boxes on 15th August. However, the technical limitations of communication by the Internet will, alas, mean it cannot carry teabags with it.

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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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 ilk. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our handles on the site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time!

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The Orphan Scrivener -- Issue # One Hundered and Fifty--Two -- 15 April 2025

Historic events occurring on the date of this newsletter has given the day a dark reputation. The death of President Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Notre Dame fire spring to mind, for example. And of course 15th April is also File Your Tax Return Unless You Have An Extension Day. As if this litany of misery is not enough, it's also the date of this latest Orphan Scrivener. Hopefully subscribers won't find it too taxing...

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MARY'S BIT or THE BRIDE WORE BLACK

Readers may be interested to hear the most popular period for marriages runs from May to October. When I read this tidbit I thought it must also be a busy time for choosing bridesmaids.

At this point I should confess I had but a short career as a bridesmaid.

My younger sister and I were bridesmaids when my older sister got married. The day was grey and brought wind as cold as gold off the Tyne. We wore chaplets of artificial flowers and shivered in ankle-length taffeta dresses featuring wide scalloped collars. At least our matching muffs kept our hands warm. Unfortunately, given the role we played we were unable to roam surrounding streets as we often did looking for a bride and her relatives leaving for her wedding. It was the local custom for such parties to toss pennies from the taxi as it left for the ceremony, forming a nice supplement to our pocket money. We always knew where to take up position by a front door because the wedding taxis were immediately recognisable by white ribbons stretched from roof to bonnet.

My next spell of bridesmaid duty was for the afore-mentioned younger sister's nuptials. My dress was probably purchased, unlike the home-sewn duds we'd worn as children, inasmuch as it resembled the type of dress that might have been worn at, say, a cocktail party, had such things existed round our way. It had full skirts and its main feature was a boat-shaped neckline not quite off the shoulder, so suitable for a church wedding. I'm sorry to say my thoughts drifted a bit during the ceremony -- it will be no surprise my school report cards were occasionally marked "must pay more attention" -- but when my sister turned to hand me her bouquet, I fortunately was able to snap immediately out of whatever daydream I was wandering in and take it as it was offered.

On another occasion I was with three others, all of us strangers to the town where mutual friends were getting married. Thus it took longer than anticipated to find the registry office where the ceremony was to take place. Our journey to the venue was notable not only for its awful weather but also for featuring an incident when a large lorry got far too close to us as we passed it. Looking out from my back seat I could see the huge hubs on its wheels spinning almost, it seemed at the time, a hand's width away and suddenly enormous as they approached ever closer.

We were strangers to the town where the wedding was to take place and it took us longer than anticipated to find the registry office. When we finally found the building its door appeared to be locked. So we walked around the back and found a window. Looking in, we could see the registrar's back and the happy couple and their guests facing us. We stood outside in sleety rain, present at the wedding and yet not present, a Schrödinger's quartet watching the proceedings through the glass and doubtless looking like the orphans of the storm to those within. Especially since I was holding a baby while his mother was soothing a fretful toddler.

Mr Maywrite and I married late in the year in one of the less popular months. In honour of the occasion he wore a tie. Meantime, in the interests of historical accuracy, I shall reveal my dress was black with a mille-fleur pattern. Yes, the bride wore black. Judge Valentino from down the street presided over the proceedings. Feel free to make jokes about it -- everyone else has!

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

We've thrown the ornamental iron gates of Maywrite Towers open to welcome our latest feature: Behind the Scenes, which will feature essays from guest authors. Our first contributor, Jane Tesh, author of the Grace Street Mysteries, writes about how fictional characters sometimes have their own ideas and one character in particular who said Let Me Tell It.

https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/p/weve-thrown-ornamental-iron-gates-of.html

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ERIC'S BIT or PAPER AND INK TO BITS AND BYTES

Years ago I gave up printed books for e-books. As a legal editor, I worked all day in front of a monitor years before home computers became available to non-geeks like me so I was never averse to reading off a screen. Besides, a story isn't a physical entity. Books -- paper and ink and glue -- are only a means of transmitting the ideas from an author's mind to a reader's mind.

Today you can grab digital files from the Internet any place you happen to be but when books were all real objects instead of electronic bits and bytes you had to go to real places like libraries and bookstores to find them. I recall hiking to the library over the highway and through town, past the drug store, the barber shop and the five and dime and staggering home weighted down with Dr. Seuss titles. You don't get that kind of exercise clicking the download button.

That was nothing compared to lugging huge tote bags of books along endless New York City blocks, like trekking through Death Valley in summer or the Donner Pass in winter. Catching a bus in the cavernous maze of the Port Authority was an adventure in itself.

These day-long expeditions into the city were, in large part, to hunt books that weren't native to small, local stores. There were trade paperbacks, an exotic species back in the day, reserved mostly for literary and foreign authors I'd barely heard of -- Alain Robbe-Grillet, Arthur Rimbaud, Max Frisch. On the lighter side, city stores carried British editions of science fiction novels with bright glossy covers that made American paperbacks look like country cousins.

Amazon was still only the name of a river but you could order books via snail mail directly from publishers. Along with your order the publisher would send a sheet listing all their titles, which made for exciting reading. More excitement was to be had at school where once a month everyone had the option to order from the offerings of Scholastic. Well, it was exciting for me but then I was always a reader.

There's no doubt that a thick stack of pristine paperbacks newly unboxed gives one more of a frisson than a "download complete" message on a computer screen.

I grew up with physical books but by the time I was born they had become less of an art form, as evidenced by my grandparents' bookshelves. There I found volumes with marbled endsheets, gilt edging, and slick frontispieces. As a very young child I thought it strange and wonderful to see colored pictures printed right on the covers rather than the jackets.

Books themselves were something new and magical, My grandmother sat with me in her living room rocking chair and read Heidi, The Wind in the Willows and the Old Mother West Wind stories by Thornton W. Burgess featuring such characters as Reddy Fox, Unc' Billy Possum, Danny Meadow Mouse and Grandfather Frog. I remember the meadows and forests they lived in but I also recall their habitat as being the oddly small books with two color pictures on the cover and humorous illustrations tipped in amongst the pages.

I can't help thinking about the law books I wrote and edited. I was writing with a computer almost forty years ago but the legal tomes to which I contributed were still printed, stuck between covers, and ended up on law office shelves. These days attorneys don't have to rummage through hundreds of bound volumes and enormous specialized indexes. They search electronic databases with a few keystrokes.

Most legal books are just decoration. The next time you're watching a show and the scene moves to a lawyer's office check out the books on the shelves. Chances are you see some beige volumes with a red band toward the top of the spine and a black band below. These are mostly part of the National Reporter System, which began back in 1879 and contains decisions of the federal courts and state appellate courts. You often see them -- inappropriately -- in the offices of doctors, business tycoons, apparently any place the set designers want official looking volumes.

I wouldn't be surprised if today more National Reporters weren't sold for scenery than for legal research -- a good example of the declining importance of books as we knew them.

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AND FINALLY

The Orphan Scrivener has always been of the electronic persuasion and always will be. We don't see bound volumes of this newsletter any time in the future. What we do see in the future is the next conglomeration of bytes and bits being transmitted into your inboxes on June 15th.

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 more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, 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 ilk. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our handles on the site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time!