THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # SIXTY-SIX -- 15 DECEMBER 2010

As we write it is 15* and we await the next big snowfall and the furnace repair technician. Thus we politely say to heck with William Hamilton Gibson's seeing silent snowflakes as individual gems and positively sneer at John Townsend Trowbridge's praise for snowfall paving the paths with pearl.

The frigid weather currently gripping much of the country reminds Mary of the oft-told family tale of the winter of 1946, when snow was piled up to the windowsills and coal was still on ration. At least the Reeds escaped having their coal stolen, as happened to a friend's parents. Folk legend has it the working class keeps their coal in the bath tub but since the terraced houses in which we grew up did not have bathrooms that would not have worked as a safeguard against nocturnal coal-pinchers. It does however raise the burning question: was it good or naughty children that winter who found a lump of coal in their Christmas stocking?

Before transmitting programmes considered to have disturbing content the BBC used to intone -- and may still -- an announcement to the effect that the following broadcast would not be suitable for persons of a nervous disposition. We would not say this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener will disturb such subscribers, but the only way to find out is to read on....

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ERIC'S BIT or THE LAST CHRISTMAS TREE STANDING

Someday natural Christmas trees will probably be about as common during the holidays as horse drawn sleighs. Even people who don't go in for the artificial sort weigh their trees down with so many ornaments (glass, ceramic, knitted, animated) and lights (blinking and bubbling, large and miniature) and so much tinsel, not to mention spray-on snow, that there might as well be a large garden gnome or a Dalek under it all.

Fake trees used to be all but unheard of. My grandparents didn't always buy a tree or cut one down. When I was a kid my dad's first Christmas tree was still growing behind the house where it had been planted decades before, by then a good 60 feet tall. There was a long row of tall pines beside the garden and more than once my grandfather cut the crown off one to use in the living room. In the fifties even the trees had flattops.

My parents were particular about trees. For years we had blue spruce. Beautiful to look at but the sharp needles made decorating the boughs a less than joyful experience.

My parents' trees also had to be straight as a plumb line. Maybe that's why I remember affectionately some of the forlorn trees I've since brought home -- trees that revealed huge gaps when their limbs thawed out and came down, trees with crooked or forked trunks. Still, it seemed in the spirit of the holidays to give those poor trees a good home, to dress them up and make them the center of attention, even if they weren't perfect.

I guess I always felt a little guilty about keeping a sacrificial tree in the house at Christmas. Maybe that's why I was reluctant to dispose of them. Most years I'd leave them up until the second or third week of January. As long as they stood in the corner decked out in lights and ornaments, their browning needles covered with layers of tinsel and artificial icicles, it was easy to ignore the reality of the situation.

The reality became only too clear, at last, as the water in the tree holder was never consumed, needles piled around the base, limbs drooped and twisted grotesquely, spilling glass balls onto the floor.

One January I got up and saw a denuded skeletal object, frozen in rigor mortis, bowed under the weight of dangling strings of lights, a wooden corpse propped up in the living room.

Tree pick-up day had long passed. It cost extra to have trees hauled away after the first week of the year. If only the body could fit into a heavy duty trash bag...

K-Mart boasted a liberal return policy. If an item did not prove suitable it could be returned, no questions asked, so long as you had the receipt. Checking to make sure the car's gas gauge was not too far below empty, I drove to the store and purchased the only saw they sold, a hacksaw of sorts made in Taiwan, and set to work on the tree.

An hour later I was bleeding profusely but the remains of the tree had been dismembered and hidden in a trash bag to be picked up by the unsuspecting sanitation workers.

The saw was in only slightly better shape than the tree. I took the twisted thing and the three broken spare blades back to K-Mart.

The store was good as its word. No one asked how I had managed to run over the saw with a steamroller, bury it in a landfill, dig it up and lend it to King Kong just as Godzilla came along looking for a Taiwanese hacksaw, in less than two hours. Nor did they remark on the bloody fingerprints on the receipt. In fact, they refunded my money very quickly indeed.

It was enough to buy gas to get me home for the final end of the holidays

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

This time around the ticker tape unspooling is fairly short, but that's appropriate as it concerns two short stories. Read on!

AFTER JOHN or MORE CRIME IN CONSTANTINOPLE

The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction will appear next year from Constable & Robinson in the UK and Running Press in the US. Editor Mike Ashley reveals the collection includes stories involving Peter Tremayne's Fidelma, Steven Saylor's Gordianus, and Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge. Other luminaries present include Tom Holt, archaeologist Tony Pollard, Richard Lupoff, and Ian Morson. Stories range in time from the Bronze Age to the eve of World War II. Unfortunately a damper is cast on proceedings by the presence of us ink-stained wretches with Eyes of the Icon, set in Constantinople two centuries after John's time.

CHRISTMAS GHOSTS or A THORNY TALE

The Thorn, a supernatural tale, will appear in the December 25th issue of the online magazine Kings River Life http://KingsRiverLife.com Editor Lorie Ham, author of the Alexandra Walters Gospel Singing Amateur Sleuth series. reveals our story will be found by pointing your clickers at the magazine's new mystery section, Mysteryrats Maze. In addition, an excerpt and link will be provided on the magazine's opening page from the 25th thru the 31st.

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MARY'S BIT or GOING ROUND IN CIRCLES

This past couple of years I've been trying my hand -- and doubtless readers' patience -- at writing reviews of Golden Age and classic mysteries.

Given the annual rash of Yuletide articles bearing titles such as Ten Frugal Christmas Gifts or Seven Recipes For Festive Dishes, I took the wink and here are some thoughts under the umbrella heading of Reed's Reviews Of Novels Whose Titles Refer To Circles One Way Or Another And Sometimes Both.

One of my favourite films is The Lady Vanishes, featuring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave as a young couple trying to discover how Dame May Whitty as the missing Miss Froy was spirited off a train in prewar Europe. Can anyone who has seen this film ever look a packet of herbal tea in the label again without thinking of Miss Froy? I've not read Ethel Lina White's The Wheel Spins, on which the film is based, or otherwise it would have been included in these scribbles, but I really enjoyed Ethel's The Spiral Staircase. Here's how I described it in a 2008 review:

It is a dark and very stormy night as the novel opens, for a terrible gale howls around Professor Sebastian's rambling but solidly built house, l2 miles from the nearest village. The entire countryside is gripped in terror after five local girls have been murdered, and once darkness falls few people venture abroad.

Protagonist Helen Capel works as "lady-help" to the scholarly professor, his chilly sister Blanche, who is firmly under the thumb of their invalid mother Lady Warren, who may or may have killed her husband "by accident" years before, and sinister, mannish Nurse Barker. There also the professor's son Newton, married to and insanely jealous of his flirtatious wife Simone, who has her eye on a fling with the professor's resident pupil Stephen Rice. Mr and Mrs Oates, faithful servants, round out the residents of the house, one of those rambling edifices with a warren of cellars, many rooms, and two staircases -- and not all of it fitted with electric light.

After learning of another murder committed not far from the house, Professor Warren announces that as a matter of safety everyone must stay inside and nobody is to be admitted under any circumstances that night. But just as he gives this order, there is a thunderous knocking at the front door....

As readers will have gathered, I really liked this book and indeed at the time named it my top read of the month.

Next, The Circular Study by Anna Katharine Green, concerning which I wrote the same year:

Oh joy, oh rapture! A mystery with a plan of the titular study!

What's more, the novel takes off at a brisk gallop. Octogenarian New York detective Ebenezer Gryce goes to Mr Adams' mansion after word of a crime there reaches the police department. And what does he find on entering the circular study? In the tapestry-hung, book-lined room with lighting whose colour can be changed at the press of a button, a room filled with curios and dominated by the portrait of a beautiful woman, lies a murdered man with a golden cross on his chest.

There were two witnesses: a deaf mute servant who has become mentally unbalanced by the sight and repeatedly re-enacts the murder and a talking bird described as an English starling, evidently a parrot, for it mimics speech.

Clues? Well, there's a scattering of rose leaves and several black sequins in the study, a pearl-handled parasol left behind, and a silver comb on the floor of the otherwise immaculately tidy bedroom opening off the study. Tracing whoever had been there is a tall task given the size of the city but Detective Gryce begins it, aided by Amelia Butterworth, an aristocratic and occasionally sharp tongued spinster of a certain age who has been involved in Gryce's investigations before, and his young assistant Sweetwater.

Casting an eye over the rest of the review I see the method of tracing certain persons of interest is noted as a particularly interesting demonstration of police leg work in the early l900s and that I recommended the book.

Fortunately for subscribers and the length of this newsletter I haven't yet finished Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase, though my review of The Bat, a novelisation of the stage adaptation by Mary and Avery Hopwood associated with the book, can be seen on Steve Lewis' Mystery*File website http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=125 Since Mary is credited with launching the Had I But Known school of mystery fiction, I can only say had I but known I'd be writing on this particular topic I'd have started reading The Circular Staircase sooner.

Finally, in the spirit of the seasonal lists mentioned we offer Four Extremely Frugal Gifts To Our Longsuffering Subscribers in the form of links to etexts of the novels:

The Spiral Staircase, Ethel Lina White http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300931.txt

The Circular Study, Anna Katherine Green http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18761/18761-h/18761-h.htm

The Bat, Mary Roberts Rinehart & Avery Hopwood http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2019

The Circular Staircase, Mary Roberts Rinehart http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/RinCirc.html

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AND FINALLY

Honore de Balzac reckoned tradesmen regarded authors with a mixture of compassion, curiosity, and terror. Unfortunately he did not give any opinion on what subscribers might feel upon contemplating future Orphan Scriveners flapping into view. Hopefully none of our gallant band are of a nervous disposition, so we'll close with warmest wishes for the holiday season and the blood freezing reminder the next issue will be emailed on February 15th.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

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

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # SIXTY-FIVE -- 15 OCTOBER 2010

The year draws to a close, so foggy mornings are now regularly tippy-toeing in just as described in Carl Sandburg's well-known lines, but hereabouts the fog is taking longer to desert the landscape as the days turn colder. October advances inexorably to its close and the sunshine thins visibly. Shadows are becoming bluer as autumn slides into yellow, gold, and scarlet, sunset is earlier and sunrise later, and Old Man Winter leers over the horizon promising short, dark days and frigid nights.

Speaking of which, James Montgomery described night as a lively masquerade of daytime. We leave our subscribers to decide on the liveliness or otherwise of this issue of Orphan Scrivener, internationally renowned for masquerading as a newsletter.

Read on!

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MARY'S BIT or CAT-ASTROPHES

Speaking of little cat feet, years ago I cat-sat for a week on behalf of a family whose feline, according to legend, had once gone a little way up the chimney, fortunately without injury to cat or chimney.

However, that particular week the cat's luck ran out as it left the house via the kitchen window on Thursday morning and was never seen again.

In my childhood one or two cats also mysteriously disappeared -- was it perhaps something we said? -- although on one memorable occasion the cat returned, only to expire under my chair from the effects of the poison local racing pigeon fanciers were wont to spread on the roofs of their pigeon lofts. And then a couple of weeks before I emigrated my cat was struck by a car but managed to make its way back home only to expire on the front door step, as I found to my horror on opening the door.

However, the current feline in residence has been smiled upon by Fortuna, since she's been pussy-footing around for twenty-one years now. Her birthday was on 15th September, chosen because it was the approximate date she would have been born given when she was weaned. As it happens, September 15th is also Agatha Christie's birthday but the coincidence did not strike me for some years.

This year it also marked the date when, as Eric observed, if human Sabrina could legally drink alcohol in her birth state of New York. We may only whisper about the cat nip headache she developed one Christmas...

Apparently the oldest recorded cat was just over 38 when it died, so Sabrina is still a lively young thing by comparison. In her youth she was in the habit of launching a vertical takeoff to catch a fly between her front paws and usually succeeding. Nowadays she rests on her laurels to such an extent that on one occasion when a field mouse ventured indoors she and it were nose to nose and she did not even raise a paw to admonish its temerity.

It may be Sabrina considers herself too elderly to jump over the moon with a stringed instrument or go out of her way to gaze at a royal personage. As for catching flies, we'll see that acrobatic maneuver again before the cat licks her ear, as they say.

No, nowadays she prefers to stay earthbound, or rather Eric's-knees-bound, for she's velcroed to them whenever the temperature drops below a certain point. And talk about dirty looks when she has to get down.

Speaking of talking, had she been Dick Whittington's companion, she'd never have advised him to such effect that he became Lord Mayor of London, for originally she rarely produced more than a squeak. It was after she recovered from being tranquilized for the long journey in a laundry basket when we moved to Pennsylvania that she suddenly found her voice. Now she exercises it often by transforming herself into a furry alarm clock and squawking if she thinks we are too long abed.

Sages through the ages have pondered on what it is cats think about when they look inscrutable. My theory is if they're not wondering when they'll get their next kitty treat it's a rueful contemplation of their descent to their present lowly position from the glory days when they were worshipped in Egypt to such an extent they were transformed into dear little cat mummies when they shuffled off their furry coil.

Sabrina, however, while she sheds fur furiously at times has not yet reached that point, so we expect she'll be around making kitty nose-prints on the windows for a few years yet.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

...tick tick tick...what's this? The ticker tape blank again?...tick tick tick...stay tuned....tick tick tick....

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ERIC'S BIT or THE FALL WALL

Mary and I have begun writing our ninth Byzantine mystery. We're a hundred pages in, but the book doesn't yet have a name. The story revolves around the death of Empress Theodora in late June, 548 AD.

It surely was hot in mid-summer in Constantinople. So while John carries out his investigation in sweltering streets and forums and the stifling corridors of the Great Palace the temperatures here continue to fall. By the time we finish snow will likely be piled up outside our office window while the cobblestones in the alley running behind the Baths of Zeuxippos will be almost too hot for the city's stray dogs to lie upon.

We have not been ordered by the emperor to solve a seemingly impossible crime. Nothing that dramatic goes on in our household. We are stocking the shelves for the coming winter, for the weeks when we will be snowed in.

Winter appears to be advancing more rapidly in town than it is in our back yard. The trees surrounding the clearing in which our house sits drop their leaves late. We're still in an oasis of green but when I drive to the grocery store, as soon as I reach the highway, I am propelled weeks forward in time, into the later autumn where trees have turned brilliant reds and yellows or already display their bare branches to a sky that looks more distant to me than the skies of summer.

In the stores the calendar has been turned even further forward as evidenced by shelves decorated not only with Halloween bats and pumpkins but with the jolly Santas and snowmen of Christmas.

I drive all the way from September to Christmas to pick up some tins of sliced beets and carrots.

My grandmother canned for the winter. This time of year she would still be laboring over the coal stove in a steamy kitchen, the table covered with jars. Every wall of the basement was lined with shelves and every shelf would be filled with canned beets, corn, rhubarb, jelly, jam. She made a dozen sorts of pickle relish. There were big clay tubs in the basement where gherkins brewed. Squash, potatoes, rutabagas, and turnips were spread out on newspapers.

I trundle my bags of tins out to the car. I guess I'm not as ambitious as my grandparents. My grandfather dug out a cellar by hand before I was born. It is family history, not anything I witnessed.

Once the groceries are put away, I look over what we have written so far about the summer of 548. A fictional summer, although based on what historians know about the real weather.

Like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Christian in Slaughterhouse Five, we are all unstuck in time. Within a couple hours I move from the 6th century to this coming Christmas. We are equally adrift in the real, the imagined, the recalled, and the misremembered.

Our physical selves are carried forward inexorably by time, like the brown leaves skidding across the roof outside our office window. But our minds occupy their own worlds, which become more layered and complicated the older we get. So often the present is overlaid by a ghostly image from the past, or a fictional image from a book.

Perhaps fiction has such a hold on us because our minds are not tightly bound to the here and the now and what really is. The stories we read, while we are reading them, can easily hold their own, and appear just as real as all those jumbled memories and imaginings we live amidst.

The sun has gone in now. The space heater is whirring, but the office still feels cold. The last page I wrote the sun was beating down on the dome of the Great Church in Constantinople and waves of heat were rising from the pavement so that the great square before the church looked as if it was underwater. I think I need to put on a sweater before getting back to that scene.

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AND FINALLY

G. K. Chesterton once remarked the notion that there's something around the corner gives an overall radiance to the world. We interpret that as an encouragement to hope for the best for the future. Subscribers however may not agree with Chesterton, given the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will come around the corner into their email in-box on 15th December.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

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

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # SIXTY-FOUR -- 15 AUGUST 2010

Scottish poet James Thomson enthused about the brilliant heat of the summer months but we suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, that had he experienced the sort of mad dog heat wave the east coast has lain under this past several weeks he would be less than thrilled about the prospect of brazen sunshine for so long and a bit more grateful for that misty, cool weather in which Scotland so often rejoices.

Right now, we would rejoice in it too.

It's only mid August and already a number of trees hereabouts are sporting yellowing patches, with scarlet banners flaunting themselves atop a pair of sumac trees near the office. There's been talk of drought and the rising risk of fires started in bone dry woods by careless visitors. Still, the typical late summer night soundtrack of crickets serenading their mates reminds us summer is fleeting and autumn will soon enough be gone down the pike after it, having ushered in the season of many peoples' discontent.

And speaking of discontent, with the arrival of this latest newsletter the Complaints Department at Casa Maywrite is now open for business. Naturally we trust no one will need to avail themselves of its services -- but the only way to find out is for subscribers to read on!

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ERIC'S BIT or THE LURE OF THE WHITE WORM

I write a lot about the past -- about history, about my own past. Too much probably. I have a terrible memory. There's a fog perpetually rolling along at my back. I turn around and everything that's happened is gone, obscured by a gray wall within which I can glimpse only a few misty ghosts. Writing about my childhood is practically like writing fiction.

Where does memory begin? Would there be anything to remember from the womb? What do the unborn think about? As neural circuits and chemistry develop is there a moment of pure awareness in the warm, dark sensory deprivation chamber? What does the functioning mind contemplate, without recollections or experience of the world? I imagine heartbeats must fill the whole universe.

I am certainly not among those who claim to recall their own birth. Far from it. My earliest memories are undated, but I know they don't go back very far.

There is a snapshot of my dad standing in a doorway. For some reason I sense it is raining outside. There's something gloomy about the picture. My dad wears a long overcoat of the sort he always put on over his suit to go to his teaching job. He must be coming home. The memory holds no sense of myself. It is nothing more than a scene observed without reaction. Perhaps I am really just remembering an old snapshot that was lost before our family photo albums were assembled.

On the other hand I have distinct recollections of fear. I was afraid of the open stairs leading down from the second story porch behind the apartment where my family lived. I recall the huge spaces between the steps -- big enough to fall through I imagined -- but mostly I recall the fear. I even remember terrible dreams about those stairs, or maybe it is only the dreams I remember. There also remains in my mind the disembodied fear of a huge, ferocious dog that lurked in the alley alongside the apartment. Did I ever encounter the dog? Did it really exist? I have no idea.

One day I looked down into the alley and saw a boy going past with his hair cut into a Mohawk. I was amazed. That I remember. I can't picture the interior of the apartment where I lived.

There is one other memory that might be the earliest of all. I am seated in a high chair, in a darkened room. A black and white television set dominates my attention. The show is called "Willie the Worm." I am pretty sure I am wearing a Willie the Worm bib and eating off a Willie the Worm plate.

A Google search yields a little information about a Willie the Worm children's show that was locally televised back in the early fifties, which would fit.

http://www.broadcastpioneers.com/willietheworm.html

What does it say about me, if the first memorable impression I had of the world is a worm made out of a vacuum cleaner hose sporting over-sized sunglasses?

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

...tick tick tick...what's this? The ticker tape is blank this time...tick tick tick...stay tuned....tick tick tick....we expect to announce news of a new short story next time around and possibly Other Stuff...tick tick tick...

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MARY'S BIT or A PASSION FOR PASSION FRUIT

The presence of hummus and stuffed grape leaves in our pantry remind us an ordinary supermarket offers bounty that would have astonished John Masefield, despite his Ninevehian ship's cargo of apes and ivory and peacocks.

But it's not just savoury offerings that bring the world to our door. We both like fruit and recently purchased a tin of jack fruit. Perusing the label revealed the contents had been grown in Thailand and distributed by a company located in the Caribbean. Its taste had one of those hard to pin down, this fruit and that sort of tang.

Unlike many other comestibles, however, it did not taste like chicken.

Jack fruit was a new venture for us, though we've purchased exotica such as mangos, guavas, papayas, fuzzy kiwi fruits, figs, and tangelos locally at one time or another. As I type there's a tropical collation of papaya and pineapple in passion fruit juice in the fridge, a favourite cold snack for another hot night.

Notice all the names beginning with p? It was the same in childhood, for much of the fruit we ate bore the same initial. Often it was tinned. There were pears, gritty on the tongue, peaches -- John Whitcomb Riley remarked the highest branches held the ripest but supermarket shelves long since did away with that distinction -- and dark, wrinkled prunes in sweet juice. When our pudding was custard-drowned prunes or plums we ended our meal by arranging their pits or stones around the edges of our plates so we could forecast the occupations of our future spouses with the aid of a rhyme chanted while counting them off: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, beggar man, poor man, thief.

I am here to tell you that rhyme lied.

Of course we also ate fresh fruit. Some was seasonal, at our house if not in the grander scheme of fruit cultivation. There were tissue-wrapped tangerines in the toes of Christmas stockings and usually a narrow box of dates would show up on the sideboard during the festive season. The oblong box arrived with a little lace-like frill around its inside edges, a small plastic fork with which to spear its contents, and a stern warning from our mother to mind our teeth didn't get broken on the pits.

That fate I escaped, only to lose part of a tooth to a hard sugar-shelled almond in my twenties.

For some reason we never used those dangerous date pits to prophesy the man we'd marry. Perhaps they would have provided more reliable information if we had.

Then there was the humble banana, made into sandwiches or sliced into our cornflakes, squirt-in-your-eye grapefruit, sweet, thick skinned Jaffa oranges, and an occasional pomegranate, not consumed quickly due to the time needed to winkle out its hundreds of the small red pulpy bits containing its seeds. And eating apples. I distinguish them from cooking apples because I preferred, and still do, the more acid cookers, so would hang around the kitchen waiting to grab gowks (apple cores) when apple crumbles or tarts were a-making, if I was not baking them myself. And occasionally there might be a bag of cherries, a fruit of trees that, according to A. E. Housman, wear white for Easter, or perhaps grapes, purple-black or green, like healing bruises.

Whether tinned or fresh, fruit had the great virtue of leavening meals that tended to the stodgy and were usually washed down with heavily sugared tea. They were good nourishment for labouring men, heavy on stick to the ribs fare such as fry-ups using lard or dripping to cook eggs, black pudding, sausages, chips, bread, thick rashers of bacon with rinds sporting hieroglyphs, a narrow portion of the Danish stamp impressed upon sides of bacon, or combinations of same. Not to mention Spotted Dick and similar steamed suet puddings and endless slices of bread and butter. The butter was Danish too, though any lamb consumed would invariably be from New Zealand. Snuggling up to the main course on dinner plates might be a serving of peas or green beans, carrots or cabbage, cauliflower or potatoes in many disguises, working class representatives of the vegetable world. Tripe appeared on the menu now and then, pigeon at times, and the traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Sundays.

Since those days, while I have picked grapefruit in Florida and grown melons in the Midwest, still I have yet to harvest a banana, orange, pomegranate, or many examples of exotic fruit -- except from a supermarket shelf.

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AND FINALLY

Despite the heat, autumn is advancing inexorably, the season William Cullen Bryant described as the final and loveliest smile of the year. However, October 15th, though glorious colour might still tint the landscape, may prove to be a day notable for gloomy looks, as the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will fall into subscribers' in-boxes that very day.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

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

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