THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # TWENTY-ONE -- l5 JUNE 2003

William Blake can declaim all he wants about beholding summer with joy, but given the dreadful heat currently half suffocating the eastern coast, a glance at the humidity hanging in white veils all over our lime-green landscape so strongly suggests the Amazonian rain forest that we almost expect to see a monkey swing by on an orange-flowered cat's claw vine or hear the mournful trumpet of a grazing elephant somewhere in the steamy distance. Of course, since elephants are not generally found in the vicinity of the Amazon, readers should feel free to put that last remark down to literary licence aka the writer's fig leaf.

We're more in agreement with Rossiter Johnson's thoughts as conveyed in Ninety-Nine In The Shade, wherein he longs for a dwelling in a cucumber garden, a couple of icebergs, or even a holiday trip to the north pole. Since the thermometer has yet to reach that high, although doubtless it will, Oscar, it will, we have not taken to lounging about on deck chairs or arranging a fortnight's sojourn in colder climes. Instead, we've been labouring away over our June newsletter -- and so now here it is, hot off the press.

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MARY'S BIT or CHANGING A BATHROOM WASHER

When Eric declared he needed a crowbar we realised that changing a bathroom washer was not going to be an easy task. And it didn't help that we had only two hammers and a pair of semi-stripped screwdrivers to do the job.

Lest readers think that employing a hammer to repair a tap is somewhat excessive, I should reveal that the item in question was, in fact, a washing machine and our problem (apart from the fact it had conked out and could not be repaired) was that it was too wide to get out the bathroom door.

The laundry machine in question was a twenty or so years old Harvest Gold behemoth, and it was obvious that to get it in there the bathroom door and part of the wall had had to be removed. Not being builders, we decided it would be simpler to dismantle the washer in situ and haul it out piece-meal rather than start tearing down walls.

I was reminded of Bernard Cribbins' comical song about Fred and a pair of his friends struggling to move something not actually specified, although it was definitely very large and from its described encrustations has always struck me as likely being of Victorian vintage. Anyhow, they have such a terrible time of it that at one point Charlie, one of Fred's helpers, suggests taking off the thing's handles and candle-holders and then using a couple of ropes to accomplish the job. To no avail.

We thought we'd come up with an inventive solution, even without the cups of tea Fred and company endlessly imbibed while considering their difficulties. However, when we began to dismantle the washer we discovered they sure made them to last in those days. It took an hour with hammers and screwdrivers before we managed to remove the back portion holding the timer and other controls along with the top containing the lid and the front panel. Getting the latter off revealed that the drum was attached to yards of wiring and piping and switches and such, to free it from which took a fair amount of labour.

The drum was by far the washer's heaviest part and therefore caused the most trouble, because being held in place by its own weight and four huge springs that could have launched a 747 did they form a catapulting device, it was a terrible struggle to get the quartet of metal coils sufficiently out of shape to unhook the drum. But with minimal bloodshed we managed to pull it off, turned the washer on its side, and triumphantly rolled the drum out of the bathroom.

This left a somewhat dented metal cube to be extracted from the bathroom. We tried the getting-a-couch-around-a-door-post manouevre, but the frame was just an inch or two too wide no matter how we angled it.

Inspiration struck! If we could somehow make one side narrower we could get the frame out using that particular side as the leading edge. But how to do that, you may well ask. Well, we reasoned, sinnce the bar bracing the side panels runs from corner to corner across the front, if it could be hammered into a v-shape -- the front panel itself having already been removed as mentioned -- this in turn would pull the side panels in towards each other and thus narrow their width just enough to be able to get the wretched thing out through the currently impassable doorway.

So it turned out to be.

It was when we brought the new apartment-sized washer home that we discovered although we had carefully measured the width of the bathroom door we had completely overlooked extra inches added when the washer was packed and boxed. So we could not get it in through the front door. However, since a passing kindly downpour was steadily reducing the cardboard packaging back to its original pulp, we eventually wrassled it inside, soggy but triumphant. The washer cleared the bathroom doorway with an inch to spare -- and it didn't need any encouraging taps with a hammer to help it along either.

Just in case you're wondering, Fred and his colleagues also tried taking the mysterious item's feet and seat off, but that didn't help either. Neither did removing the door, walls *and* ceiling so in the end whatever it was was left on the landing.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Only three items on the ticker this time, but talk about news!

LIST TO THIS NEWS or FOUR FOR A SURPRISE

We were honoured indeed to hear in May that this year's Mystery Showcase edition of the American Library Association's Booklist Magazine included John's adventures on its Best Little-Known Series list. Only four series were named, the other three being written by Beth Saulnier (Alex Bernier), Jess Walter (Caroline Mabry) and Ed Gorman (Sam McCain).

WRITING TOGETHER or UNEXPECTED COMPANY

We learnt just as we dragged Orphan Scrivener off to press that a revised edition of The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing a Modern Whodunit (edited by William G. Tapply) will appear from Kalmbach Publishing in 2004 -- and further that Hallie Ephron's chapter on how writing teams collaborate mentions some of our meanderings on that very topic. And talk about being in good company! Multi-headed authors examined include Ellery Queen, Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall. Our thanks to Hallie for including us in such august company.

FOURFER REVIEWS or JOHN SEES STARS

We are happy to report that Four For a Boy has received *starred* reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Booklist. "Written with humor and pathos, this superior historical is sure to please existing fans and send new ones in search of the rest of the series" according to PW, while Booklist's David Pitt says "At some point, every great series needs an "origin story," and this one's a real corker."

John's elderly servant Peter will now circulate among you offering cups of raw Egyptian wine. 8-}

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ERIC'S BIT or BORDERING ON FICTION

Poisoned Pen Press provides a map of Constantinople at the front of each of our books. It's a nice touch. There's a print-out of such a map sitting on my desk and already I've marked in red pen the places John is visiting as we write the fifth novel, trying to envision what route he might take, how long a walk it would be, what he'd pass along the way, and whether he could see the Marmara or the Golden Horn.

Maps have always fascinated me. By itself a map is a scale model of the world. A series of maps can tell a visual story. When I was a kid I loved to draw successive maps of imaginary worlds. Countries would appear, grow, wither away. Empires would rise, wash across bizarrely shaped continents and then recede. Maybe I was inspired by maps of the ancient world and especially of Rome, born a speck of a city state, growing to encompass the Mediterranean, before gradually dying, shrinking away once again into the single besieged city of Constantinople.

My friends and I enacted history by playing board games. RISK allowed us to spread armies of markers across a map of the world, taking over one country after another, nicely mimicking the manner in which a proper empire, like Rome, should grow. We much preferred, however, the long forgotten SUMMIT. This was also played out on a map, but the goal was to exert combinations of economic influence, military power and popular support in as many countries as possible. Colorful plastic tokens created a nice graphical representation of one's attempts at world domination. I can't recall exactly, but I think if you triggered a nuclear war, you lost.

Although maps of the ancient world are fascinating they are also misleading. Drawn the same way as modern maps with the same precise boundaries, they give the impression of being documentary, yet they are really, like movies of the week, oversimplified, more cartographic fiction than reality. In the ancient world borders were not as clear cut as they are today and notions of political control were not the same. To envision Rome as a nation state would be as anachronistic as imagining Justinian composing new laws on a laptop.

The parts of a map colored as The Eastern Roman Empire differed considerably more than, say, California and Maine. In the capital itself, being part of the Empire meant regulations even down to making certain new construction didn't obstruct someone's view of the sea, while in Africa Roman control tended not to extend outside the cities and Egypt was pretty much allowed to retain its heretical religious views.

It strikes me the lines on the maps didn't mean as much to the people living in those times. Long before Rome "fell" in 476, Italy was in the hands of German military commanders, who were content to allow Romans to run the civil administration. Our maps today show a huge change when the pretense of Roman control was dispensed with -- Italy suddenly thrust outside the sturdy border of the Empire, its land turned the color of barbarism. Yet the lives of most in Italy didn't alter. More were probably affected by the bloody wars over the "boundaries" than the actual change.

Relations between the East and West continued. Borders weren't closed, walls didn't go up. An official like Cassiodorus could spend the first part of his career advising Theodoric, the Gothic king of Italy -- who paid lip service to affiliation with the Eastern Empire -- and the latter part in Constantinople. Although Gaul was by now far removed from the map of Rome, Theodoric had extended his influence there in the early 500's and an official from his court, where Roman style administration was still maintained, sent to administer a part of Gaul would probably not have noticed what is now such a prominent cartographic difference.

The actual boundaries of Constantinople are, on the other hand, quite clear. The massive, outer land walls erected by Theodosius, with its towers and moat, still exists. Unfortunately, little else does. A typical map of the ancient capital shows the forked Mese -- the Main Street of the Eastern Roman Empire -- dotted by a few forums, the Great Church, the Hippodrome, and the general location of the Great Palace. Of the streets John walked, let alone all the twisty, dark alleys he and his friends still insist on frequenting even though they really should know better, there remains hardly a trace. Aside from the Mese there survives no fragment of a street longer than 100 meters. Scholars are attempting to recreate a street grid by reference to remaining monuments and ruins. The actual location of well known buildings is sometimes conjectural and even the size of famous public spaces like the Augustaion -- of which nothing survives -- is a matter of dispute.

Still, I love looking at maps, no matter that ancient ones might purport to show more than is actually known. The De Imperatoribus Romanis website at http://www.roman-emperors.org/Index.htm has a wonderful series of maps of the Roman Empire at 100 year intervals from 01 to 1453 AD. If, on the other hand, you want to play with maps, try out this "ancient" (1986) freeware computer game, The Annals of Rome, at http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=59. Thanks to the lack of computer graphics at the time it is little more than a map on which you can, one hopes, manage to expand your territory just as the emperors did, by appointing the right commanders and allocating armies and resources wisely. Unfortunately, in the game as in actual history, the Germans and Persians keep coming. Alas, like the emperors, I fought history and history won.

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AND FINALLY

Romans celebrated the festival of Cardea at the beginning of June, honouring her as goddess of thresholds, hinges, locks and doors as well as one who possessed the power to close or open that which was open or shut. So it's only fitting we close this June newsletter by noting that having reached our twenty-first edition, Orphan Scrivener has now formally come of age. In the UK in former times it would therefore have been presented with an oversized cardboard silver key such as British 2l year olds received on the day -- and also perhaps even tossed up and down the appropriate number of times in a blanket.

However, in most US states the age of majority is now l8 and so instead of a quick chorus of 2l Today (the traditional serenade declaring the birthday honoree had now officially received the key to the door, never having been 2l before) we'll have to content ourselves with closing this landmark issue by locking it down for transmission with a closing reminder that the next Orphan Scrivener will flap through your email door on l5th August. See you then!

Best wishes
Mary and Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the aether at

http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/

Therein you'll find the usual suspects, including more personal essays and an interactive game as well as an on-line jigsaw puzzle (at least if you have a java-enabled browser) featuring One For Sorrow's boldly scarlet cover. For those new to the subscription list there's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned!

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER ISSUE # TWENTY l5 APRIL 2003

Like the spectre at the feast or the skeleton in the cupboard, there lurks in many a corner tonight the ghastly thought that the deadline for the timely filing of US tax returns is well and truly upon us. That mild man Lewis Carroll probably shared the feeling, since when he listed an eclectic collection of things he hated he included three folk under one umbrella, spiders, gout and the income tax. And now, alas, as if American subscribers had not already suffered enough with April l5th being Tax Day of Doom, here comes this edition of Orphan Scrivener. Hopefully it will distract readers for a while -- or else drive them to distraction. Either way, feel free to stop chewing your pencil, put aside the aspirin and instruction booklets and dive right in!

ERIC'S BIT or A FEW THOUGHTS ON WRITING

Recently I read Stephen King's ON WRITING. His thoughts were of interest me because he's one of my favorite authors, not to mention one of the great writers of our time

In my opinion.

Not everyone agrees. I knew a fellow with a literary bent but no publisher, for whom the name Stephen King was the epitome of opprobrium. "It's no wonder good writers can't get published anymore, with all these bestselling hacks like Stephen King out to make a buck," he'd say.

I, on the other hand, am pretty sure that if I could write half as well as Stephen King, John the Eunuch would be a household name and people would be reading the books Mary and I write a century or more from now, just as they'll still be reading King and Dickens, another famous hack.

I believe King's books will stand the test of time better than almost all the literary fiction produced in the past fifty years. They deal with a basic human concern, a subject that isn't a passing fad, and one that has particularly poignancy for our era -- fear.

In his first inaugural address President Franklin Roosevelt told Americans they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Given the advances in human knowledge and abilities, he was right. Mankind finally has the wherewithal to vanquish disease, starvation, ignorance, injustice. Yet for the past half century we've been driven blindly on by a succession of fears. Reds under our beds, juvenile delinquents, missile gaps, crime, drugs, Japan buying up all the real estate in America (remember that one?) There was a time in the sixties when more than a few parents seemed to be afraid of their own idealistic kids. How much more could have been accomplished if we hadn't expended so much energy and so many resources on compiling black lists and building back yard fallout shelters and waging wars on shadows? Out of fear. Today, of course, its terror we're instructed to be afraid of -- fear itself -- the very thing Roosevelt warned us was most destructive of all.

I'm not saying that Stephen King has in mind to pontificate about any of this -- that's just me. He'd probably say it was nonsense. Actually he'd put it more pungently. Still, I don't think it's a coincidence that his primary subject fascinates our fear-shackled society.

So I wanted to know what Stephen King had to say about writing.

Nothing startling, it turned out. Nothing much different from what any teacher might have told me. Or what I might've told myself. As King admits, "Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do-not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad."

No kidding. Probably that's why I'm practically shaking every time I open up a new blank document.

Still, it was fascinating to see what he thought was important and what was not and which of the familiar techniques and bits of advice on which he chose to focus. I couldn't help comparing his manner of writing to what Mary and I do.

One big difference is that King doesn't like outlines. Mary and I write the John novels from detailed outlines because we can't think of how else to keep everything in order while co-writing a mystery. If we were to write individually I would still use an outline but Mary wouldn't. Oddly, King mentions INSOMNIA as one of the few books for which he used an outline. He doesn't like it much, but it's a favorite of mine.

On the other hand, King approaches those literary darlings, symbolism and theme, almost exactly as Mary and I do. For King symbolism and theme are not carefully concocted literary tricks, but simply things which are revealed as he unearths the story and which, when he notices them, he proceeds to polish and enhance, not to impress critics, but to enrich the reader's experience. Which is exactly what Mary and I do. As a book nears completion we will add a scene here and a paragraph there, to highlight some interesting thread we've noticed.

Wow. We're doing something right! That's encouraging.

I'm sure there are those who will sneer that there's nothing to be learned from a popular author because if the writing were good the masses wouldn't buy it. There are probably others who would counter that the only writing they consider "good" is writing that sells.

Both are wrong. Good writing sells, but sales are not the sole measure of good writing. I can't know for certain, but I doubt that many writers, even bestselling ones, are thinking about dollars all the time they are writing, any more than Sammy Sosa is thinking about how much he's earning every time he swings a baseball bat.

Not surprisingly, King nails it when he says that the most important thing about writing is "the language." Certainly. That's the raw material, the essence. That's what we are concentrating on. Trying to find the right word, shape the perfect sentence. At the end of the day some have written books that will bring in a fortune, but that isn't what it is about.

I must say, though, as much as I love Stephen King's books, and wish him all the success in the world (and how can't you like a guy who loves both baseball and the Ramones?) still I kind of hope he won't start writing historical mysteries. I might never be able to approach my word processor again!

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

The BSP Ticker's taken the day off, since there's no news to pass along this time, alas. Will Try To Do Better Next Time. Next Time. In the meantime, however, we can remind you that books one to three of the John the Eunuch series are available in trade paperback, while two to four are out in hardback. You may also find some of our stories in various anthologies such as The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits.

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MARY'S BIT or REEDS AS RENT

Some years ago I asked a person at the IRS if they ever accepted items in lieu of taxes, after the ancient fashion of quit-rents. Rather startled, she replied they did not, not realising I was pulling the collective legs of the Service, I being at the time young and unskillful (though not, per Kipling, a gambling kid ordained to be sold).

Having emerged this very morning from a hand-to-hand struggle to wrassle this year's tax returns to the floor, while gloomily contemplating cheques to go with them I found myself recalling that long ago conversation and thereby began musing about so-called peppercorn rents.

I must say I find it an attractive notion, especially when quit-rents really are tendered in peppercorns.

Trinity Church on New York's Broadway paid 279 of them to Elizabeth II on the occasion of her l976 visit to the church, this being one for each year since William III decreed their rent would be one peppercorn a year. Presumably the Crown waived interest on the arrearage, seeing as it was Bicentennial year. Similarly, in St George, Bermuda, every April the Freemason Lodge hands over a single peppercorn to the governor as payment for its use of the State House. Talk about a bargain rent!

On the other hand, the government charges the Cayman Islands National Museum an annual rent of a coil of locally produced thatch rope. Unfortunately the record appears silent as to what happens to these lengths of rope once they pass into the landlords' hands -- perhaps they just hang about in an official warehouse somewhere?

Like coils of rope, some quit-rents were originally vastly more useful to property owners than they are nowadays. Consider that each year in London the City Solicitor hands over six enormous horseshoes of the type used for knights' chargers -- apparently these particular specimens are over 500 years old -- plus an appropriate number of nails to a representative of the Crown. The ironmongery is payment for leasing certain ancient land, although it's said nowadays nobody is certain where the property is actually situated although it's thought to be in the Chancery Lane area.

You might think that this sort of unusual rent would become increasingly difficult to find each year given that such horseshoes are scarce on the ground not to mention the hoof these days, but in fact the City Solicitor overcomes the problem with ease. After he's handed the rent to the Crown representative and it's been solemnly counted and accounted for, the City Solicitor takes horseshoes and nails back and keeps them for next year's "payment"!

Flowers are a popular form of quit-rent. For example, each June a landlord in Leicester pays four old pennies and one rose to the mayor as rent for the Crown and Thistle pub. One's sense of the fitness of things might be outraged that a rose and not a thistle forms part of this annual payment, but on the other hand whereas those sweet-scented blooms are fairly easy to find in mid-summer, as time passes old pennies must surely be getting more and more difficult to scratch up. It's always possible that eventually the Crown and Thistle's rent might be changed to, say, half a print of best bitter and a rose, an eminently practical solution if so.

Another homely quit-rent involves the Covent Garden Area Trust. Since the early l990s an annual payment of a apple and a posy has been levied each June on the Trust's tenants, which include the famous fruit and vegetable market and nearby associated historic buildings such as several houses in a Georgian terrace as well as a block that includes the London Transport Museum.

So the seemingly absurd idea of handing over flowers or rope or spices to pay one's taxes -- which we might characterise as rent for the privilege of working -- is not that far fetched, although admittedly the problem of storing all that stuff might well prove unsurmountable. More importantly for the individual, though, is how would the IRS know who paid with what rose if the Service subsequently had an axe to grind with the hapless taxpayer?

All well and good, you may say, but what about the header to this section? Well, since l958 a reed has been presented annually to the Royal Hospital School in Holbrook, Norfolk, as payment for villagers' recreational use of the school's Reade Field, thus proving the British, as well as the Byzantines, are fond of puns.

Unfortunately it's pounds, not puns, the British equivalent of the IRS would like to see.

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AND FINALLY

Not to tax your patience any longer, we'll bring this edition to a close with the observation that the next newsletter will sneak into your email in-box on June l5th, St Vitus' Day. Among other things the saint is commonly invoked against oversleeping, dog bites, storms and lightning. However, we trust when Orphan Scrivener 2l arrives two months from today it'll be the only disaster with which you must cope on that particular date. See you then!

Best wishes
Mary and Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the aether at

http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/

Therein you'll find the usual suspects, including more personal essays and an interactive game as well as an on-line jigsaw puzzle (at least if you have a java-enabled browser) featuring One For Sorrow's boldly scarlet cover. For those new to the subscription list there's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned!

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER ISSUE # NINETEEN l5 FEBRUARY 2003

If Will Shakespeare had been living on the east coast this winter, we wonder if he'd have had a character in Much Ado About Nothing need to ask why someone had a "February face", to wit, one that was frosty, cloudy and stormy. Most coastal residents have had drifts of snow heaped about in greater or lesser amounts and for varying lengths of time since early December, although we count ourselves fortunate in having to deal with only two episodes of frozen pipes -- so far.

Still, it's an ill wind that freezes your plumbing. Local ponds have been thronged with ice fishermen, whose little shelters and flaring lanterns can be seen as late as midnight on occasion, even though it would surely be easier to purchase piscine portions at the grocery store. Just seeing them out there on the windswept ice made most passersby shiver.

Continuing with the theme of chilling the marrows of innocent onlookers, we now present this latest edition of Orphan Scrivener. Please dress warmly before proceeding.

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MARY'S BIT or BAAAAA'D CRIMES

We recently heard that a copy of Two For Joy has gone missing from a library out west and are not certain whether to consider the event a left-handed compliment from someone who could not bear to part with the book or an act intended to protest against the Michaelites' belief in the Quadrinity rather than the Trinity.

However, Twofer's strange disappearance turned my thoughts to thefts in general. Some have obvious motives, such as when Les Miz's Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread for his starving nephew. In such cases the loot soon disappears, and thus we can be fairly certain those responsible for recent Italian hijackings of lorry loads of dried cod (and in one case a haul of frozen swordfish and octopus) and the light-fingered Larries who ran off with over seventy lambs belonging to a Yorkshire farmer disposed of the evidence quickly, either on their own dinner table or someone else's.

Similarly, whoever contrived to steal 32,000 pigs ears from a pet food store in Denmark this month presumably had a ready market of dog owners keen to get a few cut-price treats for their pets -- although one wonders how so many boxes could have been removed from the emporium without someone noticing the activity.

Occasionally apprehended culprits reveal unusual reasons for what might otherwise remain inexplicable thefts. Take a Russian case a couple of years ago. Two citizens went out one night and stole a set of traffic lights. Unfortunately, as they hauled them away the pair met a local administration pooh-bah so were nabbed, as you might say, red, yellow and green handed. Their motive? It seems they intended to use the traffic lights to provide disco type illumination for a party.

In the same category we might put the Thai taxi driver caught stealing road signs. Apparently he planned to sell them to a scrap dealer in order to pay his gambling debts, having bet on Korea to win the 2002 World Cup.

But for lovers of mystery fiction, it's the unknown motives for odd thefts that are intriguing and perhaps might even inspire a short story or two.

When a German monument to Stalin was dismantled in l96l, one of the workers involved kept an ear. The bronze auracular organ was subsequently displayed in a local history exhibition at a Berlin cafe, but disappeared last year and hasn't been seen since.

. Similarly, five years ago the head of Copenhagen's harbour's famous Mermaid statue was returned anonymously two days after it was removed. Perhaps those responsible were disappointed to discover it wasn't the original tete, which was stolen in the mid l960s and never recovered. Indeed, the sculpture seems to have become a regular target for vandalism since someone also sawed off one of its arms in l983.

Then there was the strange disappearance of half a dozen mercury bulbs stolen from old style thermostats during renovation work on a building at Princeton University. Or how about the burglars who broke into a German kindergarten and, ignoring computers and the petty cash, ran off with nothing but Legos -- including one used as a substitute leg for an listing alarm clock?

In closing, I should add my current favourite in the odd theft category is last December's heist of a donated Christmas tree -- its decorations appropriately including strings of red lights -- from a Dutch city's bordello district. It hardly seems in the spirit of the season, but perhaps it was intended as a protest. It was certainly a well planned operation, seeing as the perpetrator(s) could be certain there'd be plenty of other goings-on in the area to distract possible witnesses from the tree-napping.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

This time around we've a fair bit of news to trumpet forth, so let's get to it!

HOW JOHN REGAINED HIS FREEDOM or BEWARE THE GOURD

We'll be all over the landscape on l5th February since the day brings not only the latest newsletter, but is also the official publication date for Four For A Boy *and* the paperback edition of Three For A Letter.

Fourfer is a prequel, revealing details of that oft hinted-at investigation for Justinian whereby John regained his freedom and in the process set his well-worn boots on the road to high office.

It is 525 and the empire is still ruled by Justinian's ailing uncle, Justin. It's obvious that Justin is dying and while Justinian and Theodora plot in the wings, riots and terror engulf Constantinople. This bloodshed is as much the result of the actions of forces commanded by the brutal City Prefect (nicknamed the Gourd) as from those of the Blues, elegant young thugs whose escalating depredations are petrifying the city populace.

But were the Blues really responsible for the daylight murder of a wealthy philanthropist in the Great Church, or have Justinian's enemies seized a chance to pin the death on him and thus prevent his ascension to a throne that will soon be empty? The still enslaved John and his reluctant co- investigator Felix (here a rank and file excubitor, although assigned to Justin's personal guard) are ordered to unravel the mystery and find out what's going on.

Fourfer also relates how John met other familiar characters such as Madam Isis, Gaius the physician, and that rash boy Anatolius. You'll also recognise certain unnamed personages you've met before -- including one hidden under a veil during her brief appearance, and another whose circumstances are touched upon in passing in the same chapter.

MURDER IN BYZANTIUM or CONSTANTINOPLE SERENADE

We're delighted to report that One For Sorrow's Greek edition appeared in December, sporting a different title -- Murder in Byzantium -- and a new cover featuring a quartet of minstrels strolling around tootling away outside the city wall. Even if you don't speak Greek, you might like to glance at the cover art by pointing your clicker at http://www.govostis.gr

JOHN'S ADVENTURES FURTHER AFIELD or ROMAN IN THE GLOAMING

Locked room mysteries are particular favourites of ours, so it will be no surprise that John's next short detection involves investigation of a locked room murder at an inn situated in a largely deserted Rome -- while the city itself is "locked in", being under siege by the Goth army at the time. The Finger of Aphrodite will appear in The Mammoth Book of Ancient Roman Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley. MBoARW will be published in the UK this autumn with the US edition slated to appear shortly afterwards.

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ERIC'S BIT or THE TWO HORSEMEN OF THE WRITERS' APOCALYPSE

Bad reviews. Along with rejections, they form the Two Horsemen of the Writers' Apocalypse. They're as inevitable as the Apocalypse as well. Once you start showing your writing to someone other than your mom, you're bound to get them.

The John the Eunuch novels have had a remarkable (almost preternatural) run of almost uniformly excellent reviews. Which doesn't make the occasional poor one sting any less.

With Four For A Boy, Mary and I finally garnered a *starred review* from Publishers Weekly, the veritable Holy Grail of reviews. In a demonstration of how different individual impressions can be, this heartening encomium occupied pride of place on the book's Amazon.com page for about a week until it was pushed down by a review noting in part that John spent the book going about in a pique.

It's hard to make sense of reviews sometimes. Characters one reviewer praises for being well-rounded and life-like, another will describe as cardboard. The problem, I think, is that there are truly no objective measures of writing, but we all have a temptation, borne perhaps of modesty, to put critical clothes on our personal likes and dislikes before sending them out into the world.

On the other hand, negative reviews can sometimes be thought-provoking. Last year, an Amazon.com customer referred to Sunilda, the Goth girl from Three For A Letter as "...the most unrealistic child figure since Macbeth's son." I suppose it's practically a compliment to be insulted by being compared to Shakespeare, but blush to admit since I had no recollection of Macbeth's son I wasn't sure exactly what we were supposed to have done wrong.

In my defense, the one experience I've had of Macbeth, which overrode all else, was thirty years ago, when I saw Christopher Walken play the role at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. Every seat in that little place is practically on top of the stage in the center, and the power emanating from Walken's Macbeth as he stomped around on the metal grating that was about all there was to the stage set was palpable. At the time I had no idea who he was and, having witnessed that performance, I have to say I am amazed his later career has not done justice to his talent.

Perhaps Macbeth's son was edited out of that particular production or was just not memorable compared to Walken's embodiment of his father. I did some research and found the boy described at the University of Victoria's Internet Shakespeare Editions (http://web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/) as typical of Shakespeare's children, "precocious...simply miniature (slightly naive) adults." Since we had had one of our other characters describe eight year-old Sunilda (who regularly writes eloquent if peculiar letters to her Aunt Matasuntha in Ravenna) as a "monstrosity of precocity" I suppose this is what the reviewer found objectionable.

However, as the Shakespeare site points out, childhood as we know it did not exist in older times. Children matured faster, most especially children of high rank. So it is entirely possible the Bard knew what he was doing.

Certainly people grew up fast in sixth century Rome. Scholar James J. O'Donnell writes that Cassiodorus, whose Gothic History figures in Three For A Letter, might have been as young as eighteen when he became quaestor to the Italian Ostrogothic King Theodoric. It was the quaestor's job to draft laws and answer petitions, to put the desires of the monarch into words as effectively, eloquently and correctly as possible. When we read that Cassiodorus had attained this skill before he was out of his teens -- and had already worked for some time as a legal aide to his father, the praetorian prefect -- we decided it was not a reach to allow the royal hostage Sunilda to write well-composed letters to her aunt, as well as acting in a rather adult manner.

This explains why we appreciated Gene Stratton's remark in http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com/review.html?id=2223 that "One of the most interesting characterizations...is the young royal heir...Sunilda. A precocious child, wise beyond her years, Sunilda could be a model for Lewis Carroll's Red Queen in the Alice stories."

So as you can see, bad reviews can be educational, but having brought the subject up I have to say there are bad reviews and then there are, well, *really* bad reviews. At our website we link to practically every review of our books. I've begun to post excerpts from the most recent on the site's first page, but I will admit (to newsletter readers at least) I do draw a line as to what I will go out of my way to draw attention to, let alone maintain a permanent link for. If you really want to find a bad review there's always Google. Insert any author's name and search terms such as "cardboard", "stereotype", or "cliche" and then click.

As an *Orphan Scrivener Exclusive* I'll leave you with a recently received email critique, here reproduced verbatim and in its entirety:

"And for what it's worth, Mister Big Short writer, you're writing sucks."

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AND FINALLY

It's three years this month since the first Orphan Scrivener trundled out into the aether. It hardly seems five minutes since we began writing them, but the months pass ever more and more quickly, leaving the distinct impression that we're all falling headlong down the Stairs of Time.

However, if we were indeed bumping down such a staircase, the Roman era would not be that many steps up behind us and on the subject, you may recall we mentioned in the last newsletter that Emperor Constantine's father died in York in 306. A Constant Correspondent wrote a few weeks ago noting that Emperor Septimius Severus also died there in 2ll and inquiring if a statue commemorating the departed ruler could be found in that fair city. So far as we've been able to ascertain, unfortunately there isn't. However, as a small consolation prize readers might like to glance at Canaletto's painting of the Arch of Septimius Severus at http://www.abcgallery.com/C/canaletto/canaletto53.html

Constant Correspondent's second question queried whether the Ebur Handicap was still run at York. Indeed it is. Founded in l843 and with a moniker preserving Eburacum, the Roman name for the city, this year's race will be held on 20th August. In his younger days Felix would doubtless have enjoyed a modest wager or two on the result!

Finally, whereas T. S. Eliot opened The Waste Land with his oft-quoted observation that April was the cruellest month, we now hasten to close this much less poetic offering by noting that while he obviously wasn't thinking of the double catastrophe lying in wait for American subscribers to Orphan Scrivener two months hence, his words are prophetic. For l5th April is not only the deadline for the timely filing of those annual two-aspirin headaches, IRS Form l040 and its supporting schedules, but is also the very day upon which our next newsletter will show up on your virtual doorstep.

Once you've wrassled your tax return into the postal system, therefore, you may wish to mentally fortify yourself for the next appearance of Orphan Scrivener in your email in-box on l5th April. See you then!

Best wishes
Mary and Eric

who invite you to visit their home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the aether at

http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/

Therein you'll find the usual suspects, including more personal essays and an interactive game as well as an on-line jigsaw puzzle (at least if you have a java-enabled browser) featuring One For Sorrow's boldly scarlet cover. For those new to the subscription list there's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned!

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