THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # EIGHTY-FOUR -- 15 DECEMBER 2013

This issue is being hammered out in one of the earliest deep freezes we can recall. Today for the first time this winter we got up to no power. And heavy snow. Not that a fair-sized portion of the country isn't also contending with bone-chilling cold, snow, sleet, and ice. Sir Walter Scott summed up many a weather-weary person's thoughts at this time when he declared this dark month glooms the days, taking away autumn joys.

And speaking of gloomy days, with the arrival of this latest Orphan Scrivener today may well be turning darker for those readers who insist on perusing these words. If so, we suggest they turn the light on and continue!

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ERIC'S BIT or HEADLESS IN BROOKLYN

Today's got off to an exciting start as mentioned above.

Next week we shall have another exciting day: taking the rubbish down to the road for pickup. Luckily it's only one plastic bag full. Two weeks worth.

With the car snowed in at the bottom of the grassy slope we use for a driveway, I'll have to haul the bag down the hill by hand. Hopefully I'll avoid throwing my back out, or breaking a leg by slipping on ice.

The descent reminds me of trash day when I lived in a fifth floor walk-up in a Brooklyn brownstone, only the stairs weren't icy or nearly as steep. And I was younger.

Back then I was going to school, even more impecunious than I am today. Sometimes trash went up the stairs too. Other people's trash, that is. Treasures to me. A lopsided box that became a little bookcase. A chair that stayed upright quite comfortably if you shifted most of your weight to one side.

When I was still younger certain trash days were even more exciting. Sometimes my dad took things to the dump. Oh how I loved visiting the dump.

From the main road a dirt track ran into the woods. Our big red station wagon rattled along the ruts, heading into the wilderness. Then came the smell, a sour, acrid stench. Wisps of smoke rolled across the windshield and we broke though into a clearing which sloped down into a shallow pit that seemed to my seven year old eyes enormous.

Smoke rose up or billowed from craters and hillocks of this desolate landscape. A pile of scorched brick, heaps of torn trash bags spilling their unidentifiable contents, lengths of charred wood jutting up into the eye-watering haze that hung over everything. Here I could see the rusted top of a car half swallowed up in the refuse. There, along the edge of the wasteland sat several doorless refrigerators. An office chair perched incongruously atop a blackened hillock. Above it all, borne up by the heat from flickering fires, drifted flocks of ashes of all shapes and sizes.

It gave me a cold thrill to look upon the ultimate fate of familiar things, the final destination of the old and useless and worn out. Not exactly a vista of the underworld but perhaps a back door to hell where demons had set out their garbage.

While my father dispatched our junk, my gaze wandered to the nearer confusion of rubbish, searching for what secret things strangers had sought to rid themselves of. Look! An alarm clock with a smashed face!

One time, years later, in Brooklyn, I found a severed head propped up by the curb. Not just any severed head either. The head of none other than John the Baptist, served up by Salome. Why anyone would throw away a three-foot tall reproduction of a Gustav Klimt painting I'll never know.

This week's trip with the trash is not likely to result in any such excitement. For me. Maybe for any crows, or stray cats, who find my bag before the waste disposal truck arrives.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

December is a busy month for most of us, and the ticker echoes that with a fair amount of news to impart. Read on!

NEWS OF TENFER or A CORKER OF A COVER

Ring out, glad bells! We returned the corrected ARC to the press a couple of days ago and the beautiful blue cover for Ten For Dying is a real corker! It will start appearing hither and yon soon and it's well worth an advance peak at Eric's blog http://journalscape.com/ericmayer

And in other news, Tenfer is now available for pre-ordering from Poisoned Pen Press http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/ten-for-dying/ as well as from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Dying-Chamberlain-Mystery-Series/dp/1464202273 and the usual suspects.

AHOY UK, EUROPEAN, & COMMONWEALTH READERS or JOHN IN A BOX

British publisher Head of Zeus has just issued Death In Byzantium, a boxed set featuring ebooks of the first four novels about our protagonist John, comprising over a thousand "pages". Talk about a bargain! Point your clicker here:
http://headofzeus.com/books/Death+in+Byzantium+-+Box+Set?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781859063

Head of Zeus is also offering an e-edition of the second short story about John, reworked and twinkled up a bit. The Body In The Mithraeum is currently discounted, so hasten ye to: http://headofzeus.com/books/The%20Body%20in%20the%20Mithraeum

PARTNERS IN CRIME OR OTHER MYSTERIES, OTHER ERAS

And still speaking of collections, our PPP partners in crime, er, stablemates Jane Finnis and Priscilla Royal also have new e-collections from Head of Zeus. Details for Jane's Death In Roman Britain collection can be consulted here
http://headofzeus.com/books/Death+in+Roman+Britain+-+Box+Set?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781859094
while Priscilla's readers have two boxed Medieval Mystery sets to choose from! Skinny here http://headofzeus.com/books/Medieval+Mystery+-+Box+Set+I?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781859100 and here
http://headofzeus.com/books/Medieval+Mystery+-+Box+Set+II?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857373

WORKING CLOCK ROUND or YOU CAN'T BEAT IT WITH A BIG STICK

Over on Joanne Tropello's site Mary set forth some thoughts on the value of websites for authors and others, not least their round-the-clock promotional presence. At this time of financial stringency, a website just cannot be beat, even with a big stick. Here's the blog:
http://www.mustardseedmarketinggroup.com/1/post/2013/11/guest-author-mary-reed-marymaywrite-shares-some-book-promotional-ideas.html

INVENTING A RELIGION or NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

Poe's Deadly Daughters will be running another blog emanating from Casa Maywrite this weekend, December 14th to 15th. This one deals with the religion we invented for Two For Joy, that of the Michaelites whose core belief was a Quadrinity. Or at least we thought we had invented a new system of belief but as it turned out...see
http://poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com/2013/12/inventing-religion-or-not.html

AND SPEAKING OF TWOFER or THE LATEST PPP BLOGS

Two For Joy begins with stylites spontaneously combusting -- our characters tend to get put through the mill one way or another -- and Mary's 18th November blog on the Poisoned Pen Press multi-author blog deals with spontaneous combustion with thoughts on Lighting Literary Fires Spontaneously. Point your clicker to
http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/lighting-literary-fires-spontaneously/

Our co-written December blog, which goes live on the 18th and can be reached via the link at http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/category/news-and-blog/ when that day dawns, is entitled The Morning The Coffee Pot Broke and, as readers have no doubt deduced, deals with the awful horror of, well, the coffee pot breaking. Especially on a cold and snowy day, which is where we came in...

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MARY'S BIT or THE ROLLING RS

There are always one or two teachers we recall with particular affection, are there not?

Most of my teachers were women. At grammar school level except for two the staff was largely comprised of elderly spinsters who dressed in cliches -- sensible lace-up shoes, a cameo brooch at the throat, longish skirts, iron disciplinistas. Infringe school rules such as not wearing a hat or beret while abroad in school uniform or running in the hallways and you were instructed to "sign up" on the corridor notice board list. Three signings a term and there was a stern comment from the headmistress on the next report card. I only ever had that dubious honour once, I'm happy to say. And speaking of hats, local urchins took great delight in grabbing ours and running off with them so you had to be ever alert in the street.

But my word, could our teachers teach! It would be unthinkable to them, and indeed us, for someone to leave school functionally illiterate.

I say they could teach, but in my case must exclude certain subjects. Alas, I was the despair of Madam D, our French teacher, for I never could grasp the use of different genders for objects and quickly got lost in the thickets of moi-il-elle. So I left with little grasp of the language, though such few sentences as I could construct were considered pronounced, as were those of my classmates, with a decent approximation of the French accent, given, so we understood, our Tyneside dialect caused us to speak with rolling rs. We'll overlook all our glo'all stops.

At the same school, our music teacher was Mrs J, a motherly woman who played the piano for the interpretive dancing I mentioned in Leaps, Foot and Leaves in the October 2005 issue of Orphan Scrivener http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/tos35.htm#leaps Mrs J was very patient but could never get me to grasp how to read music. Give me a couple of seconds to listen to the others singing and I could generally wing it by following the rise and fall of written notes, more or less, whereas my younger sister could read on sight. Said sister inherited my musical gene as well as her own and played in school orchestras, usually first violin. She plays other instruments equally as well, whereas the only one I can play is the kazoo, and that badly.

However, when the Queen Mother visited Tyneside, a number of pupils from each local school were chosen to form a mass choir to serenade her. To my amazement I was one of those recruited from mine. We sang local songs -- Bobby Shaftoe, The Water of Tyne, and Keel Row -- and it must have been a magnificent sound with all those rolling rs.

This particular occasion was the first time I had seen a Royal Personage in person as opposed to cinema newsreels. My main impression was how small and delicate she was -- and how interested in her visit. Especially the sudden rattle of stiff cards when a fellow standing in front of the choir and behind her majesty pulled out his hanky, a signal to those sitting in the balcony to hold up coloured cardboard oblongs to form a representation of the Union Jack. It all sounds very quaint but it was, well, a royal visit and no doubt the mayor, all done up regardless with his chain of office, was relieved it went smoothly.

At this same school we had only one male teacher. Mr R replaced our science teacher when she retired -- one of her parting gifts was a sixth-former's painting of the small Victorian building in which lived the science lab, set well away from the main school -- and we were terrified of him. He was no doubt a very nice man but somewhat gruff in manner to say the least. In that mysterious way schoolchildren have, we learned he had previously been at a boy's school so perhaps that explained it.

I wasn't very good at science either.

Nor did I shine at domestic science.

The nadir of cookery lessons at my next school was a doomed attempt to make brandy snaps. For the benefit of those who have never tried, my advice is don't. It's a tricky business whipping the snaps off the baking tray and winding them round a wooden spoon handle. You have to get it done before the snaps cool and become very brittle. Then follows the piping in of the thickened cream filling. My effort resulted, basically, in a plate of filling with bits of blackened snap floating in it. Everyone in the class laughed.

My favourite teacher, however, was on the staff of a school I attended after we moved. Shrouding his identity with secrecy, for he was nicknamed Bugsy by us heartless teenagers due to the size of his family, he taught English. He used to say that if he marked our work higher than seven out of ten we should go home and lie down. He obviously loved teaching and taught it with imagination. For example, giving out the current choose-one-of-three-topics for essays one week, the third announced was A Week In The Life of Dracula. Evidently he had got wind of the fact three of us had cut art class one afternoon the week before to see the Hammer film starring Christopher Lee. I don't know what marks my co-skippers received but mine were fairly high, though not high enough to go home. Then there was Macbeth. When studying it we read it out in class, taking turns to act as characters. His interpretation of First Witch would have torn up the carpet, had the classroom been fitted with it. Talk about a wonder to behold! Such gusto!

So, since I was no good at music, science, cookery, or languages, I suppose I was fated to eventually write novels. I like to think Bugsy would have approved.

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AND FINALLY

The gate of the new year will open in a couple of weeks, reminding us of the Latin proverb to the effect that a beginning is a writing tablet scraped clean. May our subscribers' tablets be inscribed with nothing but good things in 2014!

And speaking of tablets, subscribers may wish to have headache remedies handy on February 15th when the next issue of Orphan Scrivener scrapes into their in-boxes.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

who invite you to visit our 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, our bibliography, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit our shadow identity M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/ And just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # EIGHTY-THREE -- 15 OCTOBER 2013

A reminder that winter is creeping up the pike came on a recent morning, when a backing-up bell and a loud rattling announced the delivery of a consignment of coal to a neighbour, in the process waking us at an ungodly hour.

Wordsworth was likely not thinking of the sound of coal deliveries when he talked of wild autumnal music in faded woods, which is just as well since our fall colour has been slow in starting and the woods are not yet noticeably less bright. However, after cooler nights this past week more trees have begun to change colour, particularly maples just starting to turn that beautiful scarlet so beloved by landscape painters and our northern neighbours, and whereas Orphan Scrivener might not be described as beloved by some, unlike advancing winter it's actually here so why not read on?

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MARY'S BIT or A-MAZE-ING MUSINGS

I must confess mazes have an eerie fascination from me, and I've loved them since the first one I saw at Saltwell Towers http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/70553 in Gateshead, north-east England.

With its titular towers, red brick walls with yellow detailing and bands of patterns and built to an eccentric design displaying Elizabethan and Gothic elements, what a magnificent sight the gas-lit house must have been in its heyday when the family entertained and carriages rolled up to disgorge local bigwigs and captains of industry!

William Wailes, the prominent 19th stained glass manufacturer who commissioned the house, had the maze planted to entertain his children, though they would have aged somewhat by the time the hedges were fully grown and thickened out enough to disguise the route to the centre http://isee.gateshead.gov.uk/Local%20Studies%20Photos/Jpgs/GL003106.jpg

In the 1870s the mansion and its extensive grounds were bought by Gateshead Corporation and became a public park, from which time the hoi polloi have been able to wander round it. As a visiting representative of same, I had one or two adventures in Saltwell Park as a child. Once I fell into the lake but despite fairly deep water and the unwelcome interest of a number of exceedingly vexed swans, as you see I got safely back to land. On another occasion I was almost trapped in the Towers overnight. By then the house had been turned into a museum and still had its original arrangement of rooms, now alas no longer the case. Being upstairs wandering through what would once have been bedrooms, I did not realise the place was in the process of being locked up for the night. A promising start for a ghost story, no? But Saltwell Towers was always a favourite destination despite a long walk from where we lived near the far end of Coatsworth Road as it featured such arcane delights as a scale model of a pit head, a collection of stuffed birds and small animals, and the display at which I spent most of my time on every visit, a magnificent recreation of a Victorian living room viewed through a glass wall.

Getting back to the maze, to my eye any maze projects an other-worldly air, tinged with a touch of the sinister. Is it because it's easy to get lost in the labyrinth and an instinctive feeling of panic arises or because the arrangement of hedges changes the landscape, disorienting the treader of paths?

You might liken mazes to the intellectual puzzles of mystery fiction. Or if you won't, I will. Indeed, in Six For Gold, wherein John investigates sheep committing suicide in the Egyptian village of Mehenopolis, we present the small settlement as boasting an extensive underground maze playing a major part in the plot. So there's two mazes for the price of one. Talk about generous.

However, offhand I can only recall a couple of short stories in which mazes appear. M. R. James (pause for customary declaration that MRJ roolz!) treats of Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance, which includes a circular yew maze with a globe in its centre and lettered tiles stored in a temple in the garden. Suggestive matters indeed, ladies and gentlemen! Then there's In The Walls Of Eryx, a collaborative effort by H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth J. Sterling, featuring an invisible maze on Venus. Needless to say, it all ends in tears.

Given my declared love of mazes, it will be no surprise to learn I chuckled when recently reading Warwick Wroth's Cremorne and the Later London Gardens. In passing he mentions a maze at Camberwell's Flora Gardens, the proprietors of which helpfully provided a guide. At the centre of the maze there stood a hermitage where lived what was described as a Chaldean astrologer. Naturally, I immediately thought of Alfie Bass in Help! playing an Indian restaurant doorman claiming to be from the mysterious east -- of London, that is.

Subscribers interested in Victorian mansions will enjoy perusing photos of the Towers at http://isee.gateshead.gov.uk/info.php?s=Saltwell+Towers&type=all&t=objects The interior view shows an elaborately carved high-backed sofa-cum-settle -- I would not care to have to dust all those ornamental incrustations -- partially blocking a small fireplace. It almost looks as if the residents, or rather their servants, were in the process of moving the furniture around when the photo was snapped. Given the obvious weight of sofa and table, I suspect more than one involved in wrassling with them would rather be lost in the mansion's maze -- or even consulting a Chaldean astrologer.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Only a short ticker tape this month, but it's all good stuff if we say so ourselves!

AN ANNOUNCEMENT or TENA KOE, TENFER

A blasphemous ritual and the theft of a holy relic by demons kicks off Ten For Dying. Matters go rapidly downhill from there, and ambition, intrigue, treachery, and murder soon take centre stage. With John sailing into exile in Greece, will he be able to assist Felix's investigations from afar? One thing at least is certain -- we're happy to announce Tenfer is now available for pre-order from PPP http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/ten-for-dying/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ten-for-dying and Amazon http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/191-8864269-7896028?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Ten%20For%20Dying%2C%20Reed%2C%20Mayer as well as the usual suspects on and offline.

THREE FROM SEVEN or EVERY BIT(E) HELPS

Notices of John's adventures occasionally pop up in unexpected places and such was the case of Hygienists In Print, Lois Hirt's column for the Los Angeles Dental Hygienists' Society. Lois focuses on references to teeth and related matters in fiction and non fiction, and three quotes from Seven For A Secret appear in her September column. Point your clickers to http://ladhsociety.org/hygienists_in_print for links to her column as well as previous entries.

HANDY LISTINGS or HERE THERE BE NOVELS

Want to a handy listing of John's adventures? Fortuna smiles as that handy info may be conveniently consulted at the website of Poisoned Pen Press at http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/?s=Eric+Mayer&cat=104&x=0&y=0 and for overseas readers at the page devoted to our shadow identity M. E. Mayer at Head of Zeus http://headofzeus.com/books/One%20for%20Sorrow

In passing, HoZ has also published Three Great Historical Mysteries, a compendium composed of MEM's One For Sorrow and novels by fellow PPP authors Bruce Macbain (Roman Games) and Priscilla Royal (Wine of Violence). Details at http://headofzeus.com/books/3%20Great%20Historical%20Mysteries

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ERIC'S BIT or ON THE CAT TRAIL

Our backyard, pressed up against the woods, does not seem to be on any wildlife routes, or at least not on the routes of wildlife that travels by daylight. Who knows what may pass by our door in the darkness -- raccoons, possums, bears, skunks? Well, occasionally a skunk leaves its redolent calling card. And we did once see a black bear in the middle of the afternoon.

Generally, we have only sporadic visits from our forest neighbors. This autumn several turkeys blundered briefly out of the shrubbery, scratched the moss a bit before vanishing again. Then we saw a family of deer, six in all, does, partially grown fawns and a young buck, with just nubs on his head, who stood watch near the house while his charges nibbled at bushes.

Mostly we see squirrels and chipmunks and cats. For years there was, in particular, a white cat with black spots. There's nothing like glancing out the back window and seeing a cat with the squirming hind legs of a chipmunk hanging out of its mouth. Now we often see the neighbor's cat, a flabby, disreputable looking black creature with dirty brown blotches.

We are definitely on the Cat Trail. They nearly always follows the same route: across the back yard, behind the shed, along the perimeter of the yard next door where the grass meets the woods, then through a gap in the pines, onto the next property and down past the side of the house there, vanishing from our sight in the direction of the road. She returns along the same route exactly. There might as well be cat road markers pointing the way.

I wonder has this been the cat highway since time immemorial? And why? Because it takes them past the best hunting spots? Does it intersect a chipmunk thruway? If the cats are merely on the way somewhere, it would be faster to simply cut straight across all the yards. Then again, even in a house cats like to skirt the edges of things. Maybe that's why I like cats since I too prefer to stick to the periphery rather than plunging into the center.

When I was growing up there were ant paths worn into my grandparents' front yard. They had obviously been located intentionally. In several places they led from the flagstone walk to the big, partially hollow maple trees in front. The paths were no wider than a child's finger, but distinct. How many ants and how many years does it take to wear a tiny rut from which no blade of grass emerges? The paths were always busy. The ants hurrying toward the sidewalk were unburdened, those returning to the maples, where they must have had colonies, carried bits of leaves, or maybe a dead aphid or even a cracker crumb. If you dropped a twig on their road the ants would quickly congregate to remove the obstruction.

I once lived in a house where generations of mice had gnawed a gap in the corner of a plank door. An indentation had been worn into the floorboards where a procession of mice had scurried through the gap on their way along what was no doubt a well established route.

I suppose most of us tend to take familiar paths. Do we do so for a reason or from habit? It's comforting to have a path to follow. Whether it is always good or not is another question. Sometimes the path ahead looks obvious. Other times less so. It depends on where you are going and what you are about. Cats are looking for chipmunks, ants need to carry aphids home, writers think about writing.

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AND FINALLY

Speaking as we were of leaves, we'll now take ours and fade away quietly after reminding subscribers the next Orphan Scrivener will fall out of the aether into their inboxes on December 15th.

See you then!
Mary R and Eric

who invite you to visit our 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, our bibliography, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit our shadow identity M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/ And just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in some time!

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THE ORPHAN SCRIVENER -- ISSUE # EIGHTY-TWO -- 15 AUGUST 2013

Summer proceeds apace and that sure sign of advancing autumn, the back to school sale, is becoming more widely broadcast across the land every day. There's no stopping the passage of time and, to misquote Charles Cowden Clarke, its vast wheel now drags subscribers to the dreadful sight that is this latest issue of Orphan Scrivener. Whirl on...

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ERIC'S BIT or JEEPERS CREEPERS

Here at Casa Maywrite the creepy crawlies continue their summer offensive although so far the summer has not been as memorable as one a few years ago.

One morning a monstrous black beetle was hiding in ambush next to the washing machine. I grabbed the first weapon to hand -- a can of insect spray -- and blasted the invader with enough poison to peel the paint off the linoleum.

The horror shook the poison from its mandibles and scuttled under the washer. I bent down to investigate and it came at me from the other side. I shot it again. This time I kept my finger on the button.

The poison was designed to take out flying nasties, but a bug's a bug, and I was using the heavy duty spray, with enough muzzle velocity to knock a white-faced hornet out of the air at a range of five feet. The force of the blast lifted the beetle up and threw it back against the side of the washer. It slid down and finally lay still. Maybe it broke its carapace. Maybe it drowned.

These bugs were getting to me. A few days earlier, on the way to the shower, I was greeted by a huge spider. Just what you need to see when you walk into the bathroom naked -- an arachnid as big as your thumb.

This terror was at least four inches end to end, with a obscenely huge, bulbous body. I'd exchanged pleasantries with his great grandfather a couple of years ago. Which is to say, I'd had to hammer him five times with my shoe. The present spider could've put up a good fight against a tarantula. As for a skinny, naked guy without even a shoe...

I backed away, found my trusty bug spray, and soaked the intruder. He sauntered out of sight. There are few sights more hideous than an eight-legged saunterer. However, the poison must have taken effect, because he didn't return that evening. Or the next.

Maybe, with his dying breath, he'd sent the black beetle after me.

Probably it was just my imagination. But I was jumpy. Next morning I sprayed a menacing scrap of lettuce leaf on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Stopped it in its tracks too.

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NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER

Only a short length of ticker tape this time around but carrying some big news...

NO NEED TO BE ON TEN-TERHOOKS or TENFER'S ON THE WAY

We're happy to announce Ten For Dying has officially entered production with the appearance of its page on the Poisoned Pen Press website http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/ten-for-dying/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ten-for-dying

While there's as yet no cover image, it will unveiled soon and it's a corker!

This latest entry in the series begins on a hot summer night at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople with an attempt to raise Theodora from the dead as demons vanish into the night with one of the city's holiest relics, a fragment of the shroud of the Virgin.

John's friend Felix, captain of the excubitors, is ordered to investigate the theft, but becomes suspected of murder himself, thanks to an anonymous corpse left at his house. If only John were still in the city and could assist him!Unfortunately, the former Lord Chamberlain is on his way to exile, having sailed away the morning after the theft. It isn’t easy solving a mystery in Constantinople while aboard a ship on its way to Greece.

A former madam turned leader of a religious refuge, a wealthy and famous charioteer, a general’s scheming wife, and a superstitious man who wears so many protective charms that he jingles when he walks, all play their parts in a story of misdirection and murder.

AND WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT or ALL IN ON PLACE

Information on John's adventures may be consulted at the websites of Poisoned Pen Press at http://www.poisonedpenpress.com/?s=Eric+Mayer&cat=104&x=0&y=0 and the page devoted to our shadow identity M. E. Mayer at Head of Zeus http://headofzeus.com/books/One%20for%20Sorrow

HoZ has also published Three Great Historical Mysteries, a compendium composed of MEM's One For Sorrow and novels by fellow PPP authors Bruce Macbain (Roman Games) and Priscilla Royal (Wine of Violence). Details here: http://headofzeus.com/books/3%20Great%20Historical%20Mysteries

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MARY'S BIT or BUDGIE IN A BOX

One of my brothers in law once remarked he kept changing his locks, but his grown children still managed to get back in.

Doubtless this is not quite what Thomas Wolfe had in mind when he opined we can't go home again.

Sometimes it's just not possible for reasons other than different locks. On one occasion after some years away, I returned to Gateshead to see family and while there went to visit our old street. Imagine my consternation when I turned the corner and the street had disappeared. There was only an asphalted space where it had been, and -- even more sinister, in my opinion -- the streets framing it were still there and still inhabited.

What was also remarkable was the space originally occupied by a row of terraced houses facing another across the narrow street looked so tiny it seemed impossible fifty or so families had lived in that street at one time.

Another street where the Reeds lived across the river in Newcastle had also disappeared some years before, but its passing was not unexpected given at the time we left the city the wrecking ball had almost reached it as slum clearance efforts got under way. My spies tell me new housing was built on the site, set horizontally to the river rather than at right angles to it as the original street had been. Unfortunately, after storms water rushing down the very steep slope caused flooding so the new housing had to be taken down and rebuilt in the same configuration as the old.

Of course, when you can't go home again you're usually either living in, or on your way to, your next dwelling, which reminds me of one of my mother's more eventful moves, which involved a journey from Oxfordshire back up north to Gateshead not that far around the corner and down the main road from the street mentioned earlier. Various of the family assisted, loading up a large van with furniture and rolled up carpet and other household goods, including four wardrobes from a three-bedroomed house -- they are so useful for storage was one of my mother's mantras. A large box was punched with for transporting the budgie north, the reasoning being if he perched on the swing in his cage during the journey the continual wild oscillations caused by the vehicle's movement would not be good to the little fellow and so far as we knew no avian tranquilizers were available.

The last items to be put aboard were two sacks holding mother's remaining stock of coal, for she was determined not to leave it behind.

It was almost midnight and everything was in the van except the budgie, leaving only these two sacks of coal to be loaded. The ladies were in the kitchen making tea when all of a sudden two family gents rushed in, one with blood running down his face and both chanting a registration plate number. They'd been loading the sacks when a car stopped, a man leapt out, assaulted one because he thought a sack of coal lying on the shadowed pavement by the garden hedge was a body -- or so he claimed -- and then raced off.

With the aid of the number, the police tracked down the car and were round at the owner's house within a short time. He claimed he hadn't set foot out the door all night but, as we later learned, his car bonnet was still warm when the police arrived. But there was nothing to be done.

In any event, tea gulped, mother, a couple of family members going north, and the budgie left for the journey, driving past numerous illuminated windows from which peered neighbours who had got out of bed on hearing the police car siren howling.

To this day I am convinced they thought a moonlight flit was in progress and we had been caught in the act.

Happily the budgie suffered no ill effects and not long after she settled in mother purchased another wardrobe, making six in a two bedroom flat. But then they are so useful for storage.

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AND FINALLY

As Tennyson pointed out, seasons too flower and fade and although this newsletter arrives in high summer, autumn will beginning when the next issue of Orphan Scrivener escapes from the wardrobe of time and manages to get into subscribers' inboxes on September 15th.

See you then!

Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit our 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, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/

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