Jeri Westerson The Bow Street Runners. We tend to think that there was always a police force in every country, but this just isn’t the case. Prior to this, in the Middle Ages, there would be a sheriff (a ‘shire reeve’, a man appointed by the king to serve for a year’s time, without pay, to keep … Read more
In 1903, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle inserted a certain style of fighting into the canon of Sherlock Holmes stories. Unfortunately, he spelled it wrong. It is Bartitsu, but he scribed it as “baritsu”. Bartitsu is a conglomeration of several martial art and self-defense disciplines, developed in England between 1898–1902. It combines the elements of boxing, … Read more
Besides the writing of the world’s best novel, there are a few things to consider before that novel makes it to print. When I spent my years writing novels that didn’t get published, I also spent a lot of time planning what would happen when I finally was. And part of that planning was, of … Read more
Sometimes I think there’s too much information these days. It’s a good thing that it’s at our fingertips, but winnowing out the wheat from the chaff is the hard part. When I started writing to sell some twenty-one years ago, writing historical fiction at the time, I researched what I could. But it was no … Read more
It was a Covid project. I kept seeing ads for these this bookshelf dioramas, and while still on Facebook in those days (don’t look for me on Fascistbook anymore! And why are YOU still on it?), I ordered one called “The Eternal Bookstore” but decided to modify it by making it into my An Irregular … Read more
Lorie and I have been friends for some years, though we seldom see each other in the wild because I live in southern California and she lives in the Central Valley. But the mystery writing world, being what it is, connects us in all sorts of ways. She is the creator and has been running … Read more
I’ve been talking about medieval myths for some time now, that is, those tired saws that many people believe about the Middle Ages. And they keep showing up, even on Bluesky. Two of my personal favorites have got to be chastity belts and iron maidens. Though they sound like something that would go together, trust … Read more
A late Victorian/early Edwardian newspaper with female reporters. “A lady journalist, it is reported, has been informing an interviewer, that she makes by her profession, and by working no more than an hour and a half everyday, the very respectable income of a thousand pounds a year…a thousand pounds a year! Hark! Do you hear? … Read more
A lot of folks don’t know about this, that it was a real railway system that ran from 1854 to 1941. Necropolis, by the way, is translated as “City of the Dead”. And indeed, this is what it was. No one in the Middle Ages could have imagined that London — the second biggest city … Read more
Back in the days before I was published and I was trying to peddle my own brand of medieval mysteries to agents, I came upon an astonishing bias. One agent rejected my manuscript because she couldn’t get past the notion that my protagonist would be intimate with someone with all that “lack of hygiene.” She … Read more