Why is it that screenwriters and producers feel that a movie “based on actual incidents” or calling itself “historical” is allowed to play fast and loose with the facts? I can tell you straight out that any book that purports to be based on “actual events” or any other historical novel for that matter, can’t … Read more
I was listening to mystery author Laura Lippman on the radio a long while back and she said something that was rather an epiphany for me. She writes bestselling crime novels and I guess I would consider them the “literary” kind in the same sense that a “literary novel” is one that appeals to a … Read more
England. The mere name conjures up images of castles, long rolling plains of green, ancient stone structures, knights, kings, pageantry of a different age, stone walls and thatched cottages. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tolkien. Magical in every sense of the word. And growing up in a household of rabid Anglophiles certainly set me on an inevitable course … Read more
Today we have budding fantasy author Joel C. Flanagan-Grannemann. He tells me he has been writing since childhood, has a B.A. in writing from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford in Bradford, PA, and has lived in Columbia, SC for more than twenty years with his wife and editor, Jay-Jay Flanagan-Grannemann, and a coterie of … Read more
I remember being on a panel in one of my first Bouchercons with authors Sharon Newman and Laurie King, and since we all wrote historical mysteries, the discussion naturally rolled over to “authenticity vs accuracy.” When you write historically, history is king. You never change the history to serve the plot, it’s always the other … Read more
Are we ready to choose wisely? We just can’t get away from the Holy Grail. It’s stuck in our minds in popular culture. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Monty Python and the Holy Grail/Spamalot. The Da Vinci Code. But what is it exactly? We think of it as the one thing, the cup of … Read more
I had some thoughts after watching the latest James Gunn interpretation of Superman. It’s nice to have Superman back! You know. Superman. The original 1938 Superman. It’s not campy, because the original Supe wasn’t. It became so to make it okay to do a movie about a comic book character in the 1970s. In 1990, … Read more
“Hey buddy. C’mere. Wanna buy a mystery?” Yes, it feels a little like that when, as an author, I’m set up with a little table in a bookstore with piles of my books. Sometimes I’m in the front of the store (better), but sometimes in the back (deadly). These kinds of gigs are murder whether … Read more
You might recognize the title of this blog post from the musical “My Fair Lady” wherein linguist Henry Higgins laments that the English language was being corrupted by its many dialects. Indeed, George Bernard Shaw, who penned the original play “Pygmalion” on which “My Fair Lady” was based, was supposed to have said, “The English … 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 thirty-four years ago, writing historical fiction at the time, I researched what I could. But it was no substitute … Read more
Author of Medieval Mysteries, Historicals, and Paranormals