Sorry if you’ve missed updates of this blog for the past week or two. The combination of seasonal affective depression, a back injury and poison oak knocked me out for a bit. Hope you enjoy the return! Civilization’s changed a lot in the last hundred years. (That’s an understatement, wouldn’t you say?) We’ve gone from flimsy, barely airborne planes to walking on the moon and probes exploring the solar system; wooden wall phones for the well-to-do to computer smartphones attached to practically everyone; tiny circles of close friends and family to global communities. With all of that change, a lot of formerly private life have become increasingly public. I’m not sure if Elizabeth MacKintosh would have liked the world today. As a mystery writer, she was better than average, but the best enigma she ever created was her life. You say you’ve never heard of Elizabeth MacKintosh? Tell you the truth, I hadn’t much either until I ran into J. M Henderson’s Josephine Tey: A Life. And that is the name mystery lovers recognize. Josephine Tey, the creator of the Alan Grant mysteries and Brat Farrar. The lady who entertained us by breaking the rules laid out by other mystery writers. …
One of the things fiction readers love is something Stephen King described as “pulling aside the curtain”. Grisham fans get a peek at the lives of lawyers because that’s the world their author had known before he picked up a pen. Val McDermid and Patricia Cornwell delight devotees with their stories of police and forensic detection because, as former crime journalists, they knew the turf. But it takes someone like Josephine Tey to pull aside the curtain on that most nefarious tribe – the writers – and give readers an eyeball into the world of professional scribblers. To Love and Be Wise may be sixty-seven years old but when it comes to describing the workings of a writer’s community, this story feels like a vat of fresh, hot, gossip. The plot is simple: Leslie Searle, an American photographer, has gone missing. Since Leslie Searle is a celebrated photographer, no one is surprised he was staying at Salcott St. Mary, an English-Village-turned-Artist-Colony, when he disappeared. What is striking is how this unassuming, interesting, attractive young man managed to upset every creative mind within its borders! It isn’t enough for Toby Tullis, that imperious and pompous playwright, that the young and attractive Mr. Searle…
My mom could not be predicted. When I was in my early 20’s, she called up long distance (an expensive activity) and ordered me to read a certain book. Now. She heard about it from Gladys who got the recommendation from Jill and now that Mom had read it, I had to. This made no sense. Mom knew one or two women named Jill but neither of them usually recommended books and there was no Gladys I could think of. Mom explained to me she had received a letter from one of her favorite writers, Gladys Taber, where Ms. Taber had verified her friend, Jill, revered a book called The Daughter of Time. Based on that letter, mom borrowed the novel from the library and read it. Now, she ordered me to do the same. This story might have ended there because I had developed the habit of ignoring Mom by then but my roommate, Stephanie was working at the college library so I asked her to pick up a copy of the book while she was on shift. When Stephanie got back that night, the book was in her hand. She looked up at me and said, “I’m…