Sex and other failures.

I'm asked to send my publicist a thousand-word excerpt from This Private Plot, so I select a couple of sequences that are self-contained and spoiler-free. Only afterwards do I realize that they're both centered upon misplaced nudity. (Or, to be more accurate, misplaced clothes.)

I'm happy to write "cozy" mysteries. It's my dream to win an "Agatha," the top prize for cozies given at the Malice Domestic conference, since the MWA's Edgars tend to go toward the hard-boiled end of the spectrum. A cozy is typically characterized as having most of the "unpleasantness" take place offstage, whether it's violence or sex. In that earlier post, in which I tallied up eight murders so far in my published career, only three unfold in the real time of the narrative, and two of them are that cozy-safe method, poisoning.

In This Private Plot (one death by hanging, offstage but on cover) I also have a little deliberate fun with the second convention. It's a running gag that Oliver, who is determined to carve his first notch on the virgin bedpost of his teenage bedroom, is constantly thwarted every time he gets close to a moment or two of intimacy with his steady girlfriend, Effie.

But that's okay, as are the number of characters who seem to lose their clothes during the narrative.
Because it's also a "Traditional British" mystery, and for my generation, frustrated sex and lost trousers are neither tragic nor titillating but just plain embarrassing . . . and therefore a potent source of humor. Or humour.

Here's an extract from the book, which explains it. Oliver is consulting criminal expert Dr. McCaw of St. Basil's College, Oxford, to help him figure out what victim Dennis Breedlove may have done to attract the attention of a blackmailer:

Dr. McCaw thought for a moment.

“Sex,” she stated.

“Sex. Why?”

“Because whatever happened in the past still bothered Breedlove to this day, to put it mildly. And sex is the only thing the British fixate on forever . . ."

She took a sip of tea. “It doesn’t apply to the Europeans,” she continued. “They have an adult acceptance of sexual mores. The American attitude to sex, on the other hand, is positively infantile. But the British, as in so many things, are bang in the middle. They stay mired in their adolescence. They can’t stop thinking about sex, but they never get it right. That’s why the British can be funnier about their sex lives than any other nation.”

 Let's hope so, anyway.

Love what you've done to the place.

The observant reader of this blog* will have noticed that, as well as getting a minor facelift, it's changed its name from "This Private Plot."

The persistent reader of this blog** will have noticed that this follows more than half a year of nothing else happening.

These two facts are connected. We're shifting gears around these parts. For the plain fact is that, up to now, my blog was largely about the stuff that amused me -- generally from my present and past life -- while I was writing, editing, and attempting to sell a book called This Private Plot, the third in the Oliver Swithin mystery series. (Hence the old name of the blog, for the reader who has trouble making connections.***)

But all that changed last year. For the magnificent and highly esteemed folks at indie mystery publisher Poisoned Pen Press agreed to publish not only This Private Plot in a slew of formats, they're also bringing out the two earlier books -- An Embarrassment of Corpses and Murdering Ministers -- in paperback for the first time.

So the blog's downtime is partly due to the distractions of the final edits and text preparation of three books, which all spring from the presses in May (and also partly due to some rather time-consuming health-related stuff within the family, which is all turning out okay).

And now it's back, with a new focus on the entire series from the point of view of a newly published author, but probably still largely devoted to funny crap my kids say and blatant, blinkered adoration of my dog, Leila. Plus ca change . . .

*Thanks, Kent.
**Thanks again, Kent.
***Not you, Kent.