Is this the world's rudest woman?

Everybody read the previous (i.e., older) post? Good. The scene is set.

I go into Arcade to buy Didi's book. Proprietor Patrick is deep in conversation with what seems to be a self-published author seeking shelf space. So I patiently station myself in front of the counter to signal that, for once, my intentions go beyond that of another author craving validation and sales estimates. I am, ahem, a paying customer.

A few seconds later, Patrick's assistant Aly emerges from the rear office. Simultaneously, the front door is flung open and a woman comes in, talking loudly and angrily on her cell phone about something to do with a renovation that doesn't seem to be going to her satisfaction. She pushes past me, takes up a position at the counter, and without breaking her phone conversation for a second or lowering her voice, thrusts her platinum American Express card at Aly.

(Well, I say pushes past me, but that would suggest she was even slightly aware of my existence.)

Aly, puzzled, looks to Patrick for help. He's forced to interrupt his chat and suggests that the woman might have a book on order. The woman is still half-screaming at a contractor, still flapping the charge card, without making eye contact. Aly reads the name on the card, finds it in the order book, and is able to retrieve the volume. She charges it, gets the woman's signature, and hands her the purchase. Still without acknowledging her surroundings, the woman grabs the book and stomps out of the store, not even pausing for a thank you.

In An Embarrassment of Corpses (now in paperback, did I mention that?), Superintendent Mallard reveals that he keeps a mental list of the people who, in his personal opinion, deserve punishment even if they haven't technically broken the law. Guess who's just gone to the top of my own list?

The end is in sight. (And for once, that's not a bottom joke.)

My friend Maureen Amaturo always reads the final pages of a book first, to see if she's going to like it. As a mystery novelist, obsessed with the architectural unfolding of my story and the power of suspense and misdirection, this pisses me off. But if you, dear reader, skip to the very end of This Private Plot,  you'll see Maureen is the first person thanked in the acknowledgements, despite her appalling reading habits. That's mainly (but by no means exclusively) because she's the founder of the Sound Shore Writers Group, whose members patiently reviewed the book as it emerged, chapter by chapter.

Maureen must be doing something right, because another former member of the group, Didi McKay, is also in print right now, with a charming new children's book called Gifts of the Animals. 

Didi has the enviable day-job of working at the Stepping Stones Museum for Children in Norwalk, Connecticut, a frequent destination for the Beecheys when my kids were younger. Some of her colleagues provided the book's lovely illustrations of animals raised by families around the globe.

Here's Didi's book, in a photograph she took of the window of Rye's Arcade Books. It's the blue one under the "O." And do you see what's under the "S"?

(As for the title of this post, it's a bit of an in-joke. Barbara Peters, my editor at Poisoned Pen Press, in an effort to rein in the Briticisms, placed a restriction in the number of times I could use the word "bottom" to refer to Effie Strongitharm's posterior before reverting to "buttocks." I got three in, all in the first chapter.)

To whom this may concern.

"To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

As an adoptee, I attribute myself to four parents: in chronological order the two who supplied the nature, and the two who supplied the nurture.* But having by now lost three of them, I wonder what Wilde's Lady Bracknell would accuse me of? Gross negligence?

On this American Mother's Day, I'm happy to report that one of my co-mothers is alive and well and Morris dancing in Maidstone. (If you can call that living.**) And just as Laurence Olivier was eleven years older than Eileen Herlie, who played his mother, Gertrude, in his film of Hamlet, so my lovely Mum is actually far younger than me.***

But switching to the three I lost, I was very happy to memorialize my adoptive parents at long last in the dedication of This Private Plot, with apologies to the friends who are going to have wait for another book before their turn comes up. (I promise to write more quickly this time.)

Here's the text, so you know who to blame.

*This does reflect a development in This Private Plot, but you'll have to get to Chapter 39 before you see the connection.

**Sorry, puzzled American readers. The ritual trashing of Morris dancers is a British meme.

***That joke would be funnier if she didn't actually look it. By the way, Hamlet is also given a workout in TPP, not least by the Theydon Bois Thespians in their first appearance on the stage in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Out! Out, I say!

Sunday (May the Fourth) was Star Wars Day. (It thurroundth uth and bindth uth).

Yesterday was Cinco de Mayo. (Spanish for "Just mustard, please.")

Then what's a good reason for partying today, May 6, 2014? (Well, it's the tenth anniversary of the "Friends" series finale . . .)

Benighted mortals! Today is the official publication day of This Private Plot, the third title in the somewhat optimistically styled "Oliver Swithin Mystery Decalogy," although if I continue at this rate, I'll be 107 before Oliver and Effie get to third base.*

Anyway, don't waste your time reading this blog entry. Go and buy it! Now! (We cozy authors are tough.)

Or better still, mail me $5 directly, then you don't have to read it.

The other titles are also out in paperback today, for the first time. Buy them too.

*Just kidding, that happened between An Embarrassment of Corpses and Murdering Ministers. But most of This Private Plot is about Oliver's failure to score a home run in the bedroom of his childhood.

Joltin Joe has left and gone away, and I know how he feels.

Startling realization of the week. That Mrs. Robinson is now too young for me.

Isn't this the plot of that new Johnny Depp movie?

I step into my bedroom/office, where Tertius is sitting at my desk, fiddling with his iPod.

"Now I know where you are," he exclaims cheerfully, showing me the screen. It displays a map that is somehow tracking the location of my iPod.

"You know where I am because I'm standing two feet away from you and you can see me," I remark.

"But this is digital, which makes it more official."

Feelin' stabby.

Planning a Spring break camping expedition to Harriman State Park. Secundus seems to have an unhealthy focus on equipping himself with every sharp implement known to REI. I try jokingly to deflect his demands for a sizeable ax.

"It's just that I don't want to wake up in the tent one morning with my head chopped off," I tell him.

He smiles. "Oh, you won't wake up . . ."

*The trip was postponed because of predicted overnight temperatures below freezing. In April. His mother bought him the ax anyway. And there's a whole other story.

"You sure look purty in that fig-leaf, Meriwether!"

Tertius finds a nickel in his bedroom minted in celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. I guess that it was issued in 2003, the two hundredth anniversary, which holds T's interest for a second or two because it was the year of his birth. (2003 that is. Not 1803.)

I use the rapidly closing window of opportunity in his attention span to mention that the Louisiana Purchase spawned the Lewis and Clark expedition.

"Were they real?" he asks.

"Lewis and Clark?" I echo. "Yes, they were real."

"Only I get them confused."

"Who with?"

"Adam and Eve."

"A bit different," I assure him.

"Were Adam and Eve real too?"

Ah, now there's a whole other conversation.

Another curtain call.

Four years ago, this blog celebrated the hundredth birthday of my friend, actress Sylvia Davis. (If you want to find out more about her, use the "Sylvia Davis" label at the end of this post and read the posts in date order.)

I wrote that Sylvia had found a late burst of popular fame in her nineties because of a brief commercial she did for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. People would stop her on the street and ask her to deliver the opening line, "I've survived the depression . . ."

I couldn't find it online then, but YouTube eventually yielded up the goods.

Sylvia passed away in November 2010, six months after her centenary celebrations, a rich life well lived. Enjoy her talent and her enduring memory in one of her greatest hits:

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.