Okay…here it is, the cover reveal for The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart.
Sherlock Holmes travels to Egypt to take on the curse of Tutankhamun, along with the indefatigable Dr. Watson and the mysterious medium Estelle Roberts.
Releasing March 19th from Seventh Street Books. Available for pre-order Amazon and a host of other places now.
Cover by the inimitable Jennifer Do.
Oh, and that’s an Egyptian scarab on the cover, not a flying cockroach.
That’s my story anyway.
But: the author pulls it off, largely through the agency of his main character, a thoroughly grounded, down-to-earth, self-deprecating, modest graduate student in physics who is the only person who could ever solve the many mysteries presented to him, in part because he and his antagonist go together like yin and yang.
It’s a spy novel which may also qualify as a cozy mystery. It includes an alluring local cop and an asshole FBI agent who may be allies or enemies. Through it all, it’s strangely believable. This is an overlooked gem. Pick it up now.
Modern society is a minefield, and was even before Covid-19. But there was a lot of discussion at the height of the pandemic as to how writers should handle such an event. Ignore it?—or plunge into it? Steve Goble elects to skip it, but in doing so he (intentionally) shines a light on the aftermath, and what it means to us going forward. The waning of trust—in institutions, in each other seems to have accelerated to dangerous new levels. A lot of readers were waiting to see how writers would handle Covid and the post-Covid arena. If Go Find Daddy, Steve Goble’s third in his Ed Runyon series is any example, I would say—honestly, straightforwardly, levelly. Which happens to describe his hero, Ed.
Ed has left the force, gotten over (largely) his anger issues, and is trying to make it work as a private detective in small-town Ohio. He’s a no-nonsense kind of guy. As he says, “accountants get head-aches from staring at a screen store clerks get head-aches from dealing with assholes all day, I get shot at. No big deal.”
But he’s about to go down the rabbit hole. A cop’s been killed. The main suspect—the only suspect as far as the police are concerned—is a right-wing podcaster who’s made his hatred for cops his brand (thus helping to diminish further our faith in authority), and who’s vanished without leaving a clue, even to his wife and child. Every cop in three states is out for his blood. And now a pro-cop entity online has offered a million dollars for him—dead. No one knows whether the offer is real, whether the organization is real, or a hoax—but it’s drawn every bounty-hunter to the chase.
All of which would have nothing to do with Ed—until he takes on a mission for the fugitive’s wife—to get a vital message to him. If you know Ed, you’ll know why it’s a job he can’t refuse (involving the fugitive’s little daughter) even though he’s going up against the fugitive’s friends and enemies both, all of whom are trigger-happy, none of whom trust each other or can be trusted. Yes. Ed Runyon gets shot at—a lot.
But Ed is a person who can be trusted, a person who holds his integrity dear, a person who can be believed, a doggedly decent man—and that’s the key to the job he’s taken on, and it’s what makes him a hero for this post-Covid age.
This is the third book in the Ed Runyon series. Jump on the bandwagon.
A New York girl buys an old painting in a second-hand store upstate. Her boyfriend, an up-and-coming young painter, discovers there’s more to this painting than meets the eye. They make a big mistake: they tell somebody. Just a handful of people, really. But every single person they tell, they shouldn’t have.
This story is marinated in the New York art world, seasoned with Amsterdam, and served up fittingly enough, in the little French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh drew his last breath—and he’s not the only one to die there for his art.
Jonathan Santlofer is a rare bird, an author who’s also a painter in his own right, which makes him eminently qualified to pen this tale. (As the author of a mystery title involving van Gogh myself), I was impressed. You will be, too.
I have slowly come to the understanding that all fiction is historical fiction in that each character must be placed within their own historical context which, unless all the characters are the same age as the writer, means that every character must come equipped with his own set of historical markers, which may influence his outlook and behavior.
For instance, in my work in progress, my antagonist is 52, my protagonist 36, and my second lead 28. If my story take place in 2023, that means they were born in 1970, 1986, and 1994 respectively. For each of them, any date before those are closed books, experientially speaking. They have no memories of anything that came before.
Of course they have access to a wealth of historical information that they can draw on all the way back to the big bang, but they weren’t there at the big bang, and that makes a huge difference. I am 65 in 2023, which gives me a frame of reference which extends back further than my youngest character by nearly 40 years. When seeing the world through her eyes I must see it with one eye closed, so to speak.
And of course their years of birth are hopeless when imaging their frames. What do you remember from the year of your birth? Probably nothing. My first memory is from the age of 3, and a very imperfect memory it is. If we take an arbitrary age of say, ten, we are just beginning to come to grips with the world beyond the schoolyard gate.
So none of my characters are likely to remember a president before Reagan or a time before personal computers. My youngest character’s earliest memory is Y2k. She won’t really recall a time before Facebook. The U.S. will have been at war in Afghanistan most of her life. My protagonist would have had the word “Whitewater” burned into his brain at an impressionable age. He would never hear Carl Sagan or Tiny Tim—especially not on Johnny Carson.
None of them would know the USSR, Nixon, the Vietnam War, or the Beatles on a first-hand basis. All of them would have known Queen Elizabeth II and Cookie Monster.
Hey, nineteen,
That's 'Retha Franklin,
She don't remember the Queen of Soul.
(You do remember Steely Dan, don't you?)
We’re each speaking a different language, based on experience. Of course, this could be carried further, since no two people, even identical twins, have exactly the same set of experiences, or the same reactions to them. And we can define our characters as precisely (or as generally) as we think necessary. But each of us is caged, to some extent, by the frameset of our lives. That’s a good place for a writer to begin understanding his characters.
The most entertaining part of the Delafield & Malloy historical mystery series is the sleight-of-hand the author uses to place her sleuths at the center of historical events. Some historical writers use a crowbar; Trish MacEnulty uses a scalpel.
The setting this time is 1915. America has not yet formally entered the war, but it’s hinted that American ships are secretly supplying the British, who are desperate for succor. New York City is full of clandestine agents for both sides, jockeying for position. Society writer Louisa Delafield is contemplating an offer of marriage. Her assistant Ellen Malloy is about to cross the sea to Ireland, where her father is on the edge of death. The ship she’s booked on is called the Lusitania. It’s the fate of that ship which will turn them both into double agents working for both the British and the Germans.
There’s no rah-rah cheering in this book. There are villains and victims on both sides (on all three sides, we’re privy through Ellen to the attempts of the Irish to get out from under the British yoke; they’re not afraid of skullduggery to achieve their aims.). It’s a layered, considered view that we’re presented with, which makes for a rich narrative, allowing MacEnulty to give voice to everyone from Jane Hull to Sir Roger Casement. And these momentous happenings will overturn Louisa and Ellen’s private lives profoundly. Some of the regular characters we’ve come to depend on may not survive; it’s war after all, even if it’s undeclared.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s excitement aplenty, treachery at every turn, and courage in great measure, as we’ve come to expect from Delafield and Malloy. I look forward eagerly to the next installment.
The Orchid Hour reeks, but in the best possible way. It reeks with the smell of lasagna in Little Italy, the smell of cheap gin in a 1920s speakeasy, and most importantly and most delicately with the scent of orchids at midnight. It reeks of sleazy dodges, flimsy aliases, and multiple murders.The Orchid Hour masquerades as a murder mystery, and it’s satisfying at that level, but underneath that layer, there’s another that’s a love story, and when all those layers are peeled away, it’s a coming-of-age story.
"Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck."
--Charles Dickens. Bleak House
I came across this article in the Guardian the other day titled “Dickens exhibition to look at role of London fog in life and in writings."
Of Blue Skies I am two minds, as perhaps was T.C. Boyle when he set down to write this book. A simple family tale or a polemic on climate change? Are the characters agents of their own actions, or has climate change replaced fate as the controller of lives? Are we doomed by our past actions, or do we simply make do?
It’s a plodding plot, not so much a plot as a situation—situation dystopia. The world is seen alternately through the eyes of earnest mother Ottile (the wife of a doctor, comfortably middle-class) and her grown children, the somewhat superficial daughter Cat, and son Cooper, an entomologist and the Cassandra figure of the tale. Cat lives with fiancé Todd in Florida, while he other two are in California. One coast in perpetual drought and the other perpetually water-logged. Whole neighborhoods go up in flames on one coast while whole neighborhoods are reclaimed by the sea on the others.
The setting is not some future dystopia, but the dystopia of today and perhaps the next eight or so years in the future. The story captures the mundanity of experience at the end of the world. Sundowners and king tides (two weather phenomena I’m not familiar with, but apparently soon will be) intrude on the rituals which mark our lives, marriages and births and deaths. There are moments of joy and tragedy, as in any lives, and whether those tragedies are caused by a collapsing planet or human inertia and hubris is rather fuzzy.
This was by no means a slog to read. The story is underpinned by diamond-hard prose which is a pleasure to read. Characters are fully realized and complex. Perhaps it’s the author’s ambivalence, whether our world is truly at an end, or whether we can survive on cricket cookbooks and drones for pollinating our crops, that leaves me scratching my head. We’ll all muddle through somehow.
Right now The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart is with my editor. Normally I don’t change anything in a draft while my editor is going through it. But lately I’ve been waking up at three in the morning with urgent, miniscule changes to this one. For instance the other night I immediately had to change the word “syphilis” to “the French complaint.”Why did the question of syphilis even come up in a Sherlock Holmes tale? Oh, that’s simple. It explains Watson’s familiarity with sunglasses in 1924.
He gets out of the frying pan (through a fine bit of misdirection—and goes right back into the fire. We rarely see Holmes take such foolhardy risks as he does in this tale, but we have seen it when his dander is truly up, and it often places him on the wrong side of the law. And we rarely see him place Watson in such peril, but Watson is always faithful, even in the teeth of a trap.
It's not a perfect tale. Giant conspiracies have a way of living another day. And there’s a wholly unnecessary cameo by a favorite villain (I have a feeling it’s a setup for a sequel.) But when the giant herring is finally landed, there’s an extremely satisfying ending to the minnow mystery we began with. The hand is quicker than the eye. An indispensable addition to your Holmes collection.
(Did I give away a shred of the plot? No? Good.)
And speaking of stumbling across while googling, Randall Stock, Holmes scholar, has a list of "the best choices for new fans, and a separate section with the best new items produced in 2022." And there I am, wedged right between Nicholas Meyer and Nancy Springer. Good company. Thanks, Randall!
It's amazing what you'll stumble across when googling.
This is the list of course materials:
