It's Always a Mystery

What’s better than reading a book? For me, it’s reading a book and then getting the chance to talk with its author. That’s what happened recently when my local book group invited John Clement to attend. We’d all just read The Cat Sitter’s Cradle, part of the Dixie Hemingway cozy mystery series, and John, who lives in my township, was happy to meet with us.

His mother, Blaize Clement, created the series—when she was 72. She asked him on her death bed to promise he would carry the series torch forward. He was reluctant, he said, because it was her series. She had been a marriage counselor, and after retiring, eventually moved to Florida, to Siesta Key, which she used as the setting for her books.

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Blaize had written a number of scientific journal articles and other nonfiction pieces, as well as literary short stories, but her debut cozy Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter was her first entry into genre fiction. John said that when she attended a writers conference after completing that manuscript, the agent she pitched to offered her a three-book deal on the spot.

Since then the series has grown to eleven books, with Cradle the eighth and the first that John wrote by himself. Was it difficult to write in the same style as Blaize? Not really, he said. He could hear his mother’s voice in his head, and that was also the voice of Dixie Hemingway, the series star who works as a pet sitter while solving mysteries.

In my last newsletter, I shared a description of a fictional library. Here’s another I ran across, in the historical mystery Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart. The main character, Bryony Ashley, enters a now-empty room in her childhood home.

No ghost had ever walked in the Ashley library, but now, as I let myself quietly into the still, spacious room, it seemed haunted, probably only by the frail parchment ghosts of the books that had vanished from the shelves. It was so empty that it echoed. Somehow, I thought, a library looked worse than an ordinary room that had been stripped of its furniture. The books had been the brain of the room, its soul, its raison d’ être.

I just finished the hilarious Clementine Crane Prefers Not To by Kristin Bair, in which the main character works in a library. I heard Bair speak at this spring’s Write Stuff conference. Her sense of humor is evident throughout the Clementine novel, but she’s also tackling a serious subject: that women’s health complaints are too often ignored or dismissed by those around them. My favorite laugh-out-loud moments were the endless text exchanges between Clementine and the various members of her family.

Here’s a link to my latest short fiction post, on the site A Slice of Orange.

I’ll be at the Pennwriters conference in a few weeks, and then at a book launch at the end of May for an anthology I have a story in.

Thanks for reading -

Dianna