Wordsmithing!

March 23, 2026March 24, 2026 / Austin Mystery Writers / Leave a comment

by Helen Currie Foster

March 23, 2026

“Hop in the car, you little ragamuffins and tatterdemalions!” For so our papa fondly called his four children—two girls, two boys—on our long car trips.

Our papa was fascinated by words, and wordplay. Every Sunday he’d fetch the New York Times and finish the crossword…in ink. He abhorred sloppy word use, particularly if we said we “adored” something— “You adore a deity, nothing less.” He detested our casual use of “I swear!” Instead, “You may say ‘I affirm’ or ‘I attest’ but not ‘I swear’—‘Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay.’” Yes, some theological thoughts.

But only now do I realize how thoroughly we also absorbed our mama’s inherited expressions—maybe from forebears who brought to the New World some Scottish or English vocabulary. When getting ready for company she’d say “I’m all in a swivet!” I say the same thing and never realized not everyone uses that expression. Our mama also reminded us not to be “persnickety.” She turned clocks “anticlockwise” when appropriate and reported with raised eyebrows that someone was “fit to be tied.” And she fostered independence: a frequent suggestion we kids got was “Root, hog, or die!” To her, “gumption” was a great virtue.

When we four children were scattered far from Austin, we eagerly awaited her monthly letters (typed, with 3 carbons—she alternated who got the original). She always reported on local politics, Texas football, drought/rain conditions and her ongoing war against bamboo in the back yard, and signed “Heaps of love” or “I love you more than tongue can tell.” In one letter she reminded us that our papa used to refer to her housecleaning (after she’d gotten in a swivet) as “rearranging the mess.” In another, she said that after a welter of company “I bestirred myself to change all the sheets.”

Words! At Austin’s McCallum High School our senior English teacher, the redoubtable John Shelton, listed words on the blackboard for us to memorize each week—a task that sent us straight to the byways of the dictionary, a great (lifelong) destination. My friend remembers that one week the assigned words included “hygroscopic,” “tessellated,” “faience,” and “barghest.” https://bit.ly/4dF535p .

Other than “hydroscopic,” in ensuing decades I’ve never actually used any of those words in conversation. But that moment still may come!

Do you readers and writers keep a list of favorite words? Working on Book 11 in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, Ghost Music, I’m aiming for precision and concision. But I hope somehow to sneak in “awry”, “gleeful,” “impudent,” and certainly “iniquity” (right on point for a mystery). Also, maybe “drudgery,” “jasmine-scented” and “catkins.” Possibly “hygroscopic”?

It’s tough work to produce consistently vivid word pictures, precise and concise. One master is Stephen Harrigan. Of Harrigan’s The Eye of the Mammoth (2019), Texas writer Lawrence Wright wrote, “Word by word, book by book, Stephen Harrigan has proven that he’s the best writer Texas has ever produced.” https://bit.ly/4t440Aj

Wright’s right. It’s a beautiful book that tugs you straight into each story. (The cover calls them “essays” but believe me, they’re stories, and you see the word pictures so vividly you’ll be surprised there weren’t illustrations.)

For instance, you may already know, as Harrigan tells us, that there were mammoths in Texas up until some ten thousand years ago, and (of course) they were larger than the woolly mammoths, “reaching up to fourteen feet high, with domed heads and huge, sweeping tusks”:

Sixty or seventy thousand years ago, a herd of these creatures was foraging in a floodplain a few miles west of what is now downtown Waco. The landscape, in the waning millennia of the Ice Age, would have been prairies and lightly forested savannas populated with all sorts of vanished megafauna: camels, saber-toothed cats, ground-dwelling sloths that could rear up to twenty feet high, and massive, armadillo-like glyptodonts that shuffled along like living boulders.

The scene is set. You’ll want to know what happened when the mammoth herd was caught in “a flash flood roaring out of the ancestral Bosque River…” I was already trying to imagine gazing up at Mammuthus columbi, our Texas mammoth, fourteen feet high. Harrigan had me right there. Every word counted.

And he’s right about the time frame. Last weekend we toured the Gault Archaeological Site up by Florence, Texas, and saw the (now closed) excavation where Dr. Michael Collins and others excavated down to bedrock, around 10 feet deep, in the pasture next to Buttermilk Creek. The excavation (see white posts) is next to the gravesite of Mona, the ranch cow who faithfully visited daily during the excavation.

Dr. Collins had long been dubious of claims that humans had only been in North America for 14,000 years or so, relying on the age of the Clovis points you may remember from high school classes. Sure enough, when the archeologists reached bedrock at the Gault site they found artifacts which are 16,000-22,000 years old. https://bit.ly/3NlC8J5

The Gault site is famous for very hard chert (visible in rock formations along the creek) which permitted Paleo-Indians to chip very sharp points for the spears/arrows they threw from atlatls. As we stood staring at the rocks it was easy to imagine mammoths in the big field by Buttermilk Creek…

Wordsmithing. Hard work, like blacksmithing. Heat the words till they glow red, shape them carefully, beat them into place. Luckily, after all that hammering, words are easier to move around, edit, and reshape… not so final as a horseshoe. Still, finding the right words for the right place—keeps me up at night.

Nathaniel Hawthorne has been quoted as saying, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Maybe he was repeating the words of humorist, essayist and poet Thomas Hood, whose letter to the London periodical The Atheneum in 1837 cited as one opinion on writing: “the easiest reading is d[amne]d hard writing.”

Still, west of Austin, the hill country offers generous terms to writers, at least as far as setting is concerned. The writer can count on buffalo grass, agarita, blue grama grass, and prickly pear cactus atop Cretaceous limestone chock full of snail and oyster and clam fossils. Also, painted buntings, tufted titmice, lesser goldfinch, summer tanagers, roadrunners, golden-fronted woodpeckers, ladder-backed woodpeckers, Swainson’s hawks, red-tailed hawks, great horned owls and screech owls. And jackrabbits, coral snakes, bright green lizards, newts, armadillos, bobcats, and raccoons trained to a high degree of thievery, including figuring out how to detach birdfeeders from trees and push them downhill into their favorite dining thicket. Finally, three burros live the high life, including daily carrots. Sebastian (the burro who undertakes to announce guests) offers to anyone who comes through the gate an enormous and distinctive bray of welcome, disproportionate to his small size.

And I haven’t mentioned the equally tough, equally resourceful, equally colorful characters that have settled here, some of whom have inspired the characters in earlier books in the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series and are inspiring Ghost Music.

Yes, easy reading is damned hard writing. Yet the material’s here. Just look around!

Author Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the prize-winning Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. She’s active in Austin Shakespeare and the Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime chapter of national Sisters in Crime. And she treasures speaking with book groups.

Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com and on Amazon. Her books are available at Amazon and at BookPeople in Austin.

WHO? WHEN? HOW? So What’s the Answer?

February 2, 2026 / Austin Mystery Writers / 1 Comment

by HELEN CURRIE FOSTER

The great thing about a winter storm? A glut of reading. I took refuge in re-reading the broad swath of Tony Hillerman mysteries. What a writer! And what a setting he creates.

I live just west of Austin, beyond the limestone wall of hills known as the Balcones Escarpment, on the Edwards Plateau—a vast hilly area of fractured porous Cretaceous limestone, full of fossils, and dry, except for its secret springs and precious narrow waterways. This Hill Country provides a sharply different landscape from the forests east of Austin and the lush coastal plain around Houston. Indeed, my college roomie (from Manhattan) famously asked, on her first trip to Texas, “Isn’t it kind of scruffy?”

Maybe, but only from a distance.

And limestone’s part of our culture and setting. On our dirt road in the country, all the houses are built of limestone and wood—except for one new red brick house that looks out of place. South of us, the old town of Dripping Springs still holds old limestone buildings—as do Blanco and Fredericksburg.

Back to Hillerman. Of course we readers plan to figure out WHO killed the victim and WHEN and HOW. But also, for mystery lovers, setting is key. Hillerman immerses us in the broad landscape his characters Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee must travel as Navajo Tribal Police officers. Duty leads them not just throughout New Mexico but on into Utah and Arizona, along roads that dwindle into narrow dirt tracks, leading to canyons and cliffs. Leaphorn and Chee are always noticing desert flora—grama grass, buffalo grass, agave and yucca, and cottonwoods along a draw or seep. The sky sets the scene: “The light was turning red. The sun had dipped beneath the western Horizon, and the clouds in the west—dazzling yellow a few moments earlier—were now reflecting scarlet. Soon it would be too dark to see.” The Ghostway, Ch. 8.

And always the weather holds sway—a factor for Jim Chee to consider when driving off-road into a remote canyon: “By the time he reached the graded road leading to the Toadlena boarding school he was weary to the bone, with another thirteen miles through the snow…” (Ch. 23). Sky, weather, plants, sky, cliffs, canyons…all part of the setting. And housing? Hillerman describes the adobe buildings, the circular wood and stone Navajo hogans, the sheep pens, the Hopi cliff dwellings with their squares and kivas, where mystery unfolds. Access to scarce water may mean seeps, springs, buckets.

And as to the questions every mystery poses for the reader—which every reader plans to solve: WHO DID THE MURDER? WHEN? HOW? I loved revisiting Hillerman and searching for the answers. Not infrequently, water plays a role.

Coffee Creek, my made-up Texas town in the Alice MacDonald Greer mystery series, lies atop the Edwards Plateau. The lawyer protagonist, Alice, treasures her small ranch, with its impressive broad-branched live oaks, shallow creek, and scratchy cedar scrub––and her three watchful burros. She re-seeds her pasture with native grasses–buffalo grass and blue grama–and waits with eagle eyes to see the spring swaths of bluebonnets and the first incredibly beautiful prairie celestials. Alice also keeps an eye on water levels in her creek. Flash floods? Or drought? The Hill Country delivers both.

Currently, Barton Springs-Edwards Aquifer Conservation District, which manages groundwater for the Barton Springs segment of the Edwards Aquifer, has declared Stage 3 Drought Conditions for only the second time in its 39-year history. We got a bit of moisture during last week’s Deep Freeze but that may not be enough to avoid Stage 4 drought conditions. https://www.kxan.com/texas-water/texas-water-district-nears-historic-stage-4-emergency-drought-declaration/

In Ghost Justice, Book 10 in the series, Alice’s Coffee Creek clients seek her help opposing a huge proposed concert venue in an area lacking sewers, where concert sewage effluent threatens the town’s water supply. As the frontier adage has it, “Whisky’s for drinking, but water’s for fighting.” Recently a similar actual proposal which could have affected Barton Creek near Dripping Springs was withdrawn after different owners bought the property. And yes, there’s murder, and yes, Alice is determined to solve it.

Water’s key in the Hill Country. To find out what happened in Ghost Justice—WHO killed the original victim, and WHEN AND HOW…and what happened to the perpetrators– you can find the bookonline or at BookPeople in Austin!

Meanwhile, I’m still deeply interested in Texas rock art (rock art is critical in Ghost Cave, Book 1 of my series), especially after the recent thrilling discovery of a 67,800 year old hand print stencil on Muna Island in Sulawesi, Indonesia. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/worlds-oldest-rock-art-indonesia-hand-stencil

I’m also reading I Heard There Was a Secret Chord (2024) by neuroscientist and musician Kenneth J. Levitin, who’s exploring music and healing. One intriguing fact: of the 4500 species of animals on our planet that sing or hum, humans are the only species that live on the ground. Apparently, all the others live in the water or in trees. Humming! Levitin also notes, “The 60,000-year-old bone flute discovered in the Divje Babe cave near Cerkno, Slovenia, plays a pentatonic scale that would be recognizable by anyone alive today.” Id. At 308.

The human animal—a mystery! With history!

Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com.

Her books are available online at Amazon and at BookPeople in Austin.

“Everybody Eats Mushrooms.” Some Live to Tell the Tale.

September 10, 2024 / Austin Mystery Writers / Leave a comment

By M. K. Waller

Today’s post comprises two parts–a bit of fiction followed by a bit of fact–linked by a “fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus” and a mystery writer who used it as a murder weapon–and later confessed to something even worse.

The following flash fiction was inspired by a photo prompt on Friday Fictioneers, a weekly writing challenge sponsored by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

‘SHROOMS

John ambled into the kitchen. “What’s cooking?”

“Mushroom gravy.” Mary kept stirring.

John frowned. “Toadstools. Fungi. Dorothy Sayers killed someone with Amanita.“

“These are morels.” She added salt. “Everybody eats mushrooms.”

“I don’t.”

“Suit yourself.”

He sat down. “Where’d you buy them?”

“I picked them.”

“You?“

“Aunt Helen helped. She knows ‘shrooms.” Mary held out a spoonful. “Taste.”

“Well . . . ” John tasted. “Mmmm. Seconds?”

“Yoo-hoo.” Aunt Helen bustled in. “See my brand new glasses? Those old ones–yesterday I couldn’t see doodly squat.”

Mary looked at the gravy, then at John. “Maybe you should spit that out.”

II.

The following is a guest post I wrote for Manning Wolfe’s Bullet Books Speed Reads blog. In it, I explain what an author does when she doesn’t have a clue about the subject she’s writing about.

There are many rules for writers. Two of the major ones: Write what you know and Write what you love.

I was pleased that Stabbed, which I co-wrote with Manning Wolfe, was set in Vermont. I love vacationing there: mountains and trees, summer wildflowers and narrow, winding roads, rainstorms and starry nights, white frame churches and village greens.

In Chapter 1, Dr. Blair Cassidy, professor of English, arrives home one dark and stormy night, walks onto her front porch, and trips over the body of her boss, Dr. Justin Capaldi. She locks herself in her car and calls the sheriff. The sheriff arrives and . . .

What happens next? Vermont is a small state. Who takes charge of murder investigations? The sheriff? Or the state police? What do their uniforms look like? Where do major rail lines run? What’s the size of a typical university town? And a typical university? What else had I not noticed while driving through the mountains?

Not knowing the answers, I defaulted to a third rule: Write what you learn. Research. Research. Research. The best mystery authors have been avid researchers.

Agatha Christie, for example, is known for her extensive knowledge of poisons. As a pharmacy technician during World War I, she did most of her research on the job before she became a novelist. Later she dispatched victims with arsenic, strychnine, cyanide, digitalis, belladonna, morphine, phosphorus, veronal (sleeping pills), hemlock, and ricin (never before used in a murder mystery). In The Pale Horse, she used the less commonly known thallium. Christie’s accurate treatment of strychnine was mentioned in a review in the Pharmaceutical Journal.

Francis Iles’ use of a bacterium was integral to the plot in Malice Aforethought. His character, Dr. Bickleigh, serves guests sandwiches of meat paste laced with Clostridium botulinum and waits for them to develop botulism. If Dr. Bickleigh had known as much about poisons as his creator did, he wouldn’t have been so surprised when his best-laid plans went, as Robert Burns might have said, agley.

Among modern authors, P.D. James is known for accuracy. Colleague Ruth Rendell said that James “always took enormous pains to be accurate and research her work with the greatest attention.” Before setting Devices and Desires near a nuclear power station, she visited power plants in England; she even wore a protective suit to stand over a nuclear reactor. Like Christie, James used information acquired on the job—she wrote her early works during her nineteen years with the National Health Service—for mysteries set in hospitals.

Most authors don’t go as far as to stand over nuclear reactors to be sure they get it right, but even the simplest research can be time-consuming.

And no matter how hard they strive for accuracy, even the most meticulous researchers sometimes make errors.

Dorothy L. Sayers was as careful in her fiction as she was in her scholarly writing. But she confessed in a magazine article that The Documents in the Case contained a “first-class howler”: A character dies from eating the mushroom Amanita muscaria, which contains the toxin muscarine. Describing the chemical properties of muscarine, Sayers said it can twist a ray of polarized light. But only the synthetic form can do that—the poison contained in the mushroom can’t.

Considering Sayers’ body of work, this one “howler” seems a very small sin, and quite forgivable.

Most readers, however, don’t forgive big mistakes, and reputable writers don’t expect them to. Thorough research is a mark of respect for readers.

Sometimes, getting the facts straight in fiction has real-life consequences the author can’t predict. Christie’s The Pale Horse is credited with saving two lives: In one case, a reader recognized the symptoms of thallium poisoning Christie had described and saved a woman whose husband was slowly poisoning her; in a second, a nurse who’d read the book diagnosed thallium poisoning in an infant. The novel is also credited with the apprehension of one would-be poisoner.

Back to Stabbed—Well, we don’t expect it to save lives or help catch criminals. But doing my due diligence and reading up on Vermont’s railways, demographics, and criminal procedure set the novella on a sound factual footing.

Unlike Christie, Iles, and Sayers, however, I didn’t have to expend too much effort learning about how the murder weapon worked. One look at the book’s title and–well, d’oh–no research needed.

***

Learn more about Friday Fictioneers at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blog and on their Facebook page.

***

M. K. Waller (Kathy) is a former teacher, former librarian, former paralegal, and former pianist at various small churches desperate for someone who could find middle C.

She writes crime fiction, literary fiction, humor, memoir, and whatever else comes to mind.

She grew up in Fentress, population ~ 150 in 1960, on the San Marcos River in Central Texas, the Blackland Prairie, and memories of the time and the place inform much of her fiction.

Except for the part about murders. Fentress didn’t have any murders. At least any that people talked about.

She now lives in Austin.

Serendipitous Surprises

August 20, 2024 / Austin Mystery Writers / 1 Comment

I wasn’t going to discuss the dreadful heat. But early this morning came two despite-the-heat surprises: first, moonset of the August Supermoon.

Next, a tiny frog, less than an inch long, sitting quietly in the shade. Could it be a Texas cricket frog? Maybe some frog-maven will know. Can you spot it here?

Another treasure: an email from a reader who’d read Ghost Cave, first book in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, and wanted the recipe for the coffee cake served by Alice’s redoubtable elderly friend Ilka:

They settled at the tea table. Ilka poured. Bone china, thin and old, the glaze crazed. Like Ilka’s face and hands, thought Alice. The cake stand held something Alice had never seen—a pale smooth yeasty-smelling cake with thin cinnamon topping…

“Oh, goodness, Ilka,” said Alice. “What is that?” The yeast dough, ivory and fragrant, left a mysterious fragrance in the air.

“Cardamom,” said Ilka.

Yikes! I had to tell her I had no recipe! Only—a memory! As kids we were in awe of our neighbor Mrs. Slinn, up the street. She wore her hair pulled back in a bun and longish dresses and, I think, always an apron. When we scruffy little children approached her door she always offered cookies. (We still roll out her classic “teacake” sugar cookie dough to make Santas, snowmen, reindeer.)But occasionally Mrs. Slinn swept down the street to our kitchen bringing magic: a round yeast coffee cake, no taller than 3 inches in the middle, ivory-gold with a delicate sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar on top. It tasted amazing and when cut into small wedges was absolutely delicious…

To this memory, in Ghost Cave, I’d added cardamom—not a spice we knew when I was little. But where to find a recipe for the inquiring reader?

FROM THE READER HERSELF! She wrote back that she’d located cookbooks from Mason County, Texas (dated 1976), and Fredericksburg (12^th edition–Fredericksburg cooks published their first cookbook in 1916!). Each included a recipe for “yeast coffee cake.” (The Fredericksburg recipes include the original names—like Apfelkuchen, Schnecken, Kolatschen.) Which is further proof that mystery readers themselves are bright, curious sleuths. And why hearing from readers is wonderful.

Below you’ll find a slightly modified recipe from the excerpts she sent, but with a little cardamom added.

At a recent book talk I called the relationship between mystery reader and mystery writer a collaboration. Indeed, a primary rule of the 1930 Detection Club in London was that any clue must be instantly produced for the reader. No holding back explanations or back story until the end of the book! Of course that rule was sometimes violated (yes, Madam Christie, we’re talking about you). In contrast, Christie’s contemporary, the New Zealander Ngaio Marsh, occasionally adds some colorful backstory at the end, but she also generally has already given the reader fair notice of the clues that will identify the murderer.

In her series featuring the elegant Scotland Yard sleuth Roderick Alleyn, Marsh typically begins with the setting—often provided by a variety of characters––of the site where murder will inevitably take place, either in England or New Zealand. The setting could be an artist’s colony (“Colour Scheme”), a tour boat on an English river, a village church hall, a pub, an elegant country house (“Dancing Footman”), the London apartment of a practically bankrupt upper-class family (no one seems to have a job) (“Surfeit of Lampreys”). Thus when we open a Marsh mystery, first we meet the potential suspects, including one we may hope is innocent, may hope is truthful. Then comes a seriously tricky murder. (Did someone disturb the fly rod on the wall? Why?) At that point Inspector Alleyn arrives, with his sidekick Fox and the crime scene specialists. For the competitive mystery reader—collaborating with the author to detect the murderer––each detail matters and is promptly disclosed. But who lied? Who was mistaken?

Rest assured Marsh knew her subject matter and her settings: she was an artist, an actor and a theatre director as well as a writer. She lived and worked in England as well as New Zealand. She was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed the Grand Master Award for her lifetime achievement as a mystery novelist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngaio_Marsh I suspect her character Agatha Troy (an artist who finally marries Alleyn) may be in part a portrait of Marsh.

And Marsh received a birthday Google Doodle on April 23, 2015! https://doodles.google/doodle/ngaio-marshs-122nd-birthday/

Marsh’s first book came out in 1934, featuring Alleyn as the upper-class “grandee” who resigned from the foreign service to join Scotland Yard. A different sort of sleuth was emerging in the U.S. In 1930 Dashiell Hammett published The Maltese Falcon and we met Sam Spade. In 1933 Raymond Chandler, like Hammett, was already publishing in The Black Mask magazine, and in 1939 he published The Big Sleep, presenting Philip Marlowe. Decades later the mystery genre continues to grow and grow: Noir! Culinary mysteries! Cozies! Mysteries narrated by dogs! (Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Bernie series.) Cowboy mysteries! Fantasy/sci-fi/mystery! Sleuths in Laos, China, Australia, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, Louisiana, national parks, Native American reservations. Edinburgh! The Shetlands! Botswana! Canada! Italy! France! Israel! Scandinavia! Legal thrillers! Spy thrillers! What a wealth of mysteries for us to enjoy.

And what about the Texas Hill Country? In her latest adventure, Ghost Bones, lawyer Alice MacDonald Greer grapples with the murder of a deeply respected judge. His death was apparently triggered by his efforts to solve the murders of six people on his property almost two centuries ago. Alice needs all the help she can get from her irrepressible assistant, Silla, and from Ben Kinsear, as she tangles with mystery, legal drama, and matters of the heart. Finally–please let me know if you recognize that little froglet!

Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and prehistory, and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Follow her at www.helen.currie.foster.com.

Nearly Mrs. Slinn’s Coffee Cake:

3/8 c. milk, 2 Tbls. sugar, ½ tsp. salt, ¼ cup butter, 1 egg, beaten, 2 tsp. dry yeast, 1 ½ Tbls. warm water, 1 tsp. ground cardamom, 1 ¾ c flour–Plus additional melted butter (about 2 Tbls.) and sugar/cinnamon mixture (1 tsp cinnamon to 1/ c sugar) for the topping.

Scald milk and pour over the butter, salt and sugar. Stir and let stand until lukewarm. Dissolve yeast in warm water for 5 minutes. Stir egg and yeast mixture into milk mixture. Stir in 1 tsp cardamom and 1 cup of flour. Beat well. Continue adding remaining flour. Put dough on lightly floured board and knead until smooth (add a bit more flour if too sticky). Place in greased bowl, cover, and let double in size. Then punch down.

Butter bottom and sides of round 8” pan. Put parchment paper in the bottom. Pat in dough. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle on the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Let rise again until double in size. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes or until just turning golden. Let cool. Serve it forth!

Happy 100th, Agatha & Hercule! and Many More

September 19, 2016September 19, 2016 / Austin Mystery Writers / 8 Comments

Posted by Kathy Waller

This month mystery lovers celebrate two of the most important figures in the history of crime fiction:

~ Agatha Christie, who was born on September 15, 1890, and whose mysteries have outsold everything except Shakespeare and the Bible; and

~ Hercule Poirot, who, having appeared in 1916 in Christie’s first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, is marking his one hundredth birthday.

The Royal Mail is observing the occasion with a special stamp issue focusing on six of Christie’s novels. Each stamp contains clues and features related to a specific book. “As the solving of mysteries is the focus of Christie’s art,” said a spokesman for the Royal Mail, “it is fitting that the public have to turn detective to find the hidden words and images in each stamp.”

A series of literary events–Agatha Christie Birthday Celebrations: Marking 100 Years of Creativity–is in progress, including those in Torquay, where Christie was born, and in Wallingford, where she lived at Winterbrook House from 1934 to her death in 1976.

Closed Casket, Sophie Hannah’s second Hercule Poirot novel, was released on September 6th, just in time for Hannah to take part in the festivities, including a book signing at Christie’s holiday home, Greenway.

(Kirkus Reviews on Closed Casket: As in The Monogram Murders (2014), Hannah provides both less and more than Agatha Christie ever baked into any of her tales. But the climactic revelation that establishes the killer’s motive is every bit as brilliant and improbable as any of Christie’s own decorous thunderclaps.)

And BBC One will produce seven more adaptations of Christie’s works.

Austin Mystery Writers, alas, couldn’t attend the festivities in England, so we celebrate here in our own small but sincere way–by letting the Queen of Crime speak for herself.

*The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

English: The Agatha Christie Bus Tour bus, at the corner of the walled gardens at Greenway House. (Photo credit: Wikipedia). By Derek Harper is licensed under [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

*Many friends have said to me, ‘I never know when you write your books, because I’ve never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.’ I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone; they depart in a secretive manner and you do not see them again for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same.

*All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter…a marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.

*Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

*Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.

*There’s no agony like [getting started]. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

*One problem is that the interruptions are generally far more enjoyable than writing, and once you’ve stopped, it’s exceedingly difficult to get started again.

*One’s always a little self-conscious over the murderer’s first appearance. He must never come in too late; that’s uninteresting for the reader at the end of the book. And the dénouement has to be worked out frightfully carefully.

*I myself always found the love interest a terrible bore in detective stories. Love, I felt, belonged to romantic stories. To force a love motif into what should be a scientific process went much against the grain.

*God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings – not dummies! Be personal – be prejudiced – be catty – be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!

*I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting… I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse.

*If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.

*Three months seems quite a reasonable time to complete a book, if one can get right down to it.

*I am like a sausage machine. As soon as [I finish a novel] and cut off the string, I have to think of the next one.

*When I re-read those first [detective stories I wrote], I’m amazed at the number of servants drifting about. And nobody is really doing any work, they’re always having tea on the lawn.

*I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

*I am not mad. I am eccentric perhaps–at least certain people say so; but as regards my profession. I am very much as one says, ‘all there.’

*It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

*If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.

*I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.

*What they need is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn’t be so busy looking for it in other people’s.

*A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love he can’t help looking like a sheep.

*Mr. Jesmond made a peculiar noise rather like a hen who has decided to lay an egg and then thought better of it.

*Coffee in England always tastes like a chemistry experiment.

*I know there’s a proverb which that says ‘To err is human,’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.

*I can’t imagine why everybody is so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author’s business to write, not to talk.

*People should be interested in books, not their authors.

*If anyone is really determined to loan you a book, you can never get out of it!

*I’ve got a stomach now as well as a behind. And I mean – well, you can’t pull it in both ways, can you? … I’ve made it a rule to pull in my stomach and let my behind look after itself.

*Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

*I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.

Agatha Christie Birthday Celebrations
2017 DATES: 13TH-17TH SEPTEMBER

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For a everything about Agatha Christie, go to http://www.agathachristie.com/

And for more:

Quotations from Agatha Christie were drawn from following sources:

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Kathy Waller blogs at
Telling the Truth, Mainly,
and at
Writing Wranglers and Warriors.

Interview With AMW Member Kathy Waller

March 22, 2016March 22, 2016 / vpchandler / 2 Comments

In continuing my series of interviews with fellow AMW members, I introduce you to Kathy Waller.

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Hi Kathy!

VPC- Tell us about your professional career.

KW- I earned a B.A. in English in August 1973 and two days later began teaching high school English and biology. Eleven years later, I moved to Texas State University (then Southwest Texas State University); the first year I was a teaching assistant while I completed my M.A.; the second I taught freshman comp as a lecturer in the English department. After that, I taught another two years at the secondary level.

Then the fun began: I was invited to take the position of school district librarian, and, seeing a challenge—I‘d never taken any library science courses—I accepted. I spent a full semester working as a librarian before diving back into graduate school, this time at the University of Texas. At the time, I planned to complete the M.L.I.S., but life got in the way and I stopped with a learning resources specialist certification.

Two years later, the school district for which I worked partnered with an independent library association to form a joint-use library, extending services to all members of the community. I was fortunate to be involved in designing, building, and networking a new library. I loved the job—selecting and purchasing books and materials (with other people’s money!), doing booktalks, dealing with so many different tasks to make the program work. I especially enjoyed working with adults. Student patrons asked similar questions every year based on recurring class projects, but adults’ needs differed widely. “Is cabbage juice good for you?” “How do you build a beehive?” “Can chemotherapy help treat multiple sclerosis?” “What years and what nights did ‘I Love Lucy’ air?” Someone told me that to make a librarian happy, all you have to do is ask a question—that’s true, and a question the librarian has never been asked makes her the happiest.

VPC– Where did you grow up? What was it like?

KW– I grew up in a rural farming community, Fentress, Texas, on the San Marcos River, about fifteen miles south of San Marcos. I believe I’m the fifth generation of my father’s family to live in the area. The town was settled just before the turn of the century–that’s the 20th century–around a cotton gin and a Presbyterian church, and soon became a resort town, with a skating rink, an aerodrome theater where silent movies were shown and Chautauquas were held. (Note from VP- Chautauquas were an adult education movement in the U.S. that were popular until the mid-1920s. They brought entertainment and culture with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers and specialists of the day. More at Wikipedia.) A dam generated power, and there was a natural swimming pool with slide, diving board, and bath houses, and a large campground. There were boarding houses, a bank, a cafe, an ice cream parlor, grocery stories, a filling station, a drug store, a doctor’s office, and in 1929, a population of about 500.

When I was growing up there in the 1950s and ’60s, however, things were different. The gin, the skating rink, the grocery stores, and the doctor were still there, but a slight change in the river’s course had taken the swimming pool and resort, and post-World War II urbanization had reduced the population to about 125. By the time I started school, most of the residents were over the age of forty.

So I grew up surrounded by older people, most of whom I was related to by blood or by marriage. It could have been a boring existence, but parents there could turn children loose without fear of anything worse than skinned knees or wasp stings, so I had a lot of freedom. Except, of course, with all those aunts and uncles and great-aunts and -uncles, I knew I’d never get away with doing anything particularly interesting.

Still, I got to hang around the post office and listen to the old men sitting on benches outside, and help my postmaster-uncle put up mail (my mother was sure a postal inspector would find me doing that and haul my uncle off to jail), tag along with my grandfather and my farmer-uncle wherever they went, sit under a tree on the river reading American Girl magazine to my horse…. That kind of thing. And to sit on front porches watching old ladies play forty-two and listening to them gossip.

I think the reason many people my age love To Kill a Mockingbird is that we see in 1930s Maycomb, Alabama, the little towns we knew when we were kids twenty and thirty years later—slow, hot, dusty summers, old people sitting on front porches, the feeling that the past is still with us.

VPC– It sounds Idyllic. 🙂 You certainly can paint a picture with words. How did growing up there affect your writing?

KW– Eudora Welty said, “Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.” I was a listening child. I think I was sometimes quiet enough people forgot I was around. And it was evident early on that I recognized which parts of conversations should not be repeated elsewhere. But for whatever reason, adults didn’t seem to censor their conversations around me. And I’ve always had a tape recorder in my head. Hearing so much about the past, both from my parents and from my grandfather and his brothers and sisters, I grew up grounded in local history. I’m really more at home in the past than in the present—sometimes I feel as if I’ve never made it past 1965. Although I don’t remember the busy resort town, the stories I heard were so vivid, I feel as if I‘d been there watching Tom Mix at the aerodrome theater on Saturday nights.

As to how this affects my writing—my background provides material. My characters come from rural Texas, that’s what they know, that’s how they speak. Their levels of education differ, their professions differ. Their speech differs—some are grammatical, some aren’t, some use the figures of speech I grew up hearing—but same Southern voice runs through all my dialogue.

Concerning the people I knew—It was like Charles Dickens created a bunch of characters and gave them Southern accents and set them down in Caldwell County on the banks of the San Marcos River. Everybody—here, I’m talking about the old people—had some little quirk that set him or her apart. It as if they were intended to be re-placed in fiction.
As to my settings, there’s nearly always a river, and usually a cow. The less I see of cows in life, the more I have to see them in my fiction.

VPC– How did you come to be a member of AMW?

KW– I first met Karen MacInerney in a writing practice group the late 1990s. She founded AMW. When I moved to Austin in 2003, I visited one meeting, but the timing wasn’t right, so I declined. A few years later, Gale Albright and I met at a Writers’ League of Texas meeting and became critique partners; we called ourselves Just for the Hell of It Writers. That was good, but for the best critiques, more than two pairs of eyes are needed. Then I met Kaye George through the Sisters in Crime Guppies online chapter. She’d taken over Austin Mystery Writers from Karen and invited me to join. This time I jumped at the chance, and then Gale joined as well. That marked the demise of Just for the Hell of It Writers, but joining AMW is the best move I’ve made toward a writing career. Receiving thoughtful critical evaluation of my work is invaluable, and receiving it from writers who are supportive while telling the truth—I couldn’t ask for a better situation.

VPC- This is a tough question. Do you have any favorite authors/mystery authors?

KW– When I was eight, my grandmother gave me copies of The Secret of the Old Clock and The Clue of the Tapping Heels, so my first favorite was Nancy Drew. From there I jumped to Agatha Christie; I’ve read most of her books two or three times. When I’m sick, I want Campbell’s tomato soup, saltine crackers, and a Christie. Of the contemporaries, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell–I love Rendell’s tight plotting, where even on the last page, one more thread unravels; it feels like one final bolt falling into place. I like Robert Barnard, Ngaio Marsh… My absolute favorite is probably Josephine Tey. Her books are definitely mysteries, but they’re also more than that. I can’t say just why—later editions have a foreword in which Robert Barnard analyzes what makes Tey’s books special. She can write a satisfying murder mystery without a murder, and an even more satisfying mystery without a hint of murder at all. And I can’t leave out Austin’s Mark Pryor, whose Hollow Man is a devastatingly devastating read—think Ruth Rendell; and Texas native Terry Shames’ Samuel Craddock mysteries, where the low-key police chief keeps twenty head of white-faced Herefords in the pasture back of his house, which is about as authentic small-town Texas as you can get.

Thank you, Kathy for that insight into your past. And I’ve found a few more books to add to my To Read list. (Another note to readers: I can vouch for her recommendations. She’s never steered me wrong. After all, she was a librarian!)

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