I’ve slowly been sharing all the old posts I’ve written over at SleuthSayers during the time I fell off the edge of the world and disappeared. With today’s post, I’ll be finally caught up. In a sense, I’ve saved the best for last. Back in fall, I wrote about one of my favorite childhood books, and how I finally figured out why it moved me as much as it did way back when.

The book I’m talking about is called From the Mix-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg. And if you haven’t read it, how can you call yourself a grown-up child?

January is revered by Sherlock Holmes geeks each year because the biggest Sherlock Holmes geek ever—the late William S. Baring-Gould—decreed that Sherlock’s presumed birthday is January 6th. The best-known mystery magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, actually pubs a Sherlock Holmes issue each year at this time. And at the top of the year, I too try to do some sort of Sherlockian post at SleuthSayers, the mystery writers blog that I write for…

I have a post up on SleuthSayers, the mystery writers blog, today talking about a tiny-yet-important piece of advice on how writers can sell more books over the holidays. It’s a post entitled:

All I Want for Christmas Is This Post on Your Author Website

If you’re curious, I hope…

I have a post up on SleuthSayers today, which is the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States. Since it’s been a busy week, I’m repurposing a post I wrote back in 2010 for another site. I’ve always liked this article, and I’m glad to have reclaimed it and updated it slightly for a new audience. Here’s how it opens:

Yesterday was Thanksgiving in the United States. But if you happen to be an American mathematician, yesterday was more than just turkey and families. It was Fibonacci Day, so named because the month and date—in American notation, anyway—expressed the first four digits in the famous number sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3. (Oh, to have been alive on 11/23/58!) To talk about that, I’m repurposing an article I wrote years ago for a website that has since gone dark.

I’ve got a post running today over at SleuthSayers on the topic of indigenous mysteries for kids. November is the start of Native American Heritage Month in the United States, and I’ve wanted to talk about some of the books I picked up when we visited Cherokee, North Carolina, back in summer. The three I’m recommending today…

Back in 2015, I attended the Bouchercon mystery conference in Raleigh, and sat listening to a panel discussion in which a bunch of mystery writers recommended some of their favorite books. When her turn came, the New York Times Bestselling author Laura Lippman mentioned a children’s book entitled The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I remember her saying it was an unusual book for kids, because its key subplot deals with the murder of a child.

Published in 1967, the title was named a Newbery Honor book. That’s one of the top two awards a children’s book can receive. Clearly, it was highly regarded by many in its heyday, though I had never heard of it…

These days when I need a recipe in a hurry, I turn to the web. But if I have time, I turn to the legion of cookbooks that we have collected over the years. Besides the cookbooks we each brought to our marriage, we have a number of books rescued from the estates of loved ones who are no longer with us.

I recently wrote about two books of mine that I have long treasured. They are books on French cooking by an interesting author named Edouard de Pomiane (1875-1964), a medical doctor and food scientist who also presided over a popular radio show in France during the 1930s. He espoused a philosophy of simple cooking, which is unusual when you consider the complexity of most French cooking techniques.

Pomiane wrote a lot of books, but these two are the ones most easily found translated into English…

Back in the 1990s I stumbled across a book that changed the way I think about character—literary and real-life characters. The book was a little something called We’ve Had a 100 Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse. It’s a series of conversations between a journalist, Michael Ventura, and the great Jungian psychologist, James Hillman.

One portion of their conversation blew my mind. It has to do with how we become the people we are. In the western view, the present is always based on our childhoods.

Hillman says that this is our peculiar American myth. What if you read you life backward instead?

When an acorn falls from a tree, it’s coded to become a mighty oak. Great treeness is its destiny. The tiny puppy I picked out of a litter in South Carolina a year ago was destined to become a ferocious Doberman. Regal dogdom was embedded in his soul.

Why don’t humans think the same way about themselves?

A while back I wrote about how I came to buy and read the hardcover version of The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris, when it was first published 35 years ago. (Yes, it really was that long ago.) I was only 23 years old at the time, and not really earning enough money to buy hardcover novels on a regular basis.

But as I explain in this post for SleuthSayers, the mystery writers blog, sometimes just the right review can send you rushing to a bookstore.

In my case, it was an article in The New York Times that convinced me that this was the right book for me…

Some years ago, I told the story of how, as an adult, I reconnected with a writer I’d loved as a kid. The writer was Clifford B. Hicks, who penned a fun series about a kid inventor named Alvin Fernald. The series ran for 10 books, and inspired a Wonderful World of Disney TV movie.

I didn’t realize when I moved to North Carolina that Mr. Hicks lived about 40 minutes away. I wrote him a note and we exchanged a few emails, never meeting before he passed away.

I revisited the story a few months ago in a blog post I did for SleuthSayers. I think it’s little tighter than my previous take on the story. If you are looking for a wholesome mystery series to get a kid—probably a boy—hooked, you might want to…