Status Updates From Private Investigations: Mys...

Steph Cha relates a frightening incident she experienced while living in her first apartment, and reflects upon the threats all women face from predatory men in their daily lives. In particular, she highlights the unfair way women tend to be judged for “freezing” or choosing not to report threatening or violent incidents.

Rachel Howzell Hall gives a moving account of her struggles to publish her second and subsequent novels, while at the same time she faced a series of serious health setbacks during her 30s.

Rhys Bowen explores her preoccupation with wartime experiences (she was a young child during WW2) and her reasoning for incorporating such material into her novels.

Lynn Cahoon ponders the question of why some women, herself included, are susceptible to the charms of deceptive and predatory men.

Kristen Lepionka describes a series of eerie experiences that she had in an apartment where she once lived in Columbus, Ohio.

Jacqueline Winspear explores why war and the lingering effects of war make such compelling subjects for fiction, and explains why, for her, the why? is more enthralling than the who? when it comes to crime and mystery.

Zehanet Khan has incorporated many of these family links and recollections into her mystery novels featuring Pashtun detective Esa Khattak.

British-born American lawyer and author Ausma Zehanet Khan explores the mysterious origins of her Pashtun Muslim family, from her parents’ beginnings in ShahJahanpur, northern India, to their forced migration to Pakistan following Partition, her cultural roots in Afghanistan, to retracing the route of an epic road trip across West Asia to the Khyber Pass that the family undertook when she was a child.

William Kent Krueger describes the personal catharsis he experienced while writing his novel Ordinary Grace, a process that enabled him to gain an understanding and empathy for the plight of his late mother, who experienced several periods of psychiatric illness during Krueger’s childhood and adolescence.

Martin Limon recalls his fascination with a beautiful and mysterious foreign culture, while deployed in South Korea as a young American G.I.

Facing emergency surgery for uterine cancer while on holiday in Mexico, Connie May Fowler contemplates the far-reaching effects of the internalised trauma she and her siblings suffered at the hands of their abusive mother.

American Cara Black recounts her quest to consolidate her lifelong fascination with Paris with a genuine understanding of the city and its inhabitants, via the lens of Georges Simeon’s Crime Fiction stories featuring Inspecteur Maigret of the Surete.

Australian writer Sulari Gentill tells the story of a personal mystery that sprang from her Sri Lankan mother’s collection of old family photographs. Who was the additional child who appeared in several images of her mother with her siblings, and why did her mother so strenuously deny his existence?

Jeffrey Deaver explores the mystery of what it takes to become a successful author, an ambition he held since falling in love with books at his public library while a nerdy young schoolboy.

Hallie Ephron, a firm believer in the material world, recounts her encounter with a circle of spiritualists, following a friend’s visceral experiences in the wake of her brother’s untimely death.

“…everything we touch, everything that touches us, has the potential to be a mystery.” (p.2) “What are *your* personal mysteries? What have you seen, survived, and experienced that has made you who you are today?” (p.5)

"I Want to Be A Magician" - Anne Perry
"Ghosted" - Hallie Ephron

Perry's reason for writing mysteries: "I like the intellectual puzzle and...the moral one" in their exploration of complex social issues.

Why do I feel that in Ephron's essay, it might have been Josh who communicated to Reverend Ida? The concrete is suggestive of their real estate business? However, crushing is different from "gunning"?

"Godfathers, Nancy Drew, and Cats" - Carole Nelson Douglas
"An Extra Child" - Sulari Gentill

Still think Douglas' essay is somehow more difficult to read than the others because it's snapshot-like. Also, the allusions - it helps if you've seen "The Godfather" movies.

Gentill's is absorbing: exotic culture, "madness", and who doesn't want to know who the extra child in the photo is? I thought maybe he's queer?

"Godfathers, Nancy Drew, and Cats" - Carole Nelson Douglas

Haven't quite finished, since the Cowardly Lion appeared. I'm not sure what to make of her chronology - post-modernist? Creative, nevertheless, but something...

"Remembering the Past" - Charles Todd
"Writing about War" - Jacqueline Winspear

Thought-provoking essays as to behind-the-scenes writing of mystery novels. Todd says, "when the written record is not enough, we go to England to do our research on the ground." There's something to Winspear's saying she's interested in the events/emotions that lead to a crime, not only the "who": to her, "why" is the "real mystery."

"The Mystery of My Lost Voice" - Caroline Leavitt

After much struggle, diagnosed anxiety, and half a teaspoon of baking soda in water make for a happy ending: her cognitive therapist seems to have summed it up nicely, "Find the narrative here. Find your true voice."

"The Mystery of Deception" - Lynn Cahoon

"What did I learn from this situation?...strong heroines learn to save themselves."

Sugar and spice, Jane?

"Plot Twists: This Writer's Life" - Jeffery Deaver
"Can We Live Without Mystery?" - Tasha Alexander

Strange how by the end of Deaver's essay, a print is left on the page, as if to recall his anecdote about editorial staff possibly stomping on his manuscript!

Alexander's piece strikes a chord in showing how historically - and she quotes Ken Kesey: "The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

"Introduction: Solving the Mystery" - Victoria Zackheim
"I Don't Know This Word" - Rachel Howzel Hall

Thought to try and peer into some of the realities behind the mystery writers/genre...