Writers on Jeopardy?

 HALLIE EPHRON: We started the week talking about the amazing 31-game Jeopardy run by Jamie Ding, a cool as a cucumber, orange-shirted, sweet looking, self-described "bureaucrat" with an amazing knowledge bank and lightning fast buzzer finger.

Hank noted that one of my all-time favorite thriler writers, Meg Gardiner, was a Jeopardy champion in the 1980's.

Which got me wondering if there were many crime fiction writers who've come up aces on Jeopardy.

It turns out there are lots of writers who've done well on Jeopardy, but not many who are known for writing crime fiction. Only a few, compared to the vast numbers of attorneys and academics and assorted PhDs.... (BTW Meg Gardiner is a Stanford-educated attorney in addition to being an author.) 

Then this week, a glamorous redhead, Kate Brody, who wrote the bestselling, much critically acclaimed thriller The Rabbit Hole (Soho Crime) won, beating the guy who beat Jamie Ding.

/

I'm thrilled for her.

Turns out her appearance this week wasn't her first brush with  Jeopardy. Her novel was a CLUE when it came out a few years ago.

My husband tried out of Jeopardy but was never called. He was brilliant at any questions about history or geography (a stamp collector!) or science or art or classic lit. Useless when it came to pop culture or music.

I'd be great on Jeopardy if the clues were limited to children's lit and food. Other than that, I'm good at improvising, cracking jokes... aka, talking a good line. But that wouldn't rack up many $$.

This has me wondering whether being a crime fiction writer is  advantageous to an aspiring Jeopardy champ. Or does having an active imagination actually put one at a DISadvantage?

Would you want to be a contestant on Jeopardy? Or would Wheel of Fortune be more up your alley? Or would you rather just stay home and shout answers at the TV? Or write crime novels?

Or better yet, read them.

Winter's bones, garden scars

HALLIE EPHRON: It's still a bit chilly here in New England but spring has definitely sprung. The weeping willows have already passed from their beautiful opening number (yellow/lime green buds) to green. Cherries, dogwoods, forsythia, all are blooming like crazy, and cool temps are keep the blossoms on the magnolias. 

But everywhere the remnants of a brutal, late winter blizzard that left my yard buried for weeks in 3 feet of snow, are still in evidence.

Most of the bushes and trees have survived intact and are blooming ferociously.

And my early spring carpet of blue scilla has burst from the ground and is putting on a show.

And then there's this...

This Japanese quince bush should be in full, hot pink bloom. Instead, it's barren. And the bark has been stripped from its branches, starting at about a foot off the ground.

Time will tell whether it will "spring" back next year but I'm not optimistic.

Here's another Japanese quince which only seems to be half dead. 

Consensus here is that the culprits are rabbits. The bane of my garden.

For weeks after that formidable blizzard, a thick blanket of covered the grass and weeds that sustain the rabbits through winter. The snow weighed down the branches and the rabbits climbed aboard, helping themselves to the bark and stripping the branches clean.

And so no flowers formed. No leaves are budding. I'm not optimistic that the bushes will come back. Time will tell.

What do you think? Is there any hope that my Japanese quinces will come back?

Are you having a gorgeous spring, and does your neighborhood bear winter's scars?

Jeri Westerson's Sherlockian Pastiche... with vampires! And a quiz!

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Now for one of our favorite guests, Jeri Westerson, here to reveal all the gory (truly!) details about her new IRREGULAR DETECTIVE MYSTERY. She'll take us to Baker Street with a pastiche blending Holmes and DRACULA!

Over to Jeri...

JERI WESTERSON: My Irregular Detective Mystery series follows the detecting exploits of former Baker Street Irregular Tim Badger and his partner Ben Watson, under the mentorship of Sherlock Holmes.

In my newest novel in the series THE VAMPYRE CLIENT, Badger and Watson’s client is a pale man, with dark glasses, has an allergy to sunlight, and studies bats.

He asks Badger and Watson to go to his estate in Ashwell to convince the suspicious villagers he is not a vampire…when tragedy strikes!

 You know. Just a typical Victorian mystery.

I do like my research, and for this story, some of that research was vampires. I dove deep. And I came away with something I could really sink my teeth into.

Starting from the beginning doesn’t mean we will be starting with Bram Stoker’s novel DRACULA from 1897 (two years after the timeframe of my novel), nor the folklore from the Balkans where some folks are still buried beheaded if they are suspected of being vampires, or with a brick shoved down their skull’s gullet, but rather with 1819’s THE VAMPYRE, by John Polidori, finishing a story that Lord Byron told during that celebrated weekend where Mary Shelley came up with FRANKENSTEIN. This vampyre was a nasty piece of work, breaking hearts and sucking blood.

But it didn’t stop there. In the 1820s, Paris was lousy with plays about sexy vampires. Le Vampire; Le Trois Vampires ou le clair de la lune; Encore un Vampire; Les Étrenne d’un Vampire …and more! These were all vampires of the sexy variety, and boy, did Paris love them!

But in 1897, DRACULA was published. Based a little on lore in the Balkans, and a lot more of imagination, Stoker created something quite different. 

But if you are thinking of a sexy portrayal, you’d be wrong. What Dracula really looked like in the book is someone thin and pale of face, a long, white mustache, pointed nose and ears, protruding teeth, nearly a unibrow, and sparse curly hair on his head but hairy everywhere else, including his palms. Not exactly a sexy times kind of vampire.

With the emergence of early silent films, we begin to see the sexy vamp again. And the scary ones.

London After Midnight, the lost Lon Chaney Sr. silent film where we see Chaney in particularly scary makeup, and then Nosferatu, the copyright violation film that widow Mrs. Bram Stoker fought for decades to suppress and was almost successful (and, incidentally, looked the most like her husband’s creation). And then finally, the 1931 film Dracula based on the play, both starring Bela Lugosi, who was supposed to be considered sexy back in the day.

Do vampires see their own reflections?

Stoker adopted some characteristics of folkloric vampires for his own: aversion to garlic, staking as a means of killing them. But he invented the idea that they must be invited into one's home, sleep on earth from their homeland, and have no reflection in mirrors.

Do they wear capes?

The cape-wearing Vampire with a high collar comes from the illustrations accompanying VARNEY THE VAMPIRE OR THE FEAST OF BLOOD from 1845.

Can they turn into a bat…a wolf…a gerbil?

The lesbian vampire of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) can transform into a cat, as Dracula can transform into a dog…and a bat. Gerbil’s might be a little too cutesy. And short.

And since we are talking about my Sherlockian Pastiche here, let’s refer back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes short story The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire It was first published in 1924.

The story -- with spoilers ahead:
Mr. Ferguson tells Holmes that he lived in Peru and married a Peruvian woman while there, bringing back not only the wife to England but souvenirs of Peru. He also has a 15-year-old son, Jack, from his first wife. He was alarmed when he caught his wife sucking blood from their baby son’s neck. Mrs. Ferguson also struck her stepson Jack several times and then sequestered herself away, never telling her husband why. Holmes, of course, worked it out long before he and Dr. Watson arrived to the Sussex home; that Jack was jealous of the new child and had been shooting Peruvian poisoned darts at the baby from the collection his father had, so that the mother was forced to suck out the poison but did not tell her husband about it for fear the family would break up. Boarding school was probably a good option.

Doyle here, as he had in his other two “supernatural” stories, one being the short story The Adventure of the Creeping Man, followed the popular penny dreadful genre; lurid tales of vampires, ghosts, fiends, and non-supernatural villains.

Only in Doyle’s case – even though he was a believer in séances and mysticism – wouldn’t allow his scientific detective to believe in the supernatural, and always sussed out the true cause of these events.

So it is important that when you encounter vampires, you know who you are dealing with; an unsexy white-mustachioed Dracula; a bat-looking Nosferatu; a sparkling vampire in Seattle; or hang-dog Louis in New Orleans. If you aren’t exited around them, a stake through the heart is the way out of that relationship.

Which really could be said for ALL relationships.

And now, a bit of a Sherlockian Supernatural Quiz!

1. Besides the Sussex Vampire, Doyle wrote two other supernatural stories. Was one of them:
(A) The Adventure of the Lazy Ghost
(B) The Dreadful Account of the Deadly Sea Slug
(C) The Hound of the Baskervilles
(D) The Case of the Unpleasant Odor

2. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, what sort of creature did Holmes encounter?
(A) Scooby-Doo
(B) A swearing Parrot
(C) A ghost cat
(D) A gigantic hound

3. In The Adventure of the Creeping Man, why is that man creeping?
(A) He’s constipated
(B) He’s a burglar
(C) He injected himself with monkey extract
(D) He’s lazy

4. The creeping man uses a ‘creeper.’ What is it?
(A) A vine
(B) A walker
(C) A new dance move
(D) A hip replacement

Answers to the Quiz: 1 is C, 2 is D, 3 is C, and 4 is A

THE VAMPYRE CLIENT, book 4 in An Irregular Detective Mystery series, releases today in ebook, paperback original, and audiobook. https://books2read.com/u/3G0w2K

HALLIE: So how was your knowledge of vampire lore?