THE MEMORY OF SNOW by Julia Buckley

Jenn McKinlay: One of my very favorite traditional mystery writers, Julia Buckley, is here today and I am just delighted to host her. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at her latest project Death at Castle Dark under the pen name Veronica Bond, and I have to say it's excellent! It was one of those books where I just couldn't wait to get back to it -- always the sign of an excellent mystery. But here she is to talk about her upcoming release in another of my favorite series. Take it away, Julia.

Julia Buckley

Julia Buckley: My latest Hungarian Tea House mystery  begins with snowfall. Not any snowfall, but one of those magical snows with big fat flakes that comes just once in a while and transports us to a fairy tale like setting. The mystery begins with a man Hana sees in the snow, and who seems somehow troubling in that context. Thus begins the tale . . .

But Hana’s experience got me thinking about the nature of memorable snows. I remember, of course, the giant snowfalls, starting with the big blizzards in Chicago, which stopped traffic on Lake Shore Drive and sealed people into their homes. My husband recalls dragging a sled to the grocery store with his mother, both of them straining through the drifts, only to lose a boot on the way home--a boot that was never retrieved from the massive mounds of snow. But there were other snow memories.

I went to college in Valparaiso Indiana, which is famous, my  meteorology professor assured us, for the most snowfall, the highest number of inches. He claimed that this made Valparaiso famous worldwide. I tended to believe him when I had to walk to class over a large field that we lovingly called “The Tundra,” the Midwestern Wind biting into every exposed bit of skin, the snow dragging at me with each step like some tenacious god of the underworld, bent on pulling me down.

Then there were the fun snows. I can recall many a snow battle in my own yard, with my brothers and sisters. I was the youngest, and my older brothers did not show mercy just because I was relatively small  and not as wily. I was routinely pummeled. When I took my high school entrance test on a snowy January day, my brother Chris (who was cute and popular, with his blond feathered hair) and his friends decided to attack me with snowballs on my way out of the building. They chased me down while I screamed with a combination of joy and terror, eventually collapsing into the snow drifts next to the parking lot, where a group of teenage boys scooped up snow and threw it on my prone body. I was yelling, and a big chunk of snow got into my mouth and choked me. For a few seconds i thought I would die of snow, there outside the high school I hoped to attend, but I was also conscious of the fact that four popular SENIOR guys had a acknowledged my presence enough to tease me mercilessly. The ice particles melted in my throat. I survived my hazing by snow, and they helped me to my feet. For some reason it is not a traumatic memory, but a funny one.

I met my husband in my junior year of college, on a BLIND DATE AT A FORMAL DANCE. That’s right--potentially the most awkward way to meet anyone, but we hit it off right away, and he would come to visit Valpo some weekends, including the snowy ones. Once we had a lengthy and invigorating snowball fight: my boyfriend, my roommate, and some of my dorm friends. There was strategy; there was running and hiding; there was a great deal of laughter, and a little bit of falling in love amidst bright white mounds of snow, glittering in the sun like diamonds.

I had a student once who had come to America from Africa sometime during grade school. When I asked students to write an essay about a  memorable thing, he wrote about the first time he saw snow--how magical it was to him, who had only heard of it but never seen it in person, never experienced the white, wet flakes that fell from the sky. He had never forgotten that moment that he went outside and saw that it was real--not a legend or a fantasy, but a real phenomenon; he had the joy of experiencing an American winter as a very excited child.

I try to imagine how it must have been for him, and I remember those snows of my own childhood--the truly special snows with the fat white flakes that took forever to fall and allowed that extra moment to appreciate their beauty, their shimmery whiteness, their symmetry and uniqueness. Those were snow-globe snows, and that’s the sort of snow Hana experiences in DEATH ON THE NIGHT OF LOST LIZARDS (available for pre-order now~).

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Though we’re about to experience a hot summer, this might be the best time to read a book set in a snowy world--a way to cool down as you sunbathe on your patio or deck or tiny balcony.  The novel taps into Hungarian Christmas traditions, but it is the snow that takes center stage. I remember a quote from Tennessee Wiliams’ The Glass Menagerie, a background image that read "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?"  (Where are the snows of yesteryear?) In this novel, Hana remembers her grandmother’s description of the snows in Békéscsaba, her hometown. Hana and the reader will understand that it is not the snows her grandmother remembers with such nostalgia, but the time in which those snows fell--her youth, her time with her family, her love of her homeland. I suppose our snow memories are a celebration of the same things.

How about you, Reds and Readers, what are your best snow memories?

More about Death on the Night of the Lost Lizard: Along with her mother and grandmother, Hana Keller has achieved renown serving tea and cakes with a European flair, but when a local professor is killed, she uncovers a serving of suspects instead…

Hana Keller is getting ready for a lovely holiday season. When she receives a rare tea set as a birthday gift, she decides to host a tea at her apartment for her closest friends. During the cozy get-together, one of Hana's friends gets word that a murderer is on the loose. Hana soon learns that the victim was Sandor Balog, a professor of Hungarian Studies at the local college.

With her growing psychic ability, Hana senses that she is going to be pulled into the investigation of  the professor's death somehow. With her sexy boyfriend Erik on the case, Hana finds the Tea House steeped in suspects. She studies the smiling faces celebrating the season, but the real killer is good at hiding the truth and putting Hana in the hot seat….

The entire Hungarian Tea House Series:

Things Learned While Looking Up Other Things: Gothic Edition (An Homage to Sydney J. Harris) By Julia Buckley

JENN McKINLAY: My gateway from the children's section of the library to the adult side was Victoria Holt, specifically Mistress of Mellyn. So, it was with great delight that I discovered a gothic  mystery series had burst upon the scene written by Julia Buckley. Here she is to tell us all about it!

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JULIA BUCKLEY: Back in the 1970s I used to read the Chicago Sun-Times, to which my family had a subscription. Since I was a kid, I tended to read the Funnies, the horoscopes, and the movie reviews first, but I did enjoy many of the columnists.

One of their greatest writers was a man named Sydney J. Harris, a great 20^thCentury writer and thinker who studied philosophy at the University of Chicago while also getting his start, as a teenager, working for the Chicago Daily News. When that paper became defunct, Harris began writing for the Sun-Times.

At one point he wrote a column called “Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things.” These pieces were created long before the Internet, and Harris’s column alerted me to the idea of just how much information was out there. Generally these pieces were whimsical, but Harris, a philosopher at heart, had much to say about the human condition.

Although Sydney J. Harris died in 1986, his writing, particularly that column, has stayed with me. 

I’ve been doing some research into the Gothic tradition since my books, beginning with A Dark and Stormy Murder, are small and cozy homages to that tradition, especially to the great Gothic suspense writers of the post-war 20^thCentury—people like Mary Stewart (on whom Camilla Graham is loosely based), Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt. But before those women spun their tales of magic and mystery, there were their Gothic forbears: Ann Radcliffe in the late 18^thCentury; the Brontes and Mary Shelley in the 19^thCentury, Daphne du Maurier in the early 20^thCentury. There is much to say about the Gothic tradition, these writers in particular, writing in general.

So, inspired by Harris, I’m going to share some of the most interesting tidbits of information from some of my latest bits of research (and oh does the Internet make this easy! Harris searched through books).

·      Gothic fiction (aka Gothic horror) emerged from Gothic architecture. Many of the works of the early Gothics like Horace Walpole (the originator), and later Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, even Dickens with A Christmas Carol, set their works in buildings with Gothic elements. Gothic structure emerged from Gothic structures!

·      Most know that Poe, a master of the Gothic, wrote the first American detective story, creating an archetype for many works that followed. However, Poe also wrote science fiction! In his story “The Unparalled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” his main character took a balloon ride to the moon. 

·      The Bronte children were all highly creative: the sisters, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne, each wrote novels, and their brother, Branwell, was an artist. The deaths of many of their loved ones may well have contributed to the gloomy, Gothic tone of their writing. Three of them died around the age of 30, and Charlotte died at 38. The family’s home, the parsonage at Haworth, is now a museum in Yorkshire. 

·      Mary Stewart, before marrying the geologist Frederick Stewart, was Mary Rainbow. While I thought I had read all of her works (many times), I find two listed on Wikipedia that I have never heard of: The Castle of Danger(1981) and The Wind off the Small Isles(1968) I will be reading them both this summer.

·      Phyllis A. Whitney was born in Japan, and her middle name “Ayame,” means “iris” in Japanese. Whitney was well-traveled, but as a young married woman just beginning to write, she lived here in Chicago. She worked at bookstores and at the Chicago Public Library while she honed her craft. Later she became a book reviewer for the Chicago Sunand the Philadelphia Inquirer. Whitney lived to be 104 years old. She told the NYT: “I always told myself that when I get old I’ll reread all my books, but I never seem to get old.” She was seventy-nine at the time.

·     Eleanor Hibbert, according to Wikipedia, wrote as “Jean Plaidy for fictionalized history of European royalty; Victoria Holt for gothic romances, and Philippa Carr for a multi-generational family saga.” She wrote more than 200 books which sold more than 100 million copies worldwide and were translated into 20 languages. Hibbert was English but loved to escape cold English winters by taking cruises to warm places. She died on a cruise ship, at age 86, and was buried at sea somewhere between Greece and Egypt.

·     Daphne Du Maurier’s REBECCA (set in Cornwall, like most of her works), has never gone out of print. Du Maurier grew more reclusive as her fame grew. She did not like being called a “romantic novelist,” as she felt she her books did not fit into the genre. She lived in Cornwall for her whole life, for many years renting an estate called “Menabilly,” on which the famous Manderley is partially based.

·     Common criteria for Gothic fiction include a setting on a spooky estate or old castle; a theme of death or decay (Poe was a master of this); some element of the supernatural, perhaps involving curses or prophecies; overwrought emotion, especially in the heroine; a domineering male figure; romance; closed doors/secret passages; images of blood or the grotesque; an overall mood of gloom or horror—just to name a few! Some sites list up to 100 Gothic elements.

·     Sub-note: In my Gothic series, I make use of at least seven of those motifs! Perhaps you can find them.

I could go on and on with interesting Gothic details, and I wonder what Sydney J. Harris would make of the Internet age. Oh, and here’s one last “thing I learned” while looking up Harris himself:

·     Sydney J. Harris was on Richard Nixon’s enemies list.   J

What about you, Reds and readers, what did you learn while looking up something else?

 Here's a glimpse at the latest writer's apprentice mystery, featuring Lena London: 

Writer's apprentice Lena London is 

happily working on a new collaboration 

with her idol and bestselling suspense 

novelist and friend Camilla Graham, but 

her joy is short-lived when a dark cloud 

descends upon the quaint town of Blue 

Lake, Indiana...

Lena's best friend, Allison, is in a panic. On a walk in the woods by her home, Allison discovers the body of her mail carrier, an argumentative man who recently had a falling out with Allison's husband. Lena quickly realizes that Allison has nothing to worry about as the murder weapon points to a different suspect altogether: Lena's embattled boyfriend, Sam West.

Sam was cleared of his wife's murder when she was found alive, and now someone is trying to make him look guilty again. Surveillance video of a break-in at his house shows a shadowy figure trying to incriminate him by stealing the weapon from his desk. Lena and Camilla work on a suspect list, but a threatening note and a violent intrusion at Graham House prove that the devious killer has decided to write them into the plot.

Julia Buckley is a Chicago writer. She has two series with Berkley Prime Crime, along with a variety of mystery novels available on Kindle. Her newest release, DEATH IN DARK BLUE, is now available in bookstores and online.

Her hobbies are reading, writing, binge-watching tv series on Netflix, and hanging out with her husband, sons, four cats and one giant Labrador.

Visit Julia at her website, JuliaBuckley.com or her Facebook page, Julia Buckley Mystery Novels, or see her on Twitter @juliabucks. You can also explore her inspirations for Blue Lake on her Pinterest page, or follow her on Instagram at jellenbuckey. 

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