Rhys Celebrates a Release

 
RHYS:  Saturday was apparently National Paperback book day (who knew there was such a thing?), and it was appropriate for me as this week I celebrate the release of the paperback edition of THE LAST MRS. SUMMERS.

The book came out in hardcover last year, with little fanfare, of course, as there was no book tour and only a couple of Zoom events. But it managed to reach #10 on USA Today list, and most recently won the Agatha Award for best historical mystery.  I should be happy--right?

But now, as I look at the paperback, I'm feeling a great sense of loss and nostalgia. Because, you see, the book takes place in Cornwall (a homage to Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca) and this marks the second summer in a row that I have not been able to be in England, staying with relatives in Cornwall and enjoying the magical surroundings.

Usually we fly to England and get straight on a train in Paddington Station, heading for Truro. There we pick up a car and negotiate those scary Cornish lanes (hardly ever wide enough for two vehicles to pass) until we reach my sister-in-law's manor house.

 It's at the end of a half-mile drive, with a river at the bottom of its land. There we just feel all tension slip away. We are outside the real world. We can walk through woodlands, sit on lawns, sip a Pimms, eat a cream tea. Absolute heaven!

But we still don't feel comfortable traveling to England (where case rates are rising alarmingly) and my brother-in-law is very ill, making a visit not wise at this time. So I think I'm going to re-read my own book to remind myself about all the things I love about Cornwall.

Number one is the coastline--little fishing villages nestled between cliffs. Sandy coves to swim in. A feeling of fairy-tale.

Number two is the people. To say they are nice is an understatement. They call you 'my lovey'. Time has no meaning. I was once rushing to catch a ferry when an old man, sitting on the dock, looked up at me. "You don't need to run, my lovey," he said, "He won't be going yet. He's still having his dinner."

And number three is the food. We indulge in all the things we avoid all year: Cornish pasties come first and we have to have one on the first day, from the Oggi Oggi Pasty shop in Falmouth. Then cream teas--plenty of those too with Cornish clotted cream and homemade jam. Oh, and the clotted cream is used to make ice-creams too.  I once took a group of hiking friends to Cornwall. They were super-fit ladies, who watched their diets. I warned them they may have to bend those diets a little. They tried Cornish ice cream once and thereafter it was a main point of every day to find a new ice cream shop!  And lastly fish and chips, made with local fresh fish.

I'm sighing as I'm writing this. I'll be reliving through my photos and going back to read Mrs. Summers again.

So dear Reds, what are you missing most about not traveling? What's the first place you'll go to when we can move freely again?

A Nice Cup of Tea

RHYS BOWEN:

I couple of weeks ago my favorite stationary store closed. It was my go-to place for a whole range of things—the best selection of greeting cards, any size of envelope, any kind of pen, amusing little gifts for friends’ birthdays and even a tempting display of scarves, bags, jewelry. At Christmas it had crackers—the type that go bang, not the ones you eat with cheese. I’d always find what I needed and also something to surprise and tempt me.  But it couldn’t complete with Staples and Office Max where I have to buy twenty-four envelopes when I want just one.

So I find myself lamenting the last of a way of life I grew up with. The main street of small shops, each individually owned by people I knew. Granted it took longer to go to the grocer for sugar and then have to go next door to the dairy for milk. But the butcher would tell me which cuts of meat I didn’t want to buy and which I did. The fishmonger had fresh fish, delivered from that boat that morning. And the little haberdashery—well, they had everything from elastic to sewing thread to woolen undergarments. If you asked for it. They had it. And with each shop one stopped and passed the time of day.

                I still find that in some parts of England. When I visit relatives in Cornwall I love walking down the main street in Falmouth, gazing with longing at the fishmonger’s slab of lovely fish freshly caught. And the pasty shop with the smell of just baked pasties. And everyone calls you “My lovey” and has time to chat.

                It’s definitely one of the things I miss about England, although every town now has a huge hypermarket there too. But one thing that does seem to be vanishing from jolly old England is the cup of tea. It has always been the symbol of hospitality. Go to visit and the first thing the hostess used to say is “I’ll put the kettle on.” In many working class homes the tea pot sat on the hob, hot and full, all day in case somebody stopped by for a chat. And the tea stewed stronger and stronger!

                If someone was in an accident, suffering from shock, they were given a cup of tea. If someone was upset in any kind of disaster—the bombings of World War II, floods or fires,  they were given a cup of tea. It was a symbol that everything was going to be all right.

                But today’s generation doesn’t drink tea. Drive around Britain and you’ll see Starbucks and Costa’s Coffee on every corner. When we stay with people it’s coffee at breakfast. Those with leisure still have their afternoon cuppa at four, but it’s mostly older folks like us. The young have no time for leisure, or cuppas.

                Of course one can still find tea at the Ritz (for fifty pounds or so), at Brown’s and other very posh hotels. And in Devon and Cornwall they still serve the famous cream teas with local clotted cream. Yum. I’m sad to see tea dying out—both as a drink when one needs a pick-me-up and as a meal in the afternoon. To me it was the most civilized of meals—tiny cucumber sandwiches, home made scones with jam (and sometimes cream), little cakes, slices of rich fruit cake. All extra calories, I confess, but such pleasant calories with time for chatter and reenergizing. We sometimes serve tea as a treat to family and friends, but mostly they are too busy—rushing off to swim practice or karate or with too much homework. We live in a world that is too busy, too rushed, and that’s a great pity.

So what do you miss about our current lifestyle? Any nostalgia to share?

But is it History? Triss Stein and the Crossroads of Facts and Nostaligia

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Triss Stein and I met at Bouchercon in Albany last year, but were deep in conversation before we realized we're neighbors — both residing in Brooklyn's historic Park Slope neighborhood.

I love Triss's Erica Donato series because it's set in "the Slope" — but Triss invokes Brooklyn both past and present so wonderfully that, regardless of where you live, you'll find yourself among the brownstones with gas lamps set on shady tree-lined streets as well. And it's not just me — Publishers Weekly says Triss gives " ... a vivid sense of Erica’s Brooklyn neighborhood, and the characterization is wonderful."

Here's a brief description of Triss's newest Erica Donato novel, Brooklyn Graves: 

A brutally murdered friend who was a family man with not an enemy in the world. A box full of charming letters home, written a century ago by an unknown young woman working at the famed Tiffany studios. Historic Green-Wood cemetery, where a decrepit mausoleum with stunning stained glass windows is now off limits, even to a famed art historian.

Suddenly, all of this, from the tragic to the merely eccentric, becomes part of Erica Donato’s life. As if her life is not full enough.  She is a youngish single mother of a teen, an oldish history grad student, lowest person on the museum’s totem pole. She doesn’t need more responsibility, but she gets it anyway as secrets start emerging in the most unexpected places. 

In Brooklyn Graves a story of old families, old loves and hidden ties merges with new crimes and the true value of art, against the background of the splendid old cemetery and the life of modern Brooklyn.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Please welcome Triss as she joins us to talk about the crossroads of history, nostalgia, and the subjectivity of memory.


TRISS STEIN: If you're interested in history, a fascination I share with some Jungle Red writers, sooner or later you run into someone, in print or in person, whose memories  are in direct contradiction to everything you know.  I'm not talking about historians disagreeing. I'm talking about the elderly person who says it was so much better in the good old days. And those days happen to be the period otherwise know as the Great Depression. (I'm not making this up. That person is someone I know very well.)

Some other examples:

If you say "tenement" most people correctly picture horrifyingly overcrowded, unsanitary, epidemic-breeding housing, long outlawed. However, when the wonderful tenement history museum was being created on New York's Lower East Side, two elderly women were deeply interested in the project. Turned out they had been, as  children some of the last residents of that building before it was closed for good. There are taped interviews of them ... and their cheerful, touching and fond memories.

The co-worker, my contemporary, who collected '50's television memorabilia, is holding onto something I can't fathom. The good old days of Hopalong Cassidy and the first TV Superman?  Really? This is about his childhood, not about  the television quality. It's not so different from the book reviewer who condemned Little Women (!)  and lamented the superior books of his youth. [It's a real review, anonymous but thought to be by Henry James (!!) ]

I like Jack Finney's writing a lot, from stories I  remember reading as a teen, to his hugely successful Time and Again, but sometimes I find them irritating too. They are so sentimental about - here it is again -  the good old days, when everything was better. I used to love that romantic point of view. Now, I know better. In the photos of  How the Other Half Lives, taken just a few miles away from Finney's Gramercy Park, we see the rest of the story.

For a writer writing about the past, it's a dilemma. Unlike Rhys Bowen or Susan Elia MacNeal, I am not writing historicals but I am writing a series about a Brooklyn historian whose research into Brooklyn's very diverse neighborhoods brings her up against crimes both old and current. It gives me a chance to play historian.  For all of us, writing history,  the personal memories provide the vivid, particular details that create immediacy for our stories. At the same time, we can't trust anyone's memories to be anything more than just that - their own memories, filtered through their own experiences. Fascinating, often. Accurate? Ahh, not necessarily.

There is nostalgia. And there is history. In this time, we can't ( or shouldn't, anyway) take as fully reliable, memories of the wonderful days of the ante-bellum South, or, for that matter, the British empire, pre-World War 1. Yet it remains interesting  - and useful to know- that many people saw it all that way.

Right there, in that gap between the proud soldiers of World War

11 and the Negro troops riding in the back of the trains, the glamorous Hollywood of the studios and the novel Miss Lonelyhearts, the legendary Age of Aquarius  and the lives lost to drugs (I wrote that in Brooklyn Bones),  the  British life Upstairs and the life Downstairs, is a great place to find a story.

What do you think, you history fans out there?  Were you ever on the losing side of the argument that begins with "the old neighborhood was so wonderful until  'they' moved in" ? (It's always the losing side, because you can't argue with people's memories)   My new book, Brooklyn Graves, is about Tiffany, Gilded Age New York , a grand cemetary and -ah-ha - new people moving into an old neighborhood. With a twist or two. 

Reds and lovely readers: What’s your favorite history/nostalgia contradiction? 

And where do you stand in that particular argument? 

Triss Stein is a small–town girl from New York state’s dairy country  who has spent most of her adult life living and working in New York  city. This gives her the useful double vision of a stranger and a  resident for writing mysteries about Brooklyn, her ever-fascinating,  ever-changing, ever-challenging adopted home. Brooklyn Graves will  be out from Poisoned Pen Press in March and  is second in the series,  after Brooklyn Bones. Triss is active in both Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America and is on the board of the  MWA NY chapter.

The Scent of a Lost Time and Place--New Year's Eve Nostalgia

RHYS BOWEN: It’s the last day of the year and a time to get nostalgic for all of us. Actually the entire holiday season is tinged with nostalgia—memories of Christmasses long ago when the world was simple and safe and we were surrounded by the warmth of family and simple pleasures. Some of the memories are not so sweet—every Christmas for me evokes the sharp memories of my mother’s death, fifteen years ago. Being summoned by a telephone call on Christmas Eve telling me to come now or it would be too late. Trying to buy a plane ticket to Australia that didn’t cost an arm and two legs. Traveling through the night and arriving to find I had missed Christmas altogether and was in the middle of scorching summer, beach weather, zinc on noses, surf boards, and in the middle of it, my tiny frail mother dying of pancreatic cancer. I remember feelings of loss, not only for her and the person she was, but for myself on missing Christmas, not being there to watch presents I had bought be unwrapped, mince pies I had baked be eaten and that someone else would now sing my solos at the Christmas Eve mass… and then, of course, feeling guilty that I was even concerned about such trivial things when I was losing my mother.

 

I arrived to find my mother, shrunk to a stick figure, sitting up and eating a mince pie. I was able to curl up on the bed beside her and watch a carol service. She lasted another two weeks and I was able to brush her hair, read to her, and tell her I loved her. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

 

It’s funny how much my memories are linked to my sense of smell. Nothing evokes a time and place for me like a particular scent—those baking mince pies and sausage rolls tell me that Christmas is about to be celebrated and I’m back in my grandmother’s kitchen.  Recently I bought a bar of Pear’s soap and when I showered with it I was back in my childhood, being bathed in a very cold bathroom.

 The scent of eucalyptus leaves takes me immediately to the lakeshore where I walked my mom's dog while she lay dying... a magic forest of paperbark trees with the feeling of being very old and forgotten about it. I believe my mom used to call it the enchanted forest.

 And after my mother died I had to decide which items I wanted to bring back to California to remind me of her. Mostly things like photographs, naturally, and her jewelry, but I also had her sewing box shipped back to me. My father had had it made for her—a big contraption with layers that opened out, beautifully crafted in light oak. When it finally reached California I opened it and the special scent of my parents’ house came up to meet me—not their house in Australia but the house where I grew up in England. The smell was that old, musty, damp smell tinged with furniture polish that always lingers in ancient English houses. I thrust my nose in between the layers and breathed deeply, taking in a lost time and place.

               

The box still sits in our downstairs closet. It contains a wealth of useful things—buttons and hooks and elastic and various color threads. And every time I open it the smell comes up to meet me and I can’t resist lowering my face and breathing deeply, trying to conjure up something that no longer exists anywhere else in the world except here.

For those of you who are fellow writers, here’s my year end tip. If you want to evoke a time or a place, do it with the sense of smell. Nothing can transport us more powerfully.

Wishing you all a Happy New Year,

Happy writing and happy reading,

Rhys

I'm Dreaming of.....

RHYS BOWEN: This week as well as celebrating Red Julia’s new book, I am also celebrating the release of the paperback edition of my last year’s hardcover, The Twelve Clues of Christmas ( New York Times bestseller).  If you bought this book, you’ll know that it took place at a country house in England and I tried to create exactly the kind of Christmas I longed for—uncommercial , simple, good food, good friends, good fun..

I suppose like many of us,  I have a deep yearning for the old-fashioned Christmas of long ago. I want the yule log burning merrily while the family sits around the fire. I want the carol singers at the front door. Crackers. Mince pies. The holly and the ivy. God rest ye merry gentlemen.  I've tried to recreate it from time to time, but it never quite works. Maybe that is because we have so much year round these days that it's hard to make magic at the holidays. When I was growing up Christmas at my grandmother's house was simple in the extreme. My own kids and grandkids would probably find it boring. 

We would drive to my grandmother’s house on Christmas Eve, bringing with us the Christmas tree (trees were smaller in those days). We’d decorate it while my grandmother served hot punch and mince pies. We’d string paper chains around the house.  After supper we children would be put to bed, but of course we stayed awake, hoping for a glimpse of Father Christmas.  At midnight the grown-ups went to midnight mass at the local church. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to join them. It was magic sitting in the old church, listening to the choir singing those wonderful hymns and then walking home through the frosty night, our breath coming out like dragon-fire.  At home we were greeted with more hot mince pies and sausage rolls.

                Our presents appeared in pillow cases at the foot of our beds. We opened them at first light, sitting up in bed surrounded by wrapping paper. I suspect we ate the sugar mice right then.  The day itself was simple—highlighted by the turkey at lunch. Snooze afterward then the magnificent Christmas cake, frosted to look like a snow scene with little porcelain figures on it. And small presents had miraculously appeared on the tree and were handed out after tea. We children were required to put on some kind of entertainment—a pantomime or charades. Then a cold turkey supper and bed.
 
I suppose it was so special because it was the only time in the year we ate turkey, or dates or saw tangerines in the stores. We rarely had presents apart from birthday and Christmas. Today when everything is available all the time and we have so much more, it’s hard to create the thrill of treats. We try hard—that’s why stores start blaring Christmas music at us in October.  We up the ante by requiring bigger and better presents—remember the ad to “put a Lexus under the tree?”  Right. We want that feeling of a special occasion but we don’t know where to find it.

                I’ve gone looking for it myself on several occasions—one year we rented a cabin in the snow with friends. We arrived to a picture perfect Christmas card scene. We awoke next morning to rain. It rained non-stop all week. No snow, no skiing, just bored children imprisoned in a cabin with no TV.

                One year we took a Christmas market cruise down the Danube, going around the markets in each small town. It was quite magical with the booths and the lights and the smell of sausage and cinnamon and hand carved toys. I loved it. John complained “How many more carved angels do you need to see?”

And one year we decided to do away with commercialism and make handmade gifts.  I made dolls and quilts and others made candles and pillows and scarves. When we exchanged gifts on Christmas morning we tried to be thrilled and excited, realizing the supreme effort each one of us had made. But it’s really hard to get excited about a fleece pillow or a painted bottle. I was the first to crack. “Okay,” I said. “I did go to the store and bought these little extras.”

                “So did I,” one daughter said. “I did too,” said another. And laughing we handed out real, store-bought gifts. I guess we’re not Little house on the Prairie after all.

                So how about you? Do you still have nostalgia for long-ago holidays? Do you seek to recreate them?

And if I'm allowed a sliver of BSP for once, may I point out that the paperback of Twelve Clues is at a special price right now and makes a terrific stocking stuffer! You can find it at your favorite indie store, or at Barnes and Noble or online at Barnes and Noble or Amazon
But wait==there's more. I'll give away a copy of the book to the best comment of the day!