For us, the local author Festival for Dauphin County library this past weekend started under a cloud. Our 14-year-old cat, Olga, decided we were getting too much sleep. So she challenged us in the middle the night to play “Find the Horking Cat.” Our floors are combination of throw rugs and would. So the challenge […]
Teresa will be giving a talk at the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop tonight about “Suburban Stockade” (now called “Fed, Safe, and Sheltered”) It’ll be her first, and for the last few days she’s been working on what she wants to say. Naturally, she asks me, her husband, for advice, which I’m naturally eager to do. “Is […]
Work on the final volume of the 223B Casebook is still going on. All of the stories are in but one, and all but nine of them have their definitions written. We even have the last TwainLock story written (in fact, it was published in “The Casebook of Twain and Holmes”) In the meantime, and […]
Reader’s Almanac Born: Thomas Campion, poet, essayist, musician, London, 1567; Cotton Mather, theologist, essayist, poet, psalmist, Boston, Massachusett Bay Colony, 1663; Charles Darwin, naturalist, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, 1809; George Meredith, novelist, poet, essayist, Portsmouth, England, 1828; R(onald) F(rederick) Delderfield, short-story writer, novelist, London, 1912; Alan Dugan, poet, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1923; Judy Blume, novelist, children’s author, Elizabeth, […]
During the silent-movie days, in an era before union rules and lax government regulation, actors, directors and film studios risked life and limb to get exciting scenes onto celluloid. It’s hard to describe the mindset in which cowboys would be willing to earn $10 a day to crash their horses (with the help of tripwires). […]
The Mystery of Moldy Manor Charles Hamilton It’s been awhile since I’ve run a Sherlock Holmes parody. As of Jan. 2019, I’m still working on the last volume in the 223B Casebook series, this time covering the last five years of Conan Doyle’s life. In the meantime, let’s run another parody! This one’s by Charles […]
Hannah Nawa, a go-getting entrepreneur in Shippensburg, Pa, decided that her town needed a book festival. But instead of waiting for someone else to do the work, she started one herself. That led to a great day for us at Peschel Press and quite a few other local authors as well. The first Shippensburg Book […]
On Tuesday I returned to work at PennLive, except that I was working for myself this time. The company held its first Local Author Showcase, and organized by Mary Clayton, marketing event planner, it was a blast! About a dozen authors displayed their books in a room on the first floor, and for several hours […]
It’s been awhile since I printed a Sherlock parody, so let’s try one from Rhoda Montade, the nom de plume of an anonymous scribe who wrote for The Washington Times. In “Sherlock Holmes Jazz Age Parodies and Pastiches I: 1920-1924,” I printed Montade’s “The Gubb Diamond Robbery.” But while doing my research, I discovered no […]
Sometime later this year, I hope to finish and release “Hollywood Gone Wild,” a follow-up to “Writers Gone Wild.” This is one of the stories that will appear in the book, about a movie that was one of the weirdest, and frankly freakiest, collaborations between Washington and Hollywood. Politics can make strange bedfellows sometimes, but […]