ELEVEN QUESTIONS FOR HEATHER EDWARDS

Here is the interview with Heather Edwards I promised in my last post with. Heather is the author of the early reader I found so charming: Sherlock Cat and the Missing Mousie. And here she is with her own cat named Sherlock, who is not the Siamese cat in the story, but who has that crafty detective look, in my opnion. 

                                

   

1. The two cats in your book, Fluffy and Spot, have distinct cat personalities: Are you a “cat person” when it comes to pets? You seem to have nailed their traits.

 Aw, thanks! I like to think I’m an “equal opportunity” pets person, as I love all animals. But having said that, I have five cats, and only one dog.

 

2. What inspired you to write this mystery? Did you idly observe a couple of cats and decide to make them sleuth wannabes? Or was it just a case of thinking, “Someone should write a story where a cat wants to be Sherlock . . . what if . . .?

I’ve always enjoyed kids: reading to them, being with them, sharing adventures with them. I’ve tried writing adult novels in the past, but I realized a few years ago that I wanted to write for the people I enjoy most: the kids. And, because I know a lot about Sherlock Holmes, along with its many “inside jokes” among the fandom, I thought it would be fun to write a kids book that would make the adult Sherlockians chuckle as well. 

And I think most of us would agree that if Sherlock Holmes was an animal, he’d be a Siamese cat.

 

3. How long did the story take from start to finish?

I started it a few years ago during “Nanowrimo.”  Then I put it aside; I wasn’t sure I wanted to write books for children. I told myself  I’d get back to it when I was less busy. Of course, for so many of us, the “less busy” days came during the Covid lockdown of 2020. I picked it up again then, and finished it in the early months of 2021.  It's interesting to read of a published book that's the actual result of NaNoWriMo! Well done!

 

4. Are there other adventures for this duo in the works?

There is! “Sherlock Cat and the Thwarted Thespian” is the working title for the second one. In that book, one of the boys (sorry, I can’t tell you which one!) will accidentally become part of a community theatre production! 

 

5. What is your usual writing process?

I know that a lot of writers need absolute quiet when they write. Weirdly, having other people near me (but not necessarily talking to me) makes me more productive. Working in coffee shops or restaurants is the perfect scenario for me; I like the background noise, and the energy of the people around me. 

 

 

6. You did a good job of blending cat traits with personality traits of Holmes and Watson. Was that difficult to do?

 Sometimes it was tricky! Often I had to remind myself, “cats don’t have opposable thumbs” or “cats don’t really know how to giggle.” At times I pushed that boundary a little, but I think the readers will forgive me. 

 

7. Are you a Sherlock Holmes fan?

I am! I know that most people of …*ahem*… a certain age were introduced to Holmes through the work of the amazing Jeremy Brett. But I was late to the party, apparently, because Benedict Cumberbatch was my first “Sherlock.”  I’ve read the original books and many pastiches, and have watched many Holmes screen adaptations as well. 

 

8. The illustrations for this book are just marvelous. Did you know Amanda Downs before the book came out? Or was this a case of the publisher connecting you?

I love telling this story! Amanda and I are both members of our local Sherlock Holmes society, the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota. Before this, we had met a few times through the society, and I had been a longtime fan of her art. When I had originally started the book a few years ago, I had asked Amanda if she would want to illustrate it. She wasn’t interested at that time. 

When my manuscript was complete, I asked Amanda if she’d read it over, just to make sure it sounded all right. She agreed and a few days later, she sent me this incredible sketch of Holmes and Watson as cats. I couldn’t believe it! It was absolutely how I’d envisioned them! 

After my manuscript was accepted by MX Publishing, my publisher asked if I knew someone who might be willing to illustrate the book. This time, Amanda agreed, even though it meant she’d have to crank out all these illustrations in less than six months (while juggling her full-time job and a young family as well).  But she did it, and I will be forever grateful to her. 

We got together a couple of months ago to sign some Kickstarter copies of our book, and it struck me that we hadn’t actually seen each other for several years, and that we had gone from casual acquaintances to partners during that time.

 

9. Have you always wanted to write children’s books?

My mom- who is 80 now- has literally been telling me to write children’s books for 30 years, but I never seriously considered doing it until the pandemic hit in 2020. When we were locked down in our homes, I started reading children’s books aloud and live-streaming the readings through Facebook, and I was surprised at how many kids would tune in every night to listen. I was so inspired by the authors I was reading (especially Barbara Park, who wrote the Junie B. Jones series), and I realized I would love for children to be reading my book as well. So I dusted off the Sherlock Cat story I’d started a few years before, and finally finished it. 

 

10. Do you have a website? How can readers contact you?

I don’t have a Web site, but I just opened an Instagram account:  https://www.instagram.com/sherlockcatwashere/  

 

11. Any advice for unpublished writers?

“… Write like you’re running out of time.” I know this is a well-known line from Lin Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” but when I first saw this production, that lyric really hit home for me. We aren’t given an infinite amount of time on this earth. If you want to write, then do it right now. 

Great advice for any writer or artist, for sure. Thank you Heather, for taking time for this interview. Best of luck with the continued success of this book and I'll look forward to the next!

        (For those who wish to order the book click HERE)

Readers, is there any activity you can apply that advice to? ( "……. like you're running out of time.)

Are you a pet person? If so, cat? Dog? Something more unusual? Do you take part in NaNoWriMo?

Back from the Holidays

 

This year marked our very first Christmas and New Year's Eve/Day in Portugal. We had lovely holidays, sharing Christmas Eve with our "Portuguese family" and Christmas week with a series of Zoom, Skype, and WhatsApp get togethers with family and friends so far away. Thank goodness for the Internet. It does help close the distance so wonderfully.

Here is Christmas Eve with our "Portuguese family." What delicious food we had - a traditional Xmas Eve Portuguese meal! And wonderful company as always. Our hostess took the picture, so, alas you can't see her. The woman to your right is her mother. The young woman is her daughter. And across the table from the daughte ris her husband. They are such terrific friends. 

We also indulged in binge reading, since Covid kept us more indoors than out ("outdoors" being reserved for our daily walks.) As a result, for a while I will be sharing reviews of some of the books we read - most of them mysteries, and many on this blog related to Sherlock Holmes since his major era was the Victorian Era.

But first I have to share with you a charming children's book that you can back in a Kickstarter Project:

Sherlock Cat and the Missing Mousie. I had the opportunity ro read an advance copy, and it's just delightful! 

The book is already up on Amazon and you can pre-order if you wish, but it won't be released until March. Once it does come out, I'll review it here as well as on Amazon.

And here is the link to the Kickstarter project if you are interested.  

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haestingas/sherlock-cat-and-the-missing-mousie?ref=project_facebook&fbclid=IwAR3DfOKPSriV9E58xatChK3lRD6Pu7j-wVcKgY7cD8BaO3sFW-upAIWUVTo

A more serious review of a "thriller" type book (i.e. dead bodies and the hunt for a killer) will be on my Fourth Wish blog tomorrow.

I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday season. I will look forward to reading your posts and catching up on your news. Any good reads you discovered, please share. 

Take care and stay well. 

Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt — Book Review

                               
     

I have been "missing in action" for almost a month since we came back from Spain and Portugal. (No this picture is not me; it's the cover of a good book I read and am reviewing below.) On return from our trip, we immediately needed to go vote in the California primary. Then Rajan had cataract surgery (which went well). And ever since then I've been catching up on gardening, cleaning, and politics. (Marching this Saturday on behalf of asylum seekers on the border.)

I also wrote a new post about the Braga Romana festival in Portugal on my Fourth Wish blog HERE, if you want to check it out.

But I've also found time to read.  I am a Sherlock Holmes fan, and although the discovery of pastiches came late to me, now I'm hooked. When they are well done, they are as satisfying as the original stories. I just finished a most satisfying mystery by David Marcum: Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt. 

Here is my review below:

David Marcum’s new mystery once again presents Sherlock Holmes and John Watson with just the right “voice” to make this novel seem as if it is part of “the Canon”. The title pays homage to a line from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations,and its layers of meaning unfold with the story.

The story opens with Dr. Watson in the doldrums over the death of his beloved first wife, Constance. He has moved back in with Holmes for company and for some direction to his now purposeless life. It is a cold, stormy day in April. Enter Inspector Alec McDonald with a troubling case in Bedfordshire: Workmen who were replacing an antiquated pipe drainage system on an estate uncovered a body hidden under the pipe fifty years earlier. The corpse has been well-preserved with physical details that play a large part in the story. McDonald asks for help from Sherlock, and off the three go to Bedfordshire to investigate further.

The cast of characters are wonderfully “Victorian Gothic”: Martin Briley, the estate owner, is an old man in his sixties. He’s highly thought of by all the villagers for his many good works throughout his life, but now he’s chair-bound and on the brink of death. His housekeeper, Mrs. Lynch, is as freezing as the inclement weather outside. On the other hand, his estate agent, George Burton, is a popular villager who has worked his way up to his current position. Burton, soon to inherit the estate, enjoys only antipathy from the forbidding Mrs. Lynch. Minor characters are quirky enough to be memorable without detracting from the main cast. Interiors, landscapes, and weather are so well described it’s easy for a reader to visualize and navigate all sites in the story and feel immersed in Victorian England. The clues scattered along the twists and turns of this puzzle mystery lead to a satisfying conclusion. 

All in all, a pleasurable read, and I certainly hope more from this author are in the works. 

Author, David Marcum

                                                                                                                              


David Marcum is also the author of several Sherlock Holmes adventures as well as the editor of several Sherlock Holmes story collections. You can read more about him and all of his writing ventures on his Author Page HERE.


How about you? Are you a Sherlock Holmes fan? Are you a mystery fan? Do you prefer novels or stories? Have you ever written a pastiche?





You can contact David Marcum at 

The "New Read" Is Read, Now — And More Than Once.

It was that good! I read it twice, despite house cleaning and yard work in preparation for our coming trip to Spain. Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street

Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street

The book is edited by David Marcum and published by Belanger Books. Both Marcum and Derrick Belanger also have stories in this collection.

I'm a Sherlock Holmes fan, but anyone who loves mysteries would like this book, so I'll give you a link RIGHT HERE now, while I think of it.

Meanwhile, here is my review that I posted at Amazon. Hopefully it will whet your appetite.

It’s always a pleasure to encounter a Sherlock Holmes story. Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street, offers eleven cases by contemporary authors along with two of Sir Arthur Conon Doyle’s originals. Doyle’s stories are included for two reasons: Both took place before Holmes’s Baker Street days, and they provide reference points for some of the other stories. I can only offer teasers, but this is a must-read collection. The stories, of course, take place before Holmes moved to 221b Baker Street.

In Jayantika Ganguly’s “The Adventure of the Bloody Roses” eight-year-old Sherlock and his older brother Mycroft discover their tutor dead on a bed of cut roses in his quarters. Their parents are away on a trip, so it’s up to them to call the police, etc. What have dead roses and a murdered tutor have to do with each other? Young Sherlock’s observational skills soon lead to the answer.

Derrick Belanger offers two gems: 1. In “The Vingt-un Confession” a young man crippled from an accident at the docks, is reduced to begging and gambling. He’s not good at either. Young Holmes, not yet in college, teaches him to play Twenty-one, with surprising results. 2. In “Mr. Chen’s Lesson” Holmes shares with Watson the aftermath of a case that taught him humility after he solved a kidnapping but alienated Scotland Yard.

S. Subramanian’s “The Affair of the Aluminium Crutch” takes place during Holmes’s university days. A rich bully holds a special tea with students in his hall (including Holmes) to show off diamond studded cufflinks he’s safeguarding for his father. Another student promises a feat of magic and – poof! – the cufflinks disappear. Where? How? Sherlock Holmes figures it out.

In Robert Perret’s “The Adventure of the Dead Ringer” Holmes is new to Montague Street. He soon learns a tobacconist is being extorted by a criminal gang led by a woman whose husband is on the run. Holmes spies on her when she comes to collect, follows her to her hotel, then leaves an ad The London Times. The next day she visits Holmes and hires him—with unusual results.

In S. F. Bennett’s “The Devil of the Deverills” a post-Montague-Street Holmes is evicted once again due to an experiment gone wrong. He encounters an old classmate, Marcus Zeal. Zeal invites him to his estate in Norton Deverill, to help him with a problem: The mother of a girl Zeal fancies is accused by the vicar of witchcraft. Is she behind the strange things happening?

In David Marcum’s “The Painting in the Parlor” said parlor is at Montague Street. A landscape is painted onto the plaster above the mantelpiece. Holmes looks back an event, when a young man showed him a canvas copy of almost the same landscape given to his great-grandfather. A dagger—a missing family heirloom—shown in the canvas painting is not shown in the parlor painting. Secret codes, and missed encounters are involved—all solved by young Holmes.

Arthur Hall gives the reader a wonderful locked-room puzzle in “The Incident of the Absent Thieves”. Two art thieves, father and son, have been missing for two months. The wife, a usual accomplice, and the son’s fiancée, equally complicit in their capers, are worried, and Scotland Yard isn’t much concerned. The solution to this puzzle is brilliant, if sad.

Daniel D. Victor has Robert Louis Stevenson tell “The Adventure of the Amateur Emigrant” in a supposedly excised section from his memoir, The Amateur Emigrant. During his brief stay in New York, Stevenson attends a British pantomime of Robinson Crusoe. One of the actors is Sherlock Holmes, using a pseudonym. Soon Holmes’s detective skills are put to work when Stevenson’s wallet goes missing.

Mark Mower’s “A Day at the Races” takes a reader to Epsom Downs. Holmes joins friends of Cedric Stone, whose father Holmes helped recover a stolen ring. The group disperses except for Stone and Hughes, a schoolmaster of a boys’ school. Hughes hires Holmes to discover why the woman he hoped to marry—the sister of one of his students--suddenly forbids communication. Another good puzzle mystery with clues that keep you guessing.

Geri Schear’s “The Strange Case of the Necropolis Railway” opens under a railway bridge at 3:00 a.m. A policeman finds a bloody corpse and calls Dr. Stamford, who wants a second opinion before taking it to the mortuary. He sends for Holmes, who says the blood is not the corpse’s and that he died elsewhere. Thus begins an intriguing case only Holmes can unravel.

All the authors show mastery of storytelling and excellent research. This is a book Sherlock Holmes lovers will want to read more than once.

How about you? Are you a Sherlock fan? A mystery fan? A short story fan? Do you like anthologies and collections? As always, I'd be interested in your recommendations. 

Celebrating Two Good Reads

It's celebration time again, and I'm celebrating two good reads -- one based in Victorian London, the other based in Belle Epoque Paris.

But first a reminder that this fun blog hop is co-sponsored by Lexa Cain @ Lexa Cain , L.G. Keltner @ Writing Off The Edge , and Tonja Drecker @ Kidbits Blog, who co-host this "Celebrate the Small Things blog hop. You can go to any of these sites to get all the links and add your name to the links. 

The Victorian London read is a scientific picture book for children, BURN, by Darcy Pattison. It's a distilling, so to speak, of a Christmas lecture for children given by Michael Faraday in 1848 at the Royal Institution in Victorian London. I found this a delightful book, thoroughly engrossing, one adults will enjoy as much as children. It would be a lovely addition to an elementary classroom, both for the scientific emphasis and Faraday's approach to experiments, and for a glimpse of Victorian England -- Peter Willis's  quirky illustrations show how people dressed in the era.
(Darcy Pattison also has an interesting website about writing, called, Fiction Notes .

The second  book is a mystery, Murder on the Eiffel Tower, by Claude Inner (a pen name used by two sisters who are book sellers on the banks of the Seine.) By now, most of you know I love mysteries, and I am entranced by anything to do with Belle Epoque Europe. Especially France. Even more especially, Paris. This mystery immerses a reader beautifully in the time and place -- although I have a quibble with how the murderer and the murderer's motive was revealed at the end. (No spoilers here, because others may find the ending just right.) This is the first of a series, so a reader can plan on more journeys through 19th century Paris. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a website for the author(s).


I would recommend either book, depending on your interests. Meanwhile, check out the other links on this blog hop, and have a great week-end and a great week.

What are you celebrating today?

Has it been two weeks????

                                                     

Wow, time flies. This is kinda double celebrating, 2 weeks worth;  But first, hats off to the two co-hosts for this blog hop,  Lexa Cain @ Lexa Cain , L.G. Keltner @ Writing Off The Edge , and Tonja Drecker @ Kidbits Blog  You can go to any of these sites to get all the links and add your name to the links. 

So, what am I celebrating:

1. I'm writing a new Imogene story for an anthology, and it's going well. Tons of research, as usual, but that's going well, too. And, as a matter of fact, I love research, especially historical research.

2. Art Club at the community center started 2 weeks ago -- well, three -- and I have such a wonderful class. The class is mainly for 8-to-12-year-olds, but I have two 7-year-olds and three 6-year-olds. Normally I don't take students that young, because the class is an hour and a half long. But these little sweeties are so focused, they are in like Flynn, as the saying goes.

Two weeks ago I attended Stories on Stage in Davis, (there's one in Sacramento, too). A writer friend of mine was there, and I took copies of his mystery to sign. And Catriona McPherson, one of my favorite authors, was there, and I won a copy of her latest book! I couldn't believe it, but there you are!

Have you ever won something that you didn't expect to win? Do you enjoy doing research?