Higher Mysteries

Last month, you may recall, I urged you to drop what you were doing and come to listen to four fabulous ladies (or anyway, three fabulous ladies and me) talk about how we use religion and theology when writing crime fiction.  There’s a podcast on its way, but the excellent video has just gone up…

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The Mystery of a Good Event

What makes for a good event?  Well, it helps when a moderator is working with three wicked smart women with lightning-fast tongues and a great sense of humor. And it also helps when the crowd is equally quick on their feet and genuinely interested in the subject. (This shows about half those who eventually crowded…

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Higher Mysteries, Santa Cruz style

Tuesday night finds me in rapt conversation with three other Ladies of Mystery, talking about how we use religion and theology in our crime fiction, and why.  The panel will be podcast, and possibly videotaped (yes yes, I know they don’t use tape any more…) but if you’re anywhere in the vicinity, come and join…

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“Clash of the Books,” Part II

(For part I of Sabrina Flynn’s award-winning “Clash of the Books,” scroll down to yesterday’s post, or wait until Tuesday for the entire story.)   II   “Run, you fools!” A lash of flame descended with a sizzling snap.  The detectives and librarian ran, taking cover in the Natural Sciences aisle.  Black smoke gathered, writhing…

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Contest winner: “Clash of the Books”

Every year we run a contest celebrating National Library Week, asking readers to talk about their love for libraries.  This year I posed the challenge of explaining what “library” means,  to someone like a Martian—and said that there would be extra points if the essay/poem/etc mentioned Kate Martinelli, whose 20th anniversary 2013 is. I loved…

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Library contest, V and VI

I said in the rules of the contest that mention of one of my books wouldn’t give a person any extra points, but… I loved the depiction of childhood glee in Susan M’s piece, since who wouldn’t love a secret passageway into a world of books?  But honestly, I had to recognize Kathy Eliot, who…

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Thrills in the library stacks

The fourth winner in last month’s library contest is Beth Anne, whose piece offers insight into the richness and humanity of archival research. Archival research usually consists of long stretches of boredom punctuated by tedium, until bits of evidence start to tumble out of the documents. There is nothing like this sense of discovery, which…

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Pirate Kings and library-lovers

The third winner of last month’s National Library Week giveaway, Ashley W. tells us about her “Thrill in the Stacks”: My most personal library thrill actually happened at an archives. The Archives, to be exact. A friend works at the National Archives and is a specialist in US Department of State records. He was taking…

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Day Two of Library Thrills

Our second winner of the National Library Week contest (and there is no rank among the winners, by the way, no first prize or runners-up) is by “EMB”.  And how could it not be, coupling precision with the words “Bodleian” and “mitigation” in its very first sentence–then going on to a mystery involving the Tremulous…

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National Library Week contest, at last

Last month, while I was away in Japan, we ran a contest with the theme “Thrills in the Stacks”—asking for some exciting event that happened in the library.  I read the submissions when I got back 2 weeks ago, but although I don’t do jet lag, I do get really stupid for a while after…

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