Mysteries

Mystery is my favourite genre of literature.  Which is why the novel I am working on is a murder mystery.  (I write what I like!)  I got my hands on my mom's copy of  The Hidden Staircase - the second Nancy Drew mystery - when I was 5 or 6.  I was hooked!  My wish lists for birthdays and holidays consisted of Nancy Drew books.  I bought as many as I could afford from the book sales at school. I'm talking about the yellow-spined hardcover books - not these new fangled paperbacks!  One Christmas I hit the jackpot!  I received a parcel that included about 6 new Nancy Drews.  I was in heaven!  I read Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Dana Girls - all the young adult mysteries I could get my hands on.  I read other stuff - mostly science fiction and fantasy - but, mysteries were still my favourite.  Then, one day, I picked up my mom's copy of A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton.  I might have read some 'grown-up' mysteries before that one, but I really remember my first Kinsey Millhone story.  She was a strong woman - flawed in all kinds of ways - yet smart, independent, tough, funny, and just enough like me for me to want to be her.

I have since read dozens of mysteries - some of them great, some of them good, some that made me wonder how they got published.  Still, I love them.  I'm reading stuff from the 1920s and 1930s to get a feel for the era - the language, the culture, what was acceptable in literature.  I found Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man a little hard to follow actually.  A little too much dialogue and not enough description for my liking.  However, it is a good study in 1930s mystery.  I am interested to read Red Harvest and The Dain Curse - two novels whose main character is the Continental Op, a character with no other name.  I will move on to Raymond Chandler and others soon.  Though on some level I think I have the hardboiled style well engrained in my mind as it is my favourite.

I'm looking forward to my summer as I plan to do as much mystery reading and writing as possible!

Cheers,
Laura

Reading is Good for Writing

Apparently, reading is good research for writing.  Who knew?  Well, a bunch of people, I guess.  Anyway, I love to read and should probably do more of it.  Reading good stuff - and bad stuff, for that matter - is inspirational for my writing.  I remember having a conversation with a friend about the Harry Potter series.  She wondered why I found it so compelling (for those of you unaware, I am a complete Harry Potter fanatic).  I went on for a while about the depth of the story - clearly, Ms. Rowling has reams of notebooks full of information and ideas about the whole wizarding world and its population.  I chatted about the timeless, human themes - good vs. evil, the heroic journey, love and romance, mythic beasts and metaphor.  The last thing I said was that I loved the series because I wanted to be able to write like J.K. Rowling.  That was the one thing that my friend didn't get - that wasn't something she thought about when she read books.  I was surprised.  I thought everyone read books because they wanted to write books.  Apparently not.

So, now that I've got a really good (well, I think it's really good) idea for a novel I'm reading for research.  Not just non-fiction and archival sources - part of the story is set in the 1930s.  I've started reading mystery novels published in the 1920s and 1930s to get a feel for the literature and language of the period.  Reading is very good for writing!

Cheers!