Left Isis
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April 30th, 2008

I know that I’ve mentioned this in the last two posts, but I don’t want you to forget, Dear Reader, that Carolyn Hart and Hannah Dennison will be speaking all over the Phoenix area on May 1 and May 2. If you’re in the vicinity, it would be well worth the time to drop by one of their venues and check them out. Carolyn is the author of some 50 well-beloved mysteries, and Hannah had just had her first book published. She’s off to a bang up start with A Vickie Hill Exclusive, which features an enthusiastic cub reporter who is the daughter of a notorious jewel thief, a coven, hedge jumping, the town of Gipping-on-Pym, Devon, and a murder. On the first, they’ll be at Mesquite Library in Paradise Valley at 11:00 a.m., Tempe Public Library at 3:30 p.m., after which I will ferry them up to Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale for a gig at 7:00 p.m. On May 2, they’ll be doing Scottsdale Public Library at 11:00 a.m.

Speaking of which, I did Scottsdale Public Library yesterday at 11:00 myself. I had a nicely enthusiastic bunch show up to listen to me talk about why I write historical mysteries. I had to think about that one for a while. Why do some of us like certain types of books and others like something else? I always liked to travel to exotic places and see how people live, and imagine what it would be like if I had been born Italian, or Australian, or whatever. I think that the same desire to explore the unamiliar is what fascinates me about other eras. For me, reading historical fiction is time travel without having to remember where I put the time machine.

And if you are one of those who thinks that if it happened before you were born, it couldn’t be very relevant, I can only say au contraire, my young friend. The past isn’t over. I’m amazed at how the same things keep happening over and over again. We never learn.

I’m going to be out of town this weekend, so I’ll miss doing my Type M 4 Murder blog, but I hope to write more about this when I get the chance. I’ve been researching the beginning of World War I in the United States, and some of the parallels between then and now are pretty scary.

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