Guesting with Alexia Gordon
I’ve been wanting to guest on Alexia Gordon’s Cozy Corner podcast for awhile now, and I was lucky enough to have the chance at Bouchercon.
She’s such a good interviewer, and it was so much fun talking with her. Take a listen at Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Mystery Movies
While I find Kenneth Branagh’s new Agatha Christie adaptations artistic and contemporary, I admit that I prefer the older versions. So in this newsletter I feature Death on the Nile (1978).
The cast is exquisite. Mia Farrow is the mentally unstable woman who loses her fiancé Simon to her friend, played by the stunning Lois Chiles. Angela Lansbury as the colorful novelist I’ve always wanted to be, George Kennedy and Sam Wanamaker (benefactor of the new Old Globe in London) play the American uncle and financier, Bette Davis is the wealthy Mrs. Van Schuyler – what more could you want? How about Jack Warden, Maggie Smith, Olivia Hussey, Jane Birkin, Jon Finch, and David Niven? They just don’t make casts like this anymore.
Copyright Parade
Oh, did I forget someone? Hercules Poirot himself, played by Peter Ustinov. No, he doesn’t look like the diminutive Belgian detective described in the books. Rather, he makes the role his own with his comedic skills, and played Poirot multiple times in other films.
Anthony Shaffer wrote the script, and at the time he’d already written Murder on the Orient Express, Sleuth, and Frenzy. The director was John Guillermin, whose reputation for his on-set temper is offset by his getting the best from his actors on action-adventure films. Worth a view? You bet.
Warning: viewers sensitive to caricatures/objectionable portrayals of French, Belgian, Indian, elderly, or sexually intemperate characters might not enjoy the film as much.
Trying for a hardback
Creating a hardcover version for Murder at Old St. Thomas’s was more fraught then I expected. At first I went with a 6 x 9 inch size. I wanted a cloth book with a dust cover, because to me that says “book”.
Well, cloth covers aren’t affordable, and aren’t available to the independently published. Instead, you may have a book with a laminate cover (plain or printed with the cover, which reminds me of textbooks) or a book with a laminate cover that is printed with a cloth pattern.
I like real things, not ruses and substitutes. It’s like using veneer when you want solid wood, or pasting thin brick singles over cement block. But there’s no accounting for the costs, so I went with the faux “cloth” and cover, as I had for Before the Time Machine. The proof arrived with the dust cover folded wrong.
This made the cover misaligned. I was able to refold it, but if it were sent to a bookshop, oh dear!
I’m afraid 6 x 9 just felt like the wrong size, too. It’s just got to feel right, I think. So I’m going with 5.5 x 8.5, which doesn’t seem like a big difference but looks and feels so much better. Should be available in plenty of time for holiday gifting. 🙂
Featured blog posts
There are two this time!
First, are the half-dozen or so things I learned about writing mysteries at Bouchercon.
My non-fiction work centers around H. G. Wells, whom I have been studying for several years. My particular interest is in education, both his own and the type he hoped would be provided for humanity. In his autobiography, he claimed to have been afraid of a gorilla drawn in a particular book, so of course I had to find it.
October giveaway and links
If you didn’t get a chance to download a free e-copy of my short story “The Dancing Colonel”, there’s another opportunity through the Historical Crime and Mystery Giveaway.
Want to read previous newsletters? They’re located here at my website, where you can also find information and buy links to all my books.
Want to read previous blog posts? They’re here.
Until next time, keep grousing!