Sarah Wisseman, Mystery author

New Editions and New Shorts

2012-01-27T15:58:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! I have joined the throng of authors making use of Amazon software to republish older works and add short stories to the Kindle bookstore that have appeared elsewhere.

In January, I prepared a new edition of "Bound for Eternity" on Amazon.com. This is exactly the same book that was first published in 2005 with a yellow and white cover, but it has been edited slightly to remove typos and has a new cover. The new edition is also cheaper! The same story appears (for only $2.99) as a Kindle edition here.

Just to confuse readers even more, I created a novella version of Bound for Eternity (the challenge was to reduce over 60,000 words to less than 25,000!). Because the shortened version required removing a couple of subplots and a major character, the short version is now called "Mummy Dearest." The novel is also a Kindle ebook.

I have also taken advantage of Amazon's user-friendly Kindle platform to post short stories previously published in the ezine Mysterical-E, "Heaven for Roosters" and Wings EPress, "Then, Fall Caesar."

What’s more important, plot or character?

2011-10-16T23:30:00.000-07:00

This post is part of a Rolling Blog Tour--check out the other entries at the end

Actually, I hate this question—which is why I chose to write about it today. Plot or character? Both. They are intertwined and you can’t have a good mystery story without both. The events of the plot fuel reactions from the characters, and these reactions reveal human strengths and flaws that engage the reader. For example, in my first mystery, Bound for Eternity, Lisa Donahue finds a body in her museum’s mummy case at night. She keeps her cool long enough to get her daughter out of the way and call the police and, and then discovers her legs feel like cold linguini. She’s a good enough mom to want to protect her daughter, but she trembles with fear and horror when she realizes the dead body is that of a friend and colleague. Why is she messing around with a mummy after 5 pm? Because she’s just taken it for a CT scan at a local hospital. The mummy is the star of the plot, because everything revolves around it.

Just to make the question more complicated, one of the other “characters” is a also the setting: a creepy old attic museum with pigeons flying in and out of broken windows, no air conditioning, and an archaic security system. This attic museum, just like the one where I worked as a curator early in my career, inspired the story in the first place: it is such an delightful setting for a murder.

One of the villains in my third mystery, The Fall of Augustus, is The Boss Everyone Loves to Hate—a domineering woman who enjoys manipulating the emotions and actions of her primarily female staff. The sound of her high heels clack-clacking down the hall makes Lisa and her fellow employees flinch and shiver as they wonder what new public humiliation is in store. This character, like many obvious obnoxious people, fuels the plot because she generates hatred and fear—and the reader immediately wonders if she will be a murder victim.

The best villains are the ones who are not cardboard characters, but flesh-and-blood people with some redeeming characteristics as well as flaws. Their complicated pasts provide plot twists for the writer to explore, making the mystery a many-layered treat for the reader.

Visit the other writers and blogs at:

Mollie Bryan http://www.molliecoxbryan.com, Kathleen Kaska http://www.kathleenkaskawrites.blogspot.com,

Nancy Lauzon http://chickdickmysteries.com/blog/, Ryder Islinglton http://ryderislington.wordpress.com

WRITERS CONFERENCES: TO GO OR NOT TO GO?

2011-08-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

This post is part of a rolling blog--see the list at the end for other writers who have posted on the same topic.
Conferences? Exhilarating, expensive, exhausting, but never a waste of time. At each one I’ve been to, I’ve made new friends and connections. And at one, Love is Murder in Chicago (every February) I connected with two of my current small press editors. Love is Murder celebrates the entire mystery genre from hard-boiled to cozy, with all things in between. We have the Poison Lady (a.k.a. Luci Zahray , a pharmacist in her day job) who teaches us how to poison our characters, and cops-turned-writers teaching us about crime scenes and guns. When these guys set up a mock crime scene, they give two prizes for interpretation: 1) most accurate, and 2) most creative…Other favorite conferences are Magna cum Murder , a lively weekend conference in Indiana in October, and Malice Domestic , a medium sized house party in Maryland/D.C. every late April. Unlike LIM, Malice attracts the writers of cozies and traditional whodunit mysteries, a la Agatha Christie (not surprisingly, the coveted Agatha award is a teapot).

The only conference I’ve attended in my pajamas, though, was an online mystery con sponsored by Poisoned Pen Press a few years ago. It was great fun—we had podcasts, chat rooms, video conferencing, and asynchronous posts on all the usual topics. People I met online later showed up in person at other cons.

What all of this conferences have in common is camaraderie and the joy of interacting with people. Since writing is a lonely business most of the time, writers love to mingle and swap experiences as well as meet fans, potential readers, editors, and agents. There’s another advantage: some editors and agents are so overwhelmed with submissions that they are choosing to accept manuscripts only from people they’ve met at conferences. And doing a pitch session (speed-dating for writers) is a great way to make that crucial connection.

Best of all, I come home happy and energized and convinced that I want to keep writing as long as I can hold a pen or tap on a keyboard.

Check out the next blog in this roll by Kathleen Kaska.

And also: KT Wagner http://www.northernlightsgothic.com/blog
Mollie Bryan http://www.molliecoxbryan.com
Ryder Islington http://www.ryderislington.wordpress.com

TRAVEL JOURNALING AND PAINT CHIP POETRY

2011-08-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

Different kinds of writing feed into each other. On our recent trip to Alaska, our naturalist leaders suggested we use a “word of the day” to help collect our impressions. These words and phrases were supplemented with photos and sketches. I found this helpful, especially since the scenery was so stunning that I was initially at a loss for words. I enjoyed using words such as “frozen water,” “trail,” and the seemingly contradictory “wild quiet.” Some examples:

"Turrets, crenelations, spy holes, a castle of frozen water. Listen: she looses her chains (crack! Pop!) and lowers her drawbridge" (Hubbard glacier calving).

After whale-watching, during which I wore every layer I had against the rain and cold: "Tired tourists trail back to the Great Mother, who sucks them in through her great maw, filters them through her baleen, and spits on their hands." As anyone who has been on a cruise ship since 9-11 knows, filtering is the belt-removing, metal object-dumping security getting onto the cruise ship, spitting on the hands is the required hand sanitation.

A hike in Denali national park yielded few wild animal sightings but nice wildflowers until we came upon a chewed up aspen tree (moose tooth marks at about 8 feet above the round, surrounded by moose-trimmed bushes and a steaming pile of scat. After I got over my racing heart at the idea of being that close to an immense moose, I wrote: "Poor aspen, pale flesh exposed by a moose's love-bites. She shivers in the wild quiet."

I haven’t found words yet for the excursion we took flying over glaciers, mountains, and rounded foothills in a small plane.

Another unusual tip Susan gave us is paint chip poetry: you go into your favorite hardware store, wander over to the paint department as if you were choosing paint colors, and look at the labels on those little free cards you can take home. What great names to use in writing: “harvest brown,” “moon-glow silver, ” “southwest orange,” or perhaps “glacier blue.” A good place to go when you have writer’s block on some descriptive scene.

I feel a need to visit a hardware store…

Ebooks Rise (again)

2011-02-22T08:38:00.000-08:00

I recently attended the wonderful "Love is Murder" con in Chicago, and was struck all over again by how publishing is changing. I sat in on several panels with publishers, editors, and agents representing such companies as Murder Ink, Five Star Mysteries, and the brand new Ampicellis Ebooks.

The theme of the conference seemed to be that despite the closing of brick and mortar stores, authors have more options than ever before. We heard Joe Konrath (The Kindle King) talk about his publishing model, now entirely electronic after having a traditional publisher and NY agent. True, we have more choices, but each one of us must think carefully about where she wants to be in the general scheme of things. Do you want to be a NY author with a NY agent and publishing company? Then the traditional route (hobnob at conferences, find an agent, hold out for a good deal) is probably the way to go. For many of us, though, it makes sense to explore smaller publishing companies that offer both trade paperback and ebook editions and a focus on online marketing.

It is an exciting time to be an author, and I am willing to try new roads to publication. Launching what I hope will be a new series (historical mysteries set in central Illinois), I plan to explore all the options. I sure hope my books can still be available in some kind of print--I definitely love the feel and heft of the physical book. and the smell of the paper...

TRANSITIONS

2010-09-22T13:39:00.000-07:00

Birth, wedding, death—all of these events have made up our “biblical” summer. It began with the death of my husband’s mother, a gentle Southern lady with a core of steel. This is a huge loss, not only for my husband and his three siblings and all the grandkids, but to me who thought of Jane as the best possible mother-in-law. She welcomed me unreservedly when I married her son, made me her daughter, chuckled and cried with us at our children’s escapades. I am desolate at her passing but infinitely grateful that she was part of my life.

The “wedding” was my daughter’s, only it was not called a wedding, and it felt more like a church service than an event that celebrated family. But it was still special, leaving indelible memories of food and flowers and love and laughter. Now we anticipate the birth of our first grandchild any day now, and I wait with half-held breath in case there’s another event in store for us, such as a flood or fire or surprise of biblical proportions.

All these transitions are perfectly normal, yet they produce unexpected swings of emotion and sleeplessness because change is never comfortable. When the emotions have been assimilated, I may be able to writer better, or at least more honestly. My characters may deepen. As in other times of change, I turn to writers who express feelings better than I possibly can. This time I chose Madeleine L’Engle: her not-just-for-teenagers Wrinkle in Time and Meet the Austins and The Young Unicorns affect me like comfort food. Why? Because her families and the loving circles they make remind me of where I came from, and what I hope I created with my own children. And the grandchild to come will just expand the circle.

Is Someone Watching Me?

2010-02-24T15:06:00.000-08:00

My husband Charlie, a retired pathologist, is a ghoul. On an airplane from Luxor to Cairo, Egypt, I told him I had a new plot for an archaeological mystery, The House of the Sphinx. He listened to my ideas for skullduggery set in the Temple of Luxor and the fabulous site of Karnak. “Fine,” he said. “But what about adding a little bioterrorism?”

This sparked an interesting discussion about which diseases could be used as bioweapons. Instead of reliving our wonderful visit to the Valley of the Kings, I grilled my husband on the symptoms and treatment for smallpox and how Europeans transmitted the disease to Native Americans using contaminated blankets.

Back home, I researched the terrifying saga of smallpox in books, articles, and on the Internet. Because it is a virus that is easy to transmit during the early and unrecognizable stages of the disease, smallpox is difficult to contain and treat. Over thirty percent of people who get sick die, and survivors are often blinded or otherwise disfigured. Officially, smallpox was eradicated worldwide in 1979, but the virus stocks in select research facilities were never destroyed...

What if, I asked myself, my archaeologist heroine stumbled upon a plot to infect Western tourists with smallpox? What if there really was a stash of smallpox virus somewhere that terrorists could obtain and weaponize? Not a new idea, I discovered, as I read Richard Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer. Although nonfiction, it read like a thriller, and scared me silly. Preston’s descriptions of smallpox laboratories and frozen virus stashes in the former Soviet Union and Iraq provided me with plenty of fodder for further research, including how to manage a modern smallpox epidemic (I visited the website of the Centers for Disease Control).

Some research can make you paranoid. As I googled how to turn frozen smallpox virus into a stable, disease-transmitting powder, I wondered if other people were tracking my Internet use. Would someone show up on my doorstep to investigate me as a terrorist? Would being a mystery writer be a good enough excuse to get me off the hook? It didn’t happen, but I discovered my own ghoulish tendencies in my fascination with the history of one of the deadliest diseases in human history.

Many writers now say, “write want you want to know,” instead of “write what you know.” I say, use what you know as a jumping off point for new research, no matter how grisly. I’m an archaeologist, not a physician or medical historian, but being married to a doctor has taught me just enough about medicine to be dangerous, to want to learn more. And perhaps I was getting a little tired of killing my villains with priceless Greek vases and Roman statues—it was time for a change.

The House of the Sphinx, by Sarah Wisseman (Hilliard and Harris, December 2009). For more on Wisseman's books and stories, visit www.sarahwisseman.com
**This article originally appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Mystery Scene Magazine.

Egypt At Last!

2010-01-21T18:14:00.000-08:00

"Since I’m an archaeologist with a special interest in mummies, Egypt has always been on my bucket list. Recently my husband Charlie and I took a reasonably priced Globus tour (Cairo plus a standard 4-night Nile cruise) that met all my expectations.

You have to go there, because no video can do justice to the sheer size of the monuments or the overwhelming impression that the distant past lives cheek by jowl with the 21st century.

At Giza, you face one direction and view the mesmerizing Great Pyramid of Khufu and endless sand. You turn around, and there is modern Cairo, sneaking up on the archaeological site like a metastasizing tumor. Cairo traffic is just as my Lonely Planet guidebook described, “like the chariot race in the movie version of Ben Hur, but without the chariots.” And at night, drivers don’t turn on their headlights until they are about to do something suicidal, like veer across three lanes of traffic.

Away from Cairo, the shores of the Nile look essentially as they did five thousand years ago. Small thatched huts serve as quarters for animals and herdsmen, and fishermen travel in feluccas (sailboats) while beating the water to attract fish. If you take a sunset sail, the sailors will teach you Egyptian songs while they maneuver the boat into the middle of the Nile. Then, when you are unable to leave, they unveil their “genuine” jewelry for sale. This experience prompted my husband to whisper to me, “Don’t buy from a Nubian in the dark.”

The farther south you go, the more aggressive some of the vendors are. They set up souks (markets) between the parking lots and major archaeological sites so that tourists have to run a gauntlet of shopping “opportunities.” When you find yourself draped with unwanted merchandise, with hands tugging at your shirt, the word “imshee!” (get lost!) is very useful.

The highlight of the trip for me was Luxor, the ancient city of Thebes. This is the jumping off point for trips to the Valleys of the Kings and Queens, the Temple of Luxor, Karnak, and the giant temple of Queen Hatshepsut (your guide will teach you to say, “hat-cheap-suit”). The landscape here is stark but colorful, with sandstone rocks in multiple shades of tan, cream, gold, and mauve. Here you can also see the Colossi of Memnon, immense statues whose quartzite was shown by Illinois geologists to have originated near Cairo.

Karnak is full of wonders, room after room of obelisks, paved courtyards, and statues of the lioness goddess, Sekhmet. And if you turn at just the right angle, you can see the golden arches of a McDonald’s looming in the distance.

Avoid uncooked vegetables or you’ll get the Thutmosis Trots. But go see Egypt, before Cairo and the desert swallow up the Great Sphinx and the Pyramids…

Champaign resident Sarah Wisseman is the author of several archaeological mysteries, including The House of the Sphinx (www.sarahwisseman.com)."

(This article recently appeared in The News Gazette of Champaign-Urbana IL. Photos by C. Wisseman)

WHY I WRITE MYSTERIES

2009-11-14T12:55:00.000-08:00

I grew up in a house full of readers where everyone’s favorite pastime was to gather around the fireplace and read, talk about books, or read aloud from books such as The Hound of the Baskervilles. Gradually I became aware that some of my parents’ favorite books were mysteries, but I didn’t really understand why until I started to write one.

Traditional mysteries are layered puzzles, like archaeological digs. The best ones are rich in character and setting, hard to put down but satisfying to finish because (usually) evil is contained and chaos is tamed. Such stories offer a welcome respite from daily life, where bad guys thrive and events and personalities are usually messier and more complicated than in fiction.

I like layers and puzzles—that’s not surprising, since I am an archaeologist at the University of Illinois in my “day job.” Although I no longer shovel much dirt myself, I spend many hours reconstructing the history of excavated objects with incomplete information, much like a detective trying to ferret out clues when suspects refuse to talk.

My heroine, Lisa Donahue, is an archaeologist and museum curator with a background suspiciously like my own. She works in a Boston museum that resembles a dusty labyrinth and deals with layered complications in her job—difficult bosses, jealous colleagues—and in her personal life—a troubled stepson and an overworked, oblivious husband.

In my most recent mystery, The Fall of Augustus ( October 2009), Lisa’s museum loses two directors in quick succession in the middle of a nightmarish move to a new building. The first director is crushed by a falling statue and the second turns up as a mummy The plot layers include the machinations of a vicious woman—the sort of villain we all love to hate—the theft of valuable Celtic artifacts, and the rocky relationship between Lisa’s best friend, Ellen, and their oversexed colleague, Dylan.

Hopefully, as the reader “digs” into my mystery, she will enjoy excavating layered personalities as well as occasional esoteric facts about Greek vases and Egyptian mummification. The tricky part for me was embedding those facts deep into the plot so they become essential clues to the murders, like Roman coins found six feet under that help an archaeologist date an entire civilization.

If I’ve done my job as a writer, I’ve created something like an excavation-in-a-box for public schools: a rich micro-environment full of clues and quandaries—easy enough to reconstruct, complex enough to serve as a setting for future stories.

Fall of Augustus is here!

2009-10-28T15:38:00.001-07:00

The book is published and available directly from the publisher as either a trade paperback or an ebook.

This is the second book set in a creepy fourth floor attic museum (very similar to one where I used to work) right in the middle of a move to a new building. Lisa becomes Director of the museum after a falling statue crushes her boss, Victor Fitzgerald. Suddenly she's juggling demands from architects and deans while trying to mount an exhibit, find a murderer, and figure out why her stepson hates school.

The story is loosely based upon the move of an actual museum at the University of Illinois from a fourth floor attic in an old classroom building to a modern facility. The move required lowering heavy plaster casts of Roman and Greek statues down the old elevator shaft. Although I was not present during this interesting exercise, I imagined what might have happened...

As always, it is great fun to borrow from my profession, which is archaeology and museology, and to create characters who remind me of colleagues past and present.

The museum and all of its inhabitants have been moved to my old hometown of Boston to protect the innocent.

New book coming in October!

2009-08-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

I am thrilled that my next mystery, "The Fall of Augustus," will be published in October. Technically, this will be book four in my series, but the publication schedule is ahead of book 3, "The House of the Sphinx."

In this novel, my character, Lisa Donahue, tangles with two different museum directors:

When someone kills Lisa Donahue’s boss by dropping a Roman statue on him, she becomes Interim Director of her Boston University museum.

Suddenly she’s juggling murder, artifact theft, and a complicated move into a new building. Then the treacherous Dean announces her replacement: a vicious woman from Lisa’s past…

It is partly based on my own museum experience, but of course all the characters are fictional! The title was inspired by the fact that the staff of our local museum really did have to lower a huge plaster cast down and elevator shaft--actually several plaster casts--in order to move them into a new museum building.

To see the cover, go to sarahwisseman.com

Many Feet and Many Layers

2009-05-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

In some parts of the world, it’s easy to imagine you can hear the padding of many feet in an old alleyway or sense the layers of history all around.

Istanbul is such a place. My husband and I were just there as part of a springtime tour of the Greek islands and the coast of Turkey.

It was tulip time. Our guide told us that the Dutch, if pressed, will admit that tulips came from Turkey instead of Holland. Tulips of red, pink, purple, black, and every other color swarm all over prehistoric, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman remains and buildings. Visitors arriving by cruise ship are still greeted by the awesome skyline with the spires of the Blue Mosque, the dome of Haghia Sophia, and the walls and gardens of Topkapi Palace. The seventeenth-century mosque and the sixth century Byzantine church face each other over gardens that contain remains of a Roman chariot-racing stadium, ca. 200 AD.

In the Grand Bazaar, the art of fleecing tourists is almost as old as some of the carpets, and the two wool pillowcases we purchased still smell like sheep. The multiple alleys and gateways invite you to lose yourself in a fantastic jumble of old and new stuff from carpets, pillowcases, wool and silk pashmini, saffron—both the real stuff and colored sawdust—Turkish delight, real gold and junk jewelry, and blue-and-white glass evil eyes.

Then we sailed to Rhodes. Obsessed with archaeology and dreaming of the Colossus, I didn’t realize I was about to visit the best-preserved medieval city in the world. The fabulous quarter of the Knights of St. John, with its multiple stories, cobbled streets, and cannonballs lying around in courtyards and alleys, lacks only the knights and horses to bring it all back to life.

Next, Ephesos—even better than Pompeii. Bright with flowers and a dramatic view of the ancient port, this Greek city still has paved streets, and enormous theater, and almost three stories of its library preserved. It also boasts an ancient latrine with communal seating and a secret entrance between library and brothel (“I’m off to study Plato for a few hours, dear…”).

Of all the islands, Santorini was my favorite for its stunning combination of geology and architecture. We sailed into the caldera, created when the volcano blew up in ca. 1650 B.C., staring up at beautifully clear layers of pumice and magma that look like they were laid down yesterday. White houses with blue roofs perch on the spine of the caldera, cascading down in multiple levels over the steep slopes. We found out just how steep when, having finished our explorations, we took surly donkeys on a white-knuckled ride down the volcano.

I’m jetlagged and my sinuses are clogged, but I am content: I’ve walked ancient streets with prophets and kings and seen legendary Atlantis with my own eyes.

Artifact, Relic, or Hoax?

2009-03-10T14:57:00.001-07:00

This semester, I am having a wonderful time teaching retirees at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Champaign, IL. The course is called "Artifact, Relic, or Hoax: Case studies in Archaeological Science." I have 55 students, from university, business, industry, and educational settings and they ask lots of questions--including many I cannot answer right away.

We've considered topics such as the Shroud of Turin (the history, religion, and science behind the Shroud and its many websites), and the case of the J. Paul Getty Museum kouros (a Greek statue that is either an outstanding fake or an unusual original sculpture from the 6th century B.C.) and the University of Illinois' Egyptian mummy project.

Students continue to send me web links on interesting topics related to the course: residue analysis of pottery from Chaco Canyon (the first evidence of drinking chocolate north of Mexico, mysterious ruins under Lake Michigan, and a recent CT scan of a mummy at the Oriental Institute. Check out the links here: http://www.itarp.uiuc.edu/atam/teaching/Osherlinks.htm

Historical Mysteries

2008-12-12T16:07:00.000-08:00

As I begin to write my first historical mystery, I look back on some of my favorites: the Hilda Johannson series by Jeanne Dams, Steven Saylor's and Lindsey Davis' Roman mysteries, Sharan Newman's mysteries, and my recent discovery: "Dark Fire," by C. J. Sansom. Each series is written about a very different time and place, but all these books provide signposts for me in how to research and what to include or not include.

My goal is to create a story rich in historical detail, where the setting draws the reader in and make him want to read more, without overwhelming him with facts that have no relationship to the plot. A delicate balance, indeed. Jeanne Dams, who has recently given me advice on how to use the wonderful Sanborn maps of the Midwest, does it very well (thank you, Jeanne!).

My topic: 1920's central Illinois, with a male physician who is an amateur archaeologist as my protagonist. This gives me all sorts of new territory to explore: the history of my own home town and county 80 years ago, history of medicine (with a little help from my ex-pathologist husband), Prohibition, women's fashion and flappers, and Illinois archaeology.

It helps that I work for an organization that employs both archaeologists and historians of the discipline of archaeology in Illinois, the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program. For a little taste of what they do, check out this on line exhibit .

Kindle Publishing

2008-07-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

To Kindle or not to Kindle, that should be the question for every author who retains rights to his or her published material. Since I have two ebooks and several online short stories to offer, I was excited to see a new device (with a wireless download feature) that was actually selling.

When I wrote my first Lisa Donahue mystery novel, "Bound for Eternity," several agents and small publishers were interested enough to read it and comment favorably, but the major objection was, "we don't know how to market it." I was surprised: surely a story about an Egyptian mummy and murder in a creepy old attic museum had some selling points?

This forced me to think hard about what I had to offer as an archaeologist to the marketing of fiction. Since "Bound" was based on a real mummy project at the University of Illinois, I realized that my best "sales gimmick" was to market the novel along with the non-fiction book "The Virtual Mummy."

Self-publishing is not for everyone (and yes, there is definitely a stigma attached to it), but it my case it proved a successful strategy for getting the novel out before the companion book went out of print. I used iUniverse, which meant I retained my rights to everything except the final formatting of the manuscript and the cover design.

A month ago I decided a Kindle edition of "Bound" was worth trying, especially since preparing it cost me nothing but my time. The website is streamlined and user-friendly, and in a few hours I had reformatted the manuscript and a prepared a new cover.

To my astonishment, uploading the Kindle edition generated a favorable, new review in Midwest Book Review within days.

I expect no more than a modest increase in sales for my novel, but I'm thrilled at the new exposure. An electronic edition will never go out of print...as long as there is a server to offer it and a program like Amazon's.

INTERVIEW WITH LIBBY FISCHER HELLMANN

2008-03-01T13:03:00.000-08:00

I first met Libby at the Love is Murder convention in Chicago. Libby has two mystery series and many short stories to her credit, and a brand new book, Easy Innocence, coming out in April. She is also a past president of Sisters in Crime.

How have your other careers in television news and video production influenced your fiction writing? Do you "see" scenes the way other writers "hear" voices in their minds?

I do. In fact, I have to see the “film” in my head -- establishing shots, CUs, pans, and moves -- or I can’t write it. The other element that’s helped enormously -- and I know it came from my film background -- is pacing. I think I have a good notion of when the action needs to be ramped up… calmed down… and when to cut to other scenes. I was an assistant film editor for a couple of years, and that had its effect.

Your series protagonist, Ellie Foreman, appears to have some similarities with you in terms of background and choice of profession. But where did your cynical female cop, Georgia Davis, come from?

Beats me. I’m still not sure. Probably the dark side of my personality. Actually, Georgia was a supporting character in my second and third “practice” novels (I wrote 3 unpublished novels before the first Ellie book), so she actually pre-dates Ellie. I always knew I was going to come back to her eventually. It’s not that she’s cynical as much as she’s been raised closer to the bone… ie on the street.. In addition she has some emotional baggage which weighs heavily.

Tell us about Easy Innocence, the book that comes out in April 2008. Is this a departure for you? How?

Yes, it’s a departure in several ways. First, it’s a PI novel, not amateur sleuth. Amateur sleuth novels get tricky after a while -- how many dead bodies can Ellie come across as a video producer? Why would she even get involved? Having a PI is an excellent solution to both issues. Second, EASY INNOCENCE is a much darker book than I’ve previously written. Still, I hope readers will still find the same level of suspense.. maybe even more. Finally, it’s a more personal book. The idea came to me as my daughter was passing through high school. I was recently separated and feeling unequal to the task of parenting a teenager. EASY INNOCENCE is in some ways every mother’s nightmare.

Will Ellie Foreman come back in another book?

Yes. I’m writing an Ellie-Georgia book right now. Both characters, both voices. It’s proving to be a little tricky.

Which novel or short story you have written is your personal favorite, and why?

Of my novels, I like AN IMAGE OF DEATH the best. At least until now. IMAGE, which incidentally is the novel that introduces Georgia (she and Ellie are working the case at the same time) says things I didn’t know I wanted to say, primarily about women and the choices they are forced to make in order to survive. As for short stories, two recent ones, HIGH YELLOW which was in A HELL OF A WOMAN, and YOUR SWEET MAN, which was in CHICAGO BLUES were also departures for me, and I like the way they both turned out.

You've lived in other cities besides Chicago. Do have plans to set any future books in say, Philadelphia, or would you "rather be dead" than do that?

Ah… you’ve hit a sore spot with Philadelphia. I don’t want to offend any Philly readers -- and I DID set a chapter or two of AN IMAGE OF DEATH there -- but I don’t see myself setting any novels there. I went to college in Philadelphia and thought the streets were too narrow and the food too fattening. I liked the Second Fret, though. I set HIGH YELLOW in my home town of Washington, DC, which was fun. But again, I don’t see myself setting entire novels there. I belong to Chicago and it belongs to me.

How do you juggle your other career(s) with your writing and touring schedule and being mom to a teenager --do you cheat on sleep?

It’s a lot easier now. My son is in law school in California, and my daughter in college. So I have more time than before. Unfortunately, it hasn’t made me any more productive. (I wonder why..) In fact, I think I was more disciplined when I had less time. I find myself playing a lot of Spider Solitaire. Wonder what that means???

Who is the one writer, alive or dead, you would most like to meet?

Shakespeare. I’d love to pick his brain. I’d love to pick his brain.

New crime fiction authors are encouraged to join writers' organizations whenever possible. Which organization has been most rewarding for you personally?

No question, Sisters in Crime… hands down.

You've been interviewed many times before. Is there a question no one has ever asked that you're just dying to answer?

What would you do if you couldn’t write fiction?

For more on Libby, visit her website here.

Turning Points

2008-01-30T08:19:00.000-08:00

Exactly seven years ago, my husband Charlie and I set off on a safari of Kenya and Tanzania to celebrate our 25th anniversary. We quickly discovered that a trip in a safari vehicle--one with a top that comes off so tourists can take pictures without getting eaten by animals--is a kind of confinement. You're not allowed to walk around, you have to have an iron bladder, and you'd better like your fellow passengers, including the tse tse flies.

The first part of the trip was great--I saw Olduvai Gorge and some of the oldest skulls on the planet lying around loose in the Nairobi museum. We headed south into Tanzania and a guide wrapped a boa constrictor around my neck so Charlie could take a picture of my horrified face. We enjoyed watching lions and flamingos in the Ngorongoro Crater.

Then we had the accident. A tire blew so suddenly that our vehicle tipped over and rolled on a perfectly good road in the Serengeti. One man was thrown out through the open roof and killed instantly. Three others were injured badly enough to end up in hospital, including Charlie.

I was uninjured because I'd found an ancient, tangled seatbelt and put it on. My seatmate, Andy, who was only 11, hung on safely to the driver's seat. We became roommates back in Nairobi after our relatives were hospitalized.

Charlie had 8 broken ribs and a punctured lung. That meant staying in Kenya an extra three weeks until he was well enough to fly. But he was alive--and the man he'd changed places with on the morning of the accident was not.

As we reflected on this, I realized our lives would never be the same. Neither of us would take our marriage--or life itself--for granted again.

But sometimes good things come out of terrible experiences. My husband, a physician, decided to retire early to make mixed media art. I realized it was time to take my fiction-writing seriously and began to work harder on my first novel.

Eventually I wrote a short story "Safari," inspired by the African experience. It conveys some of the experience of traveling with strangers in a small vehicle in an exotic setting--and a different kind of "accident."

To download this story, go to Echelon
Press.

Mysteries in Archaeology: The Untold Story of the Iceman

2007-11-01T15:13:00.000-07:00

My day job is archaeology, which means I tend to think in layers and I love dirt—both real dirt as in soil, and “dirt” as in good stories about squabbling academics trying to steal each other’s research. Fortunately for me, the archaeological profession is full of multilayered, dirty stories, just like the strata of an excavation.

Take the Iceman, the mummified Neolithic man found in a melting glacier in the Tyrolean Alps. His story has at least three layers: his life in ancient times, his discovery about fifteen years ago, and the saga of the international investigation and border dispute over his body.

When Ötzi, as he is now known, was discovered, his finders thought he was just another dead hiker who’d strayed off the trail in bad weather. Granted, he was a bit leathery-looking, but the folks who ripped him out of the ice and hauled him away (leaving a couple of crucial body parts behind) hadn’t a clue they’d just found one of the most sensational archaeological discoveries of all time.

Ötzi was alive 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists have reconstructed his equipment: he carried a knapsack and a medicine bag, and wore an ingenious set of leggings and a warm, furry cloak. He also had a knife, bows and arrows, and a fire-making kit. But who was he? Where did he come from, and where was he going? Despite the best techniques known to science, many questions about Ötzi remained unanswered.

Archaeologists know the kind of settlement he came from, but not which one. They say that he was probably an important man in Neolithic society, but no one knows his name or family. And everyone thought he died in a blizzard until new X-rays revealed an arrowhead in his shoulder—poor Ötzi was shot from behind. Then someone—the murderer?—removed the arrow and the evidence of the crime was covered up by 5,000 years of glaciers and silence.

The intrigue doesn’t stop there. Scientists and archaeologists from several countries collaborated in the modern studies of the Iceman’s tissues, tattoos, and diet. Did they all get along as well as the news media claimed? Or were some researchers angered as others published their findings in prestigious journals and appeared on Nova? And since the Iceman was found near the border between Austria and Italy, officials from both countries argued over who would ultimately own the mummy and build the museum to display him.

Italy won. A month ago, I visited Ötzi in his new home in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano. He’s resting in a special climate-controlled case looking very small and lonely. Although the museum has done a great job of displaying the scientific and archaeological account of his death, a good mystery writer needs to tell the story of his life. Takers, anyone?

The Mystery of the Getty Kouros

2007-08-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

The saga of the Getty Kouros is a perfect example of a mystery that neither scientists nor classical archaeologists can solve. In the late 1980's the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, heard of an unusually fine Greek marble statue, a kouros or youth, available for purchase. Stylistically, it appeared to date to the sixth century B.C., but experts were divided about whether the statue was authentic. Why was it so pristine and white? Why did the style of the hair not match that of the feet? Would an ancient sculptor have mixed so many styles in one statue? The discussion was complicated by the fact that most existing kouroi are in fragments--only about thirteen exist that are in as good condition as this one.

So how does an archaeologist or museum curator proceed? The Getty Museum asked for some scientific testing of the marble, hoping geologists could determine where the marble came from and whether the surface crust was ancient or modern.

Here’s where the story gets as twisty as a good Agatha Christie novel before Hercule Poirot steps in. A geologist sourced the marble to the island of Thasos, an ancient quarry site, and said the statue had a calcite crust that could have only developed over a long period of time. This was enough for the Getty, and they purchased the statue.

But then it emerged that the provenance papers were faked(!) and there was another torso, an obvious fake, with striking stylistic similarities. The Museum purchased that sculpture too and took the kouros off display for further tests.

New results revealed that the surface crust on the kouros was much more complex that originally thought (a calcium oxalate monohydrate rather than calcium carbonate) with certain characteristics that could not be duplicated in the laboratory. Furthermore, the kouros did not have the same surface as the torso, which was apparently treated in an acid bath.

At a conference in 1992, archaeologists and scientists met to debate all the evidence. Unfortunately, no forger stood up and confessed; the scholars were split down the middle on the authenticity of the kouros. The Getty kouros remains either one of the finest ancient Greek statues ever discovered, or one of the best fakes ever produced.

Even Poirot can’t solve this one…

Interview with Barbara D'Amato

2007-07-24T07:03:00.005-07:00

One of the great pleasures of attending mystery conferences such as "Of Dark and Stormy Nights" and "Love is Murder" (now combined into one meeting in February) or "Malice Domestic" is meeting wonderful people. I'm honored and delighted to present today's interview with Chicago author Barbara D'Amato.

Your bio says you were once an assistant tiger handler. How did that happen? Did you like the tigers?

My husband and I had written a musical comedy called “The Magic Man.” It starred David Copperfield in his first theatrical role. When we spun off a children’s theater version, called “The Magic of Young Houdini,” I found that the stagehands did not want to handle the tiger in the change-the-lady-into-a-tiger illusion. It takes two people, the tiger’s trainer and an assistant, to get the tiger from his travel cage into the illusion equipment and out again. I worked this job for quite some time. But the trainer is a skilled person. An assistant handler, like me, is unskilled. And maybe stupid [I did like the tiger and probably didn’t fear him enough]. However, I also worked as carpenter and repair person for the big illusions for years, which was a huge amount of fun. I could tell you how the beautiful young lady is balanced on the points of three swords or levitates or how you cut a person in half. But I won’t.

A writer can learn new techniques by going back and forth between fiction, non-fiction, plays, and poetry. How did writing plays make you a better mystery novelist?

Well, I hope I’m better. One of the things you learn in plays is that you can’t black out between scenes and leave the audience hanging. Grab them right away, get them into the new scene. The mental-change problem is even more difficult in the “magical musicals” Tony and I wrote. After a magic illusion the audience is still saying, “How’d they do that?” when you’re trying to remind them of the plot. And to a large extent this is also true after songs in musicals. I suppose—bottom line—I learned to keep the main plot in the forefront of my mind.

Which of your books or stories is your personal favorite and why?

My favorite story was “Steak Tartare.” It will be reprinted in the anthology “Sisters on the Case,” which contains stories by all the presidents of Sisters in Crime and will be published in October.

“Hard Tack” is a great example of a locked room mystery—in a boat on Lake Michigan during a humdinger of a storm. It also shows a detailed knowledge of sailing. Did you write this from your own experience, or someone else’s?

I have never sailed a big luxury yacht, like the one in the book. But I’ve lived on Lake Michigan all my life. I used to sail a Sailfish out on the Big Lake. This is kind of like sailing a good-sized coffee table. But the basic idea of making use of the power of the wind, of tacking, of coming about, is the same. The difference is that in a Sailfish, there’s no cabin; icy cold Lake Michigan waves are breaking over you all the time. I did go on a real yacht in the course of doing the research.

One doesn’t normally associate dead bodies with Christmas trees. Did you grow up knowing about the Christmas tree industry in West Michigan, or did you research it especially for “Hard Christmas?”

I researched it for the book. I realized I’d been driving past Christmas tree farms all my life and never knew basic things about growing the trees. Much to my surprise, the growers say fertilizers don’t help. The important things are enough water and making sure the trees aren’t crowded or shaded, so that they grow bushy. They are also sheared to make them bushier. The experts use long, ultra sharp blades that look like big bread knives. Christmas trees are one of very few agricultural crops that are harvested in winter.

What is the story behind the story in “Death of a Thousand Cuts?”

Bruno Bettelheim was a spectacularly successful man who wrote books about child development and ran a residential facility in the 1950s and 60s for what he claimed were autistic children. He claimed that autism was caused by cold parenting, especially on the part of the mother. He told the parents of his patients that they had caused their children’s problems and he told the children that it was their patents’ fault. Even back then, researchers saw that boys were at least four times as likely to be autistic than girls and if one of a pair of identical twins was autistic, the other was much more likely to be than a randomly selected child—clear tests for a genetic component. Bettelheim was not a doctor and not trained in psychology. But people took him at his own valuation, and he ruined many lives. Living in Chicago as long as I have, I had heard early on how wonderful he was, then heard the stories come out that he was abusive to his charges, that few of his patients were autistic in the first place, and that few really improved. The Bettelheim character in Death of a Thousand Cuts is a Dr. Schermerhorn, who, unlike Bettelheim, at least has a medical degree. Early in the book, he is gruesomely murdered. Heh, heh.

What are you working on now? Is this project taking you places you've never been before?

The new book stars a woman archaeologist from Northwestern University. She visits coastal Peru, researching the Moche, who lived 1700 years ago, and Anatolia in central Turkey, researching Çatalhöyük, which was a thriving city seven thousand years ago. I’ve been fascinated by what I’ve found out in the last year about ancient cultures, but I have frequently wished that I was as knowledgeable as you.

For more on Barbara's books and stories, visit her website here.

Experimental archaeology and writing

2007-07-18T15:15:00.001-07:00

Archaeologists like experiment with early technologies like flint-knapping or pottery making because it helps them to get inside the minds of ancient craftsmen. I began making pots during college when my dorm was conveniently located near the pottery studio in Cambridge, Mass. I discovered I was a terrible potter, which immediately increased my respect for ancient Greek ceramists who achieved even wall thicknesses, delicate rims, and graceful handles in ways I couldn’t possibly replicate.

In my current job, I work with Illinois archaeologists who are interested how the transition between large, thick-walled cooking pots to smaller, thin-walled pots relates to changes in diet and cooking methods. Is it because the cooks switched from cooking with heated rocks dumped into large pots filled with water and starchy seeds to cooking over direct heat? Or do the pots change because people were switching from cooking seeds to boiling the earliest form of corn? Which pots survive repeated firings best and why?

To answer such questions, the experimental archaeologist must make lots of pots using different combinations of local clays and additives such as sand or crushed shell, different construction methods, and firings at different temperatures and lengths of time.

The process is very similar to what a writer does when experimenting with plot complications and point of view. My latest short story (about an archaeological dig in Italy) went through five versions before I chose one to polish and submit to AHMM. I took the same basic premise but changed the villain, the hero, the point of view, and the ending—five times. It was exhilarating because I realized that I had the germs of five different stories that I could go back to later.

Whether making pots or writing a story, there’s no single way to do it. If you’re a genius, maybe you get it right on the first try. For me, what works is steady experimentation with an open mind—you have to be willing to say “what if I did it this way?”—and then do it.

Interview with Molly MacRae

2007-07-10T13:52:00.001-07:00

This post is my first interview with another author! Meet Molly MacRae.

I've had the great pleasure of knowing Molly MacRae for the past four years. She is a wonderful writer with a delicious sense of humor. Together, we have formed "The Mystery Cats," a writing critique group and traveling duo. Molly's new book, "Wilder Rumors," was recently published by Five Star Press.

You ran a bookstore in Tennessee. Was it anything like the one you describe in Wilder Rumors?

Philosophically, yes; physically, no. Like Marilyn Wooten’s Blue Iris Books in Wilder Rumors, The Book Place, in Johnson City, Tennessee, was a wonderful, independent bookstore selling both new and used books. And, like Marilyn, we had a nice selection of local history and natural history books. But The Book Place was in an old grocery store building, with all the charm that implies. Blue Iris Books is in an antebellum workman’s cottage, actually a slightly rearranged version of the house my parents lived in for a time in Jonesborough, Tennessee. The crooked window in Marilyn’s kitchen was in my parent’s living room, but the binoculars hanging from a nail in the window frame were my mother’s and my father built the birdfeeder Wilder sees out the window. The picture frames containing paint chips and wallpaper fragments that Wilder looks at as he climbs the stairs are borrowed from a friend’s staircase, a detail I loved as soon as I saw it.

What is the personality profile of someone who likes to work in a museum full time? How do you know?

Oh, it’s slightly strange. If you think about someone who’s happy sorting through old mule shoes, who doesn’t find it mind-numbing to measure, write descriptions, and minutely number dozens of clay marbles, or who gets spine tingles touching the finger impressions baked into a brick hand made 175 years ago, you might get the general idea. I once read a child’s description of a history museum as being “a dead circus.” That’s an interesting image, and not entirely off the mark. So, yeah, someone who rummages around a dead circus for a living might be considered a little different. How do I know? I was curator, then director of the Jonesborough-Washington County History Museum in Jonesborough, Tennessee for several years before jumping ship and taking the bookstore job.

Is your setting imaginary, or is it a real town in Tennessee?

Nolichucky, Tennessee, exists only in my mind. There are some similarities to Jonesborough, Tennesse, but there are also similarities to other places I’ve lived. I named the town after the Nolichucky River which runs through Upper East Tennessee. There is no Nolichucky Jack History Museum, though Nolichucky Jack, himself, existed. And the story of the Widow Brown and Nolichucky Jack that Wilder tells the school children is said to be true. ‘Nolichucky Jack’ was the nickname of John Sevier, governor of the short-lived state of Franklin and first governor of Tennessee. Stonewall, Tennessee, where Wilder’s aunt lives, is also fictitious, though it bears some similarities to Johnson City, Tennessee, and my old home town, Barrington, Illinois, as it was forty or fifty years ago.

Will there be a second Lewis Wilder book?

I hope. I’ve got a title and a very general outline. But it has to wait its turn.

You've written and published quite a few short stories. How is short fiction writing different from writing a full-length novel?

Short takes less pencil and time, but otherwise I approach short and long fiction pretty much the same way. You get an idea. You map it out, either in your head or on paper or screen. You write it (and revise it somewhere along the way.) You send it out to seek its fortune. So far that’s worked for me. I’ve had seven stories in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the most recent one, “Fandango by Flashlight,” illustrated on the cover.

Who are Margaret and Bitsy, and what are they up to now?

Margaret and Bitsy are the characters in the Hitchcock stories. Margaret owns a bookstore in Stonewall, Tennessee. Bitsy is her older, somewhat annoying, sister. For some reason, they’ve never run into any of the people in Stonewall that Lewis Wilder knows. But they’re around. It’s summer, you know, and it’s hot, so not much is happening. But they’re in a novel I’m getting ready to submit and another I’m working on. They’re the reason Lewis Wilder has to wait for his second book.

Don't miss Molly's short story "Wilder Dancing" in the Summer 2007 issue of Mystericale

HOW TO TRAVEL IN YOUR PAJAMAS

2007-07-03T13:56:00.001-07:00

When I began to write The Dead Sea Codex, I realized that I didn’t really want to go back to Israel and risk being blown up by a suicide bomber. So I cheated; I stayed home in Illinois. I used today’s virtual magic carpet, the Internet. Lucky me—I avoided the purgatory of crowded airports and multiple gas-powered vehicles to traverse oceans and time zones only to arrive sleep-deprived, sweat-stained, and thoroughly grumpy. Instead, I lounged around in my pajamas and sipped hot chocolate while dragging out all my old textbooks, diaries, and pictures from my Junior Year Abroad.

As a visiting archaeology student at Tel Aviv University in the 1970s, I feasted on the exotic. I tasted shwarma (roasted lamb) and six kinds of yogurt, joined an international excavation at biblical Beersheba in the Negev desert, swam across the Sea of Galilee with a hundred other people, and was adopted by a wonderful Israeli family with Russian and Romanian roots.

But these memories are out-of-date. What does the Israeli architecture look like now? Is my memory of palm trees and cacti in urban settings accurate? How do you make hummus and tahini dip? What is the name of the female version of the long garment Arab men wear? I found all these things on the Web, as well as listings of current restaurants with their street names, signature dishes, and local beers. To supplement my virtual findings, I purchased a brand-new travel guide to Israel, dug out my Hebrew grammar book, and reread Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” and several related books on the Gnostic Gospels, and watched movies set in the Middle East.

Creating an exotic setting without going there in the flesh isn’t easy, but it is possible. I created a notebook for Codex, complete with hand-drawn maps of the area around Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, a historical timeline, phrases of Arabic and Hebrew that my characters would hear and speak, and cutout photographs of models that resembled the physical description of my heroine, archaeologist and museum curator Lisa Donahue.

Using the Internet and other media does not mean that I’ve given up travel. A recent trip to Egypt proved that no computer screen or video footage can quite capture the smelly and precarious experience of riding a camel or the enormity of the pillars of Karnak. Those experiences have become my fourth novel, “The House of the Sphinx.”

Mummies and Mysteries

2007-06-24T15:42:00.000-07:00

Mummies are intrinsically mysterious, but modern museum practice usually discourages cutting them open and doing autopsies. And Egyptian mummy covers can be misleading—the outside does not always reflect what’s inside. As X-rays and CT scans have revealed, a face portrait of a young man or woman may hide a baboon or a jumble of bird bones.

When the mummy is human, non-destructive imaging may show the age and sex of the person inside, evidence of disease such as tooth decay and internal parasites, and special charms or amulets to protect the dead person in its travels to the afterlife. Many museums and universities have completed mummy projects—one of the best known is by a team at the University of Manchester in England.

At the University of Illinois, I was lucky enough to lead a mummy investigation on a Roman-period Egyptian mummy. Although we weren’t allowed to slice through the red and gold stucco covering, we were able to take tiny samples of textile, resins, and bones from the foot of the mummy because it was falling apart.

X-rays revealed that the mummy was a child, not an adult, and the pelvic region was too underdeveloped to determine sex. Unfortunately, our mummy had no mummy tag identifying who the child was or what family he came from, nor were we able to determine cause of death despite our high-tech investigation.

The lingering questions about the mummy led me to write my first mystery novel “Bound for Eternity” (published in 2005). Finally, I was able to satisfy my curiosity! I made the mummy child a boy, the son of a Roman wine merchant, and created a scenario for his murder. Writing the fictionalized account of our project was even more fun than writing the non-fiction book and articles—and best of all, no footnotes!

The Mystery of the Ellington Stone

2007-06-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

I like to tell my students that archaeology is like a giant jigsaw puzzle—with half the pieces missing. One such mystery is close to home: the Ellington Stone. This 8” X 11” piece of limestone was found in Ellington County, Illinois, sometime between 1907 and 1920 by an arrowhead hunter. Someone chiseled the date 1671 and Jesuit symbols (the letters “IHS,” usually interpreted as a Greek abbreviation for Jesus, and two crosses) on the stone, but whodunit? And when?

Is this a marker left by the French explorer La Salle who may have been in Illinois that year? If so, it’s two years earlier than the date of the Marquette-Joliet expedition down the Mississippi. If the Ellington Stone is authentic, then historians will have to rewrite history to reflect the earlier discovery of Illinois by Europeans.

Or is it a fake, carved by a twentieth century forger? How do you prove it? Well, the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle include the archaeological context: the artifact was ripped out of a creek bed and carted home in a bucket, where it was scrubbed and then cleaned by helpful carpenters wielding screwdrivers and metal spikes. You can see the scratches left by the carpenters deep inside the carved letters and numerals. Anything that could have been useful in determining authenticity (older tool marks, lichens, organic material that might possibly be carbon-dated) has been removed or obscured by modern meddling.

A University of Illinois team was able to type the limestone. The texture and fossil content of the Ellington Stone match well with limestone from Western Illinois formations. Unfortunately, that still doesn’t help us with the problem of when the date 1671 and the Jesuit symbols were carved. The other missing piece to this puzzle is the lack of a comparable artifact—if it’s an exploration marker, how come no one has found others like it? Or perhaps we’re on the wrong track altogether and it’s the tombstone of an unknown Jesuit.

Check here for more on the scientific testing of the Ellington Stone.

The Archaeology of Mystery Writing

2007-06-07T14:25:00.001-07:00

Since I'm new to the world of blogging, I'm going to explore it in layers. That's appropriate, since I'm an archaeologist in my "day job" at the University of Illinois.

My other job is mystery writing. Gradually I'm excavating my own life to unearth situations and characters that will make good mysteries. Creepy old attic museums--digs in Israel, Italy, and Nevada--peculiar academic characters who become murderers (or murderees!).

Like an archaeological dig, a good mystery is constructed in layers: the top layer, or stratum, is what the reader sees and where the main story takes place. A couple of strata down is where the villain hangs out, plotting and planning away, occasionally rising to the surface like a misplaced artifact in an ancient garbage pit.

Garbage pits definitely loom large in an archaeologist's life because stratigraphy is rarely orderly. People in the past were always digging holes to lay a foundation trench, bury something (or someone), or to hide some garbage before constructing a new floor.

Personalities have layers too, and it's the job of writers to reveal the layers in their characters in ways that move the story along. And everyone has a garbage pit--the family traumas from the past, the dysfunctional relationships of the present. Garbage, like compost, can provide rich beginnings for new stories.