Remembrance of Crimes Past

This blog received a citation as one of the 100 best blogs about mystery novels. While it is true that I write crime fiction and that I have another blog that frequently discusses writing and the writing life, Reading Proust in Foxborough is unrelated to mystery novels.

Nonetheless, not wishing to give offense, I put the little sticker at the bottom of the blog. Do you think the purveyor of best blogs believes Proust to be a mystery writer? Of course, in his way he is. There is a mystery at the heart of any novel. Are there crimes in the great work? Mostly the crimes careless people wreak upon one another, crimes of the heart, crimes of the ego. crimes of passion, if you will. What book does not contain those crimes?

Maybe someone thinks Foxborough is a prison, like Walpole, our neighboring town.

Remembrance of Crimes Past? I thought so.

Mystified. And a little pleased.

Odette, the other one

Summer Fun and Dismemberment

Summer Fun and Dismemberment! Boston’s crime writing community is a varied and productive group and those who write about murder and mayhem always have a warped sense of humor. Tonight the New England Chapter of Mystery Writer’s of America are having their wrap up party for the year with good food and company and a program by Lee Loffland who will show how detectives work to solve a very gruesome crime with very little to go on.

Isn’t it interesting to note that the writers always manage to scarf down the comestibles no matter how gruesome the subject matter of the evening’s speaker?

Not the kind of conversation that you would overhear at the Duchesse de Guermantes receptions. No matter how hard Proust tries, these occasions are dull. Or maybe it’s the five hundred pages of description of these receptions and dinner parties that begin to grate of one. Oriane and Palamede are not exactly the F. Scott Fitzgeralds. I think some of the subtleties of social distinction and caste fly right over my head.

Not so with the mystery writers whose congeniality doesn’t include a whit of snobbery.