It's April on the calendar and outside the first three of a predicted eight inches of snow is on the ground. Clearly the only thing to do is give up on spring altogether and read until summer gets here.

First on my list is The Kalahari Typing School for Men, the fifth of Alexander McCall Smith's beguiling Botswana mysteries. Smith and his detective Mma Precious Ramotswe share a clear-eyed but forgiving view of human nature - the phrase that comes to mind is good-hearted. As the author comments in our upcoming Summer issue, these books are about the possibilities of happiness. Try one and I think you'll agree.

This issue itself is something of a mood brightener. Tom Nolan's rollicking interview with John Grisham proves that this storyteller's skills aren't confined to the printed page. Jon L. Breen ponders the ethics of ghostwritten novels in a thought-provoking essay. (And get a load of that author photo of Gypsy Rose Lee!) Elizabeth Foxwell has uncovered a little-known mystery story by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eddie Muller discusses his fascination with noir.

And to top it off, Kristine Kathryn Rusch has selected ten fascinating books about the literary life for your reading pleasure.

-- Kate Stine, Editor-in-chief

Website News

Thanks to all for your suggestions about the website. Over the next two months, we're going to continue to build up our Annotated Author Links. This is more complicated than a standard list of links since we're giving short descriptions of each author's work. This way you can discover writers who interest you without having to visit every website on the list.

We're also still working on getting the crosswords on the site, and we've started to build a Mystery Scene Reviews database that will eventually hold all the reviews published since Kate and I took over. This will be a searchable database, and will include reviews not printed in the magazine.

Many of you have asked whether we will be putting past issues of the magazine on the website. We won't be putting up anything from before Issue 76, since we don't have the online rights to any of that material. As we continue to acquire content for new issues, we are sometimes buying online rights, and sometimes not.

So you will start to see a trickle, not a flood, of articles onto the site. We'll see how that works out and decide whether to expand it or not.

-- Brian Skupin, Co-Publisher