Photo by Kristina Sherk

I don’t know any author who is more quotable on the virtues of reading—and the struggles of writing—than Stephen King. “Books are a uniquely portable magic,” King once wrote.

Like the best sentences, that one packs a lot in. As a kid, moving every two years—from Japan to England to Hawaii to remote military bases across the United States—I discovered this portable magic. There are few things that could be more lonely for a young person, particularly before the internet and social media, than moving to a new town in the middle of summer. So I had my books.

I don’t remember precisely when the obsession began, but I think it was when I smuggled King’s The Dead Zone from my father’s bedside table when I was ten. Novels kept me company, transported me, let me see the world through the eyes of people unlike myself.

At the time, I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer. But to trot out another King quote, if you don’t read, “you don’t have the time or tools to write.” I think turning to reading during those periods—the four high schools, the many goodbyes, and my admittedly misspent youth—helped in developing the tools I needed for my job.

That’s not to say my style is anything like my favorite authors. I love The Great Gatsby, but the world of Daisy Buchanan, Nick Carraway, and the denizens of West Egg is far afield from the thrillers I write. There’s no action on page one in Gatsby. And F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lyrical prose is nothing like the Strunk and White “omit needless words” approach I use to try to get readers to turn the page.

Still, the books of others find their way into my novels. In Every Last Fear, the college student protagonist and his father bond over The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece with its memorable lines (“If he is not the word of God God never spoke” “You have my whole heart. You always did.”). In The Night Shift, a character is named Atticus, a tribute to his father’s favorite novel. And in my latest book, What Have We Done, a pivotal scene is at a public library, a place where the main characters—teenagers of an abusive foster home who reunite 25 years later to uncover why someone is trying to kill them—found refuge.

Whenever I sit down and start to get lost in a great novel I think of those early days where books were my refuge. As Fitzgerald wrote in Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Alex Finlay is the author of the March 2023 thriller, What Have We Done, and his novels have been translated into 19 languages. His novel Every Last Fear is in development for a series on a major streaming service. Finlay (a pen name) is also a prominent Washington, DC, lawyer who has represented clients in more than 40 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He lives in Washington, DC, and Virginia.

Here's your chance to experience the World's Best Blueberry Buckle, a recipe created by Julia Rutland for Jessa Maxwell's debut mystery The Golden Spoon:

The knife glides into the cake, which has a springy sort of give to it. She cleaves a slice away, leaving a small avalanche of streusel crumbs in its wake. The cake inside is plump and golden, studded with juicy blueberries. Betsy can tell before she even takes a bite that it has been cooked to perfection.

"Similar to a coffee cake," says Maxwell, "a buckle includes fruit in the batter and a streusel topping. The term 'buckle' refers to how this dish bakes. As the batter rises, the weight of the fruit and streusel topping causes the cake to appear indented and buckled."

To hear more from Maxwell on The Golden Spoon, be sure to check out her Mystery Scene Q&A.

JESSA MAXWELL'S LAYERED BLUEBERRY BUCKLE (by JULIA RUTLAND)

INGREDIENTS

Blueberry Buckle

• 3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for pans
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• ½ tsp fine sea salt
• 1¼ cup granulated sugar
• ½ cup unsalted butter, softened, plus more for pans
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 cup whole milk
• 3 cups blueberries, fresh or frozen

Streusel Topping (makes about 2 cups)

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup lightly packed brown sugar
• 1½ tsp. ground cinnamon
• ¼ tsp. fine sea salt
• ½ cup (8 tbs. or 1 stick) unsalted butter

Cream Cheese Icing (makes about 2 cups)

• 8 oz. cream cheese, softened
• ½ cup unsalted butter, softened
• 3¼ cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F and place a round of parchment paper in the bottom of three 8" round cake pans, then butter and flour the bottoms and sides.

2. In a small bowl prepare the streusel, stirring together the flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Cut the butter into the dry ingredients with a pastry blend or fork until the mixture has a crumb-like texture. Set aside.

3. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt for the cake.

4. In a large bowl, beat together the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla until smooth and well blended. Once combined, beat the flour mixture into the butter mixture, alternating with the milk.

5. Gently fold in the blueberries.

6. Divide the batter among three prepared pans, smoothing the top and then adding 1/3 of the streusel topping on each.

7. Bake the cakes for 30–35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

8. Remove from the oven and cool in the pans for 10 minutes. Place a plate on top of each cake layer and invert, removing each from the pan. Peel off the parchment from the bottom, turn cakes right-side-up onto a cooling rack, and cool to room temperature.

9. Meanwhile, prepare the cream cheese icing by beating cream cheese and butter at medium speed with an electric mixer until fluffy. Gradually beat in the sugar until the mixture is smooth, then combine the vanilla.

10. Spoon ½ cup of cream cheese icing into a piping bag or plastic storage bag. Cut the end, and pipe swirls around the top outside edge of the first cooled cake layer using a star or fluted piping top (this will be the top). Spread remaining icing on the other two cake layers, stack, and serve.

Jessa Maxwell lives in Jamestown, Rhode Island, with her husband, two cats, and a three-legged dog. The Golden Spoon is her first novel.

Julia Rutland is a Washington, DC-area writer and recipe developer. She lives in Hillsboro, Virginia, with her husband, two daughters, and many furred and feathered friends.

3/15/2023 This article was edited to include Julia Rutland as the recipe author.

Jess Finnegan, newly-married to the man of her dreams, is shocked out of her rose-hued world when during a visit to a London museum, her husband and baby disappear. When Mickey Finnegan is found, he has been badly beaten, but the baby, which he had been carrying, remains missing. Through 442 terror-filled pages, the police search for little Louis, uncovering lie after lie told by people close to Jess' heart. Mickey isn't the dreamboat Jess had imagined, and her friends and family turn out to have agendas more commonly found among enemies, not confidants.

In her debut novel, Seeber has taken a great risk with her portrayal of Jess. This grieving/maddening mother is an alarmingly self-centered protagonist who, when she's not stone-walling the police, shrieks and faints as often as the most vaporish Victorian heroine. Even more disturbing are Jess' ongoing control games with the cops who are trying to help her, going so far as to forget information that would help bring Louis home. But Jess' very perversity is one of Lullaby's major attractions, forcing the reader to ask, What in the world is wrong with this foolish woman? Plenty, as we find out. Events in her past have made Jess her own worst enemy, permanently crippling her ability to tell friend from foe. Lullaby can be a difficult ride at times, but it never fails to be an intriguing one.

David Corbett is an impassioned writer who mapped the connections between the residents of a hard-luck town at the tip of San Francisco Bay and hardscrabble lives in El Salvador in previous novels, Done for a Dime and Blood of Paradise. In this novel a young and promising musician has to take a detour from his budding career in order to smuggle his recently-deported uncle from El Salvador back to America where his meager earnings keep the family barely afloat.

But there' s a catch: They also have to bring a Palestinian translator who saved his cousin's life in Iraq, but who has been denied a visa. The translator tells them he s making the dangerous trip across Mexico and the border to give his family a future, but nobody' s sure he' s telling the truth. The story grows more tangled as one family member tries to trade information about the Palestinian to the FBI in exchange for citizenship and others get trapped in a battle over drug turf as the musician leads the group north against obstacles in a voyage that begin to feel like a descent through Dante' s circles of hell.

The author has undertaken a difficult challenge teasing out the human cost of US aggression in the Middle East and Central America, making us care about the characters, and giving us a hint of hope without letting us off the hook by downplaying the horrors of the trip immigrants take to el norte. Though the narrative suffers from too many plot lines, and the violence (while never gratuitous) is hard to handle, Do They Know I'm Running? is beautifully written, ambitious, honest, and thought-provoking.

Photo by Holly Clark

English writer Jacqueline Winspear is a force in the mysterious universe. If you’ve read and enjoyed her Maisie Dobbs books, or her standalone The Care and Management of Lies (2014), or simply sit down to read this interview, it’s obvious why she’s been influential. She's beloved by readers, in no small part thanks to her character, Maisie, the clever and quirky psychologist and investigator who embodies the independent women of her time, a generation of women post-WWI who stepped up to manage the world while men were away at war or traumatized or disabled at home.

Maisie has ventured out in 17 books to date, the most recent of which is A Sunlit Weapon (2022), but after spending so much time together, Winspear brings readers a departure: the standalone novel The White Lady, which follows Elinor White, a resistance fighter, through two World Wars—and it's an absolutely compelling read in every way.

On her site, Winspear speaks to her interest in writing the stories of women's lives in the time after war: “The war and its aftermath provide fertile ground for a mystery. Such great social upheaval allows for the strange and unusual to emerge and a time of intense emotions can, to the writer of fiction, provide ample fodder for a compelling story, especially one concerning criminal acts and issues of guilt and innocence."

Mystery Scene's Robin Agnew connected with Winspear to find out more about her epic new novel and heroine, The White Lady.

Robin Agnew for Mystery Scene: This book spans two wars, is epic in scope, yet feels very intimate. It’s really Elinor’s story. I loved the development of Elinor, from young girl to grown woman. When you started writing the book, did you have this long-term arc in mind, or were you thinking of only writing about WWI?

Jacqueline Winspear: I think if I’d deliberately set out to write a novel that was “epic” in scope, I would have been too intimidated by my own ambition to get past the first page! As a character, Elinor was on my mind for many years—indeed, readers who have delved into my 2020 memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, might recognize the woman who first inspired Elinor.

With that woman as my character, I knew I wanted to take her through two wars within one novel, not a series. I’ve always wondered how living through two wars felt for those who had to endure such a time—it’s a curiosity that began with my grandfather. I wondered how it felt to fight in one war—a war during which he was shell-shocked, gassed, and physically wounded—and then 25 years later watch as his sons went off to fight another war.

I’ve always thought of the First and Second World Wars as being another European Thirty Years’ War, so my question to myself was, “How would it feel for a woman if she served in girlhood and womanhood during two wars? And how would it feel if she had been trained in the art of killing during those wars?” I wanted to get inside the character and find out how she absorbed the experience, but more importantly, how would she bear a lingering damage to the psyche, and what might spark terror in her?

I found there were things in this book that were unexpected, particularly the parts about the London gangs postwar. How did you decide to include that as part of the story?

If I was going to write a story anchored in post-WWII Britain, then organized crime was going to be part of it. Ordinary people were impacted by organized crime in some subtle and not-to-subtle ways. If a man knocked on your door and offered you a two-pound bag of sugar (sugar was rationed until 1949 in Britain), never mind that it came from some black market dealings, you jumped at the chance even though you guessed it had come from a major burglary at the Tate & Lyle sugar factory. In addition, the crime lords, though known to be brutal beyond measure, were believed by locals to be the heroes who kept their streets “clean of the filth” whereas the police were often deemed powerless.

There are many instances in this novel where women are underestimated, from secretaries, to women in queues at the market, to Elsie, the gang leader’s sister. Elinor herself learns to fade into the background. Can you talk about this?

The issue of women in wartime has always been a tricky one—in fact, women in any field of endeavor. Especially during WWI, men were encouraged to enlist to protect their womenfolk at home, yet at the same time, many of those womenfolk not only became engaged in war work, but were putting their lives on the line. It was a public relations challenge for the government: How do you get men to fight for the people at home, when the people at home were also fighting?

I’ve written about women’s roles in wartime—in both fiction and articles—for many years now, and it’s amazing how their contributions have been manipulated by the press and governments. Fortunately, there are now many books and films setting the story straight, that women have been a force to be reckoned with in wartime, even when that war is the one on the streets.

As an aside, I remember visiting Hearst Castle many years ago, and watching an old film about the construction of William Heart’s palatial California home. In one clip, the famous, highly skilled architect/engineer Julia Morgan accompanied him, and was described by the narrator as his “secretary.” Hmmm….

Were there different challenges in writing about WWI as opposed to WWII? And why begin the book in Belgium?

I can’t say there were any different challenges in writing about WWI and WWII, apart from the obvious historical details, and I have immersed myself in this era for many years. It’s fascinating to me, not only due to family history, but the way in which life changed dramatically from 1914 to 1945, and the impact it still has socially and geopolitically today. It was while I was undertaking background research for my novel A Lesson In Secrets, that I read a fascinating book about women and intelligence work in WWI, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War, by Dr. Tammy Proctor, distinguished professor of history in the department of history at Utah State University.

In the book she describes the work of the British-bankrolled La Dame Blanche (“The White Lady”) network in WWI Belgium. Given that all males, with the exception of small boys and old men, had been taken away and either shot or sent to work camps by the occupying German army, a good deal of resistance work fell to girls and women, who were not suspected of being a threat by the invaders. (You can read more about this in my January 2023 newsletter.

I knew I wanted to put the young Elinor in WWI Belgium, and I wanted to create a coincidence with the family name (I knew a girl at school whose parents had the same name when they met, so I had some fun with White/De Witt). In addition, there were a number of British citizens living in Belgium pre-WWI, just as there were many Europeans living in London. As historian Niall Ferguson noted in his book The Pity of War, the Great War ended the first great age of globalization. It’s easy to forget how much international business was done during those pre-war years.

Then I looked at Belgium in WWII. The work of women in the French section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) garners so much attention, yet Belgium was not only one of the most dangerous of locations to be conducting resistance operations, but only two SOE women were ever sent there. Given Elinor’s background, I knew that’s where she would be deployed after being recruited by the SOE in WWII, so I took some artistic license and bumped that number of female operatives in Belgium to three!

And research? I have read so many books on intelligence work in WWI and WWII, but my rule of thumb with research is that it has to be used as if it were an iceberg, with only 7% visible above the surface.

Will you revisit Elinor or will this book remain a standalone?

No, I think Elinor has served her country well and she won’t be coming back for any more assignments!

After writing 17 Maisie Dobbs books, are you tiring of her? The reason I personally love series fiction so much (and I know I’m not alone) is the long form development of characters like Maisie. Are you enjoying her long character arc?

The fact that I have moved Maisie Dobbs through time keeps her and the other characters fresh for me. I think if I’d written a series where each story could have happened on the same day, I would have stopped long before now. I love working with time, and I love working with history, exploring how ordinary people were impacted by the big and small events of their day. I love working with characters to discover how they grow and change, and how relationships develop. When you add the element of “mystery” to those ingredients, you can create a story that takes the reader along on the archetypal journey through chaos to resolution, and when part of that chaos is war, then it becomes a compelling creative quest!

What book was transformational for you, as either a reader or as a writer?

Oh that’s a big question! Of course, one’s first novel is always transformational, because you realize that you are in the game. You’ve done it, you’ve published a book and a huge dream has come true. But then there’s the second novel, and that’s where I thought, Uh-oh, now they’re going to find out that I don’t know what the heck I’m doing! I was terrified of the enormity of what it meant to write a second novel, but managing to do it really made me realize I could create a series in the way I wanted to do it.

However, writing my first standalone novel, The Care and Management of Lies, was a turning point. I knew what I wanted to create, but when I sat down to write the novel, I realized I didn’t really know how to pull it off, so I had to put a lot of trust in my vision and just get on and write my story. And I still receive so many emails about that book, even though it was published in 2014. Writing The Care and Management of Lies —which wasn’t a mystery—was the proof I needed for myself that I could one day write The White Lady, weaving a narrative across two time periods and eventually braiding the two together.

What makes it fun for you to sit down and write every day? What’s the hardest part about it?

I actually don’t sit down and write every day, though I should add I’m a great believer in writing across literary forms. I also write articles and essays (I love interviewing people for the articles I write on assignment) and of course I spend a lot of time on background research for my writing. However, when I am working on a new novel, I most certainly write every single day for months on end!

I don’t know that there is a hardest part. Sure, there are challenges, but once I get going, I keep going. I know it’s a privilege to do what I do—to write, to have the freedom and right to use my imagination in a creative endeavor when there are so many people in this world who don’t have that freedom for one reason or another. I’ve worked at some tough jobs in my life, and this is not one of them! That’s not to say that writing a novel is easy, but let’s face it, I’m not down a mine. Also, I think it’s important to have a routine, and when I’m in full writing mode, I have a very firm routine that I stick to.

And what’s next for you?

Writing the next novel in the Maisie Dobbs’ series, plus planning for a new series. I’d like to write something lighter, and I have character in mind. In addition, I’d love to write the sequel to The Care and Management of Lies, and also get to grips with a new standalone idea, again featuring an extraordinary woman plunged into extraordinary circumstances. Not sure I’ll be able to do it all, but I’ll give it my best shot!

One of the most significant authors of American Southern literature—a revered clan that includes William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Penn Warren—Eudora Welty and her writings have long been examined in microscopic detail. Yet it’s only in recent years that her links to the mystery-crime genre have been studied with the same eagle-eyed scrutiny a detective directs toward a case. Edited by Welty scholars Jacob Agner and Harriet Pollack, the essay collection Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight (University Press of Mississippi, December 2022, 256 pages, $30.) unravels and deciphers clues that point to the genre’s impact on her life and legacy.

For mystery-crime enthusiasts, this is a enlightening guidebook to an intriguing journey.

The book’s contributors are largely authoritative academics, though a notable exception is Tom Nolan, whose 1999 biography of Southern California crime maestro Ross Macdonald explored Macdonald’s deep friendship with Welty. Nolan went on to team with Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs for 2015’s Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, which explores the loving, platonic relationship that began in 1970 and spanned 13 years, a handful of in-person visits and nearly 350 letters.

Theirs was a reciprocal friendship. Her February 1971 piece on Macdonald’s The Underground Man, for the New York Times Book Review, elevated his status; the longtime writer of mysteries (aka genre fiction) was suddenly hailed as a literary diviner. Per their letters, Macdonald encouraged Welty to read hardboiled James M. Cain, starting with the short story "The Baby in the Icebox." She moved on to, and “thoroughly enjoyed,” the novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

Both Nolan and Marrs are contributors to this volume; their essays are among this book’s highlights—at least for this reviewer (a diehard fan of Macdonald’s work). Michael Kreyling, who has written extensively about Southern literature and (therefore) Welty, and did a study of Macdonald’s novels, takes an astute look at Welty and noir, and her works that appear to parody the genre.

Other pieces are devoted to specific Welty works and their mystery-crime elements. For instance, the short stories "Petrified Man" and "Old Mr. Marblehall" are scrutinized in relation to pulp fiction. Her 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter is examined alongside Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library.

Pictured: Ross Macdonald and Eudora Welty

In the book’s Appendix, Welty’s own library is perused, via a listing of the many mystery and “related” titles on her shelves. Turns out the literary lioness was a rabid reader of whodunits.

Her family home in Jackson, Mississippi, is today a museum. Growing up there, Welty was surrounded by books. Through her mother, a devotee of S.S. Van Dine and Mary Roberts Rinehart, Welty was introduced to a number of Golden Age crime writers. In latter-day interviews, Welty said she favored Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie (“endlessly diverting to me”), and Rex Stout (“I must have my Nero!”). She was also a huge fan of Dick Francis—and, of course, Macdonald, whose writings, she felt, surpassed those of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight holds a magnifying glass over Welty’s interest and respect for a genre that was once looked upon as the poor relation to (ahem) literary works. In fact, though she won many, many literary awards over her career, the only one she displayed in her house was the Raven Award that she received in 1985 from the Mystery Writers of America—as Reader of the Year.

A mystery woman in many respects, she was also—it turns out—an unapologetic fangirl.

The It Girl
by Ruth Ware
Gallery/Scout Press, trade paper, $18.99

Hannah Jones can’t believe she’s attending Oxford. Even more so, she can’t believe her roommate is April Clarke-Cliveden, the titular “it girl”—beautiful, wealthy, popular, and smart. And she considers Hannah her new college best friend.

Set between the present and 10 years prior, The It Girl unravels a murder that is not quite what it appears. Right from the beginning, we know that April is eventually killed and a creepy college porter is convicted of her murder. But when he dies in prison a decade later, the question of his possible innocence is raised.

Hannah finds herself tangled back in memories that might not have been as reliable as she once thought and now feels it’s her personal duty to investigate, as it was her testimony that sealed the porter’s fate.

The most suspenseful and captivating parts of the novel are the scenes set in the past when Hannah is first in college, making friends with her roommate, April, and the others in their orbit: Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily. The group feels the pressure of high academic expectations, but also enjoys the frivolity and thrill of college antics like strip poker. But sometimes their friendships experience fissures, as when April pranks members of the group: a ruse that makes Ryan flush his pot down the toilet, a sex doll in Hugh’s bed, and some that even more seriously impact people’s academic pursuits.

The details of April’s death are left till the end, but the possible suspects and motives are teased out as Hannah, 10 years later, returns to the past to try to solve what really happened. It is a pleasure to discover what the friends were hiding—and the possible reasons each one might have had for murdering April.

Ruth Ware also deftly and fully defines April, who feels far from the two-dimensionally drawn victims so often forgotten in murder mysteries. Ware does such a good job, the reader may find themselves hoping the murder was all a dream and that April will pop out from behind a medieval Oxford staircase after all those years, revealing to Hannah it was only a prank.

A review of this novel in hardcover first appeared in the print issue of Mystery Scene Magazine.

"Book banning and book burning...unfortunately, have a long shelf life. And readers know neither has ever had good historical outcomes, quite the reverse."

I was born and raised in heavily segregated Richmond, Virginia, the old capital of the Confederacy. I grew up with people who, to this day, believe the “old ways” were best, and we should make all due haste to return to them. What perhaps saved me from a similar fate was reading. I would go to the library and learn about folks who didn't look, speak, learn, or pray like me, but we shared the common core of humanity.

When I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I didn't realize it was just the warmup for Huck Finn, and his momentous acceptance of choosing an eternity in hell over ratting out his friend, who happened to be a Black slave. Harper Lee continued my education with To Kill A Mockingbird, but her “savior” story had limitations and suffered from what I would term “blinder boundaries” of a white person writing about the Black experience in America. However, Native Son by Richard Wright, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin brought it all home for me and fueled my escape from a life perspective that still engages far too many.

James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright © Montage JA : Ulf Andersen / Aurimages via AFP

My belief is that readers are more far tolerant, curious, open-minded, and willing to change their minds when presented with compelling evidence than are nonreaders. Those who embrace books have a firm context within which to place and measure current events. Two such examples are book banning and book burning, which, unfortunately, have a long shelf life. And readers know neither has ever had good historical outcomes, quite the reverse.

Opening a book for me is a welcoming invitation into the author's imagination. As a reader I longed to be a writer, the one whose imagination others would be invited to visit. When I write a book, I give readers a template only. And a book is never depleted to zero until the last reader experiences it. The half-life of uranium has nothing on books!

Next time you open a book, appreciate the work and discipline that went into it. And then sit back and commence to lay your own imprimatur on the story—it's a way to keep books alive forever, which should be our sacred duty.