Saturdays are for reading

 

My thrown-together from leftovers charcuterie
for old friends who understood and enjoyed 
a lazy Saturday happy hour.

Saturdays always seem like relaxing days to me. During the week, I have few deadlines—most self-imposed—but still they are there, and I feel the obligation to put in six hours at my desk, doing whatever is on the top of the pile, from the work-in-progress to the neighborhood newsletter to the email I promised to send to someone who wants to publish her first cozy.

But Saturday—ah, that’s a day without deadlines. I can sleep later than usual (if Sophie will let me) and piddle around the cottage, doing small chores I put off. It’s amazing how easy it is, even in a small space, to put off hanging up clothes or such.

But today was a good Saturday. Our new handyman came and replaced the torn screen on my patio doors—it’s one of those free-hung that allows Sophie to come and go at will, but the old one was badly patched and torn. Meanwhile, I filled out the contract for serial publication of my Blue Plate Café Mysteries and felt like I had accomplished the work for the day. So it wasn’t self-indulgence to spend much of the day reading.

Several mysteries series are among my favorites, and I think I’ve read most of them. But occasionally, with great glee, I run across a title that I haven’t read. I’ve done that a couple of times with volumes in Susan Wittig Albert’s China Bayles series, and recently I was delighted to find a title in Carolyn Hart’s Death on Demand Bookstore series that was unfamiliar to me: Dead Days of Summer.

If you don’t know the series, it features Annie Darling, owner of the Death on Demand bookstore on Broward’s Rock, an island off the South Carolina Coast, and her adorable, devoted, and wealthy-by-inheritance husband Max Darling. Max is charming and as laid back as Annie is work-driven. In this book, Max is framed for murder, arrested, and agonizing in jail, while Annie is doing just what he fears—exposing herself to great danger in an effort to free him. Hart’s books are always good, and this series features for regular readers a familiar cast of characters. But Hart has ramped up the suspense in this one, and it is truly a page-turner, nail-biter that has kept me engaged most of the day. Carolyn Hart is truly a master of the cozy genre.

And speaking of mystery matters, I see a new trend developing: the serialized novel. Only it’s not new—it’s at least as old as Charles Dickens and probably older. Serialized novels were the craze in the nineteenth century, a fad popularized by Dickens when he published The Pickwick Papers in nineteen installments. While novels were serialized before his 1836 publication, Dickens name is most associated with the trend.

In keeping with the idea that nothing is new or what goes around comes around, serialization is coming back. Several companies, including the publishing division of Amazon, are offering programs for authors. A company that has had some success in serializing romances, is turning to mysteries and has approached me, along with many others. I liked the fact that a personable representative wrote me, rather than Amazon’s apparent attitude of “Come to us if you want to do this—we aren’t soliciting.” So I have tentatively suggested we start with the four novels in the Blue Plate Café Mysteries. They tell me they prefer an entire series, because if they once get a reader interested, they can keep them reading.

So, I’m taking a chance—not a big gamble—and we’ll see what works out. When I went back to compile statistics—word count, year of publication—on the books, I discovered notes on a fifth book in the series. Since I have a history of reviving once-dead projects, I’ll have to investigate that.

Meantime, excuse me, but I have to help Annie get Max out of jail.