What’s Cooking Now

It’s good to know Amanda’s grandmother is home again and is all right.

Tomorrow is to be a busy day for me, with four appointments to meet plus the usual Thursday grocery shopping. Somewhere in there should be time for a quick lunch. But the highlight of the day will be the purchase of Ridley Pearson’s new Sun Valley series novel In Harm’s Way, out on August 3. If you enjoy high suspense, he’s the author you want to read. Well, of course, there are other writers with that same touch of genius. Robin Cook, for one, and Dean Koontz, for another.

Most writers of suspense tend to spend their entire writing career in the genre novel classification and there’s nothing wrong with that (besides you can get rich that way). However, many literature aficionados don’t cotton to this type of writing. But there is one excellent suspense writer who has grown into mainstream literature with her suspense and mystery novels. Her books are probably located today under “Fiction” in libraries rather than “Mystery.” She is Elizabeth George, an American who sets her stories in England and sounds exactly like an English writer doing the writing. She often goes to England to find the inspiration of place to start her stories. She goes out in boots and with camera to look for, for instance, a likely place for hiding a body.

George is the second suspense writer I am aware of who starts with place. The other is P. D. James. She sees a structure that tempts her into meditation on it for possibilities. She has chosen, for her books, such items as a tower, a windmill, a church vestry, a lighthouse, a nuclear power station, a garage, a museum, a reading club business office, a winery, a large legal office and courtroom, and naturally, a country house. More than one of these sometimes appear in the same novel, such as the garage and the museum or the reading club business office and the country house.

But Elizabeth George showcases such unattractive characters that one wonders if England has any good looking criminals or victims (before death). How does a reader identify with such? And P. D. James is almost as bad in that area. However, movies made from her books show the characters to be a bit more human and likeable.

James has some good news for mystery writers, however. She claims that when times are bad (as right now in a huge way) people turn to reading mystery, in which things get done and answers are found, something lacking in their country’s reality. So I assume everyone in America is reading mystery these days. It’s time to begin writing your mystery stories, if you ever wanted to and didn’t get started. They’re selling big.

♥