Author's Blog

If you'd told me a few years ago I'd be writting mysteries, especially about rural America in the 1950s, I would have told you were crazy. But after years of reading mysteries, I found myself imaging murders around the town and time where and when I grew up. Maybe the fact that my father was a lawyer in family practice got me going.

The mysteries are not autobiographical although I worked at the real Midway for two summers. It has since been torn down. The characters are fictional people, though their personalities are based on elements of friends and neighbors I knew. All of them are now deceased, and I trust they wouldn't take offense. They were all complicated, interesting and very unique people. They all were, as we would have said even at the time, 'charaters.'

The Rounders Mysteries are known in the publishing trade as "cozies." Think Agatha Christie or M. C. Beaton--though I would never imagine mine are likely to be as famous. A 'cozy' means that you won't see anyone killed, though there will be blood and bodies; they aren't true crime. They mysteries lies in the sorting out of clues and a final tying together of everything in the last few chapters. Good mystery writers don't hold things back from their readers. All the victims, suspects and clues are there. The art is putting them out front but in a way that you don't see.

One of my goals has been to portray the 1950s as they were, not as they have become romanticized and sanitized in people's minds through our memories of old black and white television sitcoms and family shows. It was a time of dramatic change. The 1950s set the stage for the complexities of our current age. High pressure politics, consumerism, competition in the workplace, and the stress of interpersonal relationships were on their way. I hope you will also enjoy some of the trivia I have tried to capture--whether it's the juke-box design of 1950s cars, radio and television shows, how people dressed, what they ate, and some of their language.

I hope that this mystery and the second one that should be published sometime this summer are just the beginning of an interesting, readable series. Please let me know where I've made mistakes and make any suggestions you have for 1950s facts and events you'd like to see in future books. I'm working on number three as you read this. 

events in the time