The Maine Crime Writers
Author Archives: Richard Cass
Once More To The Lake
Shameless Commerce Division: Sweetie Bogan’s Sorrow, number 5 in the Elder Darrow Jazz Mystery Series, will be out on October 2. Because my good friend Barb Kelly’s business depends on selling books at events and we haven’t had too many … Continue reading
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An Anniversary of Sorts
(Begging your indulgence if you’ve seen this before): Cast. Mend. Drift. Strip. Step. Despite the bluebird desert sky, the rich sage air, the gorgeous red sun rising over the canyon rim—in spite of the prospect of a perfect river day—I … Continue reading
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The Power of Pantsing
There’s a pretty well-known trope describing how people write novels. It breaks writers down into pantsers and plotters. Plotters plan out the sequence of events, outline what happens in their books, and generally have a strong idea where the ship … Continue reading
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Raw as an Oyster
I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve been feeling raw as an oyster these past few months, enough so that I’m listening to podcasts by the TED Talk-famous Brené Brown and trying to parse out feelings about what we’ve lost … Continue reading
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Baseball and the Amateur
One of the reasons I love baseball (and boy-howdy, do I miss lying back in the recliner after a long day of word-wrangling and sinking into those rhythms and sounds), is that for the most part, it’s played by normal-sized … Continue reading
The Covefe and Me
Not too much on the crime side to report this month, though I have to say I was seriously bummed by having to cancel my first-time attendance at Left Coast Crime this year. It wasn’t so much that I was … Continue reading
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“Haunted by Waters . . .”
Maine, thank goodness, is a land of rivers, something people forget when they fall in love with the coast and the ocean. In Massachusetts, I was born next to the Neponset and baptized early in the Charles River, a long … Continue reading
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Too Many . . .
Too many funerals this year, he says, as he eyes the locomotive of his own old age steaming down the tracks: first, Lea Wait, of course, then a well-loved friend and colleague of Anne’s at the New Hampshire school where … Continue reading
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Nostalgia, Comfort Food, and Cherry Tomatoes
If nostalgia is the comfort food of memory, what do we make of the fact that memory is so slippery? For the first thirty years of my life, I believed wholly in the memory I had of waking up in … Continue reading
Optimism, or the Triumph of Hope over Experience?
It’s been a busy month, what with the launch of Elder Darrow’s fourth adventure Last Call at the Esposito, or as it’s known in-house: Elder goes to the Olympics. Been a good deal of assorted hoop-te-doodle and exercise of my … Continue reading
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