The Perfect Rainy Day Read

 For those of you in ports north of Florida...

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We Did a Thing

 

Graphic courtesy of Rosalind Barden.

Most of what Gwen Mayo and I have done in the past couple of years has been invisible. I have been working full-time from home, Gwen has been ferrying my mother to and from the doctor. We had a death in the family, and it's been a depressing time.

We published three anthologies and two novels written by a friend. I attended Sisters in Crime meetings by Zoom. Neither of us were able to write for a while, and when I started again, it was with my first love, fanfiction. I slipped into the slightly more social community of https://shutupwrite.com/.

This year, we're out of the house. Gwen is the 2024 president of our chapter of Sisters in Crime, and we've been attending meetings in person. We've also participated in panel discussions and venues where we could sell our books. I had to relearn how to use Square. 

We also finished something important: Ybor City Blues, the third book in the Three Snowbirds series. Our favorite Army nurse, Cornelia Pettijohn, is on her way back to Fort Fitzsimons when gangsters board the train and haul her away. It seems that a friend of Charlie Wall is in trouble and Cornelia's just the person to help. Her very close companion, Teddy Lawless, and Uncle Percival Pettijohn offer their assistance.

Soon, the three snowbirds are up to their ears in hot water. Witnesses are being killed, sidekicks are being attacked. Just when Cornelia thinks it can't get any worse, the trio get a surprise visit from Teddy's estranged mother. She's heard about Teddy's (sham) engagement and is here to see her finally wed. Cornelia would rather deal with the gangsters.

Anyway, we have something new to show you. Take a look at it and give us a review! The book is free on Kindle Unlimited. 

Thank you for your patience.

Gwen Mayo Guest Post: 1920s Food in Florida

In the 1920’s, Florida was trying to promote itself as the Sunshine State, and citrus as liquid sunshine. While northern states were blanketed in snow, Florida developers provided crates of oranges as snack food for prospective customers. Hotels had complimentary orange and grapefruit juice. Menus touted key lime pie, sour orange pie, orange and lemon cakes, and icy glasses of lemonade. Citrus was everywhere and seemed to be in most Florida recipes. Our intrepid snowbirds sampled a wide variety of citrus fruits on their journey. However, it is an entirely different Floridian food that takes center stage on this trip.

The Mullet Express is a train devoted to transporting large quantities of mullet, a fish that was a Florida staple in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Originally, the mullets were smoked to preserve them on their journey and packed into wooden barrels.

At the time of Murder on the Mullet Express, smoked mullet spread is still a favorite dish, one Professor Percival Pettijohn is eager to try on his first night in Homosassa. He and his companions, Cornelia Pettijohn and Teddy Lawless, share a plate of it with crackers as they dine under the stars at Riverside Lodge.

Dinner at the lodge is quite an event. The lodge caters to sportsmen, and diners have the option of having their catch prepared and served. For guests who are not hunters or fishermen, there is still plenty of local game, waterfowl, and seafood on the menu. The professor sticks with seafood, ordering the red snapper. Cornelia and Teddy opt for the roast duck with marmalade.  

Prohibition limits the beverages to lemonade or sweat tea, but Teddy manages to add a little of her “medicinal alcohol” to her glass. In fact, Teddy proves to be quite good at supplementing her supply of “medicine” with cocktails and a little spiked punch. As a result, most of her breakfasts consist of dry toast with a bag of ice on the side. At one point, she laments that she is a delicate flower, and Cornelia points out that she might not be as delicate if she didn’t get potted every night.

The portability of food is also important to the snowbirds. Many of Florida’s visitors in the early twentieth century were referred to as ‘Tin Can Tourists’ because of the canned food they heated over campfires. The Three Snowbirds don’t need to camp, but Teddy keeps a tin of Oreo cookies for snacking. Wrapped sandwiches also prove convenient for frequent trips to the jail after the professor is confined there. When supplies run short, there are roadside restaurants available, like the place offering frankfurters and fresh seafood (based on a photo I saw while researching the story). 

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Gwen Mayo is passionate about blending the colorful history of her native Kentucky with her love for mystery fiction. She currently lives and writes in Safety Harbor, Florida, but grew up in a large Irish family in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. She is the author of the Nessa Donnelly Mysteries, set in Kentucky during the Decades of Discord, and the co-author of the Three Snowbirds series with Sarah Glenn.

Under the Radar

This has been a very quiet year for us in terms of announcements about the books we've published or stories we've written. We've been dealing with home repairs (free air conditioning should be a constitutional right in Florida), getting involved with our new Sisters in Crime chapter, and facing our first official hurricane in the Sunshine State. You can assume from this post that we survived Hermine. It was odd, though, to get time off for bad weather in the summer.

Oh, and we had a vacation. A real vacation, the first in several years that was longer than a three-day weekend. Gwen cooked many lovely things, we swam daily, and we also got to read for pleasure, something that we don't get to do as often as we'd like.
During this quiet summer, though, after the release of Strangely Funny III, Gwen and I were very busy, but not so you'd notice on our business page. We were finishing our first novel together. You're probably wondering how we accomplished that: she's a plotter who writes very serious, often dark, mysteries set in the 1870s; I'm a snarker with a short attention span, and most of my stories are set in the present day. I think you'll like our compromise: a mystery set during the 1920s Florida land boom. It has poison, car chases, mobsters, and some serious hangovers. Oh, and one Gertrude Stein book.

Murder on the Mullet Express will be coming out in early 2017.


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