Murder I Wrote . . .
Last night, Ted and I nestled into our comfortable reclining loveseat. Within a few minutes we
had found a promising new murder mystery series to binge on.This act of binging had become a near ritual, leftover from the days of total Covid Confinement, and now whenever we're not going out for the evening. The series is titled,"Defending Jacob,” with a great script, director and actors that immediately hooked us into this compelling drama.
I wonder sometimes where I got my ghoulish greed for blood and guts and my love of mystery thrillers and police procedurals. Thinking back from the time I was old enough to read, whenever my father would finish a good ‘whodunit', he would pass it on to me. Among them were books by Hammett and Chandler, Ken Follett, Graham Greene and LeCarre, Himes, Patterson, West and Harper Lee. So, being my father’s daughter I developed quite an appetite for all things criminal.
Of course my father, having been a public defender in his first career in Manhattan, surely made a contribution to his interest in the best of the lot of these mystery novels.
Dad was also a masterly and poetic writer, and had a lifelong wish to author the great American novel one day, which is also something I may have in my genes (the wish, not the talent or the time). However when I started my writing career in 1990, it played a supporting role to my profession as a Psychoanalyst.And having developed my writing chops in the clinical/theoretical nonfiction category, I continued on in that genre for thirty years, writing three volumes and co-editing two anthologies dedicated to the seminal work of my mentor, Frances Tustin, as well as contributing countless articles to American and International journals and chapters in many anthologies edited by colleagues worldwide.
After my retirement from my clinical work in 2016, I thought that now was my chance to write fiction! Alas, along came the COVID-19 pandemic and I was inspired to look back, when looking forward was unthinkable. Thus, I embarked on a journey I had never anticipated as I wrote a memoir during the confinement here in Paris. That was an adventure in transformations.
As soon as that book was off to the publisher, and we were still confined,(or should I say confined for the third time), I finally got down to the business of re-writing that mystery novel, one that I had begun to write nearly 30 years earlier; One that might’ve tickled my fathers fancy. So, finally after all these years I’ve managed to polish it to the point where I feel it’s ready to be released this Fall. My launch date has been set for September 6th, which happens to be Labor Day in the States, and which I think is the perfect holiday on which to launch this labor of love (or perhaps the love after labor) with the hope that at least some people might think it not half bad.
Oh by the way, did I tell you the title?
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