And a happy birthday to me!
Yes, I am now ninety-two years of age. Sometimes I feel it. At other times it’s just something that happened on the calendar. I had masses of cards and lots of lovely things to eat which is really all I want as a present nowadays.
One nice thing that happened is that Joffe have re-issued three of my early Murder & Romance mysteries, first published many years ago. SUE FOR MERCY was the very first book I ever had accepted in l974! Followed shortly after by SCREAM FOR SARAH and CRY FOR KIT. On June 12th Joffe brought them out in a slip case under the overall title of The English Murder Mysteries. [View the Kindle books here on Amazon UK.]
You’d think that would be enough for a while, but no; they have been pleased to find Ellie Quicke has a lot of new readers and are celebrating this with another box set containing the first seven, yes, SEVEN of the series. This comes out on the 21st July, under the title of ELLIE QUICKE MYSTERIES BOOKS 1-7. And each spine shows the title and a clue to the setting. Joffe are indeed amazing, delving into the archives to find more and more . . . well, I hope we can call them treasures.
The next extract . . .
Well, you know the problem. I’m just not writing fast enough to give you a brand new story each month. So, let’s have a few pages from the beginning of the very first book I ever had published – SUE FOR MERCY. See above: box set published June 12th. You can read these pages here.
Work in progress
I am coming to the end of the first draft of the Bea Abbot book – Julian, Polly and the Hall are beginning to see the results of their hard labours, the baddies are dead or in custody, while Bea and Piers are looking to the future. I still have to finish off a short story for The Methodist Magazine and another for Maximilian the Magnificent, but I’ll let you have these later in the year.
My birthday wish for all of you is to be able to spend time in the sun without sunburn, to eat as much as you like of your favourite food without indigestion, and to sleep the night through without interruption.
Veronica Heley