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Featured Author -
March 2006
Carolyn Hart |
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Featured Author -
March 2006
Carolyn Hart |
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Letter from Carolyn Hart
Annie calls for help. Police and friends begin a search. Max’s abandoned car is found with a very dead young woman nearby and the murder weapon in the trunk. Max has apparently fled. When he is found and arrested, the press portrays him as an unfaithful husband willing to kill to rid himself of an unwanted mistress.
Annie knows he is innocent, but the facts are damming. The police chief is called off the case. He risks his career to continue to investigate. Annie goes undercover to try and trap a cunning murderer who may have committed the perfect crime.
In the Death on Demand series, I have enjoyed learning about Annie and Max and their good friends, Henny Brawley and Emma Clyde, as well as other inhabitants of my mythical South Carolina sea island. Over the years, the mysteries have ranged from death and danger at a little theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace to the dark secrets and hidden heartbreak in an old Southern family to a desperate search for love that goes so very wrong one Valentine day.
So many stories and now the 17th is published. I am amazed at this fact and at my extreme good fortune. I well remember my thoughts as I wrote the first in the series, Death on Demand. I’d made a pact with myself. If it didn’t sell, and I didn’t expect it to sell, it would be my last book.
In 1985 when I wrote Death on Demand, I was the author of two juvenile mysteries, three young adult suspense novels, and several mysteries and/or suspense novels that had been published only to disappear into the black hole of publishing, unknown, unremarked, and quickly forgotten.
More depressing still, I had written seven novels in seven years and not sold any of them. An agent had gently suggested that possibly I’d sent her enough manuscripts.
The configuration of the publishing heavens was changing. I had no inkling of it, but mysteries were suddenly fashionable again. I wrote the book in five weeks, found a new agent, who sold it to Kate Miciak at Bantam. I was at Bantam for 11 books, then moved to Avon. Avon was purchased by Harper Collins and the Avon hardcover authors became Morrow authors as an imprint of Harper Collins.
DEAD DAYS OF SUMMER is my 12th book for Avon and subsequently Morrow.
SET SAIL FOR MURDER, the 13th, will be published in April 2007. It will be the eighth adventure of Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins. Henrie O finds murder and a rekindled love on a Baltic cruise. The first Henrie O, Dead Man’s Island, was a Bantam book. Along the way, I’ve also written LETTER FROM HOME, a Berkley publication, which is set in my beloved home state of Oklahoma in the summer of 1944.
I have just completed my 40th novel, a new departure for me. Bailey Ruth Raeburn, late of Adelaide, Oklahoma, returns to her little home town as a ghost to help a young woman in trouble. ONE GOOD TURN will likely be published in fall 2007 as a trade paperback.
I have had an amazing run of good fortune as an author. I have enjoyed writing the books and I always include in my prayers a thank you for the pleasure and privilege of writing.
Perhaps Rudyard Kipling best captured the joy of work, and surely writers are the most joyful of workers, in the final stanza of "When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted":
And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
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Learn more about Carolyn Hart and her books at www.CarolynHart.com
Mugshot Archives
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DEAD DAYS OF SUMMER, the 17th title in the Death on Demand series, will be published by Morrow in April. Annie Darling receives a call late one August afternoon from her husband Max. He is taking on a new investigation and warns her he may be late getting home. He never arrives.
I wrote Death on Demand with no hope that it would ever be published. Since I’d already decided it was going to be my last book, I wrote the kind of book I loved to read, an old-fashioned mystery with likable people, a hero and heroine who loved each other, and, for good measure, I set it in a mystery bookstore and had my heroine - Annie - talk about new and old mysteries. After all, no one would buy it so why not do what I wished?