Jane Haddam

So, here’s the thing.  The last few days, while I’ve been writing about mystery novels and mystery stories, I’ve been reading my way through a volume of essays/letctures on Russian literature by Vladimir Nabakov. For those of you who find the name not at all familiar, or sort of familiar but you don’t know why,…

Today, I’ve got the sinus headache from hell.  So I thought I’d post this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VrGQGi4lvA   and let it go at that. That’s Gustav Leonhardt on the harpsichord.

The title today is in deference to Robert, who complained that I’d given up on the “whine” titles without having gotten to this one. I hadn’t really given up on the “whine” titles.  I just felt really scatterbrained yesterday and it didn’t feel to me like the post had anything coherent in it. Today, I…

There are days when I can get up and function without caffeine without a problem, and then there are days like today.  I think it’s partially a problem with the long week-end.  It’s not really Sunday.  It’s… I don’t know. Back over at Steve Lewis’s blog, Steve has posted a link to an essay on…

So–I’ve been thinking of this thing, this idea that  a detective story should be “about” a detective. I intimated way back there somewhere that the problem with this idea for me is that any character, lead character or otherwise, has limits to the interesting parts of his life.  The first book in any detective series…

Okay! Sarah Palin and FGM by government doctors in Australia–there’s enough blood in the water to start World War III around here. And I do want to get to Sarah Palin, and “hometown values,” eventually.  I’ve got a feeling this is mostly going to be a matter of vocabulary. That said–back to why it is…

I sometimes think it’s a very bad idea to write things before I can actually see in the morning, but I’ve got stuff to do today–annoying, routine, aggravating stuff–and if I don’t start now, I won’t start until tomorrow. So. You’re about to find out just how bad I spell before I’ve had the nuclear…

Okay, I have to start here by saying that I am an ordinary sort of person, and something of an idiot at times.  This explains why, every six months or so, I google myself and see what comes up. What came up this time was an Internet reivew, linked here http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1128 of the kind that…

Well, just a couple of things. First, here’s a link, up today on Arts and Letters Daily, to a review of the book  I was talking about yesterday http://chronicle.com/article/Vetting-Tariq-Ramadan/65620/ A few caveats: First, the author here quotes in defense of Ramadan–or maybe I should say as a counter to critics of Ramadan–people (like Olivier Roy)…

I was going to start this post this morning by saying I was feeling addled–but it occurs to me that I start most posts most days saying I’m feeling addled, and that’s because I am addled. So maybe it’s a default state. This morning,  I’m addled because we finally got Matt back from Philadelphia yesterday,…