My Novel Picks for the Edgars

The Edgars, awarded annually by Mystery Writers of America, are mystery and crime writing's Oscars. As Best Picture is the Holy Grail of the Oscars, so Best Novel is the Holy Grail of the Edgars. Over time, MWA has chipped away at the main fiction category with separate awards for Best First Novel by An American Author and Best Paperback/E-Book Original as well as not-quite-Edgars. These include the Sue Grafton Award for a novel with a "strong, independent woman who is a professional investigator" as protagonist; the Mary Higgins Clark Award for a novel with "nice young woman whose life is suddenly invaded" as protagonist; and the Lilian Jackson Braun Award, for a "contemporary cozy mystery" that must be "light in tone, often humorous. While the book may reference serious themes or subject matter, it does so in a non-heavy-handed manner." This leaves Best Novel to some extent to literary crime or crime-adjacent fiction and what I still can't help thinking of as "boy books."

I'm a longtime member of DorothyL, a venerable online mystery lovers group of eclectic readers, including many writers and other crime and mystery professionals. In recent years, many of them have never heard of most of the Edgar nominees. This year, in a field of three men and four women contenders for Best Novel, we all knew veteran bestsellers Robert Crais and Scott Turow. Collectively, we considered their current books up to standard but not outstanding. Our first and second place 2025 Favorites votes went to Sally Smith, Of Mice and Murder, whose protagonist is a barrister in the Inner Temple in 1901; and Allison Montclair, An Excellent Thing In A Woman. The sleuths in this brilliant series, which always makes DorothyL's top ten list but has never been nominated for an Edgar, are a pair of formidable and delightful women running a marriage bureau in post-World War II London.

It seemed only fair to check out the Edgar nominees. My rule is to read on only if I'm enjoying what I'm reading. If the story doesn't grab me or the voice fails to appeal, that's it. No dutiful turning of pages because a book's been praised or because it's literature. So I'm not saying that my picks for Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Paperback Original are the books I think will win the Edgars on April 29. They're the three nominated books, one in each of these categories, that I read with enjoyment and appreciation.

Best Novel: Allison Epstein, Fagin the Thief
In this brilliant and compassionate twist on a Dickens classic, Epstein blows away the thick fog of anti-Semitism that allowed Dickens to describe Fagin the master pickpocket merely as a Jew for his readers to supply the stereotypes—small, contemptible, avaricious, heartless—and need to know nothing more about him to despise him and wish him a bad end. Instead, Epstein gives us Jacob Fagin, Jewish survivor, profoundly alone and not without heart.

Jacob loves three people in his life. His mother Leah nurtures him, reads to him, and believes in him. When Leah dies, Jacob blames God, turns his back on the Jewish community, strips himself of faith, vowing never to love again. Then he takes in a thirteen-year-old boy with nowhere to go, Bill Sikes, and teaches him the trade of thieving. He's played Pygmalion before, but this time he creates, not a Galatea, but a Frankenstein monster: a giant filled with rage and incapable of controlling his impulses. Enter Nancy Reed—again, it's Epstein who gives her the dignity of two names—a pickpocket as skilled as Fagin himself. When they work a crowd together, they're like partners in a dance. Nancy has charisma. She has only to enter a tavern to light up the room. When she stands on the table and sings, hardened criminals and down at heel old soldiers and sailors sing along. For Fagin, it's not a romantic love, but she is precious to him.

Epstein picks the right moment to challenge anti-Semitism, which is raising its ugly head again all over the world. She also takes on our current stereotypes of exploitation of child labor and domestic violence. Of course these abuses are genuine and widespread in the real world. But what goes on in Fagin's world is more nuanced. Fagin's school for thieves consists of children as young as six whom no one else wants. They come to him cold and starving. He gives them shelter, food, clothing, and a sense of family. He also teaches them a trade that will allow them to eat from day to day, which is the reason he picks pockets himself and always has been. He is a good teacher. He makes sure they excel because he wants them to survive.

Bill Sikes and Nancy Reed fall in love at first sight—both of them. It has the quality of a great love story, even a love triangle. Jacob, with his love-hate relationship with jealous, dangerous Bill and his concern for Nancy's safety, is the third. For more, you'll have read the book. It's beautifully written, well researched, and a satisfying story.

Best First Novel by An American Author: Zoe B. Wallbrook, History Lessons
Wallbrook gives us a Black feminist perspective on academe red in tooth and claw in a savvy, distinctive, and often hilarious voice and a clever mystery that keeps the surprises coming.

Newly hired assistant history professor Daphne Ouverture, "a Bambi in the eyes of her colleagues," has to deal with all the usual tenure battles, shredding of reputations, sexual shenanigans, and plagiarized student papers in the age of AI, along with the traditional sexism and racism that clings like ivy to the older tenured white male professors. The rich intellectual and cultural context of Daphne's life makes this book far more than just another academic mystery.

   Daphne, Sadie, and Elise became best friends after finding one another at some university-sponsored mixer for faculty of color last term. Daphne thought she had been making do just fine with her white colleagues—until Elise and Sadie barged into her life. ...The conversation took off the moment Daphne and Elise realized they'd been raised by tough, immigrant mothers. At some point when swapping strategies for surviving varying punishment methods, a tall Brown Amazonian goddess..had leaned across the bar and asked if she could compare notes. By the third margarita, they were screaming with laughter about the merits of surviving middle school with a mother who refused to pack sandwiches like the white moms. By one in the morning, the trio was dancing to Lil Wayne at a bar downtown and making plans to meet for brunch the next day.
   Brunch lasted approximately ten minutes. ...They'd napped away the rest of the day in Sadie's living room like toddlers at preschool until their hunger woke them up. ...Something had clicked for Daphne that day—an actual physical feeling of her brain making sense of herself. Sadie and Elise had gifted her with the greatest freedom through their friendship. The freedom to be her most honest, messiest self.

Daphne tells Elise about a disastrous first date.

     "Did he like your story about Belgium, at least?" Elise asked.

     "You mean how nineteenth-century Belgian colonial administrators in the Congo dismembered indigenous Africans for the purpose of scaring local villagers into creating profit for their newly emerging rubber industry?...No, Elise, it turns out that explaining the evils of late-nineteenth-century European imperialism on a first date isn't exactly a seductive move."

The mystery itself is the murder of Sam Taylor, the university's most popular professor, a rising star whom everybody loved—or did they? a man who could do no wrong—or had he? Daphne finds herself increasingly embroiled in the investigation, which is somehow connected to her. This complicates her growing interest in Rowan, a former cop turned bookseller, who works with the police. She can't walk away, because for some reason, Sam's death has earned her enemies who threaten her career and perhaps her life.

Best Paperback Original: Abbi Waxman, One Death At A Time
I'm not usually a fan of Hollywood or LA novels, but the sleuthing duo in this one won me over: Natasha Mason, age twenty-five, three years sober, recovering from alcohol, drugs, and intrusive psychiatrist parents in Berkeley; and Julia Mann, age sixtysomething, fading Hollywood star: formerly famous, still glamorous, served her time for murdering one husband and can't remember if she killed the one who's been found floating dead in her swimming pool, because she was in an alcoholic blackout at the time. Mason volunteers to be Julia's interim AA sponsor and finds herself cast as personal assistant, dogsbody, chauffeur, and unlicensed PI charged with detecting the real killer, preferably before Julia is convicted of the murder.

I'm a pushover for funny books about recovery from alcoholism and addictions, and this one is both on target about what it's like and very funny indeed. The wisecracking narrative voice elicits not only laughter but compassion for both protagonists, who start out bristling with antagonism toward each other and slowly form an unlikely alliance that works for both of them and satisfies the reader. The mystery is convoluted and takes in the machinations of the varied participants in the complicated business of making movies.

Applying the Bechdel Test to Real Life

SleuthSister Melodie Campbell and I have written about the Bechdel Test, a measure of whether a movie has 1. two named female characters; 2. who talk to one another; 3. about something other than a man. Both Melodie and I came up with excellent lists of movies that met the Bechdel criteria, neither of which included most of the movies our SleuthBrothers spend a lot of what journalists used to call column inches writing about.

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2024/06/sleuthsisters-movies-and-bechdel-test.html
https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2024/06/sleuthsisters-movies-and-bechdel-test_01994901369.html

The thought that bubbled up one morning, as I lay in that state between sleeping and waking when so many of my creative notions come to me, was that it might be illuminating to apply the Bechdel standard to real life. We get a strong cultural message that when women talk to each other, it is mostly about "men," as in the award-winning country song: I'm gonna love you forever/ forever and ever, amen/ as long as old men sit and talk about the weather/ as long as old women sit and talk about old men... or in these enlightened times, about intimate relationships regardless of gender—or else about sex, clothes, and shopping, as in Sex in the City. Maybe that describes some women's lives, but it has nothing to do with mine.

So what do I talk about with the women in my life?

Let's start with my SleuthSisters: Melodie Campbell and Eve Fisher, with whom I share an ongoing conversation via daily comments on the SleuthSayers blog posts, sometimes joined by Janice Law and blog newcomer Anna Scotti on literature, writing, language, movies and tv; and on to one-on-one emails for fuller exchanges on politics; sharing, comparing, and discussing our own childhoods, ethnicities, families, and environments; telling funny stories, and laughing at each other’s jokes.

I meet weekly on Zoom with a group of women in our sixties, seventies, and eighties to discuss how we experience the aging process. There's a lot of common ground as well as striking differences in how we're doing and how we're taking getting older. Many of us have become friends who stay in touch via group and individual texts as well as phone calls and Zoom visits. Some conversations are the proverbial “organ recital” of consequences of aging, from deficits in hearing, mobility, and memory to diagnoses such as Parkinson’s, heart disease, and cancer to procedures from colonoscopy to hip and knee replacement to nuisances like shrinking in height. We also talk about our children, grandchildren, and aging parents if we still have them. We also talk about retirement, which everybody perceives differently; creativity, which does not diminish with age; travel, which some of us do extensively; and how we use structured and unstructured time. We talk about loss, death, and sexuality from the perspective of aging women, which is a far cry from "talking about old men." We talk about self-care, including exercise, bodywork, spiritual practice of various kinds. Occasionally we talk about our childhoods and families. And like everybody else in these complicated times, we compare notes on how we deal with the state of the world without freaking out.

As for my longtime friends of sixty and seventy years: what don’t we talk about! My surviving friends in other countries (six in France, one each in the Netherlands, UK, Africa, and Australia) are always interested in my perspective on what’s happening in the US, political, economic, and sociological. With my Jewish women friends from childhood on, I always had a tremendous amount of common ground. Now political challenges have fragmented our opinions, but we still call on longtime affection and frankness to connect with each other across various divides. So we still talk about family, aging, losses, life cycle changes, activities and new ventures, the organ recital, what the kids and grandkids are doing, and what happened to the world we tried so hard to make a better place.

What about my most active friendships? With one friend, who lives in New York, I talk about the state of academia, finances, and music. With another, who lives in San Francisco and whom I've known since we were eleven, we talk about our mothers and our sisters; good food—she's a recreational cook, and we both live in foodie cities; memories, mutual friends, and losses; she talks about Bay Area culture, I about New York museums and concerts; she about her activities, bocce and knitting, I about my writing, my mystery activities, my garden, my photography, my ocean swimming, and my relationship with Central Park.

We all have plenty to talk about besides men!

Groundhog Day: Do you need to do it again?

Today is Groundhog Day, a peculiarly American holiday—or is it? It evolved from the medieval Christian celebration of Candlemas, to which weather prognostications involving the European hedgehog were added in Germany. When Germans emigrated to Western Pennsylvania, according to the website of the Punxutawney Groundhog Club, they chose a similar hibernating animal from among the local fauna. The first such festival in Punxutawney, PA recorded in the newspaper took place in 1886. Does the eponymous groundhog, Punxutawney Phil, ever really see his shadow? If he does, do six more weeks of winter follow? Does it matter? Does anyone care? The multitudes who flock to Punxutawney on February 2nd every year are surely folks who seize any excuse to join a crowd, make a noise, and enjoy whatever refreshments are on offer.

Since 1991, the term Groundhog Day has come to mean more than an annual weather prediction wrapped in a fur coat for all seasons. Bill Murray's portrayal of a cynical reporter who gets trapped in a time loop in Punxutawney became a movie classic, and his dilemma has become a metaphor for having to do something—in particular, to do it badly or to make mistakes—over and over until you get it right.

It's not much of a leap to the idea that there's something wrong with doing anything once. In our own field, I've heard numerous discussions in which some writers claim that if you're really a writer, you write every day...or if you're really a writer, you always want to write...or if you're really a writer, you'll never want to stop writing for good. If that's true, how do you explain Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird, which more readers than not consider the best novel of the twentieth century? It's the only novel she wrote. Wasn't Harper Lee really a writer? (I refuse to consider the unedited version that was published when she was 102 and imo incompetent to say no a second novel.) Of course she was.

In any endeavor, "doing it again" is considered the seal of approval on anything you do once, whether it's visiting Paris in the spring, whale watching off Cape Cod, sailing in the Caribbean, skiing in the Alps, or whatever you happen to think is exciting or romantic or adventurous. "This is wonderful!" you say. "We have to do it again." This sets you up for disappointment and a sense of failure, or at least a nagging feeling that you've missed out on the best that life has to offer. Because life is full of new experiences, as well as time-consuming challenges and catastrophes. You never do get back to Paris or the Alps, or not in spring or skiing season.

The older I get, the more I let go of preconceptions, ambitions, and burning desires that seemed immutable when I was younger. Last month I wrote about not having to live forever. Today, Groundhog Day reminds me that the things I have done once are sufficient unto themselves. I detest the marketing phrase "making memories." When you're there, wherever it is, be there. But I do have some perfect jewels that are my memories of experiences I have had once: visiting Timbuktu in 1965, camping in Yosemite in 1975. Not only could these experiences not be recreated, but Timbuktu has changed in 60 years, as has Yosemite—or camping in Yosemite—in 50 years. The world is not so welcoming; the wild is not so wild. I settled for a tame environment, ie a hotel pool, for swimming with dolphins in Hawaii. The dolphin kissed me on the lips and swam between my legs. It was enough for both of us.

Then there are physical experiences that I never would have mastered. I'm glad I did them once.

Skiing: the smell of cold andevergreen, blue shadows on snow and white birch, the crunch of snow as I told myself over and over to keep my weight on the downhill ski. I made it down the novice slope triumphantly. Riding a horse: okay, three times: once at age 6, once at age 23 with a Western saddle, once in my 50s with an English saddle, never faster than a walk, thank God, even when we unexpectedly met a deer on the trail through the brush. Just enough. Flying a plane: I logged 30 hours in a Cessna 150. The “once” would have been when I soloed, but I had to quit before that happened. I confess I was relieved.

A few more experiences that could only have happened once:

Visiting Narita-san Temple in Japan, ten minutes by train from the Narita Airport that serves Tokyo. We were on our way to my son's wedding in Manila. A French artist friend and his Brazilian wife turned our dreary stopover into a magical side trip. It was February: almond blossoms and light snow were falling.

Chipping rock for garnets on a mountain in Vermont in 1950. I was six years old, at summer camp, and only remembered this recently. This is definitely illegal now; I don't know about then.

An English country house weekend fifty years ago. No, there was no murder. Yes, I fell in love. I eventually got six poems, three flash stories, and, um, a great deal of emotional growth out of it. I didn’t need to do it again. I didn't even need to write a novel.

Do you have a memorable experience you've always said you have to do again? On reflection, can you leave it at that memorable once?

What Happened to Living Forever?

I've written so many January posts about why I don't make New Year's resolutions that I'll mention only two points: one, living one day at a time works better; and two, within a few weeks, many of the most fervent resolutions, such as dieting, economizing, and refraining from smoking and other compulsive behaviors, will have been broken. Another issue, however, has come to seem equally appropriate for reflection at the turning of yet another year.

Everyone knows the young believe they're going to live forever. Why else do they take the risks they do? The moment teens age out of supervision by adults, many of them drive recklessly, drink to excess, experiment with drugs, try extreme sports, hook up with strangers, and otherwise play Russian roulette with their lives, convinced they'll be the lucky ones who'll always beat the odds and dodge the consequences. As we get older, our beliefs about our own vulnerability to death diverge, depending on a number of factors. As a healthy middle class American from a family that took few risks and had a genetic predisposition to longevity on both sides, I have lived my whole adult life confident that death wasn't coming for me any time soon—in other words, believing that I would live forever.

I was born a couple of years before the Boomer generation, and the world has changed by three paradigm shifts (if you count the one in progress) in my lifetime. As an octogenarian, I no longer say "forever." I tell my dental hygienist, "These teeth have to last another twenty years." I tell my husband, "If I live to be 100, let's go to Paris on my birthday." However, it's no longer up to me, ie how my body, mind, and DNA weather time. For me to live my full span, a couple of other things have to beat the odds. The planet has to refrain from falling apart or boiling over. The human race has to refrain from blowing itself to oblivion. I'm not as concerned for myself as my younger self would have been, having had one helluva run till now. The worst is that time needs to keep rolling out long enough to accommodate my hostages to fortune—my granddaughters.

Here are three poems from my new poetry collection, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle, that speak to this concern. "Once Upon A Time" and "Dissonance" first appeared in Yellow Mama.

If The Plot Unravels

in 1654 the Montaukett warriors met
at the highest point of the bluff
the Naragansetts won the battle
the Montauketts were defeated
they had already sold land to the settlers
their way of life was about to unravel

today a great boulder marks where they met
Council Rock overlooks the ocean
it anchors Fort Hill Cemetery
a municipal burying ground
where all the dead are welcome
founded thirty years ago, when we
had just acquired our crumb of Hamptons heaven
and were looking for accommodations after death

no graves had yet been dug when we first visited
we walked hand in hand over the wild hill
admired the Rock and the ocean view
joked about how this six-foot double decker bed
was the classiest real estate we’d ever own
later, I wrote a poem about that day, a love poem
it felt like permanence

now the planet is unraveling
the Montauk Point Lighthouse, built
three hundred feet from the cliff’s edge
now stands only one hundred feet
from tumbling onto the rocks below
having reached an age that visits doctors and reads obits
we wonder if our plot will be there when we need it
or by then have fallen to earthquake or tsunami
wildfire or flood, some implacable disaster
one of the many that unspool, relentless
now the world’s no longer tightly wrapped

riding in the limo to my father’s funeral
I heard Aunt Hilda dither: if she sold the country house
should she dig up Uncle Bud’s ashes or leave them in the garden
that’s when I vowed I’d never be cremated
on top of all the movie sight gags, it was the last straw

but the last two in-ground plots in Manhattan went
in 2015 for $350,000, and in 2023 a single grave
in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood runs as high as $26,000
so if Fort Hill is swept away or crumbles into the sea
and the $750 plot in Montauk is a write-off
you might as well send me up in flames
with the rest of the planet, sere as dune grass
ready for a conflagration we can’t stop


Once Upon A Time

once upon a time I walked through Timbuktu
city of sand, its hushed streets sifted fine, its buildings
rounded like sandcastles shaped by tidal winds
long before terrorists destroyed what I remember
passing Tuareg draped in indigo
I watched them drift beside their camels
toward the desert, the stone well and leather bucket
the salt mines that lie beyond the sunset

once upon a time I spent a week in Lahaina
before the fire consumed it, I remember
wearing a white tuberose lei, hearing laughter
the breeze carrying music and the scent of food
sunset tinting the water, slate blue mountains rising
not far from shore, humpback whales and their young

once upon a time I climbed the tower of Nôtre Dame
ancient stone rose into darkness all around me
my young knees made nothing of the winding stair
or if I breathed a little faster at the top
it was worth it to say salut to the gargoyles
and stick out my tongue at Paris

once upon a time in Côte d'Ivoire, in Bouaké
when independence was long fought for, newly won
before the civil war, before the hate and anger
when nobody had a television and the nights
were for drinking and dancing, oh, the dancing
for two years I always fell asleep at night
to talking drums in every courtyard
all across the city chanting lullaby

it's not looking like much of a happily ever after
this grumbling planet is exhausted
me, I'm glad I had my once upon a time
now I'd like to ask for a generation longer
until my granddaughters have had their time
squeezed joy to the last sweet drop
embraced love and laughter and adventure
why is it so hard to hold back the fire and flood
that's been baying for release since they were born


Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that occurs
when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326738

if they'd only leave us in peace
how we'd relish our longevity
our gift for the unmeasured moment
the giant tortoise, the African elephant
the koi with its splashes of sunset red and gold
and humanity, the genetic booby prize
our extra burden, values and beliefs
responsibilities and ambiguities

who holds as few as two beliefs?
what two values fail to contradict each other?
the dissonance of my choices every day
would crush me if I didn’t push
with all my strength against their weight

I could spend my birthday scanning the news
read how many missiles one country launched
and the other guys shot down
grind eighty-year-old teeth, those that remain
over loss and disappointment, how we fail
and fail and fail to distinguish truth from lies

instead, I will walk in the sun
rejoice in my loves and my adventures
marvel that I've survived until today
when little girls wear fairy wings and tutus
and princess crowns in the New York streets
and grow up to be neurosurgeons and CEOs
and astronauts as if they have forever
I'll wear a sparkling tiara to my birthday dinner
and dance down Columbus Avenue if I want to
as if they have forever

The thing about fiction and poetry

As a fiction writer who’s also a poet, I was happy to receive an invitation to talk about how one literary art informs the other on a podcast interview. The series was canceled, sadly, for reasons beyond the podcaster’s control, before I could have my say. That left me popping like a firecracker with thoughts on the topic. Luckily, as a SleuthSayer, I have a forum close at hand.

Decades before I ever wrote a publishable novel or short story, I was writing poems that did the same thing in fewer words. What is “the thing,” you ask?

Some poems tell a story.

on the stage of Carnegie Hall
rich and dark and gleaming
they seem to surround me
each tier’s apex a velvet throat
hidden in the depths, the rows of jaws
yawn wide as if to snap
on this twelve-year old girl

from “Orchestra Class,” first published in Yellow Mama; in my new collection, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle

Some poems make people think.

I am the daughter of the son of the daughter
of a woman whose name no one remembers
though all the oldest still alive and sane
were there last time I asked

from “I Am the Daughter,” the title poem in
my first collection, I Am the Daughter

Some poems make people laugh.

my mother rejects the unconscious...
her house is clean...
when she visits the optometrist
she peers fiercely at the eye chart
and tries to put her glasses on
she is 20-20 at life
but wants an A in both eyes too.

from “My Mother Rejects the Unconscious,” first published in Sojourner;
in my first collection, I Am the Daughter

Some poems make people cry.

when I sleep in my parents’ house
they make up the bed I traded in my crib for
the pine tree outside my window
still catches stars in its branches
the pine tree is still growing
it frightens me
having so much to lose

from “On Borrowed Time,” in I Am the Daughter

Some poems surprise people.

then there was the day I took them to the zoo
riding the subway up to the Bronx...
we looked as normal as anyone in the car...
three of the paranoid schizophrenics took a ride
on the aerial tram, but I was too scared
of heights to go along
they snapped my picture smiling

from “Outing,” first published in Home Planet News; in my second collection, Gifts and Secrets

Some poems hold up a mirror to our conscious or unconscious selves.

Whether I’m writing a poem, a short story, or a novel, the creative process is the same. Some call it it inspiration or being "in the zone." The process of writing a new short story may begin with what I call “my characters talking in my head.” A novel requires such a long period of sustained effort that it demands a high ratio of slogging to inspiration. But those moments are equally familiar to my inner poet. I wrote about one such moment long before I realized that other writers had the same experience.

it's like The Red Shoes only instead of dancing
I keep getting up to write poems
a dozen times between 3 and 6 AM
I curl back around you in the dark
and pull the blankets up
but then a line tugs at my mind
and I go stumbling through the hall
groping for light and pen
each time I lie back down
the images pop up like frogs
clamoring to be made princes
and you grumble and roll over
as I shuffle into my slippers once again
and go kiss the page

from “Night Poem,” in Gifts and Secrets

For me, the main difference between the two crafts is that, like other fiction writers, I say, “I tell lies for a living,” and I’m only half kidding—well, completely kidding about the “living” part. As a poet, I say, “All of my stories are true.” In my novels and short stories, my goal is to create fictional characters who leap off the page, made-up characters so real that the reader not only believes, but falls in love with them. In my poetry, the ring of authenticity comes from lived experience.

Some poems have something to say.

The poet’s craft is speaking my truth and turning it into art as opposed to hitting you over the head with it. My new book, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle, took more than two years to write. When I started writing poetry again for the first time in twenty years, I was much too angry at the state of the world to create art rather than polemic. It took everything I’d learned about patience as a novelist and about revision as a short story writer to write good poems that said what I wanted to say. Over that period, as the world got even more chaotic and the future more uncertain, I learned that I also had something to say about hope, connection, love, and peace of mind.

but ah, the whale! there’s a creature of the now
no anxiety, no regret, a vast serenity
in the greater vastness of the sea
singing while we moan about how to fix it all
swimming parallel to our troubled world

from “Afternoon On the Beach,” first published in
Yellow Mama; in The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle

All poems © Elizabeth Zelvin
The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is available as paperback or e-book.

Liz's other poetry collections, short fiction collections,
and novels are all available as e-books.


Poetry by Elizabeth Zelvin
Bruce Kohler Mysteries
Mendoza Family Saga

The Old Lady Shows her Mettle

Why is this book different from all other books?

If you're Jewish, you'll get the reference.

"This book" is my new poetry book, The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle.

First, let me tell you my numbers. I'm 81 years old. I've been a writer since I was seven. My first book of poetry was published when I was 37. My first short story was published when I was 63. My first novel was published when I was 64. I've published three poetry books, seven novels, and more than 60 short stories. As a novelist, I've had and been dropped by three agents and five publishers. I've had novels in hardcover and poems in journals that folded before some of you were born.

So why is this book different?

1. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is the voice of a vanishing generation. My poems were published widely during the Second Wave of the women's movement. I was a New York Jewish feminist poet. My first book, I Am the Daughter, was about that political sensibility as well as being a young mother and my love life at the time. As I discovered when I looked for old poet friends to ask if they would consider blurbing the book, not many of us are left. In the late 1970s, a group of young mothers traded poetry critique on the Upper West Side. One of us went on to become revered, a household name, a Pulitzer winner. Her assistant wrote she sent best wishes but her health was too poor even to read emails. That's the way it goes when you're over 80.

2. I self-published The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle in print and e-book editions, after shopping it for a year. The poetry world is different from the mystery and crime fiction world I know, so I asked an old friend, a highly regarded award-winning poet, about reading fees. I was surprised when he didn't say he turned up his nose at them. "Not any more,"he said. So I did what I had to and got two offers. The catch was that the contracts were for print books. The publishers insisted on owning the electronic rights but did not intend to issue an e-book.

That made no sense. I turned the contracts down. In the end, I realized that I preferred to do it myself, have all the control, and get exactly what I wanted.

When I started out, it was shameful to self-publish a book. Today, it's one of many options. With poetry especially, the author does all the marketing—the hard part—in either case. Since the book came out a month ago, half its readers have chosen paperbacks, the other half e-books. So it seems I had the right idea about the need for both formats.

3. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is my only poetry book available in print as well as e-book form. Both I Am the Daughter (1981) and Gifts and Secrets (1999), my mid-life book, which was about my work as a therapist, being a mother, and the beginning of losses—the death of friends and eventually of my parents—were originally published before the digital world existed. But I re-issued them as e-books a few years ago, the rights having reverted, with a few editorial tweaks I'd been longing to make for forty years.

4. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle is my "Jewish book" in a way that even the Mendoza Family Saga, my Jewish historical adventure series set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is not. For one thing, fiction, as we fiction writers like to say, is "telling lies." Poetry, at least for me, is always about the truth. "All my stories are true," I say at readings. Some of these poems tell stories about the emigration of my family from Hungary and what we then called the Ukraine to New York and what happened to those who stayed, those left behind, and any who got homesick and went back. Others, the most difficult to write, were my way of working through the divisive effect that political and environmental events from 2019 to the present have had on the world and various entities and institutions, including publishing, the American left, and the community of Jewish friends on whom I've depended all my life. All this and the rise of anti-Semitism in the US and throughout the world have made me aware of and willing to declare my identity as a Jewish woman in a way that I never have before, certainly not in my poetry.

5. The Old Lady Shows Her Mettle includes grandmother and granddaughter poems that are not about a grandma rocking or hugging the grandchildren or feeding them, cooking, or otherwise confined to the kitchen. While I was looking for places to submit my new poetry, I was horrified that I could find no current poetry by men and little by women portraying grandmothers outside traditional gender-based roles. As these poems attest, my granddaughters and I order in, go out, and talk about stuff that matters.

Extraordinary People

Everyday New York midtown crowd

A lot of crime fiction writers I know describe their process as one of taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary circumstances. Such prototypical ordinary protagonists are jolted out of their comfort zone into sudden danger. The writer keeps putting the pressure on and raising the stakes. Their characters must be resourceful to survive. All they want is for things to return to normal. They want those they love to be safe and their lives to be exactly as they were before. But circumstances change them. Either they rise to the occasion and become heroes, or they are sucked into violence and criminal behavior from which there is no way back.

In cozies, the stakes are less dramatic than in thrillers—a domestic murder, a group of people under suspicion. Again, the premise is that the characters are ordinary people. The amateur sleuth is a divorcee with kids, a bakery owner, a book club or knitting circle member. The law enforcement antagonist and/ or love interest is a police chief, sheriff, or detective, also an ordinary person doing their job. The story starts when the amateur sleuth’s circle is thrown out of their comfort zone by the murder. The death has consequences, and the investigation stirs up suspicion and uncharacteristic behavior in a community that may have seemed untroubled on the surface.

Define Normal, Central Park

It has never occurred to me to say that I write about ordinary people. The great John Floyd has affectionately called my characters "zany." But John lives in suburban Mississippi, and I live in New York. My characters, like New Yorkers in general, don’t seem zany to themselves. They range from interesting to extraordinary, which is how I like them. How else could they leap off the page crackling with life and feeling? How else could their dialogue sizzle with wit? My favorite characters are clever, but they're also long on empathy. They have heart as well as humor. Like other writers’ ordinary characters flung into danger, they're resourceful survivors. But my premise is that they survive and triumph against odds because they're extraordinary from the start.

My first series, the Bruce Kohler Mysteries, has a protagonist and two sidekicks to begin with, his friends Jimmy and Barbara, and eventually a third, his girlfriend Cindy. Bruce is a recovering alcoholic with a New York attitude, a smart mouth, and an ill-concealed heart of gold. He is in the gutter in the first novel, and by the twelfth and latest short story, he's almost ten years sober. He's never relapsed, and he's grown up. He's become a mensch, as we say in New York. That's extraordinary. Barbara's a nice Jewish girl, smart and funny and a born rescuer. She's never met a needy person she didn't want to help. At first, she was a lot like me. But as a writer, I realized that didn't work. So did I tone her down? No. I took her over the top. Unlike me, Barbara never learns from her mistakes. She has to help. She has to investigate. She sniffs out murder like a bloodhound. She drags Bruce and Jimmy into danger. She's extraordinary—and hilarious. Jimmy, another alcoholic, has "been sober since Moses was studying for his bar mitzvah." He's a computer wiz, an obsessed history buff, and a New Yorker who freaks out if he has to leave Manhattan. Not ordinary. Nor is Cindy, an NYPD detective who gets her gold shield before she's ten years sober and has also done a lot of growing up.

Sultan Bayezid II welcomes Jews to Istanbul

My second series, the Mendoza Family Saga, is about an extraordinary Sephardic Jewish family. My real-life family is Ashkenazic, ie Eastern European Jews, but they inspired the Mendozas to some extent, as did Louisa May Alcott's fictional March family from Little Women. In 1492, young Diego Mendoza sails with Columbus on the same day the Jews are expelled from Spain. A year later, he and his sister Rachel join the second voyage. The family ends up in Istanbul, where the Ottoman Empire welcomes the Jews. Rachel marries the last surviving Taino and has a family. She is arguably the best traveled woman of her time. By 1520, she is working as a purveyor to the ladies of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent's harem. She is also solving mysteries in partnership with the Kizlar Agha, the Chief Eunuch of the Harem.

Esperanza Malchi, a kira who sought 
wealth and power and was murdered 
by sepahis in 1600

Rachel is my favorite character, but all the Mendozas are extraordinary. They have intelligence, resilience, flexibility, compassion, and integrity. The family's outsider perspective as dispossessed Jews allows me to explore the theme of cultural relativism in an age of absolutism. Rachel's children are brought up to be at ease with both Judaism and Islam. As Rachel tells them, “If we had not learned to tolerate a great deal of inconsistency, not a single Mendoza would have made it out of Spain alive back in 1492, much less reached Istanbul to prosper and produce such cheeky children.”

Kizlar Agha, 17th c painting
by J-B Vanmour

The Kizlar Agha, the Chief Eunuch of the Harem, is an extraordinary character in himself. Rachel's—and my—Kizlar Agha is fictional, but the office existed from 1574 until its abolition in 1908, carrying a range of ceremonial and practical duties and political power in different eras.Other than women and the Sultan himself, only he and the black eunuchs under his supervision were permitted to enter the royal harem. In my portrayal, he is a figure of great intelligence, magnificence, and gravitas, but very lonely. It is not surprising that he and Rachel begin by matching wits and come to enjoy each other's company—and their investigations—immensely.

Revisiting the Art of My Youth

The group of young Asian Americans beside me gaze at The Starry Night with its sharp spears of cypress piercing the swirling patterns of the sky.

"Is it real?" one of them asks.

"It is," I say. "Those are the real colors Van Gogh painted and the real brushstrokes. You won't see those in the immersive digitized version. This exhibition from the 1880s to the 1940s is only a fraction of what we got to look at every week when I was a kid. But the art from the 1960s to the 2020s hadn't been painted yet."

On the day of this conversation, I'd just scored a free year's MoMA membership, usually three figures, as a perk of the NYC ID that New York residents are entitled to as photo ID with numerous benefits. When I was in high school, I spent every Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. We took the subway from Queens and feasted on art for free. Now, they've curated the hell out of the bits of the collection on display. My very favorite, Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide and Seek, doesn't fit any category so may never make the cut.

The Cubists have plenty of wall space. I've been reading a mystery series based on art crimes, the Genevieve Lenard novels by Estelle Ryan. The Braque Connection gave me a new appreciation of Cubism and Georges Braque in particular, as seen through the eyes of its autistic protagonist. I'd never liked Braque because his art at MoMA in the 1950s was limited to a few brown and gray paintings, which hung next to similar brown and gray canvases by his buddy Picasso. A visit to Google Images taught me that Braque had an enormous stylistic range and a broad and vivid palette. Back at MoMA in 2025, I looked at his work and that of Picasso, Juan Gris, and the other Cubists with fresh eyes. Braque's Road near l'Estaque, which I don't remember, is a Cubist abstraction with the colors of a Cézanne.

Some of the paintings I visited many times in my teens made me feel as if I'd come home. Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, Chagall's I and the Village, and Cézanne's Château Noir all put a huge smile on my face.

You don't watch the news?

Some people are astonished to hear I don't watch the news. One friend who expressed shock told me that she'd been waking up to the headlines on the radio every day for the past twenty-five years in the same breath that she said she was feeling depressed. I could understand why. She's a brilliant woman, but she resisted making the connection.

Here are three questions people ask me, in tones ranging from baffled astonishment to horror.



You don't watch the news?

For many people, watching the news is like breathing. And morning coffee. The fact that the news is invariably depressing at best, terrifying at worst, seems to be irrelevant, even though it inevitably sets the tone for their day.


What do you do in the morning?
Lie in bed and think. Idea time. The germ of a new story may come to me. Or maybe it's a title. Or my series characters start wisecracking in my mind. Sometimes my unconscious writes a publishable flash story or the next chapter or scene of a book I'm reading or show I'm watching in my head. Word for word. Recently it wrote a scene in the TV series Murderbot, based on Martha Wells's multi-award-winning novella, All Systems Red, in which the rogue protagonist SecUnit aka Murderbot explains to its humans how a SecUnit properly programmed by Corporation Rim would fool a group of scientists into letting it invade their facility so it could kill them: "It has to wait for an instruction. If the humans say, "Who is there?" or "What do you want?" it is silent. If they say, "Tell us what you want," it says, "HOW?" The instruction is HOW. Humans: "What do you mean, how?" Invader: "HOW." Hear, Obey, Wait. It really should be HOWL. Hear, Obey, Wait, Learn. It Hears the humans' voices asking who is there and what they want. It Obeys whatever their response dictates. It Waits to see how they react. It Learns to imitate the humans' voices and reactions. Then it persuades the humans to let it in, and it kills them." No, Martha Wells didn't write that, nor did the TV scriptwriters, though I think it's kind of brilliant and in character for Murderbot. My unconscious worked it out in the creative time in which I wasn't watching the news.
Once my unconscious is ready for a nap, I get up and
Potchke with my flowers.
Do my stretches.
Eat breakfast.

Drink coffee as I go through some daily tasks on the computer that include health maintenance records and checking my finances as well as my husband's. (I manage the money. He does the housework and follows and analyzes the news.)
Look at my email and clear it all. Respond to whatever needs a response: a letter to a friend, a post on DorothyL or Short Mystery.
Do some writing if I haven't been moved to start earlier.



If you don't watch the news, how can you deal with what's happening?

As I said, my husband is the news guy. As someone who's smart enough to have been learning from history his whole life, he has a global perspective. He's kept a close eye on Ukraine since that conflict started. He's a big fan of the Ukrainians. Since the election, I've told him he has to start following the national news with equal attention. He's to report to me at once if Social Security or Medicare is in danger or if they're about to cart the Jews away. When the pogroms got bad in what's now Dnipro in 1905, my dad's parents packed the kids up and took them to America. There's no obvious place to get away to now. I have a couple of friends who moved to Mexico between 2016 and 2020. Americans, Jewish or not, might be getting very unpopular there right now. The same goes for Canada, where some of my generation of draft age young men sought refuge in the Sixties.

I refuse to get my knickers in a twist on a daily basis. Until the worst is actually happening, agita is optional, and I choose to avoid it. We do both follow the obits. It's an age thing. We've both reached the stage where we don't recognize most of the celebrities featured in AARP The Magazine as turning 50 or even many of the turning 60s. The 70s, 80s, and 90s, though, are our peeps. We want to know how old they were and how they died. As with the friends and family members we're gradually losing, we're both sad about these losses and grateful that for now, we're still healthy, productive, and reasonably happy. We don't have forever any more. We don't want to spend it doom scrolling and chewing over how our youthful efforts to make things better fell short. We don't want to spend the time we have left miserable about the past, angry about the present, and terrified of the future. So no, I don't read the news. I potchke with my flowers instead.

A Passion for Cross-Genre

One of the nominees for the Edgar Award for Best Novel this year was The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, a multiple Hugo Award nominated fantasy writer. In an Empire threatened by contagion and menacing leviathans, a murder occurs, the weapon a tree sprouting from the body of the victim.

The detectives are a female Nero Wolfe who investigates blindfolded, without leaving her home, and a magically altered Archie Goodwin. Bennett won an Edgar in 2012 for Best Paperback Original for an alternate historical noir science fiction thriller.

I'm one of thousands of authors featured on www.Shepherd.com, a online book browsing site whose founder, Ben Shepherd, claims it's a more effective way for readers to find books they'll fall in love with on the web than Amazon or Goodreads and more akin to the experience of browsing a brick and mortar library or bookstore.

He may be right, because every time I've visited the site to check my own promotional material (which is the primary reason authors join—for free), I end up falling in and following links and come away with something to read.

In order to promote one of their own books, readers are asked to pick a book-related theme ("The best…") and five exemplars. The idea is to draw kindred spirits first to your favorite books and then to your own, with which it presumably has something in common. Rather than manipulate the client by trying to list the five books that were closest in nature to the first in my longest series, I decided to be honest about my five favorite books "with characters you fall in love with." That's my top requirement as a reader for a favorite book. It didn't surprise me that the list consisted solely of genre fiction, because that's 97 percent of what I've been reading for decades. It did surprise me that the whole list of five consisted of cross-genre fiction, with not a single straight mystery among them.

Here's my personal list of "The best historical, fantasy, SF, and mystery books with characters you fall in love with":

• Kate Quinn, The Rose Code
• Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
• Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon
• Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
• Martha Wells, All Systems Red

You can read what I said about why I love them as well as why readers of these books might also be drawn to Voyage of Strangers, the first novel in my Mendoza Family Saga, here.

I read and write mystery because it's fiction in which something is guaranteed to happen. Most literary fiction comes across to me as a dish without salt. I've always read historical fiction, and I've been writing it ever since young Diego Mendoza popped up in my head demanding that I tell the story of how he sailed with Columbus when the Jews were expelled from Spain.

I read more and more urban fantasy and occasionally high fantasy these days because it's so imaginative and so much fun. I like speculative fiction in general, but my mind glazes over when the science kicks in. I can't read the tech in a technothriller either. And whatever I read, character, character, characters I love, well developed characters I care about are a must. That's what I'm best at writing myself, along with snappy dialogue that moves both plot and relationships forward. I haven't taken my own urban fantasy mystery series as far as a novel yet, but you can read my novelette about Jewish country artist and shapeshifter Emerald Love, aka Amy Greenstein, Shifting Is for the Goyim, and the collection of stories that follow, Emerald Love, Shifting Country Star, as e-books. I've found urban fantasy mystery is as much fun to write as it is to read.

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Opera Does It With Music

Genre fiction readers know all about plots that are tortuous and bloody. Whole genres, horror and Gothic, are devoted to terrifying the reader. On the more sedate end of the spectrum, probing the minds of serial killers and describing torture with loving precision easily become hot crime fiction trends. Readers don't mind suspending disbelief in order to admire the cannibal Hannibal Lecter who escapes prison hidden in the skin of a flayed victim in Silence of the Lambs (a book I wished I could unread) or love Dexter, the serial killer with a moral compass (first appearing in the 2004 novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter), a character any expert forensic psychologist can tell you doesn't exist and never will.

Today, good little mystery writers try hard not to plug too many coincidences into their plots. Some subgenres put limits about how over the top the atrocities will go. The revered authors of classic literature didn't worry about that. Take Sophocles, the greatest of the playwrights of ancient Greece. In Oedipus Rex, the protagonist's parents give their baby up for adoption to avoid a prophecy that he'll kill his father and marry his mother. He meets a stranger at the crossroads, quarrels with him, and kills him. Guess who? He meets a widow twice his age and marries her. Guess who? For over-the-top twistiness and gore, take Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus is the most extreme example. The Roman general Titus captures the Queen of the Goths and her three sons in war and executes one of her sons. In revenge, they rape his daughter. After a lot of reciprocal accusations of murder, killing of sons, and cutting off of hands and heads, Titus bakes the remains of the Queen's sons in a pie and serves it to her at a feast.

The plots of soap opera on modern TV are so labyrinthine and unlikely that the term itself is used to describe any sequence of events that is so excessively dramatic and complex that it beggars belief. It has become so natural to think of any melodramatic story, real or imagined, as "soap opera" that my adorable husband used the term when I read him the synopsis of Il Trovatore, the opera I was about to see at the Metropolitan Opera. I live only twenty blocks from Lincoln Center and was able to accept the last-minute invitation to the Met by a friend with front row orchestra seats whose husband couldn't make it. Giuseppe Verdi's music makes Il Trovatore one of the gems of grand opera. The story, on the other hand, epitomizes the reason soap opera was named for opera, not the other way around: a theatrical presentation with a story as ridiculous as any opera's, with the added benefit of advertising soap.

Il Trovatore, the Troubador, is the leader of the rebel forces in a 15th-century Spanish civil war. He and his principal opponent, the Count, are both in love with the same lady. The Count seeks a gypsy woman, called a witch because she looks like "a hag" (ie old and poorly dressed) and can shift shapes (the villagers saw an owl—they're a superstitious lot). Her mother "bewitched" the Count's infant brother, so they burned her at the stake. The daughter got even by throwing the baby into the fire. It turns out that the rebel leader is the son of the gypsy witch (the daughter). Of course, the lady loves him, not the Count. Four acts later, it turns out that the Troubador is actually the Count's baby brother. The gypsy woman threw the wrong baby into the fire. Oops. The lady offers herself to the Count as the price of freeing her lover. He nobly refuses, but it's too late. She's taken a slow-acting poison. The Count finds out the enemy he's imprisoned is his brother. But it's too late. He's already beheaded him. Curtain.

The music is glorious. But don't you love mysteries? We ask the reader to suspend disbelief so little compared to opera. A coincidence here, an act of heroism there. A logical conclusion.