Your chance to name Roxy's 5th book!

Fans of my Ghostwriter Mystery series will be happy to hear I have finished the latest Roxy Parker adventure, and my children are still in one piece—see blog below. Of course the fact that they've spent the past few months being ignored by their mother, staring at far too many screens, and generally learning that writers are a grumpy bunch on deadline, is neither here nor there.

We're alive and we're happy. Well, actually, not everyone is. There are at least three very unhappy people in my latest novel. One of them has just fallen off a cliff on the Italian Riviera, so that's not so much fun. Another has been bludgeoned in his Berlin apartment, and it's ruined a perfectly good guitar (not to mention his head). And the third? Well, you'll have to read the book to find out what happens to the third. It's Roxy's boyfriend Max and he's gone missing while working in Europe.

Why has Max vanished?
Is he still alive?
Can Roxy Parker find him, even with his annoying, self-absorbed sister by her side?

Before you can find the answers to those questions, I need YOUR help. The manuscrpt is currently with my US editor and will be online in a few weeks, but I'm looking for a creative title.

What would you name it?

If you can think of a good title you get to name the book and be credited in the Acknowledgements section. How good is that? All you have to do is think of a snappy title that encapsulates what the Ghostwriter Mysteries are all about: writing, murder, adventure, fun. But this time we need to add a spice of travel.

I've been playing with the titles: Lost in Translation or Globe Plotting. My cover designer tells me the former is a film, the latter an embarrassment. Can you do better than that?

I'd love to hear from you. Don't forget it HAS to include some kind of reference to writing, words, books etc, just like the previous four titles (but also mystery and travel, tricky huh?):

    

You have one week to complete your task. Good luck!

xo Christina

UPDATE: A big THANK YOU to all my readers who got in touch with cover titles (all via email, although a comment here would have been just as good). There were some fun, inspiring and just plain loony suggestions, but sadly, none were quite right. Special mention to Hannah P's contribution: Dead on Arrival. (Very clever, Hannah, and I might store that away for another time.) So what did I end up calling it? You'll have to wait and see when the book gets published, very soon!

My first murder

A friend asked me a few months ago, one eyebrow raised a little cynically, why I was so fixated with crime and why I've spent the past 15 years writing about murder and mayhem (see my crime ebooks at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/C.A.-Larmer/e/B006S9LC86/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1376891328&sr=1-2-ent).

I can't remember what I told her, but I do remember giving it considerable thought soon after.

Why AM I so fixated with crime, death, mysteries and puzzles? Why did I seek out The Three Investigators when all my friends were immersed in pony stories and The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe?

I think I have pinpointed why, or at least when my curiosity for crime began. I can't recall my age, but I must have been six or so, I was living in Brisbane, and had heard (either directly or via gossip) that a young child had been kidnapped off a Brisbane street in broad daylight and found days later chopped into a million pieces. (Allow a little poetic license here for a child's overactive imagination if you will.) That wasn't the worst bit for me, or at least the bit that stuck in my mind and haunted my dreams for years to come. What freaked me out was the 'broad daylight' bit. The poor kid, according to my hazy memory, was picked up and carried away in a public place, and despite wailing and flailing, onlookers allowed it to happen.

Why?! Why would they do that?!

I don't know if I worked it out for myself or if my mother explained it in a warning lesson, but it soon became obvious. The poor love had not made it clear this was a stranger. He/she (I'm sorry, I don't recall their gender) had screamed and cried, and onlookers had assumed it was just a very naughty child having a very disruptive tantrum. "The poor dad," they probably thought, glancing away and minding their own business.

I learnt then—and I have taught my own children since—that you must always let people know what's really going on. I learnt that if a stranger dared to scoop me up and try to haul me away, that I MUST scream out words to the effect of: "I don't know you! Let me go! Help, I don't know this man!"

It was an eerie story for a young child to hear and I can't even verify if it ever really happened. No Google back then to check it out now, just a horrible, lingering memory. Maybe it was a storyline from a dodgy TV show I had sneakily watched without my parents knowing. Perhaps it was a scenerio someone simply mentioned to me. I simply don't know. But it stuck with me and rather than being appalled and shrinking from crime, I feel, now, that it was the seed that began to grow into a lifelong passion for the dasterdly deeds of others.

What made that horrendous man steal that child in the middle of the day? What made him then chop that poor soul up? How did those onlookers feel afterwards, knowing they had allowed the kidnapping to happen? Who was that child? Who were the parents? The siblings? The murderer? How did the world settle down again after that?

How could it, ever again?

And so, perhaps, lacking answers and wanting some vestige of control, I began to read about crime and immerse myself in it. Because it seemed so damn important. This wasn't Black Beauty, this wasn't fantastical wardrobes that opened into fictitious worlds. This was life and death stuff.

And it was in each of our hands, whether we liked it or not.

I'd love to hear about YOUR first murder, your first whiff of the darker world outside. Share your stories, real or imagined, via comment below or drop me an email.

In the meantime, happy reading, (if you can!)

xo Christina

Roxy's next breathtaking adventure!

Fans of Roxy Parker and my Ghostwriter Mystery series will be happy to hear I have now completed the fourth book in the series and it is with my US editor as we speak. I've had many wonderful emails from fans begging for another Roxy Parker adventure, so I hope this one delivers on every scale. It's now called Dying Words and actually derives from a real-life incident that happened to me about two years ago.

A man I had met and interviewed once very briefly called out my name on his death bed. He was begging for a photo to be returned. It was a photo he had given me for a relatively dull book on Surveying that I had just completed. I had to Express Post the photo back to him before he died and it got me wondering: why did he NEED that picture back, so desperately? Was there something hidden in the picture? Some clue to a secret treasure or a cause for his death?

And so Roxy Parker gets the same desperate plea in my next book, Dying Words. In her case the man was definitely murdered and she must try to work out why he called out her name before he slipped off this mortal coil. Thus begins a very baffling adventure for the adventure-prone ghostwriter who goes on a frantic chase to locate an old missing photograph before a mysterious burglar beats her to it. This seemingly benign, black and white portrait of six people in 1975 holds the key, not only to the man's senseless murder, but to another very brutal crime that happened 37 years ago.

Along the way, we also reunite with Roxy's motley collection of mates including gutsy copper Gilda and Roxy's now-boyfriend Max (who has a secret bombshell he's about to drop!)

It's an intriguing tale and I hope you enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed writing it and it's also been great fun creating the cover with my talented Aussie designer Stu Eadie. This cover will be a little different to the last three and I'll give you all a sneak peek once I have it in my hot little hands (or should that be hot little hardrive?).

Once again, thanks to everyone for your patience and support, and I'll let you know once it's available online. In the meantime, you can catch Roxy's other adventures (or try one of my other books, The Agatha Christie Book Club or An Island Lost) at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=C.A.+Larmer

All feedback most welcome.

Happy reading,
Christina

Too many books, not enough time to write them

Are you a writer? Do you have endless books in your head, as I do? Or do you prefer to read the writings of others, something I also enjoy but which often leads me to the former. Being a writer can be irritating sometimes, especially when you have so many ideas and so little time. I want to take another three months out of my freelance soon and write my next book, or at least get it started.

But what book?

I have just posted my two completed Ghostwriter mystery books, Killer Twist and A Plot To Die For on Smashwords, but I have a third one already in the pipeline. It was originally intended as book number two, before A Plot To Die For swept into my imagination and took over. Loosely dubbed Last Writes, it's a cracking tale, one I desperately want to complete. I'm about 10,000 wds in. I know exactly how it will go. I might as well finish it.

But I have this other idea, see, that's just as intoxicating to me as a writer. It's a whole new crime mystery series called The Agatha Christie Book Club (see earlier posts). I am also 10,000 words into that, and it excites me even more than the ghostwriter books. It's just fresher, I guess, and has more marketing potential. So I would like to re-focus on that, if only to clinch the idea which I think is a corker. (Why hasn't anyone ever thought of it before?)

What do you think? Stick with the first series, extend that portfolio of titles? Or launch into something new?

All comments/critiques/advice most welcome. Anyone?

xo C.