Button Sunday and More

In July of last year, I posted about one of the best times I ever had at a booksigning when I saw Dean James, Carolyn Haines, and Mary Saums at Houston’s Murder By the Book.

I got to repeat that pleasure Saturday when they returned to the scene of the crime. Dean was signing his new Bridge Club mystery, The Unkindest Cut, written under the pseudonym Honor Hartman. Carolyn was signing her newest Sarah Booth mystery, Wishbones. And Mary Saums was signing her second Thistle and Twigg mystery, Mighty Old Bones.

Dean, Mary, and Carolyn

After last year’s post, Mark commented that I must have been in a good mood, but I attributed my high spirits to giddy exhaustion. Yesterday made me rethink that. There is just something about these three writers up close and in person that uplifts me. It was unexpectedly hard to tell Dean that my mother had died. He met her on several occasions, and as fellow Mississippi natives, she loved talking to him. Besides being funny, Dean is the soul of kindness. We promised to get together soon over dinner and just talk.

“Just talking” is a favorite Southern pastime, and I suppose that when I’m with these three, I feel a sense of kinship because we are all Southerners. Mary’s an Alabama native who now lives in Tennessee. Carolyn, like Dean, is from Mississippi and now lives in Alabama. I realize that technically, Texas is part of the South (it did fight, after all, on the right losing right side of the War Between the States), but perhaps because, as Lynne has pointed out to me, I live in such a multicultural city, Texas doesn’t feel like the South. When these three writers start talking, their accents are musical, and their stories crack me up. I told Carolyn I could listen to her all day, and she suggested that I might want to call her ex-husbands for another opinion.

For my readers who enjoy Dean’s work (including his Simon Kirby-Jones Mystery series), this is the last of the Bridge Club Mysteries. He will, however, have another offering from his Trailer Park Mysteries, written under the name Jimmie Ruth Evans, and I was allowed an advance peek at the new cover, which he said I could share with you.

Dean, Carolyn, and Mary made my day–and now I get to look forward to the pleasure of reading about murder and craziness at a bridge players’ retreat in the Hill Country of Texas, in the fictional town of Tullulah on the edge of Alabama’s Bankhead National Forest, and in the life of a scrappy P.I. with her own personal ghost as a new adventure takes her from fictional Zinnia, Mississippi, to Costa Rica via Hollywood. These are three writers who have certainly managed their caffeine properly.