Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books Read in 2013

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Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly event hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, winds up the year with the highly fitting theme of Top Ten Books Read in 2013. I read a lot of great books this year; it was hard picking just which ones to squeeze into the nine and ten spots! But here they are. They appear in the order I read them, not the order of favorites:

 

Day of Infamy by Walter Lord

I love a good solid piece of historical nonfiction, and WWII is one of the areas I’m interested in. I’d been curious to read more details about Pearl Harbor after seeing the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), and I really enjoy Walter Lord’s readable and information-packed style. I actually checked this one out of the library again and re-read it early this December.

 

No Life For a Lady by Agnes Morley Cleaveland

An extremely entertaining memoir of growing up on a New Mexico cattle ranch beginning in the 1880s. Agnes Morley and her younger siblings had enough colorful adventures to spark ideas for a dozen novels—and yet there’s a lot of interesting detail on the people, the work and domestic life of the Southwest too. A great read for any Western fan and/or history buff.

 

Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart

Easily my favorite read of the year. Gorgeous writing, a stunningly evoked setting, suspense and intrigue and romance…it doesn’t get much better than this. Read my review here.

 

Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson

Anybody might enjoy it, but writers especially are bound to get a kick out of this charming book, the tale of a mild-mannered English spinster who writes a novel based off the people in her little village, and turns said village upside-down! Read my review here.

 

Firmament: Radialloy by J. Grace Pennington

Yes, this is probably the most unexpected entry on my list! I didn’t think I would ever read science fiction. But the delightful characters and twisting plot drew me in, and I couldn’t put it down. Read my review here.

 

The Hanging Tree by Dorothy M. Johnson
I’d long meant to try out Dorothy Johnson’s Westerns, and this collection of short stories plus the title novella more than answered my expectations. Read my review here.

 

 

The Bellamy Trial by Frances Noyes Hart

I couldn’t put down this unique mystery from 1927. It’s told from the perspective of two young reporters, a girl and a man, covering a sensational murder trial—the whole book takes place in and around the courtroom, with all the evidence in the mystery presented via testimony and speeches. Mystery lovers won’t want to miss it.

 

These Wonderful Rumours!: A Young Schoolteacher’s Wartime Diaries by May Smith

Good historical journals and diaries are another one of my favorite types of books, and May Smith is one of the wittiest, most entertaining diarists I’ve ever read. Her diary gives a wonderful snapshot of life in a typical English town during WWII, and how ordinary life went on under extraordinary circumstances.

 

The Trusty Knaves by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Rhodes is another Western author I read for the first time this year, and this is my favorite of his books that I’ve read so far. He has one of the most unique and entertaining writing styles I’ve come across—this tale of a bank-robbery conspiracy and a counter-conspiracy set to thwart it is both exciting and hilarious. Read my review here.

City Editor by Stanley Walker
I picked this up for research, but enjoyed it so much that I ended up reading it from cover to cover instead of just the applicable chapters. First published in 1934, it’s a fascinating first-hand look into a newspaper industry that practically doesn’t exist today, detailing the ins and outs of reporting, writing, managing, publishing and more.
The means by which I got my hands on these favorite reads was a little more varied this year. I got more than half of them through my library, although it took interlibrary-loan requests to find The Hanging Tree and City Editor. These Wonderful Rumours! and Firmament: Radialloy I bought on Kindle; I had to buy a vintage hardcover copy of The Bellamy Trial, and I found The Trusty Knaves in a collection of Rhodes’ works at Internet Archive.
Previous years’ top-ten lists: 2011, 2012.

Extracts from the Diary of an Author

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book-1502805_640“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

~ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

A few days ago I started a new blank journal. When I went to put the last filled one away, I naturally paused for a minute and flipped back through a few old entries…and ended up reading more of them…and before I knew it I was digging out the journal before that and reading it, too. These journals of the last few years don’t make me writhe the way the ones from my early teenage years used to (until I burned them this summer). I’d say ramblings about my writing make up a good two-thirds of the entries. It’s really helpful to be able to muse and brainstorm and speculate in my journal when I’m stuck with a story—not to mention a relief to have a place where I can just write, without any demands of consistency in style, plot or believability. I’ve been making a conscious effort to make it more a journal of life in general, but writing is so big a part of my life that you know it’s going to get in there somehow.

Anyhow, in the course of re-reading these past journals, I came upon a number of variously funny and thought-provoking entries, and I thought it’d be fun to share a few excerpts of them here:

July 20th, 2011
I haven’t the faintest idea what to make for lunch today. I know I’ve used the words “eyes,” “moved,” and “turned” about a million times apiece in [this] story [it was “Delayed Deposit”] and I’ll have to find other ways to say it about half a million times.

November 19th
The side-effects of successful writing are backaches and absent-mindedness. My back hurts more consistently even than my head, and I’ve been forgetting everything. I broiled some cookies instead of baking them last weekend, and this morning at eleven o’clock I found myself trying to remember if I had eaten breakfast. I had to go count the bowls in the dishwasher. Turns out I hadn’t. What I’m still trying to figure out is how I stayed on my feet that long.

March 8th, 2012
I was thinking today about my experience reading Hay-Wire. Much as I loved it, a certain thing kept happening to me. A lot of what Lynn learns in the course of the book is never stated in so many words; it’s left to the reader to observe in him. Similarly, when the author shares his early thoughts she doesn’t point out the fallacies; she leaves it to the reader to recognize them. Even though I caught on all right, I caught myself saying mentally, “Yes, but when are you going to explain? Explain, or the reader won’t see it!” But the thing is, I was the reader, and I was seeing it. I was just thinking like an author, and treating the book like one of my own. This makes me think: I’m probably so over-careful and over-concerned about my readers “getting” it. That’s the questions I always ask everyone after they read one of my stories: “Did it make sense? Did you understand such-&-such a part? Do you get what I was trying to say?” Maybe I underestimate the reader. But then again, is it riskier to overestimate?

January 23, 2013
I’m reading The Little Regiment & Other Stories. Is it a bad thing that I see similarities between Stephen Crane’s writing & mine, & yet find things to criticize in Crane’s? Yet if Crane’s considered a good writer & I do write at all like Crane, then wouldn’t people think my writing was good…? Conundrums!

Colorado Bound

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In the midst of getting my third Mrs. Meade Mystery into shape for publication, it occurred to me that I’ve never really talked here about where and how the series came into being. Partly, I suppose, because its beginnings are shrouded in the fogs that always seem to obscure the details of my initial inspiration in hindsight—leaving me with a complete sketch of a story idea in hand, wondering, “Now where exactly did this come from, anyway?” A guest post that I wrote several months before the release of The Silver Shawl mentions some of the things that inspired Mrs. Meade, but sheds no light on when the ideas first entered my brain or how they came together. I do remember vaguely that the plot of The Silver Shawl may have started as something I mentally tried out as a Western story and found that it didn’t quite work that way; but the characters in the final version are totally different. Exactly when and where Mrs. Meade herself first appeared, or where Sheriff Royal went from a useful side character to a full-fledged sidekick, I couldn’t say.


There is one element of the series’ development that stands out pretty clearly in my mind, though; something which I feel is an integral part of it—the setting. Colorado in the first decade of the 20th century. Again, I can’t say exactly when I picked this time and place, but I do remember how and why. It came about mainly because of two books I read, and a random sentence in a third. The first was Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden, and the second was Clover by Susan Coolidge. The former was nonfiction, the latter fiction; both were set in Colorado, and the descriptions of the setting in both books fascinated me. To begin with, I’ve always adored mountains. In addition, the juxtaposition of early 20th-century modernity with the remnants of the frontier West, as portrayed in Nothing Daunted, presented all sorts of fascinating possibilities for stories. Edwardian-era Colorado had both thriving cities and remote settlements. Ranching, mining, railroads were industries that held plenty of interest. Also, the plot of Clover was driven by the heroine’s accompanying her younger brother to Colorado for his health—which opened up even further possibilities. As a popular resort for invalids and travelers of all sorts and social classes, where could I find a better place for bringing in whatever characters I needed to fill the cast of a mystery?

The clincher might have been a sentence in Initials Only, a 1911 mystery by Anna Katharine Green, which I read just a short time after reading Nothing Daunted. A family of travelers staying at a New York hotel, filling a small but important role as witnesses to the murder that takes place in one of its lobbies, was referred to as being “well known in Denver.” Green’s work in general had a significant influence on the development of Mrs. Meade—not only did she create one of the first lady detectives in her Miss Amelia Butterworth, but the milieu of Victorian and Edwardian life portrayed in her books was one of the things that I enjoyed most about them, and which I wanted to reflect in my own historical mysteries. The reference to Denver seemed to link this in neatly with the Colorado setting that already attracted me.
 
I feel I’ve yet to fully explore the possibilities of the setting. Hopefully that will develop further in future stories. But it has provided me with a distinct backdrop to work against, and has even sparked the beginnings of some plots by itself. One thing is certain: I know I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of its potential!
 
(And incidentally, after searching for a picture to illustrate this post, I really want to go to Colorado myself…)
 
image credit: Telluride, Colorado (Wikimedia Commons)