Book Signings

One of the more pleasant duties of being a published author is doing signings. It’s a time when I actually get to meet face to face with the people who are reading my books. It’s ego-boosting – which for someone engaged in an essentially lonely profession is marvelous – and sometimes useful, because I’ll get feedback about the direction I’m taking with my stories and/or characters. Even, once in a while, I’ll be offered a story idea or book title I can actually use. So I love to do book signings.

One of my favorites is an annual event, offered by a local mystery bookstore, Once Upon A Crime. Owners Pat and Gary call it Write of Spring, and this past Saturday was their ninth annual.

Minnesota is chock-a-block with authors, many of them mystery writers. No one seems sure why, but I think it has something to do with our long, dark winters. If you’re not a skier, a snowmobiler, or an ice fisherman, what else is there to do but write?

This year there were about fifty mystery authors in attendance at Write of Spring. We came in one-hour shifts, standing shoulder to shoulder behind a long table stacked with our books. The place was crowded with visitors, who munched on ginger cookies and lemonade while waiting to speak with a favorite author, buy a book or, in some cases, offer previously purchased books they brought along for autographs. At this point in my career, I have a long backlist, so I got to talk about not just my current Betsy Devonshire series, but also the Dame Frevisse medieval mystery series and even the Peter Brichter series I started with back in the 80s. One author who came in a little early for the second shift is dear friend Gail Frazer, with whom I collaborated on the Dame Frevisse series. Pat had a set of the six books we wrote together (Gail continued the series alone later) to be sent to a collector. She wanted us to autograph them, both with our mutual pseudonym and our “real name.”

That raised a question for me: What is my real name? That is, I have a legal name, the one I married into, but not many people know or use it. I have a “professional” name, my maiden name, the one I started writing under. And I have a current pseudonym, the one most of my readers know me by. I decided to go with the professional name.

One thing I noticed about the books, which began appearing in 1992 as paperback originals, is that the pages are already turning brown. Before too long, they will crumble. Now it has been my position that one problem with e-books is that, as the technology changes, the ones coming out now will be unreadable and volumes will be lost. But looking at the browning pages of Margaret Frazer’s books, I realized that time will render them unreadable, too. There’s something sad, even tragic, about that. Not that I write deathless prose, but there is value in even the common literature of a culture and its loss is real.