When they'd ordered, Felicity said, "Have you seen any of the others arrive? I'm a bit early. I always like to get rid of the airplane hair and rest up my white knuckles before I go into author mode."
"I saw Zac Zebra," Jane said. "There's no mistaking him." She studied Felicity as she spoke. The author had put her hair up in a twist at the back and was wearing freshly pressed tan slacks and a pink blouse. A lovely soft scarf draped over her shoulder was held in place with a pretty gold pin.
"Zac must go to every mystery conference in the country," Felicity said. "He's an unforgivable show-off with that crazy hair. He claims to have written several books under a pseudonym, but I don't believe that. For one thing, nobody's really named Zac Zebra, are they?"
"I hope not," Shelley put in. "Do you already know all the other guest speakers? Do you do this a lot?"
"I know most of them. But not, thank goodness, the E-Pubbed Wonder."
"Who is that?"
"I've forgotten her name. Deliberately, I fear. She posted a book on the Internet. She's quoted as saying her wonderful husband sold his pickup truck to fund the publication of it."
"People pay for being published?" Shelley said with horror.
"Some do," Felicity said. "I've never heard of
any of them actually making back the money though, until this hick turned up. She had the nerve to send it to Sophie Smith."
"Who's Sophie Smith?" Shelley asked.
Jane knew the answer but let Felicity reply.
"The toughest old editor in the business. She's called other names I won't repeat because they're obscene. Most of us have had her at one point or another. To our sorrow. She has a reputation for buying up anybody she can get her hands on and just splatting their books against a wall to see who sticks. Once every couple of years, she fires upward of two dozen who haven't flogged their book sufficiently to live up to her sales expectations. I was one of those. Not only once, but twice." She admitted this with a wry smile.
Jane was liking Felicity more and more as she went on. She had the same self-deprecating sense of humor that showed in her books. She could criticize others with abandon, but also make fun of her own mistakes just as could her heroines.
"What did this Sophie think of the e-pubbed book?" Shelley asked.
"She loved it and so did that assistant of hers, Corwin. Rumor is, she paid a fortune for it. It's apparently told in two alternating viewpoints, chapter by chapter. Sophie must have thought that was a truly original thing to do. I don't think Sophie has ever read anything that wasn't by one of her own writers or she'd have known better."
"Is it still on the Internet?" Jane asked.
Felicity shrugged. "I don't know. I never looked for it. Other writers I know thought it was awful. Pretentious. A sort of conflicting quest for both characters. Lots of misspelled words. And those who read clear through it said the ending stunk. The two viewpoint characters had never even heard about each other until they met in the last chapter, and it was apparently a very boring meeting. Of course, this all might be just sour grapes. All of this gossip came from the struggling mid-list writers like me who are beating their fingers to a pulp to keep up."
"Mid-list?" Jane said. "But you've had a lot of bestsellers."
Felicity laughed. "If you claw your way onto the bottom of the one hundred and fifty books on the USA Today list, your publisher can call you a bestseller. But I have a good many readers who genuinely like the books and keep on buying them. And most of them are still in print, so I consider myself very lucky."
"Aren't there other authors who have self-published their work, which eventually led them into real publishing?" Jane asked. "I've heard of a few, but don't remember who they were."
"Neither do I," Felicity said. "But I do recall that a few of them became really big names and made tons of money."
Five
Over their last cup of coffee, Shelley asked Felicity about the other guest speakers. Glancing down at the brochure she'd received in the mail, she asked, "What about this man Chester Griffith? He's a bookseller, it says."
"That's a very modest bio. He's a lot more than a bookseller," Felicity said. "He's the antidote to Zac Zebra, for one thing. Zac is a macho pig who only gives good reviews to tough-guy books. On the rare occasions Zac critiques a book by a woman, he's vicious. His favorite phrase is 'powder puff mysteries.' And he claims to read ten or twelve books a day. Which is ridiculous. If you've read the book he's reviewing, you can tell that he only reads the back-cover copy and imagines what the book is about. He mixes up characters with each other and he's notorious for giving away the endings, with men and women both."
She sighed. "I'm sorry I'm ranting. To answer your question, Chester Griffith is an intelligent gentleman though he doesn't mince words. He
makes no bones about saying that women writers are superior at their craft. He's practically memorized all the Golden Age female mystery writers' output. He's the world's expert on Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and several less-well-known women. He's researched their lives as well. He's a good speaker.
"He also likes what he calls 'the Modern Golden Age' writers. Emma Lathem, Dorothy Simpson, Gwendolyn Butler, and Ruth Rendell's Wexford novels as well. With the exception of Christie's Miss Marple, all of these women wrote about male protagonists with a sensibility that's missing from tough-guy books."
"I'm going to like this man," Jane said. "The names you've mentioned are nearly all of my favorites. I've reread many of them."
"But Zac Zebra says all these women's male protagonists are wimps, if not downright homosexual."
"You're kidding?" Jane asked with disgust.
"I've heard him say it to whole groups of fans, many of whom walk out on his speeches," Felicity said.
"Why do the people who plan the conferences agree to let him take the podium?" Shelley asked.
"Most of them, I suspect, think he spices up a conference," Felicity said. "I myself think he's a pollutant of the usual goodwill between readers and writers."
"What about Taylor Kensington?" Shelleyasked, again consulting her brochure. "Should one of us go to her talk? It says she writes two different series and one of them has an historical setting."
"Taylor Kensington is a delightful woman," Felicity said. "Very funny, very low-key. One of my best friends in the business. She's a trooper who has helped a lot of aspiring writers. I like her suspects, her settings, her plots, which are so well researched, but…"
"But what?" Jane asked. She'd recently read one of Kensington's novels and hadn't liked the ending.
"She writes heroines who, at the end, stupidly go out in the middle of the night all alone to investigate suspects. In every one of her books, the woman is nearly killed for being suddenly so dumb," Felicity explained.
Jane said, "I've only read one of her books and that's exactly what happened at the end. The character seemed so smart all the way through, and then went out to a deserted construction site at four in the morning to meet a stranger who tried to kill her. I wanted to slap her silly."
"I'll jot her name down to avoid reading, nice as she might be," Shelley said, scribbling a note on her brochure.
"Who is this Miss Mystery?" Jane said, still perusing the most recent mailing. "I'd never heard of her and she's the only one without a picture."
"Oh dear. I didn't know she was coming," Fe-
licity said with slight alarm. "I should have read the last bulletin they sent. She has an Internet site where she critiques women's fiction. She slaughters the work of newbies and e-pubs. She also puts her saber through the guts of the most successful, genuinely bestselling women writers. Struggling mid-list authors are her cup of tea. I should be grateful, I suppose, being among that group. But I'm not. She's a lot like Zac in that she merely skims the book and mostly misses the whole point of the work. I think it's a power thing. I've actually seen a couple of paperback originals who cite her in the blurbs."