October 6: “The Holy Grail of Detective Fiction”, with Susan Rowland, Grace Topping, and Connie Berry” (6:00 pm London/1:00 pm EST/10:00 am PST)
Register on: https://us02web.zoom.us/
For award-winning authors Connie Berry and Grace Topping, as well as renown literary scholar and mystery novelist Prof. Susan Rowland, the process of writing detective novels has a “quest” vibe to it. It highlights the protagonists as heroines and shows how the detective genre may have some kind of “mission” to accomplish. Our notable guests will discuss the inspiration behind writing cozy/traditional mysteries, why and how these mysteries are written, what effect the process of writing them has on the author, and the heroines in their novels.
Grace Topping:
Grace Topping is an Agatha Award finalist and the USA Today bestselling author of the Laura Bishop home staging cozy mystery series. She’s a recovering technical writer and IT project manager accustomed to writing lean, boring documents. Let loose to write fiction, she’s now killing off characters who remind her of people she dealt with during her career. She is the former VP of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, the Membership Guppy of the SINC Guppy Chapter, and a member of Mystery Writers of America. For more info on Grace’s work, please visit https://www.
Connie Berry:
Connie Berry is the author of the USA Today and Amazon best-selling Kate Hamilton Mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. During college she studied at the University of Freiburg in Germany and St. Clare’s College, Oxford, where she fell under the spell of the British Isles. In 2019 Connie won the IPPY Gold Medal for Mystery and was a finalist for the Agatha Award’s Best Debut. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America, the Crime Writers’ Association, Sisters in Crime, and is on the board of the Guppies and Buckeye Crime Writers. Besides reading and writing mysteries, Connie loves history, foreign travel, cute animals, and all things British. She lives in Ohio with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Emmie. You can learn more about Connie and her books at her website www.connieberry.com.
Susan Rowland:
Susan Rowland’s first detective novel will be published in 2022 as The Sacred Well Murders. It offers three marginalized women as sleuths who are challenged to their core by a group (mis)using Celtic religion to save the world from climate change. Previously Susan published two scholarly studies of mysteries by women: From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (2000) and The Sleuth and the Goddess: Hestia, Artemis, Aphrodite and Athena in Women’s Detective Fiction (2015). Susan is core faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute and has published other books on Jung, the arts, feminism and the novel.
