"Jane Jeffry. And the woman approaching us is my next-door neighbor Shelley Nowack."
"Jane Jeffry is a good name. You're sure you didn't make it up? Are you a writer or reader or both?"
"Both," Jane admitted. "So far unpublished though. I came here to learn tips on how to market my book."
Shelley had returned and introductions followed.
"That's what everybody who wants to crack the shell should do," Felicity went on. "And what about you, Shelley?"
"I have no writing aspirations, though I read a lot," Shelley said. "I'm just along to help out Jane.
I'm planning to go to different lectures to take notes because she can't be in two or three places at one time."
"Shelley isn't quite telling the truth," Jane said with a laugh. "She writes the best letters of complaint you can imagine."
"A skill I wish I had," Felicity said. "Where are you ladies from?" she said, signing the book with a flourish of green ink.
"Only a few blocks away," Shelley said. "Would you sign another one for me later?"
"I'd be delighted. Have you had breakfast yet? I'm starving. Will you join me? Just give me ten minutes to change out of my airplane garb and fix my hair."
Jane was thrilled but refrained from gushing. "We'd like that."
When Felicity was out of earshot, Shelley said, "This is astonishing. John at the front desk said those cowboy people checked in as part of this conference. And there was another odd thing I overheard. That Zac person who's been lurking near the desk went up to the woman and young man checking in. He gave a paperback book to her, saying, 'Sophie, you must read this.' "
"That's sort of strange," Jane said, still preoccupied with how very nice Felicity Roane had turned out to be.
Felicity met them at the door of the hotel restaurant shortly. Now she looked a lot more like the photo on the back of her books.
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."