This week: Mystery Lady Lilian Jackson Braun Edited by: eyestar~*  
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 Hello Mystery lovers! I am honoured to by your guest editor this week. There are so many mystery writers and types of mysteries. One of my favourite Cosy Mystery authors is Lillian Jackson Braun, whose cats feature as clue finders in her stories!  Let's have a look at her and this type of mystery. 
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Product Type: Toys & Games
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Amazon's Price: $ 24.95
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Welcome Mystery lovers!
Are you familiar with "Cosy Mysteries'? Do you have a favourite "Cosy Mystery" story or author?
Let's talk Cosy Mysteries. You may recall from earlier newsletters it is a type of mystery where violence is less intense and the focus is on puzzle solving rather than suspense.. The setting is usually a small, social community where a local person becomes an amateur detective. They know the people and the area and use intuitive knowing, common sense and observation to discover and interpret clues. They may have a contact on the police force or be regarded as a busy body. Many times women are the main characters, though not always as in Lilian Braun's books.
The crooks are local people and can usually explain why they committed the crime when they are taken. Motives can be jealousy, greed, revenge of past events or family issues. The violence or crime is generally not shown and the criminal is generally taken without a lot of violence.
There are many books out there now of this type and many are including animal friends as helping characters. 
 My favourite author of this type is Lilian Jackson Braun with her light hearted "The Cat Who.." series. I enjoy the Siamese cat antics immensely as the author uses their attributes and habits as indicators or clues to solve mysteries as their owner, an ex journalist James Qwilleran, gets involved in trying to solve odd happenings in the small town of Pickax located in Moose County "400 miles north of everywhere." The setting, love interest and eccentic characters, humour and puzzle solving makes for a light, fun read.
Her characters are based on composites of people she had met and years of observing behaviour and speech. she considered the characters as important as the mystery. Her two cats gave her lots of ideas as she considered them intelligent and made KoKo and YumYum smarter than their owner Qwill in the stories. She always had cats in her books.
 Though I had read many of her books I do not know much about her so join me in my discovery of this mystery woman!
Lilian Jackson Braun was born in Chicopee, Massachusetts in 1913. Her mother was a storyteller at home and Lilian was making up rhymes at an early age. She began writing as a teenager. She wrote sports poetry for the Detroit News and then wrote advertising copy for department stores. She was the "Good Living" editor in the Detroit Free Press for 30 years and retired in 1978.
 From 1966 to 1968 she published three novels which won critical acclaim:
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern, and The Cat Who Turned On and Off
and the New York Times called her "the new detective of the year.' in 1966.
Then she disappeared from the publishing scene for 18 years. Another mystery in itself.  One source says that publishers wanted her to add more sex and violence into her works, and it was not her style. Guess we will never know.
 In 1986, the Berkley Publishing Group republished an original paperback, The Cat Who Saw Red. and created a new generation of fans. Within two years, they released four new novels and reprinted older ones. The series became best sellers. In January 2007, Penguin Group published her 29th novel, The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers,
 It is cool to note that she wrote all her books long hand and typed them herself. Shes used a felt pen and yellow pad! She was a technophobe. I think many authors felt the same at the beginning of this computer age. I remember watching Murder She Wrote (another cosy mystery} when Jessica Fletcher, the writer detective, was trying to get used to computers after typing for years! 
In a rare interview she gave in 1998, she said that she read a lot and letter writing was a practice. She learned a lot from reading, enjoying writers like Dickens and Bronte and as for fiction, she claimed it was a self training and she tended to write in a natural way.
Braun was a very private person and not a lot is known about her life in detail. Her last residence was in Tryon, North Carolina with her second husband of 32 years and two cats, though in her last few years at this retirement home, they were catless. She passed on at 97 years of age, in 2011 of lung infection, leaving behind her siblings Florence and Lloyd and her husband Earl Bettinger, to whom her books were dedicated.
 She also left behind a legacy of cosy mysteries as her novels are still popular to mystery and cat lovers alike and have been republished and also translated into 16 languages! Lucky for me, I found the ones I read in my local library a few years ago and now I am a fan too.
Since her time, the cosies are still going strong and I found many with animal assistants! Lots of mayhem while solving mystery puzzles!
If you know of any good reads, let me know! So many choices out there, so share!
Have you written any of this type? Let me know! We can post them next time!
Happy mystery solving, til next time.
Thanks for reading!
eyestar
Sources
https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/lilian-jackson-braun/214707/
https://www.cozy-mystery.com/lilian-jackson-braun.html
http://thecatwhoclub.tripod.com/id201.html
https://whiteoakattic.com/ad-libitum/a-real-live-mystery-of-sorts-what-happened-...
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Mysteries up!
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 Do you have a favourite Cosy Mystery to recommend? Have you written one? Please share!
As a writer, how much do you share of your life with readers?
Thank you for your kind comments on my last newsletter "Mystery Newsletter (December 11, 2019)"
Quick-Quill 
"What a challenge. I never thought about writing a Christmas mystery. I may take up the challenge and do that this year. I'll let you know when it's published."
Yay!
Lilith 🎄 Christmas Cheer 
"Christmas Mysteries sound great! Thanks for providing a reading list to go along with the topic!"
You are welcome. |
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Mystery: February 19, 2020 Issue [#10024]
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