Blurb:

About Lessons for Suspicious Minds

1909

In the innocent pre-war days, an invitation to stay at the stately country home of a family friend means a new case for amateur sleuths Jonty Stewart and Orlando Coppersmith. In fact, with two apparently unrelated suicides to investigate there, a double chase is on.

But things never run smoothly for the Cambridge fellows. In an era when their love dare not speak its name, the risk of discovery and disgrace is ever present. How, for example, does one explain oneself when discovered by a servant during a midnight run along the corridor?

Things get even rougher for Orlando when the case brings back memories of his father’s suicide and the search for the identity of his grandfather. Worse, when they work out who the murderer is, they are confronted with one of the most difficult moral decisions they’ve ever had to make.

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When I’m out Deadly Daming, we’ve sometimes speculated about that strange land which I’ll call “Cosy mystery parallel universe”, where the most dangerous place in the world to live is middle England and death lurks on every respectable street corner. I mean, if Oxford really was as it’s depicted in the books of Colin Dexter, Peter Tickler, Dorothy L Sayers and the like, nobody would allow their children to attend the university there. And you’d never be able to afford insurance premiums if you did live in the city – life insurance would probably be non-existent there – because it would be the murder capital of Britain.

When I open the pages of a cosy mystery, I transport myself into a world where reality has to suspend itself for a while. Certain conventions have to be observed that don’t apply in our world. Deaths are rarely bloody, nasty or overtly sadistic. If people have sex it’s either “offscreen” or presented in non-explicit language. Nobody routinely uses strong language, even football supporters, and the f-word is barely known. There can be a string of murders yet there isn’t, as a result, the huge media interest and hype that we get in the real world, especially in Britain where serial murders are, thank God, still rare. Amateur sleuths can still get one step ahead of the police, even if they lack the latter’s forensic equipment and intelligence sharing facilities.

It could be a really pleasant place to live, were it not for the high death rate.

Or would it be? Would we even recognise life in “Cosy mystery parallel universe” as resembling our own? Nobody seems to have many bodily functions to attend to, although the lack of such everyday matters as eating a meal or going to the loo seems to be a common thread in fiction. Jasper Fforde has created a wonderful series showing up this slightly ridiculous aspect of “storyland”.  The Midsomer Murders television series was castigated for its homogenous portrayal of the inhabitants of rural England (where are the ethnic minorities?) although it’s possibly more accurate than people think. There are plenty of villages where one only seems to see white faces.

The other group of people who seem to be underrepresented in cosy mysteries are those who sexual orientation is not exclusively heterosexual. Yes, Agatha Christie seems to have had a lesbian couple in “A Murder is Announced” but other examples are few and far between, especially in the golden age mysteries. I’m working hard to redress the balance, with both “The Best Corpse for the Job” (I describe that at a touch of Midsomer Murders with a dash of slash) and the Cambridge Fellows series, of which “Lessons for Suspicious Minds” is the latest.

When you can’t find many gay couples in “Cosy mystery parallel universe”, you have to write about them yourself!

About the Author

As Charlie Cochrane couldn’t be trusted to do any of her jobs of choice—like managing a rugby team—she writes, with titles published by Carina, Samhain, Bold Strokes, MLR and Cheyenne.

Charlie’s Cambridge Fellows Series of Edwardian romantic mysteries was instrumental in her being named Author of the Year 2009 by the review site Speak Its Name. She’s a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Mystery People, International Thriller Writers Inc and is on the organising team for UK Meet for readers/writers of GLBT fiction. She regularly appears with The Deadly Dames.

Connect with Charlie:

• Website:charliecochrane.co.uk/
• Blog: charliecochrane.livejournal.com/
• Twitter: @charliecochrane
• Facebook profile page: facebook.com/charlie.cochrane.18
• Goodreads: goodreads.com/goodreadscomcharlie_cochrane

Every comment on this blog tour enters you in a drawing for a title from Charlie Cochrane’s backlist (excluding Lessons for Survivors.) Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on April 25. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Don’t forget to add your email so we can contact you if you win!