A warm welcome to author Charlie Cochrane joining us today on Riptide’s blog tour for her newest release “Lessons for Sleeping Dogs”

Welcome Charlie 🙂

Permanently Offscreen Characters

There are some recurring characters in television shows who have never actually appeared onscreen. Mrs Slocombe’s pussy (her cat!) in “Are You Being Served” is often referred to but we never see his little fluffy whiskers. Likewise, Mr Mainwaring’s wife Elizabeth only appears as a lump in a bunk bed, even though she’s often an angry noise at the other end of a phone. Another “we only hear half the conversation with them” character is Sheridan, the evidently gay son in “Keeping Up Appearances”.

I love this phenomenon. I don’t ever want to see Sheridan, or the ‘friend’ he lives with – it would spoil my pleasure as the reality could never match up to the mental image I’ve created. It would be like seeing a radio presenter and having the usual “He never looks like that does he?” reaction. There’s a similar feeling about plot points which are never really explained. I mean what on earth is going to happen after the cameras stop rolling on “Some Like it Hot”? Because clearly Jack Lemmon isn’t going to get out of marrying his millionaire.

In the Cambridge Fellows books there are a number of running jokes. The likelihood of Dr. Panesar blowing up his lab/the university/the world with one of his mad inventions is one. Those inventions don’t appear in the books, although one can be found in the free story “The Boy from Kings” which is at my free fiction site. https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Charliesfreefiction/files

The other incident which will never appear directly on the page is the occasion of the goat in the porters’ lodge, the cause of Jonty getting a fine, a gating and a crate of beer when he was a student. All that I’ve revealed is that he took the wretched thing in there and milked it. I’ve toyed with writing it as a missing scene, but I worry it would lose all its allure were it fully explained.

I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Blurb

Cambridge, 1921

When amateur sleuth Jonty Stewart comes home with a new case to investigate, his partner Orlando Coppersmith always feels his day has been made. Although, can there be anything to solve in the apparent mercy killing of a disabled man by a doctor who then kills himself, especially when everything takes place in a locked room?

But things are never straightforward where the Cambridge fellows are concerned, so when they discover that more than one person has a motive to kill the dead men—motives linked to another double death—their wits get stretched to the breaking point.

And when the case disinters long buried memories for Jonty, memories about a promise he made and hasn’t kept, their emotions get pulled apart as well. This time, Jonty and Orlando will have to separate fact from fiction—and truth from emotion—to get to the bottom of things.

Riptide

Amazon

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 your choice of an a ebook from Charlie Cochrane’s backlist (excluding Lessons for Sleeping Dogs.) Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on October 17, 2015. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Don’t forget to add your contact information so we can reach you if you win!