What’s a nice lady like me doing on a blog visit to the site called The Lady Killers? Especially since the sub-title of the blog is “An unsuitable blog for women”? Well, the answer is I just couldn’t resist an invitation from the Top Mystery Blog 2010 Award Winner.
With 200 hits a day, 1,400 a week, 4,800 a month, 57, 600 per year, it’s obvious how they got their high Google ranking. How did they achieve such success? Well, maybe because their blog is a sophisticated blend of posts offered by fourteen mystery writers who take turns either creating their own offerings, or inviting guests to do so. They choose a theme each week, and, morsel by morsel, a feast of opinions is set on the thematic table.
When the author-administrator Ann Parker first invited me to be her guest, she asked if I wanted to come up with a theme. What fun! “Yes!” I answered immediately. “When Smart Characters Do Something Stupid!” It was a theme I’d been wrestling with while writing my new novel, but also one that crops up time and again while reading or watching favorite mysteries. I mean, don’t you just hate it when that happens? So, how can an author justify such a thing? Well, you can read why I did it in in What the Heart Knows by reading today’s Lady Killer Blog.
What’s so fun is that you can also read what a few of the other writers have to say on the subject, because they also took up the theme. So when you reach the end of my post, keep going! You’ll have as much fun as they did writing their pieces.
Lady Killers was founded in 2006 by mystery writer Rhys Bowen. When she decided she needed a break, Ann Parker stepped in, but invited the thirteen other writers to join her, so no one such a large blog-load as to interfere with her own authoring. (Actually, members include thirteen women and one man, but I bet he kills off some ladies in his books.) “Our own genres,” Ann explained, “run the full spectrum of mystery from gritty police procedural, to cozy historical. And among our guests, we even have authors from other genres, and sometimes librarians.”
Ann Parker is an award-winning author in her own right, having taken home one each of the coveted WILLA and Colorado Book Awards. She writes the Silver Rush Mystery Series set in 1880s Colorado, mostly in Leadville, with a new one set in Manitou Springs. “My protagonist Inez runs a saloon. She’s a woman with a mysterious past, a complicated present and an uncertain future.” Wow! I’m going to have to meet this Inez.
So, is LadyKillers really an “unsuitable blog for a woman?” I think I fit right in. But then, I did kill off a very favorite lady in the Prologue of What the Heart Knows. Why would I do that? Well, I could tell you. But I’d have to kill you.
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I had an agent once ask me why so many people had to die in my unpublished novel “Woman in White.” I replied, “Why do so many people die every day in real life?” We just never know, do we? The phrase “lady killer” is so odd, but so compelling. I wonder where it came from…and how many meanings it really has.
You’re right . . . “lady killer” is a phrase that invites speculation because of all its built-in double entendres. . . .
Back in the day, “lady killer” referred to a dashing man, like Clark Gable, e.g., who’d woo the ladies. It was high praise and bloodless.
Yes, thanks for the historical reference! That phrase in that context sure wouldn’t be p.c. in today’s world. . . . yet it carries a truth about “dangerous” relationships. . . .