Anthony Lee Collins

As I said before, there were two mystery stories which had wandered off, but they are corralled now, and here’s the other one: “The Mystery of the Four Women.”

(Well, there’s one more missing, but that one was taken down deliberately. 🙂 )

This story is pretty short, and it features a missing person case (Jan Sleet’s least favorite kind of mystery), some spiffy deductions by Marshall (just to show that he’s sharp, too), and a mystery that the great detective solves without ever leaving her lawyer’s office.

Here's the Jan Sleet mystery story for this month. A bit late, I know, but the first of the month kind of sneaked up on me.

The story is called "The School Mystery." In it, Jan and Marshall go to the U-town School, where the great detective addresses a class, on a variety of topics, and they run into two old friends.

And (strictly for educational purposes, of course) Jan Sleet quotes an Irish playwright, and an English novelist (twice).

Well, as I've talked about before, the Jan Sleet mystery stories are being polished up and re-posted, one per month. Here's December's story, The College Mystery.

It's the third in the stories, and the first one where the great detective travels outside U-town. She travels with quite an entourage, as it happens: her assistant (of course), her lawyer, a bodyguard, and a reporter.

And, though she doesn't know it at first, someone else is traveling with them also...

You can get a printable version of the story, also suitable for e-book reading, here.

I don't usually do this sort of thing (well, ever), but this is special.

My good friend (and very talented artist) Bethany has a commission to create a permanent art installation at the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia. That's right, a permanent installation. And she needs money to do this, so she (of course) is raising it on Kickstarter.

This is from her email (the capitalization is hers 🙂 ):

my kickstarter to fund my commission work at Please Touch Museum here in Philadelphia is about 65% funded. there are less than 48 hours left - it ends on Monday, November 26th around 10 pm. i will only get the funds if my goal is met - so if i don't make it to that goal by the end, i don't get anything.

so please take a look - i have a number of rewards for various levels of donations - almost all of them will be handmade by me. so you will only be funding a permanent piece of public art, you'll get something awesome for yourself, too.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bethanyrusen/personal-possession-an-installation-of-new-and-rec

trying not to sound like NPR at pledge time,
Bethany

The Kickstarter page has links to Bethany's web page and the blog where you can read about the progress on this project.

So, give a look. You'd be contributing to a permanent art installation, you'd get a small gift (which will indeed be awesome) and if you're in the Pennsylvania area you'd be able to go see the instalation yourself at the Touch Museum (which sounds like a very groovy place).

As promised, "The Hospital Mystery," the first of the Jan Sleet mysteries, is all spiffed up and ready for some new readers.

Hope you like it.

A few quick links today.

1) Part Two of Stevie One was started a couple of days ago. It begins here.

2) Interesting article here about successful movie adaptations of "unadaptable" books. It was surprising how many of the movies I've seen, including some pretty good ones (and one masterpiece).

3) Laura Stanfill came up with a great idea for a post: Line of the Week.

4) One thing the Underworld and Resident Evil movies have in common which I didn't mention in my earlier post was that both are featured here: "Significant Others Directing One Another." I like the fact that so many of the couples apparently found working together to be a good experience. I didn't like the fact that it was always the man directing the woman. I thought maybe they'd overlooked Ida Lupino and Howard Duff. She directed a lot of movies, and they worked together quite often but (as far as I could determine from imdb.com) always as actors, not with her directing him.