Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog, and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
First, let’s introduce our hosts for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot:
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
Title: Peg and Rose Solve A Murder (Senior Sleuths Mysteries)
Author: Laurien Berenson
Date published: August 2022
Pages: 288
Source: Libby/ebook (also available in paperback/hardback wherever books are sold and maybe at your library)
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Description: Rose Donovan looks for the good in everyone. With her sister-in-law, Peg, that sometimes requires a lot of searching. Even a sixty-something former nun like Rose has her limits, and gruff Peg Turnbull sure knows how to push them. But after forty years of bickering, they’re attempting to start over, partnering up to join the local bridge club.
Peg and Rose barely have a chance to celebrate their first win before one of the club’s most accomplished players is killed in his home. As the newest members, the sisters-in-law come under scrutiny and decide to start some digging of their own. Bridge is typically seen as a wholesome pastime, yet this group of senior citizens harbors a wealth of vices, including gambling, cheating, and adultery . . .
By comparison, Peg and Rose’s fractious relationship is starting to feel almost functional. But as their suspect list narrows, they’re unaware that their logic has a dangerous flaw. And they’ll have to hope that their teamwork holds steady when they’re confronted by a killer who’s through with playing games . .
What I liked:
I loved the relationship between Peg and Rose. We know right from the beginning there must be a reason the two don’t get along but is it just personality differences or something more? The layers of that onion are pulled away as we continue the book and as Peg and Rose find themselves tossed into the middle of a murder mystery.
I enjoyed learning about the two women and how different each of their personalities were and why. Peg is very sassy, outspoken and bold while Rose is more demure, soft spoken, and a bit innocent or naïve depending on the situation.
I felt that we learned a bit more about Peg than Rose in this book but that’s totally okay. There will probably be more of a focus on Rose in future books and there was a fair amount in this book as well.
I also really liked ….
That this book was clean. I know there is a lot of debate on what clean means but for me it means there was no graphic sex and no obscenities, or very minor ones. There were a few innuendos but they were fairly tame or they weren’t and I am just too big of a prude to have understood them.
Of note: It did take until the end of Chapter 11 to get to the mystery of this book, but since it was the first in the series I cut it some slack. Usually I hope for a mystery much earlier. Once this mystery occurred, though, the sleuthing took off full force and was fun to watch.
There were also some slow parts, for me anyhow, in the beginning involving Peg’s dog show judging.
I enjoyed learning about how much Peg loves poodles and judging dog shows but I really didn’t need the entire chapter about her showing her one dog. I didn’t need it, or feel the book needed it, but it was still enjoyable to see Peg at work.
Chapter 2 was literally one of the longest chapters I ever read in a book but the rest were much much shorter.
Content warnings:
There is discussion of loss in regards to a spouse and early pregnancy and there is some focus on grief from those losses. There is also mention of adultery.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
This week was way more relaxed than I thought it was going to be but only because the whole house, except me somehow, came down with some kind of cold virus. I’m usually the one who gets sick when no one else does so that was very unusual. Maybe I had a minor version of it since I had a slight sore throat and headache on Monday.
I could, of course, still develop it, I suppose, but so far only Little Miss and The Boy and maybe The Husband have had it. It was fairly minor but a total nuisance.
The Boy was hit the worst with running nose and leaking/burning eyes and a major headache and sore throat. Little Miss had a sore throat but then the dreaded postnasal drip set in and Little Miss refuses all help for that particular symptom, so she slept very little the one night due to a dry, repeated cough.
Not being able to go anywhere was tough on me because I wanted to be at my parents helping them but none of us wanted my mom to get sick since she is still dealing with some health issues.
I didn’t develop symptoms by yesterday so I went to their house and took Mom some fresh fruit and visited for a while.
It was chilly and raining almost all week and I am not going to lie, I really enjoyed that. I am not a fan of warm weather so curling up under a blanket and being able to sleep comfortably at night (other than the nights Little Miss hacked all over me all night) was very welcome this week.
I spent most days with a blanket around me while I worked on blog posts, my book, and read. Okay, so the real bitter cold wasn’t as welcome this past week, but I can warm up easier than I can cool down. Humidity makes me very sick and cold makes me achy …. I’m a mess. I need it to be just right. I’d take about 67 to 72 all year around if I could.
This week I should be able to help my parents again and next week The Boy is graduating. Two weeks after that we will be meeting with our homeschool evaluator and official school for the 2024-2025 year will be complete. We still do a lot of educational stuff over the summer and after July 1 that can all be counted toward our hours for the next school year. So any field trips, 4-H groups, museum visits, books we read, or art projects we undertake for July and August counts as “school”. I love that about homeschooling.
We will be holding another one on May 24 at 1 p.m.
The crafternoons are events where we gather on Zoom and craft at our respective homes and chat while we work on various projects. There is one woman who creates with beads, another who colors, I sometimes draw or color, and Erin has been embroidering lately. We are calling them drop-in crafternoons because you can drop in and out during the time we are on. No need to stay the whole time if you can’t. Come late if you want or leave early.
If you want to join in, email Erin at crackcrumblife@gmail.com and she will add you to the mailing list.
The Hardy Boys: A Twisted Claw by Franklin W. Dixon.
This week I started Peg and Rose Solve A Murder by Laurien Berenson and finished it last night.
It is a cozy mystery and it took until chapter 11 (!!!) for a mystery to unfold but I still enjoyed the book and learning about the two women, who are sister-in-law’s who haven’t gotten along for years.
I guessed the guilty party before the end of the book but I was entertained enough with the characters and backstory that I didn’t mind. I hope to read more in the series, but they aren’t free on Libby and I can’t bring myself to spend $10 for a kindle book so it might be a bit before I get to the rest.
I am still reading, slowly, All Creatures Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot. I hope to continue Grave Pursuits by Elle E. Kay this upcoming week. I had taken a break from it because it dealt with the topic of a serial killer, and I wasn’t sure I could handle that with all the stress we had going on in our family. Still, I would like to know what happened so I am going to pick it back up again
I am still reading, slowly, All Creatures Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot. I hope to continue Grave Pursuits by Elle E. Kay this upcoming week. I had taken a break from it because it dealt with the topic of a serial killer, and I wasn’t sure I could handle that with all the stress we had going on in our family. Still, I would like to know what happened so I am going to pick it back up again
Last night I started Miss Austen on Amazon, which is about Cassandra Austen, Jane’s sister, and her decision to burn all of her letters between her and Jane to keep their lives private. She also burned letters between Jane and other family members. I was really getting into it and looking forward to part two and then discovered part two doesn’t drop until tonight. Siiigh.
For some reason I’ve always been fascinated with Jane and Cassandra and how fiercely Cassandra protected Jane’s privacy. We would have known a lot more about Jane and how she thought and spoke in her real life if it wasn’t for Cassandra, but, at the same time, I can totally understand her protecting her sister from being scrutinized after her untimely death.
This week we also watched Everybody Loves Raymond, Blue Bloods, Murder She Wrote, Charade, and my “farmer guy” on Just A Few Acres on YouTube.
This past week I worked more on the fourth Gladwynn Grant book (by the way, the first book is free on Kindle right now) but I am still quite behind on finishing it.
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
Last weekend my family and I headed about an hour south to visit a small town called one of the most picturesque towns in the state of Pennsylvania — Lewisburg, Pa.
The week before had been a very long one for all of us so it was nice to escape for a little while and see some different scenery.
That weekend was also Free Comic Book Day, so the trip had actually been planned for a while to pick up some free comic books at a comic bookstore in town. The store also is a Warhammer shop, which is the main reason our son wanted to visit it.
He has really been enjoying painting the models. He doesn’t do the gaming with the models, but he loves figuring out how to paint them to look realistic and, well, just cool. He does play the online game, read the books, and knows all the Warhammer lore.
Lewisburg is a small town featuring colonial-style homes and buildings. Many of the buildings are something I would expect to see in some parts of colonial-era Philadelphia or Gettysburg. Of course not every house is picture-worthy, but it is close. Even the churches downtown (there are three different denominations on one corner in one section) are elegant and photo-worthy.
There was an independent bookstore near the comic shop that The Husband and The Boy found on a trip they took back in November for The Boy’s birthday, and The Husband wanted me to see it.
I have some autoimmune issues, and I often get very tired out or weak in my legs, so I was worried about having to walk a lot. I had also been on my feet a ton throughout the week as I helped my elderly parents. I prayed throughout the week and the day of, though, and ended up doing just fine. I was able to walk further than I normally can and visit stores without feeling dragged out or my legs hurting, or at least not hurting as much as they sometimes do.
The Boy was thrilled with the part of the comic store which featured the Warhammer gear. It was small but still packed solid with models, paint, merchandise, books, etc.
The shop is small overall, but The Husband said there was a room in the back where the comic books were being given out and the atmopshere was very jovial. Out front the feeling was more subdued and a bit underwhelming to me after attending free comic book day celebrations in the past at other stores where cosplays and more “celebratory” events were going on. Still, the store is nicely set up and offers a good selection for it’s small size.
The Husband and The Boy had visited a pizzeria the previous time they were in town and we headed there after leaving the comic store because Little Miss was “starving.”
It was a very quiet, small and unassuming place but the food and service were amazing.
If you are ever in Lewisburg, be sure to check out Pi Pizza on Market Street. They were the nicest people and the food was great. I recommend the chicken Caesar wrap.
After eating, we walked down the street to Mondragon Books, an independent bookstore that sells a mix of new and used books and records.
It is a cozy store with its walls covered with attractive bookshelves packed to the brim with books of all genres and varieties. There is a tree inside the store, people. A beautiful tree. Okay, the tree isn’t real (I mean..I don’t think? It really looked real.) There is also a record player up front behind the counter where the owner/staff member sets records on to play throughout the speaker system. Real records.
Here is a bit about the store from its website : “Our collection focuses largely on literary fiction and poetry, social studies of all sorts, the arts, children’s books, health & wellness, the home economy, the political economy, DIY skills, nature connection, and other books that foster knowledge and power to the people.
In 2024, Mondragon relocated to 302 Market Street, across from the post office and into what was once Lewisburg’s downtown CVS (& before that Newberry’s Department Store). Aside from books, we also sell high-quality used LPs, a selection of postcards, buttons, & stickers, japanese incense, earth flags, and small goods from a few local artists.”
There are chairs, couches and other seats for customers to relax on while they look or read. I could have sat on their plush leather couch for the rest of the afternoon, but The Husband wanted me to see the three-story Barnes & Noble down the street, so, alas I had to leave. Not before grabbing a book about horses for Little Miss and a book of recipes by artist Georgia O’Keefe.
I hope to go back there again and simply take my time looking at each and every book there.
About a block from this bookstore is the Barnes & Noble/Bucknell University campus bookstore and spirit shop, built in 2017.
The first floor is the Barnes & Noble and a snack shop. An escalator leads to the second floor where merchandise and gear representing Bucknell University is held. The third floor is a campus bookstore where textbooks and other college supplies can be found.
Bucknell is not a “ivy league” school but it is considered very close and offers what most consider “high academics”.
From what we could tell the students there really like to party.
When The Husband took The Boy in November they walked past a frat party and there was another one going on on like an entire block near the playground we stopped to visit. The music was so loud it was like we were at a live concert.
One thing I learned while visiting Lewisburg is that fat people do not live there.
Almost all of the women I saw were well-dressed, skinny or in amazing shape and were jogging, walking, or running.
I only saw one or two overweight girls. I also didn’t see very many people who “looked poor” in this part of Lewisburg. Whatever that means. Ha! I just mean they were all dressed very nice with expensive clothes and shoes.
On our way out of this part of Lewisburg, I did see an entirely different side of the town, which I guess is “the other side of the tracks” since it was literally across the railroad tracks. The homes in this part of time looked more like average day homes and the people who lived in them are probably people I would hang out with versus the more wealthy people a couple of which who watched me with a suspicious eye when I was in the Barnes & Noble and the comic store.
While the Barnes & Noble was very nice, I was not that bowled over by their book selection. That might be because I am used to the old Barnes & Noble that had rows and rows of bargain books and book genres and an entire wall of journals. Also, I didn’t explore every inch of the place so there was probably more there than I realized.
Their mystery section was not very exciting to me, and I noticed the store focused more on the romance genre than anything else. The store is operated by Bucknell University and was built in 1942. It once housed a Hardware Store and there is a small display on the lower floor of some historic items found in the building when they were demolishing the inside to renovate it. I wish I had grabbed a photo of that but I didn’t think to.
After leaving the Barnes & Noble we found a playground for Little Miss to have some fun on.
There was a lilac bush there that had clearly started blooming a few days earlier and they smelled amazing.
We also took a small tour of the Bucknell campus and visited their stadium.
That was our last stop in town before heading home and crashing in our separate corners of the house in silence for a few hours, which is something this family of introverts does every time we go somewhere we have to deal with other human beings.
I have been sharing my takes on the episodes from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from the late 70s off and on for the last few months.
The show was, of course, based on the separate series of books from the 1930s and switched off between featuring The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew each week for most of the first season. Eventually the “teen” sleuths would combine their efforts in joint episodes.
Up this week is a look at the episode called The Flickering Torch Mystery. I have absolutely no idea where the title for this one comes from by the way. There is no flickering torch.
But whatever…let us not focus on semantics.
This episode is certainly full of some weirdness, but not as weird as our next Hardy Boys — The Disappearing Floor, which actually came before this episode. Somehow I mixed up the order, so I am writing about this one first.
Now, when I say weirdness when talking about this show, I don’t mean to be slamming it at all. It’s just, well, a little weird sometimes. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good show or doesn’t have some good episodes/storylines.
This episode does actually feature a fairly engaging storyline and if that doesn’t grab you then maybe looking at former teen heartthrob Rick Nelson all grown up will.
We enter this installment with Rick Nelson (Tony Eagle) on stage “singing”. My husband walked in at that moment and said that the musicians and Nelson were not really playing at first. Later, he says Nelson was, but the other guys still weren’t. Hey, that’s TV for ‘ya. No reason to really do what you can fake doing. Also, if you really want a sad story, look up how Rick Nelson died. It was not a simple plane crash, like I always thought. What a horrible situation for him and the others who died.
Fenton Hardy is off stage, clapping for Rick’s character, and we wonder why Fenton is there but we soon find out that he is helping security for Tony’s next performance, which will be where the Hardys live – The Tri-City area. Wherever that is.
Fenton says he will be ready with the help of his sons, even though they are “just your normal, average teenage boys.”
We flip right to Joe and Frank Hardy in a small airplane, doing flips. Or at least Frank is. When another plane runs into severe fog and starts to struggle because of an instrument failure, the boys are there to rescue the guy and help him land safely.
That’s when they realize the man, a Mr. Lou Haskel, is exactly who they are looking for because they are investigating a case of a missing man — Richard Johnston — for their dad, who is a private investigator in case you forgot.
The missing man, a sound engineer, left for work one morning and never came home. He was supposed to show up to an appointment with Mr. Haskel, but he never showed. The boys want to know if Mr. Haskel has seen him. He says he hasn’t but gives them a warning that his wife, who hired their dad, is known to “overreact” at times.
Thank you, Mr. Misogyny, the boys will keep that in mind.
Mr. Misogyny works for All Points Airway and the boys want to know why a sound engineer would be working for him. Mr. M says it is because he developed the sound system for the jet in front of them.
Ooh. Ah. Fascinating.
The boys want to see the inside, but Sexist Man says, “Nope..not right now. Have to get on with my day.”
They take that answer pretty easily and head off home to mull over what they’ve learned so far, which is very little.
Their Dad returns home with Tony in tow and they are starstruck because they have all his albums. Breaking all kinds of confidentiality they tell their dad what they’ve found out about Richard Johnston in front of Tony and his manager.
Tony’s shocked. “Richard’s missing? He’s the best sound engineer in the country. He’s supposed to be doing our sound at the stadium. What happened to him?”
The local fire chief, always a source of absolutely the worst take on things offers up this gem: “He probably turned Mom’s photo to the wall and took a plane to a place he’d never been before….” Implying that he simply walked out because he didn’t want to deal with his family.
Everyone promptly ignores that idiot and heads out to the venue to discuss security. Tony says he wants to stay back and “discuss some things” with the boys. Huh…whatever that means. At that moment, though, Fenton’s secretary, Callie, is trying to reach the boys on a CB radio.
She’s found a car over an embankment and wants them to come quick. Tony overhears it and says he’ll join them for more screen time and a bigger check — I mean because he wants to find out what happened to Richard.
They find the car over the embankment and if anyone was in it, they’re dead, Joe declares. For some reason the boys don’t call the cops at this point. Joe just ties a rope to a tree and lowers himself down to the scene. Luckily, Richard isn’t in the car, and they won’t have to tell his wife he’s dead. At least not yet.
Tony suggests they go back to the plane that Haskel didn’t want them to go in and start investigating there to see if there are any clues to where Richard went.
Inside the plane they find Richard’s equipment but only after they are chased by an angry pair of Doberman Pinchers.
Dipsy-Do police chief catches them snooping, by the way. Seems he shows up at just the right, or wrong, times. He scolds them a bit and they decide not to share anything about what they’ve found, probably because they know he will bungle the case.
Fingerprints that Joe pulled from a Tony Eagle tape inside the equipment box prove to the boys that Richard was in the plane, even though Haskel said he wasn’t.
Dun-dun-dun.
Later we are at the stadium, getting ready for the concert with Fenton talking to his staff about security and the boys heading to see Tony, who is in his dressing room arguing with his manager, Carl, about how he hasn’t been shown his finances lately. Tony says he doesn’t know how much money he has. The manager tells him not to worry about it, his finances are fine, so we clearly know something is up there.
Tony starts sleuthing when he asks his manager if he’s seen Richard Johnston. The manager says he hasn’t in a couple of weeks, but Richard said he’d be there that night for the concert.
“Come on, don’t worry…I’m going to go do something totally not suspicious now,” good ole’ Carl says as he leaves the room.
Okay, he doesn’t really say that, but that’s what it sounds like if you listen between the lines.
Meanwhile, Richard’s wife found a piece of paper in the floor of his car after the car was taken to the junkyard. It’s ripped up but the boys can see enough that they know there was something dangerous Richard was trying to warn someone about. The letter is a carbon copy so the boys ask if they can go to Richard’s office and find the original so they can learn what Richard wanted to warn everyone about.
When they get there they can’t find the letter, but they overhear someone talking outside the office and discover that Richard wanted to warn someone that something has been rigged to the sound system to —
Well, I think I’ll leave it right there because you might want to watch the episode yourself and learn what someone was supposed to be warned about.
Ah, who are we kidding? You probably won’t want to watch it or already have so if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read past these dots. . . .
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.
.
.
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And
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Okay, so while Frank and Joe are snooping for the letter that will tell them what Richard was trying to warn someone about, they overhear someone on the phone saying that the Hardy boys won’t find out that once the sound machine hits a certain frequency Tony will be killed.
Then the person sets the office on fire to cover up the evidence, not knowing that the boys are inside. Eventually the boys are able to break out, just as the fire company shows up (rather quickly I might add, without it being clear who called them), and rush out to try to warn Tony.
The way the boys try to call the police station with their CB totally bewilders me, especially since it works. Can you really call a landline with a CB radio? I should Google this, but I’m ot going to….
What bewilders me more is how they don’t say to the officer, who answers, “Tell my dad or the chief Tony is going to be killed!” Instead, they ask to talk to the chief and the officer puts the phone down to go to look for the chief.
This wastes a ton of time, so Joe tries to call the operator again to patch it through to the police station. Sadly, this is before there were multiple phone lines so the operator can’t get through.
Joe and Frank drive as fast as they can to the stadium, race in and onto the stage and demand that the concert be stopped before Tony is killed. They are certain there is a bomb inside the sound system.
There isn’t, however, and now the chief and everyone who was evacuated from the building and missed out on the concert are extremely angry. The boys look like the boy who cried wolf.
Carl, Tony’s manager, is incredulous. How dare these teenagers ruin the concert and say something was going to happen when it wasn’t! There’s no death threats against Tony, he says and then reminds them that Tony is on his way to London the next day.
The boys are gently scolded by their father for putting themselves in danger and not having all the facts, which makes Frank even more determined to figure out what the letter actually said. The evidence is gone, but surely if he jots some letters down on a blank piece of paper next to the piece of the letter, he will completely figure out what is going on. Somehow, he decides the name that is cut off is actually Haskel.
Richard was trying to warn Haskel that there is a bomb wired into the sound system of the plane that is flying Tony to London Joe summarizes, from very little information provided by Frank.
When the scene shifts to Carl and Haskel bidding Tony farewell and telling him to enjoy his trip to London, but declining to go with him, the viewer can see guilt written all over them.
The boys make it to the airport just as Tony’s private jet is starting down the runway.
Once again, they beg the police chief to listen to them, but they’ve already been wrong once, so they’re told to go cause trouble somewhere else.
The boys won’t be silenced, though, so they take off with their van to follow the jet and force it to stop before they take off. Richard is found inside the airplane, where the extra gas would be stored and the plot by Haskel and Carl unravels.
Carl was taking Tony’s money and investing it in the airplanes owned by Heskel and also charging Tony extra every time he chartered the plane. Their plan was to kill Tony before he found out what they had been doing, especially since Tony kept asking to see his financial records. Richard found out about the plot when he checked out the system for the jet star (the name of the charter plane Tony used) and discovered that a high frequency feature had been added. He knew that was dangerous, so he tried to warn Haskel. Haskel, though, knew since he’d planned the plane to explode with Tony inside so he kidnapped Richard and stowed him in the bottom of the plane.
By the time he was found, it had been almost a week and as far as I know he was in there without food or water. Somehow, though, he was standing and chatting with everyone else like he was totally fine, instead of being in a hospital to be treated.
I am going to say that the story in this episode is not related to the book with the same title since this is the description of the book: Two unexplainable plane crashes near an airport on the East Coast plunge Frank and Joe Hardy into a bizarre case. From the moment Frank and Joe find a radioactive engine in an airplane junkyard, unexpected dangers strike like lightning. Despite the repeated attempts on their lives, the teenage detectives pursue their investigation, discovering two vital clues and others that provide the solution to one of the most baffling mysteries the boys and Mr. Hardy have ever encountered.
Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog, and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
First, let’s introduce our hosts for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot:
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I have been watching movies that take place in Paris for the last couple of months.
For our last week, we watched Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Directed by Stanley Donen this movie was released in 1996 and tells the story of Reggie Lambert (Hepburn) and Peter Joshua (Grant) who meet briefly on vacation in the Alps. When Reggie returns home, she finds that the husband she’d planned to divorce has been murdered, but before he was murdered, he sold the contents of their apartment, including all of her possessions.
A mystery ensues and what follows is a movie that was good but was very confused about which genre it should be in.
When Reggie returns to Paris and her empty apartment, a police officer approaches her and tells her that her husband was found in his pajamas dead by the train tracks and that he was apparently trying to leave Paris quickly.
While Reggie was discussing her husband at the beginning of the movie with a friend, and we learned he was wealthy, we learned very little about him and now it is clear that Reggie also learned very little about him. As the police show her several different passports from different countries with his face on them, she begins to realize she didn’t know the man at all.
Reggie is bewildered later when Peter Joshua shows up to her empty apartment and says he read about the murder in the newspaper and wanted to check on her.
She believes the police think she murdered him.
Peter offers to find her a hotel room until she can find a new job and apartment.
Peter asks what she’s going to do now that her husband has been murdered and she says she’s going to try to get her old job as a translator back.
At his funeral, Reggie is even more bewildered, because there aren’t any guests other than her and her friend. Three American men (James Coburn, George Kennedy, and Ned Glass) show up and either spit on him, poke his body, hold a mirror to his nose, to make sure he is dead, or say something inappropriate. James Coburn approaches her and doesn’t offer condolences. He just says, “Charlie had no reason of doing it thatta way. No siree.” and walks away.
Um..okay…poor Reggie is even more bewildered.
A large man then approaches, handing her a letter requesting she visit the American embassy the next day to discuss the death of her husband.
She shows up to meet with Walter Matthau who seems to know her husband. He informs her that her husband was wanted by the CIA and his real name was Charles Voss. He also tells her that her life might be in danger.
He suggests that she somehow has the money her husband earned from selling all their possessions. That money is the same amount he stole from the United States government during World War II, he says. He instructs Reggie that she needs to find the money and return it to him before the other, dangerous men find her. Looking for help and someone to talk to, Reggie contacts Peter, who decides one way to help is take her out for a night on the town to cheer her up. What results is a very strange game where people have to pass an apple down a line of people only using their chins and necks.
So..yeah..that was strange and uncomfortable to watch. *laugh* I am not sure how the actors did the scene without totally falling apart in laughter or embarrassment.
It was nice to see Cary’s familiar goofy expressions in this scene. I’ve noticed watching his later movies that he doesn’t loosen up the same way he did when he was younger which is natural, but also hard to watch sometimes.
The game leads Reggie and Peter in some compromising positions where they pause to look at each other for a long time and you can tell in that moment that Peter is thinking about what it would be like to kiss her and vice versa.
It’s all fun and games until all three men track Reggie down at the club and begin to threaten her for the money they think she has.
This movie is categorized as a comedy/thriller which makes it a little hard to figure out at times. I sometimes wondered if I was supposed to laugh or feel dread during certain scenes. There is a terrifying scene where one of the men (Coburn as Tex) keeps lighting matches and dropping them on her lap while she screams and cries and I couldn’t laugh at that scene so I don’t know what the director and writers were going for – maybe that was it — to have the viewer not sure what to think.
When Peter convinces Reggie to tell him what he is going on, he decides he will help her find out why she is being pursued and tells her that he will keep the men from hurting her. Now we viewers have to decide with Reggie who Peter is and if he is really a good guy or not.
I read that Cary actually didn’t want this role at first because he said he felt like a predator, going after the younger Audrey.
That’s funny since he was in many movies in his older years where he was “going after” younger women and he married a woman much younger than him, but I digress….
Cary turned 59 during filming and it was this movie that made him decide it was time to stop playing the romantic lead. The reviews focusing on the 26 year age difference between him and Audrey was one big driving factor in this decision, he later said.
He was so uncomfortable with the idea of their age gap he asked for the script to be changed so screenwriter Peter Stone made Audrey the aggressor and Cary the man trying to fight her off.
Stone said he wrote things like “Can’t you just think of me as a woman?” and have Cary say, “I’m already about to get into trouble for transporting a minor above the first floor.”
He then says, “Come on, child, let’s go.”
Stone said, “Cary made me change the dynamic of the characters and make Audrey the aggressor. She chased him, and he tried to dissuade her. She pursued him and sat in his lap. She found him irresistible, and ultimately he was worn down by her. I gave him lines like “I’m too old for you, get away from me, little girl.’ And ‘I’m old enough to be your father.’ And in the elevator: ‘I could be in trouble transporting you beyond the first floor. A minor!’ This way Cary couldn’t get in any trouble. What could he do! She was chasing him.”
When I first started the movie, I was afraid I wasn’t going to like this film at all. Cary’s acting was stilted and “off” for me right from the start.
I found some parts of the movie confusing and odd because of its identity crisis, or inability to choose between being a comedy or a thriller, but I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie by commenting on which parts.
What I will say is that it was just weird to that Audrey’s character continued to throw herself at Cary’s character even when she isn’t sure who he really was. And this is just after her husband has been murdered and she is being pursued by people who want money her husband stole.
I enjoyed the action and the movie overall but really would have liked it the movie had picked a lane and stayed in it.
This was Cary’s chance to finally work with Audrey, by the way, after turning down leading roles in at least four movies she’d been in — Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954) and Love in the Afternoon (1957). He’d turned them all down because of the quarter-century age difference between them, according to TCM.com.
The rumor at the time was that he’d also turned down the role of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady because he didn’t want to work with Audrey. This wasn’t true, but instead was a decision made out of respect of Rex Harrison who had created the role on Broadway.
The article on TCM.com reads: “In the Barry Paris biography, Donen recalled that “Cary thought he was going to do a picture with Howard Hawks called Man’s Favorite Sport? [so he] said no to Charade. Columbia said get Paul Newman. Newman said yes, but Columbia wouldn’t pay his going rate. Then they said get Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. So I got them and Columbia decided they couldn’t afford them or the picture. So I sold Charade to Universal. In the meantime, Cary had read Hawks’s script and didn’t like it. So he called me and said he would like to do Charade.”
I want to share another quote from the TCM article because it is such a funny story: “ In Audrey Hepburn: A Biography by Warren G. Harris, the director recalled: “I arranged a dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Paris. Audrey and I arrived first. Cary came in, and Audrey stood up and said, ‘I’m so nervous.’ He said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Meeting you, working with you – I’m so nervous.’ And he said, ‘Don’t be nervous, for goodness’ sake. I’m thrilled to know you. Here, sit down at the table. Put your hands on the table, palms up, put your head down and take a few deep breaths.’ We all sat down, and Audrey put her hands on the table. I had ordered a bottle of red wine. When she put her head down, she hit the bottle, and the wine went all over Cary’s cream-colored suit. Audrey was humiliated. People at other tables were looking, and everybody was buzzing. It was a horrendous moment. Cary was a half hour from his hotel, so he took off his coat and comfortably sat through the whole meal like that.”
Despite that awkward first meeting, the pair apparently hit it off very well, even ad-libbing some of their lines.
Do you ever look up trivia like this for movies when you watch them or am I just the weirdo in the group?
Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it?
If you wrote about today’s movie, or any of the movies we watched during this movie event, you can post your links below.
Also, thank you so much for participating and I hope you all had fun taking part! Do you have an idea for a themed movie event? Let us know in the comments!
I hope you will join us for the next one, though I am not sure when we will do it. Erin and I both have a lot going on in our personal lives with family health situations so we might not hold one until autumn. Not sure yet. We will have a meeting of the minds on it at some point.
We are, however, holding Drop In Crafternoons where we meet on Zoom and do crafts of any kind while chatting.
I had planned to try one this weekend but things are a bit up in the air right now with my parents’ health and the fact my whole family came down with a cold/virus and I am waiting to see if I am next, so we are sticking with one on May 24th for now.
Whose Body? was my first book by Dorothy Sayers, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I might when I first started it. Ironically, the book was also Dorothy’s debut book, written in 1923.
As I got into the book there were some references to ethnicities that I thought were a bit inappropriate but when I found out that Sayers wrote this series, featuring Sir Peter Whimsy, with satire in mind, I hoped that the references were meant to show the incorrect attitudes of the characters and not show what Sayers really thought about Jews.
One article I read said that her goal was to poke some fun at the upper crust and their attitudes about Jewish people but other articles disagreed. Some literary critics said they weren’t really sure what Sayers thought about Jews but that she did perpetuate quite a few stereotypes while also appearing to paint Jews in a positive light.
Before we get into all that, though, let’s talk a bit about the plot of the book.
Lord Wimsey is a nobleman who has developed an interest in solving murders and mysteries as a hobby. At first, he seems rather stuck up and proper, but as the book continues, there is much more to Peter Wimsey than meets the eye.
Thipps is an architect who finds a body in his bathtub wearing nothing but a pair of glasses. He looks to Lord Wimsey to help him solve this murder before he contacts the police.
Wimsey agrees to privately investigate the matter but still suggests the police be called. An Inspector Sugg shows up and believes the body may belong to famous financier Sir Reuben Levy, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances the night before.
His disappearance is being led by Inspector Charles Parker, who Wimsey knows.
The body in the bath does somewhat resemble Reuben, but not exactly and soon it’s clear the body isn’t his and the two cases probably are not connected. Despite the lack of connection, Wimsey joins Parker in his investigation.
Wimsey’s connections to other wealthy people will help Parker in his investigation, he decides. Together with Wimsey’s manservant Mervyn Bunter, who he just calls Bunter, the three work to find the identity of the one man and to find out if Reuben was, in fact, murdered.
Like any mystery with a lighter flair there are red herrings and complex twists and turns aimed at confusing the reader and delaying the revelation of the true killer
Eventually Wimsey and Parker visit a teaching hospital near Thipps’s flat to see if one of the students had been trying to play a practical joke on Thipps.
Evidence later given at an inquest by Sir Julian Freke, who runs the teaching college, reveals that no bodies were missing from his dissecting room, which leads Wimsey to believe he is on the wrong trail.
I enjoyed the twists and turns of this one and I especially enjoyed Wimsey’s tricks, verbal sparrings with suspects, and how he seemed to mock his own class throughout much of the book.
His character was created by Sayers during a time when she was low on money and prospects. She’d also had a few failed love affairs, according to historians.
Of her creation of Wimsey, Sayers said, “Lord Peter’s large income… I deliberately gave him… After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.”.
In their 1989 review of crime novels, the US writers Barzun and Taylor called the book “a stunning first novel that disclosed the advent of a new star in the firmament, and one of the first magnitude. The episode of the bum in the bathtub, the character (and the name) of Sir Julian Freke, the detection, and the possibilities in Peter Wimsey are so many signs of genius about to erupt. Peter alone suffers from fatuousness overdone, a period fault that Sayers soon blotted out”
Going back to the antisemitism that seems to be in this book — and from what I read, other Sayers books: this was prevalent in books written by British crime writers, especially those who came from upper class families. There was a deep-seeded distrust and dislike of Jews among the rich of Britain. We can see this most clearly in Agatha Christie’s novels where, to me, it is clear she wasn’t a big fan of Jewish people and often made them the villains of her novels.
Sayres views of Jews are complex, muddled and confusing, wrote Amy Schwartz of Moment Magazine. Sayers was once in an affair with a Jewish man who broke her heart and worked with many. She didn’t shy away from writing characters who married and had children with Jews, even if they weren’t.
She still used many stereotypes, including that they were greedy, or at least good with money, but did she feel that way about Jews herself? There is a ton of evidence that suggests she didn’t and as one commentor on Schwartz’s article writes: “Isn’t it possible that writers reflect in their fiction the world that they observe, rather than create themselves over and over again? The character is not the author.”
In other words, it is very possible that Sayers was writing the characters and how they thought and believed, not saying she believed the same things.
Despite not being sure what Sayers thought of Jews and being a bit uncomfortable with the comments of some characters about them, I did enjoy the book and Sayers writing style. I enjoyed that she writes more descriptively than Christie and therefore helps the reader feel closer to the characters and more involved with the story.
The complexity of this story was just enough to keep me puzzled until very close to the end and even when I knew who the guilty party was, I thoroughly enjoyed Wimsey’s verbal banter with the “villain.”
Have you ever read this book or any of Sayers books?
*Note: If I review Sayers books in the future, I don’t plan to comment on her views of Jews every time. Many writers portrayed people of various minorities in a negative light throughout the years. It doesn’t make it right, but it happened often. Sometimes the writers believed those things about the minorities but sometimes they were showing the true feelings of the characters they were writing for the sake of the story. It’s impossible to determine what a writer’s actual intentions were in most cases. I hate to throw out entire books simply because I don’t know the actual heart and mind of the authors since they are all dead now. Instead, I will try to focus on the stories as a whole.
Mildred, or as many called her, Millie, wasn’t an amateur detective, but she was the co-creator of one of the most famous teen amateur sleuths in the United States — Nancy Drew.
For 50 years very few people knew that Millie helped create Nancy Drew.
Until 1980, many readers of Nancy Drew didn’t know that Carolyn Keene, the woman listed as the author of the Nancy Drew books, wasn’t actually a real person. She was a pseudonym for some 28 authors, men and women, who create and wrote the stories for the series.
It was a lawsuit between Grosset & Dunlap, the original publisher of the Nancy Drew books and the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the owner/creators of the stories, that brought Millie into the spotlight.
Really, though, Millie had been somewhat in the spotlight before that. She’d written some 130 books in children’s series under her own name from the 30s to the 50s and was an accomplished journalist and world traveler.
What she hadn’t really talked about a lot was her involvement with the Nancy Drew Mystery series.
She’d signed agreements saying she wouldn’t talk about how she’d written 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books. She’d written the books with the direction and input of Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and the brains behind many juvenile series, including multi-million selling series like Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, and Rover Boys.
Millie was born Mildred Augustine in 1905 in Iowa, the daughter of a well-known doctor. She wasn’t treated like other girls at the time who were expected to learn how to sew and keep the house.
Instead, Millie was given freedom to explore her own interests and passions. One of those passions was sports. She felt women should have the same opportunities as men to participate and compete in sports she said in an interview with WTGE Public Media in the mid-1990s
“Girls were discouraged from all sorts of athletics,” Millie said. “And I fought that tooth and nail right from the start because I felt that girls should be able to do the same things that boys did.”
While Millie enjoyed sports, such as swimming and diving, she also loved to write, something her mother encouraged her to continue.
Her father, however, said if she wanted to make money, she should do something else and she admits that he was probably right.
She began selling her stories to church papers, but they only paid a few dollars.
She finally sold a story for a whole $2.50.
“That made me a writer,” Millie said in the interview, while laughing. “So, from then on, I was hooked.”
She attended the University of Iowa after school, majoring in journalism and working on the school newspaper. She also worked with George Gallup, the creator of the Gallup Poll.
After graduating, she landed a job at a newspaper, but at the age of 22, she wanted to see what else she could do and traveled to New York City to look for work.
It was there she wrote to Edward Stratemeyer looking for work. Stratemeyer was releasing a book series for juveniles. They were assembly-line type books where he wrote a paragraph detailing what he wanted in the book, including character names and plots. He would send the information he wanted out to writers he knew, and those writers would write the books under the pen name that Stratemeyer controlled and retained the rights to. The writers signed away their rights to credit for the books to Stratemeyer.
While Stratemeyer didn’t have anything for Millie at the time she contacted him, he reached out to her later and asked if she would write a book for the floundering Ruth Fielding series. She did and from there she began to write books for other series for the company. In the midst of all this she also married Asa Wirt in 1928 while attending graduate school.
Millie was reliable, dependable, and a good writer. When Stratemeyer thought about his Hardy Boys series and how young boys liked the boy detectives and then began to wonder if girls would like a girl detective, he turned to Millie.
Stratemeyer had the basic idea of Nancy Drew, but many literary historians and Nancy Drew fans say it is Millie who flushed her out and made her who she became. Millie created a version of Nancy that Stratemeyer’s daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, later toned down and changed.
Millie’s version of Nancy was a lot like Millie. She was athletic, adventurous, bold and brash, and never backed down from a challenge. Harriet’s version made her a bit more “perfect” — a rule follower who was polite but still adventurous and who little girls could look up to.
Nancy was what so many girls in the 1930s weren’t allowed to be.
Young girls could live vicariously through her.
Stratemeyer passed away 12 days after the first Nancy Drew book was released. His daughters took over the business after they couldn’t sell it in the difficult economy. Eventually Harriet began taking more control of the Nancy Drew series. Other ghostwriters were working on the series in addition to Millie, who wrote 23 of the first 30 books in the series. In the 1950s Harriet began to rewrite Millie’s original books, changing Nancy’s character, updating some of the material, and, in many ways, stripping away the personality of Nancy that Millie had created.
Millie was working on her own books at that time and had dealt with the illness and death of her first husband and then being a single mother. It was disappointing to see the changes being made but she had other irons in the fire.
In the early 1950s, she was working for the Toledo Times, remarried to the editor of the paper, and being a mother to Margaret Wirt.
She was also writing a character she felt was even more Nancy Drew than Nancy Drew — Penny Parker in the Penny Parker Mysteries.
Penny didn’t see as much success as Nancy, but she didn’t have the mammoth marketing effort that Nancy had, says Millie.
In 1959 Millie was widowed again and afterward she began to live a life a bit more like Nancy Drew — international travel, adventures, independence, learning more about archaeology and even taking flying lessons and eventually earning several flying lessons.
It wasn’t until 1980 when Harriet decided to move the printing of Stratemeyer books from Grosset & Dunlap to Simon and Schuster that more of the public learned about Millie’s role in creating Nancy.
She told WTGE that she could have pushed for her to get credit for the books she’d written. She could have gotten a lawyer and demanded more of the royalties.
She simply didn’t have the desire to put up a fight, though, she said.
“I wrote because I liked to write and I wanted to produce books that girls would enjoy,” Millie said. “And so I didn’t care too much but it got to be … my friends knew I wrote the books and that was sufficient for me. Eventually though it got to be that Mrs. Adams put out publicity to the fact that she was the author and people were reading that.”
One person who was reading all those stories was Millie’s daughter, who asked her own mother if she’d been lying all those years about writing the Nancy Drew books.
Millie hadn’t shared her role in the books with many but when her own daughter started to doubt her, she began to be more open about sharing her role in the creation of the character.
“I thought if my own daughter doubts my integrity, then it’s time I let the truth be known so when people asked me, I stuck my neck out and I told them the truth, which was that I wrote the books.”
Millie was subpoenaed by Grosset & Dunlap during the 1980 when the publisher sued the Stratemeyer Syndicate to keep them from publishing Nancy Drew with anyone else.
They wanted to prove that Harriet Adams didn’t have the right to say who could and could not publish past Nancy Drew books because she had not actually written them. As part of the case, the records that showed Millie had helped developed the series were also subpoenaed.
The truth was finally out there. Millie was the original Carolyn Keene.
Harriet, however, continued to claim she’d written the books right up until her death in 1982 and because the court records were sealed for years, it wasn’t until 1993 when the University of Iowa held a Nancy Drew conference, that Millie really became known as Carolyn Keene.
The conference at the university attracted the attention of literary scholars, collectors, and fans who wanted to know more about the original author and Millie was the main speaker.
Millie, incidentally, was the first woman to earn a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Iowa in 1927.
More fame than Millie imagined hit her after the conference. In some ways, life continued as normal despite the extra attention. She continued to write news and feature stories and her column for the Toledo newspaper. Nancy fans began to contact her, though, asking about her role and for autographs. She was also inducted into the Ohio and then the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame and her typewriter was enshrined at the Smithsonian.
Millie worked first at the Toledo Times, now defunct, and then at the Toledo Blade right up until the day she died, literally. She was writing her column for the paper, at the age of 96, in the Blade office, when she became ill and was taken to the hospital, where she later passed away.
In the article about her death, the Blade wrote about how her writing impacted young girls and women.
“Her books, Nancy Drew buffs have said, allowed teenage girls and young women to imagine that all things might be possible at a time when females struggled mightily for any sense of equality.”
“Millie’s innovation was to write a teenage character who insisted upon being taken seriously and who by asserting her dignity and autonomy made her the equal of any adult. That allowed little girls to dream what they could be like if they had that much power,” said Ilana Nash, a Nancy Drew authority and doctoral student at Bowling Green State University.
The article continues: “Going to work was a way of life for me and I had no other,” she wrote in a December column upon her pending retirement.
In the column, she explained that her legendary work ethic related to being hired by The Times in her third try during World War II.
“I was told after [the war] ended there would be layoffs, and I would be the first one to go. I took the warning seriously and for years I worked with a shadow over my head, never knowing when the last week would come,” she wrote.
Millie’s column was called, “On the Go With Millie Benson.”
Millie was described in the article about her death as fiercely independent and “always willing to go after a story she was assigned or had set her sights on.”
She almost never took a day off. In fact, the day after she was diagnosed with lung cancer in June, 1997, she was back at her desk working on her next column saying her desk was where she needed to be.
Millie once said in an interview that she never looked back on the books she’d written, “Because the minute I do I’m going into the past, and I never dwell on the past. I think about what I’m doing today and what I’m going to do tomorrow.”
I have had the opportunity to read a couple of books written by Millie, before Harriet got to them, and I have to say I did enjoy them. I didn’t know at the time that other books had been revised, and I had an original copy of Millie’s work, but when I found out, I could see the difference between Millie’s writing and other ghost writers/Harriet.
I am going to be purchasing a couple of books from Millie’s Penny Parker series to see what that series was like as well.
As president of the Nancy Drew Fan Club, Jennifer Fisher is considered a Nancy Drew and Mildred Benson expert. She operates the website nancydrewsleuth.com and donated her Nancy Drew collection several years ago to the Toledo library and now curates items to be added to the collection.
She is currently looking for information on Millie, from letters to manuscripts, to any memorabilia of hers that someone might have.
On her site Jennifer details the life of Millie and talks about the impact her books (130 of them all together, including the Nancy Drew books) made for young women.
Jennifer wrote about Millie in a special section on the site, including detailing the trial where Millie spoke about the conflict that eventually arose between her and Harriet Adams.
“On the stand when shown letters between herself and Harriet regarding criticisms and difficulties, she recalled that this was “a beginning conflict in what is Nancy. My Nancy would not be Mrs. Adams’ Nancy. Mrs. Adams was an entirely different person; she was more cultured and more refined. I was probably a rough and tumble newspaper person who had to earn a living, and I was out in the world. That was my type of Nancy.”
And it is that type of Nancy, and that type of woman, who so many women over the years have been drawn to despite the changes. Even with the changes later made to the books, the heart of Nancy, created by Millie, always remained.
