AUTHOR JUDITH COPEK DELVES INTO THE ROARING TWENTIES WITH HER NEWEST NOVEL

Mystery author Judith Copek has discovered that bad guys and scary situations are not limited to mystery fiction. In her latest novel, she leaps into another genre with an historical novel set in the nineteen twenties. Learn more about her and her books at her blog. 

Did the Twenties Really Roar? 

In 1928, my late mother took the Santa Fe Super Chief from Newton Kansas to Pasadena California. She would spend the summer with some girlhood friends who once lived in her hometown. She left a scrapbook, now in tatters, and a photo album, as well as a couple letters. The letters hinted at something darker, but photos and souvenirs just show everyone having a good time. 

 

My mother’s scrapbook opened my eyes to life with a nice middle-class family in 1928 Southern California. These were not the nineteen-twenties I had expected. Where were speakeasies? The skinny girls in short dresses? Did my mom or her friends, all in their early twenties, do any roaring at all? They knew how to have fun. 

And single people partied a lot. At home, at country clubs, at the dance hall on the mountain. Sometimes girls drank, but often they didn’t. At lease not this bunch. They were not averse to being around parents. Most of the girls didn’t drive, and parents were available for trips to Yosemite and other landmarks. I discovered that clothing for such excursions consisted of sweater, jodhpurs, striped socks, and boots or sturdy shoes. Rather fetching, actually. Women’s hair was worn short, some bobbed, some curly. Dresses were often fancy with lace and lots of ruffles.

 

My research found much sleeker women with shorter skirts and definitely bobbed hair. Seductive, vamping, dancing wildly. The image we all have of the twenties. Where did the truth lie? As usual, somewhere in between.

 

I couldn’t write a novel about young people swanning around and having a wonderful time all summer. It would have been dullsville. But on the other hand, I wanted some semblance of reality. I finally found a middle ground. And characters I could love. In a million years my mother would not recognize herself. But that’s okay, because her life-long friendship with these girlhood pals, and the inspiration she left-behind helped write Such Stuff As Dreams.

Some women of the time were serious about business careers and had their own organizations with meetings and what we would now call networking. 

Bridge was a popular came both for women and men. Colorful placecards and bridge tallies echo the times. Life was more formal then, often with cards for seating as in the sample above. 

 

Such Stuff As Dreams

Carla Curby, a young teacher and photographer, arrives in Southern California from rural Kansas to visit girlhood friends. Carla anticipates an exciting summer away from her staid Mennonite town, a summer where lipstick, bobbed hair, and dancing the Charleston are normal. She doesn’t anticipate the graft and corruption that permeate life in the Golden State where many dream of finding gold or striking oil.

 

Carla is pulled into the local art scene and is smitten with a Bohemian artist who admires her photography, but he has a huge strike against him. When her mother demands that Carla return home to help with summer chores, Carla, in an act of uncharacteristic defiance, sells her return ticket, sends her mother the money, and determines to stay in California.

 

Her choice haunts her, but love beckons as she becomes involved with two men: the artist and a get-rich-quick dreamer. On the uncertain road ahead, Carla travels far from her safe Kansas life. A young woman with gumption and perseverance, she will be required to make hard decisions and to face challenges that were never part of her dreams.

 

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#CRAFTS WITH ANASTASIA--FIRE-STARTERS FROM AMATEUR SLEUTH AUTHOR JUDITH COPEK, PLUS A BONUS #RECIPE

Judith "Judy" Copek describes herself as a writer, ex-geek, cook, gardener, traveler, and cat fancier. Today she joins us with a twofer—a craft project and a recipe. Learn more about Judy and her books at her website.

Fire-starters*

These will work for wood-burning fireplaces, fire pits, and wood stoves. 

 

Materials: 

Old muffin tins

Baking cups (not metal) 

Wood shavings (Available at pet supply stores. You can also use sawdust.) 

Paraffin wax (Gulf Wax is good) 

Small cones and pods, dried wildflowers, dried rosebuds (small) milkweed pods, dried statice flowers. (It’s easy to collect these in the fall with a walk in the woods, or down an alley.)

 

Lay out all supplies and have dried items organized by size and color. 

 

Place paper baking cups in muffin tins. Fill muffin tins with wood shavings. 

Melt wax on stove. I put wax in an old coffee can, and put the can in a pot with water. Turn heat on medium. When wax is melted, carefully pour into shavings-filled baking cups. Fill to the brim. 

Working before wax can harden, arrange dried cones and pods, weeds, flowers, and milkweed pods in hot wax. Crowd dried items together. A milkweed pod (small or medium) gives some height, and colorful (red, orange, purple) dried items lend visual interest. 

 

I made twenty in all. It’s fun to do with a friend, older grandchild, or someone who likes crafts, but for 

 

*Safety Warnings: Do not let small children participate. They could be burned by the hot paraffin. 

 

Store away from small children in a metal container. 

 

These fire starters burn like crazy, and they ignite almost instantly. As for anything combustible, keep children away. Once ignited, the wax burns for 20-30 minutes. 

Laura’s Lemon Squares

My heroine from my amateur sleuth mystery Murder in the North Woods took these lemon squares to a party. They quickly disappeared. 

 

(This is really my mother’s recipe Easy and delicious. For best results use butter and under no circumstances use "Real Lemon" or anything other than fresh lemon juice and fresh rind.) 

 

Ingredients for Step 1:

1/2 cup butter

1/4 cup sugar

1 cup flour

1/8 tsp. salt

 

Ingredients for Step 2:

2 eggs, beaten

1 cup sugar

2 T. flour

2 T. fresh lemon juice

Grated rind of 1 lemon

 

Additional ingredient:

Powdered shugar

 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

 

Cream together butter, sugar, flour and salt from first ingredients list. Press mixture into bottom of an 8” x 8” square pan lined with parchment paper. 

 

Bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees F.

 

Combine ingredients from second list. Pour over hot crust. Return to oven and bake 20-25 minutes longer. Do NOT overbake. 

 

Remove from oven and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Cool thoroughly before cutting into squares. 

Murder in the North Woods

She’s into high tech. He’s into homicide. The Northwoods rock and roll when a savvy cyber-sleuth teams up with a hunky homicide cop to route corporate miscreants and to solve a murder. 

 

When she arrives in Wisconsin’s North Woods, Laura Goode discovers her only contact is now a corpse. The information officer at Great Northern Shoe Company was a local lothario whose killer could be anyone from an enraged husband to a bitter factory worker whose job is heading overseas.

 

Working undercover, Laura digs into the Y2K Millennium project, but office politics thwart her mission to determine who is subverting it. Adding more complications to her life, boyfriend Jack, a homicide cop visits unexpectedly, and makes friends with the local cops. Her soon-to-be ex-husband also makes an appearance. Laura welcomes Jack’s help, but he’s also a distraction as she segues from boardroom to bar room, trolls for bass, hunts hackers, and tries to rescue her kidnapped cat, all while getting closer to the identity of the murderer. The exciting but off-beat conclusion involves high water rafting and a naked motorcycle gang. 

 

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AUTHOR JUDITH COPEK SETS A MYSTERY AT BURNING MAN

According to author Judith Copek, she’s most likely the only person you will ever meet who was born in Montana. A former English major and Information Systems nerd, she

Enjoys putting a literary spin on technology, and showing technology’s humor and quirkiness along with its scary aspects. When not writing, cooking or digging in the garden, you’ll find her on a Baltic beach or at Burning Man in the Nevada desert researching her next novel. Learn more about her and her books at her website. 

Sometimes I take a vacation that inspires a novel. World of Mirrors came about from a visit to the Baltic Island of Ruegen. Festival Madness arrived after a couple of trips to the Burning Man Festival. Setting is paramount in my fiction, up there with characters and plot. When I know I’m going to write about a place, my camera is my best friend. There’s no pressure to take a wonderful photo. I just need to record an image.

The Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert is a writer’s dream, with a hostile but scenic environment, (the Black Rock Desert), thousands of people, art, music, drugs, booze, fire, and total craziness. And isolation. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and you are nearly one hundred miles from civilization. There is one road in, two-lane and dusty. A perfect setting.

Anything can and does happen at Burning Man!

Everything is dusty: your vehicle, your luggage, yourself. Radical self-reliance is the watch phrase. You bring in what you need including food and water and carry away everything. Every speck of trash There’s always a dust storm. Rain turns the playa to gooey mud. Black Rock City becomes a vast chaotic circle of “camps” consisting of tents, campers, trucks, and people. The people are mostly in costumes, the more bizarre the better. Some of them are naked. Men wear dresses with ease. They are living their fantasies. The “Man” is the best place to do this because there is a pleasant anonymity. A more-perfect setting.

The desert is called the Playa, Spanish for beach, and it stretches forever, surrounded by bare mountains including the Black Rock. Somewhere there is always a techno beat. The statue of the Man looms over the Playa. The Temple does, too. Both are ultimately burnt to the ground. Art cars belch fire. A band marches by in women’s underwear. Beyond the city is the art. Stunning is the best word for this desert museum. You can get drunk on the art. I mostly ignored the drugs and the booze because I had a mission: to capture this compelling setting for my novel.

Weird stuff happens. Pilots at the airport offer rides so Burners can join the Mile-High Club. The women have a bare-breasted bicycle ride. Thousands of naked-to-the-waist women on bikes. With attitude. The “Critical Tits Ride.” There are parades. At dusk, the Lamplighters light lanterns throughout the city because most of the burners are on bikes and they need to see. Headlamps are everywhere, as is glowstick jewelry. Bad stuff can happen in the dark. Yes!

And the Burn? Saturday night everyone forms a huge circle around the statue of the Man. There is drumming and fire dancers and all the art cars (mutant vehicles) gather round with belching flames and the throbbing, pulsing, techno beat. You cannot help but dance. Fireworks explode, and the man starts to burn. He raises his arms. The flames burn higher. Everyone is shouting and dancing and drinking and drugging and screaming as the man burns. Enough drama for a half-dozen settings.

Sunday night the temple burns and the celebrants make their way off the playa through the dust. The drive is long, slow. and hot. Next year will be more of the same, but different. It’s addictive. A most-perfect setting.

Festival Madness

The Burning Man Festival, two murders and high-tech hi-jinx equal Festival Madness for a troubled cyber-sleuth. Boston-based computer security consultant Emma Lee Devens leaves her top-secret project in disarray and jeopardizes her marriage when she races to find her missing friend and colleague. Emma’s search takes her to the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada and the Burning Man Festival where a unique experience of survival, ceremonial fire, danger, and transcendence awaits. Anything can happen at Burning Man. Even murder.

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