I met Patti Abbott thanks to, um, was it Laura's blog? And Patti has started a "forgotten book Friday" on her blog which is http://pattinase.blogspot.com/. She asked if I'd be interested in contributing a write-up of a "forgotten book". The rules are pretty much "whatever you think they are" and i thank her for asking and for this opportunity to look back on a book and a friendship. Here's my "forgotten book" for Friday, May 30.

I’ve met a lot of mystery authors in the last 16 or so years, going back to the year that a group of Seattle fans organized Bouchercon 25, the World Mystery Convention in 1995. We started planning three years out, and that meant attending conventions to talk with people, check how they did things, see what to do or not do when we did it. Bouchercon in ’92 was in Toronto. As I was heading to the airport, a guy I’d just met, a publicist, handed me an advance copy saying “here, something to read on the plane”. Mind you, I thought maybe he was being nice (Matthew was incredibly generous and nice, as we were to learn later) or maybe he wanted one less thing to find room for in his suitcase. Who knew? At any rate, I took it, glanced at it, said “thanks” and opined that my partner Stu would probably like it, this being more his thing than mine, this English historical thing.

The following year, we were at Bouchercon (this one in Omaha), and Stu and I were in the dealer’s room (the room where mostly booksellers sell to members during the weekend) when a woman walked toward us, As we read her name badge, we both burbled at her. “Ohmigosh, look honey, it’s Kate Ross! Oh boy, oh wow,gee, gosh, did we like your book!” And we made her day. We made her weekend, I think, because as she told us “you know, my publisher said I should come to this thing and I had no idea what it was or why I should attend. I think I just found out.”

That was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Kate’s death. When she was on book tours, we got together, including one epic dinner a year or so before she died. She got held up at one of the signings, as I sat and I waited (and waited) for her to show up at the restaurant (and the staff all looked at me as if they just knew I’d been stood up (this was pre “everyone has cell phones” days) .but she showed, and we spent hours over fish and conversation. Kate was wonderful.

Kate was a trial lawyer in Boston, a graduate of Wellesley and Yale Law School. She was a scholar, a researcher par excellence and a brilliant writer. I went back east for a visit in spring of 1998, during which time I had plans to visit Kate, if she had the energy, but I never saw her. She died that March, leaving behind four books set in the English Regency Period which still stand out as some of the best novels I’ve ever read. And I don’t say that because of our friendship. She had a true expert’s interest and a writer’s passion for the period she wrote about. Her protagonist, Julian Kestrel is a remarkably drawn complex character, sympathetic, honest and achingly empathetic. His own life on the face of it was easy, facile – he’s a dandy, seemingly the sort of flighty young man who spends hours on which way to tie his cravat and agonizing over the color of the buttons on his gloves – but that’s a façade. Julian has a keen mind and a great heart. He’s one of Peter Wimsey’s spiritual cousins, hiding all that he is under cover of frivolity and lightness. As the four books revealed more about Kestrel’s life and his reasons for doing what he did, you learned why he was the way he was.

Ross clearly borrowed from Sayers in a few ways, patterning Kestrel on Lord Peter’s best qualities. Like Wimsey, Julian’s manservant, Dipper is a working class guy, not one born to the service. Bunter served with Peter during the war and came to his aid after Wimsey returned home. Kestrel hires Dipper after discovering that Dipper had stolen his watch.

In rereading this book for this blog entry, I was again blown away that a first novel could be so well-written. In only a few pages of chapter one, Ross accomplishes what some authors haven’t done in a career of writing. She effortlessly slides the reader into the time and place of Regency England, the mores and conflicts of being Quality and not a regular “cit” or citizen, and by using dialogue and relatively spare description, she sketched the conflict facing Hugh Fontclair who has, for some unnamed reason, offered marriage to a young woman he barely knows. I’ve read a lot of first mysteries and there’s nothing harder than educating the reader without being boring and didactic. It’s hard enough setting up plot, character, setting, red herrings and all that, but to get the reader to understand the when and why is difficult. Kate Ross did it well.

The story in CUT TO THE QUICK is a complex one, and not one a lot of first-book authors would have written that well. There are too many opportunities to mess up. On reread, I wondered a bit about the character of Catherine, a truly obnoxious woman, but hey, I’ve read lots of Dick Francis novels and there are so many upper class snobs who get away with rudeness out of their deeply-held belief in their own superiority. Besides, it gave Julian a chance to show off; he was subtle in his responses to her enormous insults, in ways she often didn’t see. But we did. This was a man who knew his place in his world, a world full of class prejudice, assumptions of superiority and inferiority, pride and appearance. He was not fooled by appearances, even his own.

In the few years that he appeared, Julian Kestrel stole my heart. In the three books to follow her debut – BROKEN VESSEL, WHOM THE GODS LOVE and THE DEVIL IN MUSIC were strong, wonderfully written and promised a long and rich career for Kate and for Julian and Dipper. No matter what a reader might know about this period in England, no matter how much you might like historical fiction, there’s wonderful writing here, a distinct talent for showing and not telling that many historical mystery writers might envy, and a facility for dialogue that shows exactly who is talking. Talent to spare.

Kate Ross was only 41 when she died, waiting for an experimental treatment for her leukemia. She was my friend. She was a superior writer with a great future. She died three days after my 45th birthday. I still miss her.