Hildegarde

Hello.

This is the very first post on this blog. Sorry I couldn’t think of a more imaginative title for it, but considering how much procrastinating I’ve been doing getting this started, it’s not bad.

A few things about what you’re going to find here.

1) My name is Jane Haddam, and I write detective novels. I’ve written 23 of them or so, published most recently by St. Martin’s Press. You can find my work on Amazon and in Barnes and Noble and in a lot of other places. I’ve been nominated for every mystery writer’s award in the US but not won any of them. I’ve published in a lot of magazines over th eyears, including Parents, The Nation and Skeptical Inquirer.

2) So a lot of what I’m going to write about is writing. Writing detective novels. Writing about crime. But also things connected to that, like ideas of good and evil, and…well, everything, because everything is connected to that.

3) There’s a comments board that will let you say stuff if you register first. You have to register because the last time I had a comments board, it was pretty well destroyed by avalanches of spam, sometimes as many as two or three hundred a day. I didn’t have the time to keep up.

4) Still, I don’t moderate otherwise, so say what you want, including how awful I am. But I DON’T promise to respond to anything. I may, or I may not. It depends.

5) This blog is called Hildegarde, after Hildegarde von Bingen, who was a Benedictine abbess in the Middle Ages and the author of most of what we know think of as “Gregorian chant.” She also ran one of the largest agricultural establishments of her time, and had more authority, and more control of property, than the vast majority of the men of her era, including many men who were theoretically her “social superiors.”

6) She could also read and write when very few women could, and she wrote theology when very few women did. You can find out more about her here:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/hildegarde.html

which is I hope a link that works. I’ve got no idea if I’ve done that right.

7) Anyway, she was a remarkable woman who did things, and she’s a reproach to every idiot out there who declares that the Middle Ages were a theocracy not much better than the present Islamic Republic of Iran where women were chattel and science dared not speak its name.

8) By all that, it must be obvious that one of my absolutely favorite things is the Middle Ages in Europe, which is true. I also really love harpsichords. Someday, I’m going to be able to afford a Peter Redstone harpsichord, but the way things are going that may take a while. Peter Redstone has a web site here

http://www.ctg.net/redstone/

which has lots of wonderful pictures of harpsichords. If you want to hear what a harpsichord should sound like, I suggest you try any music by Gustav von Leonhardt. He’s got a CD of Bach’s Goldberg Variations which is really excellent.

9) So that’s where I am here, plus cats, Portuguese literature, what’s wrong with college students, and that kind of thing.

10) But I’m going to start with a book I wrote, just out this year, called Cheating at Solitaire. A lot of people seem to be mad at me about it, and part of me doesn’t blame them, but…

Tomorrow.