Gigi Vernon

Saturday,  October  19, 2pm

@Bradford County Public Library (Troy, PA)

Join me and other authors from the Adirondack Mysteries and Other Mountain Tales (volumes 1 & 2)  for a reading and Q & A!

Crazy exciting news!

My short story “Show Stopper” will appear in the upcoming Mystery Writers of America 2014 anthology, Ice Cold. (If you’re interested, here’s the complete list of past MWA anthologies)

All of the stories in the volume will involve the Cold War in some way or another. “Show Stopper” is about killer Soviet fashion,  about the world of fashion told from the Soviet point of view. It’s set in the summer of 1959 during the opening of the Soviet Exhibition of Science, Technology, and Culture at the New York Coliseum.

For your viewing pleasure, two short films.

“Russian Trade Fair, NY 1959”

And here’s a Russian documentary: “Soviet exhibition in NYC + US exhibition in Moscow (1959)”

As you can imagine it was a lot of fun to research and write. More of the newspaper articles and other sources I used for my research are here.

“Purse Strings” is the story of kidnapping and corruption, knights and rusty armor, dusty summer streets, and Sir Thibaut the cripple in service to Basilia, a lovely and savvy Jewish moneylender. You won’t see the ending coming.

“Purse Strings” is set in the 12th century in the French city of Troyes in the county of Champagne. At that time, Troyes was an extremely wealthy and important city, a center of commerce and culture. Today’s old city retains a charming medieval character (see the city’s tourism site), but this image of a medieval street is the Troyes of my story:

Photo courtesy of the talented Vincent van der Pas

A genuine medieval purse, excavated in London, < /br>
from the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme.

If you’re curious, and would like to read more, here are some of the sources (French and English) I used for research: bibliography.

The story is forthcoming in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.