Maurvene Williams: Good afternoon, and welcome everyone. I'm Maurvene Williams, and I'm program officer in the Center for the Book, and we are delighted to be co-sponsors of this event. In the wonderful hustle-bustle behind the scenes world of the National Book Festival, I don't really get the chance to meet - to really meet the author. I'm sorry, Carolyn, that means you, too. [laughter] However, I traveled to Oklahoma City last month representing the Center for the Book at the Oklahoma Book Awards celebration. This is a program of the Oklahoma Center for the Book and it's one of the most established - this is their 15th year of a book awards program - and the most well-run state book awards event in the nation. I had the opportunity to dine with Carolyn and Oklahoma Center for the Book colleagues at a dinner the night before the awards ceremony. The next evening, I witnessed Carolyn Hart receiving the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award. From these two occasions, I witnessed the very genuine high esteem in which Carolyn is held by friends and fellow writers, alike. So, Carolyn, it's a pleasure getting to know you [laughter] I'd like to also congratulate you and to welcome you. Now I'll turn the program over to Emily Howie, who'll take it from there. Emily Howie: Good afternoon, and welcome. My name is Emily Howie. I'm a reference librarian in the Main Reading Room, Humanities and Social Sciences Division, of the Library of Congress (Library). I want to welcome you to our wonderful program this afternoon, featuring mystery writer Carolyn Hart. Two administrative notes before we begin. As you can see, this program is being videotaped for subsequent broadcast on the Library of Congress's website. The audience is encouraged to offer comments and raise questions during the question-and-answer period, but please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast. By participating in the question and answer period, you are consenting to the Library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. Also, a book signing will follow the program. Both of Ms. Hart's most recent books - "Letter from Home" and "Murder Walks the Plank," will be for sale at the table right outside of this room, Dining Room A. For any of you who might have brought an older or a favorite Carolyn Hart that you want her to sign, we will be glad to do that if time permits. So as soon as we're done, if you'll just allow us a minute to get her set up here, then she'll be glad to sign your books. Thank you. I am absolutely thrilled to introduce Carolyn Hart as today's speaker. Let me tell you how I met Ms. Hart after being a devoted fan for many years. Last fall, one of the organizers of the National Book Festival for 2003, sent out an e-mail with a list of the authors who would be appearing at the festival, and asking for Library staff to volunteer to be an author escort for the day. I read the e-mail and began to scan the list of authors. As soon as I saw Carolyn Hart's name, I e-mailed the organizer and said, "I have to be Carolyn Hart's author escort." Ms. Hart and I spent a delightful day together at the National Book Festival, and we have been e-mail buddies ever since. That day, I asked Ms. Hart if she would like to speak at the Library the next time she was in the Washington, D. C. area. She replied that she would be in town at the end of April to attend the Malice Domestic Convention and she would love to give a talk. So as you see, we've been working on this for six months. Carolyn Hart is a recognized master of mystery and suspense. She is the author of 36 novels with more than 2. 5 million books in print. A winner of numerous awards and accolades, Ms. Hart is the only author to be nominated seven times for the coveted Agatha Award. A native of Oklahoma, Ms. Hart resides in Oklahoma City. She began her love affair with the mystery by reading Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and Beverly Gray. She grew up fascinated by news and newspapers and graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. She worked briefly as a reporter, before marrying and starting a family. Her mystery writing career began with her entry in a writing contest for a mystery for girls 8 to 12. "The Secret of the Cellars" won the contest and was published in 1964. Her first adult mystery, "Flee from the Past," was published in 1975 and has recently been republished. Ms. Hart wrote eight more stand-alone novels, but was discouraged by the lack of interest in mysteries by and about women. This changed in 1987, with the publication of "Death on Demand," her first title in the series about young mystery bookseller Annie Lawrence and her boyfriend, Max Darling. The "Death on Demand" series now has 15 titles, with the latest entry published last month, which is entitled "Murder Walks the Plank." Also, Annie Lawrence is now Annie Lawrence Darling. [laughter] In 2003, Ms. Hart also published a stand-alone mystery entitled "Letter from Home." This World War II era novel captures the spirit of a small Oklahoma town in the tumultuous summer of 1944, when events are dominated by war, and then by murder. Again, Ms. Hart has created an inquisitive, brave heroine in the person of 13-year old Gretchen Grace Gilman, who is working for the summer as the cub reporter on the local newspaper. "Letter from Home" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa, and was included among the "Best Books of 2003," chosen by "Publishers Weekly." Ms. Hart is with us today to tell us why she writes mysteries, the relevance of mysteries in our literature and culture and her latest books. If you will permit me to related one more personal note about Carolyn: Our day together at the National Book Festival was just such a treat for me, because we talked about so many of the mystery writers that I read and that she knows personally. She could tell me all these nice little tidbits. [laughter] But before the end of the day, Carolyn had said to me, "Emily, I know that you could write a mystery. Just think about the setting where you work and all of the incredible materials that you have access to. Just imagine that a patron comes up to the reference desk one day and you help that person with a very intriguing question and the next day you see in the newspaper that this person has been murdered. [laughter] Later in the day, after telling Carolyn about Ask a Librarian, our Ask a Librarian service which is our electronic reference service that we offer now at the Library of Congress, she immediately said "What a great title, 'The Ask a Librarian Murder.' " [laughter] So you can see, if I ever do write that mystery, I will have the best mentor that anyone could possibly have. [laughter] Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Carolyn Hart. [applause] Carolyn Hart: Thank you very much, Emily. It was a lovely day. We had so much fun at the Book Festival, and I really appreciate such a wonderful welcome and from Maurvene who came all the way to Oklahoma and spent a wonderful two evenings, actually, with Oklahoma readers and writers. You see, I have always claimed that librarians are mystery authors' best friends, and you all are definitely proving that to be true today. So thank you very much for coming. It is a great pleasure and an honor to be here. To an American reader or writer, the Library of Congress is surely a magical place, so I am very excited to be here, and I look forward to visiting with all of you. I'm a mystery writer. I write mysteries and I read mysteries. I love doing both, and I'm here today for my most recent mystery, which is called "Murder Walks the Plank." As Emily said, it's the 15th in a series set on a lovely South Carolina sea island. It is my 36th book to be published in a career that began 41 years ago. So I have been at this for a long time. I grew up wanting to write, but I had no inkling that I would become a novelist. My ambition was to be a newspaper reporter. You see, I was a child during World War II, and I understood, very quickly, that the newspaper was our primary source of information. I saw that the larger and blacker the headlines, the more important the story, and I was convinced there could be no more important job than providing information to readers. In a way, that's exactly what librarians do, so we both had the same ambition. I studied journalism and I worked as a reporter. Then I met a young law student. We married and started a family, and I didn't want to go back to reporting because of the long hours. That was the first time I ever thought about writing fiction. I subscribed to "The Writer" magazine -- and trust me, it has not changed a bit in forty years - [laughter] -- and I'll bet it still does this, but in one issue it listed a contest for a mystery for girls 8 to 12 years old. And I thought "I love Nancy Drew. I love mysteries. I think I'll try. " I wrote a book called "The Secret of the Cellars," it won the contest and it was published in 1964. I wrote four more books for younger readers and then I did my first adult suspense novel, "Flee from the Past," and it was published in 1976. For the next 10 years, I wrote a number of mysteries, some sold, some didn't. Those that sold disappeared into the black hole of publishing, and no one has ever heard of them since. During one period, I wrote seven books in seven years and none sold. So you see there's such a thing as being obsessive. [laughter] Finally, five of those were published in England, and only in recent years have been reprinted in the United States. What I did not realize at the time was that New York publishers were not interested in mysteries by American women. And as s far as New York publishers during that period-as far as they were concerned, there were two kinds of mysteries: The American mystery was a hard-boiled private eye, written by American men with male protagonists. The traditional mystery, which is what I write, was written by dead English ladies. [laughter] And you see, there's no room in that scenario for American women. But something wonderful happened and that was, I think, in 1978 when Marcia Muller's first book was published, "Edwin of the Iron Shoes," and it was the very first hard-boiled private eye book written by an American woman with a female protagonist, and she was followed very soon thereafter by Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. The effect of that was to transform publishing because those books really sold, and if there's anything New York publishers understand, it's money. They thought, you know, American readers are interested in books by American women, and that was what opened up the window of opportunity for writers such as myself. And today I'm very fortunate to be here with the 15th in my Sea Island series, "Murder Walks the Plank," and since that sale of "Death on Demand," which was in, gosh19__, 19__, think for a minute Carolyn. 1985, came out in 1987, since then I have written the 15 Annie and Max books, six Henrie O mysteries - those are books featuring a retired reporter named Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins - and my book last fall, "Letter From Home," which is a stand-alone novel set in Oklahoma in the summer of 1944. So, all of my books are mysteries. The Sea Island books are also intended as a celebration of wonderful mysteries of the past and present, and the mystery as a literary form. The owner of the Mystery Book Store, Annie Darling, loves mysteries and setting the series in a mystery book store gives me an opportunity to talk about wonderful mysteries of the past and present. Annie Darling is young, energetic, lively and fun. Her boyfriend and later husband, Max Darling, is her easygoing companion on her adventures. In "Murder Walks the Plank," Annie plans a mystery evening aboard an excursion boat to raise money for literacy. She also knows the evening will be a great advertisement for her Mystery Book Store. The evening is a great success until the island's favorite volunteer, good, serious, earnest Pamela Potts goes overboard. When Annie realizes that Pamela was lured onto the boat, Annie is convinced that her friend's fall was no accident. But why would anyone want to kill inoffensive, well-meaning Pamela? Annie is determined to find out the truth and her quest is aided by Max's loopy mother Laurel-- [laughter] -- the store's best customer, Hennie Brawling, and Island mystery author, Emma Clyde. In the chilling finale, Annie races against time to prevent the killer from striking again. Now, I have told you about what kind of books I write, mysteries, and I expect that some of you, those among you who do not read mysteries, may want to know why do you write mysteries? Why do you want to write about murder? When I am asked these questions, I know, at once, that the questioner doesn't read mysteries. [laughter] Because murder is never the point of the mystery. Let's remember for a moment those glorious years when we were growing up and we were reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew - how many of you read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew - oh, good people, okay - [laughter] Why did we love those books? What did we find in those books? We found independence, a battle for justice and a puzzle. Girls reading Nancy Drew found a heroine who delighted and inspired them. Nancy Drew was and is brave, honorable, fun and gloriously independent. Boys and girls found the same qualities in Frank and Joe Hardy. I know you remember them well, serious, thoughtful Frank, fun loving, eager Joe. They, too, exemplified independence, a status children thrilled to envision for themselves. We were not as brave and independent as they, but we wanted to follow their lead and oh, what an example they set for us, as they battled injustice, dishonesty, cruelty and corruption. They faced bewildering challenges that persevered until the mystery was solved, the criminal captured. Independence, a battle for justice and a puzzle - these are still prime attributes of the mystery. But the mystery offers more to us as adults, much more. There are two sharply different kinds of mysteries, the crime novel and the traditional mystery. The crime novel features heroes such as private eyes Sam Spade or Kinsey Millhone and the traditional mystery features the amateur sleuth such as Miss Marple or my own Annie Darling. The crime novel is the story of the honorable woman or man who tries to remain uncorrupted in a corrupt world. The crime novel is always the story of the protagonist, not the story of the murder that is solved within those pages. Today's private eye, whether we're talking about Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone or Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, is the white knight who will never betray her or his code of honor. These books explore society's ills and attempt to right society's wrongs. These books, the private eye books, are about the quest for honor. Can you all hear me? Okay [laughs]. Although crime novels are often described as books about the mean streets, and, indeed, they look at the underbelly of society, crime novels are very romantic in intent. They celebrate heroes and heroines who are willing to fight corruption, dishonesty and fraud. My own particular love is the traditional mystery. These books were once pejoratively described as cozies by those who admire books about the mean streets. The inference was that mean street books are real, and cozies are about drawing room crimes in little villages that could never happen. But, as Agatha Christie brilliantly demonstrated, the traditional mystery is at the heart of our lives. In her Miss Marple books, Christie made the very point that life in a village is a microcosm of life everywhere. One does not have to live in a huge city and wander the alleyways to be acquainted with anger, jealousy, greed and despair. The opening segments of the Agatha Christie television mysteries captured the essence of the traditional mystery. If you recall, the TV presentation opens with a figure peering out of the window into the street, and two women with sly faces in close conversation. There is an air of secrecy, covertness and, most of all, intimacy. Neighbors watch. Friends and enemies gossip. There are lies and deceptions, misunderstandings and misapprehensions, passion and pain, fear and fury. Christie once compared the mystery to a medieval morality play, and it's a fascinating analogy. In the morality play, the trades fair audiences saw a graphic presentation of what happens to lives dominated by lust, gluttony, sloth and all the deadly sins. This is precisely what readers of today are offered in a more sophisticated guise. The traditional mystery offers a primer in relationships. The distant mother creates a child who cannot love. A tyrannical boss engenders hatred and frustration. Slyness evokes distrust. A man who cheats on his wife or a woman who cheats on her husband cannot be trusted in any relationship, if this, dear reader, is how you live. So readers who understand the dynamic of the traditional mystery will inquire, why do you want to write about murder? The answer is simple. Murder is not the focus of either the crime novel or the traditional mystery. In the crime novel, Kinsey Millhone explores how society has been warped and strained by those without laws and conventions. In the traditional mystery, Miss Marple is discovering what went wrong in the lives of those living in the village. The focus of the traditional mystery is fractured relationships. In trying to solve the crime the detective searches out the reasons for murder, by exploring the relationships between the victim and those around the victim. The detective is trying to find out what caused the turmoil in these lives, what fractured the relationships among these people. And readers, being the intelligent creatures that they are, extrapolate the lessons observed in fiction for their own use, their own lives. When readers observe the lives around them, they can see the torment of an abused wife or husband, the despair of an unloved child, the anger of a betrayed spouse, the jealousy of a less-favored child, the hatred of a spurned lover. Usually, these emotional dramas do not end in murder and, in fact, they do not end. The violent emotions created by fractured relationships corrode the lives of every person involved, often forever, and this is what the traditional mystery is all about. The traditional mystery focuses on the intimate, destructive, frightening secrets hidden between what seems to be a placid surface, and often the traditional mystery affords humor as well as insights. Once again, Agatha Christie comes to mind. No one ever captured the destructive power of greed any better than she did in the "Murder of Roger Ackroyd." But equally, in book after book, she punctures pretension and wryly observes the human drama. In the "Body in the Library," Christie notes with humor the stuffiness and class-consciousness of Colonel Bantry, but she also observes with compassion how a suspicion of wrong doing, if not resolved, could destroy his life. It is no accident that Christie has out-sold every writer, living or dead. It is because her people are real. Readers recognize them at once, "Oh yes, that's just like the fellow in my office" or "Yes, that's just like Aunt Alice" or the woman across the street, or me. Truth to tell, and fortunately, most readers do not spend every waking moment trying to escape from a serial killer. [laughter] Now, it's true that serial killer books have enjoyed enormous popularity. They are a very visible example of the randomness of violence today, and of the ultimate separation of a human being from society. So these books respond to a definitive reality of our times. Readers want to try and contain this kind of evil. One way to contain it is to read about the vanquishment of a serial killer. But readers are also deeply concerned about the expressions of dissention and violence far short of murder that occur in their own lives. Readers spend much of their lives in moments of stress and confrontation with those around them. They know the jealous mother, the miserly uncle, the impossible boss, the woman who confuses sex with love, the selfish sister. These are the realities of life with which they must cope. This is why Christie's mysteries and all traditional mysteries are so popular. What could be more everyday, more humdrum, than life in a remote English village? Miss Marple can tell you. I've always been amused by those who dismiss traditional mysteries by saying "Oh, how absurd. All those bodies in a little village. Isn't that silly?" No, actually, it's reality. There may not be a body in the library, but there will always be heartbreak and passion, fear and denial, jealousy and revenge in every society, everywhere. It is how these emotions destroy lives that fascinates the writer and reader of traditional mysteries. Mysteries mirror the realities of our lives, personal and social, but perhaps the greatest gift we take from the mystery is a continuing reassurance that goodness matters. Readers read mysteries because we live in an unjust world, and that's why I write mysteries [coughs]. In life, evil triumphs as Americans were reminded most painfully on 9/11, but we still want the world to be good, we want the world to be fair, we want the world to be just. So we can go together, you and I, to a magic place where goodness will always triumph, where justice is served, where wrongs are righted. We can read a mystery [coughs]. [applause] Emily Howie: If you have questions [inaudible]. Carolyn Hart: Yes. [end of transcription]