Saxton Reads! & Reviews

 photo courtesy of author
"These days my husband Bob Sexton, and our huge Maine Coon cat Priscilla, live in Richmond, Virginia, where, when I’m not writing or giving talks, or checking in with the grandboys…Ben, Matt, Levi and Wes, you’ll find me either in an antiques shop or my garden."

Welcome Guest Blooger Emyl Jenkins...
author of the Sterling Glass Mysteries.

 Emyl Jenkins’s Sterling Glass series centers around antiques and the mysteries they hold. Her books, Stealing with Style and The Big Steal, have received starred reviews from BookList and been compared to Alexander McCall Smith’s stories.

When asked what kind of books I write, I know I’m supposed to say "mysteries"—and I do. But in truth, I also want to add: I write gentle books where there may, or may not be, a body lying around.

It all goes back to the books I loved when first discovering that pages could take me places I wanted to go—into dark, shadowy attics, behind curtained windows, down treacherous stair steps, through overgrown thickets, along forgotten paths.

Looking back, I think the most frightened I ever was came while reading the graveyard scene in Dickens’ great novel, Great Expectations. There I met "A man… soaked in water, smothered in mud… who limped and shivered and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin."

Of course the "me" Dickens was writing about was Pip, the protagonist of his novel, but to this twelve year-old girl, I was the one being seized by the chin.

And so my love for mysteries began. Who cared that there wasn’t a body in the graveyard, or in the book, for that matter. Great Expectations was and is a great thriller, a mystery of the first order.

My love for old houses and the treasures they hold had already begun by then. I was a child in the 1940s and ‘50s, and in those days people went visiting on Sunday afternoons. To me, nothing was more thrilling than going to an old house. Who cared if there weren’t children to play with. I had my imagination.

And if the houses were ramshackled and dark, the furniture worn and shabby, and the garden overgrown, it was all the better. It was scary and romantic. It was thrilling.

Thus, long ago, without my even knowing it, I was laying the groundwork for the sort of setting where my protagonist, antiques appraiser Sterling Glass, finds herself these days.

Of course it helps that I, too, was an appraiser, and while working for insurance companies, private clients, world-famous museums, and even law agencies, I, too, found myself in those very same places.

"So," my readers ask, "is Sterling Glass you?" Oh no. I’m writing fiction, not a memoir. You see, when I sit down to write a story, I become Sterling Glass, and like that little girl of years ago, I step into romantic and scary places for the fun of discovering what happens.

In fact, one of my biggest surprises came when writing my most recent book, The Big Steal. Sure, like Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants, says about my book, "There’s a dash of danger, a hint of romance, and a pinch of international intrigue." But there’s also another story going on that I didn’t even realize until I’d finished writing the book. It’s the story of four women—Mazie, Miss Mary Sophie, Tracy, and Michelle—and how the times in which they lived shaped their views of the world and led them to make the choices they did in life.

Such is the fun of being a novelist and learning all over again what every child instinctively knows: Nothing beats the fun of discovering the adventures that lie between the covers of a book.