Mary Hoffman
adult books
I have recently been writing adult fiction, and many years ago I wrote two adult non-fiction books. There is likely to be more adult fiction in the future!
Adult fiction
My second adult novel, When she was Bad, written as Amy Lovell, was published by The Greystones Press in April 2017.
My first adult novel, The Italian for love, written by me as Kate Snow, was published by The Greystones Press in April 2016
I'm delighted that my adult Crime story "The Day of the Dead" will appear in the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime next year (2014).
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My first published fiction for adults is a short story in this anthology. My story is the last one in the book.
Published by Akashic Books (2012) Buy from Amazon | Buy ebook from Amazon
A bonus bit of adult fiction for you is this as yet unpublished short story I wrote in 2012. It is called Almost Perfect and I have added it here because it is rather Noir too.
I've written two novels for adults, neither of which has been published yet. The first one is called When she was Bad and is written by Amy Lovell. It's not a murder mystery though there is a murder in it and it is quite autobiographical, I suppose, drawing on my childhood roaming Clapham and Wandsworth Commons, unsupervised.
The second novel is quite different ; The Italian for Love is a romcom with a dark underbelly, written by Kate Snow, and I'm very happy with it.
Choosing a pseudonym for two different strands of adult fiction has been hard and there is no guarantee that these names won't change again!
Jakubowski saved the best for last in this book. In Hoffman's story an Englishwoman visits Venice, chooses a gondolier, and starts peppering him with questions about the city's most notorious crimes. She's working on a collection of short stories, she explains, but something about her makes Taddeo, the gondolier, quite uncomfortable.
When the tourist is found murdered in her hotel room Taddeo is the only suspect and is promptly arrested. His fellow gondolieri don't believe in his guilt and conduct their own investigation. The reader knows more than the characters and it is fun to watch as the net closes in.
I like the subtle way in which the underlying motive -- the crimes behind the crime -- is left below the surface. We can figure out what is in the victim's short story about Venice; the details are left to our imagination. A very nice piece of work.
LittleBigCrimes
Adult non-fiction
I wrote a book on personal names, called Our Names, Our Selves, and had to change my name to do it! At the last moment my editor panicked that I might be too closely associated with children’s books and so I became Mary Lassiter for this one. Lassiter is my mother’s maiden name and we gave it to all our daughters as a third forename. Our oldest daughter liked it so much that she changed her name to Rhiannon Lassiter (Rhiannon was her second name).
Published by Heinemann (1983)
Before I could earn my living as a writer of fiction, I did a lot of work in the field of literacy. (I was Reading Consultant to the BBC Schools TV series “Look and Read” for eighteen years – Bill the Brickie, Dog Detective and Wordy, anyone?).
I wrote a book for teachers called Reading Writing and Relevance, which was a set book for the Open University course on Reading Development. It was only my second book and I was a bit daunted when my Course Team Leader (as they were called at the OU) told me I had to write a set book. He assured me it would be very easy, as schools would send me material in the form of case-studies. In the end, we were so busy during term time writing and trying out course materials that Reading, Writing and Relevance had to be done in the Christmas holidays in three weeks!
It was the quickest book I ever wrote but not the easiest. I was hosting Christmas that year and had a terrible cold the whole time.
Published by Hodder & Stroughton (1976)