Gaus, Paul L.'s blog

At the talks I give around the country, people often ask me why I write murder mysteries about Amish people, who are arguably the most peaceful Americans anyone knows, and my answer is always in two parts.  First, I think Amish society is endlessly fascinating, and it deserves to be better understood by Christians in particular and by all Americans in general.  Second, I think crime fiction gives us one of the best vehicles in popular fiction to explore the human condition.
 

An emerald sea and a sapphire sky.  Lying on the pearl-white beach at Lido Key, Florida.  Eyes focused on infinity, and up there it hangs, a Magnificent Frigatebird (that’s really its name) heading south to its mating grounds in April or May.  The first time I saw one, I was in the Sarasota area, researching locations for my seventh Amish-Country Mystery, Harmless as Doves, due out this summer.  Lido is a beach like the one on famous Siesta Key just to the south, where Amish kids, in

Literary critics?  They can be a bane or a boon to an author.  And even a single critic can simultaneously be both.  The experience of reading the critics’ reviews can be traumatic for new authors, and even for authors who have been around awhile, the sting of a bad review can be a trial.  The trick is, to let the sting serve as something useful, like the sting of a flu shot.  It hurts, but you just keep telling yourself that it’s good for you.  Even for authors who have made it to the top, although they may profess a disdainful disinterest, I suspect it still matters to them what

On the Mt. Hope road, south of U.S.

The contrast of the modern on the old is quite high in Holmes County, Ohio, just like the contrast of black on white in this photograph. Here, the old world and the new operate side by side, Amish living separate lives, dispersed among the English of the county, and sharing the roads and towns as if there were nothing unusual about the contrast between the old world and the new. We who have lived in this part of Ohio don’t even notice the contrast any more. There seems nothing improbable about the seventeenth century and the twenty-first being interlaced.

Do you remember recess at school? Do you remember the swings? I do, and I remember how I used to pump those swings as high as I could go. Amish kids are just like that, too. But here is a pair of girls who have figured out a better angle on pumping a swing - one girl on each side, taking turns to pump from a standing position. I saw several pairs of girls work this swing that day, taking turns on their way back from the outhouse at the edge of the school yard. Kids at recess at a one-room Amish parochial school in winter?

In Holmes County, Ohio, the largest Amish population in the world can be found sprawled across the rolling hills and down in the narrow valleys that so much reminded the first Amish settlers here of their homelands in Germany. It’s a diverse Amish population, and we have everything from the most conservative Schwartzentruber Amish to the rather more urbane and liberal sects who interact extensively with the non-Amish, or English, population.

Courthouse square in Millersburg, Ohio, is often a setting used in my Ohio Amish Mysteries. On a prominent block in the center of town, there is a red-brick jail, a civil war monument, and the ornate sandstone Holmes County Courthouse, all surrounding a central lawn. I thought you would like to see pictures of these landmarks, and I have already posted a photograph of the jail. Here is one of the courthouse. They say that when it was first being built, you could see the gleam of the shiny copper top from the high ground in Salt Creek Township, twelve miles to the north.

In my Ohio Amish Mysteries, soon to be republished as the Amish-Country Mysteries by Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA), the old red-brick Holmes County Jail is featured prominently, and I thought my readers might like to see what it looks like. Here is a picture taken just a few years ago, after Holmes County moved its real jail to a modern facility in the countryside north of town.

We have had snow on the ground in northern Ohio since Christmas, and today we are getting another good dusting. It isn't as bad as last year - at least not yet. Then, we had over a foot of snow on the ground for nearly three months, and about a year ago in the middle of that, I was out in Holmes County to see how Amish people there were coping with the snow and cold, and I got this photo of a new parochial school on Salt Creek Township Lane 601, just south of Fredericksburg, Ohio.