Sherlock Holmes And The Ladies For Tea At University Books

Laure R. King, best-selling mystery author, drew a standing-room-only crowd at the University Bookstore last night. King is the author of two mystery series, one about a lesbian police detective in San Francisco, and another featuring Sherlock Holmes with an ass-kicking emancipated female sidekick-spouse, Mary Russell. The two series finally converge (to the delight, surely, of her publisher) in King's latest, The Art of Detection.

King is tall, broad-shouldered, and has an amazing quantity of grey hair pinned to the top of her head and trying to escape. Add a brightly-colored blazer and a brooch shaped like a pair of handcuffs and she was hard to miss. She started off with a few jokes about lesbians and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, read a passage from the new book, and answered questions ranging from broad to minutely detailed and fan-girl-ish.

The audience was mostly female, fully armed with razor-sharp intellects and heavy hardback editions. So it was lucky for King that she didn't rouse their ire. It was easy to imagine some of them murdering her with their knitting needles, then sitting down for a nice cup of tea. Placated with the promise of more Mary Russell books, soon, they bought massive quantities of books and lined up to have them personally inscribed instead.