Cozy Up With Kathy: Bad Boy - A Guest Post & Giveaway

I'm pleased to welcome Winona Kent back to Cozy Up With Kathy. Winona writes the Jason Davey Mystery series. Bad Boy is the fifth book in the series and was released last week.

Razzle Dazzle
By Winona Kent

I love incorporating things I remember from my past into my Jason Davey mysteries. Sometimes I give those memories, people and events to Jason, and I let him tell you all about how they’ve influenced and affected his life. Sometimes I just throw them into the plot, and you never know whether they’re real, or if they’re simply a product of my very fertile imagination.

In Bad Boy, Jason has to solve a series of puzzles, brain-teasers and quizzes in order to track down a stolen collection of musical manuscripts by the famed English composer Sir Edward Elgar.

Elgar was also very fond of codes and puzzles, and that’s probably why having him at the heart of the story appealed to me so much.

One of the puzzles Jason has to solve involves a Secret Decoder Wheel—three paper discs with numbers and letters printed around their edges, that you can rotate to create—and decipher—cryptic messages.

If you want to create your own (or see exactly what I had in mind when I describe what Jason has to download, print, cut out and manipulate in order to retrieve his next clue), you can find it here:

https://dabblesandbabbles.com/printable-secret-decoder-wheel/

The decoder wheel in Bad Boy is attributed to a kids’ tv series called Lollygobble that Jason recalls from his childhood.

When I was a kid in the early 1960s, I owned a Secret Decoder Wheel that was pretty much identical to this one. I got it from a Canadian TV show that was extremely popular with the after-school crowd. It was called Razzle Dazzle, and it featured human hosts Al Hamel and Michele Finney—yes, the same Alan Hamel who went on to fame and fortune as the manager and spouse of Suzanne Somers—and Howard the Turtle, a joke-telling puppet with a droll sense of humour, who was, hands-down, the show’s absolute star.

Razzle Dazzle had a fan club, and, of course, I immediately signed up. I was beside my seven-year-old self when the large brown envelope arrived in the mail. Inside were a welcome letter, a newspaper, a fan club button, and that Razzle Dazzle Secret Decoder Wheel, which you had to cut out and assemble. At the end of every show, a coded message was transmitted to us kids, which we had to use the wheel to decipher. I can honestly tell you that this caused me to embark on a very intense period of research into codes and code-breaking, down at the public library. And the results of that have stayed with me to this day.

If you’re curious, you can read more about Razzle Dazzle here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razzle_Dazzle

And you can see actual clips of Al Hamel and Howard the Turtle and even a secret message being sent out here, on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/howardtheturtl

Wow, that takes me back….

And now, you know where Lollygobble came from. Not just any random razzle dazzling!

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Bad Boy: A Jason Davey Mystery by Winona Kent

About Bad Boy

Bad Boy: A Jason Davey Mystery
Musical Mystery 5th in Series
Setting - UK: London and Derbyshire
Publisher: ‎ Winona Kent / Blue Devil Books (September 26, 2024)
Print length: ‎ 278 pages

Fresh from a 34-day, 18-city tour of England, professional musician and amateur sleuth Jason Davey accepts an invitation from a fan, Marcus Merritt, to meet at Level 72 of The Shard to sign one of his band's programs. Marcus hands him the booklet, then leaps to his death from the open viewing platform. Thus begins a week-long quest, during which Jason is tasked with retrieving a stolen collection of scores by England’s most famous composer, Sir Edward Elgar.

Marcus shared Elgar's love of eccentric puzzles and games, and the challenging clues he's assembled for Jason seem to mirror the 14 themes in Elgar's renowned Enigma Variations. Jason's journey takes him to Derbyshire and then back to London, and a four-hour walking tour of Soho's lost music venues where, in Denmark Street, he faces a life-threatening battle with two adversaries: a treacherous Russian gangster who is also hunting for the stolen collection, and Marcus's sister—who holds the key to a decades-old mystery involving a notorious London crime lord's missing daughter.

Bad Boy is the fifth book in Winona Kent's mystery series featuring jazz musician-turned-amateur sleuth Jason Davey.

About Winona Kent

Winona Kent is an award-winning author who was born in London, England and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she completed her BA in English at the University of Regina. After moving to Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing and a diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School.

Winona's writing breakthrough came many years ago when she won First Prize in the Flare Magazine Fiction Contest with her short story about an all-night radio newsman, “Tower of Power”. Her debut novel Skywatcher was a finalist in the Seal Books First Novel Award and was published by Bantam Books in 1989. This was followed by a sequel, The Cilla Rose Affair, and her first mystery, Cold Play, set aboard a cruise ship in Alaska. After three time-travel romances (Persistence of Memory, In Loving Memory and Marianne's Memory), Winona returned to mysteries with Disturbing the Peace, a novella, in 2017 and the novel Notes on a Missing G-String in 2019, both featuring the character she first introduced in Cold Play, professional jazz musician / amateur sleuth Jason Davey. The third and fourth books in Winona's Jason Davey Mystery series, Lost Time and Ticket to Ride, were published in 2020 and 2022. Her fifth Jason Davey Mystery, Bad Boy, was published in 2024. Winona also writes short fiction. Her story “Salty Dog Blues” appeared in Sisters in Crime-Canada West's anthology Crime Wave in October 2020 and was nominated as a finalist in Crime Writers of Canada's Awards of Excellence for Best Crime Novella in April 2021. “Blue Devil Blues” was one of the four entries in the anthology Last Shot, published in June 2021, and “Terminal Lucidity” appeared in the Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Women of a Certain Age (October 2022). “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”, will appear in the upcoming Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Dangerous Games (October 2024). A collection of Winona’s short stories, Ten Stories That Worried My Mother, was published in 2023. Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent , a screenwriter and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. She's currently the national Chair and the BC/YT rep for the Crime Writers of Canada and is also an active member of Sisters in Crime – Canada West.