Earlier this week we had the pleasure of a visit from Laurie R King (bestselling author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series) and her lovely daughter, Zoë.

I naturally tweeted the news with the picture above, but my over-excitement caused me to type too fast and I ended up tweeting the caption “Lunch in the A&B offie…” as opposed to office.

An inadvertent error (spotted with a chuckle by some of our Twitter followers before I could delete it) which generated a rather fanciful notion of what would be an unlikely, yet not exactly unappealing, pairing. A Publisher-cum-Off-Licence. Get your fill of books and booze! Why not? Who doesn’t enjoy relaxing with a book and a glass of wine? ‘Buy the upcoming hardback The Bones of Paris and get 20% off a case of Chardonnay!’ I can see a business plan in the making…

I was tickled by the fact that one missing letter had sent me on this little tangent. And so I sought to try again. What if I missed out another letter somewhere? Where would that take me? So I tested it, taking Laurie’s crime-sleuthing heroine Mary Russell. What if I left out the ‘r’ and had written May Russell instead. Where would that name lead me?

A quick Google and I came across this intriguing mug shot of a very real woman, coincidentally from the other side of the crime spectrum. May Russell was, infact, a criminal, photographed here at the Sydney Police Station in 1922.  If the fictional and factual world had collided, Mary and May’s paths might indeed have crossed…   You can see more of these incredibly evocative mugshots here.

Play with words and it can open up entire new worlds. Try it yourself sometime – who knows what day dreams it will conjure up or what interesting things you may discover.

Chiara Priorelli, Publicity & Online Marketing Manager