Adele Langendorf

“Never too late,” Adele Langendorf says about her recently released debut novel, The Shipyard Murders. This year she will attend her Stanford class of ’50’s sixtieth reunion with her husband Don, ’49. After they had been married twenty years and one daughter was in college and the other almost there, Adele attended San Francisco State University where she worked with Frances Mayes and received a Masters degree in English and Creative Writing. Her thesis book, Denial, a book of poems, was published in 1986 by Floating Island Publications.

After the poetry, she concentrated on fiction. Living in Palo Alto allowed her to take continuing studies courses at Stanford where she studied with Nancy Packer. She attended the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, and her poetry and short stories appeared in literary journals. While an affiliated scholar at Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Adele studied Rosie the Riveter and the impact of war workers on Women in the work place.

After two consecutive Mystery Writers Conferences at Book Passage, the information from her research at Stanford became The Shipyard Murders, a historical crime novel and came out recently, a few months before her 80th (or should I be honest and say 82nd ) birthday. “Yes, it is never too late. In fact writing, which is my passion, keeps me young,” Adele said.