The Benrey Blog

The Great Mystery We Write Blog Tour has gone full circle: 15 mystery novelists visited each other’s blogs during a span of 14 days, for a total of 210 different posts. The intrepid travelers were:

• Beth Anderson—November 25
• Anne K. Albert—November 26
• Earl Staggs—November 27
• Jinx Schwartz—November 28
• Mike Orenduff—November 29
• Marilyn Meredith—November 30
• Jean Henry Mead—December 1
• Jackie King—December 2
• Timothy Hallinan—December 3
• M.M. Gornell—December 4
• Wendy Gager—December 5
• Alice Duncan—December 6
• John M. Daniel—December 7
• Pat Browning—December 8

Most of my guest posts looked at different aspects of why mystery novels are fun to read. I suppose the “universal answer” to this question is that mystery novelists really do work hard to entertain readers. And we often succeed! The scores of popular whodunits and thrillers written by the MWW bloggers prove the point!

And The Winners Are …

As promised, I’ll award paper or eBook copies of Dead as a Scone or The Final Crumpet to the folks who posted the THREE BEST comments during the blog tour.

It was tough to choose among dozens of great comments, but I’m delighted to announce that that the three winners are:

“Brenda” — liberalartsgrad(at)live(dot)com

“lil Gluckstern” — lilhmb(at)sbcglobal(dot)net

“Mare F” — mary-fairchild(at)sbcglobal(dot)net

Congratulations to you all! And thanks to everyone who visited The Benrey Blog during the tour.

My final guest blogger — on Day 14 of The Mystery We Write Blog Tour — is Pat Browning, the Tour’s organizer and “benign dictator.” Pat was born and raised in Oklahoma. A longtime resident of California’s San Joaquin Valley before moving back to Oklahoma in 2005, her professional writing credits go back to the 1960s, when she was a stringer for The Fresno Bee while working full time in a Hanford law office. Her globetrotting during the 1970s led her into the travel business, first as a travel agent, then as a correspondent for TravelAge West, a trade journal published in San Francisco. In the 1990s, she signed on fulltime as a newspaper reporter and columnist, first at The Selma Enterprise and then at The Hanford Sentinel. Her first mystery, Absinthe Of Malice was published by Krill Press in 2008. An extensive excerpt can be read at Google Books. Visit Pat’s blog at: pbrowning.blogspot.com

“Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter/Sermons and soda water the morning after.” – George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Second.

“As writers, we want our audience to stay with us all the way to The End. Fiction or fact, fantasy or biography, no matter how lofty or lowdown, our first requirement is to recognize that we must entertain.” – Screenwriter, playwright, author Thomas B. Sawyer, Fiction Writing Demystified

One of the small newspapers where I worked in the 1990s is a more sterile place now, with reporters ensconced in their own little cubicles. Still, I won’t forget my first day in the old newsroom. Another new hire didn’t have a chair. He sat on a stack of old telephone books.

Those were the fun days. It was a given that another of my small work places would show up almost intact in my first mystery, Absinthe of Malice. Here it is:

The newsroom smelled faintly of cheese. Cramped, cluttered with debris from a thousand deadlines. I could swear the walls moved closer together every day.
Funny thing, though. When everyone was there, with phones ringing, computers clacking, the printer and fax machine churning out paper by the yard, the clutter appeared to serve a real purpose. On a quiet Sunday morning like this, the newsroom had about as much charm as a pigsty.

The sports editor’s desk slumped against the back wall, a convenient backstop for the out-of-town newspapers he collected and read late at night, after he wrote his copy for the day.

Jiggs had left his desk in a state of shock. An old pizza box, bits of dried cheese stuck to the open lid, covered the seat of his chair. Fax messages, edges now curling, lay on the bottom of the box. Garlands of yellow sticky notes hung from his computer monitor. On his desk, a hodgepodge of newspapers, phone directories, magazines and junk mail teetered in precarious stacks.

Maxie’s desktop was clean, her workspace—it didn’t help to think about it.
Shug’s contact sheets were on Elmo’s desk, just as he said they were. I took the sheets to my desk, got out my loupe, started through the photos. Found the one of Maxie and Editha coming out of the hotel’s espresso bar, examined it in detail.

Maxie’s right hand was plunged into her knapsack. Was she putting something into the knapsack, or taking something out? They looked like any other two women coming out of the espresso bar after a little friendly gossip over frozen lattes, or whatever they drank.

I looked at all the other photos. There were none of Merrily or Layton at Egg Foo’s. Shug had taken several photos of people entering or leaving through the arched doorway, but none of the Swanns. If either of them went in, they must have used the side door.

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. Maxie, I said silently, give me a sign.

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Of all the reviewers of Absinthe of Malice, author Donna Fletcher Crow is the only one to mention my newspaper experience. She wrote: “Browning’s obvious knowledge of small town newspaper business is a perfect background for the savvy Penny Mackenzie who by the end of the book has not only solved the mystery of several deaths and disappearances, righted an ancient wrong or two, but also has her personal life set on a most interesting track. A very satisfying read.”

Absinthe of Malice can be ordered through any bookstore. It’s available in paper or eBook format from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

John M. Daniel, my guest blogger on Day 13 of The Murder We Write Blog Tour, was born in Minnesota, raised in Texas, and educated in Massachusetts and California. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University and a Writer in Residence at Wilbur Hot Springs. He has taught fiction writing at UCLA Extension and Santa Barbara Adult Education and was on the faculty of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference for nearly twenty years. He now teaches creative writing for Humboldt State University Extended Education. John’s stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines. His thirteen published books include four mysteries: Play Melancholy Baby, The Poet’s Funeral, Vanity Fire, and Behind the Redwood Door, recently published by Oak Tree Press. Visit John’s website at www.johnmdaniel.com

Ron is certainly on target when he says the primary function of mystery fiction is to entertain. That’s why the characters are quirky, why the plots are fast and surprising, and why the whole premise is often a puzzle pitting the wits of the reader against those of the writer. Sheer entertainment is why we keep turning those pages, why we sometimes laugh out loud, and why our response to the story is, over and over again: “Aha!”

It’s why, once we’re seduced into an author’s tangled fictional world, we read avidly till we turn the last page and sadly close the book. And then what do we do? We find out what else the author wrote, and we takes steps (let’s hope it’s steps to our local independent bookseller) to pick up another book by the same author. Why? Because we’re fans. And why are we fans? Because that author’s so damned entertaining.

Reading mysteries is fun, and I believe the most enjoyable mysteries are those where we can tell, we can be certain, dead sure, that the author was having just as good a time writing the tale as we’re having reading it. I never met Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard, but I’ll bet my tin whistle those two scribes grin like sailors at a hootchie kootchie show while their fingers dance over the keyboard and their words pop up before them on the screen.

Now let me pause for a minute and get back to Ron’s original premise: that the mystery novel’s number-one function is to entertain readers. Yes, that’s so. But I also add a close second. I maintain that every fiction writer, and perhaps especially every mystery writer, has a moral lesson to sell. We write to make this planet a better place for humans and other fellow earthlings to live.

Does this sound outrageously highfalutin? Well think about it: isn’t the basic premise of all crime fiction: “Crime should not pay”? Sometimes the bad guys win, but readers pity the victim and root for the hero, and although they may be amused by the villain, we love most of all to see that scoundrel get his or her comeuppance.

I believe most writers of crime fiction — and I bet this includes Ron and Janet Benrey — want to preach at least a little bit about right and wrong. But any writer knows that no reader’s going to sit still and listen to a sermon, especially if there’s anything good on TV. So what do the writers of mystery do? They wrap their message into a gift of entertainment. It wins the audience over every time.

What makes a novel entertaining? I’ve already mentioned the quirky characters, the surprising plot, and the challenge of whodunit. But what works best of all for me—what keeps me reading, and also what keeps me tapping the keyboard when I’m in the zone—is style.

Style is what makes Elmore Leonard such a wizard at dialogue. That guy has an ear for ethnic speech patterns and oddball phraseology. And his patches (sometimes pages) of conversation crackle with humor, personality, and plot. By the end of every conversation, something important has changed. We can’t wait to read more, because that dialogue has been so engaging, so clear, so entertaining.

Take Carl Hiaasen. That guy gets every scene, and every chapter, off and running from word one, builds to a surprising climax, and leaves us with a piece of action or dialogue that downright forces us to turn the page.

For me the essence of style is language. Each writer has his or her own style. That’s what gives wings to our words, what makes writing the infectious fun it is. “No other writer would use these words in just this way,” the writer rejoices. “That’s my voice.”

That’s how I feel about my writing, and I hope it shows in my books. I write mysteries in the first person voice, so I have the advantage of a well-spoken, wise-cracking protagonist named Guy Mallon. His language is ironic and surprising, with a touch of the noir. He knows how to tell a tale, and I confess I’ve learned a lot from Guy.

I think you’ll enjoy meeting Guy Mallon, and I invite you to make his acquaintance in his newest adventure, Behind the Redwood Door, a mystery set on California’s north coast, a land of rocky shores and tall redwood trees. If I’ve done my job right, by the time you finish Chapter One, you’ll be so entertained that you’ll race into Chapter Two, and on and on until I’ve sold you the whole package, including the lesson that crime should not pay.

Behind the Redwood Door is sold by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It can be ordered by your local independent bookseller, or bought directly from the publisher at www.oaktreebooks.com. For an autographed copy, call John at 1-800-662-8351.

Award-winning author Alice Duncan is my guest blogger on Day 12 of The Mystery We Write Blog Tour. Alice lives with a herd of wild dachshunds (enriched from time to time with fosterees from New Mexico Dachshund Rescue) in Roswell, New Mexico. She’s not a UFO enthusiast; she’s in Roswell because her mother’s family settled there fifty years before the aliens crashed. Alice no longer longs to return to California, although she still misses the food, not to mention her children, one of whom is there and the other of whom is in Nevada. Alice would love to hear from you at alice@aliceduncan.net. And be sure to visit her Web site at www@aliceduncan.net

I love mysteries primarily because in mysteries the good guys win and the bad guys are caught and punished. That doesn’t always happen in real life. In fact, recently it seems that it NEVER happens in real life!

In my own books the characters pretty much lead the way, mainly because I’m often plot-challenged. At the moment, I have three historical cozy mystery series going, all of which are set in the 1920s. I hadn’t planned to have three series going at the same time, but odd things happen in the publishing industry.

My favorite books feature a phony spiritualist named Daisy Gumm Majesty and are set in my own home town, Pasadena, California, during the early twenties. Daisy manages to get into all kinds of trouble, even though it’s seldom her fault. Try telling that to her husband Billy or his best friend, Detective Sam Rotondo. Daisy and Sam are almost always at cross-purposes. Daisy became a spiritualist at the ripe old age of ten, when someone gave her aunt an old Ouija board, she used it, people believed what she was telling them, and she figured what the heck. Thus a spiritualist was born. And a good thing, too, since Daisy has to support her poor, war-injured husband and contribute to her family’s income. Daisy, Billy, Daisy’s mom and dad and her aunt Viola all live together in a nice bungalow on South Marengo Avenue in Pasadena. In Daisy’s latest book, Genteel Spirits, Daisy is hired to be spiritual advisor to a temperamental silent-screen star named Lola de la Monica. Unfortunately for Daisy, Sam is stationed on the same set as she. Also unfortunately, something happens that Daisy needs to keep from Sam, who is too perceptive for Daisy’s good.

Then there are my “Mercy Allcutt” books. Mercy, a Boston Brahmin, comes to Los Angeles to live with her sister Chloe and Chloe’s movie-producer husband, Harvey Nash. Mercy’s sick to death of her ivory tower in Boston and wants to get to know how the “real” world works, much to her parents’ dismay. In order to do this of-the-people thing, she gets a JOB! No female in Mercy’s entire family has ever obtained a job of work before. What’s worse, the job she gets is secretary to a jaded ex-cop turned P.I., Ernie Templeton. Together and apart, Mercy and Ernie have many adventures, most of which Ernie tries to keep Mercy away from. Mercy, however, has other ideas. Mercy’s latest book is Fallen Angels, in which a wealthy Los Angeles matron, Persephone Chalmers, is conked on the head and pushed down a flight of stairs. In order to solve her murder, Mercy goes so far as to attend the Angelica Gospel Hall, which I fashioned after Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare Church of God. The book takes place in 1926.

Pecos Valley Revival, book #2 in my “Pecos Valley” books, takes place in Roswell, New Mexico, where I now live (although I call it Rosedale in the books). It’s early October 1923, and three interesting things are going on in the generally dull town of Rosedale: the fall cattle drive, the fall rodeo, and a tent revival. Annabelle Blue is excited about the first two events. The last one might be okay if it weren’t for the Reverend Milo Strickland’s sister, Esther, whose ethereal loveliness has captivated all the men in town, including Annabelle’s long-time beau, Phil Gunderson. When a couple of murders take place, to the shock and horror of the entire town, Annabelle goes into action.

My favorite mysteries are cozies, and I love historical mysteries. Not for me the grim and gritty, thank you very much. If I want to be depressed, all I have to do is wake up in the morning. When I read, I want to be entertained, and I hope my books provide entertainment to others.

Here are purchase links for Alice’s recent novels. Pecos Valley Revival (featuring Annabelle Blue and set in Roswell, NM, in 1923). Fallen Angels (featuring Mercedes Louise Allcutt and set in Los Angeles, CA, in 1926). Genteel Spirits (featuring Daisy Gumm Majesty, and set in Pasadena, CA, in 1922).

Wendy (W.S.) Gager — my intrepid guest blogger on Day 11 of the Murder We Write blog tour — has lived in Michigan for most of her life, except when she was interviewing race car drivers or professional woman’s golfers. She enjoyed the fast-paced life of a newspaper reporter until deciding to settle down. That’s when she realized that babies didn’t adapt well to running down story details on deadline. Since then she honed her skills on other forms of writing before deciding to do what she always wanted with her life and that was to write mystery novels. Her main character is Mitch Malone who is an edgy crime-beat reporter always on the hunt for the next Pulitzer and won’t let anyone stop him, supposedly. Visit her blog at wsgager.blogspot.com.

Picture a white trench coat, a ceiling fan moving the breeze and a femme fatale in need of private investigator to solve her problems. In film it would be Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon. Those hard-boiled crime novels and movies started a genre of mysteries that are growing in popularity today.

My hero Mitch Malone isn’t a private detective, but a newspaper reporter who displays some of the same characteristics as those noir heroes from the 1920s, 30s and 40s and then took to the screen in the 1940s and 1950s. He wears a leather bomber jacket not a trench coat and instead of gun, he carries a notebook in his back pants pocket and a camera in his jacket.

Mentality wise, Mitch is ready to be abused by females he perceives as femme fatales as Patrenka did in A Case of Infatuation. He has high hopes for the homecoming queen in my latest, A Case of Hometown Blues. Problem is she is found dead the next morning and Mitch is the prime suspect.

What is it about mysteries that have stood the test of time? The mystery sales have remained strong and even gaining in popularity after decades when other forms have come and gone. They are always fun, entertaining reads but the mystery genre offers something that others do not. It is the opportunity for the reader to pit himself/herself against both the author and sleuth to see if they can come up with the perpetrator of the crime before it is revealed.

This competition gives the readers something that isn’t in a romance or literary fiction. It gives the reader more incentive to pay attention to the small things and determine as they read what is important and what isn’t. Most things in America are too easily revealed. We sit in front of the TV for hours having information, jokes and dramas fed to us without any mental activity needed. Unlike the easy entertainment of TV, the mystery novel is one of those things where the reader still has to work and better yet think as they read. Each mystery is a more memorable book because you take a second and third look at each character as you try and figure out whodunit. This extra emphasis imbeds the plot and characters into a long range memory similar to one liners from movies. No one will ever forget Bogey’s line from Casablanca. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

While Mitch has never made it to the silver screen yet, he has some pretty good lines. Pick up a copy of the Mitch Malone Mysteries and see if you agree that it is pitting your brain against the sleuth that makes readers come back to mysteries often. Why do you think mysteries have increased in popularity. Let me know and leave a comment. You will be entered to win a copy of A Case Of Hometown Blues when the blog tour is over.

A Case of Hometown Blues is available in both paper and eBook versions at Amazon.com and other online book retailers.

Madeline (M.M.) Gornell is my guest blogger on Day 10 of The Murder We Write blog tour. M.M. has three published mystery novels — PSWA awarding winning Uncle Si’s Secret (2008), Death of a Perfect Man (2009), and her latest release, Reticence of Ravens (2010) — her first Route 66 Mystery. Reticence of Ravens is a 2011 Eric Hoffer Fiction finalist and Honorary Mention winner, the da Vinci Eye finalist, and a Montaigne Medalist finalist. M.M. continues to be inspired by historic Route 66, and has recently completed Lies of Convenience, which hopefully will have a 2011 winter release date. It is a tale that fictionally connects murder, truths untold, and Chicago’s Lake Michigan with California’s high desert on the opposite end of “The Mother Road.” Madeline is also a potter with a fondness for stoneware and reduction firing. She lives with her husband and assorted canines in the Mojave in a town on internationally revered Route 66. You can visit her online at her website www.mmgornell.com, or her blog mmgornell.wordpress.com

Thank you, Ron, for hosting me on your blog. Your blog topics—like so many others on this tour—are intriguing. Your questions, Why are readers entertained by mystery novels?–and What aspects of the mystery novels you read did you enjoy most? particularly caught my interest.

To start off with, I thought I should say what I call a “Mystery.” For me, it means “Murder Mystery”—a human being is killed by another human being—and the protagonist and reader need to figure out who did the dastardly deed. I think of entertainment as an activity that is fun, and holds your interest. Which I think, is the key (fun, that is) for all literature—fiction and non-fiction. I know someone who never reads fiction of any type, only non-fiction history, and he’s in heaven and completely captivated (entertained) for hours! I honestly don’t think fictional murder mysteries have any particular claim on reader enjoyment. Depends on who you are, and what tickles-your-fancy.

For me, murder mysteries are unique in that the underlying pinning for an author’s story is solving who done it, which in turn provides much of the impetus for the protagonist’s emotions, activities, and interactions—while simultaneously offering the reader a tricky puzzle to solve. But, solving the murder and bringing the bad guys and gals to some kind of justice is not the whole story. For me, the sense of place, the layers of back stories, the human emotions exposed, the characters’ psychological or emotional advancement—these are the key ingredients in a good story!

Which takes me to your other question—which is about the mysteries I read. If I could only read one novelist, it would be P.D. James. She does all those things I just mentioned to my taste, almost exactly. She is my literary guiding light. Also, your question of what aspects you like in a mystery novel, pointed out to me how much what you like to read affects what you write. That sounds obvious and very simplistic, but your own “voice,” literary trends, even the country you live in—can sometimes dilute how that obvious observation plays out. And like with everything else, no rule is hard-and-fast. As much as I like following her protagonist, Adam Dagliesh, I’ve so far been “compelled” by my inner muse to write standalones. Oh well…

Madeline’s books are available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and Smashwords, in paper and e-book formats. Here is the Amazon link for Reticence of Ravens.

Timothy Hallinan, my ninth guest blogger on The Mystery We Write Blog Tour, is giving us our second look this week at the joy of mystery fiction. Tim is eminently qualified to opine on the subject. He is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of the traditionally-published Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers (most recently The Queen of Patpong), and the Junior Bender mysteries, which are ebook originals. The newest Junior book is Little Elvises. Earlier this year, Hallinan conceived and edited a volume of original short stories by twenty first-rate mystery writers, Shaken: Stories for Japan, which is available for the Kindle at $3.99, with every penny of the price going to the 2011 Japan Relief Fund. (Please buy a copy.) Tim lives in Santa Monica and Southeast Asia, and he is lucky enough to be married to Munyin Choy. His website is www.timothyhallinan.com.

Ron asked us to muse about mystery novels. Here’s a secret: mystery writers muse about mystery novels all the time, but are rarely asked to pass on the results of our musing. So this is kind of a luxury; I get to talk and pretend you’re listening. (By the way, I’m broadening the topic slightly to include thrillers, since thrillers are what I write about half of the time.)

Right at the top of his list, Ron is kind enough to suggest we to comment on what (in our opinion) readers find so entertaining about mysteries and thrillers. I think there are two answers, one structural and one thematic.

Structurally, the mystery novel puts a big fat question mark at the very beginning of the book and then proceeds, over the course of however many pages, to work toward an answer. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that question marks are shaped like fish-hooks. The question almost literally hooks us in the opening pages and then the writer reels us over the intervening pages toward the answer. This is an ancient and honorable structure that Shakespeare and the Greeks didn’t scorn – both “Hamlet” and “Oedipus Rex” are mysteries. This device has worked for more than 2,500 years.

Thematically, mysteries are almost the only form of literature that focus on the restoration of order in the world. They virtually all begin with a world that’s broken—an unsolved crime, an unavenged wrong—and gradually put things right again, Among other things, this means that mysteries almost always have happy endings. In a time when so much of “literary fiction” can be described in the sentence, “Nothing happens for 300 pages and you still feel bad,” the tendency of mysteries to end well is comforting.

But in a mystery, most of the time, at the end of the book all is relatively right with the world.

I learned how much people depend on that when my first Poke Rafferty Bangkok thriller, A Nail Through the Heart, came out. One of the sub-plots was about a lost child who called himself Superman, a street kid who’d taken in the little three-year-old who is later (at the age of eight or nine) adopted by Poke and his Thai wife, Rose. At the very beginning of the book, Miaow—the adopted child—drops Poke’s hand and takes off at a dead run, chasing a scrawny, filthy, amphetamine-addled boy. A few minutes later, at her fevered insistence, the kid moves into the apartment the three of them share. Throughout the remainder of the book, the recovering Superman and Poke forge a very tentative allegiance. All sorts of other things are going on, but I felt this story very deeply as I wrote it, and apparently many of the book’s readers, felt it, too.

At the book’s conclusion, all does not end well for Superman. He doesn’t die or anything (in fact, he comes back in a later book), but his ending is equivocal. And I got, by actual count, about 700 e-mails raking me over the coals for not giving the kid a Hallmark ending. This was, by far, the biggest fan response of my career. I don’t regret what I did—in fact, a few other stories in the series have ended somewhat unhappily—but I learned that you mess with the “happy ending” convention at your peril.

In fact, earlier this year at Bouchercon in St. Louis (four years after Nail appeared in print) at least fifty people took me aside to make sure none of the continuing characters were going to end up badly in the new one. Several of them told me they start my books by reading the ending, just to make sure that no harm befalls Miaow, who’s now twelve or thirteen (no one know when she was actually born) and turning into a sometimes-troublesome teenager.

And finally, Ron asks what it is about mystery novels that I personally enjoy most. For me, the answer is character. I could not be less interested in the mechanics of whodunnit. What I want to experience is time with characters who fascinate me (whether I actually like them or not) at a point in their lives when the hidden good and bad come out. And I have to say, considering the reaction to what happened to Superman, my readers seem to agree that character is what matters most.

We’re halfway through the Murder We Write Blog Tour. Today — Day Eight — I’m delighted to welcome Jackie King as my guest blogger. Jackie loves books, words, and writing tall tales. She especially enjoys murdering the people she dislikes on paper. King is a full time writer who sometimes teaches writing at Tulsa Community College. Her latest novel, The Inconvenient Corpse is a cozy mystery. King has also written five novellas as co-author of the Foxy Hens Series. Warm Love on Cold Streets is her latest novella and is included in the anthology, The Foxy Hens Meet A Romantic Adventurer. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, RWI Inc., Oklahoma Writers Federation, and Tulsa Night Writers. Visit Jackie’s website at www.jacqking.com

Mystery novels are the best entertainment in the world. In the comfort and safety of one’s own home, a person can expand their lives by participating in vicarious dangers and intellectually challenging puzzles. Mysteries range from cozies to thrillers. I write cozies, but I read every mystery genre.

On winter days when Oklahoma streets are covered with inches of freezing rain, I sit in my buttery soft leather chair and read to my heart’s content. The sound of ice-laden branches cracking and falling outside, remind me how fortunate I am. A cup of coffee or tea or hot chocolate rests on the table nearby. What could be better?

Frantic friends call me with hysteria-edged voices and ask if I’m stir-crazy, too. ‘I’ve been housebound for days and I’m climbing the walls,’ they say, then ask me, ‘Are you going bonkers, too?’

I’m not, but daren’t say that because it sounds unkind. So I say, ‘I’m reading,’ but they don’t seem to hear. I suspect they’re bemoaning the weather, too loudly.

Mystery readers live exciting, adventurous and amusing lives. I’m so glad that I am one. Our travels take us all over the world, and sometimes beyond. We exercise our minds with the challenge of solving some of the stickiest murders imaginable. And often we know the villain before the protagonist tells ‘whodunit.’ But best of all, sometimes we don’t. And how we love that surprise ending!

There are many different types of mysteries, and we can pick or choose any that suits our fancy. I read from all mystery genres, but my favorite is the cozy or traditional mystery; stories involving an amateur sleuth. I fell in love with this type of story at an early age, and was an addict by age seven.

This compulsion to devour mysteries was the fault of my school-teacher mother, although her actions seemed innocent enough at the time. She received a vendor’s copy of The Secret at the Seashore, a Bobbsey Twin mystery, at State Teacher’s Meeting and brought it home to me. I was 5. One taste of matching wits to solve a crime and I was forever enslaved. As soon as I devoured one story, I had to have another. I finished the Bobbsey Twins series and almost panicked.

Then an older girl whispered to me about something even stronger—something called Nancy Drew. For a while I found relief in these teen stories, but soon they weren’t strong enough. An addict will find her fix somehow and I stumbled onto The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and I started mainlining Agatha Christie. I was a goner. Nothing would stop the craving except another book and then another book. So I wonder… are there any other souls in cyberland with the same affliction?

I’ll bet the answer is yes, because you found Ron’s blogsite. Ron’s a “pusher” (of mystery fiction) you know. After I read Dead As A Scone, I immediately had to download another of Ron and Janet’s books. (I told you I’d become an addict.)

For readers who enjoy cozy mysteries, here are some thoughts about my latest cozy mystery, The Inconvenient Corpse:

If Grace Cassidy had known she was going to find a naked corpse in her hotel bed, lose every penny she had in the world, and encounter zany characters straight from the Mad Hatter’s tea party, she might have kept her usual poise when she spotted husband Charlie’s mistress at their business convention in San Francisco. She wouldn’t have left in a temper to drive up the northern California coast. For sure she wouldn’t have stopped at the obscure Bed and Breakfast called Wimberly Place where she’s suddenly the prime suspect in a murder investigation.

In the mystery The Inconvenient Corpse, Grace comes to realize that she is made of a tougher fiber than she had thought. With the help of some zany strangers she hires on as the temporary inn sitter, where she bakes, cleans, and entertains as she works her way through the maze of conflicting stories told by the eccentric guests. Her detecting doesn’t go quite as she plans, but she muddles her way through and solves the crime.

The Inconvenient Corpse is Available (both eBook and paper versions) at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

My guest blogger on Day Seven of The Murder We Write Blog Tour is Jean Henry Mead, the author of 15 books, half of them novels. She’s also an award-winning photojournalist and children’s author of the Hamilton Kids’ series: Mystery of Spider Mountain and Ghost of Crimson Dawn. Her magazine articles have been published nationally as well as abroad and she served as a news, magazine and small press editor. Jean is native southern Californian who now lives in the Laramie Mountains with her husband and Australian Shepherd. Visit her website at: www.jeanhenrymead.com

Publishing is a crazy, unstable business and few writers earn enough money to pay their expenses. The last I heard, 95% of us earn less than $15,000 a year and the average book sells fewer than 99 copies.

So why would anyone in her right mind devote so much time and effort to writing and marketing books? Is it the desire to give birth to something unique? A need for recognition? Or the desire to inform and entertain? Perhaps I can’t answer the question. I just know that writing is imprinted in my DNA.

I sold my first book in 1981, a collection of interviews with politicians, authors, artists, craftsmen and ordinary people who had accomplished extraordinary things. The book was published by Pruett Publishing in Boulder, Colorado, and sold some 2,000 copies. I traveled around the state to take part in signing parties and sold 40 books the first time at a small town in eastern Wyoming. My signing parties slid downhill from there.

My second book required more than three years of research and writing. I shudder to think how little I’ve earned for my time spent although the books sold steadily over the years from two publishers and eventually became a college textbook. My third was a book of interviews with well-known writers of the West, including Louis L’Amour and Hollywood screenwriters. It’s still selling online but I’ve never received a royalty payment because I was told it didn’t earn out its advance.

After checking WorldCat, the library site, I found that there are still copies of Maverick Writers available in 114 libraries, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Baverische Staaftsbibliothek in Munich, Germany. Now, there’s a reason to continue writing. The advance I received barely covered travel expenses, so satisfaction and eternal hope are also motivations to continue writing as well as the satisfaction I receive from it.

I then decided to write my first novel from leftover microfilm research. Escape on the Wind took a number of years to write and was helped along by the advice of two award-winning western authors, Richard S. Wheeler and Fred Grove. It’s now in its fourth edition and retitled
Escape, a Wyoming Historical Novel. It remains my best selling book.

I next began work on my first mystery novel, originally titled Shirl Lock & Holmes, a humorous senior sleuth novel, which was originally published in 1999 as an ebook and later in hardcover with another publisher, which eventually closed its doors. I then changed the characters’ names and it was republished as A Village Shattered in print, Kindle and multi-format.

I’ve written a number of nonfiction books along the way, none of which sold more than several hundred copies, so I decided to write what I enjoy reading most: another mystery novel, Diary of Murder, the second in my Logan & Cafferty series, which was followed by my recent release, Murder on the Interstate. I enjoy writing about my senior sleuths, Dana Logan and Sarah Cafferty, two 60-year-old, feisty widows who are not afraid to push the envelope when it comes to crime detection, or to brave the elements by driving their motorhome through a Rocky Mountain blizzard. Dana and Sarah are like old friends whom I thoroughly enjoy visiting each day and eavesdropping on their conversations.

I think I’ve found the answer to the question I asked. I write because it’s fun and deeply satisfying.

Jean’s latest Logan & Cafferty mystery/suspense novel, Murder on the Interstate, is available at: Amazon.com (print and Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (Nook)

Day Six of the Mystery We Write Blog Tour gives me the pleasure of welcoming Marilyn Meredith, the author of over thirty published novels, including the award winning Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series, the latest Bears With Us from Mundania Press. Writing as F. M. Meredith, her latest Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novel is Angel Lost, the third from Oak Tree Press. Marilyn is a member of EPIC, Four chapters of Sisters in Crime, including the Central Coast chapter, Mystery Writers of America, and on the board of the Public Safety Writers of America. Visit her at fictionforyou.com and her blog at marilymeredith.blogspot.com.

The reason I love both reading and writing mystery novels is because in most cases the “bad guy” get caught in the end—something that doesn’t always happen in real life. Yes, mystery novels can be a form of escapism, but they have developed into far more.

Many of today’s mysteries are as literary as any so-called mainstream novel. I’m thinking Louise Penny, James Lee Burke, William Kent Krueger, Dennis Lehane, Nancy Pickard as well as an author on tour with us, Michael Orenduff.

That doesn’t mean that’s the only kind of mystery that I read, frankly, I love them all. I like to read about new places — and today’s mystery authors are so good about really letting the reader experience a place through their characters’ eyes, it’s almost like being there. My least favorite mysteries are the ones that are a bit too cutesy — but I know there are many who love them too. Isn’t it great we have so many varieties of mysteries to choose from?

I’ve been reading mysteries since I was a kid, Nancy Drew, of course, and then moving on to Mickey Spillane when I was in high school. (I kept the book in a brown cover so no one would know what I was reading.) I fell in love with Perry Mason and read other mysteries by Erle Stanley Gardner. Learned in later years that he wrote four books at once, dictating to four secretaries. I moved on to many other mystery series and authors through the years. One of my favorites was Ed McBain and I read all of his series.

I was particularly fond of Tony Hillerman’s writings which I’m sure had an influence on me wanting to write about Indians. When I learned about the Indians who lived where I lived, not surprisingly I live in a mountain community near a reservation; I decided to write a series about a Native American female deputy. Tempe lives and works in the fictional town of Bear Creek which is located in the mountains — the Southern end of the Sierra Nevada in Central California. The Bear Creek Indian Reservation is also nearby — and in earlier books she’s been called upon to help with investigations of murders in or involving residents of the rez.

In the latest, Bears With Us, Tempe is called upon to chase pesky, and sometimes dangerous, bears off the school grounds, out of people’s homes and apple orchards. Of course that’s not all, there’s a woman with an unusual form of dementia who disappears from home, a prominent woman who makes a complaint about both Tempe and her husband, the discovery of an old and secret romance, and a young teen who commits suicide with parents who are hiding something.

When we first moved to our small town, I interviewed our resident deputy for the local newspaper. I also went on several ride-alongs with the police in the next larger town—including a female officer who opened her heart to me during a long, rather uneventful tour. Along the way, I’ve managed to meet and become friends with several native people and now have a one-half Indian daughter-in-law who resembles Tempe — or the other way around, and one-quarter Indian great-granddaughter. I’m counting on all this giving me the credentials to write about our local Indians.

My desire is that the reader will relate to Tempe and follow along with her as she tries to solve the problems that arise as she does her job as the resident deputy of the small mountain community. I also hope that they’ll enjoy getting to know Tempe and the often unique people who live in and around Bear Creek.

Bears With Us is both a trade paperback and an e-book and can be purchased in all the usual places as well as directly from the publisher: mundania.com