1. photograph of mystery author claudia bishop

    2. Accidental Crimes

      I didn’t set out to write culinary cozies, of course. I don’t know that any of us did. The first Hemlock Falls novel appeared in late 1994, at a time when the publishing industry was shaking off the remnants of a belief in the writer as individual contributor and preparing to buttress its commitment to fiction as a commodity. Those of us with food in our mystery discovered we were part of a sub-genre when we published back then. It didn’t appear to be a good thing or a bad thing. It just happened.

      I came up with the idea for a plot-driven puzzle mystery in 1993. Just one. With a pair of sisters as amateur sleuths, who didn’t solve the crime. The town sheriff did, which police professionals generally do. And I wanted it to be funny. Now, I’ve never been sure how to evaluate my own sense of humor except that I know it’s not very commercial. I don’t understand why my stepchildren laugh at Adam Sandler, or why people laughed at Johnny Carson or now, Jay Leno.

      I don’t get the Osbournes. And I’m embarrassed to mention this in a public forum, but I think Woody Allen is cruel, which makes me feel unsophisticated.

      On the other hand, every time I see John Cleese try to return his parrot to the pet store, I laugh so hard I fall off the couch. P.G. Wodehouse prostrates me. Some scenes in Carl Hiaasen’s early novels are the funniest in contemporary American fiction. So what I do know about my sense of humor is that it’s based on the deadpan, and the absurd, on the juxtaposition between the profoundly real and the nutty. This is the best challenge I face as a writer: to make myself laugh.

      Although I’d never realized until I began to write this article, the setting came before anything else when I began to write the first Hemlock Falls novel. It’s because I wanted to write a particular kind of funny. A loopy, off-the-wall kind of funny, skirting whimsy. But it’s really hard to sustain whimsy in a murder mystery. Because the other thing I wanted to do was write about why people kill other people. And that’s only funny in a grim, savage black humor kind of way, which is not whimsical at all. Stout and Christie and Innes all wrote about murder in a whimsical way in safe settings. It was part of the reason I loved to re-read them. So I decided to place my murders a safe setting, too. A reassuring setting.

      It didn’t take me very long to create Hemlock Falls, the village where Meg and Quill run their twenty-seven-room Inn. Hemlock Falls is a lot like the town I live in most of the year, except there aren’t any waterfalls, so I added those, and there aren’t any great restaurants (although we have some sock-o diners) so I added those. The only murder in town for the past fifteen years was a guy who whacked his wife over the head with a rake and then sat there until the police arrived, so I had to add some interesting murders, of course. I didn’t want any murderers actually living in Hemlock Falls. (Ugh!) So I added a twenty-seven-room Inn to my fictional gourmet restaurant so the murderers and victims could check in and out.

      It didn’t take me long to create my two squabbling sleuths, either. I don’t like to refer to Meg and Quill as characters. They are really types. I mean.

      Hercule Poirot isn’t a character in the way that Falstaff is a character, or Hamlet, or Gatsby. Poirot is a type. Meg and Quill are types. And as types, they have identifiable and slightly comic traits that don’t need to be explained, although I can tell you where I stole them from: I have a short, volatile little sister who is a sensational cook (and an even better horsewoman) and my best friend and I have made squabbling into an art form, so Meg sprang forth, if not fully formed from the brow of Zeus, like Athena, at least close to it. And I admit that Quill herself has a lot of my own discursive, indecisive qualities. And neither one of us can drive worth a bucket of warm spit.

      Of course I didn’t have a novel yet. A novel is a big effort. You have to be motivated for a long time to stick with it. My very first novel (it wasn’t a mystery) took me two years and seventeen drafts. Four of the drafts were handwritten. The final draft was 122,000 words. You have to have a really good reason to work that long and that hard. (Unless you’re crazy.) You have to have a story.

      Now, the first part of sitting down to write a story is easy for me. I need to be indignant about something. My threshold for indignancy is very low. I get indignant about all kinds of stuff, mostly pollution. Not the oil spill kind of pollution. I get very cranky over spoilers. Like the people who tell you nasty gossip about you for your own good. The kind of people who pollute a happy view of the universe with ugly facts because they are mean and malicious.

      Having a low tolerance for this kind of thing is why I write the kid of light entertainment that I do, in the kind of setting that I’ve chosen, about people who aren’t characters, but types. If, for example, I wanted to write story about a woman who went to Kabul to tell the Afghanis what she thought of their treatment of women, I would fail utterly. I’m not equipped to deal with evil on an epochal scale, although I love reading books from writers who are. As a writer who can make up whole stories out of indignation, dudgeon and spleen, however, I am well within my area of expertise.

      Except when it comes to plot. I hate plotting. I spend months on plotting. I have no idea why it’s so hard for me. I do know that I hate it more than anything. I would write for free if my publisher let me write ambient fiction: no plot, no characters, just atmosphere. But I have to say, when I do get the wretched thing plotted, I am one happy woman. I love trickery, misdirection, red herrings and all that legitimate fakery. I spend happy hours dropping all that stuff in when the bloody plot is finished.

      I’ve wandered a bit from my essay premise — but here it is! Finally!

      Back in 1993, I threw all these elements together: Meg and Quill, the Inn, Hemlock Falls with its waterfalls and great restaurants, a PAINFULLY plotted funny plot, and mailed it off to my agent, who called in a few weeks and said that he’d sold three.

      -Three?

      -Yeah, he said. And they really like the food angle. They’re going to emphasize the food angle.

      -There’s not really a food angle, I said. There’s food IN it, sure, because Meg is a gourmet chef because when I write I get hungrier than usual so I end up writing about what I’m thinking, but there’s not really a FOOD angle. As such.

      -Three, he said, firmly.

      So I suppose I do write culinary cozies, in the same way that Rex Stout wrote culinary cozies, which is to say, there is food in my books. And I suppose, if you want to get analytical about it, food is an integral part of my books in a couple of ways. Food is sometimes part of the plot — Just Desserts turns on a dessert competition and Steak in Murder on a recipe for a beef marinade. Meg’s attitude toward food is a defining trait of her character, so food is an occasional contributor to character.

      But food is always part of my setting. It’s a part of that warm, reassuring feeling I look for when I write.

      So I didn’t set out to write a series. Nor did I intend to write a culinary cozy. But here I am — thirteen years and fifteen books later having done just that.

      It’s a great way to make a living.

      Read how Claudia created Austin McKenzie in Well-Schooled in Murder.

    2. Dearest Readers:

      I published my first novel in 1988. If my then-agent had said to me: “You’re to spend a good portion of your earnings each year on arranging personal appearances, buying print advertising, and paying for bookmarks, posters, direct mail campaigns, and publicists” I would have thought long and hard about the advisability of becoming a pro. Investing in self-promotion made no sense back then. Total earnings from that first novel were twenty thousand dollars (less my agent’s ten percent). If I’d spent any money on advertising the book myself, I’d have needed a subsidy to pay the mortgage and the grocery bills, either from a domestic partner or a day job. If conditions today had obtained back then, I’d have looked on writing as an avocation, not a profession.

      When I began my career, the ‘publicity partnership’ between writer and publisher was only a gleam in some CFO’s eye. It was possible, then, for a reasonably productive mid-list writer to make a living. The publisher profited, too. Readership was climbing. Bookstore chains were expanding. Although the novel wasn’t the cultural icon it had been in the early and mid-20th century, writers of all but porn and Harlequin romances had a modicum of respect from the media- not to mention your Uncle Cyrus and the man who delivered the heating oil.

      For nearly twenty years, I was a pretty contented midlist writer. I wrote from my office at home. I visited a few conventions every year. If I were in a bookstore, I’d offer to sign stock. If I were invited to participate on a panel, I’d do it, and happily. On the other hand, if someone invited me to speak, unless it was a charitable cause and my conscience plagued me, I’d turn the offer down. I really didn’t enjoy teaching the craft itself. I never toured, I never sent out postcards, or gave away stuff, or hired a publicist, or purchased prime space in a bookstore or took out an ad in a trade magazine, much less the New York Times. Until three years ago, I didn’t have a website. I figured if my publisher thought these things made financial sense, they’d do them for me. I thought this: My job is to make a living writing books that sell. The publisher’s job is to make a profit choosing what books to sell and how to sell them. A nice, uncomplicated division of labor in concept-(although frequently flawed in execution, I must admit.)

      I had lunch with my editor in New York a few months after the royalty checks for 2004 were issued. My backlist was down. Which was okay, she said, because everyone’s backlist was down. People weren’t reading as much as they used to. What was important was the steady increase orders for my new novels over the past years.

      Well, the latest data on the reading habits of Americans illustrated my editor’s concern for the future of commercial fiction as a category. (Here are the results of the study.) But that didn’t explain why readers were happy with the new Hemlock Falls novels, but were reading fewer of the old ones.

      “What’s going on,” my editor said, “is that you’re the only writer I know who refuses to lift a finger to promote your books. The bookstores don’t keep all of your backlist on hand unless there’s a demand. If you got out more, it’d help a lot.”

      I responded the way I’ve always responded to nudges from my publishers about self-promotion: “I’m flummoxed in front of a crowd. I hate talking about myself. And financially, the bottom line doesn’t make sense.” And then, in a burst of nervous defensiveness, “Why would people want to actually see me, anyway? Basically, I’m all about the books.”

      “Ten years ago, when you started writing mysteries it didn’t matter. Five years ago, it began to matter. Now, it matters a lot.”

      I’ve had a pleasant, happily productive career for almost twenty years. I write entertainments for intelligent women with the flu. I write escape novels for middle grade readers. I do it from my farm in Upstate New York in the summers and our small place in Florida in the winters. And no, I haven’t gotten out at all.

      But I will in the future! Times have changed, and I’m going to try to move with them. I’ll be happy to come to bookstores with my cooking demonstration COOKING FOR ONE HUNDRED AND TWO—102 being the number of seats available in the dining room of the Inn at Hemlock Falls. And I’m available for lectures to book clubs, libraries and other organizations. Just e-mail me and ask.

    2. The Importance of Being Earnest or Billy Bob or a Man Named Sue

      By Lucienne Diver

      Lucienne Diver is a partner in the long–established Spectrum Literary Agency. Her advice to Claudia has been invaluable over the years.

      I was pretty daunted when Claudia asked me to contribute here from time to time, because I have to admit that I’m all talked out on thosesubjects most people want to hear about—what an agent does, how we work, how rejection letters should be interpreted, etc. No one wants to hear me babble on about my newest addictions (jewelry making and scrapbooking) or the fact that Joss Whedon is my idol or the latest adorable thing my five-and-a-half year old writer/actor/director has done. So, what’s left to say?

      Well, I could get on my soap box and talk about how I feel the term “literary” fiction strikes me as demeaning other types of fiction as “non-literary” by implication, but I’ve decided to go positive. I’m going to talk about something I feel passionate about–character, point of view, VOICE.

      I once had an aspiring writer respond to a rejection with, “I don’t understand. You represent fantasy; I write fantasy.” If only it were that easy. I find more often than not what pushes me over the edge from liking to loving is the voice. It can be quirky or sassy, ironic or homespun, but is always that of a character I want to follow on adventures, whatever they may be. This would probably explain my eclectic list. I’ve taken on everything from Southern commercial literary suspense through rip-roaring romance to science fiction, fantasy and young adult fiction. Yes, I love the diversity, even try to make a rounded list one of my criteria, but each time I’ve been led to explore something new it’s been because of the wonderful, exceptional voice calling like a siren song. I want characters who turn convention on its ear, who express things in a way that only they could, who aren’t stock or studied but are just brashly, unrepentantly themselves. Or, hey, not brash and unrepentant at all, sardonic and self-deluding, or—well, that’s the point, I don’t know them until I see them because they’re so uniquely themselves. I want characters who live and breathe so that I find myself thinking I’d love to sit down with them and chat or there’s no way I’d let them near the good china.

      At the same time, I want characters with whom I can identify. There are authors out there whose books I have to lay aside for a while to give my stomach a chance to settle after eating itself up out of concern for the characters. There are books I have to read in fifty-page increments because that’s as much as I can get through without the tears pouring down my face. I don’t like to cry. I’ll fight you on it, but if you can make me laugh or cry or emote in any way, you’ve hooked me. If you make a reader connect, you make us care, we’ll do your selling for you—rave about it to our friends, family, and, in an agent’s case, editors.

      That’s what it’s all about.

    2. Well-Schooled in Murder

      I think most mystery readers have a particular fondness for mysteries set in academe. Certainly the setting is ideal for mystery writers with a preference for the classic puzzle plot: the crime occurs in an enclosed universe with a sophisticated atmosphere and features a cast of well-educated victims and villains with intricate motives for malice and mayhem. Writers JoAnne Dobson, Amanda Cross, and Dorothy Sayers—whose GAUDY NIGHT ranks as the greatest academic mystery ever—are writers I read and re-read every year with enormous pleasure.

      But there’s no denying that academic settings are one step removed from the scarier realities of the outside world, and that fact contributed to the creation of my seventy-two year old detective Austin McKenzie, DVM, Professor Emeritus of Bovine Sciences. There were three college professors in my immediate family before my parents passed on, four if you count my brother-in-law. And although both my parents left teaching and research for the wider world, they had a persistent nostalgia for that way of life (undoubtedly colored by the fact that they weren’t in the middle of it anymore.) So when Austin settled onto my shoulder and demanded my attention, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how he would handle life outside the security of his former university.

      Austin sets himself up as a detective because he’s broke. He put his retirement income into Enron stock. He and his wife Madeline live in Summersville, a village located ten miles from the Cornell school of agriculture, where he’s spent forty years studying cows. His immediate response to the loss of his retirement income is to set up as a veterinarian. But a LOT of veterinarians settle just outside Cornell. It’s one of the best vet schools in the country, and that part of New York State is as beautiful as the southern part of England. Austin and Madeline are just making ends meet when his first murder case presents itself. And as one of Austin’s clients points out in The Case of the Tough-Talking Turkey, there’s a ton of vets around Summersville, but only one detective agency. Austin is well-aware that diversification is a hedge against tough times in business, so he opens Case Closed, Inc., as an adjunct arm of McKenzie Veterinary Services, Inc. (Practice Limited To Large Animals.)

      Austin’s assistants Joe Turnblad and Allegra Fullbright, are grad students at the vet school. His best friend—and chief nemesis Victor Bergland—has taken over Austin’s former career as Chair of the Department of Bovine Sciences. And most of the cases that make up the series The Casebooks of Dr. McKenzie come from his association with his former university. So, tensions occasionally arise because, while Austin is surrounded by academe, he is not in it anymore. These tensions really help flesh out his character, and make me fonder of him than of any other amateur detective I’ve made up in the course of my mystery writing career.

      Claudia explains the genesis of the Hemlock Falls series in Accidental Crimes.

    2. Words from Central Park West: Books vs. Film

      by Lucienne Diver

      Lucienne Diver is a partner in the long–established Spectrum Literary Agency. Her advice to Claudia has been invaluable over the years.

      Something that always surprises me is seeing new writers talk about the timeliness of their novels based on what’s happening in the film industry. For example, “Fantasy is hot right now, as evidenced by recent films like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.” To start, these were books first and the movies, which lagged years behind, were not at the forefront of the trend but were made because of the popularity of the books. This is not to say that more obscure books are not made into movies and that films don’t increase book sales. Both of these things happen, of course. The point is that publishing and film are two completely different fields and while they may chase each other—books based on movies (tie-ins, novelizations, visual dictionaries, etc.) and movies based on books or comics—they’re seldom in the same place at the same time.

      For example, women’s fiction is hot in publishing right now, whether it be romance, chick-lit, lady-lit, or genre novels, like cozy mysteries, with strong female protagonists. On the flip side of that, male stars continue to dominate the box office, so it’s more difficult to option a book featuring a female lead. Not impossible, of course, and there are exceptions, like Tomb Raider, which come immediately to mind. Overall, though, the field is still very male-dominated. Horror, which for many years was anathema in publishing and had to be sold under alternate labels like “dark fantasy” or “supernatural suspense,” is a Hollywood mainstay.

      All of the above is a long-winded way of saying that if you want to get a sense of what’s happening now, take a look at forthcoming and recently published books, but keep in mind that even in publishing, we have a lag time—a delay from the time the book is bought to when it is turned in and then published—often of more than a year. So, what is a savvy writer to do? In theory, if you’re submitting your work to an agent or editor, you’re doing so because he or she is already an expert in your field. (For the purposes of simplicity, I’ll continue on with “she.”) This being the case, she’ll probably have a better take on the pulse of the market than someone who doesn’t work within it on a daily basis. Don’t stress over categorizing your work and convincing us there’s a market for the kind of books we already represent. Just concentrate on writing the best and most original work you can and then on targeting the right agents with a polished, professional submission.

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