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.

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