Southern Fried Mysteries

by Cathy Pickens

Good blogs are hard to find, which is why I’m glad Kathy Patrick agreed to keep herding this one. Why read a blog? Don’t you have enough to read already?

I can think of one reason to read this one: because it will help you find new writers. Did you know that, just ten years ago, fewer than 200,000 new books were published that year? Fewer than 20,000 of those new books were fiction titles. Know how many will be published this year? Are you ready for this??

More than 1 MILLION NEW BOOKS!

On one hand, that’s good news. We have lots more to read. But let’s face it, even if you are Super Reader and chug through four books a week, you can read only 200 books a year. Most of us don’t have even that much time. So how can we make sure we aren’t wasting our time on less-than-good books? Or books that might be great for someone else but wrong for us?

Blogs and book clubs. That’s how. So I’m glad to meet all y’all. Together, we’ll discover some books and some writers we’ll enjoy.

By way of howdy, I grew up in South Carolina, where my family has been for right at 300 years. The other family branches settled in the western North Carolina mountains. In other words, we don’t get out much. Or, as I prefer to see it, when you’ve found a good thing, stick there.

My books are set in Upstate South Carolina, in hill country, where I grew up. Yes, the Southern Appalachian chain dips into South Carolina—where they filmed the movie Deliverance. And yes, South Carolina can be just as crazy as what creeps out into the national press. We’re perversely proud of it, too. But that’s another blog.

The series started when Southern Fried won St. Martin’s Malice Domestic Award for Best Traditional Mystery. Four more books followed (in order): Done Gone Wrong, Hog Wild, Hush My Mouth, and Can’t Never Tell. [I still think it’s funny that a big New York publishing house owned by an international conglomerate let me keep those titles. Gotta love ’em for that.]

Attorney Avery Andrews returns to her small town after a spectacular courtroom blow-up, where she had had enough of her own lying witness. She doesn’t plan to stay. She just needs to lick her wounds, have some Thanksgiving turkey, and head back to the big city and another big law firm.

But something happens – she finds you can go home again. And she finds that her quirky family and friends and habitués of her hometown exert a strange, strong pull on her.

Publishers Weekly called the first book “a cozy with sharp edges.” That’s as good a description as any. I prefer the term “traditional mystery” to “cozy” because life isn’t always gentle. I like humor in mysteries, but not silliness. But, most of all, I wanted to write love letters to the little-known, often-misunderstood place where my roots run deep. I want the characters to be recognizable to those who know the real South, with authenticity and affection.

Yes, I own a hand gun and know how to use it, have raced my car up and down mountain roads, love whitewater rafting, and have won trophies as a clogger (mountain square dancing). I’m older now; my knees object to too much climbing or clogging. But, in true Southern fashion [to paraphrase Hodding Carter], I’ll be nice to you right up until I’m mad enough to kill you. Which is why I write murder mysteries.

The Call

by Cathy Pickens

I came to writing as a reader. That doesn’t, I’ve learned, go without saying. I’ve met several folks at signings who want to write a book but who never read books. That’s another blog.

I love reading, and I knew I wanted to write murder mysteries when I was 11 years old. When I announced that, the head librarian gave me old copies of The Writer Handbook and back issues of The Writer and Writer’s Digest, on their way to the landfill. I poured over those magazines and books, musty from the library basement.

I wanted to know how all this worked. I realized later I was looking for THE PATH. I figured there was a secret entrance to the magical world of “published author.” All I had to do was find it.

I read and I read. I wrote and I wrote.  For years, I looked and listened for word on the magical entrance.

When Duane Lindsey asked me to write an essay for the book How I Got Published, I wrote about The Path … and about how I discovered, after I was published, that everyone has a different path. I haven’t met a writer yet who got there in exactly the same way any other writer did.

There are some rules, though: Good news comes by phone. Bad news by letter. Don’t wait by the mailbox.

For both my first short story (in the Sisters in Crime/Private Eye Writers of America anthology Deadly Allies II) and my first novel, news came by phone. Sue Dunlap, anthology editor and one of my mystery writing idols, called me on a Sunday afternoon. I managed to hang up the phone before I started jumping around and yelling.

The second phone call came while I sat in my office at Queens University of Charlotte, nearing the end of my five years serving as Provost, not because I ever wanted the job but because the president was quite a salesman. That’s another story.

Anyway, Ruth Cavin, the iconic mystery editor, was calling to tell me I’d won the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic Award.

I calmly thanked her, hung up the phone, nodded to the folks working in my office, walked quickly across campus to my husband’s office, closed the door … and started jumping up and down and yelling.

I had only a faint glimmer of how that would change my life. I was glad to be leaving the administrative job returning to the classroom I loved. But the bigger transition was to one-year deadlines, travel schedules, and life as a real, live mystery writer.

My husband didn’t know either what that meant. That we’d travel to Bristol, England and Anchorage, Alaska, and Boise, El Paso, Tucson, Denver, New York City, and Kings Mountain, North Carolina. 

We’ve had a blast over the last five years, meeting writers (mostly of the murderous type but also folks like Karin Gillespie, blog mistress extraordinaire – that was in southern Kentucky), and running into them again and again. The writing and reading community is a large, ever-changing, welcoming, quirky, bookish, fun bunch.

Six books later, I’m so glad the phone rang.  The secret entrance? Read, read, read. Write, write, write. Learn the business. Perfect your craft. 

Take yourself seriously. Persistence trumps talent every time. 

And take every opportunity, at bookstores, libraries, book festivals, to meet authors, to join the incredible community of readers and writers. The entrance isn’t so secret after all.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! from Cathy Pickens

Cool day to draw for a blog -- Halloween. Except it's the night before and I've made myself sick on Halloween candy. (I allegedly bought it for the tricker-treaters, those I won't be home to greet, so might as well get an early start on bloating myself with sugar).

I LOVE Halloween -- which led me to write a ghostly walking tour of Charleston, South Carolina, one of my favorite "haunted" cities ... and which led me to include some ghost-hunters I lovingly refer to as "ghosters" in my latest mystery, Hush My Mouth (out in paperback in November).  

One of my favorite travel treats is to find a really good

ghost tour. My long-suffering husband rolls his eyes dramatically, but he always comes along. I've never heard him scream, but he's jumped a time or two.

One needn't wait for Halloween to partake in a ghostly tour because, my goodness, one wouldn't have time to see very many. For whenever you have time, may I suggest some delights?

In Wilmington, NC, they have some wonderful storytellers who conduct walking tours around this historic seaport city. A little farther south, try the harbor boat/ghost tour in Georgetown, SC (check the times and dates, though, because they're usually closed in the winter). 

Charleston, SC is, of course, awash in ghosts, as is Savannah. And don't forget the Jekyll Island Club, on a sea island on the Georgia coast. Spend the night there and imagine all sorts of hauntings. While you're traveling, continue on down to St. Augustine, which has a fun tour.

Not coming South any time soon? The Boston ghost tour is one of my favorite -- complete with a hearse-like bus to chauffeur you around. Seattle has an Underground Seattle tour which is spooky. Or try yet another boat tour -- near midnight in Chicago. Beautiful and mysterious.

While combining beauty and scares, put a night tour of Alcatraz on your San Francisco itinerary. It's the most beautiful view of the city, and the U.S. Park Service (as always) does a spectacular job of storytelling. Book before you leave home -- it's often filled during peak vacation times.

Going abroad? None can beat the haunted Edinburgh tours, unless it's the several mystery walks in London -- the Jack the Ripper walk is a fave.

For me, it's the stories and the unusual views of familiar places and a sense of history that lead me to these tours. So while you're making your Thanksgiving and Christmas travel plans (something to distract the family from a squabble?) or your summer vacation, don't forget to check whether there's a ghost tour nearby. One website includes tours in a variety of states.

Anyone else have any out-of-the way favorite ghost tours? Let us know! I've got to go have a lie-down -- too much candy.

Agatha Christie Familiar -- Cathy Pickens

I took a break from cleaning closets – yes, I admit it, the lengths I’ll go to procrastinate when I should be writing really do know no bounds. I decided to treat myself to lunch at a new pizzeria so I could begin reading a new book I’d just gotten. Oh, what a jolly break to the end-of-the-year holidays, to read and not rush. Then I had to disturb all the others who’d come for lunch, causing some to wish they’d chosen another table at which to perch. One nearby couple decided to move to another seat.

I couldn’t help it, though. I started laughing. Out loud. At first, it was just a snicker, but after I read only a few more lines, it turned into an outright snort. Who knew Agatha Christie was so outrageously funny?

Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan (1946, reprinted 1974) is her memoir of digging with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan in the Syrian Desert. With the Middle East so much in the news, her tales of that time leap to life with names from the evening news. Her Epilogue was especially poignant; she talks about the war (World War II) keeping them home and how wartime London made her long for the primitive but beautiful digs in remote reaches.

But the start of the book was what prompted my giggles. Was it the jolt of recognition? Her author photos always show her comfortably padded in her English tweeds, solid and accomplished and … grand. How could the grand Dame herself have had the same experiences I’ve had while rummaging through closets?

From Chapter 1:

Shopping for a hot climate in autumn or winter presents certain difficulties. One’s last year’s summer clothes, which one has optimistically hoped will “do,” do not “do” now the time has come. For one thing they appear to be (like the depressing annotations in furniture removers’ lists) “Bruised, Scratched and Marked.” (And also Shrunk, Faded and Peculiar!) For another—alas, alas that one has to say it!—they are too tight everywhere.

So—to the shops and the stores, and:

“Of course, Modom, we are not being asked for that kind of thing just now! We have some very charming little suits here—O.S. [out-size] in the darker colours.”

Oh, loathsome O.S.! How humiliating to be O.S.! How even more humiliating to be recognized at once as O.S.!

(Although there are better days when, wrapped in a lean long black coat with a large fur collar, a saleswoman says cheeringly: “But surely Modom is only a Full Woman?”)

Alas, indeed, to have clothes that one reserved for just such a future excursion come out of the closet looking … Peculiar. And how loathsome to be a size(s) larger than you rightfully should be, despite all the exercise during the holidays and all the resolutions dutifully kept from last year.

Then there was Agatha’s tale of her new Zip traveling bag, which had all the inherent defections she’d feared in zippers, and how long it took to decide what books to carry on the trip, and her husband hanging about wanting to put some of his books into her suitcase because he had to remove them from his in order to fit in the barest number of shirts and underpants and socks.

(Okay, I confess. I’m the one who sneaks books into my husband’s suitcase when he’s not looking. He always has plenty of room. But I know I’m not the only one who spends more time deciding what books to take than what to wear.)

Then Agatha encountered a Turkish border guard who cross-examined her at length about the number of shoes she’d brought on board the Orient Express. Who knew Agatha had a shoe fetish? (Okay, that would be my sister’s and my best friend’s favorite fetish – but who knew it was Agatha’s? She seems so … sensible.)

Is that what’s kept her mysteries so alive, so relevant despite vast changes in the world? That Dame Agatha was really, at the heart of it all, just one of us? True, reading the book delayed me from finishing the closet cleaning, but I eventually gave away stacks of clothes. Other folks will enjoy them, and I no longer have to worry about why they don’t quite work the way I remembered.

I have, however, avoided the mall and any clothes shopping and a chance encounter with a clerk who identifies me immediately as the size I am rather than the size I’d like to be. I’d rather write than face that.

Hope you have a stack of new books to read for the new year – and go ahead, laugh out loud.