Double Your Fun with Two Christmas Cozies

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We have a double helping of book fun for you today! Jungle Red friends Edith Maxwell (as Maddie Day) and Maya Corrigan both have brand new Christmas-themed mysteries. And, yes, we really do need to start getting in the mood. Christmas will be here before we know it. Here are Maddie and Maya with some holiday cheer!

 

 A Couple of Recipe-Wielding, Pseudonym-Toting Authors

Maddie: Thanks, Debs, for hosting Maya and me! When we realized we both had Christmas cozies coming out the same day (September 29), we thought a joint appearance would be more fun than going solo, so we’re going to interview each other. The Reds community gets two for the price of one! And we’re both giving away a copy of our new books, too.

Maya, Gingerdead Man (best title, ever) features a Dickens of a Holiday Festival, and your protagonist Val throws a tea for the volunteers – who are all in costume. It’s a fabulous visual. How did you think up a Dickens-themed holiday festival? Have you ever been to one like it?

 Maya: The idea came from one of my critique partners, Carolyn Mulford. Though I’ve never been to a Dickens Festival, I found photos and programs online from several festivals with volunteers dressed as Dickens characters. It was a perfect fit for my series. My previous books in the series, Crypt Suzette and S’more Murders, had scenes with costumed, role-playing characters. Costumes can disguise people, but the choice of a costume can reveal someone’s true nature. The killer who crashes the tea party in Gingerdead Man is shrouded in black like the eeriest Dickens ghost from A Christmas Carol. The ghost gives each person a gift. When Santa opens his, he finds a gingerbread man, but it doesn’t have raisin eyes and an icing smile. Instead, it’s a skeleton with bones traced in white icing—a gingerdead man. I bet you can guess what the murder weapon is. 

Speaking of skeletons, Maddie, you have one in Candy Slain Murder, only it’s a real skeleton, not an edible one. Your main character, Robbie, like mine, runs a café. How did you incorporate holiday motifs in your mystery? 

 Maddie: Robbie decorates her country store with garlands and tiny white lights. She puts up a freshly cut tree and decorates it with her boyfriend, Abe, and his teen son, Sean, who brings holly-shaped cookies his grandma made. The three of them walk downtown for the tree-lighting and visit from Santa, who drives in on an antique fire truck driven by Mrs. Santa. Unfortunately, Danna, Robbie’s assistant, gets in a fight with an aggressive local photographer, which kind of spoils the event.

And then we have the food and the recipes, which we both include in the books. In Candy Slain Murder, Robbie Jordan and her assistants work hard to come up with Christmas breakfast and lunch specials that look festive. They make a spinach and red pepper egg bake, a Noel omelet, and a split pea soup that includes fresh peas and minced fresh tomatoes. They serve gingerbread people and red-and-green sugar cookies, too. But at Pans ‘N Pancakes, they can use as many ingredients as they want. Your book recipes always have only five ingredients. Is it hard to come up with those?

 Maya: When I was a Mom with two part-time jobs and two preschoolers, I began collecting easy recipes so I could cook fast. Besides the recipes I’ve used for years, countless five-ingredient cookbooks are out there. I’d rather be able to use a few more ingredients for the book’s recipes, but five works with my mystery framework—five suspects, five clues, and five-ingredient recipes. I found it hard to stick to just five suspects in Gingerdead Man. With two seemingly unrelated deaths and no one person with a motive for both crimes, I had to juggle two different sets of suspects. They’re winnowed down as the story progresses, but the connection between the two deaths doesn’t become clear until the end. 

 Maddie, you also have multiple victims in Candy Slain Murder, but a different kind of challenge. One victim shows up as a skeleton. How did Robbie go about investigating a long-ago death, and have you incorporated cold cases in other mysteries?

Maddie: Good question! I don’t think I’ve used a cold case before. But this one kind of slammed Robbie in the face, when Abe spies the skeleton in the attic of a house where the roof was opened to put out a fire. Robbie does what she does best (next to cooking) and digs into the disappearance of a local woman a decade earlier. She sneaks a peek at some of the woman’s diaries from before she dies, and she visits the hospital where the woman’s husband practices.

A different kind of cold case in this book is when a young man shows up claiming to be Danna’s older half-brother. The problem is, growing up as the single child of a single mother, she’d never heard about any siblings, half or otherwise. I don’t want to spoil the story, but it gets complicated, and stems from an issue that formerly was more scandalous than it is for many these days.

Most people think of cozy mysteries as light and humorous, but they also tackle familial and societal issues familiar to readers. Real life has real-life problems, and I don’t shrink from including them in books – but only as a backdrop to the mystery.

Tell us about that aspect of your book, Maya.

Maya: A situation many families face comes up: what to do about an aging parent who needs more care than is available at home. Val caters a birthday dinner for an older man and overhears an argument his daughters have about whether and how to convince him to give up his house. Related to his living situation is the status of the young immigrant woman who’s been his live-in aide and is in a precarious economic and legal position.

Maddie: Both are current and timely. How about pen names which we both write under? Were you asked to use one, or was it your own choice?

Maya: I’ve written nonfiction and short stories using my first, middle, and last names. For this series, which I knew would come out as a small paperback, I combined and shortened my first and middle name so it would fit better on the cover. In Gingerdead Man and other books, I’ve created characters with pseudonyms, aka, aliases. Like a costume, an alias disguises your identity, but your choice of a name can be a clue to who you really are.  

 So, Maddie, are your pen names a way to hide your identity and why did you choose them?

Maddie: That’s funny. No hiding for me, since I do my best to link my names everywhere I can. My name since birth has been Edith Maxwell, and my Agatha Award-winning Quaker Midwife Mysteries are written under that name (book #6, Taken Too Soon, released September 8!). Maddie was born five years ago with the first Country Store Mystery, when my editor wanted me to use a different name than Edith. Here’s why. The Local Foods Mysteries series was by Maxwell but, after five books, the contract was not renewed. Kensington wanted the new series to look like it was written by someone else, but they never said I couldn’t connect the names. The series has done so well, Maddie Day also writes my newest series, the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries.

 Maya: Thank you again to Deborah and all the Jungle Red Writers for hosting Maddie and me. May we all meet again in person very soon.

Readers: What’s your favorite season for books to be set in? Do you seek out books by a favorite author’s alter ego? Have you been surprised to learn two authors were the same person? Each of us will send a signed copy of our new book to a lucky winner!

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In Candy Slain Murder, Country Store owner Robbie Jordan’s life seems merry and as bright as the Christmas lights glistening around South Lick, Indiana – until a man claims to be the long-lost half-brother of Robbie’s assistant. A fire destroys the home of a controversial anesthesiologist, exposing skeletal remains in his attic. The twin of the long-dead woman is murdered. Unavoidably intrigued, all Robbie wants for Christmas is to stop her winter wonderland from becoming a real nightmare.

Maddie Day pens the Country Store Mysteries and the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. Agatha Award winning Edith Maxwell writes the historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries and short crime fiction. With twenty-three mysteries in print and more underway, Day/Maxwell lives with her beau and their energizer kitten north of Boston, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook. She hopes you’ll find her on social media under both names, on WickedAuthors.com, and at her web site.

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Gingerdead Man: During Bayport's Dickens of a Holiday festival, Val hosts a tea party for the festival's costumed volunteers. Robed in black, a party crasher hands out gingerbread men with white icing skeleton bones. Though the creepy cookie—a gingerdead man—looks like a Halloween leftover, cookie addict Santa can’t resist it, gobbles it up, and keels over. His death puts a damper on the festivities, and then someone else dies from eating a sweet gift. To restore the holiday spirit, Val and Granddad must stop the murderer from baking more deadly treats.

​Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries. They feature a café manager and her live-wire grandfather, the Codger Cook, who solve murders in a historic Chesapeake Bay town. She’s also written nonfiction and short stories as Mary Ann Corrigan. She lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords. Connect with her through her website, mayacorrigan.com, where you’ll find book news, recipes, and mystery history anecdotes and trivia.  

DEBS: I just wanted to add that my town used to have a Dickens festival on the town square every year, on Thanksgiving weekend. I'm not sure why they stopped but I wonder if it might have had something to do with heavy Victorian costumes and unseasonably warm Texas weather.... There were no murders (that I know of!)