To Cozy? Or Too Cozy?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Okay, I’m just gonna step back and let LeslieBudewitz talk. She’s hilarious, brilliant, and a dear pal. She’s the immediate past president of Sisters in Crime—and did an absolutely stellar job. She's a nationally best-selling author who lives in the wilds of Montana, and she’s fearless.

As she proves in this essay.

TO COZY, OR NOT TO COZY?

            By Leslie Budewitz

Ah, the poor cozy. In some circles—and I know you’ll be shocked—it’s fashionable to denigrate the cozy. To dismiss the amateur sleuth as a busy-body who should stick to running her book shop, her catering business, or her spice shop, and leave the down-and-dirty world of investigating murder to the cynical and jaded private investigator or his cousin, the cynical and jaded police detective.

I’m not buying it.

There is a reason we love the amateur sleuths of cozy world, and I’ve got a theory.

It’s not because we love the food they cook or the sweaters they knit. Well, not just because of the food and sweaters.

I’m not going to define the cozy—I could, but that would be another post! Suffice to say, as the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, we know it when we see it.

But here’s the key, for me. Whether the cozy is set in a small town or a community within a larger city, in the past or the present, whether the amateur sleuth is single or widowed, young or old, whether we like the victim or think she needed killing, the murder is a shock that disrupts the norm. It must be solved—and this is key—to restore a sense of order. Of course, there’s one in every book, so the reader isn’t shocked, but the residents are. They share an underlying belief is that people are basically good, and natural order can be restored.  

Some writers don’t like the term cozy. The great Carolyn Hart, whom I adore, says what’s more uncomfortable than murder in a small town where everyone is affected? I live in a small town, and she’s right. I never want to forget that murder is not just a means to tell a story—it’s real, and it hurts everyone.

But I like the term, because ultimately any book with an amateur sleuth is about community. Our intrepid sleuth steps away from her busy life to investigate because it’s necessary. The job of the professional investigators is to restore external order by making an arrest and bringing the killer into the justice system. But the job of the amateur sleuth is to restore internal order within the community. To restore the social order.

How does she do that? She’s part of the community—sometimes new to it, sometimes a local girl who returns home. Her occupation—running a coffeehouse or a pet-friendly hotel, catering, or midwifery—puts her at the heart of the community. She knows everyone. She understands the dynamics. She can see things the professionals can’t see and ask questions they can’t ask, because she knows what goes on. Often, her expertise gives her an advantage—because she knows the true value of the stolen rare book, beyond its price, she can understand the motivation to take it and identify the killer the police never suspected.

Ultimately, the cozy is about community. The characters and their relationships drive the plot, and the entire novel. And so I find the label “cozy” a positive choice. A hopeful choice.

As I often tell readers, cozies are the comfort food of the mystery world. And don’t we all crave a little mac and cheese now and then?

HANK: That’s such a great way of putting it.  What do you think, Reds and lovely readers? Have you had the “cozy” battle, er, discussion with anyone? Who's your favorite cozy author?

 

ABOUT KILLING THYME:

In Seattle's Pike Place Market, Spice Shop owner Pepper Reece is savoring her business success, but soon finds her plans disrupted by a killer in the latest from the national bestselling author of Guilty as Cinnamon.

Pepper Reece's to-do list is longer than the shopping list for a five-course dinner, as she conjures up spice blends bursting with seasonal flavor, soothes nervous brides fretting over the gift registry, and crosses her fingers for a rave review from a sharp-tongued food critic. Add to the mix a welcome visit from her mother, Lena, and she's got the perfect recipe for a busy summer garnished with a dash of fun.

While browsing in the artists' stalls, Pepper and Lena drool over stunning pottery made by a Market newcomer. But when Lena recognizes the potter, Bonnie Clay, as an old friend who disappeared years ago, the afternoon turns sour. To Pepper's surprise, Bonnie seems intimately connected to her family's past. After Bonnie is murdered only days later, Pepper is determined to uncover the truth. But as Pepper roots out long-buried secrets, will she be digging her own grave?

ABOUT LESLIE:

Leslie Budewitz blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in two cozy mystery series. KILLING THYME, her third Spice Shop Mystery, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, is due on October 4. DEATH AL DENTE, first in the Food Lovers' Village Mysteries, set in Jewel Bay, Montana, won the 2013 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. The immediate past president of Sisters in Crime, she lives and cooks in NW Montana.

Find Leslie and excerpts from her books on her website, and chat with her on Facebook.

Grandfather Knows Best

HANK: Was there a memorable moment in your life-when you knew it would change? Many of us were in the audience at the last Malice Domestic when the iconic Carolyn Hart was  interviewed..and the interviewer asked what great books she'd read recently.  Carolyn said: the best book she'd read in a while was Terry Shames  A KILLING AT COTTON HILL.

Talk about something that would make your day. Now of course you know Terry is a major-league friend of the Reds--and I'll never forget the look on her face when I told her about Carolyn! And, of course, I snagged her for a guest blog immediately

Today Terry lets us into her life a bit, and at the end, she has a question for you--maybe about your own grandparents? Are we giving away a copy of A KILLING AT COTTON HILL to one lucky commenter? Well, of COURSE. This is Jungle Red!

THE REAL SAMUEL CRADDOCK

  by Terry Shames

They say if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. I grew up on the Gulf Coast in Texas, and until you’ve been to Texas in the summer, you don’t know heat. I loved my family and the great heart of Texas, but once I realized that not every part of the country sweltered nine months of the year, I couldn’t wait to get out. I tried the East Coast then Denver, and ended up in Berkeley, California. The first night we arrived, I said to my husband, “I feel like I’ve come home.” I’ve never considered moving back. It’s nice and cool here.

I’ve now lived in California longer than I ever lived in Texas, so how come I am writing a mystery series set in Texas? Because it isn’t the setting I chose, although that’s an integral part of the books; it’s the character. Samuel Craddock is loosely based on my grandfather, a man who loomed large in my life. A loud, brash, hard-working, hard-drinking man, he sometimes scared me when he yelled at me--he didn’t have much use for children being underfoot. But he fascinated me, which meant I was frequently underfoot.

He only finished the third grade, but he read constantly and he had a tremendous respect for education. My grandparents had a bookcase full of books. My mother told me that once when she was a child my grandfather told his kids to get in the car, that they were going to the courthouse. Why? Because the county was giving away used library books.

My grandfather could tell a funny story as well as the best comedian. I can still picture him laughing and slapping his leg as he described a prank someone in town played on a bunch of teenage kids who had been bugging him—a prank that resulted in someone fleeing the house through the front screen door—without opening the screen door!  Maybe that’s where I got my story-telling ability.

The former town mayor, years after he retired people still came to him to help solve community problems. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, but he also didn’t waste time judging people harshly. Having lived a hard life, he valued hard work and humor, which had seen him through.

When I went off to college, my grandfather was thrilled. I still have a letter he wrote me in his childish scrawl, telling me how proud he was. I’m so happy that he lived long enough to see me graduate. And what I wouldn’t give to have him read my book—the book that he inspired!

Before I wrote my first Samuel Craddock novel, I wrote several other mysteries that didn’t find a publisher. And then I attended a workshop in which the takeaway for me was to dig down deep and write a novel from the heart. Within a couple of weeks I sat down and started to imagine a man like my grandfather, a man sitting on his front porch in the early morning…a man who had lived in a small town in Texas his whole life and who had a visceral feel for the land. A man who kept his eye on the pulse of the town and, when things went wrong, had a drive to repair them.

These days when I go back to the small Texas town that I based Jarrett Creek on, I feel as if I could run into my grandfather at any moment. There’s a certain combination of smells--of damp vegetation, iron in the red dust, creosote from the railroad tie plant, and the smell of barbecue cooking that I know he would recognize. Birdsong, animal sounds, wind in the trees, and the whistle of a train invite his spirit to me. And I hear him in the accents and jargon of the people in small town Texas. And I tried to translate all this to the page in A KILLING AT COTTON HILL.

I’m curious to know if others had someone in their lives who inspired them? Someone you hold in your heart and who guides your writing hand?

HANK: My grandfather, one of them, we think sold cars..I hardly knew him. The other had a chain of department stores, and I used to love to go in and fold things. We called it "going to the store." (Thinking about that now, what else would we have called it? :-) But it seemed very special at the time.) Grampa Dave was a diligent hard worker, 24/7, and used to give us quarters. But it was his wife, Gramma Minnie, who taught me to type. SO--in a funny way-- she guides my hand every day!

How about you, Reds?  Who were your grandfathers? And did they change for lives?

********************

  

In A KILLING AT COTTON HILL the chief of police of Jarrett Creek, Texas, doubles as the town drunk. So when Dora Lee Parjeter is murdered, her old friend and former police chief Samuel Craddock steps in to investigate. He discovers that a lot of people may have wanted Dora Lee dead—the conniving rascals on a neighboring farm, her estranged daughter and her surly live-in grandson. And then there’s the stranger Dora Lee claimed was spying on her. During the course of the investigation the human foibles of the small-town residents—their pettiness and generosity, their secret vices and true virtues—are revealed.

Terry Shames grew up in Texas. She has abiding affection for the small town where here grandparents lived, the model for the fictional town of Jarrett Creek. A resident of Berkeley, California, Terry lives with her husband, two rowdy terriers and a semi-tolerant cat. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Her second Samuel Craddock novel, THE LAST DEATH OF JACK HARBIN will be out in January 2014. Find out more about Terry and her books at www.Terryshames.com.

"Oh, Kaye!" - Who Do You Love?

Who do we miss?



Thankfully, there are plenty enough books still out there that I haven't discovered yet, along with all the new books being released every day, that I'll never be lacking for new reading material.

But.

There are some series that have come to an end that I mourn.

One I mourned long (and loudly) was Margaret Maron's Sigrid Harald series.  I'll be forever grateful to Margaret for having Sigrid and Deborah meet.  What a treat to have two much loved characters meet and visit in one another's home settings.  (see there, dreams do come true!).

Others I fear may not enjoy a similar comeback include - - -


Reed Farrel Coleman's Moe Prager (one more Moe book to come, THE HOLLOW GIRL, out in early 2014 - Yay!!!)

 

 

Mark de Castrique's Burryin' Barry

 

 

 

 

 

Phillip DePoy's Flap Tucker

Carolyn Hart's Henry O.

 

 

 

Deborah Morgan's Jeff Talbot



Gillian Roberts' Amanda Pepper

Sarah Shankman's Samantha Adams

Sharon Wildwind's Elizabeth Pepperhawk/Avivah Rosen

 

 

 

 

 

and I often wonder what Archie and Nero Wolfe are up to.  And, how things might be with Pierre Chambrun at the Hotel Beaumont.  And what kinds of sandwiches Sgt. Edward Delaney has concocted during the last several years . . .

 

oh, Laws, don't even get me started on Harry Potter!

 

 

How 'bout you, Reds, who do you miss?



 

 

 

 

LOVE LETTERS FROM THE PAST

HANK: You know Carolyn Hart. You love her, right? And you probably think you could predict, oh, I don't know. What she'd do, and what she'd think. And how she'd feel about things like ebooks, for instance. Or, um, sex.

But Carolyn Hart has...some surprises to reveal. See how many you can find...and there's a book giveaway at the end! 

CAROLYN HART: I'm not a fan of reunions. It isn't that I don't enjoy remembering those out of my past, it is more than I want to remember them as they were, young, vibrant, so many exciting adventures ahead of them. I like to live in the present, which may be the only Zen quality of someone who is challenged to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time.

True to this mantra, I've never given much thought over time to old books. In my case, that would be 14 books published prior to Death on Demand in 1987. (The 34 books since 1987 have remained in print since publication.)

HANK: So the books before 1987 (yikes) were just…gone?

CAROLYN: Yes! However! The advent of ebook technology changed my attitude and gave me an appreciation for remembering past loves... the books that I thought were consigned to dusty garage sales.

HANK: And, unlike human past loves,  you had the rights? Or what was the deal? What did you realize?

CAROLYN: Authors who hold the rights to their early works have many avenues open to them. They can self publish as ebooks, which provides better monetary reward, or they can explore posting the ebooks on Amazon exclusively for a year then deciding what platforms to add, or they can seek a small press that would take both print and ebook rights..

In 2011, Amazon posted all 14 early books plus two short story collections with exclusive rights for a year. Sales were respectable but the unexpected outcome for me meant a great deal more than accruing royalties. Two small presses - Seventh Street Books and Oconee Spirit Press - are now republishing between them seven of those titles.

I love this because I am still an old fashioned want to-hold-the-book-in-my-hand reader.

HANK: But it’s not just the money, I bet.

CAROLYN: Right! There have been other huge - not monetary - rewards for me.

Finally, after 29 years, ESCAPE FROM PARIS, a WWII suspense novel set in Occupied France in 1940, is available as it was first written. To make the initial sale to a small pub house in England, I cut 40,000 words from a 93,000 word ms. When some of my backlist was previously reissued, I refused to have Escape from Paris republished unless in its entirety. When the offer came from Amazon to post the backlist as ebooks, I included the book on the understanding I would provide the complete original ms.

HANK: Whoa. Did you have it? From 29 years ago?

CAROLYN: Sometimes our author's angel sits on our shoulders. The book was written before computers and all I had were the tattered bond paper pages. In 2001 - for no good reason, no one wanted the book or as far as I knew ever would - I hired a typist to put it in an efile. That file resided untouched in my computer for years but it was there when I needed it. I plunged into revising and improving the book.

HANK: That could be scary! I mean...when was the last time you'd read it?

CAROLYN: I had not reread the book since I finished it in 1980. I came into the house one evening and my husband asked me what was wrong. I suppose the strain was evident. I said I'd been reading Escape from Paris and discovered I used to write tougher, harder books. His response summed it up: Readers will find a Carolyn Hart they never knew.

HANK: That’s…very very intriguing, I must say. And probably requires a whole new wardrobe. How about the other early titles? Did you revise those?

CAROLYN: I didn't do many revisions to the other earlier titles. Rereading Rendezvous in Veracruz, a light romantic suspense novel set in Mexico City in the early '80s, was a different experience altogether. I told the editor that rereading it was better than a trip to the Fountain of Youth. The background was drawn from time I spent as a freshman at Mexico City College. When I read the galleys I felt once again that I was eighteen and living in Mexico City.

HANK: So did that get you thinking…I wonder if…

CAROLYN: Yes! The rebirth of early titles either as ebooks or as ebooks and paper prompted me to look in my closet. All old writers have closets and in mine were several never before published mss. Berkley put out one last fall as an ebook only. Another - which might possibly shock my readers - is a very sexy novel of danger and suspense in first century Rome and my agent has just submitted it. I'll let you know what happens.

HANK: Now that—is well, I’ve gotta say, hard to imagine. Cannot wait! So, what advice do you have now, as a result of this?

CAROLYN: My advice to writers is to be sure that you get reversion of rights of all OP books if at all possible. A negative aspect of ebooks is that publishers can retain rights by keeping books available as ebooks but with no paper copies available. I think some agents are now trying to include in contracts a provision that a certain number of ebook sales must be made or the rights are reverted.

Many writers are doing their own self pub of ebooks and doing very well with them.

HANK: SO interesting to think about you entering this new world...you’ve been writing for how many years? And it seems—it’s actually an unexpected link to the past!

CAROLYN: As almost everyone agrees, no one in publishing is sure of how much ebooks will transform our world. To my surprise, the ebook revolution has brought the past close to me and now my books are available if there are any readers who wish to seek them out. I don't foresee a big audience or big sales, but the nicest part for me is remembering books that I'd not thought about in years and rediscovering the writer I once was.

HANK: SO great to talk with you, Carolyn. And we hope to see you at MaIice! And a copy of one of Carolyn’s books to a lucky commenter!

Let’s chat about ebooks, and your books, and your reading habits, and what you’ve discovered in the eworld! How often do you use your ereader, if you have one? Are you buying more books? DO you actually READ them? And any questions for Carolyn?