LUCY BURDETTE: Today I'm so pleased to welcome a great friend and one of my favorite cozy mystery writers, all wrapped up in one package! I'm very lucky to have lured her into serving with me on the Friends of the Key West Library board. Mostly, I can't wait for the new book...
BARBARA ROSS: Thank you so much for having me, Lucy and the Jungle Reds!
For writers, inspiration comes from everywhere, and often seemingly out of nowhere. It may come from a snippet of overhead conversation, an image, a place, a person, or event. Inspiration can come from a combination of things, taken out of context, maybe half-remembered or not consciously remembered at all. Things the writer didn’t even know were there.
The eleventh Maine Clambake Mystery, Hidden Beneath, is about a summer enclave on an island in my fictional Busman’s Harbor. The island is ringed by a hundred summer houses that have often been passed down in families for generations. The story begins when a woman disappears and is presumed drowned.
Five years later, after the woman has been declared legally dead, my sleuth Julia Snowden and her mother arrive for her memorial service. The first floor of the woman’s home on the island is strangely empty and sterile, not at all the way Julia’s mother remembers it. But on the second floor, behind mountains of furniture and household furnishings, the dead woman has left a wealth of clues about her disappearance in the form of murals on the walls.
Unusually, I do know where the inspiration for this part of the story came from.
In October of 2021, after Tina Pesce died at the age of seventy-four, her older son, who lived on the other side of the country, had her house in Stockton Springs, Maine cleaned out in preparation for sale. On her way past, her neighbor, Noelle Merrill, noticed the work and decided to peek inside. (As one does. At least if one is a deeply curious, nay nosy person—like a mystery writer for example.)
What Noelle saw stunned her. The house was filled with murals painted on the sheetrock on the walls. Thinking it was a positive story in a fraught time, Noelle posted about the murals on Facebook. Those posts were circulated eventually picked up by the media, including this story in the Boston Globe, where I probably originally saw it. (The following photos are all credited to Noelle Merrill.)
I love this story for two reasons. The first is the surprise of it. Imagine walking in, expecting a little look into a neighborhood house, and finding those murals. I love it when people’s expectations get turned around in an instant.
The other reason is the persistence of the artist. Tina Pesce had always made art. She had a ceramics studio in Massachusetts and then a small gallery when she moved to Maine. When health and circumstances largely confined her to her home—she just kept going. Isn’t that the way human beings are? The drive to create never goes away.
Also, I love the murals. I do love primitives and representational artwork.
Of course, the murals in Hidden Beneath are completely different from the ones that inspired them. For one thing, they contain human figures that tell stories from the artist’s childhood in order to give clues to my sleuth. In my head, fully imagined, the murals also are quite different in style, although they are also primitives. I’ll be interested to hear what kind of pictures readers build in their heads from my descriptions.
An inspiration is a starting point only. The rest we build from our imaginations.
Readers: Do you ever go peeking where you maybe, sort of aren’t invited? Have you ever been surprised by what you found! (Leave a comment to be entered in the drawing for a copy of the new book.)
About the book
In Barbara Ross’ award-winning series featuring sleuth Julia Snowden and her family’s coastal Maine clambake business, two mysteries rock the colony of Chipmunk Island after a suspicious memorial service has Julia and her mother shifting into some family sleuthing.
Serving up mouthwatering shellfish, the Snowden Family Clambake has become a beloved institution in Busman’s Harbor, Maine. But when new clues rise to the surface five years after the disappearance of Julia Snowden’ s mother’s friend, the family business shifts to sleuthing.
Julia and her mother, Jacqueline, have come to the exclusive summer colony of Chipmunk Island to attend a memorial service for Jacqueline’s old friend Ginny, who’s been officially declared dead half a decade after she went out for her daily swim in the harbor and was never seen again. But something seems fishy at the service—especially with the ladies of the Wednesday Club. As Julia and Jacqueline begin looking into Ginny’s cold case, a present-day murder stirs the pot, and mother and daughter must dive into the deep end to get to the bottom of both mysteries . . .
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About Barbara Ross
Barbara Ross is the author of the Maine Clambake Mysteries. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Barbara and her husband live in Portland, Maine. Readers can visit her website at www.maineclambakemysteries.com
