LUCY BURDETTE: I read and enjoy many of our JRW pals' books, even while I'm writing (struggling) with my own. On the train home from Malice Domestic, I passed the hours by reading Barbara Ross's third Maine clambake mystery, MUSSELED OUT. As I read, I found myself taking notes--thinking, for example, oh this is how you get an amateur sleuth involved in a believable way...as if I'd published no mysteries instead of almost fourteen!
Anyway, that should tell you how much I enjoy and admire Barb's books--and I'm thrilled to have her visiting here today. Welcome Barb!
BARBARA ROSS: Hi Lucy! I’m so happy to be back visiting
the Jungle Reds. Several of the Reds, (you know who you are) have been so
supportive of my writing career—going back to my very first book.
LUCY: Your
lobstering scenes seem so realistic– I felt like I was out on the boat with
Julia. Tell us what kind of research allowed you to write those scenes so
well?
BARB: I’m laughing because maybe you identify
with this? I’m writing about a resort and I always seem to be writing in the
wrong season. I first heard the series had been sold in October 2012. I had to
write a couple of drafts of Clammed Up
without ever visiting the real Cabbage Island Clambakes, on which the series is (very loosely) based. It was probably good
because I could make up my own fictional island and family without influence,
but my husband and I were on the boat to the first clambake in June. Same for Boiled Over, which has scenes set on a
blueberry farm. Book due on September 1, wild blueberry season mid-August. I
had to put the finishing touches on those scenes at the last minute after a
trip to Down East. 
For Musseled Out, I had the same
problem of timing. Over a long, snowy New England winter, I read and read about
lobstering. Two marvelous books I recommend are The Secret Life of Lobsters, by Trevor Corson and The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small
Island by Linda Greenlaw. But we all know you can only get so far with
books. So with Musseled Out due June
1, last year, my husband Bill and I were the first people Captain Clive Farrin’s first tour on his lobster boat in May.
Interestingly enough, Captain Farrin cited information from Corson’s book on
the tour.
LUCY: Now
with your third book in the Maine Clambake series, I am imagining you are
running into the bane of the amateur sleuth, the Cabot Cove syndrome. How do
you think about reasonable ways for Julia to get involved in crime
solving?
BARB: I think Cabot Cove Syndrome particularly haunts
Maine writers, since that fictional town is in our state. Down East Magazine once calculated that that the murder rate in Cabot
Cove is higher than in Honduras, the murder capitol of the world. You do have
to wonder, why do people keep inviting that old lady to dinner?
For me the hardest thing is not finding
victims and suspects. When you write about a resort tens of thousands of people
visit a year, and a place at the end of the road where plenty of people go to
forget their pasts, that part is easy. (Perhaps, Lucy, you identify with this,
too?) The hard part for me is coming up with what Ramona
DeFelice Long calls the
VGR—the Very Good Reason your amateur sleuth becomes involved in solving the
murder. After all, 99% of us would call the police or the FBI and be done with
it. The more I write mysteries, the more I understand how critical it is to
find the VGR and find it early in the narrative. The VGR is what flips your
sleuth from being a passive recipient of information to a driver of the
investigation, and that in turn drives the story.
It’s tempting, of course, to turn every
person the sleuth knows into a suspect over the course of a series, but then
you’re back to Cabot Cove Syndrome. Wouldn’t her family and friends solicit
donations to send her out of town? (BTW, if anyone knows the Secret Solution to
this challenge—e-mail me! I start the fifth book in the series next week.)
LUCY: I
love learning more about the intricacy of Julia's family. Are you the kind of
writer who had all this mapped out before you began the series? Or have aspects
of these relationships surprised you?
BARB: Thank you, I love learning about it, too! The answer is—a
bit of both. I did put some Easter eggs into the first few books. For example,
the fact that Julia’s mother’s cousin Hugh disappeared off Morrow Island on the
night of her twenty-first birthday and was never seen or heard from again is in
the first book, Clammed Up. We’ll
find out what happened in the fifth book.
But other ideas are more organic. I see it a lot like
getting to know a friend. First you know her, then maybe you meet her friends
and eventually her family. But inevitably, twenty years later, you’re sitting
at a party and she says, “Yeah, that was just like the time I went on a date
with Paul McCartney.” And you are—“What! How could I not know this about you?”
And she says, “It was stupid really. It never went anywhere. I guess it never
came up.”
What I’m trying to say is, your friends surprise you and
your characters do, too.
You can read one of
the delicious recipes from Musseled Out
at Mystery Lovers Kitchen. And Barbara will be here all day to answer your comments and questions...
MUSSELED OUT
On bookshelves now!
(Audio book coming from Audible June 2nd)
blog mainecrimewriters.com
