Life Then and Now by Peg Cochran

LUCY BURDETTE: Today I'm delighted to welcome a good friend from the Mystery Lovers Kitchen blog, Peg Cochran. Besides being a wonderful cook, she writes multiple series, including a historical mystery series taking place in the 1930s. I'll let her tell you about the new book--welcome Peg!

PEG COCHRAN: I want to thank Lucy and the Jungle Reds for having me.  I’ve long admired the blog so this is a great honor!

My historical series, Murder, She Reported, is set in the late 1930s in New York City.  Both my parents grew up in New York City and became teenagers during those years.  I’ve been fascinated with the 1930s and 1940s since I heard their stories of eating at the Automat or Chock Full O’Nuts, listening to Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller and dancing the jitterbug.   I’ve also always been a huge fan of old movies and at one time I was positive that I’d grow up to live in a Manhattan high-rise with a view of the city and a martini glass in my hand! (I did eventually live in Manhattan with a view of Queens but sans the martinis—I hated the taste.)  One of the things I love about the time period is how different it is from today…and yet how similar in many ways.  

Much of the action in Murder, She Encountered, the third book in the series, takes place at the 1939 New York World’s Fair—billed as the “World of Tomorrow.”   

Carrier debuted air conditioning at the fair and became a very popular attraction during the sweltering summer heat.  Dupont previewed nylon stockings that were less expensive and more durable than silk hosiery and the Westinghouse exhibit included Elektro—a seven-foot tall robot with a 700 word vocabulary.  We now take air conditioning, nylon pantyhose and robots—used for everything from manufacturing to surgery—for granted.

A lot of what I learned during my research helped to shape my characters and create an exciting story.  Take one upper-class woman who graduated from Wellesley College and who wants to do something with her life and put her in a time period when she is expected to live at home until she lands a suitable husband and moves into her own home to raise a family, host dinner parties and lunch with her girlfriends—and watch the explosions occur and the sparks fly!   

From the beginning, Elizabeth “Biz” Adams has other plans.  She’d studied photography and much to her mother’s dismay, lands a job at the Daily Trumpet, a tabloid newspaper where she starts as a gal Friday and eventually becomes a crime photographer and a woman working in a man’s world.

Women like Biz fought the good fight for the rest of us who now have opportunities unheard of in her time although we are still battling certain issues like equal pay or the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment or validation of the #MeToo movement.

In Biz’s day there were distinct divisions between the classes—upper class women marry within their social class—an appropriate young man in banking, law or medicine who knows how to play tennis and bridge and knows who and how much to tip at restaurants like the Stork Club.  

Biz again bucks expectations by falling for Sal Marino, a NYC detective who she met while photographing a murder.  Not only is he not from her social class, he’s Italian, his parents are immigrants and they live on the lower Eastside instead of the upper Eastside of Manhattan—all strikes against him in the eyes of Biz’s parents and friends.

America tended toward isolationism at the time—a committee called America First was formed toward the end of the 1930s.  In May of 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Hitler’s Europe aboard the S. S. St. Louis seeking asylum in the United States but were not permitted entry into the country.  Biz is appalled that these poor souls were turned away while the prevailing view was that the United States ought to curtail immigration.  Today we are still striving to regulate immigration and provide a fair and equitable process for those seeking sanctuary within our borders.

All of this, as you can imagine, created a lot of (delicious) conflict between Biz and her parents and friends.  But like Katherine Hepburn, a leading lady of the time who insisted on wearing trousers when most women didn’t, Biz is determined to live life on her own terms and not be bound by the restrictions of the era. 

In Murder, She Encountered, her romance with Marino is heating up and she is saving money for her own apartment—all bound to send her friends and family into a tizzy!

Red readers: If you had lived in the 1930s, would you have conformed to expectations or would you have rebelled like Biz?

Mystery writing lets Peg indulge her curiosity under the guise of “work” (aka research). As a kid, she read the entire set of children’s encyclopedias her parents gave her and has been known to read the dictionary. She put pen to paper at age seven when she wrote plays and forced her cousins to perform them at Christmas dinner. She switched to mysteries when she discovered the perfect hiding place for a body down the street from her house.

When she’s not writing, she spends her time reading, cooking, spoiling her granddaughter and checking her books’ stats on Amazon. A former Jersey girl, Peg now resides in Michigan with her husband. She is the author of the Murder, She Reported series, the Cranberry Cove series, the Farmer’s Daughter series, the Gourmet De-Lite series, the Lucille series and the Sweet Nothing Lingerie series (written as Meg London.) Find her on Facebook and her website.

**And the winners of Tuesday's books are Daisy Dilly (Vicki) for Sherry Harris's SELL LOW, SWEET HARRIET, and MARILYN (ewatvess) for Barbara Ross's SEALED OFF. 

Peg Cochran — Mysteries to Cozy Up With

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Today I'm delighted to introduce Peg Cochran, author of Berried Secrets, the first in The Cranberry Cove series which will be published on August 4th. 

Congratulations on the new book and series, Peg, and welcome!

When Monica Albertson comes to Cranberry Cove—a charming town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan—to help her half-brother Jeff on his cranberry farm, the last thing she expects to harvest is a dead body.

It seems that Sam Culbert, who ran the farm while Jeff was deployed overseas, had some juicy secrets that soon prove fatal, and Jeff is ripe for the picking as a prime suspect. Forming an uneasy alliance with her high-maintenance stepmother, Monica has her hands full trying to save the farm while searching for a killer. Culbert made plenty of enemies in the quaint small town…but which one was desperate enough to kill?

PEG COCHRAN: One of the fun things about being a writer is you get to do research on many varied topics.  And not just about police procedure and when does rigor mortis set it in and what’s the difference between a pistol and a revolver.  For my Sweet Nothings Lingerie series, I got to research vintage lingerie (and bullet bras!)  For my Gourmet De-Lite series it was healthy but delicious food (I was always hungry.)     

With my latest release, Berried Secrets, first in my Cranberry Cove series, I’m all about cranberries. Cranberries are one of three fruits native to North America (the Concord grape and blueberries are the other two) and are packed with vitamin C.  Whalers carried them on their ships to prevent scurvy.

Cranberries don’t grow in water as you might think if you pass a cranberry bog during harvest.  They grow on vines in sandy soil and most are “wet harvested.”  The bogs are flooded, the cranberries are beaten from the vine, and thanks to air pockets in the berries, they float.  Farmers use a boom to corral the berries toward a pipe which sucks them into a truck.

Cranberries are susceptible to frost and farmers combat that by flooding the bogs (which can be as much as 20 degrees colder than the surrounding area) when there’s a danger of frost.  The water freezing produces enough heat to protect the berries.

A man named Pegleg John discovered that good cranberries bounce. Folklore has it that he kept his berries on a loft in his barn, and unable to descend the stairs while carrying a basket due to his “pegleg” he poured the berries down the stairs.  The good berries bounced to the ground while the rotten berries stayed on the stairs.  This discovery gave rise to various sorting machines which are still used today to put the berries to the “bounce test.”

Most cranberries harvested go to Ocean Spray which is actually a cooperative owned by the farmers themselves.  Wisconsin produces the most cranberries with Massachusetts coming in second and my home state of New Jersey coming in third.  Cranberries are also grown in Oregon and Washington.

I was able to visit a cranberry bog in Michigan where I watched the harvest.  It’s a beautiful sight—the brilliant red cranberries bobbing in the water.  Their color can range from almost white to pink to the deepest red. 

The farmer was very patient, explaining everything to me and answering all my questions.  Except one.  When I asked him what he’d do if a body floated up in the bog, he didn’t know what to say!

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Um, call 911, right? Kidding... 

See the things mystery authors do for us? Learn about guns! Try on bullet bras! Visit cranberry bogs! 

Peg, Reds and lovely readers, how far would you go to research a mystery? What wouldn't you do? Tell us in the comments!

Mystery writing lets Peg indulge her curiosity under the guise of “work.”  As a kid, she read the entire set of children’s encyclopedias her parents gave her has been known to read the dictionary.  She put pen to paper at age seven when she wrote plays and forced her cousins to perform them at Christmas dinner.   She switched to mysteries when she discovered the perfect hiding place for a body down the street from her house.

A former Jersey girl, Peg now resides in Michigan with her husband and Westhighland white terrier, Reg.  She is the author of the Sweet Nothings Lingerie series (written as Meg London), the Gourmet De-Lite series, the Lucille series and now the Cranberry Cove series.  Her newest series, the Farmer’s Daughter, debuts in 2016.

Visit Peg's web site at pegcochran.com. 

It Takes a Village--Meg London aka Peg Cochran

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  This seems to be our double-barreled week! I wish these talented writers

who can manage to be two people at once would teach me their secret...  Although today's guest, Peg Cochran, actually manages to be four people at once.

Meg London is the pen name for writer Peg Cochran.  Peg grew up in a New Jersey suburb about 25 miles outside of New York City and now lives (on exile from NJ as she likes to joke) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

She has two cozy mystery series from Berkley Prime Crime— the Sweet Nothings Vintage Lingerie series, written as Meg London, set in Paris, Tennessee, and the Gourmet De-Lite series, under her own name, set in Connecticut.  Her Cranberry Cove series for Berkley Prime Crime will debut in August 2015.  She also writes The Lucille Series for Beyond the Page Publishing.

Here Peg gives us a hint--

PEG COCHRAN: To use an expression that has become something of a cliche…it takes a village to

create a writer. 

My relatives were the first supporters to join my team.  I had decided at the tender age of seven that I was going to be a writer (it’s been a long journey!).  I figured that since I didn’t have the time to write an entire novel (second grade is pretty intense, you know), I would write a short play.  Which I did. I then forced, er, coaxed, my cousins into performing the three minute skit at Christmas dinner.  When it was over, and everyone in the family shouted, “Author! Author!” I was hooked.

My high school English teacher (another cliché, I suspect) was my first supporter outside the family.  She very graciously worked with me after school on my short stories (which only further confirmed my extreme nerdiness to the rest of my class.)  She told me my writing was very “visceral.”  As soon as I got home, I ran to the dictionary and looked up the word “visceral” to confirm that that had been a compliment.  Apparently it was, and I took that as a
good sign.

My late mother-in-law was also a huge supporter.  She would send me clippings about Janet Evanovich.  Janet Evanovich!  In my dreams, right?

I even “came out” at work about my writing and found an unexpected source of support in my boss who read my manuscripts and encouraged me to keep going.  She also suggested I show them to John Russell, former art critic for the New York Times, and a very elegant writer, who was doing research at the art foundation where we worked.

He very kindly read several manuscripts and pronounced them “jolly good fun.” (I imagine they were compared to Kafka or Tolstoy or the other greats I pictured him reading.)  He said he particularly liked the ending of one of my manuscripts (a jet ski chase scene), and that it reminded him of

something his good friend would have written.  “Maybe you’ve heard of him,” he asked casually, “Ian Fleming?”  Believe me, I was both shaken and stirred!

Finally I found enormous support in the on-line mystery writing community.  Publishing is a hideously competitive business but instead of running into Tonya Harding type writers, I found wonderfully giving people without whom I never would have made it to publication.  I won’t do the whole Oscar speech thing and name names, but you guys know who you are!  Thank you!

Who has been supportive in helping you realize your dreams?

DEBS: Peg, I absolutely love your story. And the photos!  I wish I had one of my--yes, cliched but true--tenth-grade English teacher, who read a poem I submitted for a class assignment and told me I had "talent."

But I did NOT have my work critiqued by a the former art critic for the New York Times, who just happened to be friends with Ian Fleming.  Ian Fleming!!

And you, by the way, were adorable!

REDS and READERS, Peg would love to give away a copy of the upcoming A FATAL SLIP, and we'd both love to know who supported and inspired you.

(And one last thing--the winner of Daryl Wood Gerber's  ( or Avery Ames's) book is Pat D.  And the winner of Terry Shames's THE LAST DEATH OF JACK HARBIN is Joan Emerson. Pat D and Joan, if you will email me your addresses at deb at deborahcrombie dot com, I'll pass them along to the authors.

AND THE BEST NEWS, JUST IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY HEARD--OUR OWN JRW HALLIE EPHRON IS NOMINATED FOR THE 2014 EDGAR MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD FOR HER NOVEL,  THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN!  We are over the moon, so raise your glasses--or your teacups--with us in a toast to Hallie!