How Two Non-Cooks Write Culinary Mysteries by Debra Goldstein and Barbara Ross

JENN McKINLAY: Today, two culinary mystery authors, Barbara Ross and Debra Goldstein, confess their lack of kitchen know-how on this edition of Jungle Red Writer's author confessions. Pull up a chair, kids, this is going to be good! Seriously, welcome Debra and Barb! We're delighted to have you with us. 

Side note: I am a baker but I don't enjoy regular day to day cooking, so I feel ya!

Barb: Debra Goldstein and I have discovered we have many things in common since we decided to do a joint blog for our books released on December 18. Debra’s book is One Taste Too Many, the debut in her Sarah Blair Mystery series for Kensington. (So exciting!) My new book is Steamed Open, the seventh in my Maine Clambake Mysteries. One thing Debra and I have in common is though both of us write culinary mysteries, neither of us is much of a cook.

Let’s go back to the beginning, Debra. How did your life evolve to make you a “cook of convenience,” as you so cleverly call it in your series?

Debra: Growing up, my mother made dinner between five and six p.m. My sister shadowed her in the kitchen while I opted to unload the dishwasher at five-fifteen, set the table at five-thirty, say “hello” to my dad at five-forty-five and come to the table after the six o’clock conclusion of Perry Mason. My sister learned to cook from scratch while I learned courtroom procedure and short-cuts that held me in good stead in my later career choice.

Barb: I’m laughing at the idea of you learning legal procedure from Perry Mason. I would have liked visiting your courtroom. So given all that, how did you come to write a culinary mystery series?

Debra:I love reading cozy mysteries (yours are some of the best!). When I decided I wanted to write, I thought about how cozy mysteries usually center around food or crafts – two areas in which I’m challenged. Somewhat frustrated, I realized there had to be readers who, like me, preferred bringing take-out in, making dishes using pre-prepared ingredients, or buying quilts, scarfs, and other already finished crafted items. When I researched and found recipes like Jell-O in a Can, I knew there was no shortage of material for a fun culinary cook of convenience mystery series. 

Considering your technical background and admitted reliance on your husband for recipe preparation, how did you come to write a culinary mystery series?

Barb: When my agent first brought up the idea of a series centered around a clambake, he characterized it as a culinary mystery.  I ignored him and wrote a proposal and sample chapters that didn’t include recipes. After all, if you’ve ever been to a clambake, it’s the same meal every time, and much of the meal isn’t practical to cook at home. Eventually, my agent caught on and made me put in recipes. By then I was too in love with the setting and characters to turn back.

Okay. So now we know you, like your main character Sarah, are a cook of convenience, how do you make readers’ mouths water when they read your book?

Debra: My first goal was to write a fun book that combined a good plot with recipes true cooks and cooks of convenience could both appreciate. Using my experience raising night and day twins, I opted to have my protagonist be a cook of convenience while her twin sister is a gourmet chef. This gave me the ability to introduce recipes, even for the same dish, all readers could salivate over. A good example is the contrast between Sarah’s Spinach Pie made with Stouffer’s Spinach Souffle and her twin’s farm to table version.

Seven books in a series is quite a feat – what workarounds did you use to keep readers’ mouths watering considering the limits of a clambake’s menu?

Barb: You’ve already alluded to my major workaround. My husband is a great cook. I decided early on that since most of them couldn’t come from the clambake, I would provide recipes from the other meals my characters ate in the course of the story. I tell my husband Bill the type and circumstances of the meal. He figures out the recipe, and then we taste test so I can describe it accurately.

What’s the most embarrassing/funny/crazy thing that’s happened as a result of the mismatch between your series focus and your own culinary shortcomings?

Debra: Last year, after writing about food, I got the brilliant idea to make matzah ball soup from scratch for our family Seder. While buying my ingredients, I grabbed a bag of Passover approved noodles. The day of the Seder, I spent all day bringing my soup to perfection. I tasted it and knew I’d nailed it. As the Seder service began, for an extra touch, I threw in the noodles. When we finally reached dinner, I removed the pot’s cover and watched the liquid whoosh away. Our first course was chicken flavored noodles sans soup. 

How about you? Most embarrassing moment?

Barb: Possibly the librarian who decided my husband and I absolutely had to cater her annual board meeting. I explained several times in several ways that Bill and I are not my characters Julia and Chris and she would surely regret her insistence.Or there was the panel I was on this year at Bouchercon. The moderator was a last minute sub, and she did a great job. Unfortunately, she’d prepared a whole slew of questions about cooking, and not one author on the panel was a cook. She was great, though, and it made for a very funny panel.

How about you, Reds and Readers, are you a culinary wizard or do you fake it 'til you bake it?

About the authors

 Judge Debra H. Goldstein is the author of Kensington’s new Sarah Blair cozy mystery series, which debuted with One Taste Too Manyon December 18, 2018. She also wrote Should HavePlayed Pokerand 2012 IPPY Award winning Maze in Blue. Her short stories, including Anthony and Agatha nominated “The Night They Burned Ms. Dixie’s Place,” have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies including Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and Mystery Weekly.Debra is president of Sisters in Crime’s Guppy Chapter, serves on SinC’s national board, and is president of the Southeast Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Find out more about Debra at www.DebraHGoldstein.com.

Barbara Ross is the author of seven Maine Clambake Mysteries. The latest, Steamed Open, was released December 18, 2018. Barbara’s novellas featuring Julia Snowden are included along with stories by Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis in Eggnog Murder and Yule Log Murder. Barbara and her husband live in Portland, Maine. Visit her website at http://www.maineclambakemysteries.com

Marinating in Murder by Linda Wiken

Jenn McKinlay: One of my very favorite people to see at conferences is Linda Wiken. She always has a sparkle in her eye and she always makes me laugh. Our mutual love of food and books helps, too, so I am thrilled to have her here today to talk about her latest release! 

Linda: Some of the questions I’m asked by writers just starting down the publishing path are: what do you think about using a pen name (I am aka Erika Chase, and soon, as Essie Lang); where do you get your ideas; and, who comes up with the book titles? All good questions but here’s some advice I’ll throw in, without being asked. Think long and hard before writing a foodie mystery!

I know, an odd thing to be saying since the third book in my Dinner Club Mysteries, MARINATING IN MURDER, has just come out.

Jenn: And isn't this cover spectacular?

Oh sure, it’s fun to make and make-up recipes. Pouring over cookbooks and cooking magazines for hours on end is very satisfying – not to mention, they are tax deductible. But the hidden downside in all this becomes evident fairly quickly. The expanding waistline – not your character’s but your own! And then there’s the inability to walk past a chocolate shop without going in to sample. You must! It’s your duty to make sure your characters are eating only the tastiest truffles. And, don’t get me started on the amount of wine that must be consumed, all in the name of matching said wine with a dish or an entire meal.

My main character, J.J. Tanner and I share so much, but not the expanding waistline. That is mine alone. She is the newest member of the Culinary Capers Dinner Club and is easing into the cooking experience. Her main thing is the cookbooks. She has an impressive collection of cookbooks, all with color photos. She loves pouring over them, reading the short notes about far away places, when there are some. And, now that she’s having to actually make a dish a month for their dinners, she’s finding each new success makes her a bit more daring in the kitchen.

That’s me, and my brave family and friends who are my “guinea pigs” and to whom I am eternally grateful. But again, I must point out, her waistline does not grow; only her cooking and sleuthing skills. Because there’s always a body. But since the Culinary Capers use real cookbooks – you can find them in your local bookstore – there’s no poison involved. Spoiler alert, I know.

The calories are all mine but so is the fun in trying out new recipes, watching a whole pile of shows on the Food Network, and landing a spot on the culinary mysteries panels at conferences with other foodies who love talking about eating, cooking…and writing mysteries.

 What about you, Reds and Readers, do you love murder with a side dish? If so, what's your favorite type of foodie mystery?

Want to read all about the latest sleuthing adventure of J.J. Tanner and the Culinary Capers Dinner Club? Just leave a comment and be entered in a drawing for a signed copy of MARINATING IN MURDER.

Linda Wiken writes the Dinner Club Mysteries as herself, is writing the new Castle Bookstore Mysteries as Essie Lang, and has written the Ashton Corners Book Club Mysteries as Erika Chase.  She was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel and has also been short-listed for an Arthur Ellis Award from Crime Writers of Canada for Best Short Story. She is a former mystery bookstore owner and still loves reading all the mysteries she can get her hands on.  She also loves singing in a choir, which is not always so pleasant for her Siamese cat, Keesha, who must endure hours of practice.

Leslie Karst: Appropriation or Appreciation?

LUCY BURDETTE: I love Leslie Karst's culinary mysteries and so I'm thrilled that there's a new one coming very soon and I have it ordered. If you love food and mysteries, these are for you too. However, today she has a confession to share with her readers...and us...

LESLIE KARST: 

Buon giorno, tutti! I write the Sally Solari culinary mysteries, set in the beautiful beach town of Santa Cruz, California. My protagonist is descended from one of the original Italian fishermen who arrived in Santa Cruz from Liguria in the 1890s, and her father is fiercely proud of Solari’s, the family’s traditional Italian seafood restaurant out on the hundred-year-old wharf.

house-made pasta with clams

But although Sally practically grew up in the kitchen of her dad’s old-school restaurant, she is also sympathetic to the “food revolution” that has recently descended upon the town’s surprised old-timers. And when she inherits her aunt’s trendy restaurant, Gauguin, the dynamic between Sally and her father—hurt that his daughter no longer wants to work at Solari’s and convinced she now looks down on her family heritage—grows tense.

From all this, you may well surmise that, like Sally, I am also of Italian heritage—and many of my readers, and friends, do in fact assume this to be true. After all, I write about an Italian American family, I speak some Italian, and I have the olive complexion and (once-)brown hair of una vera Italiana. Indeed, I myself had always assumed I had, if not Italian, at least some sort of Mediterranean blood running through my veins.

But the sad truth is that I recently had my DNA test done, only to discover that, alas, I possess no Italian—or Mediterranean—ancestors whatsoever. Così triste!

Santa Cruz artichokes

So what does that mean to me, as an author of these stories about an Italian American family?

There’s been much discussion of late about “cultural appropriation” in literature, the idea that writers shouldn’t create characters with cultural or ethnic attributes different from their own. In other words, the argument goes, a young man of European descent who’s lived his entire life in Vermont has no business making his protagonist an elderly, Kenyan woman. The problem, of course, is that taken to its logical extreme, this would mean that women couldn’t write about men, gays couldn’t write about straights, and the wealthy could not write about the poor. And where would that leave us authors of fiction?

But I do get the concern. When you try to create stories about cultures far different from your own, it’s easy to fall into the trap of false stereo-types and tropes. But the key word here is “easy.” Yes, it can be easy to slide into cliché, but that’s not because of the attempt to write about another culture; that’s because of bad writing.

espresso—the writer’s friend

It seems to me that the key to being respectful in one’s writing is to do your best to truly understand your subject and your characters. Which doesn’t mean you can’t create a Japanese side-kick if you’re from New York City. But if you’re not familiar with the culture you better damn well do your homework first: hang out with some Japanese or spend time in the country; study the language; read books written by Japanese authors.

In my case, I’m not actually all that different from my protagonist, who is a fourth-generation Italian and thus relatively far-removed from her ancestral roots. Nevertheless, Sally’s culture is unlike mine in significant ways: she’s twenty years younger than me, was raised Catholic, and has older relatives who are still very much “Italian” in their sense of identity.

from the New World yet so very Italian

Yet I feel comfortable about writing the character. I’ve lived in Santa Cruz for over forty years and have known numerous members of the Italian American community, some quite well. And I do my research: reading oral histories of the old-time fishermen, interviewing the guys who operate the davits (boat cranes) out on the wharf, researching the cuisine the Ligurians brought with them to California, and, of course—the very best part—sampling myriad dishes at my local Italian restaurants!

Solari’s Linguine with Clam Sauce

But most importantly, I have profound respect and affection for the community, whose vital contributions have helped make our town the special place it is. And if I can bring a sense of that vibrant community to life on the page so that others may learn something of the history and culture of my beloved Santa Cruz, then I am content.

What about you? Readers: How do you feel about characters who are culturally different than their creators? And authors: What do you think of the issue of “cultural appropriation”?

About Death al Fresco

It’s early autumn in Santa Cruz and restaurateur Sally Solari, inspired by the eye-popping canvases of Paul Gauguin, the artist for whom her restaurant is named, enrolls in a plein air painting class. But the beauty of the Monterey Bay coastline is shattered during one of their outings when Sally’s dog sniffs out a corpse entangled in a pile of kelp.

The body is identified as Gino, a local fisherman and a regular at Sally’s father’s restaurant, Solari's, until he disappeared after dining there a few nights before. But after witnesses claim he left reeling drunk, fingers begin to point at Sally’s dad for negligently allowing the old man to walk home alone at night. From a long menu of suspects, including a cast of colorful characters who frequent the historic Santa Cruz fisherman’s wharf, Sally must serve up a tall order in order to clear her father’s name.

The daughter of a law professor and a potter, Leslie Karst learned early, during family dinner conversations, the value of both careful analysis and the arts—ideal ingredients for a mystery story. She now writes the Sally Solari Mysteries (Dying for a Taste, A Measure of Murder), a culinary series set in Santa Cruz, California. An ex-lawyer like her sleuth, Leslie also has degrees in English literature and the culinary arts. The next in the series, Death al Fresco, releases March 13^th.

You can visit Leslie on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lesliekarstauthor/ , and you can go to her author website  to sign for her newsletter—full of recipes and fun Italian facts!—and to purchase all her books.