The Timrod Library: A Real Historic Gem in a Small Town by Dorothy St. James

      Jenn McKinlay: There is nothing I love better than a mystery about books and libraries, so I am delighted to invite Dorothy St. James to tell us all about what inspires her amateur sleuth Tru Beckett in the Beloved Bookroom Mysteries volume two, which drops on September 28th!

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Dorothy St. James: When I started writing about Tru’s secret basement bookroom—complete with card catalog and book slips—in the Beloved Bookroom Mystery series, I started to pine for a library like the one I was writing about that I could visit in real life. I often do that. I wrote about a bean-to-bar chocolate shop in the Southern Chocolate Shop Mysteries and started to buy and savor high-quality chocolates. When I was writing the White House Gardener Mystery series, I took classes and became a master gardener. I suppose you could say that I tend to throw myself one hundred percent into my work.

 

Luckily for me, I didn’t have to go far to find a library like the one my intrepid sleuth had created. In fact, I found a wonderful library in the town where I grew up. Stepping through the doors of the Timrod Library in the Town of Summerville, South Carolina is like stepping back in time. Steeped in history, this private membership library has been operating in its current location since 1915.

 

 

At the Timrod Library, there are no computers. When you walk through the front doors, you’re greeted by a huge card catalog. The librarians who work there are welcoming and friendly and eager to help you find the book you didn’t know you’d come looking for. The collection has been carefully curated to meet the members’ needs. In the back of the library, a curious reader will be delighted to find the historic book collection containing two rooms filled with wonderful old books. If not for libraries like this one, some of these books might be forever lost.

 

Tru would certainly approve of the place if she had the time to visit it. But she’s been terribly busy dealing with the troubling rumors running around town about her. She’s also been investigating a mysterious lady who seems to have a connection to the used bookstore owner. There’s a vandal that keeps targeting the secret bookroom, a murder, and the most vicious apple pie contest this side of the Mississippi.

 

 

But don’t worry. Tru and her friends will be able to handle it all…maybe…we hope.

 

Does your town have a special library? What do you love about it?

 

 

To read more about Trudell Becket’s special library, be sure to check out A Perfect Bindwhen it comes out September 28.

 

A Perfect Bind

A Dead Body.

A Library in Shambles.

And a Town Drowning in Rumors.

 

"A librarian's guilty secret is imperiled when murder stalks the library. ... It’s not easy to guess the killer in this amusing cozy filled with romantic angst and peculiar characters." ~ Kirkus Review

 

 

 

Dorothy St. James is the author of several cozy mystery series. She lives in the Lowcountry of South Carolina with her sculptor husband. Dorothy is a member of Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and the International Thriller Writers (ITW) and Sister’s in Crime (SinC). This is her second Beloved Bookroom Mystery. 

 

Follow Dorothy Online:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/dorothy.stjames

Twitter: www.twitter.com/dorothywrites

Instagram: www.instagram.com/dorothymcfalls

Website: www.dorothystjames.com

 

Bookless Libraries – Is This Our Future? by Dorothy St. James

Jenn McKinlay: As a librarian, I'm sure it's no surprise that when I heard about a new series called A Beloved Bookroom Mystery series, I was all in!!! Today we are lucky enough to have author Dorothy St. James tell us all about her first in this new series and she offers up a subject of interest to every library lover's heart - the possibility of bookless libraries! (Pause to clutch my pearls here)!

Dorothy St. James: Let me start off by saying I don’t hate technology. I rely on my phone far too much (and I almost never make phone calls). I prefer ebooks because I enjoy reading in bed without having to use my reading glasses. And the ability to stream TV shows (on my schedule) has been a game-changer. I love the digital world!

 

But digital libraries? Shouldn’t libraries be required to have real hold-in-your-hands books?

 

My latest series, the Beloved Bookroom Mysteries, is based on an idea that a small town library modernizes to become a bookless library, much to the horror of the librarians who work there. The series plays on the theme of technology clashing with the analog world.

 

Bookless libraries indeed exist. In fact, it’s not a new idea. Many university libraries throughout the world have gone bookless more than a decade ago, relying solely on ebooks and digital resources. A few municipal libraries in the United States have tried out the bookless model. A library in Arizona went bookless for a while, but due to pubic outcry the library brought back the printed books. A library in Texas opened a bookless branch in a low income area, providing vital digital services to a community where, historically, wi-fi access has been limited. Because of the vital services this library provides to its community, this new library has been hailed as a success story.

 

Why can’t we do both? Libraries today are asked to provide more and more services. Libraries are not just about the books anymore. Modern libraries often provide maker spaces, computer labs, community meeting rooms, and more. These services cost money and take space.

 

In my local library system (the Charleston County Library, which is wonderful), the largest regional branch building was 16,000 square feet. However, the library system recently built a new branch in my neighborhood that provides both digital and community services as well as room for all kinds of books. This new library building covers a whooping 40,000 square feet. Not every community can afford to build at such a grand scale.

 

My fictional town of Cypress, located in the coastal plain of South Carolina, is like many small towns in the South. (I know. I’ve worked with similar towns in my past life as an urban planner.) Budgets are tight, jobs are scarce, and towns are desperate to attract industries with high paying jobs. Cypress’s town manager comes up with a scheme to make headlines. He takes what little he has in his budget and invests it into modernizing the town’s historic library into a bookless library. The last town to do this had attracted national press, and that’s exactly what he wants. He then plans to use that press coverage to lure high tech industries into investing in the town. His vision it to turn the region into a Silicon Valley of the South. It’s a big gamble, but times are tough and the potential payoff could change the lives of everyone in Cypress.

 

When Trudell Becket, a Cypress Public Library librarian, protests, the town manager gives her a lesson in budgets. The town simply does not have the budget or space to provide digital services and still offer room for a printed book collection. That’s when my warrior librarian decides to do act. She breaks all the rules and saves the printed books that are in the process of being removed to make room for technology.

 

Real life echoes fiction. COVID-19 has been a challenge for libraries. My beautiful 40,000 square foot branch library has been closed. The only way to get books is to order the books online and pick them up at the curb. It’s a necessary precaution. I’d never want the librarians to risk their health. I only mention this because, ironically, since penning this book way back in 2019, I have been experiencing firsthand the angst that I wrote about in The Broken Spine. I dearly miss walking up and down the stacks, discovering books I never knew existed and leaving with many more books than I ever knew I needed. There is a certain magic in discovery that I love about libraries. As we move more and more into the digital age, I hope librarians will be able to figure out a way to replicate this experience for online browsing.

 

In the meantime, I’ll be cheering on (and helping) warrior librarians who have been working fiercely for years in bringing the best resources to their communities.

So, how about it, Reds and Readers, what are your thoughts on booklets libraries?

 

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The Broken Spine, which has been called a mystery that “is destined to become a favorite of all book lovers” by Miranda James, New York Times bestselling author of Cat Me if You Can, is the first book in the Beloved Bookroom Mystery series from Berkley Prime Crime. It arrived in bookstores everywhere January 19, 2021.

 

When a small-town librarian sets up a secret bookroom in her newly modernized library, she discovers that protecting the printed word harder than she’d ever imagined.

 

In fact, it’s murder.

 

Dorothy St. James is the author of the White House Gardener Mysteries and the Southern Chocolate Shop Mysteries. She lives in the Lowcountry of South Carolina with her sculptor husband. Dorothy is a member of Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and the International Thriller Writers (ITW) and Sister’s in Crime (SInC). This is her first Beloved Bookroom Mystery. 

 

Follow Dorothy Online:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/dorothy.stjames

Twitter: www.twitter.com/dorothywrites

Instagram: www.instagram.com/dorothymcfalls

Website: www.dorothystjames.com

 

The Broken SpinePurchase Links:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086SCQ639

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-broken-spine-dorothy-st-james/1136806393?ean=9780593098578

Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/books/the-broken-spine/9780593098578

Indie Bound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781087855806

 

 

National Dewey Decimal Day! by Jenn McKinlay

 Jenn McKinlay: It's quite possible that only librarian nerds will appreciate this day in all its Dewey glory, but given that I am a recovering librarian, I am full on celebrating today, which is... 

Named after its inventor, the Dewey Decimal System came into being in 1876, developed by Melvil Dewey, who was just twenty-one years old at the time. It's now used in over 200,000 libraries in 135 countries around the world. 

How does it work? Well, Dewey's rage for order broke non-fiction down like this, leaving fiction to be filed by author's last name.

Of course, it's changed exponentially beyond its infancy but can you imagine how they were categorizing books before Dewey? By color? Height? Number of pages? 

Having sat on a reference desk for years where people come in asking for the "green book" or the "blue book", let me just say, I can not imagine my former profession without Dewey. 

Of course the library also makes a fabulous setting for...murder!

There are a host of library based mysteries sure to delight library lovers the world over. I would list them here, but it's a long list and it's already been done by the fabulous website Stop You're Killing Me! (click on their name to go to the full list) but I will highlight a few of my favorites:

The Aurora Teagarden Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. Lawrenceton, Georgia, may be a growing suburb of Atlanta, but it’s still a small town at heart. Librarian Aurora “Roe” Teagarden grew up there and knows more than enough about her fellow townsfolk, including which ones share her interest in the darker side of human nature.

 
With those fellow crime buffs, Roe belongs to a club called Real Murders, which meets once a month to analyze famous cases. It’s a harmless pastime—until the night she finds a member dead, killed in a manner that eerily resembles the crime the club was about to discuss. And as other brutal “copycat” killings follow, Roe will have to uncover the person behind the terrifying game, one that casts all the members of Real Murders, herself included, as prime suspects—or potential victims...

The Cat in the Stacks Mysteries by Miranda (Dean) James. Everyone in Athena, Mississippi, knows Charlie Harris, the good-natured librarian with a rescued Maine coon cat named Diesel that he walks on a leash.  He’s returned to his hometown to immerse himself in books, but soon enough he’s entangled in a real-life thriller...
 
A famous author of gory bestsellers and a former classmate of Charlie’s, Godfrey Priest may be the pride of Athena, but Charlie remembers him as an arrogant, manipulative jerk—and he’s not the only one. Godfrey’s homecoming as a distinguished alumnus couldn’t possibly go worse: by lunch, he’s put a man in the hospital. By dinner, Godfrey’s dead.
 
Now it’s up to Charlie, with some help from Diesel, to paw through the town’s grudges and find the killer before an impatient deputy throws the book at the wrong person. But every last one of Charlie’s friends and co-workers had a score to settle with the nasty novelist. As if the murder wasn’t already purr-plexing enough...

 

The Library Lovers Mysteries by Jenn McKinlay (Hey, that's ME!!! Shocker, I know).      Lindsey is getting into her groove as the director of the Briar Creek Public Library when a New York editor visits town, creating quite a buzz. Lindsey’s friend Beth wants to sell the editor her children’s book, but Beth’s boyfriend, a famous author, gets in the way. When they go to confront him, he’s found murdered—and Beth is the prime suspect. Lindsey has to act fast—before they throw the book at the wrong person.

So, how about you, Reds and Readers? Do you enjoy a library based mystery? And do you love your local library? Give them a shout out if you do! Librarians need love!

An Interview with Miranda (Dean) James

           Jenn McKinlay: One of my most favorite mystery series is the Cat in the Stacks mysteries, penned by my friend Dean James (aka Miranda James). In case you don't know, one of the lead characters is a Maine Coon cat named Diesel. Seriously, what's not to love? 

          With his new book CARELESS WHISKERS, the 12th book in the hugely popular series, hitting the shelves on January 21st, I thought it was a good time to have Dean pop in for a visit. We did a little Q & A about his series and his writing life, and I love it so much because he really hits some elemental truths about the writing process. Enjoy!

Available for pre-order NOW!

Jenn: How did you come up with Charlie Harris and Diesel and the Cat in the Stacks mysteries?

Dean: After my Trailer Park Mysteries series was canceled, I was trying to come up with an idea for something new. My editor at Berkley, Michelle Vega, and her boss, Natalee Rosenstein (my editor before Michelle), suggested a series with a librarian and a cat, thanks to the popularity of the book Dewey the Library Cat. I sent them three chapters and a synopsis for the book, they liked it, and a three-book contract got me started.

Jenn: When did you decide to become a writer?

Dean: When I was old enough to figure out that people actually wrote books (and they didn't just magically appear on the shelves out of nowhere), I thought that would be a cool thing to do. Inspired at the age of eleven or twelve by my two favorite sleuths, Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, I wrote a novella (at the time I thought it was a book) featuring a girl sleuth who was half Nancy/half Trixie. My aunt typed it up for me, and I sent to the Whitman, who was publishing the Trixie Belden books at the time. I got a form rejection letter, and that rather daunted my enthusiasm. All the other volumes in the series I planned never got written. Skip ahead to grad school days, and I started writing murder mysteries (you should not assume a direct connection between my being in a Ph.D. program and wanting to kill fictional people).

Jenn:  How long does it take you to write the first draft of a mystery?

Dean: I never really have a "first draft" in the most technical sense. I have a "living draft" because I adjust and change as the story develops. I'm not one of those people who can come up with a minutely detailed outline; that would drive me nuts and I'd never write the book. I like to see what happens while I write. I always get good ideas this way for twists and for character bits. As for how long it takes, it varies. The actual time of fingers on computer keys is many hours, but the writing process also consists of letting the subconscious pull 

things together, and that usually takes a few months.

Jenn: What is your work schedule like when you're writing?

Dean: Schedule? Um, no. I have a full-time day job as an electronic resources librarian in a university medical center, and I spend five days a week at a computer. Mostly I write on the weekends, but as a deadline looms I will 

write before and after work as well.

Jenn: Late night writing when the house is quiet is still my favorite.

Jenn: What do you like to do when you're not writing?

Dean: Sleep. Read. Travel. Watch TV and movies. Sleep some more and read some more.

Jenn: What’s the biggest challenge to writing a long running mystery series? 

Dean: Not repeating yourself. I try to keep the stories fresh with what's happening with Charlie and his family and friends, but also with the characters involved in the murder plots. There are only so many tropes you can use in a conventional cozy mystery, after all. I've read several thousand mysteries, 

many from them the Golden Age of detective fiction, and I think I've absorbed most of the variations you'll find in a traditional mystery. I like to play with the conventions. I had a lot of fun with this, in particular, with my

Simon Kirby-Jones mysteries. He is a gay American vampire who resides in an 

English village and comments acerbically on everything and everyone.

Jenn:  As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?

Dean: I went through various stages of career enthusiasms. I babysat younger cousins frequently, so I thought being a pediatrician might be the thing. Then I became fascinated by foreign languages in the fifth grade and decided I wanted to be a translator at the UN. I even wrote to the UN for information. 

So my plan was to go to college and study several languages. Then I ended up getting a degree in history, with minors in English and Spanish. I thought being a college professor seemed like fun, so I went on to grad school and got a Ph.D. in history (specialty, medieval England), and eventually got my master's in 

library science. It was far easier to find a job in a library than a teaching position in history when I finished grad school, lo these many years ago.

Reading over this, I realize that what I wanted to do all along was concerned with languages, speaking them and writing them, and the writing of them came to predominate, I suppose. Where the urge to kill serially came from, I'm not quite sure...

Jenn: LOL, Dean. Thanks so much for joining us today!

What about you, Reds and Readers, any questions for Dean? Also, since I asked Dean I'll ask you, too. As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Miranda James is the New York Times bestselling author of the Cat in the Stacks Mysteries, including Twelve Angry Librarians, No Cats Allowed, and Arsenic and Old Books, as well as the Southern Ladies Mysteries, including Fixing to Die, Digging Up the Dirt, and Dead with the Wind. James lives in Mississippi. Visit the author at catinthestacks.com and facebook.com/mirandajamesauthor.

  

HITTING THE BOOKS! Let's talk Library Love!!!

JENN McKINLAY: Today's the day! HITTING THE BOOKS is out! I'm just thrilled to have another library lover's mystery "hitting" the shelves! Even more wonderful, HITTING THE BOOKS was chosen as one of the top ten books published in the month of September by Library Reads! Thank you! Thank you!

Now, because I am a former librarian and write a series set in a library, people frequently ask me what my favorite library is. Yeah, no, I can’t choose so I’ll tell you my top three – in no particular order. 

First, there is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. I was fortunate enough to do a tour of duty there while in library school and it was one of the most transformative experiences in my education. Housed in an iconic building, they have a collection which has to be seen to be believed. Samples of their holdings include works by Benjamin Franklin, John James Audubon, George Eliot, the Mellon Collection of Alchemy and the Occult, the Romanov family photo albums, Gutenberg bibles, and more. Seriously, I’m pretty sure I could move into that building and live there forever. When I created my amateur sleuth Lindsey Norris, I made her an archivist from Beinecke just because I loved it so.

Second, is the Phoenix Public Library, also housed in an iconic building, it is where I worked part-time for twenty years in every department from children’s and teen’s services to government documents and law. My home was the Burton Barr Central Library and I spent many evenings gazing out over the city of Phoenix from the enormous reading room housed on the fifth floor. It really is an architectural marvel and the staff are some of the best and brightest in the industry. These are the people who give me so many of the day to day workings of library life that I frequently use in the fictional Briar Creek Public Library.

Third, was a job I only held for two years, but it was definitely the coolest environment. I was the research librarian at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, AZ. My days were spent in the middle of this lush desert garden, researching the ethno-botanical properties of the agave (it’s used for more than making tequila) among other varied research topics. My coworkers were two desert tortoises, Patches and Puddles, who would meander into the library to visit when they were out of hibernation. Patches was so named because the staff had to patch his cracked shell for him and Puddles got her name because there was a dip in her shell and when it rained she always had a puddle on her back. I left the job when I started my family, but it remains one of my favorite library experiences.

The world of libraries is so vast and varied. When I travel, I always visit the local library because as I learned during my library career, libraries really are the hearts of their communities. I think that’s why I love writing the library lover’s series so much. It gives me a chance to celebrate libraries and the people who love them. 

So, tell me, what's your favorite library?

It's murder by the book in the latest hit Library Lover's mystery from the New York Timesbestselling author of Death in the Stacks.

When a stack of library materials is found at the scene of a hit and run, library director Lindsey Norris finds herself dragged into the investigation as the police try to link the driver of the stolen car to the person who borrowed the books. Before Lindsey can delve into the library's records, the victim of the hit and run, Theresa Houston, suffers another "accident" and the investigation shifts from driver negligence to attempted homicide.

A clue surfaces in the confiscated library materials that could crack open the case and it is up to Lindsey to piece it all together. But things are not as they seem in the sleepy town of Briar Creek and when the driver of the stolen car turns up dead, Lindsey, her staff and her library friends have to hit the books before the murderer gets the last word...

Embracing My Senior Sleuth by Nora Page

JENN: My agent never asks me to endorse anyone because she knows I'm usually in one stage of deadline hell or another. So, when she mentioned she had a librarian sleuth that she thought I would enjoy, I was all in and I am so glad I was because I adored Better Off Read by our guest author today. And don't just listen to me, this is what Publisher's Weekly had to say: "Funny [and] fast-paced… A dynamo of a lead in Cleo, who drives with a lead foot and refuses to back down from anything or anyone, including bullies and murderers."


Nora Page Many thanks to Jungle Red Writers and Jenn McKinlay for inviting me to guest post! I’m a huge fan, so right after celebrating the invite, I got down to dithering. Namely, what to write about? Do I have Jungle Red–worthy advice? Doubtful.

Nora Page, aka Ann Myers

I’ve never overcome procrastination or found joy in decluttering. I have poor writing posture (I take the “lap” in laptop seriously), and I don’t have the secret to producing five-thousand words a day or even a few hundred. I kept on dithering.

Then I recalled some memorable writing feedback: You write old.

To backtrack a little, last year I returned to college. It wasn’t like those movies, where—let’s say, hypothetically—a mid-forties, white-haired, work-from-home wallflower discovers her inner party girl. No. It was terrifying, but also enlightening.

The class was a senior fiction seminar at the college where my husband teaches. Classes there run as blocks, three-and-a-half-week sessions taken one at a time. A friend—a professor and writer—invited me to sit in. It was kind and generous, and remember how I take laptops literally? I took the sitting-in part at word value too.

I imagined I’d be sitting back, soaking in the brilliance of the professor and another award-winning novelist. There was brilliance all right, but no relaxing. The students had signed up to write entire novels. Big, meaningful, edgy, fabulous, full-length works of fiction they’d crank out by the end of the semester. Senior fiction seminar was the starting block, the sprint to get down words and dissect them daily in class.

Yikes! I’m a shy sharer, let alone with bright college students half my age. Adding to my terror, I was between projects and floundering for ideas, any idea.  

Under the next-day deadline, I made up something fast. I had a homeless, college-age heroine. She was good with scalpels in a med-student way. I got about 10,000 words down but shelved the idea after the seminar, mainly to start a new project but also because of a seminar participant’s critique: You write old.

The student who said this was being kind and constructive. She thought my main character seemed more aged than her years. She was onto something. The problem wasn’t just a matter of age or slang. It wasn’t the character’s fault either. As characters go, she had fine elements: flaws and noble goals, conflicts and a traumatized backstory. It was me. The seminar student was right. I am drawn to more senior characters, and that’s who I was writing.  

Previously, I wrote a culinary cozy series (the Santa Fe Café Mysteries written as Ann Myers). My favorite character was the bold octogenarian sidekick. She reminded me of my grandmother. She had spunk and experience and said and did what she wanted. I missed her most when that series ended, and I was still hanging on to bits of her.  

Available: June 12, 2018!!!

The Bookmobile Mysteries got the green light from Crooked Lane Books the day the seminar ended. I was thrilled and ready to embrace a new heroine, a senior sleuth! Librarian Cleo Watkins has the starring role in the Bookmobile Mysteries. She’s seventy-five, adores her job, and resists retirement, so much so that she’s wary of crossing into nearby Florida. Together with her feline sidekick, Cleo hits the road in a school-bus bookmobile and rolls into trouble, including murder.  

I have a blast with Cleo. I connect with her, and that’s a key, isn’t it? It’s the broader message behind the student’s critique. Stitching together a handful of traits and troubles won’t cut it. As both readers and writers, we want to feel for the people on the page.

I spend a lot of time with Cleo in my head. She’s also someone I’d want to hang out with in real life. I imagine we’d read quietly on her porch or mix up some biscuits in her kitchen. Maybe we’d do a little sleuthing, although I’d probably stay back in the bookmobile. I’m not as brave as Cleo, not even in writing seminars.

I am glad I sat in, though. I learned a lot from the students, and I hope if they got to critique Cleo, they’d feel her senior spirit. What a compliment that would be. 

What about you, Reds and readers, do you find that you write characters in a certain age demographic better than others? Do you have a preferred age for the characters of the books you read?