Leslie Budewitz: I’m willing to bet every Jungle Red will agree with me: When an author gets her first audiobook contract, she breaks out in a grin. Why, exactly, I’m not sure, but it feels like a sign that you’ve arrived.
For me, it may be in part because books on tape—and they were on tape, back then—were such a big part of my reading life when I started writing. (We’ll just ignore the debate about whether listening is reading; it’s story, and that’s what matters.) I was living in a small town on an Indian reservation in western Montana and driving a lot—I worked for a small law firm 30 miles north, and helped teach a legal writing class at the University, 45 miles south in Missoula. My town didn’t have a public library, but the Missoula Public Library took the view that it served the region and gave anyone living in an adjacent county a card. As I drove, I listened to books by Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Elizabeth Peters, Ellis Peters, and Tony Hillerman. It was Hillerman whose books showed me I could set a mystery in my own rural community and that readers, and listeners, would be interested.
And it was those narrators—Barbara Rosenblat, George Guidall, Stephen Thorne and Patrick Tull—who gave the stories another dimension. Through them, I could be in two places at once: Driving my narrow highways lined by foothills and mountains, winding above the river or through a lush farm valley. And at the same time, walking the streets of Chicago, cruising along the Pacific Ocean near Santa Teresa, harvesting herbs in the gardens of a 12th century Benedictine monastery, or roaming the vast Hopi and Navajo lands. It was the voices who took me there.
Although my Food Lovers’ Village series began before my Spice Shop series, it was the Spice Shop books, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, that came to audio first. When I heard the voice sample the publisher sent me after they chose the narrator, my eyes widened. I knew that voice! You know it, too—Dara Rosenberg who does voiceovers for TV and ads, as well as narrating books. She even narrates Barbara Ross’s Maine Clam Bake series, a favorite of mine and a regular Jungle Red visitor.
At some point, we connected by phone and talked about talking—that is, pronunciations. My main character, Pepper Reece, is a Seattle native, and Northwesterners have their own way of saying certain things. It’s toorist and toor, not the Northeasterner’s toreist and tore. The king of clam chowder is EYE-ver, even though it’s spelled Ivar. Some characters have an accent, or a personal manner of speech.
The books are loaded with regional names, many from Native languages. It’s SHIL-shole Bay, not Shils-hole. Klickitat, Duwamish, and Snoqualmie. (KLIK-uh-tat. Doo-WAHM-ish. Snow-KWAL-mee.) The t and l of Tlingit are said as one syllable, rather than inserting a vowel between them. And it’s Spo-KAN, not Spo-KANE.
For The Solace of Bay Leaves, Pepper’s fifth adventure, knowing there would be an audio book directly influenced the writing. There’s a character named Jake Byrd, and no spoilers, but at times, the spelling of his last name matters. How could I make that clear for the narrator and for listeners? That led to passages like this:
“I went to a couple of meetings,” the customer said. “I didn’t trust that Burns or Burke, whatever his name was.” ...
“His name was Byrd,” the stylist said. “With a Y. And he called the project Byrd’s Nest. With a Y.”
“That’s right. He had all these fancy drawings, but they were ugly as sin.”
And this:
“You know, mostly you know the other people in the business, right? You’re looking at the same jobs, hiring the same subs. But this guy was new on the scene. His name was Jake Byrd, with a Y, doing business as Byrd’s Nest, LLC. With a Y.”
“Cute,” I said. Finally, a first name for the man.
“I thought it was dumb.” Jessica bit into a lemon coriander crescent. “Oh, wow.”
Wait until the baker started using my spices.
Each chapter opens with a short epigraph, usually a bit of spice lore or Seattle history. I wanted to use a snippet from a book of walking tours saying that Lake Union, in the heart of Seattle, was known as XáXu7cHoo, or “small lake,” in Whulshootseed, the language of the Puget Salish tribe. But I couldn’t use it if I couldn’t tell Dara how to pronounce it. I emailed the guidebook author; he had no idea. An old friend of my husband’s is a professor of linguistics at Western Washington University; I emailed her. She didn’t even recognize the phonetics, and was sure it wasn’t a widely used system. She reached out to colleagues among the Northwest tribes, but it was Christmas; my copyedits were due January 2. I chose a different epigraph. Trust me, that made recording an audio file for my darling narrator much easier.
Readers, let’s talk talking books! Are you a fan? Do you have a favorite narrator? Do you listen in the car, like Leslie, or as you go about your day? One lucky winner will get their choice of a paperback or set of audio CDs of The Solace of Bay Leaves.
From the cover of The Solace of Bay Leaves, the 5th Spice Shop Mystery by Leslie Budewitz: Pepper Reece never expected to find solace in bay leaves.
But when her life fell apart at forty and she bought the venerable-but-rundown Spice Shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, her days took a tasty turn. Now she’s savoring the prospect of a flavorful fall and a busy holiday cooking season, until danger bubbles to the surface ...
Between managing her shop, worrying about her staff, and navigating a delicious new relationship, Pepper’s firing on all burners. But when her childhood friend Maddie is shot and gravely wounded, the incident is quickly tied to an unsolved murder that left another close friend a widow.
Convinced that the secret to both crimes lies in the history of a once-beloved building, Pepper uses her local-girl contacts and her talent for asking questions to unearth startling links between the past and present—links that suggest her childhood friend may not have been the Golden Girl she appeared to be. Pepper is forced to face her own regrets and unsavory emotions, if she wants to save Maddie’s life—and her own.
Leslie Budewitz blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in two cozy mystery series, the Spice Shop Mysteries set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in NW Montana. Watch for her suspense debut, Bitterroot Lake (written as Alicia Beckman) in April 2021. A three-time Agatha-Award winner (2011, Best Nonfiction; 2013, Best First Novel; 2018, Best Short Story), she is a past president of Sisters in Crime and a current board member of Mystery Writers of America. She lives and cooks in NW Montana.
Find her online at www.LeslieBudewitz.com and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/LeslieBudewitzAuthor More about the Solace of Bay Leaves, including an excerpt and buy links here: http://www.lesliebudewitz.com/spice-shop-mystery-series/
