Paul Austin Ardoin's Blog

Inspiration from Summerfest 2025

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that inlate 2022 I exchanged the mild winters, blazing summers, and wildfires of Sacramento, California for the frozen winters, warm summers, and fried cheese curds of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of the reasons I love it here in Milwaukee is music… and more specifically, the world’s largest music festival, Summerfest.

I usually hate music festivals, but instead of being in themiddle of the desert with terrible food and porta-potties, Summerfest is on modern festival grounds on the shores of Lake Michigan, and they’ve got real food (General Tso’s Cauliflower made by a Top Chef runner-up) and real bathrooms (regularly maintained). Summerfest features eleven main stages, several side stages, and more than 200 bands over three weekends, usually at the end of June and beginning of July.

I love Summerfest so much, I featured it in the openingchapters of The Executive Murder, last year’s Woodhead & Beckerrelease. It was slightly fictionalized—the names of the different stages weren’t
real—but I wanted to capture the vibe of the show. And because there are so many stages, there’s something for everyone: rock, EDM, country, metal, folk, rap, and everything in between. Country and metal aren’t really my thing, but there’s plenty of genres I do like every single day.

My love of Summerfest dovetails with one of the other greatthings about Milwaukee: the live music scene. There are a dozen concert venues within a half-mile of Water Street and Wisconsin Avenue, the heart of downtown, and that’s less than a ten-minute drive for me. Most of the big names hit Milwaukee, and many of the smaller bands do, too. And especially compared to the concerts in California, the tickets are pretty reasonable. Summerfest is no exception: I always get a full 9-day pass for Christmas, which this year was $60. (I saw 27 artists this year at...Read More

A Time for Murder: Sacramento Surprises

Although I’ve now lived in Milwaukee for more than two years, A Time for Murder is set in my former hometown of Sacramento.

All my novels are set in the same “universe,” where many of the stores and brands are fictionalized. (This helps when, for example, a billionaire purchases and rebrands a popular social media application! That
way, my fictional “Photoxio” social media app isn’t affected.) While car brands and models mostly stay in the real world—Fenway Stevenson drives a Honda Accord, and Luke Guillory, the main character of A Time for Murder, drives a Chevy Malibu—many of the other brands mentioned are made up:

Marks-The-Spot is a big retail chain in all my seriesFlashRide is the most popular rideshare app in all my booksJava Jim’s is a popular national coffee chain in my novels

I’ve done the same for local spots, too. There’s no Marquette University in The Winterstone Murder’s Milwaukee; in the book, Kilbourn Tech is the big university in town, set just a few blocks north of where the Marquette campus is in real life. And I visited a couple of fantastic taquerías when I went to college in Santa Barbara that served as the inspiration for Fenway’s favorite spot, Dos Milagros. (A few of my readers have asked me where the real Dos Milagros is; alas, both places closed long ago.)

I don’t always fictionalize the real brands or real places, although sometimes I’ll reread my books and think I’ve missed an opportunity to do so. Sometimes I like using real brands that are a little obscure—think Inka Kola at the Peruvian restaurant in The Executive Murder.

You’ll find a few fictional local places and brands in A Time for Murder, too! The prison where Luke's mother would be incarcerated is Folsom Prison, but I didn't want people humming...Read More

When Setting Becomes More Than Just a Backdrop

Last week, the neon lights and constant buzz of the Las Vegas Strip surrounded me during a business conference. Las Vegas served as the landscape for my latest Fenway Stevenson mystery, but it wasn't the glitz of the Strip that captured my imagination, but the raw, unfiltered world just beyond the city limits.

In The Digital Coroner, Fenway finds herself 60 miles northeast of Vegas, at a casino and a museum where the setting is as much a character as any person walking through its doors. It's a reminder that some of the most powerful stories aren't just told through dialogue or action, but through the very ground they inhabit.

Think of the great mystery writers who understood this magic. Agatha Christie didn't just set Death on the Nile in Egypt—she made the river itself pulse with tension. Hilary Rose Berwick's Lavender & Foxglove series isn't just set in the French...Read More

NFTs: the crux of Fenway 10's mystery

The Digital Coroner was inspired by a real-life museum I visited earlier this year. In the museum, all the artwork was based on NFTs (which stands for “non-fungible tokens,” which sounds like a line from Jabberwocky).

Most of my editors and early readers weren’t familiar with NFTs. NFTs are “digital assets” (for example, a digital image in JPEG format that you can view on the web) with a complex “digital signature” attached to it that says the digital asset belongs to you.

How can a JPEG graphic that can be downloaded from a website or sent in an email can “belong” to someone? (“Because the digital signature says so” appears to be the answer.) Creating that digital signature is really expensive and consumes a LOT of energy—roughly what the average American household consumes in six days. And some NFTs sell for a LOT of money!

Hopefully, I’ve explained enough about NFTs in The Digital Coroner for readers to understand enough to enjoy the murder mystery! But for those of you who want to know more, I’ve got a few links here:

Good Housekeeping wrote an article about NFTs which is the best article I’ve found that...Read More

Honoring my final proofreader:

It’s been almost three weeks since my mom passed away, and I want to share my memories of her.

First, there’s a lot of her personality in Fenway Stevenson. Her attitude, for one—and her unshakability when she had conviction about an important topic. There’s even more of her in Bernadette Becker, which is probablyone reason she didn’t like Bernadette as much as she liked Fenway!

She was the last proofreader in the line of early readers, editors, and sensitivity readers who read my books in their various stages of pre-publication. And even in early March 2024, when she could only stay awake for a few hours a day, she still caught dozens of typos and inconsistencies in The Warehouse Coroner that everyone else had missed.

My mom in 1997 near Carmel-by-the-Sea, a town about a hundred miles north of the fictional Estancia, where the Fenway Stevenson books are set.

 

When she finally realized she couldn’t live on her own and moved to Seattle to stay with my cousin, we still had weekly computer sessions over Skype. That’s me, part son, part tech support!

I found out a lot of new stuff about her when I went through her papers in the last couple of weeks. I knew she had taught English in South Korea a few years after the war ended—but I didn’t realize it was against the advice of pretty much everyone in her life. I found her journal during those months, and it’s eye-opening.

When she returned to the States, she had enough money to buy a house. This was in the early sixties, a time when no bank would give a mortgage loan to women—but she bought the house anyway.

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Remembering Paul Auster

When I was an 18-year-old community college student (De Anza College in Cupertino, California, down the street from the Apple headquarters), not really sure what I wanted to do with my life, I took a "Contemporary Literature" class.

The professor, Barbara Loren, assigned us a 25-page term paper as our quarter-long project. The assignment: read five books from a living author, and analyze them.

Across the street from De Anza was a fantastic bookstore: A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, in what was then the Oaks Shopping Center. I loved this bookstore, and after class, I traipsed over there and began my search for a living author who had written five books I could use for this monster paper.

It didn't take me very long—I started in the A's—and came across a guy with a name remarkably similar to my own. I picked up The New York Trilogy. (This was late 1990, when Auster only had six novels published.) The first line of the first book in the trilogy, City of Glass, completely captivated me:

I burned through those six books and wrote my essay on the themes of solitude and the overlapping of names (shout out to Jacques Derrida and the signifier/signified arguments). And I was VERY excitered two years later whenRead More

Creating the New Look for The Woodhead & Becker Mysteries

Previously, I announced a change to the Murders of Substance series to The Woodhead & Becker Mysteries, as well as a change of the book titles to The Winterstone Murder and The Bridegroom Murder. After fixing the title pages and other pages of the books’ interior where the titles appear. Once that’s done, I re-published these books with their new titles. The next Woodhead & Becker release (coming in 2023) will have the new title format and cover style.

I’ve written about the origin of the original series and the influence of the 1987 album Substance from the British post-punk band New Order, and why I made the change. This post discusses the process of coming up with the concepts for the new covers, and shows the full visual transformation!

I work with Ziad Ezzat of Feral Creative for my book covers, and I absolutely love his designs. The original covers of the Murders of Substance series are haunting and gorgeous—so I was really disappointed when I realized I gave him bad directions on what readers would be looking for. 

After...Read More

How I Decided on The Woodhead & Becker Mysteries

I just released The Trailer Park Murder, the third book in The Woodhead & Becker Mysteries. This is the first book in the series I've released since the series was renamed—and I thought it would be a good time to talk about how I decided on the new name and identity for the series.

I’ve written about the origin of the series title, of the Murders of Substance and how they were influenced by the 1987 album Substance from the British post-punk band New Order, and why I made the change to The Woodhead & Becker Mysteries. This post discusses the process behind the new titles.

After deciding to make the...Read More

Woodhead & Becker 3 early reactions: “My favorite so far!”

After my books go to my editor and my first round of early readers, I’ll send the mostly-edited manuscript to beta readers. These are people who reads through the whole book to provide feedback, usually on the story structure, characters, plot, and whatever other comments they want to make. These are readers I’ve gotten to know over the years—many before I was published—who are mystery fans. Sometimes they’re experts in areas that are big components of the mystery. (One of my beta readers is a surgeon who always tells me when my medical terminology, pharmaceutical information, or autopsy descriptions need improvement!)

After a month of fixing the errors that my editor and first-round early readers caught, as well as rewriting several chapters, I sent The Trailer Park Murders out to beta readers. One beta reader burned through it and has already given me comments: “Bravo! This is my favorite book of yours so far—well-paced and exciting!”

And while I was writing this, another early reader returned her comments. She’s got expertise in two areas of major importance in this book, so I’ll need to fix some details that I got wrong. (These beta readers are AWESOME.)

Writing the first draft of the book is always the hardest part for me, but there’s nearly as much work in the editing stages. (And there are always a couple of typos or punctuation errors that make it past my three editors...Read More

My Editor Visits Milwaukee!

Many of you followed the story of my move from Sacramento to Milwaukee late last year. While my wife and I have gotten a lot of incredulous looks from people—why did we leave sunny California for the frozen tundra wasteland of Milwaukee?—we love almost everything about Milwaukee. We love the art and music scenes, the restaurants, the cheese curds and beer, and yes, even the cold winter weather!

Before last year, I'd lived my whole life in California, and that's where I joined the Sacramento chapter of NaNoWriMo where I finished my first novel. It was in that group where I met Max Christian Hansen, who has edited every one of my mystery novels since The Incumbent Coroner, Fenway Book 2 (and he even did a re-edit of Book 1 in 2020). He and I co-chaired the NaNoWriMo chapter in Sacramento for a couple of years.

So I was delighted that Max, who does a lot of freelance work for a company based in Milwaukee, was coming for a short visit! While out on a trip to the Midwest, he stopped in to see his co-workers in Milwaukee—and he and I took a boat tour down the Milwaukee River and out to Lake Michigan on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon. We learned about Milwaukee history. We ate currywurst at the Hofbrauhaus, drank some great microbrews, stopped to see the Bronze Fonz, and and discussed The Trailer Park Murder , the latest book that Max is editing...Read More