Edith Maxwell's Blog, page 142

Do Our Books Really Make a Difference? Welcome Guest Joanna Campbell Slan

In July I was on a panel with Joanna. We’d never met before and I just happened to sit by her. She’s smart, funny, and prolific. Our meeting was serendipitous in so many ways. Please join me in welcoming Joanna to The Wickeds.

[image error]On a recent trip to Savannah, I was surrounded by reminders of John Berendt’s famous book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Shops sold the book in hard and soft cover, the audio version, the DVD of the movie, and trinkets galore. During a tour ride on a trolley, the guide mentioned the book over and over again. Although Savannah’s recorded history begins in 1733, Berendt’s bestseller wasn’t published until 1994, so it’s not like Savannah didn’t exist until John Berendt found it. I visited the city fifty-plus years ago as a child. Back then, we clamored to see the Juliette Gordon Lowe house. During this visit, Juliette’s name was mentioned exactly twice.

Why?

I think it’s because John didn’t put Juliette in his book.

We authors create immortality and popularity both when we write. We elevate the mundane, expose the quirky, and publicize the little known. Through the power of story, we change the world. One word at a time.

Sometimes this happens on a personal level. Growing up in a chaotic, alcohol-fueled home, I took solace in reading Jane Eyre. Jane’s quest to get an education and her subsequent success in life inspired me to find a way to go through college without the support of my parents. It’s fair to say that Jane Eyre changed my life. I have a hunch I’m not alone.

Charlotte Brontë’s classic changed my life for a second time when I won the Daphne du Maurier Award for Literary Excellence with my mystery Death of a Schoolgirl, a continuation of Jane Eyre’s story.

As a matter of fact, I bet that every book ever written has changed someone’s life. Maybe the work served as a happy escape from boredom. Maybe it inspired the reader to look up a new fact. Maybe the author’s viewpoint gave people a new point of view. At the very least, we can be sure the book changed the author’s life, because time spent writing could have been used some other way.

[image error]My new book Grand, Death, Auto (Book #14 in the Kiki Lowenstein Mystery Series) was inspired when one of my reader-friends told me about a rash of teen suicides in her community. I chose to write about teen suicide for many reasons. Some personal and some not. In particular, I wanted to remind parents that to teenagers, suicide seems very romantic. The victims get a lot of attention—usually positive–although they aren’t around to enjoy it. People wish they would have treated the dead friend more kindly. There’s a lot of weeping and wailing involved. If you’re a fan of high drama (and what teen isn’t), a funeral is pretty darn cool stuff.

I once met the mother of a young man who’d killed himself. She made it her life’s mission to go to high schools and tell the students how disgusting his body looked after he died. “These kids romanticize death. I want them to know the facts.”

Not surprisingly, she saved a lot of lives.

I hold no illusions that Grand, Death, Auto will save lives. I’m not that egotistical. I do hope it will spark discussion. I expect that some mystery readers will *ding* me on Amazon for even attempting such a dark subject. That’s okay. I really want my work to make a difference. And I’m willing to settle for just a small one.

Readers: How about you? Do you consider making a difference when you write?

[image error]Bio: Joanna Campbell Slan is a USA Today and Amazon Bestselling author. Her work has appeared in five New York Times Bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul books. As the author of three mystery series and numerous non-fiction books (nearly 40 in total to date), she is practically super-glued to her keyboard, except for when she is forced by her Havanese puppy, Jax, to pay attention to him.

Finding a Treasure — A Short Story by Maud Hart Lovelace

I’ve written before about how much I love the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. Click here for a link to a post I wrote in 2015.

[image error]For some reason about a week ago I went on eBay and typed in Maud Hart Lovelace. There were lots of listings to scroll through — mostly Betsy-Tacy books — lots of them newer paperback versions of the books. Then I spotted a posting for a Woman’s Day magazine with a short story written about Betsy in 1944! The magazine was found in an attic in Maine and claimed to be in good condition. Two seconds later I hit the buy button.

The magazine is almost like new. The front and back cover are above. Some of the pages are a little yellowed but there’s no tears and it doesn’t stink which was my biggest worry. The magazine itself is fascinating, but that will wait for another day. Look at the price — two cents!

The story is titled “An Errand for Miss Canning.” In the story Betsy is eight and in third grade. Her teacher asks Betsy to run an errand for her — to her house! (Can you imagine that these days?!) Miss Canning wants Betsy to retrieve a notebook from a secretary in her parlor. Betsy says yes, but is too embarrassed to ask what is a secretary. I shared every distress Betsy felt as she walks to and enters Miss Canning’s house.  It’s a trademark of Lovelace’s writing to put the reader in the middle of the story.

[image error]Spoiler Alert — Of course the story ends happily when Betsy figures out a secretary is a desk, but it takes some fits and starts to get there. She does get a doughnut out of the deal.

[image error]Above is the table of contents. The magazine itself is an amazing glimpse at life during World War II. The ads, recipes, and articles all pertain to the war. And there’s a delightful story about a Westie — talk about serendipity! I’ll share more about that another time.

Readers: Do you ever buy things from sites like eBay?

 

New Beginnings — Often Come From Something Difficult

[image error]New beginnings often come from an event that was difficult. How has this played out in one of your books? How did it impact your protagonist and those around her?

Barb: In some ways this is a cozy trope, the heroine’s life goes into the dumpster and as a result she moves to a small town and starts a business. In the Maine Clambake Mysteries, it’s [image error]not so much Julia Snowden’s life that goes bad, but her family’s back in Busman’s Harbor, Maine. As the series starts, the Snowden Family Clambake is on the brink of bankruptcy due to Julia’s father’s death, a bad bank loan, the mismanagement of her brother-in-law, Sonny, and the lingering effects of the recession. Julia’s sister Livvie calls and begs her to come home to run the clambake. Julia does so with some resentment, although it turns out to be the best thing that could have happened to her.

[image error]Sherry: Barb, I always loved how you gave the trope of going home a new twist. It felt fresh to me. In my Sarah Winston Garage Sale mysteries Sarah has to start life over after her divorce, but instead of going home to California she decides to stay in Ellington, Massachusetts the small town close to the Air Force base she was living on. She didn’t want to go home as a perceived failure and that forces her to cobble together a new life.

Barb: Sherry, what I’ve always admired about Sarah’s origin story is how in losing her marriage she also loses her place in her community and her lifestyle. It’s a complete ground zero, yet she grows where she is planted.

[image error]Edith: And what a success Sarah has made of her new life, Sherry! As has Julia Snowden, Barb. In my Cozy Capers Book Group series, Mac Almeida goes home again after a couple of disappointments while traveling, but the investments she previously made in the banking industry and the smarts she acquired give her the means and the savvy to open her own business down the street from her family on Cape Cod. In my Country Store series, Robbie is already living in Indiana, happily working as a chef after a divorce in California, when her beloved mother dies suddenly. She’s devastated, but Robbie’s inheritance from her mother enables her to buy and renovate the country store where she opens her restaurant.

[image error]Julie: I do love the varied and robust ways our protagonists prevail! In the Garden Squad series Lilly is a fairly recent (within 2 years) widow who is just starting to come back to life to tend her gardens, and her town. She’s been there forever, but has been buried in grief so she is able to tell readers how it used to be while she notices all that has gone wrong.

Liz: I agree, Julie – I think we’ve all done a good job of making new starts fresh and different. In my Cat Cafe series, Maddie comes home for a funeral and has no intent on sticking around, until it becomes apparent that her grandfather is going to lose his house unless she steps in. Which leads to a whole new life for her back home that she never expected. And much like Julia, Barb, she doesn’t really know if she is going to stick around for all that long at first.

[image error]Sherry: Maybe we should have title this blog “you can go home again or create a new one.”

Readers: How has a new beginning played out in your life?

Welcome Back Guest Heather Redmond!

I’m delighted to welcome back Heather. She writes the A Dickens of a Crime mystery series and is giving away a signed copy of A Tale of Two Murders. Grave Expectations the second in the series released on July 30!

[image error]Every subgenre of mysteries has its own subtle rules about the degree of violence and gore actually shown in the murder scene and its aftermath. From the graphic descriptions of Kathy Reichs’ forensic anthropologist-led Tempe Brennan series, to the off-camera death in Kellye Garrett’s PI trainee-led Hollywood Ending, there is a wide range of what kind of death is on the page.

I had never really thought about this until recently, when I was working on a library presentation on how to build exciting mysteries. I revisited or discovered a number of British and American mysteries from the last one hundred years in the process and noticed the substantial variations in crime scene discovery.

My A Dickens of a Crime series is that subgenre called “historical mystery” but it is one of the less clear genres in terms of descriptive death. It all depends on the sleuth. If your hero is an “anatomist” like in Tessa Harris’s Dr. Thomas Silkstone’s mysteries, it’s going to be gorier, whereas with someone who is writing cozier historicals, like Catherine Lloyd, the violence might be more glossed over.

My books, led by real life nineteenth century author Charles Dickens when he was a parliamentary reporter, are somewhere in between. I’ve written three of them so far. A Tale of Two Murders had poisoning and suicide, with Charles witnessing the first tragic death. The new one, Grave Expectations, has a rather grisly demise. Next year’s Christmas Carol Murder has the most delicate murder, I would say, though I think the novella I based it on, A Christmas Carol by Dickens, is as much a horror story as it is a comedy or holiday parable.

My series is based on both author Charles Dickens’s life as a young man in London and much more loosely, on his novels. Grave Expectations is set in the summer of 1835 when he lived in Selwood Terrace and worked at the Morning and Evening Chronicle as a reporter and sketch writer. I took themes and motifs from his novel Great Expectations, written many years later. Themes like “the dead don’t stay dead” and “the tug of past life on the present” and motifs like “spiderwebs.” I had to have characters like a blacksmith to honor the saintly Joe in the novel, and of course, an elderly lady in a wedding gown. Miss Havisham is such a grotesque character that my own version seemed to require some sort of fantastical death.

Readers, where do you fall on the murder spectrum? Do you want a cerebral puzzler, just focusing on the whodunnit, or do you like the realistic atmosphere of crime scene description? Answer below by September 10th to win a signed copy of A Tale of Two Murders, my first A Dickens of a Crime mystery. North American residents only.

About the book:

In this clever reimagining of Charles Dickens’s life, he and fiancée Kate Hogarth solve the murder of a spinster wearing a wedding gown . . .

London, June 1835: Charles checks in on an elderly spinster who resides above him. He finds her decomposing corpse propped up, adorned in a faded gown that looks like it could have been her wedding dress. A murderer has set the stage. But to what purpose?

Secrets shrouded by the old woman’s past may hold the answers. But Charles and Kate will have to risk their lives to unveil the truth . . .

About the author:

[image error]Heather Redmond is the author of many novels, novellas, and short stories under three names. She writes the A Dickens of a Crime and the Journaling mysteries series. Her novel, A Tale of Two Murders, received a coveted starred review from Kirkus and was a multi-week Barnes & Noble Hardcover Mystery Bestseller.

How Old Are Your Characters?

Happy Labor Day, and a belated “rabbit, rabbit” (I’ll admit I forgot).

I had an interesting conversation with my agent lately. No, no new contracts in the offing, but much discussion and negotiation. I have faith that my agent will come up with a good solution. Or two. Or three. Some old, some new.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. My agent is well connected with the ever-changing publishing world, and she made the observation that some publishers are now looking for younger protagonists from us aged writers (most of us here are “of a certain age”). Not young young (she wasn’t thinking of teen books), but maybe in their twenties?

Which got me thinking. When I started writing early in the current millennium, I knew nothing about writing conventions for current popular fiction. It didn’t feel right to write about protagonists who were my age, so for about half of my characters they were in their twenties. I’m not. These were mixed in with others who were probably in their late thirties, or maybe even fortyish. Now I’m trying to figure out how I made those decisions.

My best guess is that I believe that women who are twenty- or thirty-something have a reasonable amount of experience in living, but they also still have a lot of options open to them. They may have been through failed romances, or they may have lost more than one job through no fault of their own (hey, this is fiction!). They don’t just give up—they choose another career path or life path, if you want to call it that. They try something new. They have faith in themselves, and they have hope for the future. And they usually (in the books or series) find a profession and a love interest that make them happy, after they’ve overcome a few minor difficulties (often a dead body, if it’s a mystery).

My most recent (and, coincidentally, youngest) protagonist, Maura Donovan in the County Cork Mysteries, may be in her mid-twenties, but she’s a city girl with no family and not much education or working experience, so she takes on a big challenge when she goes to Ireland. She’s an old spirit, if young in years. And it has been fun to write her as she opens up and learns new things and makes friends and handles running a pub and, yes, kind of falls in love. It wouldn’t be the same if she was forty-something.

But if you’ve read any of the books in that series, you’ll notice that I deliberately chose to include a wide range of characters, from a teenager to a couple of eighty-somethings. Each of them is a distinct character, and each contributes to the stories in their own way. This is as close to the real world as I can make it.

What about you? Readers, do you prefer to read about main characters close to your own age? Younger? Older? Writers, what age (or ages) do you feel most comfortable writing about?

 

[image error]The next County Cork Mystery, coming in January 2020

 

 

Guest- Ashley Weaver

Jessie: Back in New Hampshire where some leaves are looking just the teensiest bit orange.

I am delighted to welcome Ashley Weaver to the Wickeds blog today. I have had the privilege of getting to know her and her work as a fellow member of the Sleuths in Time Facebook group. Ashley writes charming and engaging historical mysteries as I am sure you will see from her post! Take it away Ashley!

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I’ve had a lot of strange research phases over the years, niche interests that I read about until I’ve finally mastered the subject—or my attention gets drawn away by something else. My family, friends, and coworkers have gotten used to my reading (and regaling them with information) about things like the French Revolution, polar exploration disasters, Paris during WWII, and survival cannibalism. But one of my earliest phases, which I developed as a teenager, was a fascination with Prohibition-era organized crime.  

It came about, I’m sure, due to my love of old movies. I would often find a star I loved and watch as many of their films as I could get my hands on. I worked at the library, and my staff box would always be full of VHS tapes ordered from other branches. There was an almost unlimited supply! So I’m not sure if it was Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, or Edward G. Robinson who was to blame, but I soon spiraled into the world of smoky speakeasies, blazing tommy guns, and barrels of bootleg hooch.

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My interest in the film portrayal of the topic led to my collection of history books, accrued from various bookstores over the years. There weren’t many kids my age reading about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and perusing vintage mugshots, but the era’s combination of glamour and grittiness, decadence and danger, drew me in. I found something so fascinating about the culture of gleeful lawlessness that developed around Prohibition and the cunning and violent men who took advantage of it. 

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You might think this kind of thing is off-topic for a mild-mannered librarian who writes cozy mysteries about a wealthy British socialite and her charming husband. But it turns out that all my research was not in vain! When I began writing my sixth Amory Ames mystery, which takes place in New York towards the end of Prohibition, I knew that I had the perfect opportunity to sprinkle in some of the details I had gleaned over the years.  

And, so, though she hails from England, Amory gets to visit a speakeasy, mingle with the criminal element, and winds up entangled in a murder investigation that may or may not be linked to bootlegging. I even had a chance to include a dashing and dangerous gangster named Leon De Lora. He’s not based on any particular historical figure, but I feel like there’s a little of all my “favorite” mobsters in him! 

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It’s pretty exciting and satisfying that an unusual fascination I developed over twenty years ago has finally made its way into one of my books. I guess it just goes to show that learning is never a waste of time. And who knows? Maybe one of my other obsessions will find a place in a book one day! Though I find it a bit difficult to believe that survival cannibalism would make a good cozy mystery . . .

Readers, what’s the strangest niche interest you’ve developed? Have you ever been able to make good use of it? Ashley would love to offer a copy of A Dangerous Engagement to one lucky commenter!

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Ashley Weaver is the author of the Amory Ames Mysteries and the Technical Services Coordinator for the Allen Parish Libraries in Louisiana. Weaver has worked in libraries since she was fourteen and obtained her MLIS from Louisiana State University. She lives in Oakdale, Louisiana.

www.ashley-weaver.com

Stop Fall Fast Forwarding: Enjoy August

By Julie/Julia enjoying the last gasps of August

I love August. I love the heat, the fruits and vegetables that are in season, the languid pace as we have vacations and long weekends. I love wearing sandals with a nice pedicure, white linen pants and the sun kisses on my shoulders and face. I love not having to wear a jacket, and being able to sit outside to eat. I love long walks on the beach.

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And yet there are those who persist on wishing for fall. They cheer the pumpkin spice everything and celebrate Halloween decorations taking over shelves.

To those folks, many of whom I know and love, I say this:

Stop.

Just stop.

Enjoy August.

Here in New England, fall is lovely. Really lovely. Postcard lovely. But fall leads to winter which is long, cold and icy. You can’t sit outside to eat, and long walks require layers of clothes and boots with good treads.

I love August. And this August I have something else to celebrate. Tilling the Truth was released on Tuesday. This is the second in my Garden Squad series. The first in the series, Pruning the Dead (which is on sale for ebooks this month) was released in January.

Tilling the Truth is not only released in August, it takes place in August! So when you’re reading about Lilly riding her Vespa and sweating you don’t have to use too much imagination.

As a gardener, Lilly loves August as well. She’s has the same issues with fall that I do, as you will find out in the next book.

Until then, in celebration of Tilling the Truth , I’m going to give away a copy of the book to a commenter! Tell me, dear readers, what do you like best about August?

Wicked Wednesday-The Spirit of a Place

Jessie: Finishing up the last week of summer vacation!

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Since both Barb and Julie have books that released this week with a heavy emphasis on the darker side of a place I wondered if you have any memories or stories ( that you believe or don’t) of haunted locales? Houses, towns, wooded groves or misty lakes, I am interested in them all!

Edith: So many congratulations to Barb and Julie! I can wait to read both the new books. A friend was staying in our guest room a few years ago. Our house was built in 1880. Bonnie woke up in the night and saw a woman in an old-fashioned nightgown standing at the end of the bed. She wasn’t malevolent and didn’t speak or move but stayed there for some time. Bonnie turned over or something and when she looked again, the woman was gone. I get shivers just thinking about it! I’ve never seen the woman in white, but I kind of wish she would reappear.

[image error]Barb: As regular readers know, my mother-in-law ran a bed and breakfast in an old sea captain’s house in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. My husband’s Aunt Connie, who was given to that sort of thing, firmly believed a female ghost resided in the back bedroom called the Garden Room. One night, after my husband and I owned the place, we had a house full of family and Bill and I ended up sleeping in the Garden Room with our cocker spaniel MacKenzie. The dog was a nervous wreck all night, panting, walking around on his toenails, and generally keeping us awake. Finally, exasperated and nearing dawn, we threw him out of the room. He immediately settled in the hallway and fell into a deep sleep. I think there were squirrels in the walls, but I think Bill kinda wonders…

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Julie: I lived in an apartment in Brookline years ago, and we had a poltergeist. My roommate and I were talking once and a can of bug spray flew off the top of the refrigerator at us both. She told me that when she’d lay on her stomach and read, a red light would flash on the page. One night I heard a crash in her room, and the large mirror that had been resting against the wall on the back of her very crowded dresser top had fallen. It was face up, and not broken. Nothing else was disturbed, but a pair of ceramic earrings she had were crushed under the mirror. The earrings were of a skeleton face and a cross. Yup, we moved.

Sherry: Oh, that is scary, Julie! When we lived at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts our house was near the Minute Man National Historical park which runs from Lexington to Concord. It’s where the first battle of the Revolutionary War took place and the woods were said to be haunted by the soldiers who died that day. I never had any weird experiences but others did. Another haunted place not too far from there is the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. I used the story of the woman who haunts it in All Murders Final.  I’ll have to save the story of the haunted houses on F.E. Warren Air Force Base for another day as is my encounter with Cary Grant’s ghost.

Liz: My favorite topic – haunted stuff! I had a friend from college who said the house in Marblehead her grandmother lived in was haunted. She promised to invite a bunch of us over for a slumber party but alas, it never happened. I’ve never had any haunted experiences, to my dismay, but I keep hoping. Eventually I’m going to have go stay at one of those hotels famous for the hauntings just to get it out of my system.

Jessie: I love all these stories! I do love a bit of woo! Any supernatural experiences I have had have not been related to a specific place and so would be best in a different post but I would say that there are places that either feel wonderful to me or give me the creeps. One of my children participated in an after school activity in a building in a different town that I felt had repellent energy. There was just something about it that made me uneasy. I made sure to stay with the other parents when coming and going from the events there. It turned out several assaults were committed there not long after we started attending. I don’t know that it was the spirit of the place but I was truly glad I trusted my instincts.

Readers, do you believe a place can have a strong personality, either malevolent or benign?

Happy Release Day Julia and Barb!

It’s release day for Kensington Books, and as has happened so often this year, it’s a multiple release day for the Wickeds. Julia Henry’s new book is Tilling the Truth, second in the Garden Squad Mysteries, after series debut Pruning the Dead. Barb has once again teamed up with Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis for a holiday novella collection, this one the Halloween-themed Haunted House Murder.

To celebrate, we’ll be giving two lucky commenters below a copy of one of the books.

Barb: Julie and I both have series characters with the last name Jayne, a complete coincidence. Lilly Jayne is the main character in Julie’s Garden Squad Mysteries. (Susan) Wyatt Jayne is the architect who’s come to renovate Windsholme, the derelict family mansion in the Maine Clambake Mysteries. Since this coincidence happened, I’ve been imagining the characters’ relationship.

[image error]In my scenario, my Wyatt Jayne is the niece of Julie’s Lilly Jayne. Lilly’s younger brother Bill decamped the Jayne hometown of Goosebush, Massachusetts to go to Northwestern University and then stayed in the Chicago area. He became a highly successful accountant with a big international firm. Like Lilly, his first marriage didn’t take, but his second marriage was very happy and he and his wife raised their three kids in Winnetka. When the time came, Wyatt was sent east to prep school in New Hampshire and–et voila!–she and Julia Snowden from the Maine Clambake Mysteries were assigned as roommates.

Julie, what do you think? Do you want to add, contradict or offer a new scenario? Only the last sentence of the above represents anything that appears in any of my books.

[image error]Julie: Barb, I love this. And I love the coincidence of the names. In my scenario, Bill and Lilly are cousins. Bill’s side of the family gave up the rights to the family house generations ago, since it was an albatross around the neck as far as the costs for running it. Bill’s daughter, Wyatt, regrets that family decision, and has always wanted to have a house like Windward in her family. Hence her interest in building and restoring.

Barb: Julie, this is a very intriguing scenario. I like it! I think there is the possibility to merge these somehow. All our fictional names come from somewhere. Julie, why did you decide to use the surname Jayne for Lilly?

Julie: In my family when someone acted too big for their britches, they were called Lady Jane. I don’t remember which grandparent used the phrase, but I do remember it. It likely came from Lady Jane Grey, though I can’t imagine folks making the connection. I hadn’t thought about it for years, but when I was thinking about Lilly’s story, part of what I thought of was the reaction folks might have of her. Lady Jane came to mind. “Who do you think you are, Lady Jane?” I’d already decided on Lilly, and I liked the sound of Lilly Jane. But I needed to add a “y” to make it sound like a last name.

Barb, where did your Jayne come from?

Barb: I’m laughing, because my mother used the same expression when I got too full of myself. “Who do you think you are, Lady Jane Grey?” I wonder if it came from a popular movie or something from the 30s or 40s? Also, and in even weirder coincidence land, our mutual friend Ang Pompano, who lives in Guildford, Connecticut tells me I am most likely related to Lady Jane Grey via my ancestor William Dudley who was born in Guildford in 1639. Which means when my mother said, “Who do you think you are, Lady Jane Grey?” I should have said, “Why yes I am.” (That would have gone over like a lead balloon.)

My last name Jayne came from the family who lived at the edge of the woods at the end of our little pre-World War II development in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. There were three girls, all with long braids, and they lived in the wing of an old mansion that had belonged to an ancestor. (That wing and a library were the only remnants of two huge mansions on the property that had been torn down. I wrote about it here.) I thought it was just about the most romantic fairy-tale set up ever, and the mansion, woods, and girls have been playing out in my fiction ever since.

I think we need to do some kind of crossover. Maybe short stories or novellas.

Readers: Which scenario do you like? Or would you like to add an alternative. Let us know, or just say “hi” to be entered to win a copy of Tilling the Truth or Haunted House Murder.

The Ghosts of Busman’s Harbor and a #giveaway

by Barb, noticing a little nip in the air as we approach Labor Day

[image error]I’m quite excited about the release this week of Haunted House Murder, which includes my latest Maine Clambake novella, “Hallowed Out.” The book also contains novellas by Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis. All the stories take place in Maine during the Halloween season.

I’m always grateful when these requests to write a holiday novella come around. I love writing in the novella length (roughly a third to half the length of a typical cozy mystery) and I like being given a theme to see what I can do with it. It’s a fun challenge.

In this case, the theme given us was the title of the collection, Haunted House Murder, and that was it. My story has always come third in these anthologies, so I figure the obvious choices will have been covered by the time readers get to it. So just like I didn’t poison anyone with eggnog in Eggnog Murder, I didn’t focus on a creepy haunted house in Haunted House Murder. I doubted that would be a new setup by the time readers turned the page to begin my tale.

Instead, I wrote about a Haunted House Trolley Tour, a special offering for Halloween week in Busman’s Harbor. The end of October is often pretty yucky in Maine. The beautiful foliage is gone, as is the likelihood of warm weather. We are headed into November, which some people argue is the yuckiest month of the year. So in my story the Haunted House Trolley Tour is a part of a push to bring in tourists after the season has officially ended.

I do offer up a ghost story–three in fact. One is a story that is told originally in Stowed Away about a mysterious woman who drowns herself at Herrickson Point in the off-season. My fictional ghost story is based on a well-known local legend in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. In the real story, just as in my story, the woman’s true identity is never established. She has carefully removed the labels from her expensive clothes. For research, I relied on the book Ghosts of the Boothbay Region, by Greg Latimer, a part of the Haunted America series. If you’re interested I highly recommend the book.

The second ghost story in “Hallowed Out,” I heard from one of of my husband’s cousins. My husband’s Aunt Connie was staying with them, and she was quite superstitious. Events in the household convinced there was a ghost in residence. It seemed unlikely. It was a newly built house. Where would a ghost have come from? But it did turn out there was an explanation for the strange goings-on.

The third ghost story forms the core of the novella, the central mystery. I had established in Fogged Inn the former warehouse where Gus runs his restaurant and where my protagonist Julia Snowden lives was used as a drop for booze smuggled from Canada during Prohibition. But I didn’t know that the  handsome, Robin Hood-esque (at least in his own mind) rumrunner Ned Calhoun had been murdered there while his fiancee Sweet Sue watched in horror. It is during a reenactment of this story for the enjoyment of the customers of the Haunted House Trolley Tour that a real murder takes place.

I loved doing the research about smuggling alcohol in the 1920s. I knew liquor came over the border and into Maine, but I didn’t know Canadian distilleries and distributors anchored massive boats just inside international waters. There were so many lights out there in a row from all the big boats, the area was called, “the rumline.” The small boats that carried the booze back to Maine were faster than anything the US Coast Guard could give chase with at the time. The boats, and eventually the captains, were called “rumrunners.”

I hope you enjoy “Hallowed Out,” with its three ghosts stories and in-the-present murder mystery.

Readers: Do you have a ghost story? Tell us your story or just say “hi” in the comments for a chance to win one of three copies of Haunted House Murder.