If I had told myself I would be writing mysteries a few years ago, I would have said I was crazy. But I’ve read mysteries all my life so I suppose what I now enjoy doing should not be surprising. I enjoy a complex plot that is entirely probable but keeps you guessing. Maybe the fact that my father was a lawyer in a little town and would talk to me about his cases got me started.
For two summers when I was in high school, I worked at the real Midway on the Lincoln Highway between Belle Plaine and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was torn down several decades ago, but I have tried to create the atmosphere of the place. And although my characters are entirely fictitious, they do reflect some of the idiosyncrasies and behaviors of people I knew during the time. Those people are all deceased now, but I hope they would not take umbrage at my effort to capture their essence.
In the publication industry the type of mystery I write is called a “cozy.” Several credible suspects and multiple clues that resolved only in the final chapters. Think Agatha Christie and M. C. Beaton—although I would never flatter myself by assuming I could be that successful. Cozies aren’t “true crime,” and in a cozy you will never witness a killing although there will be plenty of bodies and blood around. The mystery writer must be fair with the reader: The clues must all be there and the killer or killers introduced early in the book; nothing should be sprung on the reader at the last minute.
One of my goals is to portray the 1950s as they were, not as they have been simplistically portrayed by fictional radio and television dramas or in the popular nostalgia of the period—especially as reflected in family-oriented situation comedies. It was the beginning of the complex age in which we now live: pressure politics, materialistic consumption, conflict in the workplace, and uneasy interpersonal relationships. I have also tried to capture some of the details of that time: cars that looked like juke boxes, poodle skirts and rolled up jeans, flat tops and bobbed hair, cherry Cokes and malted milks, as well words such as when queen meant a good looking girl and skinny meant you were broke.
Reader comments would be appreciated. Tell me the I mistakes I’ve made, and what you’d like to see captured in future mysteries of small towns and rural areas of the fifties. I’m working on my third book now. It’s set in the same location with the same characters. It’s based on one of the few unsolved murders in Benton County.