Month: August 2025

Hi Y’all

~ Nancy Lynn Jarvis ~ 1 Comment

I’m new here and decided it would be fun to introduce myself by telling you a tale about a writing coincidence I had some years ago that still gives me chills.

For the fourth book in my first series, Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries, I needed help with a murder I had in mind. The premise for the Widow’s Walk League is that the husbands of women in a ladies’ walking group are being murdered one by one. I wanted to kill off one of the husbands at Woodies on the Wharf, an annual event in Santa Cruz where I live.

I had an idea about how he should meet his end, but I wasn’t sure if it was feasible so I contacted the president of the local woodies club to ask for advice. I presented my idea for how the victim should die and, once he was convinced that I was writing fiction and not a murderer plotting a real killing, he was eager to help.

 We met for coffee. I came armed with questions; he brought diagrams, photos, and a wrench. He not only explained how easy it would be to use a wrench on the undercarriage of the car to reverse the transmission, he had a photo of the make, model, and year of the woodie to use and told me where it should be parked on the wharf so my victim would plunge into the bay and sink to the bottom so quickly, he wouldn’t be able to escape the vehicle.

Now for the shivery part. A recuring character in the series is a police officer named Dave. He’s my protagonist’s buddy—you have to have some law enforcement connection in a cozy mystery—who has talked himself into a job as the police department ombudsman after losing an eye in a shootout. He’s based on a real friend also named Dave who lost his eye in a shootout while on duty. Remember that for a minute.

The book came out a week before Woodies on the Wharf so I decided to take a copy to the helpful woodies club president. I also decided it would be fun to see who was parked in the deadly parking space and tell him to be careful because things hadn’t worked out well for the last man who parked there.

As we introduced ourselves, I noted that he had the same first name as my murder victim. When I jested about being careful, he said nothing scared him because he was a retired homicide detective and had seen it all.

“Where did you work?” I asked.

“San Jose,” he replied.

“One of the characters in my book is based on a real police officer who worked for SJPD until he lost an eye in a shootout,” I said.

He snorted, “You must mean Dave. I was with him the night that happened. I told him you never  pop your head up to look over a fence when pursuing an armed suspect, but he didn’t listen to me.”

Writing is so much fun, and when things like this happen, it’s even more entertaining.

Serendipity on a Train

~ Janet Dawson ~ 6 Comments

I thought about using Strangers on a Train as the title for this blog post, but it’s already taken. Still, serendipity is a better term.

Last month, I took the Amtrak version of the California Zephyr from the Bay Area to Reno. My ultimate destination was Carson City, where I visited a friend. The trip takes about six hours, and I always enjoy looking at the scenery as the train winds its way through the Sierra Nevada.

When the time came for lunch, I made my way to the dining car. As I ate my salad, I talked with the man across from me and discovered we both had degrees in journalism. In fact, he had worked for the San Francisco Chronicle from the mid-1970s until retirement a couple of years ago.

Serendipity, indeed. Why? There’s a character among the many fictional people who live in my head and in my fiction. Her name is Maggie Constable. She first appeared in in my novella, But Not Forgotten, and again in the latest Jeri Howard novel, The Things We Keep. Maggie’s backstory is that she worked for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s.

As she says in The Things We Keep, “I started working for the Chron just in time for the whole Patty Hearst circus.”

Maggie has been demanding her own book for quite some time. I have at least two, maybe three, plots in mind for her. So, to meet someone who did indeed work for the newspaper in the 1970s is great. You can be sure I acquired contact information for my lunch companion.

More evidence of serendipity on a train: in 2010 I was researching the first Jill McLeod California Zephyr mystery, Death Rides the Zephyr. The old CZ, which ran from 1949 to 1970, took a different route through the Sierra Nevada, going from Sacramento to Oroville and then up the Feather River Canyon. I found out about a special train going that route, pulling all sorts of classic rail cars. The train was going to Portola, site of the Western Pacific Railroad Museum, for a local festival called Railroad Days.

I signed up and opted to ride in a Pullman car that had seen service on the Union Pacific. In the roomette across from me was a man who told me he was a graphic artist as well as a rail fan. When I told him about the book I was researching, he said, “I want to design your cover.”

Indeed, he did. His name is Roger Morris and he designed the covers for all four books, covers featuring nighttime scenes of the train cars.

I also met three other people on that particular railroad car. We called ourselves the Pullman Pals and took another train trip together, from Los Angeles to San Diego in the same car, which involved the interesting experience of spending the night in the Pullman car in the middle of the vast Los Angeles rail yard. I’ve stayed in touch with one of those people over the past 15 years. In fact, that’s who I was visiting in Carson City. We rode the Virginia & Truckee Railroad Company’s historic train from Carson City to Virginia City, pulled by a steam locomotive, riding in a vintage passenger car.

More serendipity? Well, yes. In my historical novel, still in progress, my protagonist rides a train. Seeing those vintage rail cars definitely gives me ideas about her journey.

All aboard! You never know who you’ll meet on a train, and what sort of creative ideas that journey will inspire.

Guest Blogger ~ Susie Black

~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

The Perils of Creating a Teen Amateur Sleuth

I am the author of seven published humorous cozy mysteries. While my adult female protagonist in The Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series is younger than I, the age difference between us did not present any verisimilitude issues when I created her personality, lifestyle, or career. One key element that made it easy was that she was based on me.

But writing a series with a teen amateur sleuth who was again based on me, this time as a high school newspaper investigative reporter, presented several challenges that had to be overcome to make the tale realistic. The Case of the Croaked Coach, the debut title of The Hannah White Mystery Series, was simultaneously the easiest and most difficult manuscript to write.

How much danger could I/should I put my young sleuth into?

Would she tell her parents what she was doing or lie to them?

Who would take a teenage amateur sleuth seriously? If she interrogated an adult suspect, would they even give her the time of day, much less answer her questions? How would she know what questions to ask?

If she had suspects in mind, how would she go about investigating them? How would she know what to do? How would she gain access to conduct her investigations?

If she did somehow discover proof that a suspect was the killer, would the homicide detective take her information and look into it, or blow her off?

The scene where the protagonist discovered her classmate holding the bloody murder weapon over the victim was harder to write than any other. While the series is based on my experience as a high school newspaper investigative reporter, I thankfully had never made such a gruesome discovery as Hannah White did. How should she react? Terrified? Shocked? Faint?

So, how did I overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges?

  1. I created two adult characters who interacted with the teenage sleuth:

Bart White: Hannah White’s uncle and the defense attorney for the teenage murder suspect.

H.S. Whiperski: A Private Investigator, Bart hired. H.S. tailored Hannah’s questions & the steps the teenage sleuth could realistically and safely take.

  1. I incorporated Hannah’s investigative reporter skills into how she approached suspects and the methods she employed to question them. Hannah questioned several teacher/ suspects under the guise of interviewing them for a story she was writing for the school newspaper.
  2. I created a group of Hannah’s friends called the Young Yentas. This group served as a sounding board for Hannah to bounce ideas off of. They were also enlisted as assistant sleuths at the victim’s funeral.
  3. I created a teenage sidekick for Hannah who gave her access to a key site at the high school to search for proof that a teacher had committed the murder.
  4. I created a janitor who served as a trusted source of information—a see-all, know-all adult at the school to bounce ideas off of.
  5. Lastly, I relied on Hannah’s self-reliant personality and moral compass to dictate how she conducted her investigation. As such, I created a “rope-a-dope mechanism Hannah employed to interview suspects without them realizing what she was doing until it was too late and they had answered her questions already.

The Case of the Croaked Coach

There wasn’t an honest bone in Buzz Bixby’s body. The Encino High School’s head football coach was an equal-opportunity scoundrel. Bixby cheated and lied his way to the top and screwed anyone and everyone in his wake. So, the question wasn’t who wanted the bastard dead. The question was, who didn’t? Student reporter Hannah White’s interview with the coach is a nonstarter when she discovers varsity football hero Dean Snyder standing over Bixby’s battered corpse holding a bloody trophy.

Despite how guilty Dean looks, Hannah is convinced he’s innocent. When Snyder is arrested for Bixby’s murder, the wisecracking, irreverent amateur sleuth jumps into action to flesh out the real killer. But the trail has more twists and turns than a slinky, and nothing turns out how Hannah thinks it will as she tangles with a clever killer hellbent on revenge.

UNIVERSAL BOOK LINK: https://books2read.com/u/m20yWk

Named Best US Author of the Year by N. N. Lights Book Heaven, multi-award-winning cozy mystery author Susie Black was born in the Big Apple but now calls sunny Southern California home. She has published eight books as of May 2025.

She reads, writes, and speaks Spanish, albeit with an accent that sounds like Mildred from Michigan went on a Mexican vacation and is trying to fit in with the locals. Since life without pizza and ice cream as her core food groups wouldn’t be worth living, she’s a dedicated walker to keep her girlish figure. A voracious reader, she’s also an avid stamp collector. Susie lives with a highly intelligent man and is the mother of one incredibly brainy but smart-aleck adult son who inexplicably blames his sarcasm on an inherited genetic defect.

Looking for more? Contact Susie at:

Website: www.authorsusieblack.com

E-mail: mysteries_@authorsusieblack.com

Blue Sky: @hollysusiewrites.bsky.social

Facebook: Susie Black, author of The Holly Swimsuit Mystery Series | Facebook

Facebook: https://facebook.com/TheHollySwimsuitMysterySeries

Instagram: Susie Black (@hollyswimsuit) • Instagram photos and videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/authorsusieblack-61941011

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/hollysusie1/

X: Susie Black (@hollyswimsuit) / X