I’ve admitted it before; I’m a setting thief.  I also steal dialogue, people, and events. But book seven in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series takes my thievery to a whole new level. Last year I participated in something called Santa’s Shelves at the Felton Fire Protection District’s Fire Station. It’s an annual event, with vendors paying a fee to be included in the fundraiser for the district. The fire station is home to 30 volunteer firefighters, full-time EMTs, Captains, and a Fire Chief, serving 6,000 permanent residents and up to 15,000 summer visitors.

At the two-day Christmas faire last year, opportunities for theft of setting, dialogue, characters, and murder, presented themselves and I decided to steal all of them. I’ve done it before. The bank robbery in “Mags and the AARP Gang” took

place where I bank and my admission that I was “casing the place” to understand how to rob it made bank officials exceedingly anxious and got me put under surveillance until the book came out and I presented the manager with a copy so he and the nervous employees would understand that my robbery was pure fiction.

 And then there was the time I witnessed a death at a funeral and turned it into the beginning of

“The Funeral Murder.”  In both of those thefts, I only used the setting, a soulless entity, and created the characters…well mostly. Setting a death at the eighteenth hole pond at the Delavega Golf Course for the  “The Two- Faced Triplex, “

and the murder in the walkway near the post office for  “What Lucy Heard”

was even more settings-driven without any potentially real characters.

I’m still amazed and delighted by how eager to help with ideas and means for murder so many people are when I tell them I’m writing a cozy murder mystery. They find flaws in my reasoning and make corrections which make the killings work so well that I often wonder how many innocent-seeming bystanders fantasize about committing murder and if only the prospect of getting caught keeps them from doing it.

For “A Faire to Remember,”

I went way beyond the norms of privacy by placing many real people in the book. I fictionalized them and made up their backstories, but they will know who they are and recognize their booths and the placement of them if they read the book. I also made the fire captain a serious suspect with motive and means to be a murderer. That last decision made me worry. Was he too real? Was the setting too real?

I wondered if I should make up a town and place it in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Fellow writer Victoria Kazarian does a series set in River Grove but assures me her setting is really Felton, California. Should I borrow her town? I like that my books are set in real places and many readers enjoy recognizing local references so I really didn’t want to do that.

With the book off to the editor, I finally had to confront my dilemma. I called the fire station and explained to the volunteer who answered the phone that I had been a vendor last year when the lights strobed and a towel was put over them… 

“That was me,” he exclaimed. “I’m the one who put the towel over the light fixture. Is my name in the book?”

“You’re referenced but not named,” I offered. “Cool! But if you want to use my name, I’m good with that!”

“I hope your captain will feel the same because he’s a suspect.”

“Send him an email and ask him.”

I did. He wants to read the book when it comes out.

In my last post I promised a cover reveal and more interesting outtakes about “A Faire to Remember,” the book my editor is reviewing, in this month’s post. Now, that lighthearted missive isn’t going to be posted until September.

I write murder mysteries for fun and hopefully for my readers entertainment. I’ve had my protagonists, Regan McHenry from the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries series and more recently Pat Pirard of the PIP Inc. Mysteries series find bodies and sometimes know the murder victim. I ‘ve done my best to have them react realistically to what those discoveries and events felt like. What I wrote doesn’t come close to what it really feels like to have someone you know die, a real victim of murder.

There’s an order and logic to the murders I make up. The victim did something in the past that caught up with them; their existence is an obstacle between the killer and something they want; they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and heard or saw something that threated their killer.

From the killer’s perspective, there’s a solid reason for committing murder: money, sex, revenge or to avenge a real or perceived injustice. At the very least, their victim poses a threat to them. During the final scenes in my books as in all cozy mysteries, the murderer explains why they did it. Most of my killers rationalized what they’ve done because, in their eyes, murder was justified or necessary. In fourteen books I’ve only written one murderer who was completely evil, the rest were flawed people, and in a couple of instances I expected my readers to sympathize with the killer.

When I killed a character who is still one of my favorites in the first book I wrote, it upset me so much that my husband found me curled up on the sofa shaking and sobbing; It all seemed so real to me. But, no matter how much I imagined it, it wasn’t real.  On July 21^st I found out exactly what it feels like to lose someone you know in a senseless murder.

Rachell Summers was stabbed to death on a pleasant summer day just before 1:00 in the afternoon. Her killer is a nineteen-year-old man she didn’t know and had never met. He turned himself in within an hour of her death. He said he wanted to murder someone and she came into view.  He said he stabbed her eleven times as she cried, “Help me.” There is no order, no logic, in why she died and that is almost as troubling as her death.

Discovering that Rachell, the manager of a store that carries my books, had been murdered started out slowly with curiosity. News stories said a woman had been stabbed to death near the food court exit at the Capitola Mall. Wow, that’s the door I use when restocking books at Art of Santa Cruz because it’s close to the store. The next time I saw her, I was going to have to ask Rachell what the commotion inside the mall was like when the police were searching for the killer.

As the day progressed, news dribbled out mostly about the killer. I tried calling the store several times; no one answered and there wasn’t an outgoing message explaining why. That was odd. Like my protagonist chasing down clues I became suspicious and started doing research.

Someone released a post saying the victim’s name was Rachell Summers. It was taken down immediately. The police announced that her name was being withheld pending notification of her next of kin. I started to feel ill. I couldn’t remember Rachell’s last name, but I knew she spelled her first name in an unusual way. Had I misread that quick release? I had sent her messages so I knew she would be on my contacts list. I typed in “Rachell” and her last name and email address popped up. No. No, it can’t be. Confirmation came later in the day, and when it did, it felt like a gut punch.

I’ve thought about trying to write a book where a murder like Rachell’s happens. I won’t, though because I know I couldn’t make it work. Her death was unimaginable.

.

I’m a setting thief. Lots of writers are, but I always set books where I can see what’s happening which probably isn’t true of all writers. I also steal dialogue, people, and events. What that means right now is book seven in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series isn’t the one I expected to be writing. Originally, I had a great idea about using AI to facilitate a murder, and I will get around to that book, but as number eight, not number seven. What changed the story order was what happened at a two-day Christmas faire last year where I was selling my books when opportunities for theft of setting, dialogue, characters, and of course murder, presented themselves and I decided to steal all of them.

The faire was held at the fire station in spaces normally reserved for huge engines and in the other rooms reserved for meetings, food prep, overnight sleeping, and storage of all sorts of equipment and supplies the firefighters use. The engines were discretely relocated outside for the event and I was lucky enough to be assigned a booth in the part of the fire station where they normally were housed.

Fire engines are incredibly tall vehicles so the garage part of the firehouse had ceilings high enough to accommodate them. Lighting was supplied by banks of lights built into the ceiling. As we vendors began setting up our booths on Saturday morning, one of the lights over where I was started strobing, flashing on and off with bright bursts of light. It was disturbing and likely to cause headaches or worse if we had to try and work under such conditions.

The firefighters, as firefighters do, rushed to help. They took a tall ladder off one of the engines and placed it under the offending light. A brave young firefighter climbed it and decided which florescent lightbulb was the trouble maker. He shouted down to us that he thought it would be an easy fix, but when he removed the bulb, the whole bank went dark. A search for a replacement bulb was started, but it seemed the fire station with its vast stores of equipment was out of lights of that length. He replaced the bulb, towels were collected, and an attempt was made to wrap them around the offending bulb. It didn’t work. The only way to stop the light from causing us all to lose our sanity was to cover the entire bank of lights.

The strobing stopped, but some of us were plunged into late-afternoon-post-time-change darkness. We needed light to show off our wares. Many vendors were distraught. We tried to help one another with some booth occupiers switching places, but there were still problems. Lamps, hurriedly gathered from other rooms in the fire station satisfied some of our needs, but there were many unhappy people and one vendor remained outraged at how dark his space was and caused a scene. At that moment, I decided to kill him.

The light situation presented a great opportunity to do so. No stabbings or poisonings for him. No gunshots. He was going to die by electrocution. My creative, or should I say warped, mind immediately came up with some ideas for how his murder would take place and a clever twist about who his killer was. All I was missing was a motive for his murder since it didn’t seem reasonable to kill him for being annoying. By the time the faire was over on Sunday afternoon, I had watched how other vendors moved around the faire, who covered for whom for food runs and bathroom visits, and where firefighters slipped off to for breaks. I had many red herring suspects with opportunity…but still no motive.

Writers know that sometimes you just have to stop pondering and sleep on it; which was exactly what I did. The motive came to me in the middle of the night, not exactly in a dream, but in a moment of sleepless restlessness.

 “A Faire to Remember” will be out later this year. A cover reveal and more about the book in next month’s post.

Which is a shame because my to-be-read pile is growing every day, filled with intriguing titles, but I’m working on book seven in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series which means no reading until it’s finished. You might wonder why I can’t read when I write. I’m a very undisciplined writer so it’s not like I sit at my computer tapping away all day long. Why, then, can’t I read when I take a break from writing?

I consider my particular writing and reading impairment as the result of being a good realtor for almost twenty-five years. Realtors are taught to mimic clients talking speed, body language especially use of hands, emotions, and language as much as possible. Classes are taught in how to do those things. I dropped out after the first class because I’m a natural mime, always have been. That helped me as a real estate agent and probably has helped in other situations, too, but as a writer it’s a problem for me.

Many cozy mysteries are written in first person. I don’t do that. I write in third person. But if I’m reading a good cozy written in first person, I start to slip into that style of writing which makes a mess of the POV and my manuscript in progress.

There are other distractions, too. Dialogue is a potential problem. After fifty pages of another writer’s dialogue, my characters begin to mimic their phraseology and start to take on their use of language. Mime time again.

My storyline suffers when I read while writing. I do a short psychological profile and background history for most of my characters before they head for their places on my pages. I do use a timeline because I need to know who knew what when or I get lost having, for example, a clue about when a character who had taken her hearing aids out in a noisy restaurant, put them back in (critically important in What Lucy Heard, for example) and why her dinner companion didn’t know she had.

My outlines are a lot more flexible, though. Before starting a book, I know who the killer is, how and why the murder victim was killed, how the story will begin and how it will end, and have characters I want to introduce to move the story forward, but there’s a great deal of flexibility in how all those pieces come together. If I read while writing, the mimic in me invariably spots a clever plot twist in the work I’m reading and wants to incorporate it in what I’m writing, which as you can imagine, makes a mess of my plot. I do wonder if it’s just me or if other writers have the same problems?

Until my book is finished and off to the editor, I’m sorry Nicole, Vinnie, Mary, Robin, Valerie, Claire, Genevive, Richard, and Verlin. Your books will have to wait a bit longer to be read, but I do know how important reviews are so I promise to leave one as soon as I finish reading your book.  It’s the least I can do for keeping you waiting while I write.

I wrote my first book, The Death Contingency, when I was an active realtor. It became part of a seven-book series, the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries, but when I was working on that first book, it was only a game for me, a puzzle to be solved, and an opportunity to right a few wrongs in dealings where I felt slighted or abused by the realtor on the other side of a transaction. You might say in addition to being a murder mystery, it was a revenge book.

Most realtors are nice hard-working people who care about their clients, but if you work in that business long enough, you come across people who aren’t. Writing a book outing some shady dealers promised to be satisfying.

 I assumed the people who read the book would be realtors holding open houses so it was designed to be read in small bursts during downtime between visitors. I thought if I carefully dropped clues about the identities of the real agents I turned into villains, astute fellow realtors would figure out who they were even if their names had been changed.

I was mistaken about that first book on many levels. It turns out most realtors don’t read books, or at least not mysteries written about their associates.  The few local realtors who did read my first book didn’t have any idea who I used as my characters even when it was incredibly obvious and it was great fun when they argued with me about the real identity of a character.

But based on the messages I received from realtors working in other communities, there must be many people out there who’s actions are similar because they’d say things like, “You never met Kathy from my office, but you sure nailed her.”

I always use the phrase, “This is a work of fiction. Unless specifically credited, names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.” It’s a lie.

I eavesdrop unabashedly. I freely steal snippets of other people’s lives to use in my books. The admonition, “Be nice to me or I’ll kill you in a book,” works for me. And that’s not all. Some of my best side stories come from writing about the foibles of others. (I’m not proud, though.  Sometimes I’m the one being parodied.) When I speak at book clubs or in front of audiences about the Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries, I always tell people that the murders are made up but the real estate stories, no matter how farfetched they seem, are real and happened to me or to an associate.

I have the feeling other writers do the same sort of things. The baker-protagonist writer has probably seen real flour-throwing incidents similar to the one she used to help her character escape from a killer. The yachting-protagonist writer may have watched an attempted drowning. The chef-protagonist writer has all those handy knives to work with not to mention flaming cooktops and opportunities to add poison to a dish.

Who knew writing murder mysteries could be so much fun…and so therapeutic?