A Declan Shaw Mystery – Ladies of Mystery

Pretty as a Picture and Far from Innocent

By M.E. Proctor

Catch Me on a Blue Day, Book 2 of the Declan Shaw mystery series, takes place in Old Mapleton, a postcard-perfect town on the Connecticut coast.

It comes with Queen Anne cottages, a yacht club, a bakery-chocolatier, an art gallery, several cafés, including one next to the marina that serves delicious crab cakes and lobster rolls. The police station is in the Tudor style, and its dark beams and stained glass windows give it the appearance of a tavern, or an inn—Ye Olde Copper’s Nest, Declan Shaw muses when he first sets eyes on it. The old Customs House, restored, is a private residence on a point next to the commercial fishing harbor. The camp of a lesser robber baron is now a B&B, and art afficionados can visit an artist colony on the outskirts of town, by appointment.

Families flock to the beaches from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Dogs are not allowed on the beach. Other things are not allowed. The list is long; it includes ‘horsing around’.

Doesn’t it look like the perfect setting for a cozy mystery?

Before you settle down in a comfortable armchair with grandma’s Delft teapot in easy reach (I just read that Delft is fashionable again), I must warn you: I don’t write cozies.

Bad people do nasty things no matter the landscape. There are homicidal maniacs in Neverland. And all the notices painstakingly posted by the city council won’t stop mischief. Violence is even uglier in an ideal setting because nobody expects it.

But you, readers of Ladies of Mystery, have consumed metric tons of crime fiction and you’re already making guesses about what comes next.

Small towns have secrets, buried deep.
The detective has a good shovel.
A love interest delivers inside information.

I’ll try to stay away from big spoilers, I don’t want to ruin the fun, but I’ll knock down a few hypotheses.

Old Mapleton, CT, has a dirty past. Not in a Stephen King kind of way—it isn’t built on a burial ground, and it doesn’t suffer from recurring murder sprees—but it went through a traumatic episode of collective hysteria. A horrible murder happened there thirty years ago. A little girl, Ella, was killed. The town tore itself apart in a frenzy of suspicion, denunciations, anonymous letters, and recanted confessions, with the media stoking the fire. To this day, the case is still open. Lives were destroyed, and long-time residents remember. None of this is secret. Ella and Old Mapleton made headlines far and wide.

The detective, Declan Shaw, doesn’t come to town to poke in the trash of the past. An old friend, Carlton Marsh, asked him to help with research for his book. Marsh was a war correspondent and he’s gathering his articles on the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s. Declan is recovering from a severe leg injury and intends to take it easy. Learning, upon arrival, that Marsh committed suicide throws him off kilter. Nothing in his last conversation with the reporter indicated that he was in any kind of trouble. The Old Mapleton chief of police agrees … even if he’s not eager to have a PI sniffing around. No fisticuffs and roughing up, the two men get along. In the claustrophobic town, they’re both outsiders. The chief calls himself ‘the token punk’, he doesn’t belong to the local elite and has a lot more in common with the rough trade on the wrong side of the tracks.

The love interest. Ha! The title of this post applies to her as much as it applies to the town. Isabel is in her late twenties, smart, pretty, not too hindered by morality, and bored out of her skull. When Declan walks into the art gallery she manages, her first thought is that maybe her summer isn’t a complete waste of time. This would be a meet cute if the lust thermometer wasn’t stuck in the high nineties. I had a lot of fun writing Isabel’s point of view. Let’s say that she has very, very, little self-control … and no, she doesn’t know anything about the cold case, or Marsh’s suicide, which will not keep her out of trouble.

I like complex narratives. How does a little’s girl death in New England connect to political upheaval in Central America? Carlton Marsh knew but he’s no longer around to make Declan wise. The path to the truth will be sinuous and dark. Through the woods where Ella was found, many years ago.

—-

Catch Me on a Blue Day

A Declan Shaw Mystery

“For Ella and all the innocents slain by soulless men.”

It’s the dedication of the book on the Salvadoran civil war retired reporter Carlton Marsh was writing before he committed suicide.

A shocking death. Marsh had asked Declan Shaw to come to Old Mapleton, Connecticut to help him with research. He looked forward to Declan’s visit: “See you at cocktail time, a fine whiskey’s waiting.” They talked on the phone a few hours before the man put a bullet in his brains.

Now Declan stands in the office of the local police chief. The cop would prefer to see him fly back to Houston. He’s never dealt with a private detective, but everybody knows they are trouble. If only there weren’t so many unanswered questions around Marsh’s death … the haunting first three chapters of his book, and that dedication to Ella, a girl whose murder thirty years ago brought the town to its knees.

In Catch Me on a Blue Day, Declan is far from his regular Texas stomping grounds. He’s off balance in more ways than one, and the crimes he uncovers are of a magnitude he could not foresee.

Between the sins of an old New England town and the violence of 1980s El Salvador. And the links between the two.

Buy Links:

Catch Me on a Blue day is available in eBook and paperback

On Amazon at

https://www.amazon.com/Catch-Blue-Declan-Shaw-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0FR3DWYGD/

From reviews:
“In Catch Me on a Blue Day, she combines the strengths of the best of the best mystery writers, writers like Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and Janet Evanovich, to create a mystery novel that will have you saying, where has this terrific mystery writer been all my life?” —John Guzlowski, author of Suitcase Charlie, a Hank and Marvin mystery

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. She’s the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries. The first book, Love You Till Tuesday, came out from Shotgun Honey. Catch Me on a Blue Day is the next installment in the series. She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments, and the co-author of a retro-noir novella, Bop City Swing. Her fiction has appeared in Vautrin, Tough, Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly among others. She’s a Shamus and Derringer short story nominee.

Social Links

Author Website: www.shawmystery.com

On Substack: https://meproctor.substack.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/martine.proctor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEProctor3

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/meproctor.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/proctormartine/

The Detective Comes Calling

When I start working on a short story I never know much about the characters. I might have a place in mind—a bar on a beach, a path in the forest, an iced-over parking lot—or a line of text I woke up with, like this one that I used recently, curious to see where it would take me: Innocence doesn’t do it for me. Spoiler alert: somebody dies.

Most of my pieces unspool that way. Characters walk on stage, I get to know them, and things happen. Or nothing happens and the story goes asleep on my laptop, for a while or forever. That loose process works well for me, for short fiction.

A book is a very different animal.

If you write yourself in a corner in a short story the damage is minimal. You can shelve the draft, revisit it later and either find a solution or scrap it entirely. It’s disappointing but at worst you’ve only lost a few weeks. On the other hand, if you’re fifty thousand words into a book and hit a wall or run out of juice, it really hurts. The investment in time and the emotional commitment are substantial. Of course you can try to rescue the project. As Chandler said: In doubt, send in a guy with a gun. Sometimes it works, other times … Raise your hand if like me you’ve read books that feel like they’re limping to the finish line.

The pitfalls of winging it were very much in the back of my mind when I decided to sink my teeth into a crime novel. The problem is that I’m not a plotter. Detailing every beat of a story before sitting down to write it feels too much like a straitjacket. It sucks all the fun out of the project. Why bother to write it if I know everything, no surprises, from the get go? Still, I wanted to be better organized than usual. Start with an idea and develop a rough outline that could go the distance.

It was an excellent resolution.

It didn’t happen.

Because Declan Shaw threw me for a spin.

I was on the back porch, engaged in the creative exercise known as woolgathering, when a name popped into my head. Out of nowhere. Insistent. I’d never written anything, book or short story, that used the name of a character as a prompt. I was intrigued. Who the hell was this guy pitching a tent in my subconscious?

Names aren’t neutral. In life, we’re passive recipients—a gift from our parents. In fiction, the writers are in control. They can play with the mental images a name creates (Dickens mastered it). What does the name suggest about the character’s past, family, or cultural background? Smith evokes 1984 or The Matrix, Cadogan-Smith comes with horses and country estates, Smith-Underfoot might be a familyliving in Hobbiton.

Declan Shaw. What does it bring to mind? Irish heritage. He probably drinks whiskey and can tell a tale. Yes, I know, it’s a cliché. But seriously, with a name like that, what does he do for a living? I love antiheroes but I didn’t feel like spending an entire book with a hitman, Ken Follett did it so well in The Day of the Jackal, and, more recently, Rob Hart in Assassins Anonymous. So what? Reporter. I could see the byline, front page, above the fold. Then an insidious voice in my head whispered: Can you build a series around a journalist, how many cases can he cover, without stretching credibility? A series? The inner voice had to be kidding, there was no book #1 yet. It was ludicrous. But, but … I could smell the possibilities.

And that‘s how, right there, on my porch, Declan Shaw became a private detective.

The first scene I wrote had nothing to do with investigating. I pictured him as an eleven-year-old boy, standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs, looking up at his intimidating grandmother. She was a black-clad villain straight out of a comic book. I imagined the events that brought the kid to her place and the disastrous consequences that ensued. Readers won’t find any of that in Love You Till Tuesday, the first book in the series. Declan’s back story is in my back pocket and won’t come out until the time is right.

I forgot my resolution to outline and gave myself permission to improvise. The plan was to learn who my character was by writing him. It took a lot longer than I expected, three years, three manuscripts, a thousand pages, multiple false starts. None of that work made it into the book, but the effort was worth it. I knew Declan inside out. We were both ready to tackle Love You Till Tuesday. In some sort of orderly fashion.

My plot document looked like the output from a chaotic brainstorming session, a jumble of character sketches, a rough timeline, cryptic notes, dead ends and side stories. It was an unstructured and messy pseudo synopsis, with plenty of freedom between the lines to change almost everything. As I typed away, things changed indeed, and changed again after input from editors and beta readers, cuts and tightening up, but the original bones of the story remained. Until finally Declan Shaw made his official debut with his cigarillos, his cowboy boots, his good and flawed impulses, and his ironic take on the world. He’s good company. I’m keeping him.

Love You Till Tuesday – A Declan Shaw Mystery

The murder of jazz singer April Easton makes no sense, and yet she appears to have been targeted. Who ordered the hit and why? Steve Robledo, the Houston cop in charge of the investigation, has nothing to work with. Local P.I. Declan Shaw who spent the night with April has little to contribute. He’d just met her and she was asleep when he left.

The case seems doomed to remain unsolved, forever open, and quickly erased from the headlines. And it would be if Declan’s accidental connection with the murder didn’t have unexpected consequences.

The men responsible for April’s death are worried. Declan is known to be stubborn and resourceful. He must be watched. He might have to be stopped. He’s a risk the killers cannot afford. The stakes are high: a major trial with the death penalty written all over it.

Buy Links:

Love You Till Tuesday is available in eBook and paperback.

Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Love-You-Till-Tuesday-Proctor/dp/1956957707

From reviews:

If you think the crime fiction market has enough PIs, think again. Declan Shaw is the kind of PI this genre has been waiting for. Declan is a well-developed, complex and nuanced character, wrestling with his own internal conflicts as he investigates the murder of April Easton. Sharp, witty dialogue and a fast-pace make Love You Till Tuesday an engaging read—one of those books you can’t put down and keep reading late into the night. It is a fun, intense read from beginning to end and M.E. Proctor displays her incredible talent at creating a well-written and beautifully crafted book.

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. The first book in her Declan Shaw PI series, Love You Till Tuesday, is out from Shotgun Honey with a follow up scheduled for 2025. She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments. Her fiction has appeared in various crime anthologies and magazines like Vautrin, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly.

Social Links

Author Website: www.shawmystery.com

On Substack: https://meproctor.substack.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/martine.proctor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEProctor3 BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/meproctor.bsky.social