Kate Morton, Rhys Bowen, Martha Grimes (Emma Graham series/Hotel ParadKate Morton, Rhys Bowen, Martha Grimes (Emma Graham series/Hotel Paradise Series...more
When I was 16, I played the spoons in a washtub band on a nationally televised talent show — sort of a low-rent American Idol. When a lucrative spoons career did not materialize, I went to college (Ole Miss and University of Memphis) and became a journalist and later a college professor. As a reporter and then columnist at a metro daily newspaper, The Memphis Press-Scimitar, along with being a wife and mother of two children, I didn't have time or creative energy left over for fiction writing. Still, the many fascinating people and events I covered as a reporter stuck with me and would eventually give me much material for fiction writing. My first mystery, which was the fourth novel I wrote and the first book in the Britt Faire mystery seriesWhen I was 16, I played the spoons in a washtub band on a nationally televised talent show — sort of a low-rent American Idol. When a lucrative spoons career did not materialize, I went to college (Ole Miss and University of Memphis) and became a journalist and later a college professor. As a reporter and then columnist at a metro daily newspaper, The Memphis Press-Scimitar, along with being a wife and mother of two children, I didn't have time or creative energy left over for fiction writing. Still, the many fascinating people and events I covered as a reporter stuck with me and would eventually give me much material for fiction writing. My first mystery, which was the fourth novel I wrote and the first book in the Britt Faire mystery series, came about when I got a phone call at my office at the University of Memphis, where I teach journalism. It was the mother of a man who had been murdered a couple of years before. The case has never been solved, and the mother was desperately hoping my students and I would take it on as a reporting project and find out who killed her son. I sympathized but had to tell her that my students and I were not equipped to help her. However, I wondered what would have happened if I had gotten that phone call while I was still a reporter — I just might have taken it on. After all, reporters are a lot like detectives, using many of the same investigative methods and knowing many people in high and low places. That’s how Pre-Marital Murder was born. I love many genres of books, but I am an avid reader of mysteries. I learned from reading Nancy Drew books when I was a kid that a good mystery isn’t too slow — it has many plot turns to keep the reader interested, and it has a satisfying ending. From Jane Austen, I learned that a bit of humor and romance makes a novel fun. And from many wonderful writers, I discovered that interesting characters are just as essential for commercial fiction as they are for literary fiction. ...more
There were several summers when I was 10 or 11 that I read Nancy Drew mysteries all summer long. In our small town of Winona, Miss., there was no book store, and the library was a tiny one-room set-up in the town's Community House. Miss Nancy was the librarian — and a terrifying figure she was for those of us who sometimes accrued late fines (2 cents a day).