I usually know the title of a novel before I start writing it, and Arsenic with Austen was no exception. I’m always a fan of alliteration, so pairing a death-related word with the name of the classic author du jour (du roman?) was a no-brainer. And since we’re playing off initial letters, why not go alphabetical? Especially since Austen starts with A.

The inimitable Jane Austen is the first alphabetically and also the first in my personal catalog of greats. She was not only a pioneer as a female author, but she was the first writer of either gender to perfect the novel form as we know it today. Her wit and incisive characterizations are as on-point today as they were 200 years ago.

The Brontës were an obvious choice for B. Honestly, although I played off it to some extent in Bloodstains with Brontë, Wuthering Heights annoys me to no end. Its structure is all over the place, its protagonists are mad, bad, and socially unacceptable, and there’s no redemption in it for anyone. But Jane Eyre, which I also used, is one of the greatest novels in the English language. It’s the first time we get an intimate, unvarnished look into a female mind whose goal is not first romance and marriage but independence and self-respect. Romance and marriage come as a reward for long suffering.

Whom could I pick for C but the queen of crime, Agatha Christie? She gave me so much to work with that writing Cyanide with Christie was great fun from beginning to end. If you want an amusing parlor game, go through it and count the Christie tropes—beginning with a bunch of strangers trapped in an isolated country house by bad weather.

Dostoevsky was my first choice for D, but my initial (American) publisher didn’t think he was cozy enough. I started on a Dickens-themed novel, but halfway in my American publisher dropped the series, and it was picked up by a British house who had no problem with tormented Russian authors. So I switched gears and wrote about the great Fyodor Mikhailovich instead. As a proto-psychologist extraordinaire and the author of two of the first great murder mysteries, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, he provided plenty of material. And I got to put my degree in Russian literature to some use after all these years.

The pandemic hit as I was beginning work on what would have been Execution with Eliot. But I was so stressed out in 2020 that I couldn’t bear to be immersed in George Eliot’s rather grim and depressing novels. So I jumped forward in the alphabet to Fatality with Forster. I love E. M. Forster for his sly wit, his wonderful characters, and his quiet rebellion against the rigid and stifling social structures of his time. I had visited Oxfordshire in 2019, and it made the perfect setting both for Forster and for Luke & Emily’s disappointingly (to them) but unsurprisingly (to us) not corpse-free honeymoon.

I skipped G for the simple reason that I couldn’t think of an appropriate author who was well known enough for a book to work. So it was on to H.

Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables, proved to be fertile ground for a murder mystery with its larger-than-life characters and dramatic plot. In addition, the novel is among the most powerful explorations of forgiveness and redemption ever written—and forgiveness and redemption are among my favorite themes. Next to Cyanide with Christie, Hanging with Hugo probably makes the most explicit use of the source author’s material of all the books in the series.

What do all these authors have in common? Perhaps only two things: They are outstanding craftspeople with the English (or Russian or French) language. And they know human nature deeply and believe it to be redeemable.

In a minute, I’ll talk about my inspiration for Crime with the Classics. But first I have something else to share with you. Yesterday (eight days before expected) I received my first box of author copies of JUSTICE WITH JAMES. Honestly, it was almost as exciting as the first box of ARSENIC WITH AUSTEN, which was the first novel I had published.

I didn’t have three hands or a videographer handy, so you’ll have to settle for still shots. Just picture me wildly excited as I’m taking them.

Except for the professional cover design I paid for (and of course the printing and binding), I made this book all by myself. Not usually the way I do things, but I’m glad to have done it this once. And I’m pretty happy with the result.

The Inspiration for Crime with the Classics

Now, on to more serious matters. The idea for the Crime with the Classics series came to me in 2012 or ’13, after The Ghostwriter had made the rounds of editors who liked the story but couldn’t see a place for it in their lists. I’d been writing seriously for about eight or nine years by then, and I was getting tired of being rejected—not because my writing wasn’t good enough, but as the Brits say, because my face didn’t fit.

I thought about the novels I liked to read and realized they fell predominantly into two groups: classics and mysteries. At the top of my mystery list were a group of women writers from the British Golden Age whom I affectionately refer to as “my dead Englishwomen”: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth, Agatha Christie, and Josephine Tey. I also came to love some contemporary writers, including the best-selling Louise Penny and Jacqueline Winspear. Mysteries, I realized, were popular. They sold. People made actual money writing them.

At the same time, I had been hearing an increasing (and worrying) number of aspiring writers confess that they didn’t read the classics. How could one become a decent writer without reading the classics? How could one even be a truly thoughtful and critical reader without that background?

So the light bulb went on: I would write a series of traditional mysteries* that somehow incorporated the classics as well. I could satisfy readers like myself who loved both categories. Maybe I could even inspire some people to begin reading them who hadn’t done so before.

I started assembling elements of series I had either wished for or enjoyed in the past, both in books and TV:

• A small-town setting with a series cast of quirky characters
• A dose of humor to balance serious situations
• Lots of literary allusions
• A middle-aged female protagonist
• A dash of romance
• A local lawman who was neither hostile nor an idiot
• A literary angle (but not a bookshop or library, because those are overdone)
• A setting where a steady stream of visitors or temporary residents is plausible (because you don’t want to kill off or lock up all the townspeople)

I poured all those ingredients into my magic cauldron, recited a few arcane spells, and came up with a widowed literature professor who inherits a mansion in a small coastal town and reconnects with her teenage sweetheart, who is now the local sheriff. She uses her knowledge of literature to bring a new perspective to the characters and situations involved in the (naturally) statistically improbable number of murders that occur in her immediate vicinity. I would theme each book around a different classic author, basing my titles on alliteration and alphabetical order to achieve the requisite cleverness.

And Crime with the Classics was born.

*This series is often classed as “cozy,” a label I don’t much care for because it suggests fluffy mass-market paperbacks with cartoonish covers focused on crafts, cooking, or pets. I prefer “traditional” because it harks back to my dead Englishwomen, who were much more serious writers. But my books do meet the basic criteria for a cozy, which include an amateur sleuth, no or only mild profanity, and no graphic violence or sex.

As you may have gathered, each volume of Crime with the Classics is themed around a different classic author. Sometimes the connections are strong, sometimes subtle. They may center on characters, themes, plot elements, or a general mood.

If you’ve read any Henry James, you’ll know that one thing you can never count on with him is a happy ending. Don’t worry—that’s not a characteristic I drew on in writing Justice with James. Traditional mysteries demand happy endings, and this one won’t disappoint.

What I’m primarily playing off here is James’s ghost stories. The most famous of these is The Turn of the Screw, but he wrote a number of others as well. The ghostly presences manifest in a wide variety of ways in the different stories, but there’s one common thread: The ghost (or other supernatural phenomenon) tends to target one character in particular with a very specific agenda. It could be revenge, it could be seduction, it could be protection, it could be a sort of passing on of a torch. You’ll have to read Justice with James to find out what our ghost’s agenda is and whether she accomplishes it.

In Arsenic with Austen, widowed Emily Cavanaugh’s great aunt Beatrice leaves her a Victorian mansion, a fat bank account, and half the real estate in the (fictional) Oregon coastal town of Stony Beach. Emily’s return to the setting of her childhood summer vacations also brings the return of her first love, Lieutenant Sheriff Luke Richards. As they work together to uncover the real story behind Beatrice’s death, Emily and Luke rekindle their thirty-year-old romance, and Emily decides to retire from her college teaching job and relocate to Stony Beach permanently.

Unaccustomed to and uncomfortable with her newfound wealth, Emily determines to turn her mansion, Windy Corner, into an invitation-only retreat center for writers, with each bedroom themed around a different classic author. She hires a local teenage single mother, Katie, as housekeeper, and Emily’s friend and colleague Marguerite helps to recruit the guests.

But to Emily’s dismay, over the course of the following months (and novels), Windy Corner and Stony Beach become the sites of a series of troubling murders, each of which brings to Emily’s mind some connection with a classic author. She uses this knowledge to help Luke bring the murderers to justice.

The series moves to Emily’s old college in Portland for Death with Dostoevsky, then to Oxfordshire for Luke and Emily’s honeymoon in Fatality with Forster, then back home to Stony Beach in Hanging with Hugo.

(In case you’re curious about the alpha order, there is no “E” book because the pandemic hit at that time and was so stressful I couldn’t face writing a book themed around the rather doleful George Eliot. “I” was going to be a tongue-in-cheek short story called “Iocaine with Ionescu,” but I never got around to writing it.)

You can find the previous volumes of the series at your favorite online retailer, or order them from your local bricks-and-mortar store, or request signed copies from me.