Why Crime with the Classics?

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.