My name is Lesley Cookman and I
write a series. I call them Murder Mysteries;
in America they call them “Cozies”. I
have learnt, over the past few years, to refer to them as such, although I
stubbornly prefer to use the English and – ahem – original spelling.
And the latest of these is called Murder In A Different Place, and as I
write it’s vacillating between number one and two in Amazon’s Cosy chart. This is a surprise, as it was without doubt
the most difficult to write. Part of the
problem in writing an amateur sleuth series, is that you have to invent these
situations, mostly improbable, for your protagonist to stumble into murder – no
choice there, every title has to start with the word. My eldest son has come up with several ideas
in the past, and this was no exception as he said I ought to take my chief
characters away together, and came up with the reason – a funeral. So off I went. Yes, that’s about the extent of my planning.
First we (son and I) decided we
wanted to take them to an island. Not
sure now why, but we decided on the Isle of Wight, being a favourite UK holiday
destination of ours. I didn’t need to do
an awful lot of research on the Island, as I knew it so well, but I checked up
on everything I could. But then I came
to the victim. A news item I’d heard came
back to me and I thought – yes, that could be how my victim died. But how? Why?
Another problem these days is the
short lead-time of the books and two-a-year contracts. This
I struggled on, despairing. They came back home from the Island. Then they went back – and came home again. What next?
I just kept coming to dead end after dead end, and mine aren’t the sort
of books where, as Raymond Chandler tells us, you can have a man come in with a
gun. Meanwhile, I was trawling pages and
pages of online research, some of which was unprofitably sparse. But eventually, I got to the end – or near it. And changed the murderer. So don’t believe anyone who tells you they
knew who the murderer was from the beginning.
Because I didn’t.
I have readers who know the books
and the characters almost better than I do myself so imagine my relief when one
of them told me it was all right. Better
than all right. But it’s taught me a
valuable lesson – despite the fact that I like “writing into the mist”, it’s probably better to have a bit of a
ground plan first.
More information about Lesley and
her work can be found on her website
and also on her blog. You can also follow her on Twitter
@LesleyCookman and find her on Facebook.
Murder in a Different Place is out now via kindle
(£1.60)
