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Writing Mysteries that Sell Part I: An Interview with Cynthia Baxter

© Deborah Cannon

Mystery writer Cynthia Baxter was born and raised on Long Island. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After 10 years in Manhattan, she returned to Long Island, where her stories take place. Originally from the South Shore of Suffolk County, she now lives on the North Shore.

Baxter was always fascinated by the life vets lead. Her character, Jessie Popper, was inspired by a college friend, a practicing vet in upstate New York. Baxter frequently visits her, acting as a "fly on the wall" to see first-hand what real-life veterinarians do. A full-time writer most of her life, she has written for newspapers and magazines and has published over 40 novels under two different names.

The innovative 51-year-old author is married to a biology professor. She has one son, Jesse, from her first marriage, now a sophomore at the University of Vermont. She also has three step-children, aged 24, 22, and 18. She travels frequently, is crazy about her "step-dog," Bailey, and loves reading, quilting, and baking - especially cheesecake.

I recently spoke with Cynthia about her new mystery series. Here's how it went:

DC: Let's start with how you came to be a writer. You went to MIT, the foremost North American school of technology. I am certain you didn't take creative writing there. How did you end up a writer? What attracted you to mysteries? Is this what you like to read and are you a puzzle solver by nature?

CB: Even though I've wanted to be a writer since I was six years old, I never felt it was a very realistic goal. So I tried to follow a more practical route - which meant getting an MBA at MIT's business school, the Sloan School. Boy, was that ever a bad match! While I was supposed to be working on my Masters Thesis, instead I couldn't resist writing the first 40 pages of what turned into my first novel in one sitting on a snowy day in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (I can still hear the flakes hitting the window pane as I wrote in longhand...) It was semi-autobiographical, about a young woman who's been overweight all her life but starts going to a weekly Weight Watchers-type weight-loss club. In addition to changing her body, she changes all kinds of things in her life.

After working in business for four years - and meanwhile getting my first book, "Once There Was a Fat Girl," published - I "dropped out" of corporate America to try writing full time. Over the next two decades, I wrote more than 40 novels under my real name, Cynthia Blair. I wrote 13 books that were considered "contemporary women's fiction" and 29 books for young adults, including mysteries. In the mid-1990s, I hit a dry spell, and I turned to other kinds of writing. But I missed writing novels and I just had to get back into it. One November afternoon, the idea of writing a series about a spirited female veterinarian who used her involvement with animals to solve murder mysteries just popped into my head. Then the book started writing itself, usually after I'd ingested large quantities of caffeine. The genre appealed to me because I do like puzzles. Even more, I like quirky characters, and mysteries introduce so many interesting ones, with new and different ones in every book. While I like the mystery aspect, to me it's secondary to the development of the characters, both the on-going ones and the new ones that pop up each time a new crime is committed.

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