Inventing a Mystery Series that Sells: An Interview with Leslie Caine, Part II
In part one of our interview Leslie discussed pitching ideas for a series, editor input, titles, writing from a marketing angle and publicists. In part two . . . well, you'll have to read on to find out!
DC: You live in Colorado and you've set your new series in Colorado. So many authors place their stories where they live. What is your reason for doing this? Is it just easier to write about where you live?
LC: Yes, sure, it's easier. I can head out my front door to do research. It also goes back to my belief that I need to write about that which I feel passionate about, and I absolutely love Colorado. It's a beautiful part of the country.
DC: Your series, including your two previous efforts swing wide of traditional mysteries that showcase a detective or lawyer of some sort. I can imagine a journalist constantly stumbling onto murder, but a designer? Of course the TV show "Murder She Wrote" had a novelist whose whole town should have been murdered in the course of that show. Now that was a hit! Is the trend now toward protagonists with no previous experience in murder? For writers who want to break into the mystery racket, should they follow this trend?
LC: No matter what profession a given sleuth has, the reader must be willing to suspend his disbelief about the frequency of homicides that the sleuth will come across, or there cannot be a mystery series. Even a homicide detective must relate personally and deeply to each murder that he is investigating book in and book out, or the plot will feel flat. Three or four murders down the line, the cynical reader can ask of a police procedural, "Again with the victim that reminds you of your dead wife?! Get yourself a different profession, dude!" For my series, readers have got to be willing to accept that a pair of designers can run into more than one dead body in the course of their careers. In no way is that realistic. But even though I've lived a typical quiet life in suburbia, I personally knew three people who were murdered in separate incidents; I was taken hostage by gunpoint in a robbery. We live in a violent society that we all struggle to understand and to come to grips with.
I would hesitate to say that it's a "trend toward protagonists with no previous experience in murder." For every Agatha Christie, there has also been a Dashiell Hammett. I would urge new writers trying to break into the market to choose the type of mystery that they like to read the most; chances are this will also be the type of book that they can write the best.
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