Welcome Barbara Ross with MUSSELED OUT

LUCY BURDETTE: I read and enjoy many of our JRW pals' books, even while I'm writing (struggling) with my own. On the train home from Malice Domestic, I passed the hours by reading Barbara Ross's third Maine clambake mystery, MUSSELED OUT. As I read, I found myself taking notes--thinking, for example, oh this is how you get an amateur sleuth involved in a believable way...as if I'd published no mysteries instead of almost fourteen!

Anyway, that should tell you how much I enjoy and admire Barb's books--and I'm thrilled to have her visiting here today. Welcome Barb!

BARBARA ROSS: Hi Lucy! I’m so happy to be back visiting the Jungle Reds. Several of the Reds, (you know who you are) have been so supportive of my writing career—going back to my very first book.

LUCY: Your lobstering scenes seem so realistic– I felt like I was out on the boat with Julia. Tell us what kind of research allowed you to write those scenes so well? 

BARB: I’m laughing because maybe you identify with this? I’m writing about a resort and I always seem to be writing in the wrong season. I first heard the series had been sold in October 2012. I had to write a couple of drafts of Clammed Up without ever visiting the real Cabbage Island Clambakes, on which the series is (very loosely) based. It was probably good because I could make up my own fictional island and family without influence, but my husband and I were on the boat to the first clambake in June. Same for Boiled Over, which has scenes set on a blueberry farm. Book due on September 1, wild blueberry season mid-August. I had to put the finishing touches on those scenes at the last minute after a trip to Down East.

For Musseled Out, I had the same problem of timing. Over a long, snowy New England winter, I read and read about lobstering. Two marvelous books I recommend are The Secret Life of Lobsters, by Trevor Corson and The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island by Linda Greenlaw. But we all know you can only get so far with books. So with Musseled Out due June 1, last year, my husband Bill and I were the first people Captain Clive Farrin’s first tour on his lobster boat in May. Interestingly enough, Captain Farrin cited information from Corson’s book on the tour.

LUCY: Now with your third book in the Maine Clambake series, I am imagining you are running into the bane of the amateur sleuth, the Cabot Cove syndrome. How do you think about reasonable ways for Julia to get involved in crime solving? 

BARB: I think Cabot Cove Syndrome particularly haunts Maine writers, since that fictional town is in our state. Down East Magazine once calculated that that the murder rate in Cabot Cove is higher than in Honduras, the murder capitol of the world. You do have to wonder, why do people keep inviting that old lady to dinner?

For me the hardest thing is not finding victims and suspects. When you write about a resort tens of thousands of people visit a year, and a place at the end of the road where plenty of people go to forget their pasts, that part is easy. (Perhaps, Lucy, you identify with this, too?) The hard part for me is coming up with what Ramona DeFelice Long calls the VGR—the Very Good Reason your amateur sleuth becomes involved in solving the murder. After all, 99% of us would call the police or the FBI and be done with it. The more I write mysteries, the more I understand how critical it is to find the VGR and find it early in the narrative. The VGR is what flips your sleuth from being a passive recipient of information to a driver of the investigation, and that in turn drives the story.

It’s tempting, of course, to turn every person the sleuth knows into a suspect over the course of a series, but then you’re back to Cabot Cove Syndrome. Wouldn’t her family and friends solicit donations to send her out of town? (BTW, if anyone knows the Secret Solution to this challenge—e-mail me! I start the fifth book in the series next week.)

LUCY: I love learning more about the intricacy of Julia's family. Are you the kind of writer who had all this mapped out before you began the series? Or have aspects of these relationships surprised you?

BARB: Thank you, I love learning about it, too! The answer is—a bit of both. I did put some Easter eggs into the first few books. For example, the fact that Julia’s mother’s cousin Hugh disappeared off Morrow Island on the night of her twenty-first birthday and was never seen or heard from again is in the first book, Clammed Up. We’ll find out what happened in the fifth book.

But other ideas are more organic. I see it a lot like getting to know a friend. First you know her, then maybe you meet her friends and eventually her family. But inevitably, twenty years later, you’re sitting at a party and she says, “Yeah, that was just like the time I went on a date with Paul McCartney.” And you are—“What! How could I not know this about you?” And she says, “It was stupid really. It never went anywhere. I guess it never came up.”

What I’m trying to say is, your friends surprise you and your characters do, too.

You can read one of the delicious recipes from Musseled Out at Mystery Lovers Kitchen. And Barbara will be here all day to answer your comments and questions...

MUSSELED OUT

On bookshelves now!

(Audio book coming from Audible June 2^nd)

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