Having Fun Again By Vicki Delany

Jenn McKinlay: One of the people I most love to see at mystery conferences is the fabulous Vicki Delany! Super talented and (bonus points) she always makes me laugh, she's here today to talk about her multi genre world.

Vicki Delany: I started my writing career writing standalone novels of psychological suspense, what’s now so hugely popular under the label of domestic suspense; I then wrote an eight novel police procedural series. In between those I wrote a historical series set in the Klondike Gold Rush and novellas for adult literary. 

And now I’m writing cozies. Why the change?

About six years ago, I was starting to get a bit... shall we say burned out?  I was seriously thinking about giving up writing. I can’t really say why, maybe I wasn’t having fun with it any more. Tough stuff, even fictionally, is tough to deal with sometimes.  

None of my suspense novels or the police series were exceptionally graphic in their descriptions of violence (not going there!), but they dealt with the ugly side of life. As my protagonist Constable Molly Smith said:

       “When I decided to become a police officer I knew I’d have to deal with the hard side of life. Beaten children, raped women, accident victims, blood and gore. But that’s not the hardest part, is it? It’s the goddamn tragedy of people’s lives.” 

--Among the Departed, by Vicki Delany

In one book, Molly Smith kills a man; in them all the fall-out of the murder or crime is wide-spread and devastating. I dealt with the murder of a mother, the disappearance of a father, the suspected betrayal of a spouse, the death of adult children (not touching little kids), a man who went to prison for twenty-five years for a crime he didn’t commit, and an ex-soldier with PTSD and a gun on his lap.

The standalones were about dysfunctional families and the lasting repercussions of wartime trauma. I completed a book (never published) about a tough-as-they-come former cop whose niece is sold to a sex-trafficking ring and tries to find her.  

I had a vague idea for a new standalone, maybe something about a WWII era ghost living in an abandoned barn that’s being developed for a new winery, when I was asked by Kim Lionetti of Bookends if I’d like to try my hand at the Lighthouse Library series work-for-hire Berkley was offering. 

Sure, thought I. Might as well. I gave it a go, got the contract, and I’ve never looked back. 

Because I found that writing could be fun again. I love writing cozies.  One thing led to another and I’m now writing FOUR cozy series. That’s three or four books a year. I approach every day (well, almost every day) excited to get back to the computer and the story. 

The word I often use for the cozies I write is FUN. They should be fun for the author and fun for the reader.  Not all cozies are humorous, but I hope mine are. Writing humour, I’ve found, makes me smile. (The master, if I may say so, of the laugh-out-loud cozy is Jenn McKinlay!)

Jenn: Aw, shucks. Thanks, my friend, I feel the same about yours! Humor is the secret sauce, in my opinion, to a good cozy series.

Cozies are intended to be nothing more than an entertaining read. You won’t learn many lessons about the human condition, no one is suffering from angst or threating to kill themselves because of depression. No PTSD. No terrorist attacks or serial killers. Just people with friends and lovers and community. And the occasional enemy. And a murder of course.

Cozy mysteries are not trying to make an important statement about the human condition, or hoping to change the world. A cozy mystery tells a story that attempts to be entertaining, that’s about people much like us (or like us if we were prettier, or smarter, or younger!) and our friends and family. 

Cozy mysteries are about real people living real lives (except for that pesky murder bit), although writ large. Everything is exaggerated. The nosy neighbour is nosier, the ditzy friend is ditzier, the mean girl is meaner. And the handsome man is, well, handsomer.  Even better if there are two of them. 

Case in point: My newest book is the fourth in the Year Round Christmas series, Silent Night Deadly Night, coming August 27 from Berkley.  It’s set in the week before Thanksgiving when Merry Wilkinson’s mother hosts her college friends for a reunion.  What’s Thanksgiving but family, friends, food? Oh, and a decades-long resentment that finally spills over. Literally over, into the pot luck supper.  Take a look at that cover – I bet it brought a smile to your face.

Readers who enjoy cozies often tell me they read them to escape from the real world. They get enough bad news on TV, and sometimes even in their own life. Cozy mysteries really are an escape.  

I get a lot of letters asking me to write a new Constable Molly Smith or another standalone. And maybe someday I will, but right now I’m loving the opportunity to write cozy mysteries. 

As a writer, I might be committed to cozies now, but as I reader I really do like to mix it all up. I’d love to know what type of novels Jungle Red readers prefer. Are you into the dark gritty stuff, or do you seek escape in your reading? Maybe both?

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She is the author of more than thirty-five published books, so far: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane, the Year Round Christmas mysteries for Penguin Random House, the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington and, as Eva Gates, the Lighthouse Library series, for Crooked Lane Books.  

Vicki lives and writes in bucolic Prince Edward County, Ontario. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Vicki is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing.