Maggie Pill Mysteries

Here's where writers set themselves up. I liked the Once Upon a Trailer Park, Twice the Crime This Time , Third... idea in the titles, but that meant that the final book of Trailer Park Tales had to have THREE crimes. Talk about making work for myself! Throughout this series, I tried to showcase "types" of senior citizens (knowing of course that we are all unique and therefore never typical). One of our couples has been married forever, and they love each other dearly. That does not preclude anger at foibles, like leaving one's shoes in the way or spending too much time crafting. Another couple is newly married and still unsure of how to talk to each other. A third couple is dealing with the husband's decline in health, which changes a marriage in ways that can create stress. The fourth couple is adjusting to a new way of life after decades of working a farm, where there was always plenty to do. Secondary characters are the park complainers, those who think they s...

 Writer brains are weird. I had no intention of playing off the title of Book 1, Once Upon a Trailer Park, in the rest of the series, but it seemed inevitable to follow Once with Twice. That meant two crimes, so I came up with a cold case and a current one. Such stories require balance, so I needed lots of help to keep the details straight and both cases moving along. This is where long-time readers are a blessing. Many of them will read a rough (sometimes really rough) draft and make suggestions to help clarify events and pinpoint characters' motivations. It's hard to find readers who do this well. Many read purely for enjoyment, so they don't look for flaws in a story. A writer needs someone who reads with a critical eye--not to nitpick, but to tell her where the story cracks open because something doesn't add up. I read a mystery recently where a nationally known radio host revealed the name of a person she suspected of murder on her show without the slightest bit ...

 We winter in an RV park in Florida, and when residents there found out I was an author, I heard time and time again, "You should write about this place." So I did. An RV park is a strange microcosm of the nation (though our population is mostly from east of the Mississippi) in that people come from many different locales to escape winter weather. We're a mix of Canadian and U.S. We aren't Floridians. Most of us stay 3 to 5 months and then go back home. In the park people meet and mingle daily, but for most of us, that doesn't continue for the rest of the year. That means that you see people every day for say, four months, and then have no contact with them until your return next fall. I tried to recreate that feeling in Trailer Park Tales, my three-book mystery series. The events are seen through the eyes of four couples. That means eight narrators, which is a lot, so I give readers lots of hints as to who's who.  Using multiple narrators was purposeful, sinc...

Once the Sleuth Sisters series ended, I thought about what I'd like to write next. I came up with a precocious child (actually two of them) and a private detective who isn't quite sure what to do with them. This one took a lot more research than I expected, which is my own fault. I wanted the kids to have grown up in South America, which I knew nothing about. My interest stemmed from meeting a well-known archaeologist, Napoleon Chagnon, who hailed from my hometown. My daughter was thrilled when her class at Columbia was assigned to read his book, since she'd simply known him as her friend's "Uncle Nap" at their family reunions.   From there I went off on a tangent, with Lucy the child of a couple who'd lived among the tribal people of the Amazon jungle but died, leaving her and her brother stuck with an evil guardian. I toyed with making it a series, but while the reviews were good, there weren't many. It isn't worth a year of my life to write a se...

  The final book of the Sleuth Sisters series didn't start out to be final, though I was aware that I was tiring of the adventures of Barb, Faye, and Retta. The appeal of a series is that readers eagerly await the next book, and I still have bookstore owners tell me that readers ask when there will be another one. The downside for a writer is that series have the tendency to become formulaic. Everyone knows the characters. We know the basic setting. All that's required is to invent a murder and solve it in the next installment. That can come to a point where it's no longer fun, and that's where I was.  What clinched the end of the series for me was that one of my sisters died. It seems wrong now to write happy tales of the sisters sniping at each other. I chose to move on, though I did finish this one, #7. I moved the setting to Green Bay, Wisconsin, which was fun. I let Retta's undisciplined dog Styx be part of the rescue. And I tied up the loose ends as best I cou...

  Any series that includes dogs is likely to touch on puppy mills at some point. It's a hard topic to deal with in a cozy mystery, because it's such a horrible, sad subject, but the reality is that people need to recognize that such places exist and that they play on animal lovers' naive beliefs. As I write books that include pets, I find myself visiting humane societies all over my area. The people who work there are amazing, from the volunteers who play with the kittens to the managers who puzzle out how they're going to afford to feed the animals in a given month. After seeing the bare bones operation at some places, I joined my local humane society and support their work by getting the word out when I can.    One of the hardest times a local humane society faces is when a site is discovered where animals are abused, such as a puppy mill. They have to rescue and care for animals that are often in bad shape. They have to find homes for them (once the court says the ow...

  Setting a book in your home area is common for authors. It's easy, because we know a lot about it already. In addition, we can showcase what we love about the place. I live in northern Lower Michigan, so for the Sleuth Sisters, I invented and inserted a county along the Lake Huron shoreline, between Alpena and Presque Isle Counties. In this book, the sisters go west to visit the Leelanau Peninsula, noted for charm, vineyards, and tourists. Michigan has two very different coastlines in the top half of the "mitten," the Lower Peninsula. On the east side (where I live), the land is flat and the coastline fairly regular. On the west, Lake Michigan side, one finds dramatic rises, inlets, and other interesting geographic features like steep sand dunes and long, narrow peninsulas. Over the last few decades, growers have begun vineyards along the western shores, and that combined with the visual beauty brings in visitors with lots of money to spend. One of the things I notice l...

  One of the great things about cozy mysteries is their humor, and I had fun with this one because I grew up with chickens and can attest to humorous moments with these critters. They're fluttery and feathery, and they have minds of their own. On the serious side in this story is the criteria for judging an elderly person's competence. We have all heard of cases where a family member pushes to get control of grandma's estate for their own benefit, but the question must be asked: How crazy is crazy? When does a person's right to independence become dangerous to their health and even the health of others? A word about the covers for the Sleuth Sisters series. I absolutely fell into a pot of gold when I went online and hired a young woman from Singapore to do covers for me. She was fast, she was creative, and she listened to what I wanted. She drafted a theme for the books, the fence with three rails, each with an object that represented a sister. First she used shoes, the...

  Book #3, Murder in the Boonies , is a bit of a tribute to my younger sister, who always wanted to have a farm where horses could retire in their old age. We lived only fifty miles or so from Mackinac Island as kids, and she was a horse lover from the get-go. To help out a friend who supplied the island with horses (and to please his 3 girls), our dad wintered horses from the island, feeding and caring for them until it was time for them to go back to pulling carts around the Victorian-themed dot off Michigan's eastern shore. My sister never got her wish for a horse retirement home, so I made it part of a book about missing parents and fringe-group plots. Writing this book required knowing a bit about reindeer, and here's where being a retired schoolteacher is a great advantage. I can always find a former student or coworker who is an expert on any topic, and I knew that two of our school's former bus drivers raised reindeer. They were generous with their time and willing ...

The second book in the Sleuth Sisters series delves deeper into the characters of Barb, Faye, and Retta. It seemed likely to me that Retta would have a dog. She lives in the country, she's alone, and she just seemed like a "dog person." Faye is the type who is compelled to help anyone in need, so when she finds a dog hurt on the road, she naturally takes it in. So we have 3 sleuths and 2 dogs. All I had to do was write in a murder for them to solve. The fun part of writing this series is the response from readers, who want to tell me which sister they are. "I'm Barb," someone will say. "I'm always correcting people." Or, "I'm Retta. I'm the baby, and I always get my way." People often ask who I am, but that's complicated. Characters in a story become who we writers need them to be, so while one might figure an ex-English teacher would write herself as Barb, correcting grammatical errors on public signs in secret, I agree, ...

 On my Peg Herring website ( http://pegherring.com ) , I've started posting a bit on the history and background of each of my books. I thought it might be fun to do the same for Maggie's books here. I was a fairly successful traditionally published author as Peg Herring back in 2013, when my publisher abruptly stopped taking mystery submissions. I was left to either find another publisher (which is a pain) or join the growing trend of writers publishing their own work.  I'd been to lots of conferences where I met writers who were having fun with what they called "cozy" mysteries. The setting is usually small town. The sleuths are usually not professionals. The violence is very limited. Cozies sounded like a fun stories to write, but I didn't know if I could write funny. They say to write what you know, so I thought a sisterhood theme would be easy for me. The cozy part was a question, since I believe a good book requires a logical plot. I can't write about...