The mystery genre has gone through various metamorphoses from the traditional “who done it,” to far-out fantasy. The rise in travel and increasing globalization has led to an even greater expansion of the genre, which now includes the popular International Mysteries.  These are stories from far-off places that allow you to sightsee while you solve a murder.  Like the travels of Gulliver in the past, these stories allow you to learn about new cultures and to develop a greater love for humanity.

It’s the genre I got into, the one I most enjoy.

So, where did I develop this attraction for these types of mysteries you might ask?  It was a combination of travel and falling in love with International Mysteries in their original language on MHZ, a local Washington DC television Network, especially Andrea Camilleri’s "Montalbano," Donna Leon’s, "Inspector Brunetti," and Georges Simenon’s, "Magret." There are also those dark Swedish Mysteries like Martin Beck and Wallander.  (I urge you to read the books and find the shows on www. MHZ.com online). These wonderful mysteries intrigued me.

I also traveled, quite by accident the first time, to Southern Spain.  The problem is that, as soon as the plane landed in sunny Malaga airport, I knew that was where I belonged.  There began a lifetime love affair.

I don’t believe in Karma or that kind of thing, but if I did, I’m certain I had an ancient relative, perhaps from that time when the Moors ruled Spain before the La Reconquista. The romantic era of the final conquest of Grenada (home of the Al Alhambra, which you definitely need to see), by Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand in 1492 the same year Christopher Columbus opened America to the Europeans.

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This attraction drew me back several times a year for a while, to the point that my friend Lourdes’s then husband said I was 45% American and 65% Spanish. I haven’t been to my other home in a while, though I intend to return. In the meantime, I invite you to travel with me across the Mediterranean, to look over at the Rock of Gibraltar into the continent of Africa.  I invite you to immerse yourself in colorful Flamenco, share tapas, stop for a churro in rich deep dark chocolate, and finish the night with a fine glass of Cava or Rijoa. While we’re there, we’ll find out who done it.

I recently read that the Japanese term Honkaku- which means orthodox, refers to the old-fashioned detective stories. The entertainment from them derives from the logical reasoning of solving the crime, like everyone’s favorite, Agatha Christie novels. A Brief Introduction to Honkaku Detective Fiction - killerthrillers.net
Now, we’ve entered what the Japanese call, Shin Honkaku- the New Orthodox. These started with Island mysteries in the 1980’s. 4 Different Styles of Mystery Novels from Around the World (bookriot.com).   The new orthodox involves solving a mystery on an island, something like the popular television show, Death in Paradise, if you’ve seen it (also love those British mysteries on Britbox).  Today, we don’t stop just at the islands. We can go anywhere from Spain to Italy to France to Sweden, to Greece, to Morocco, or to Istanbul. This new orthodoxy expands our imaginations even further than Gulliver traveled.

I invite you to join me and fall in love with a land not your own. You may want to see a part of the world you never knew existed; you may want to write your own mystery. Whatever you decide, you can’t go wrong with a good trip and a good murder to solve.

Paula B. Mays is a Native of Washington, D.C. She is the Current President of Sisters in Crime (SINC) Chesapeake Chapter, a Trademark attorney, a former USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) attorney, and has a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from George Washington University. MURDER IN LA PLAZA DE TOROS is the first in a new series of mysteries set in a fictional town in Southern Spain. Paula has also published articles in the Huffington Post and has written other trademark-related articles. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Having recently published my first novel, I feel fortunate to have sampled the pleasures many aspiring authors despair of ever experiencing: the momentary disbelief when a publisher says “yes;” the tactile thrill of holding the printed copy of your “baby” for the first time; the rush of excitement when a complete stranger posts a laudatory review; the warm memories triggered when a hand from the distant past reaches out and pats you on the back; the encouragement implicit in an eager inquiry about the next installment in a planned series.

Grateful as I am for all these delights, what has struck me most profoundly is the individuality of readers’ responses. How differently readers react to this or that character or plot twist or interpret the meaning of an exchange of dialogue. The first time I read her a passage out loud, my own wife was aghast to learn that I pronounced the first name of my protagonist, Bruneau Abellard, with a drawn-out emphasis on the second syllable, lobbying vehemently for her Bruno over my Broo-know. Some found Bruneau’s on-again, off-again girlfriend overbearing; others wished she was more assertive. The city of New Orleans, where the novel takes place, was perceived as beautiful or threatening; fragrant or malodorous (author’s note: both these things are true!); mysterious and cloistered, or open and welcoming. And so on.

What the novelist comes to realize is that once the reader takes the reins, she is off and running, beyond your control. You have provided a map, and a well-marked trail, but she is free to wander where she may.

Contemplating the wondrous, and wonderful, phenomenon of the “runaway reader,” brought me back to my long-ago grad school days, when in a literary criticism class, we waded through a fascinating if at times impenetrable tome called The Implied Reader. Its author, German philosopher Wolfgang Iser, is best known for pioneering a school of literary theory called “reader-response” criticism. To crudely oversimplify, Iser’s central insight is that reading is as much an act of creation as writing. As she writes, an author may have a particular reader in mind, but that reader is a mere construct of the author’s imagination. The actual “flesh and blood” reader brings her own experiences and sensibility to her encounter with the text, creating impressions and points of view that are uniquely her own.

Remembering Iser’s treatise and experiencing for the first time the subtle shock of the runaway reader, brings me to two parting thoughts. The first is that I am now better able to articulate my longstanding aversion to the audiobook format, at least when it comes to works of fiction. I understand the appeal of the medium and suppose that listening to a novel beats never picking one up, but I remain firm in my conviction that the audiobook experience is a pale simulacrum of the real deal. The mostly passive -- dare I say, lazy? -- act of “listening” as a narrator appropriates the characters’ voices, cannot possibly replicate the creative engagement inherent in the act of reading.
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My second, and parting insight, is that releasing a published novel is not unlike sending your kindergartener off to her first day of school. You’ve done the best you can to prepare her for this moment, but now she must make her own way in the world.


Norman Woolworth’s first novel, The Lafitte Affair, is a historical mystery set mostly in present-day New Orleans, with glimpses of the city during its “Belle Epoque” of the 1820s. In a starred review, Kirkus called it “a well-crafted mystery that is beautifully written, educational, and all-around entertaining.” BookTrib deemed it “a savory jambalaya that tempts you to take another bite and keep turning pages.” And Readers’ Favorite gave the book five stars, saying “the novel is as much about the city’s colorful characters as it is about the unfolding mystery.” It called the novel “a fast paced, edge-of-your-seat read … worthy of the big screen.” Woolworth is a retired corporate executive who resides in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife Lori and their blue-blooded mongrel, Nola.
 

​I pride myself in developing the settings in my books as if they were secondary characters. Often, they are. The good guys and the bad guys sweat when the sun’s blazing with heat, whether they’re in the barren landscape of west Texas or the smothering humidity of North Carolina. The quietness of a mountain snow can be deafening. The smell of freshly cut hay is starkly different than the smells lingering near the dumpster behind a restaurant in Newark, New Jersey.
 
Like many authors, I too, get sidetracked when researching a setting I’m not familiar with. Our dear friend Google makes it way too easy to fall down that rabbit hole we call research. When I was writing Wink of an Eye (Minotaur, 2014), I spent way too many hours researching Wink, Texas. Yes—there really is a small town in west Texas named Wink. The Roy Orbison Museum is located right there on Main Street. It’s by appointment only, though.
 
I was on a mission to learn everything I could about Wink, Texas. We all know how Texans like to spend their Friday nights under the lights watching their high school football games and Wink is no different. It’s home of the Wildcats. The population of Wink holds steady at about a thousand except when the oil’s hitting then it explodes to sometimes three thousand. I learned this from the mayor’s wife. We became friends on Facebook when I joined the Wink, Texas Facebook group. Rather than googling everything and relying on Wikipedia, I used a more reliable source—the actual residents.
 
With one scene, I wanted the common name for a specific cactus. I sent my friend the mayor’s wife a few photos I’d found and asked her. I said I wanted to know the slang name, the name she’d use if she saw it on the side of the road. I anxiously waited for a really cool name like Flowering Betty, or Lady Redbud. I was a little disappointed when she came back and said, “we call it a cactus.”
 
I’ve never been to Wink, Texas. Although I have been invited to dinner at the mayor’s house. But I did enough research, even longtime residents were impressed. I was told by more than one that I had “nailed it.”
 
While I’ve never been to Wink, I have been to the mountains of Appalachia. I’ve stood in a coal camp in the Coal Miner’s Museum in West Virginia. I’ve stopped in Goober Peas store in Meat Camp, North Carolina. I’ve taken so many day trips to Boone, I no longer use GPS. I’ve hiked the Linville Falls trails several times. I’ve been to the top of Grandfather Mountain and caught snowflakes on my tongue then drove down to the parking lot where we’d stop, get out of the car, and take off out coats because it was sixty degrees at the foot of the mighty mountain. I’ve been deep into the hollers bordering North Carolina and Tennessee. I was even invited to a snake-handling church but it didn’t work out. Yes, those churches do exist but they’re so well hidden, sometimes in plain sight, their very existence is hush-hush.
 
My other books, The Ava Logan series, and What the Monkey Saw are set in the North Carolina mountains. Two different series, two different protagonists, two different career paths joined by a common thread. The people of Appalachia.
 
I’m not really sure why I’m so drawn to that region, but I am. I was born and raised, and still live in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, but man, those mountains speak to me.
 
Watching the devastation going on in Western North Carolina right now thanks to a hurricane of all things, is like taking a punch straight to the gut. Honestly, I’m too stunned to cry. I stare at the images of homes reduced to scattered, splintered wood. Roads I’ve traveled that are no longer there. Entire towns that are no longer there. And I wish it was a nightmare we would wake up from and everything would be back like it was. From now on the survivors will think of time as before “the storm” or after the storm. There’ll be no in between. No other way to reference time.  
 
And somewhere in the far corners of my mind, I’m thinking about these two series I have with more books to come. How do I write them now? Do I include the day the rain came and the rivers and creeks rose and the mud rolled and raged like flowing lava and the very land my mountain people stood upon washed out from under them? Do I dare write about such a catastrophic event?
 
The terrorist attack on 911 forced the entertainment industry to rethink using images of the twin towers. Those towers that used to be there, but now they’re not.
 
Can I act like nothing’s happened at all and continue writing the two different series set as they were? Or do I, too, write before and after?

Lynn Chandler Willis is a best-selling, multi-award-winning author who has worked in the corporate world, the television news industry, and had a thirteen-year run as the owner and publisher of a small-town newspaper. She lives in the heart of North Carolina on a mini-farm surrounded by chickens, turkeys, ducks, nine grandkids, a sassy little calico named Jingles, and Finn, a brown border collie known to be the best dog in the world. Seriously.    

Why write historical fiction? Let’s review some stats. Regarding genre, mystery and thrillers account for 47% of all book sales. Good news for us crime fiction writers! More great news, historical fiction makes up 20% of total book sales in the United Kingdom. Audiobooks are outselling ebooks by a wide margin, with historical fiction seeing a 17% increase in audiobook sales in 2023.

I have a theory about why historicals are so popular. I believe that the readership of crime fiction skews older This is not based on anything more than anecdotal evidence. I recently returned from Bouchercon, the grand-daddy of the crime fiction conventions, and the attendees skewed older. This has been true for several years at the crime fiction cons I’ve attended. I would say that it is likely that the attendees at any panel are, by and large, my contemporaries, and I’m not young.

So why did I write a historical crime novel? Although research into the slang used in the 1920s is a trip down a delightful rabbit hole, the ins and outs of cell phones, computer code, and the latest surveillance equipment leave me baffled and bored. I use a smart phone, and I was a technical editor for many years and have worked on several textbooks, but I struggle to keep up with the latest in modern sleuthing techniques. I think that is why cozy mysteries have an edge over hardcore thrillers. There is a lot less demand for the more technical aspects of crime-solving. It’s the candlestick in the library with Miss Scarlett as the murderer. The same holds true for a historical novel. There are other facts to pin down, but not blood-splatter patterns or the velocity of an AK-47.

I set my recently published historical mystery in 1930 San Francisco. I’m old enough to remember when you wore white gloves and a hat to visit the City. It was a world where high-end department stores ringed Union Square and where you shopped for clothes you needed for an “event.” When I was ten, we flew back to Ireland to see my grandmother, and my mother bought a suit at I. Magnin’s for the journey. My sister and I didn’t rate dresses from I. Magnin’s, but we wore dresses on the plane! And it wasn’t that many years ago when the department stores tried to outdo each other with their windows at Christmas. That was worth a special trip. I’m a December baby, and one year my parents took me to buy a gift at the City of Paris department store. I remember that amazing rotunda even if I don’t remember the present. When the City of Paris closed and was replaced by Nieman Marcus, I had no interest in crossing their threshold even though they kept the rotunda. Buying something at Nieman Marcus, the bastion of Texas excess, doesn’t have the same appeal.

My point is that with historicals, the reader can enter the writer’s world, and it’s all vaguely relatable, regardless if it’s ancient Rome, Victorian England, or sixteenth-century Tudor England. If you have a Roman Senator riding a horse, well, I’ve ridden a horse—pretty badly and I was stiff for days—but I can relate to someone on a horse. Someone is murdered in a castle? Hey, I’ve been to castles. I know what it feels like to climb up stone steps and feel the chill of the walls on my face. Holding a cell phone in my hand doesn’t elicit any vibes that I can relate to, and the ones I do feel are largely frustration and irritation. Of course, I’m not saying that everyone is as much of a Luddite as I am, but the stats say that I’m not alone. Welcome, my tech-weary peeps!


Claire M. Johnson’s first novel, Beat Until Stiff, was nominated for the 2003 Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was a Booksense pick. Her second book in this series, Roux Morgue, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Fog City, her noir crime novel set in Prohibition-era San Francisco, debuted July 2024 from Level Best Books. This book won the Gold from the Royal Palm Literary Award hosted by the Florida Writers Association and is the first in a series featuring Maggie Laurent, P.I. Ms. Johnson is currently President of Mystery Writers of America’s Northern California Chapter.