Maddie
Day writes the Country Store Mysteries and the Cozy Capers Book Group
Mysteries. As Edith Maxwell, she writes the Quaker Midwife Mysteries, the Local
Foods Mysteries, and award-winning short crime fiction. With eighteen novels in
print and five more in production, Maxwell has been nominated for an Agatha
Award six times. She lives north of Boston with her beau and two elderly cats,
and gardens and cooks when she isn’t killing people on the page or wasting time
on Facebook. Today she joins us to talk about why she set a series in Indiana. Learn
more about Maddie/Edith and her books at her website and the Wicked Authors blog.
Why
Set a Series in Indiana?
Several decades ago, I spent five happy
years earning my doctorate at the flagship Indiana University
campus in Bloomington.
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| Maxwell Hall |
It’s a school that every generation of
Maxwells has attended and of which my great-great-great grandfather was one of
the founders (also: my great-grandfather was the first dean of the IU Medical
school, my grandfather was captain of the IU basketball team in 1916, and my
own father was an undergrad there). Think huge university in a small town. You
can walk or ride a bike everywhere. People are friendlier and talk more slowly
than in the northeast. And neighboring Brown County is as hilly and pretty as
Vermont.
The seed for this series was this: a
fellow grad student named Benjamin dropped out of the IU Linguistics PhD
program in the late 1970s. With his girlfriend he bought a run-down country
store in the town of Story fixed it up into a breakfast restaurant as well as a
bed-and-breakfast establishment. They served whole-wheat banana walnut
pancakes, which I make to this day, and which figure prominently in my books. The Story
Inn still exists, although my friends don’t own it any longer.
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| Story Inn |
When I was imagining how this series
might play out, I conjured up a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Robbie Jordan
who grew up in Santa Barbara, California. Three years after Robbie moves
near her mom’s sister Adele in Brown County to work as a chef, Robbie’s
carpenter mom dies suddenly. Robbie uses her savings and a small inheritance to
acquire a run-down country store filled with antique cookware. She uses the
carpentry skills she learned from her mom to transform the place into a
breakfast and lunch restaurant, later adding three B&B rooms upstairs.
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| Bean Blossom Covered Bridge |
I’ve been having a ball remembering and
researching phrases and pronunciations from that part of the country. “I might
could do it for you.” “Faster than green grass through a goose.” “I can’t eat
another bite ’cause I’m as full as a tick.” Actual small town names
are awesome: French Lick, Bean Blossom, Gnaw Bone, Floyds Knobs, and so on.
When I saw South Lick Creek on a map, I knew that was the name of my fictional
village. Strangled Eggs and Ham is
the sixth book in this popular series, and there will be at least nine, plus a
novella coming out in Christmas Cocoa
Murder this fall.
(Note: a version of this post first
appeared on the Wicked Authors blog in 2014.)
Readers: what are your favorite
colorful sayings?
Strangled
Eggs and Ham
A
Country Store Mystery, Book 6
While Robbie scrambles through
breakfast orders South Lick, Indiana, tempers run as high as the sticky August
heat. A developer’s plans to build a towering luxury resort at one of the most
scenic hilltops in Brown County infuriates opponents, who concoct protests and
road blockades. When tensions boil over and a vocal protester is silenced
forever at the resort site, Robbie ditches the griddle to catch the killer. But
if slashed tires are any indication, she’ll need to crack this case before her
own aunt gets served something deadly next . . .
Buy
Links
Dear Edith (Maddie): I am a Hoosier "born and bred," as they say. I followed my parents to IU decades ago. They loved to meet at Nick's, didn't have cars to drive to Brown County; but I did travel there and even did my student teaching at Smithtown HS.
ReplyDeleteMy pedigree at IU isn't as strong as yours with no famous name. I have to mention that my mother was an editor of the Indiana Daily Student in her senior year before getting a journalism job in Fort Wayne, where I was born. Several younger relatives who married into our family are also IU graduates.
My parents visited French Lick, IN to stay when going to the Kentucky Derby in later years. We weren't small town IN people, but you can use any of these places in your next IN book if you wish.
Thanks for sharing your memories! I know I will enjoy the setting and your interesting plot as always.
Beth
Great
ReplyDeletewe love your skills,
keep sharing!