Cynthia Baxter | Confessions of a Mystery Writer . . . Er, Travel Writer

We’re all entitled to an obsession or two, aren’t we?

One of mine is travel. I suppose it’s because I spent my childhood in the backseat of a car with my sister and grandmother – often a Volkswagen bug – with my parents in the front seat, acting as pilot and co-pilot. School vacation was synonymous with road trip. Since my father was an English teacher in a neighboring school district, he usually had the same days off that we kids did – and so off we’d go.

Our home was on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York, which was a great starting point for traveling all over the eastern half of the United States. The five of us explored New England, Florida, and just about every state in between. (Eastern Canada, too.) We saw the big cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Montreal; historic towns like Williamsburg, Virginia, and Salem, Massachusetts; and places that were just plain fun like Hershey, Pennsylvania, and St. Petersburg, Florida.

In fact, Florida was a favorite destination for spring vacations. The drive took about three days, including stops at every Stuckey’s and Horne’s we passed along the way (a blast from the past for those of you who had the pleasure of putting those on your itinerary before their demise). Once we were there, we also stopped at every attraction. This was still the 1950’s and 1960’s, so Disney had yet put in an appearance. But we found plenty to do: alligator farms, orange groves, Cypress Gardens, stores selling everything that could possibly be made with seashells, and the glitzy hotels of Miami Beach, where we strolled through the lobbies and pretended we were wealthy enough to stay at them.

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Cynthia Baxter | The Importance of Creating a Compelling Main Character

What goes into writing a good mystery? While it’s critical to have a compelling plot filled with twists and turns, I’ve always believed that the book’s heroine – and the development of her “real life” – was at least as important.

When I started writing the Reigning Cats & Dogs mystery series, I wanted the focus to be my protagonist, Jessica Popper. Jessie is a veterinarian with a mobile services unit, essentially a clinic on wheels. I chose to make her practice mobile instead of based in a regular office because she needed an excuse to go out into the community every day, talking to suspects and ferreting out clues. But since I love to incorporate humor in all my books, I wanted her to be sassy, independent, and strong-headed, as well as someone who was battling a few demons. The main one is her conflict over commitment, which provides the ups and downs she experiences with her boyfriend Nick. (I tried to model their relationship after the sparkling repartee in those wonderful old Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy flicks – or one of my favorite movies of all times, It Happened One Night.)

The Reigning Cats & Dogs series was already moving along nicely when I came up with an idea for a second series, one that featured a travel writer. I’ve done some travel writing, and it occurred to me that it would be fun to set each book in a different location as my heroine researched a new spot for a magazine article. But as I started to write the Murder Packs a Suitcase mystery series, I wanted to create a heroine who was completely different from Jessie Popper. So I made Mallory Marlowe a little older, as well as less secure in her career and herself. Perhaps even more importantly, I made her central conflict the exact opposite of Jessie’s. While Jessie struggles with her fears of getting into a committed relationship, Mallory is dealing with the loss of hers, the result of her husband’s sudden death. And while the members of Jessie’s family all have four feet (one has wings), Mallory has two almost-adult children. That gives her a support system that Jessie doesn’t have – and isn’t sure she wants.

It’s been a challenge, alternating between the two series and having to go back and forth, getting into the head of each of my two heroines. Writing about two such different women requires a totally different mindset. I “hear” them in my head and I “see” them in various situations – and the experience is strangely different. Thank goodness that in the end, both Jessie and Mallory have the same goal: discovering “whodunnit!”

Cynthia Baxter
www.cynthiabaxter.com/