I love mysteries with a quirky convention or fan festival as part of the story. In your new book BAKE OFFED, you have the “Maryland Mystery Fan Fest”. What was your inspiration?
BAKE OFFED takes place at a fictional mystery fan fest. The book was inspired by the dozens of actual mystery fan conventions I've attended. I was at one of them, Left Coast Crime, in March of 2020 when Covid shut down the gathering on its first day. At that time, I was plotting my 8th Five-Ingredient Mystery. Realizing it might be a long time before I would once again meet mystery writers and fans in person, I created a fictional mystery festival. Like most such gatherings, the one in my book includes panels, book signings, and a charity auction for book lovers. But it also has a few features not usually seen at a real mystery convention--a Deadly Desserts bake-off and a murder, which the fest attendees are eager to solve.
As is the case with many mysteries, the murder victim in BAKE OFFED seems to be disliked by many, and so there are multiple plausible suspects. Do you have the murderer determined before you write the book, or does the guilty party change as you write the story?
I always start knowing who the murderer is and planning the clues and red herrings with that in mind. But in 3 of my 8 books, I changed who the killer was while I was writing the book. I did this twice when I was a third of the way into the book and once after I’d written the final chapter! It’s not as hard as you might think to switch culprits because I always have a number of suspects with motives and opportunities to commit the crime. But after changing who the murderer is, I have to go back and insert a few more clues.
Where do you get your recipes for each book? How do you decide what type of recipes to include? Do you enjoy cooking?
I began collecting easy recipes as a Mom with two part-time jobs and two preschoolers. I also simplified recipes that had many ingredients so I could cook fast. After my children were older, I had the time to make more elaborate meals, but I rarely found complicated recipes with many ingredients worth the effort and time. These days I don’t even read a recipe if it has more than a dozen ingredients. The recipes I put in the books have a maximum of five ingredients and are usually dishes that the characters in the book have made and that I have often cooked and served. The titles of the books also suggest the recipes that need to be included, for example, clam chowder in SCAM CHOWDER, chocolate fondue in FINAL FONDUE, and gingerbread for GINGERDEAD MAN.
How much research, if any, goes into one of your mysteries?
Writing a mystery requires research because you have to make sure the details of the crime and the investigation are accurate. For every book in the series, I’ve consulted a medical doctor who specializes in forensics to check what medical examiners would discover when someone is killed by the method in the book. I’ve also interviewed police in different jurisdictions about how crime scenes like the ones in my books would be handled. Each book requires special research related to the plot. For example, to write CRYPT SUZETTE, I consulted a book on how to set up a haunted house. For GINGERDEAD MAN, which takes place at a Dickens of a Holiday festival, I interviewed a professional Santa and reread “A Christmas Carol” by Dickens. For SCAM CHOWDER, I researched financial scams directed at retirees and asked a financial expert to review the pages in the book related to that subject.
As a cozy mystery fan, I’ve read stories with a wide variety of crime-solving duos. What made you decide to create a series with a woman and her grandad?
Mysteries benefit from a dynamic between people who come from different generations. Granddad serves as both a confidante and a foil for Val. With different perspectives, they challenge each other’s assumptions and arrive at conclusions that neither would reach alone. They make a good team though their relationship is not always smooth. They have typical male-female and old-young conflicts and don’t always agree about food. Yet they are alike in being independent, dogged, and sometimes impetuous. Val’s grandfather is based on my father, who took up cooking in his 80s, when my mother, who’d always been the cook in our family, was going through cancer treatments. He said it was his turn to take care of her as she’d taken care of him for decades. Like Val’s granddad, my father boasted about cooking dishes with only a few ingredients.
If you could only pick one of your books, other than this one, for a romance reader unfamiliar with your work, which one would you pick? And why?
CRYPT SUZETTE would be the best one because it introduces new characters that have roles in the Five-Ingredient Mysteries that come after it. Val becomes involved in a relationship that I believe romance writers would enjoy. CRYPT SUZETTE is also a fun Halloween story with characters dressing up as literary ghosts, Granddad taking up ghost-hunting, and a haunted house with clues to solving the mystery.
Other authors I’ve interviewed have told me that the kinds of books they enjoy reading are different from the kind of books they enjoy writing. What do you like to read? Favorite books? Favorite author?
I enjoy books that involve writers or the characters they created in the plot. Sometimes these are mysteries and sometimes not. My favorite authors are Jane Austen and Agatha Christie. I’ve read and reread all of their books. One recent book I enjoyed was THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR by Nina de Gramont. It solves the mystery of Agatha Christie’s 11-day disappearance in a highly inventive way. The book intertwines history and mystery and includes a murder solution worthy of Agatha Christie. I also loved reading THE MURDER OF MR. WICKHAM by Claudia Gray. It brings together characters from five of Jane Austen’s books for a country house get-together with fatal consequences.
My background is . . .
Writing and teaching have been the focus of my professional life. I have a Ph.D. in English and spent two decades teaching literature and writing on the college level, including a course in the literature of mystery and detection. In my spare time, I created and programmed educational games for middle schoolers. Then I taught training courses for business and government employees and worked as an instructional designer for in-person and computer-based courses.
What are you currently working on?
I’m finishing the ninth Five-Ingredient Mystery, A PARFAIT CRIME, which will be published in 2023.
Thanks so much for interviewing me!
A Five-Ingredient Mystery #5
Managing a fitness club café and collaborating on recipes with her grandfather are Val Deniston’s usual specialties, only she’s about to set sail into another murder case—this time at a mystery lovers convention!
When the Deadly Desserts bake-off lives up to its name, Val and Granddad turn up the heat on a killer . . .
The Maryland Mystery Fan Fest sounds like exactly the fun getaway cafe manager Val Deniston and her grandfather could use. Granddad will even compete in a dessert competition in which contestants assume the roles of cooks to famous fictional sleuths. Playing Nero Wolfe’s gourmet cook Fritz is an exciting challenge for Granddad. A restaurant manager is playing Lord Peter Wimsey’s valet and cook Bunter. But Granddad is steamed to learn who will be playing Sherlock Holmes’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson—his nemesis Cynthia Sweet, who he believes ripped off his five-ingredient theme from his column “Codger Cook” to use in her own recipe column.
Apparently, he isn’t the only one who has a beef with his not-so-sweet competitor. When she’s found dead in her room with the teakettle whistling, it’s up to Val and her grandfather to sort through the festival goers to find out who was most definitely not a fan of Cynthia Sweet . . .
Includes delicious five-ingredient recipes!
Mystery Amateur Sleuth | Mystery Cozy | Mystery Culinary [Kensington Cozies, On Sale: November 29, 2022, Mass Market Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781496734570 / eISBN: 9781496734587]
Maya Corrigan lives near Washington, D.C., within easy driving distance of Maryland's Eastern Shore, the setting for this series. She has taught courses in writing, detective fiction, and American literature at Georgetown University and NOVA community college. A winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense, she has published essays on drama and short stories under her full name of Mary Ann Corrigan.
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