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.

Travel is a passion I brought into my adult life. I’ve gone all over the United States, Canada, and Europe, always with an eagerness to see every sight, wander through every neighborhood, sample every pastry, and talk to every person who spoke a few words of English. So when a friend mentioned that she’d taken several trips to exotic locales in a very short time, I enviously asked her how she’d managed it. She explained that she’d launched a side career as a travel writer, covering a range of destinations for a website for honeymooners.

She also offered to put me in touch with her editor, which I did that same day. Before I knew it, I, too, was a travel writer. Over the next three years, I traveled to Tahiti, Brazil, Maui, Jamaica and half a dozen other Caribbean islands, and resorts and charming towns up and down the entire West Coast. I took notes, snapped pictures, interviewed the general managers at hotels and the chefs at restaurants – and then came home and wrote it all up for the website.

Perhaps it was the fact that for some reason there always seems to be an unusually quirky journalist on each junket, but at some point it occurred to me that my three- to five-day visits to one locale after another would make a great theme for a mystery series. I was already writing the Reigning Cats & Dogs mysteries for Bantam Books, which featured a female veterinarian. When I suggested the idea of a series about a travel writer to my editor at Bantam, she agreed that it offered great possibilities.

The Murder Packs a Suitcase mystery series was born – and it featured a travel writer, Mallory Marlowe. Mallory is a recent widow in her mid-forties who falls into a career as a travel writer at the same time she and her two teen-age kids are struggling to adjust to a difficult new chapter in their lives.

Florida seemed like the natural setting for the first book. In fact, I gave my character the assignment of researching whether the Old Florida that I’d fallen in love with as a kid still exists, despite the arrival of the theme parks. Of course I had to do research, which gave me a chance to visit all the sights I ended up including in the book: alligator farms, seashell stores, theme hotels and restaurants, and even Cypress Gardens. When it comes to sightseeing, my character and I are one, viewing everything with excited eyes and taking copious notes, then trying to convey the experience to readers.

The first book, like the series, was entitled Murder Packs a Suitcase. When it came to the second book, I wanted to set it someplace completely different. I’d recently traveled to Aspen, Colorado, to write about it for the website, and I realized that the combination of nature at its most glorious and the glitzy mountain town’s popularity as a getaway for the rich and famous made it the perfect spot for another murder mystery. The book, Too Rich and Too Dead (published in March 2009), was born.

While I’ve always loved writing mysteries, the opportunity to tell readers about the places I so enjoy visiting makes the process even more fun. Writing the books also gives me one more excuse to travel, since it’s imperative that I describe each destination accurately. In fact, each book contains the article that my character supposedly wrote for the magazine, describing (and evaluating) all the spots she visited.

I’m really pleased that I found a way to combine two of my passions – writing mysteries and traveling – by creating a series that incorporates both. I hope my readers enjoy the chance to become “armchair travelers” by accompanying my character, Mallory, on her adventures. And who knows? Maybe they’ll even decide to check out some of the spots I’ve written about themselves!