Book Groups to Die For: Guest Post by Maggie King

Maggie King is the author of the Hazel Rose Book Group mysteries, including the recently-released Murder at the Moonshine Inn. She contributed the stories “A Not So Genteel Murder” and “Reunion at Shockoe Slip” to the Virginia is for Mysteries anthologies. Maggie is a member of Sisters in Crime, James River Writers, and the American Association of University Women. She has worked as a software developer, retail sales manager, and customer service supervisor. Maggie graduated from Elizabeth Seton College and earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration from Rochester Institute of Technology. She has called New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California home. These days she lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband, Glen, and cats, Morris and Olive. She enjoys reading, walking, movies, traveling, theatre, and museums.

Maggie King:
Book Groups to Die For 

Write what you know. That phrase is surely seared on every writer’s brain. I write mysteries set in book groups. What do I know about book groups? Plenty.

I know that book groups allow you to share your passion for books with like-minded people. I know that at book groups you get to socialize and make new friends. Like a little conflict in your book group? You can have that, too!

In 1993 I joined my first mystery book group in Santa Clarita, California. We read mysteries based on theme. I’d been reading Agatha Christie for years but there was a whole world of other mystery authors out there, and I was ready to dive in. Themes included main characters with professions in journalism, business, law enforcement, and academia. We chose stories set in specific regions, small towns, large cities, you name it. We gave summaries of the books we chose, taking care to avoid spoilers (some were a bit lax about the spoilers!).

When I relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia in 1996, I said good bye to what I would come to consider my favorite book group. I took a writing course at the University of Virginia and started penning Murder at the Book Group. I joined a local mystery group. One prolific reader showed up at each meeting with a large green loose leaf notebook that contained her book log. Another woman routinely declared that she hated whatever book we’d chosen for that month.

In 2002 I moved down the road a piece to Richmond, Virginia and made a beeline for the Tuckahoe Library mystery group. There I met Mary Miley, who would later publish her Roaring Twenties mystery series. 

When the Tuckahoe group folded in 2006 a number of us joined the long-running Mystery Lovers Group, led by Lelia Taylor, who runs the popular blog Buried Under Books.

What happened to Murder at the Book Group? It was perishing and had become little more than a rainy day pastime. In 2010 I realized that I had amassed enough knowledge of book groups and their often fascinating dynamics and, yes, conflicts.

You can find the full range of human behavior at a book group and that can add up to one thing: conflict. There are the domineering sorts who take over the discussion with their non-stop chatter. Conflicts arise over what to read and how the group should be conducted. Others don’t read the assigned book. Others hate it. Besides mystery groups, I also participated in literary fiction groups (that’s where I found real clashes!). No doubt about it, if you want conflict, a book group can satisfy that need.

I had to face facts—the only way I could get back on track with Murder at the Book Group was to give up book groups!

Have I returned to one of them? Not yet—but I’m privileged to visit many as a guest author. Many gifted mystery authors set their stories in book groups. Among my favorites:

Ashton Corners Book Club Mysteries, by Erika Chase 

Agatha Christie Book Club series, by C.A. Larmer 

Golden Age of Mystery Book Club series, by Marilyn Levinson 

Helen Hath No Fury by Gillian Roberts, a title in her Amanda Pepper series

***

Murder at the Moonshine Inn by Maggie King: 

When high-powered executive Roxanne Howard dies in a pool of blood outside the Moonshine Inn, Richmond, Virginia’s premiere redneck bar, the victim’s sister enlists Hazel Rose to ferret out the killer. At first Hazel balks—she’s a romance writer, not a detective. But Brad Jones, Rox’s husband, is the prime suspect. He’s also Hazel’s cousin, and Hazel believes in doing anything to help family. Never mind that Brad won’t give her the time of day—he’s still family. 

Hazel recruits her book group members to help with the investigation. It’s not long before they discover any number of people who feel that a world without Rox Howard is just fine with them: Brad’s son believes that Rox and Brad were behind his mother’s death; Rox’s former young lover holds Rox responsible for a tragedy in his family; and one of Rox’s employees filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against her. The killer could be an angry regular from the Moonshine Inn—or just about anyone who ever crossed paths with the willful and manipulative Rox. 

When a second murder ups the ante Hazel must find out who is behind the killings. And fast. Or she may be victim #3.

Write What You Know or Write to Discover What You Know?: Guest post by Gordon McAlpine

Is it “Write what you know,” or “Write to discover what you know”? Acclaimed author Gordon McAlpine explores this question, drawing from his experience writing the Edgar nominated novel, Woman with a Blue Pencil. 

Gordon McAlpine:
Thanks Flannery O’Connor, Thanks Dad 

All students of writing fiction are familiar with the dictum to “write what you know”; I have always regarded this advice with ambivalence. For some, it provides important license to draw from actual experience, suggesting, not inaccurately, that each of our lives is characterized by meaningful elements that could make for a compelling story. All to the good. However, the flip side to this advice is an implication that one ought to write only what one knows, to ignore or avoid uncharted territory accessible exclusively through the exercise of imagination, often in combination with research to make the imagined feel real. For me, then, a better precept for writing a work of fiction is this simple thought experiment: if I were browsing in a bookstore, what as-yet unwritten book would I wish to come upon to read? This simple ground rule, I believe, incorporates the most valid element of “writing what one knows” -- specifically, the natural impulse toward stories that reflect upon our own lives, whether or not we consciously understand why – without limiting imaginative possibilities My own work has been undertaken under these general guidelines. That is, I’ve begun new stories or novels simply because I wanted to create the precise reading that most interested me at any given time. This provides the act of writing (which consists, day after day, of being alone in a small room) with a sustaining tie to the boundlessness of reading, discovered wondrously as a child and no less powerful now as an adult. Write what one knows? Rather, write the book you’d like to read, which will never exist unless you write it. Simple enough.

Or, perhaps not so simple.

My books have been set in Paris in the ‘20’s, Chicago in the 30’s, Los Angeles in the ‘40’s, New York in the ‘50’s….nonetheless, these books, undertaken as acts of imagination rather than disguised memoir, have all, eventually, revealed themselves to me as autobiographical in sly, unplanned ways. This revelation usually comes about 2/3 through the first draft. This is not to say the books are ever overtly autobiographical. Rather, elements that comment on my own life or the lives of those I know deliver themselves in indirect ways. It turns out, then, that, despite my protestations, perhaps I write “what I know”, after all. Or, at least, what I come to know through the process of writing….

I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor, who said, “I write to discover what I know.”

For me, writing to discover what I know has never been more true than in my latest novel, the Edgar-nominated Woman with a Blue Pencil, which is set in Los Angeles during World War II and the Japanese-American relocation to internment camps, specifically revolving around a young man named Takumi Sato whose dream of publishing a mystery novel is compromised by world events. Such compromise eventually effects not only the young author’s work but also his concept of identity. According to the straightforward dictum, “write what you know”, I would be disqualified from writing this novel, being neither Japanese-American nor 96 years-old, as the character Sato would be today. Fortunately, I used my own bookstore ground rules, as outlined above, for beginning the book. However, about 2/3 of the way through the first draft, I realized that its essence revolved around a question that was unexpectedly personal to me: how to exist when you are “the wrong kind of man”. In the novel, this is characterized by political and racial discrimination. Some reviewers have linked the story to political and racial events in our country today. This, I had planned. What came as a surprise, however, was that the book’s heart had come from my heretofore unrecognized acknowledgement of my recently deceased father’s lifelong, painful, and mistaken sense of being “the wrong kind of man” himself. Thus, I could empathize with the pain, humiliation, anger, shame, and pathos of a young Japanese-American in the 1940’s because I had witnessed, as a child, my father’s heartbreaking sense of dislocation in his world, which had nothing to do with Japanese internment but everything to do with being fully human and generous of heart and yet still feeling like “the wrong kind of man”. Hence, I came to know my late father in a new way by writing about a 22 year-old Japanese-American named Takumi Sato and his fictional experiences between the years 1940-1944.

Write what you know or write to discover what you know? 

I’m with Flannery on this one.