EDITH MAXWELL/MADDIE DAY: Why New England?
Think of crime fiction set in Boston and what comes to mind? If you read thrillers, you might conjure stories by Hank Phillippi Ryan and Dennis Lehane. Robert Parker’s many books are set in Boston, as are Edwin Hill’s suspenseful Hester Thursby mysteries. A little farther north finds Kate Flora’s Joe Burgess police procedurals set in Portland Maine, as are Bruce Robert Coffin’s Detective Byron books.
When we venture into the gentler side of the genre as brought to the screen, we find the delightful Jessica Fletcher in the Murder She Wrote series, now continued for many more tales on the page. Just don’t go to Cabot Cove, Maine. Someone is guaranteed to die.
I’ve written five cozy and traditional mystery series, with two that are ongoing. Four of them are set somewhere in Massachusetts. All of my talented Wicked Authors blogmates also write books set in New England, along with a slew of other authors. Why? What’s the draw?
Apart from gritty Boston, with its Irish mob and history of fraught race relations, most of the rest of New England is both bucolic and iconic. We have hundreds of miles of coastline. Many small family farms still sell their produce at farm stands and farmers’ markets. You can hike gentle mountains and then eat in a diner on a classic village green complete with a white church. People drop their Rs and call soda pop “tonic.” And the food! Lobster rolls, clam chowder, Boston baked beans, apple cider do- nuts, and the best small-batch ice cream any- where.
For cozy mystery authors, New England is a perfect place to site books. The late (sniff) Sheila Connolly’s long-running Orchard Mysteries are set in a small town in the western part of the state. My Local Foods Mysteries take place on a small organic farm (much like the one I used to own and run) in northeastern Massachusetts, with members of a locavore club signing up for CSA [Community Sup- ported Agriculture] shares—and helping farmer Cam Flaherty solve crimes.
Sherry Harris writes the Sarah Winston Gar- age Sale series, which includes one of those classic town greens west of Boston as well as a nearby Air Force Base. Also village-based are Julia Henry’s Garden Squad Mysteries, with sixty-something Lilly Jane leading a group of guerilla gardeners—and crime solvers.
The coast is never far. In Barbara Ross’s popular Maine Clambake Mysteries, Julia Snowden and her family run a clambake business on their island off fictional Busman’s Harbor. Shari Randall’s Lobster Shack Mysteries are set on the Connecticut coast. Cate Conte’s fun Cat Café books take place on an island somewhere in New England.
And who hasn’t heard of Cape Cod? Amy Pershing has a delightful new Cape Cod Foodie series out. Just off the coast, Cynthia Riggs has a long-running Martha’s Vineyard series. In my Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries (writ- ten as Maddie Day), Mackenzie—Mac—Almeida owns and runs Mac’s Bikes in fictional Westham on the Cape. Along with other business owners and town officials, she’s a member of the Cozy Capers book group, which reads and discusses a different cozy mystery every week. The group also helps Mac solve the real- life crimes she encounters.
New England is also rich in history, of course. Alyssa Maxwell writes the wonderful Gilded Newport Mysteries, which take place in Rhode Island in the last years of the nineteenth century. Jessica Estevao wrote two intriguing Change of Fortune mysteries set around the same time in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
I staged my Agatha-Award-winning Quaker Midwife Mysteries a decade earlier in the former mill and factory town where I live in the northeast corner of Massachusetts. Many of the homes from that era still exist (I live in one of them) as well as the repurposed brick factory and mill buildings and the Friends Meetinghouse, still a place of worship (my own, in fact). It’s easy to walk around town and imagine parts of my stories. Earlier and farther north yet are Beth Kanell’s deeply drawn Winds of Freedom novels, featuring a young abolitionist woman in 1850s northern Vermont.
If you want your New England in short bites, you can’t go wrong reading any of the almost twenty annual anthologies of Best New Eng- land Crime Stories. Published by various incarnations of Level Best Books, this year the endeavor was taken over by the new Crime Spell Books. Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stories came out in November 2021, edited by Susan Oleksiw, Ang Pompano and Leslie Wheeler. The collection includes a historical story of mine, “Dark Corners,” featuring a young PI named Dot Henderson (a fictional version of my grandmother) solving a crime with the real, pre-fame Amelia Earhart in 1926 Boston.
You could read crime fiction set only in New England and never run out of books. And really, why not?
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Edith Maxwell writes the Agatha Award-winning Quaker Midwife Mysteries and short crime fiction; as Maddie Day, she pens the bestselling Country Store Mysteries and Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. She lives north of Boston with her beau, where she cooks, gardens, and wastes time on Facebook when she isn’t plotting new murders.
