The following article appeared in the New England I issue of Mystery Readers Journal (38:1) For the Table of Contents, go Here. To order this issue as Hardcopy, go here. For a PDF download of 38:1, go Here.
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?
***
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.
To read other articles in this issue, go Here.
