A Conversation with Mystery Author Reba White Williams

with Reba White Williams

We are delighted to welcome back mystery author Reba White Williams to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of The Story Plant, which is coordinating her current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find her schedule here.

Reba visited with us last year, when she published the first in a new series of art world mysteries. Now the second in the series, Fatal Impressions (The Story Plant; April 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats), is being published this month, and we had the opportunity to catch up with her to talk about it.

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Omnimystery News: Tell us a little more about your series characters.

Photo provided courtesy of
Reba White Williams

Reba White Williams: I chose to write books with two protagonists, young women who know each other and are close to each other but have very different views of the world. I thought it would be more interesting to have it work that way than with a single protagonist. I do not plan to keep them unchanged totally but I deliberately made them in their 30s to have them old enough to have good jobs and so on, but not really old. I learned my lesson from Agatha Christie who was sorry that she made Miss Marple so old because she could not keep her out there for a long time. I do expect my characters to change somewhat over time.

OMN: Into which mystery subgenre would you place this series?

RWW: I would categorize my books as cozies and I think there are advantages to label them that way because a lot of people do not want to read a great deal about very violent, ugly crimes and I think they are not all that keen about very graphic sexual scenes in so many books. So I think calling it a cozy signals that they are not going to encounter those.

OMN: Tell us something about Fatal Impressions that isn't mentioned in the publisher's synopsis.

RWW: I was inspired to write a series of two women solving crimes together by my admiration for the old Cagney & Lacey TV show. Good friends — and two very different people — who were able to solve crimes because they saw things differently and were able to uses those different points of views and talents to solve them.

As for the way Cagney and Lacey worked together to solve crimes … in my books, generally speaking, the police are involved, and they may (or may not) be going in a wrong direction — but my protagonists become involved because they are attached somehow to someone who was hurt, as in the first book in the series, Restrike, where Coleman gets involved because her employee and friend is murdered.

OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in the books?

RWW: There are no characters in Restrike that are based on people I know, and there are none in Fatal Impressions. But there are many real-life kind of events that have happened to people that I know. For example, in Fatal Impressions, there are rather shocking, pretty horrific events that the Dinah finds herself seeing in the corporation — those are taken from real life.

OMN: Describe your writing process.

RWW: I created very deep biographies of my characters Coleman and Dinah. My short story "Angels" is about them as children and contains details about their childhood.

I do not write a detailed synopsis and I do not develop it as I write. For example in Fatal Impressions I simply sort it out from the beginning. I knew exactly how I was going to write the story and I knew that I was going to have poor Dinah come under suspicion. I knew all these things from the beginning and I didn't really change anything from the time I started to write until I finished and similarly I just started working on book 4 and I did not change anything. It's organized the way I planned and the characters developed as I did.

OMN: How do you research the plot points of your stories?

RWW: A lot of art related and corporate stuff is firsthand experience. I rarely go on the internet myself but sometimes I take material from that. Often the information is in books that I have. Or I might go to ongoing experts who write about something.

I've been doing research at one time or another forever because that's been my career. I worked for nine years at McKinsey as a securities analyst. I don't recall anything that was terribly challenging. There are varying degrees of interest. Sometimes I find topics that I want to research to be terribly interesting and sometimes they turn out to be not quite as interesting as I thought. I have done a lot of research on exciting topics for Bloody Royal Prints — the 3rd book that I have just finished writing. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it's set in England. I wanted to be very careful about doing a lot of firsthand checking on things. I had a vague idea that I knew what was right, like what a certain restaurant menu was, but I constantly keep checking because these changes occur so often.

OMN: Tell us more about the locations for the books. How true are you to the settings?

RWW: Those things are kind of planned out for me. I intend to set a book in Charleston, SC, so I will be down there doing some research. I'm going to be continuing to do books in New York, and in intervals in other cities.

Regarding taking liberties — I think that I mix it up. Some of the things are obviously authentic. People write me saying, "I love your book because it took me back to New York, I haven't been able to visit for a long time." So when I talk about restaurants or stores, or something like that, I don't take liberties. But there has to be places I also invent. So there is a mix.

It was very important that the first book in particular takes place in New York because that is where Coleman and Dinah have made lives for themselves, leaving their Southern roots behind for "the big city," finding their careers. Once that groundwork is laid out, subsequent books can take them elsewhere.

OMN: If you could travel anywhere in the world, all expenses paid, to research a setting for a book, where would it be?

RWW: I don't think I need to go anywhere so far, far away or so exotic — somewhere that I would need someone to pay all my expenses — to research the next Coleman and Dinah Greene mystery. I am going to Alaska late this summer but I don't see Coleman and Dinah solving a crime there.

OMN: What are some of your outside interests? And have any of these found their way into your books?

RWW: My major hobby is reading and so that's my major interest outside of writing. I also like to go to the theater and I like to go to films. We travel a lot and I like working with and/or admiring my gardens. So far most of these things have not found their way into the books, but obviously 40 years of art collecting (prints) and being a part of the art world plus a PhD in art history means a lot of that trickles in. As does all my time in the financial world, too.

OMN: Complete this sentence for us: "I am a mystery author and thus I am also …".

RWW: … a mystery reader. I read a huge number of mysteries both the traditional old ones and new ones and I am constantly fascinated.

OMN: Tell us more about the series' book titles and covers.

RWW: The book titles have an art connection — "restrike" is a print term, as is "impression" — but the words also have to have a threatening feel in terms of the books being a mystery series.

I always felt strongly that the two girls, Dinah and Coleman Greene, should be on the covers of all the novels — they are the heart of the series — but I received a lot of (very strong) feedback that I needed to push the art angle of my books (I don't even like most "art" mysteries) and not to feature the girls. I think these current covers are great — simple, mysterious, colorful — and I think the public will respond to them.

OMN: What kind of feedback have you received from readers?

RWW: I enjoyed very much a letter from someone in Australia who told me that she loved my books and she particularly loved the fact that I gave just enough about the world of art and prints to be interesting, without the book being an "info dump," as it's called. She said so many people who write about art in particular do give you far too much — they get carried away and forget that they have a plot and people there. I thought that was really a wonderful comment, and she said she thought it was unusual for a first book to not have that problem. So that was a great compliment.

One of the things that has been very exciting to me is I thought that because of who my protagonists were (two young women), that it would attract an almost exclusively female audience and be "a woman's book," but I have been amazed at the number of men who just loved Restrike and I think they are going to love Fatal Impressions even more.

OMN: If these mysteries were to be adapted for television or film, who do you see playing the key roles?

RWW: I haven't thought about who would play the parts. I know what they look like, and I've described them carefully in the books. Coleman is only about five feet tall, has blond curly hair, is cute and hates it. Dinah is tall and slim and has dark hair and is rather moody. I leave it to the reader to visualize them for themselves.

OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young? And did any influence how and what you write today?

RWW: As a child I read everything! I was not crazy about Nancy Drew although most mystery readers were, I take it. I got to grown up mysteries pretty fast.

About favorite books that influence me: I would say Jane Austen's books. And one thing I do with my books is I don't ever tell you exactly what the period is — you don't have politics, you don't know who is president, you don't know where any wars are going on, or anything like that. Austen left all of that out and I do, too. I try not to think too much about what else influences me.

OMN: And what do you read now for pleasure?

RWW: Everything! Some recent books I've read and enjoyed: Anna Quindlen's Still Life with Bread Crumbs; A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy; Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd; Takedown Twenty by Janet Evanovich; and White Fire by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

OMN: Do you have any favorite series characters?

RWW: Love some of the golden age, Lord Peter Wimsey and his courtship that is so gently done in there. At the same time, I love Miss Marple. I like quite a lot of contemporary work but I hesitate to go any further because I know too many of those writers and I don't want to single out just a few.

OMN: Create a Top 5 list for us on any topic.

RWW: Places I am alway happy to visit (and when):

1. London — anytime, but especially in February when the snowdrops are in bloom.
2. Palm Springs — in winter when the weather is wonderful and the flowers are in bloom.
3. Stonington — in summer, when the roses and waterfront gardens are in bloom.
4. Connecticut — in October when the leaves have turned
5. Italy and France — on the same trip!

OMN: What's next for you?

RWW: I just finished my third book in the Coleman and Dinah Greene series, and I'm starting another one. I have a bunch of book parties coming up. We have travel coming up which I am looking forward to — back to London where I am always happy to go.

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Reba White Williams has written articles for American Artist, Art and Auction, Print Quarterly and Journal of the Print World. She served on the Print Committees of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum and The Whitney Museum. She was a member of the Editorial Board of Print Quarterly, and is an Honorary Keeper of American Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University. She earned her MBA from Harvard, MA in Art History from Hunter, PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and MA in Fiction Writing from Antioch University.

Williams has served as President of the New York City Art Commission and Vice Chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts. In 2009, most of her and her husband's collection — about 5,000 prints — was donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

She and her husband founded the annual Willie Morris Award for best Southern fiction, now in its sixth year. With her husband and their dog Muffin, who is fictionalized in her books, Williams divides her time between New York, Connecticut and Palm Springs.

To learn more about the author and her work, please visit her website at RebaWhiteWilliams.com or find her on Facebook.

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Fatal Impressions
Reba White Williams
A Coleman and Dinah Greene Mystery

Coleman and Dinah Greene are making names for themselves in the art world. Coleman's magazine publishing empire is growing and Dinah's print gallery is gaining traction. In fact, Dinah has just won the contract to select, buy, and hang art in the New York office of the management consultants Davidson, Douglas, Danbury & Weeks – a major coup that will generate The Greene Gallery's first big profits. However, when Dinah goes to DDD&W to begin work, she discovers a corporate culture unlike anything she's ever encountered before. There are suggestions of improprieties everywhere, including missing art worth a fortune. And when two DDD&W staff members are discovered murdered, Dinah and Coleman find themselves swept into the heart of another mystery. Revealing the murderer will be no easy task...but first Dinah needs to clear her own name from the suspect list.