A Conversation with Lesley Cookman, Author of the Libby Sarjeant Mysteries

with Lesley Cookman

We are delighted to welcome crime novelist Lesley Cookman to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of Cozy Mystery Book Tours, which is coordinating her current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find her schedule here. Cozy Mystery Book Tours is also giving our readers a chance to win a $25 Amazon.com gift card or PayPal cash; use this link to enter.

Lesley's latest mystery featuring actress and artist Libby Sarjeant is Murder in the Monastery (Accent Press; December 2012 trade paperback and ebook formats).

We recently had a chance to talk to Lesley about the most recent book in her long-running series.

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Omnimystery News: Murder in the Monastery is the eleventh book in this mystery series. When you wrote Murder in Steeple Martin in 2006, did you know it would be the first in a series?

Photo provided courtesy of
Lesley Cookman

Lesley Cookman: My publisher, who bought the first book before it was finished (unusually!), asked if it could be a series. As my favourite books had always been mystery/detective/crime series, I was happy to oblige!

OMN: How would you characterize the books in this series, genre-wise?

LC: Mine are definitely cosy (note the English spelling!) although in the UK we didn't call them cosies for years. They were all lumped together under "Crime" until the various sub-genres began to filter in from the US, although we did already have the "Thriller" genre. The brick and tile bookshops here still don't differentiate, so it's up to the reader to find out. Online bookstores are different, and extremely helpful in pointing the way to books in the genres you have been buying.

OMN: Have you incorporated any of your own experience into the books?

LC: I live in the county of Kent in England, where my books are set, although the villages and towns I feature are fictional. I, like my lead character, am an actor and very involved with the theatre in my home town. However, I don't paint, which she does, and I haven't tripped over one murder in my whole life!

OMN: Tell us about your writing process.

LC: I usually have to fit a plot round a title, sometimes suggested by someone else. (Like the Sales Director of my publishers!) Luckily, I'm never asked for a detailed synopsis, so I just start writing and hope for the best. My characters tend to arrive in my head fully formed, and the only details I have to look into are points in their history if they are relevant to the story.

OMN: How do you go about verifying those "details"?

LC: I do a lot of internet research. I also buy a lot of books — particularly history books. Most of my books have an event in the past which has either caused, or has a bearing on, the current situation, starting with the Hop Pickers of Kent during World War Two. I have researched Victorian Workhouses, Reliquaries of the Dark Ages in Britain, the English Civil Wars, Pagan and Witchcraft ceremonies and Smuggling in South East England. All of them interesting, and all challenging in one way or another.

OMN: You mentioned that the books are set in Kent, though you fictionalize the villages and towns. How do you go about doing that?

LC: I've unzipped a section of the county Kent from the coast to Canterbury, and inserted my own slice. However, I am true to the geography and local environment of the county, and if people knew where to look, they'd probably recognise many of the places!

OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?

LC: As a child, I read all Monica Edwards' and Malcolm Saville's books, many Enid Blytons and all of Pamela Brown's. Once I got to the age of nine, my parents let me loose on their bookshelves and I started on Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, and regrettably — although they went over my head — Thorne Smith! Ngaio Marsh remains my all time favourite crime novelist, but my all time favourite books are The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goodge, I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith, The Swish of The Curtain by Pamela Brown and Three Men in A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. A very English selection!

OMN: What do you read now?

LC: My own genre, and women's fiction written by friends of mine.

OMN: Are there any questions you most enjoy — or maybe least enjoy — receiving from readers?

LC: One of the least must be, Where do you get your ideas from? I usually say, From the ideas shop on the corner.

OMN: What's next for you?

LC: The next book in the Libby Sarjeant series will be Murder In The Dark, released in October 2013, followed by Murder In A Different Place in May 2014. In June, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of my publisher, Accent Press, we are releasing a short collection of previously published short fiction which we've called Bad Behaviour.

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Lesley Cookman started writing almost as soon as she could read, and filled many Woolworth's exercise books with pony stories until she was old enough to go out with boys. Since she's been grown up, following a varied career as a model, air stewardess and disc jockey, she's written short fiction and features for a variety of magazines, achieved an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales, taught writing for both Kent Adult Education and the WEA and edited the first Sexy Shorts collection of short stories from Accent Press in aid of the Breast Cancer Campaign. Lesley is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, the Society of Authors and the Crime Writers' Association.

Learn more about the author and her work on her website, LesleyCookman.co.uk, or find her on Facebook and Twitter.

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Murder in the Monastery
Lesley Cookman
A Libby Sargeant Murder Mystery (11th in series)

Libby Sarjeant is invited to look into the provenance of a jewelled Anglo-Saxon reliquary which has appeared on a website. The nuns at St Eldreda's Abbey are curious, as it apparently contains a relic of St Eldreda herself.

Libby's friend Peter obtains permission to mount a play based on St Eldreda's story in the ruins of the original monastery called, naturally, Murder In The Monastery. And then, inevitably, a real body is discovered, and Libby and her friend Fran find out that this is not the first.