with Ilsa Evans
We are delighted to welcome author Ilsa Evans to Omnimystery News today.
Ilsa introduces columnist and amateur sleuth Nell Forrest in her first murder mystery, Nefarious Doings (Momentum; August 2013 trade paperback and ebook formats).
We asked Ilsa to tell us more about how, after writing nine books in other genres, she decided to start a murder mystery series.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Ilsa Evans
My decision to try writing murder mystery arrived on a bit of a whim, on the back of three-quarters of a bottle of champagne. Those with whom I had been sharing (some of) the champagne had just departed and I plonked myself in front of my computer to stare at the screen. I needed inspiration for this, my tenth book. I swivelled my chair, fuzzily perusing the bookshelves. Then it hit me —murder mysteries. They were among my very favourite things to read so it followed, naturally, that they should be also terrific fun to write.
Inspired by this dubious logic (in retrospect, I can now identify at least three things where being the recipient is vastly more enjoyable than being the donor), within minutes I was typing furiously. A floodgate had been opened and the words flowed through, over a thousand of them that very first night. Unfortunately, as I discovered the following morning, they were also codswallop. An orgy of adjectives and adverbs that did not so much frame a narrative as masticate it into a molten mess. From memory there was a multi-dimensional dream sequence that featured a gargoyle and a ménage a trios. Selective amnesia means that I can no longer recall whether the latter included the former. Regardless, it was tripe. But while those floodgates were rapidly closed (and bolted), the idea germinated into a challenge. Over the next few weeks I came up with a (decent) plot and characters, without a gargoyle in sight, and then all I needed was somewhere to put them.
The country town of Majic was born during that time and has grown exponentially ever since. I have a map on my study wall showing the main street, from the bookshop Renaissance to Svetlana's Haberdashery to the Majic Art Gallery, now under new management. I have a file-box full of residents, and local clubs, and the layout of the three floors that make up the local community centre. It has been amazing fun, this complicated little town and all these personalities who are totally unaware that they are being manipulated by yours truly. Mwa ha ha ha (cue Machiavellian look and steepled fingers). The sense of power is heady.
That sense of power extends to the mysteries themselves. With the first book, and again with the third now under construction, I've changed my mind about the murderer halfway through. With just a bit of backtracking, altering a slice here and a sliver there, I can change guilt to innocence or even raise the dead. In my real life, I have to juggle bills and appointments and offspring and variables like internet connections and my uncanny ability to always join the slowest queue in the supermarket. I have little control over any of it even, seemingly, the last. But here, in Majic, I have total control. I am a megalomaniac. Drunk on power instead of champagne.
I now know more about police procedures, and decomposition, and poison, and facial contortions during strangulation, than is strictly necessary for a suburban life. Certainly it hasn't proved useful apart from writing the books — and probably just as well. But while the little town of Majic and the murder mysteries that happen in and around that part of the world may have been born from a slightly sodden whim, about one thing I was right — it's all been terrific fun.
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Ilsa Evans was born in the Dandenongs, east of Melbourne, in 1960 and enjoyed a blissful childhood that has provided absolutely no material for writing purposes. Fortunately adulthood served her better in this regard. After spending time in an eclectic range of employment, from the military to health promotion to seaside libraries, she returned to tertiary studies and completed a doctorate on the long-term effects of domestic violence in 2005. She has now settled into an occasionally balanced blend of teaching, public speaking and writing and lives in a perpetually partially renovated house, not far from where she was born, that is held upright by a labyrinth of bookshelves.
Ilsa is the author of eleven books in a variety of genres, including two murder mysteries in the Nell Forrest Mystery series. She also contributes to several newspapers and online journals on social issues and won the Eliminating Violence Against Women (EVA) Award for online journalism in 2011. For more information about the author and her work, please visit her website at IlsaEvans.com or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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Nefarious Doings
Ilsa Evans
A Nell Forrest Mystery
Welcome to the sleepy town of Majic, where neighbourhood watch is a killer …
For Nell Forrest, life in the little town of Majic is not going smoothly. One of her five daughters has just swapped university for fruit-picking, another is about to hit puberty, while a third keeps leaving aggrieved messages on the answering machine. On top of all this, her mother is infuriating and it's only been a matter of months since Nell lost her husband of twenty-five years. It's no surprise, then, that she is even struggling to write her weekly column.
But the floodgates of inspiration are about to swing open, almost knocking her out in the process. Murder and mayhem, arson and adultery, dungeons, death threats and disappearances are just around the corner. Despite Nell's abysmal aptitude for investigative work, she manages to shine the light on the local Richard III Society and that's when things really start to heat up. Throw in some suspicious widows, nosy neighbours, a canine witness, plus a detective who is getting a little closer than he should, and it's clear that nefarious doings are well and truly afoot.
Nefarious Doings is available directly from the publisher in Australia or from these vendors (buttons, below).
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