with Connie Knight
We are delighted to welcome mystery author Connie Knight to Omnimystery News today.
Connie's first mystery in a new series is Cemetery Whites (Maple Creek Media; April 2013 ebook format), and we recently had the opportunity to talk to her about it.
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Omnimystery News: Cemetery Whites is your first novel. How long have you been writing?
Photo provided courtesy of
Connie Knight
Connie Knight: It's something I started in junior high. A teacher encouraged it. One year I wrote poems, a play, a short story, and kept on with this through high school and college. I took some journalism classes after finishing my creative writing degree. I worked in journalism — a busy career — and didn't write anything fictional until I retired recently. Then, with time to relax and remember, I started to think about writing a novel. Maybe a mystery novel. I love mysteries.
OMN: Tell us a little more about the book and how it came to be written.
CK: I wanted to set the story away from my personal life history. I didn't want it to be a memoir, and I didn't want to bring real people into the story. But I didn't want to write about a place and people I knew nothing about — like something placed on an alien planet, or back in the dinosaur days. Some writers actually do this, but I didn't want to.
So I started thinking about places I'd lived that would make an interesting setting to readers, and something I'd enjoy writing about. My father's family lived in the country in Texas near San Antonio. When I was a child, we visited them frequently, and I had vivid memories of those times. I thought I'd find material to work with, to create fiction inspired by the past.
I write by hand, and then type things up on the computer and print them out for revision. I have a Texana library, too, and there was a stack of books to consult, and stacks of articles I'd found on the computer. I had a lot of stuff accumulating. And there's my experience as a journalist. I'd accumulate material and organize it for a news story or a feature article, long or short. They're different.
So I took over the dining room and set things up on the large table. I started writing sketches of characters and episodes that came to mind, and sketching an outline. I found a book, The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery. It was an excellent reference about putting a novel together. So, surrounded by all these things, I began to write.
OMN: Did you develop the storyline from an outline?
CK: Not exactly. I had a general idea, but it changed as writing went on and the story developed. I started with developing the main character, Caroline Hargrove Hamilton, and her cousin Janet. They're childhood friends glad to spend time together. Caroline is a widow whose life in Houston has changed, and she moved to the country to start life anew. She's interested in family history, and Janet drives her around the country road to visit this and that. One morning, they drive to the Hargrove Family Cemetery to gain information from old tombstones, but when they arrive, they find a dead man in a patch of white irises. He hasn't been dead very long, but his pulse is gone and his eyes are blank. He's a black man, well dressed, with dried blood on his shirt. A small shovel is in his right hand; he's been digging at the foot of an 1875 grave.
OMN: That's an intriguing introduction. What happens next?
CK: The first chapter is brief, but it shows us the murder, so we know gun-toting Great-Aunt Hettie didn't do it, even though she thinks she did. We see the perpetrator at the end of Chapter 1, but we don't know who it is. Just not Aunt Hettie.
The plot develops with a family meeting where Caroline volunteers to do some journalistic investigation into Professor Harrison, the victim. She and Janet make several trips to San Antonio, find clues to follow, and eventually find themselves with Janet chased up a tree by a feral hog who refuses to go away, and Caroline seeking help but finding herself in the clutch of the murderer.
Much of what happened in previous chapters converges as the solution to the murders — current and one from 1875 — finds its way. Hidden family secrets now are found — a treasure, as Uncle Henry claimed, but not diamonds and gold as he thought they would be.
OMN: How did you go about choosing the title?
CK: Cemetery Whites is the name for an old-fashioned white iris, officially known as Iris albicans.
In the 1800s and after that, these sturdy bulbs were planted at homesteads and old cemeteries. Sometimes in the spring you can see them in clumps where a house used to be. The book cover is a photo I took some time ago. The Hargrove Family Cemetery is fictional, but it's a nice, old family cemetery, like this one.
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Connie Knight grew up in San Antonio, Texas with many childhood visits to her family in the DeWitt County nearby. Her debut mystery novel, Cemetery Whites, is based on memories and stories shared, but all characters in the book are fictional and so are the events. Her writing history includes a career in journalism. She lives in Houston and frequently visits her cousins in DeWitt County.
For more information about the author, visit her on either of her websites, ConnieKnightMysteryWriter.com or ConnieKnightBooks.com, or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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Cemetery Whites
Connie Knight
A Caroline Hargrove Hamilton Mystery
When Caroline Hargrove Hamilton and her cousin Janet visit their family cemetery in the country, they find Professor Harrison, a black man, lying dead in an ancient patch of white irises.
Caroline and Janet become amateur detectives, uncovering half-a-dozen family secrets related to murders from today and from the turbulent post-Civil War days of Texas.
