Mystery Books News is thrilled to welcome Cindy Lynn Speer as our guest blogger. Cindy Lynn is the author of The Chocolatier's Wife (Drollerie Press Trade Paperback, June 2010), a magical mystery ... or maybe a mystery of magic!
Today, Cindy Lynn writes about mixing genres, with a little extra attention on mystery itself.
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Photo credit, provided courtesy of Cindy Lynn Speer
In all of my novels, especially my most recent two, I take elements from romance, fantasy and mystery to create the story. I like mixing genres partly because it’s so hard to come up with anything original. You think, “Oh, if I do this and this and add a little bit of that it will make an incredible story unlike any other!” and you go into the bookstore and you find someone’s already beaten you to it. The readers always deserve the best you have to offer, and trying to combine these elements, I hope, will give great reads.
For me as a reader, romance is a hard sell … I love the concept of that ideal love and I enjoy seeing people who seem right for each other getting together, but it can’t be the whole point. I need something else, and I think it’s because my suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain when it’s just a story about love ... I find it harder to believe in. For me, it’s much, much easier to believe in vampires and fairies and the end of the world than true love.
Fantasy is, in a lot of ways, the main element I borrow a lot from ... I love the rich possibilities, the seemingly limitless choices we can make. Fantasy serves as my framework. The type of fantasy I decide to write for the story tells a lot about the kind of atmosphere the story will have. In The Chocolatier’s Wife the fantasy is much more fable-like, so the story feels like a fairy tale. In Unbalanced the fantasy is darker, grimmer, which suits the multiple murder-noir feel of the story line better. Fantasy also allows me to throw in elements that we do not see in traditional mysteries ... magic, fantastical creatures, new ways of solving cases. It also lets me take out world and show it to you in different ways. All of these things give me more tools to use to create something good.
Even though fantasy is my home, I seem to be really drawn to mysteries. I read mysteries more than anything else. In reading them, it’s almost more important to me that the back story takes me somewhere new ... if the main character has an unusual profession, or if I get to go to a different time in history. I think this is because, since I write, it’s sometimes much easier for me to see where someone is going. I understand about hiding clues in context and so I know the tricks we use ... and see through them. Really good writing prevents this, or, as I mentioned, a world that particularly interests me. (I’ve also said it’s because you can only kill someone so many times before it becomes, oh, good, someone’s dead. Let’s see who did it. Oh. Yay. But that’s just me trying poorly to be amusing.)
In writing them, I love the challenge of carefully laying in the clues. If I’ve done my job right, then maybe you know who it might be, but you’re not certain. When you get to the end, if you go ... ”Huh! I had no idea!” or, “Aha! Yay!” you shouldn’t feel cheated ... you should be able to re-read the book and understand how we got to where we are now. Even if I use some spell to find a clue to solve the case, everything has to click together and make sense in the end. I also enjoy trying to put in little twists and red herrings ... because I know there are people who will, before the last chapter, get it. But I want to make it as hard as possible so that they really feel they earned the conclusion ... not that my writing was sloppy.
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Cindy Lynn Speer loves books and the written word, and has spent much of her life involved in them in some way, from working as a librarian to freelancing as an editor. She’s also written several book reviews and articles. This is the part that she usually attempts to be clever, saying something like “When not chained to the computer or reading she can be found doing something else, usually something exciting and mysterious.” Sadly, this would be fantasy, and she likes saving that for her readers.
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About The Chocolatier's Wife: Tasmin, William’s wife to be, was chosen by a spell, as all wives and husbands are chosen. It’s a nice, tidy way to find a reasonable mate for almost everyone. Unfortunately, Tasmin is from the North, a place of magic and strange ritual, and William is from the South, where people pride themselves on being above the kind of insanity practiced by the Northerners, which has nothing to do with the fact that most people in the South have lost their ability to practice magic.
William doesn’t seem in a hurry to send for Tasmin, for which none of his family blame him. After all, she’s a barbarian. She, on the other hand, would like to know what’s keeping him. When he’s framed for murdering his patron, Tasmin takes matters into her own hands, harnessing the wind to bring her to William’s side. She’s gotten to know Wiliam from his letters. He’s not a murderer and she’s going to help him prove it.
William, incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit is shunned by his family for the embarrassment, and for giving up the family shipping business for foolishness, and for saddling them with a Hag for a wife, which means he can’t protect Tasmin from his family’s cold dislike of his barbiaran wife-to-be–but that’s not the worst of it.
Someone out there doesn’t like him and is beginning to dislike Tasmin almost as much, and that someone isn’t at all averse to making sure William and Tasmin aren’t around long enough to celebrate their wedding.
Tasmin, of course, has other plans.
