with T'Gracie
and Joe Reese
We are delighted to welcome authors T'Gracie and Joe Reese to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of Great Escapes Book Tours, which is coordinating their current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find their schedule here.
The fifth mystery in the Nina Bannister series by the authors is Frame Change (Cozy Cat Press; September 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the chance to catch up with them to talk a little more about it.
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Omnimystery News: How has Nina Bannister changed from the first book in the series, Sea Change, through this new one, Frame Change?
Photo provided courtesy of
T'Gracie and Joe Reese
Joe Reese: Our protagonist doesn't become a completely new person between books. She doesn't develop super powers or drastically alter her way of looking at the universe. She does, on the other hand, grow. Her experiences broaden and change her — as, we hope — they do for all of us.
The same is true for her friends. They don't sit still as time passes. They marry, have babies, choose new career paths, and encounter both exciting and challenging problems. We hope, though, that they remain real people, who will be a part of our readers' lives.
T'Gracie R: I've loved reading mystery series for a long time. I love discovering a new author and beginning with the first book and reading until the last of the series. Seeing how the characters change based on their experience over time adds to the enjoyment of the books for me.
OMN: Into which mystery subgenre would you place this series?
JR: Our books are "cozy" mysteries. Your readers are probably aware of the characteristics of the genre. The protagonist is frequently an older woman — a retired librarian or teacher, living in a charming town or village. There is no profanity or graphic violence and the extent of the sexuality is "he kissed her passionately and the bedroom door closed behind them." These books are based on the models of Miss Marple or Angela Landsbury in Murder, She Wrote. This being said, there is room for variation among cozy plots. Ours tend to emphasize more a particular quality or part of small town life: the role of community theater or the excitement of attending a high school basketball game. Still, we do supply a murder at what we hope is just the right time and we take pleasure in eliciting from our readers a breathless, "Wow! I didn't see that coming!" Great literary works (Greek tragedies, for example) often follow a tightly constrained format. These constraints themselves, however, often amplify the intensity of the work. We hope this happens in little Bay St. Lucy.
OMN: Give us a summary of Frame Change in a tweet.
TR: #Nina Bannister discovers she can paint, but she doesn't know art thieves are using her paintings to smuggle art. Nina must travel to Graz, Austria to recover the lost art!
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experiences have you included in your books?
TR: All of our books begin from an experience one of us has had that makes each of us think, "What would Nina do?"
JR: Set Change springs from an experience both of us had attending a community theater performance in Jena, Louisiana.
TR: Sadly, Oil Change comes from a fatality that really happened in Lafayette, Louisiana. A young engineering student was found in a coulee (a concrete drainage canal) near campus. He was hit by a car. But I wondered, what if it wasn't an accident and what if he had learned something about big oil, that mustn't come to light?
OMN: What is the best advice — and harshest criticism — you've received as authors?
JR: I want to begin with the harshest criticism. It first came to us long to us long ago and it continues to come every now and then. All fellow authors will recognize it. It is sent to authors from book publishers. It is: "NO." The best advice was written by Somerset Maugham, who said, "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
OMN: Complete this sentence for us: "I am a mystery author and thus I am also …"
JR: I am a mystery author and thus I am also a person to whom individuals I make up are more real to me than people I actually know. This condition is called insanity if your books do not sell and celebrity if they do.
TR: Joe, when writing, often tells me that he's worried that the characters are not talking to him. I begin to worry when they are.
OMN: Tell us more about the settings for your stories.
TR: Many of our settings come from those we experience first. Typically, we get the idea of a place, or maybe a person, that would be the focus of a new plot. (And have fun, thinking of how we can work "change" into the title). Once we have the minimal structure, Joe begins to write, and his strength is dialogue and funny back and forth between the characters. He does description, too, but has had to learn that as we work together. In the Sea Change I embedded much of the description. Since then, he is able to write descriptions and I help more with character detail and some plot devices.
OMN: Are either of your names pseudonyms?
TR: Well, I'm the one with a pen name. The first Nina Bannister book was published as I was graduating from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette with a Ph. D. in Applied Language and Speech Science. The Nina books are so much fun, I wanted to separate my authorship in those from my "official" academic name. "T'Gracie" comes from a Cajun endearment. "T" is from "petite" and is often put in front of a name of a child or a loved one. Grace is my middle name, thus "T'Gracie" was born. I'm happy I did that because it's easier to search Amazon and find our books using "T'Gracie" than using "Joe."
OMN: How do you go about researching the plot points of your stories?
JR: This varies. In Game Change, for example, we drew from what we already knew about small town high school basketball. Oil Change on the other hand, required extensive knowledge of the incredibly complex world of deep water oil drilling. So I spent 15 minutes on Google …
TR: Nooo …
JR: … and called it done. (We may get in trouble for some sloppy scholarship here, but by that time we hope to be living in another country.)
TR: But don't you remember that book I found in the library about deep oil drilling?
JR: Yes. It was a pretty book and I enjoyed having it on the coffee table for a while. As for actual research, though, if I had wanted to spend time doing that I would have become a college professor.
OMN: And what about the setting? Are the Nina Barrister mysteries set in a real place?
TR: We were driving home to Lafayette from Hattiesburg, Mississippi and decided to go home by way of a Gulf Coast highway. Quite unexpectedly, we happened on an artist's community called Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. We stopped at a bakery, run by an Italian couple, and were told about an art exhibit happening in the community center. We walked around the town and remarked how unusual it was to find in Mississippi. On our way home, Bay St. Louis became Bay St. Lucy, and Nina had found a home.
JR: But we've never been back, and many of the places in Bay St. Lucy are pure fiction.
TR: But we Googled Bay St. Louis one time to see the street map and real names of some of the businesses …
JR: But we wanted to be sure we didn't want to use any real names of businesses, although I think Stinkshop slipped in.
OMN: If we could send you anywhere in the world, on our dime, to research the setting for a book, where would it be?
JR: Paris. If you really need to ask "Why?" then you've never been to Paris.
OMN: Ah, but we have been to Paris! Many times. So don't need to ask. But let's talk about screenplays. Suppose your series were to be adapted for television or film. Who do you see playing the key roles.
JR: We, as opposed to many authors, envision no actors playing our characters. We do, on the other hand, envision actors playing us. T'Gracie is played by Grace Kelly and Joe by Cary Grant.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
TR: Oh, I grew up reading mysteries. I started with Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys (why did the Hardy Boys have much more exciting mysteries than poor Nancy?). I kept reading and worked through Agatha Christie in high school. In college I discovered Ngaio Marsh and, later, Simenon. Any series of mysteries you can think of (Ruth Rendell, Tony Hillerman, John Lou — oh, what is his name — he has a great series and one book became the movie, The Lincoln Lawyer — , Janet Evanovich).
JR: I read the Hardy Boys and all the Duck comic books (Donald, Unca Scrooge, Gladstone, etc.).
OMN: What's next for you?
JR: We have six books after a flurry of writing last spring and summer. We feel like that is a nice body of work, especially since we both have extremely heavy teaching and research loads. We might be able to start writing again next summer at the earliest.
TR: But what about the one where Nina gets asked to teach a literature class at a university (fictitious, of course) in Jackson, Mississippi. There are all kinds of administrators and their assistants that could be fair game for murder.
JR: We could call it Grade Change!
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Pam (T'Gracie) Britton Reese is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department at Indiana-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. She has published books about autism with LinguiSystems. She enjoys teaching and research, but is never happier than when plotting (with her husband) a new murder, or coming up with ways that Nina Bannister can solve it.
Joe Reese is a novelist, playwright, storyteller, and college teacher. He has published seven novels, several plays, and a number of stories and articles. He and Pam have three children: Kate, Matthew and Sam.
For more information about the authors, please visit their website at ReesesWrite.com, or find their on Facebook and Twitter.
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Frame Change
T'Gracie and Joe Reese
A Nina Bannister Mystery
Nina Bannister loves to paint, and she thinks her hobby is painless enough. But she is wrong. Her love of doing seascapes leads to a friendship with a young ex docent from The Chicago Art Museum — and to their entry into the murky and dangerous world of international art smuggling.
Can she save her young friend, who has been kidnapped to the mountains of southern Austria? Can she determine the identity and motives of the mysterious Red Claw? Can she see the real painting that is hidden beneath the false one?
Her success in these matters — indeed her very survival — depend on her ability to perform a last ditch Frame Change!
