You Had Me At Cozy!

Who out there has read a cozy? I'm the first to admit, I stay pretty genre-centric with my reading. I started reading cozies a few years ago as a way to escape the tedious amount of research and reading I was doing for my WWII novels. Helena Dixon's Miss Underhay Mysteries, followed by Posie Parker and Carmen Radtke's Murder at the Races. However, these are also historical fiction. I started to wonder, am I a book snob?

According to BookRiot, there is a big fat line between being a book snob and personal preference. (Whew!) I was just being picky. Okay, time to branch out. For me, choosing a book is a little like going to your favorite restaurant. You know what you like. You get it every time. So why chance a good night out by trying something different, something you might not like? However, trying something new, I reminded myself, is also exciting and refreshing.

I started reading contemporary romantic comedies. Shocker, I liked them. Sandy Barker, Nina Kaye, Aimee Brown, Julie Houston, Paige Toon... and Fiona Leitch. Now, Fiona Leitch has a particular skill of luring you in and blazing you with laugh-out loud comedy threaded into nearly every sentence that, at times, leaves you breathless. Yes, breathless. At least that is what I found when reading her self-pubbed murder-mystery mashups The Bella Tyson Murder Mysteries - Dead in Venice (with the tag: There are worse things than writer's block 😁) and Murder Ahoy. When I heard she'd written a cozy series for Harper Collins, I thought... okay, here we go!

I found Fiona's writing effortless. I'd started to flip back the pages and ask, "How'd she do that?" And this was between tears of laugher. The Nosey Parker Murder Mystery Series is no different. Here's the series blurb:

Ex-copper turned caterer Jodie ‘Nosey’ Parker returns home to Penstowan, the small seaside town in Cornwall where she grew up, after almost twenty years in London’s Metropolitan Police Force. With her teenage daughter in tow, and her slightly batty mother still living there, Jodie plans on having a quiet life running her new catering business. But she soon discovers that life in Penstowan is not as quaint (or boring) as she remembers. Missing brides, bodies in the shrubbery, annoying writers pushed off cliffs and movie star madness all conspire to get this not-so-amateur detective back on the case. Helped by her old childhood sweetheart Tony and hunky newcomer, DCI Nathan Withers, not to mention new member of the family Germaine the Pomeranian dog, finding the killer is bound to be a piece of cake. Murder, mayhem and much consuming of pasties will ensue, to prove that when Jodie’s around, murder is always on the menu…

I wanted to know more about Fiona, her writing, and how she comes up with this stuff! SO, I asked her!

 

Hi Fiona! I read and loved your Bella Tyson series, Dead in Venice and Murder Ahoy, how was writing the Nosey Parker cozies different than writing your other books? 

The main difference is that I’m not allowed to swear in the Nosey Parker stories… I’m kind of joking there, but actually it’s true: because I’m writing to contract, I’ve been far more aware of the market and of the audience I want to attract (many of whom don’t like the kind of strong language that Bella makes liberal use of). With the Bella Tyson books, I just kind of write what I want and hope it finds an audience; with Nosey Parker, I’m actively hoping to attract them. The other big difference is in writing for a hopefully long-running series. I’ve made sure that I’ve introduced a lot of secondary characters who are interesting in their own right, who I can use again and again in further adventures. In the Bella Tyson books, it’s mainly just Bella and Will who are recurring characters. I’ve also had to do a bit more world-building, setting them in a location (based on a couple of real towns) which I can use again and again.

Why are you so funny? No, really. I find I laugh my way through Fiona Leitch books, and I often wonder if you are this funny at home. Is your family constantly in stitches? 

My whole family is funny. I grew up in a household where there was a lot of laughter and playfulness. My mum, my sister and I regularly get each other into bouts of full on hysteria, where we’re crying with laughter and it actually hurts, but we can’t stop. My son and I have the same effect on each other. I suppose I AM funny all the time! Although whether my family are laughing with me or AT me is another matter… I used to want to be a stand-up comedian, until I actually got a really big debut gig through the BBC. It was the most terrifying experience of my entire life, and utterly cured me of the desire to ever do it again.

You know that saying, write what you know? You can plead the 5th here (meaning you don’t have to answer), but are your characters loosely or closely based on real people?

There is one character (in Murder Ahoy!) who is based on a real person, although (unbelievably, as she is a total monster in the book) a watered-down version. All my female MCs do have elements of me in them, I have to admit, although I wouldn’t say that I am quite as nosey as Jodie! Also in Murder Ahoy!, one of the other characters is based on a book blogger who I got to know after Dead in Venice came out, as she absolutely loved it and has since become one of my biggest on-line cheerleaders. I named the character after her and based some of it very loosely on her, but I was quite concerned because that character also turns out to be a bit of a monster and I was worried that she would be hugely insulted, but she loved it!

Who is your inspiration for Jodie, our detective MC? And what kind of research did you do to prepare?

Physically, I had the actor Sheridan Smith in my mind when I was writing Jodie, because I’d love her to play her in the TV adaptation (please let there be a TV adaptation!). In terms of her actual character, I used to work in an office with someone who was an ex-copper and she was incredibly nosey; whenever she saw something going down by the water cooler she had to get involved. It had been part of her job as a police officer, and she didn’t seem able to stop. It was actually quite annoying! But I wanted to make Jodie different to a lot of the cozy sleuths out there, in that she isn’t a complete amateur. I wanted it to be as believable as possible, without turning it into a police procedural thriller. In terms of research, I focused more on the locations (places that I know and love), and on the crimes in each book, rather than on Jodie herself. So I now know a lot about wild flowers in the North Cornwall area; Goldsmiths College art alumni (I went there myself, along with but not at the same time as people like Damien Hirst, Anthony Gormley, Damon Albarn and Mary Quant), and about the toxic properties of pufferfish. 

What is your writing process? Are you a sticky-note writer? Please say it isn’t so. I’ll be instantly jealous. Well, are you?

God no! I don’t get the whole sticky note thing. I never used to plan - I started off writing screenplays, and if you need to go back and rewrite things it’s much simpler with a script than with a novel (the word count of a script is probably about 25% of that of a novel). But I’ve found that I do need to outline novels, particularly when I’m writing a mystery; I need to know where the different twists and turns will be, where I’m going to plant the clues and the red herrings, and if I don’t plan it means I’ll probably be looking at a major rewrite. So I have an outline, sometimes quite rough, sometimes more detailed, but I will find as I’m writing that I have other ideas or I’ll deviate from it, it’s not set in stone. I think maybe the sticky note thing is helpful if you struggle with structure - it means you can write scenes and jig them around to fit - but I’m one of those annoying types who can just ‘do’ structure, so it seems like a waste of time to me.

What else are you working on?

I just finished outlining the next 3 books in the Nosey Parker series, so hopefully I’ll be writing them soon! I also have 3 other books outlined, romcoms rather than cozy mysteries, and I’ve got 2 others written that I’m trying to get out there. I’m pretty busy… 

Murder on the Menu is out now, as is the 2nd installment of The Nosey Parker series, A Brush with Death! A Sprinkle of Sabotage will be released next month. Buy here: mybook.to/Brush

Fiona Leitch is a writer with a chequered past. She's written for football and motoring magazines, DJ'ed at illegal raves and is a stalwart of the low budget TV commercial, even appearing as the Australasian face of a cleaning product called 'Sod Off'. After living in London and Cornwall she's finally settled in sunny New Zealand, where she enjoys scaring her cats by trying out dialogue on them. She spends her days dreaming of retiring to a crumbling Venetian palazzo, walking on the windswept beaches of West Auckland, and writing funny, flawed but awesome female characters. Find her on Twitter: @fkleitch

Thank you Fiona for taking time to answer my questions. As you can see, I'm pretty nosey too. So, readers, what genres do you read? Have you ventured out into the unknown and tried something new?  Are you a reformed book snob picky reader? Tell me about it.

Have a lovely day! 

Andie xx