Describe the first time you pictured Buck Schatz in your head. Buck Schatz is a 90-year-old World War 2 veteran, and a retired Memphis detective, whose colorful past has a tendency not to stay in the past. The idea I had when I started writing this character was that I wanted to convey to readers…
Describe the first time you pictured Lucy Lancaster in your head. Lucy first popped into my head when I was at a writers’ conference in Austin, Texas. I was listening to a panel about writing characters with interesting day jobs and this idea for an amateur sleuth who was a professional genealogist kept going around…
Describe the first time you pictured Ellery Hathaway in your head. Ellery Hathaway came into being twenty years ago with the first draft of what would eventually be The Vanishing Season. I’m a linear writer, so Ellery’s first appearance would have been in the prologue, when she’s fourteen years old and riding her bike alone…
Would you like to live in the setting you created for the Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series? Oh, yes. Rocky Point is a special place, a quaint town on the rugged coast of New Hampshire. It’s a sweet and decent community, the kind of place where local bands play familiar tunes on warm summer nights.…
Describe the first time you pictured Mike Bowditch in your head? Paul Doiron: This might sound unbelievable, but I don’t have a clear idea what Mike Bowditch looks like. I can tell you he has blue eyes, dark hair, is 6’2”, with a physique that’s closer to a cornerback than a linebacker, that he has…
Describe the first time you pictured Sarah Booth Delaney in your head? Carolyn Haines: I had just finished a two-book contract and I was thinking about what I would write next. It was an incredibly spring day. Right outside the window the Chinese fringe tree and the cross vines were in full bloom. Sitting at…
Chapter One In my dreams, the dead can speak. They call to me, in whispers and murmurs, and I greet them by name, like old friends. Tommy and little Andrew. They seem to smile in return but this is merely my imagination; I have no way of knowing what their smiles looked like. I’ve seen…
Describe the first time you pictured Robin Lockwood in your head? Phillip Margolin: My books frequently have strong female characters who get into dangerous situations. When I started the Robin Lockwood series I wondered how I could make a fight between my heroine and a man realistic and I decided to make Robin a professional…
Describe the first time you pictured Vera in your head? Ann Cleeves: Vera appeared suddenly, in one of those incredible moments that make writing such a joy. The Crow Trap was never intended as a traditional detective novel, which is why she doesn’t arrive until a good way in. I never plan my books in…
There is a technique that will supposedly trigger creativity in a writer. It is a list of words and phrases used as random prompts. Take the next one on the list, and use it like an electric cattle prod to goad your muse into action. (I can speak from personal experience that the word tequila…
