As I said last month, once I came up with the craft for my cozy mystery series, I had to think about my amateur sleuth. The sleuth in most cozies is usually a woman in her early-to-mid thirties, often newly arrived in town, and still single.
I’m a long way from my thirties, and I had concerns about my ability to convincingly write a character of that age. For one thing, I’m not familiar with cultural things—like favorite television shows, books, music, movies, and food—that someone of that age would enjoy. I’m reminded of that on almost a daily basis when I watch Jeopardy.
For another, mystery readers, like myself, are largely over fifty-five. If they’re like me, they enjoy reading about characters who are somewhat like them, only maybe a little more adventurous or with a more glamorous lifestyle or living in an exotic location.
Of course, an author has to avoid creating a Mary Sue character, which is all too tempting at times. I consciously thought about how Lilliana would not be like me. The most obvious is that she doesn’t think a whole lot about food. She’s one of those people who can forget to eat. I’ve never understood how that’s possible, but I’ve known one or two people like that.
She also enjoys getting up early in the morning to hike before the desert gets too warm. While in my younger days I did force myself to get up early and take a walk before work, these days I shudder at the whole idea of getting out of the house much before ten or eleven.
Being over sixty-five is an advantage to an amateur sleuth—she would have plenty of time to investigate murders. Most of the thirty-somethings own their own businesses, and for some reason are able to leave them in the hands of a capable assistant while they run all over town questioning suspects. My character would be retired, and like most retirees, have too much time on her hands.
With this idea in mind, I started reading senior sleuth mysteries to get an idea of what was popular and what had already been done. One thing that bothered me was the way older women were portrayed—forgetful and almost by dumb luck stumbling on the solution to the crime. They had to be funny and quirky. I blame this on Janet Evanovich for creating Grandma Mazur, a beloved character in her Stephanie Plum series.
I compared those characters to the older women I met at church and at the local meeting of the African Violet Society of America. They were not incompetent buffoons, but women with a lot of life experience, still living active and interesting lives. In Tucson, most of the docents at parks and museums are retired people. They’ve discovered a second occupation learning about something different and sharing that knowledge with visitors. In other words, in the real world, retired people were more like Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher than Grandma Mazur.
That was the kind of sleuth I wanted to create. So I made my character a retired librarian with a life-long interest in reading as well as her new hobby of raising African violets. Instead of not being married yet, she would be a widow with a daughter who had died young. This gave her similarities to those younger sleuths with few or no family ties and the opportunity to have a romantic interest at some point in the series.
But what would her name be?
I went to my go-to source for character names: the Social Security Administration, which has a database of popular names by birth year. Names go in and out of fashion, and I always want to make sure that a name is appropriate for the age of the character. Naming a seventy-year-old something like Brittany would probably jar a reader out of the story. I found Lillian on the list for when my character was born. It wasn’t the most popular name, but it was fairly high on the list. For some reason, I decided to add the ‘a’ on the end.
Lilliana immediately gave me more of her personality. She was probably of English heritage and maybe a little stuffy. Out of the blue, Wentworth came to me and sounded exactly right. (I have since discovered that there’s a Wentworth Road in Tucson which I’m sure I’ve driven by many times, which might be why that name emerged out of my subconscious.)
As I write the mysteries, I find out other little bits and pieces about Lilliana and my other characters. She’ll be talking to someone and mention a fact which is totally new to me. It’s one of the things that makes writing fun.
Melodie says
February 5, 2018 at 7:32 pmI love reading about how characters came to be. I do really like that Lilliana is intelligent and active. Real women are like that and it’s an inspiration to those of us coming up behind them.
This is one of my very favorite series. Thank you for continuing to write!
Elise M. Stone says
February 5, 2018 at 9:42 pmAnd thank you for reading my books!
Kit Donner says
February 6, 2018 at 12:39 pmI agree that in too many cozy mysteries and even other sorts of mysteries it is amazing how much time and money young self-contained employed business owners have to spend away from their business. There is an old saying that when you work for yourself you only need to work half a day, and you can sometimes even choose which twelve hours a day you work. That is the reality for most self-employed people who do not want to live in deep poverty. And the ones who live half starved in a tiny shack that is bitterly cold in winter and bakes in the summer heat are usually not spending time solving mysteries and do not have the money to do something that requires rapid travel and fancy equipment in most cases, which does not make a good mystery impossible, but would make for a very different mystery.
Maybe one about a resourceful veteran who was a Green Beret in ‘Nam and never got back to living in civilization after retiring after twenty years as a Staff Sergeant. So he has a pension and a small cabin and hunts, fishes, gardens, and harvests edible plants and medicinal herbs. He may even have a wife or girlfriend who is also skilled in woodcraft and wildcrafts, and a handful of close friends, some like him and some with lives in town and cars that he could occasionally borrow if he needs to but almost never does. But someone that is almost a ghost story to most of the people in town who don’t even know what he looks like and that is the way he wants it. Sort of like Bo in To Kill A Mockingbird. The post Vietnam version. Even a lot of people who were never in Vietnam never got over that war to some extent because it changed people we knew.
Or maybe I will try writing about this one. But again, there are so many stories about this idea that we could both build on the idea and neither book would be recognizably related. So I don’t mind sharing ideas. It is not like taking a leaf from someone else who has a hybrid African violet.
Probably my ideas come from books that I have read as well as the life that I have lived. Parts of every life are unique but much life experience is shared with multitudes. So books share common threads, which is a part of why we read them, but each author brings unique elements. So reading one book or one thousand books is never enough.
Thank you for writing.
Elise M. Stone says
February 6, 2018 at 1:38 pmYou’re definitely right about the same idea resulting in entirely different stories depending on the writer. That’s why you can’t copyright ideas. It’s only the finished novel or short story or script that’s unique.
I say, write your story!
Kit Donner says
February 6, 2018 at 12:54 pmI am writing on a tablet and like many tablets it often adds or changes words to something that makes sense to the tablet but has nothing to do with what I want to write. I catch most but not all. In my last post the word “contained” was added in the middle of self-employed, making a reasonable sentence into nonsense. I did not catch it until after it posted. I reread the sentence when I had just finished writing the sentence and the sentence read correctly then, but by the time I finished the rest of what I wanted to say and posted my comment, what I wrote was no longer what it said. I need to find a way to write without having a machine editing my words randomly!
Elise M. Stone says
February 6, 2018 at 1:36 pmAutocorrect drives me crazy!
Judith Anne Horner says
February 9, 2018 at 12:10 pmLove reading this series. Autocorrect drives me crazy, too.
JACQUELINE HOUCHIN says
February 9, 2018 at 3:50 pmI enjoyed reading the post – a background on Lilliana. I’ve just finished reading True Blue Murder and loved it. Your heroine is exactly what you set out for her to be. .
Here’s what I posted on my FB page (with the Amazon link), and I will go to Amazon right now to post a review. I hope the other reviews have not given away the astounding reveal that you’ve put in this first book (which I hope to see more of in future books). While I’m there, I’m going to order Blood Red Murder.
“I just finished reading this “cozy” mystery, the first in a series. There’s murder in a Tuscon retirement center… a perky senior determined not to be accused of the crime… cool facts about raising violets… clues and suspects galore… and… and… a truly astounding revelation at the end. NO SPOILERS here, you have to read the book. (Titles of the 6 books come from the names of violets.)
Great job Elise M. Stone.”
Elise M. Stone says
February 9, 2018 at 3:53 pmThank you so much! I’m so glad you liked the book. And, yes, the “surprise” shows up in the other books.