The Mystery Queens

I drop by the recent Vancouver Writers Festival event and share insights on a panel discussion with three authors who specialize in writing about subterfuge and deceit. Ann Cleeves is a British mystery novelist known for perfecting the police procedural. Beverley McLachlin is the former chief justice of Canada who now pens legal thrillers and Nita Prose has is the master of the comedic, locked room mystery.

Book discussed:
The Long Call by Ann Cleeves
The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves
The Maid by Nita Prose
The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose
The Maid's Secret by Nita Prose 
Proof by Beverley McLachlin

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Transcript

Amy Tyler: 0:00

THE MODERATOR, Allison asked the panel, well, what would be the perfect murder? And Ann cleaves without hesitation, just interjects and says, Well, I know, because she's done so much research and held so many different jobs. She says, Well, it would be you push someone off a cliff, because what I've been told through my research and from other detectives, it's very hard to tell if Someone's jumped or if they've been pushed you. Me. Hello, welcome back to the Red Fern book review. I am your host, Amy Tyler, and today I'm here to talk about one of my very favorite genres, mysteries. Now I was inspired to record this episode after attending a recent panel discussion at the Vancouver Writers Festival called the mystery Queens. And the discussion featured three writers, Ann cleaves, who is the master of the British police procedural, Beverley McLachlin, who is a former or the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, who's now turned into a mystery writer of legal thrillers and Nita Prose, who is a former book publisher, editor and editor turned writer, and she wrote a runaway comedic mystery novel called The maid that I think a number of you will be familiar with. So and this discussion was moderated by Alison broadle from the CBC. So with that, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the talk, do a deep dive into all three authors and review or preview their current books. And within that, hopefully you will find a book to add to your to be read list, and maybe just in time for the weather turning and the holidays. So anyway, let's start. So first of all, the talk was held at the Writers Festival, which I attend every year, and it's a festival made up of, oh gosh, I don't know, 50, 100 writers from around the world. And it's held on Granville Island, which is a wonderful live work space just outside downtown Vancouver in the city. But it's located in the city. It's anchored by a beautiful Public Market, and around the market there's theaters, artisan shops, restaurants, live, work spaces, mostly in creative industries. So that's kind of the setting. And this event was held at one of the theaters there. So the first thing I will talk about is it was interesting. The three authors came out, and everyone was super excited, and Anne came out, and then Anita came out, and there was clapping, and everyone was excited, but Beverly, Beverly McLaughlin comes out and basically had a standing ovation. People just were so excited. She means so much to Canadians as a woman, she's the first woman to hold the position that she did, and she's held the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada for the longest that anyone has in the history of the position. So I think she held it for like 15 or 17 years. The other thing that I was struck by was their personalities. Anne is hilarious. She has a Geordie accent, which is a very unusual accent that signifies that she's from Northeast England, Newcastle. Specifically, it's a bouncy. Undulating, rhythmic accent with a little it sounds a little Scottish, but it's not. She's got an understated, dark wit, that kind of typical British humor, and NIDA prose is hilarious. She is laugh out loud funny, just like the books that she writes, she was imitating her mother, who was French Canadian, which was like this, the French Canadian accents like a staccato, kind of almost guttural way of speaking. And she was imitating her even in her passing, she hears her mom's voice kind of parsing out advice, whether wanted or unwanted, and very much like Gran, the character in her book that dispensed dispenses advice to the main character, Molly, the maid. So, and I'll get into that a bit later. But curiously, Beverly McLaughlin was much more serious than circumspect, while she came out to a standing ovation, and she was very elegant and obviously super accomplished. She just was more reserved, and therefore on the panel not quite as appealing. But in the end, I was not deterred, and I ended up buying her book because I had read books by the other two authors, and I really wanted to find out a little bit more about Beverly and what she was about, and I knew the book would contain a lot of legal details, and done in a very authentic way which it was. So I'll get into that in a little bit. And one of the first things that the speaker, the moderator, talked about, is she wanted to know if the writers were Pantsers or plotters. So that's a term that applies to mystery writers, and what that means is a pantser is someone who literally flies by the seat of their pants, who writes the characters as they come and almost the book the plot reveals itself in time, and that, of course, is the opposite of a plotter, which is someone who knows the ending ahead of time and then goes back and sort of carefully plots out the story. So Ann cleaves said that she was completely a pantser, and she doesn't really understand how could be any other way, because it's entertaining for her and she doesn't know what's going to happen. So it's almost like she's reading along with you, in a way. Juanita prose says she's the opposite. Maybe it's her background as a former editor and publisher, but she prefers to plot everything out and actually knows the ending ahead of time. And I can't remember Beverly McLaughlin, what her what kind of what her method is. But let's start first with Anne. So Anne has written 30 37 novels, and three she's written three series, and all three series have been adapted for the television. And there's the Vera series Shetland, which you might know that's kind of probably her best known series, and the long call series. She's won tons of awards, and I about a year ago, I happened to pick up I knew that she was a big deal in kind of the police procedural space, so I picked up her book called The long call. And the long call refers to sort of a guttural call that gulls seagulls use to contact each other, usually when they're threatened or they're wanting to be aggressive. So that's what that refers to, and this, this particular book is anchored by a detective. It's the first in a series Matthew Vin, and what I liked about his character is that he's super damaged, but also a hero, and I think that makes for the best protagonist. He grew up in a religious sect, and he escaped the religious sect, but went on and became police detective, but has never, kind of forgotten his past, and so that colors all the work that he does. But this particular book that I read, the long call, is about above. Body that washes up on a beach and there's nothing left on there's no ID on the body, except there's an envelope, and inside the envelope there's information that leads the detective and his team to the kind of the first clue the book includes social justice topics. It is a good book if you're looking for if you want to be an amateur sleuth, there's some Easter eggs along the way. You probably won't find out figure out who the murderer is, but there are clues there that if you actually want to figure it out, you can. So that appeals to a lot of people, but I found it. You know also, it takes place in Devon on a windswept beach. So the setting is good, but it just to me, it was a little too serious for me, and at the time, not quite what I was looking for. While at the same time, I will admit that it was well executed. So her current book that she was there to talk about is the 11th novel in the Vera Stanhope series, and a similar idea, there's a man's body is found in the early morning light by a local dog walker, and the body is found outside a care home for troubled teens. And what ends up happening, and it was a staff member who didn't show up for work, so Vera Stanhope is called to the scene, and one of the first people that's suspected is a 14 year old Resident Chloe named Chloe. But then shortly after, a second body is found that's connected in somehow with the first body, and it's found at the site of three standing stones that are known as the three dark wives, these are not real stones. She talks about that in her book. While this book is set in the Northumbrian countryside, which is a real place, obviously, the three stones are from her imagination. But in the book, these standing stones combine sort of the wilds of the Northumbrian countryside with superstition and folklore, and then pretty soon, fact begins to collide with fiction, and the myth kind of intersects reality. So that's the story there. So I would say this while I have not read her current book, if you really want a meaty police procedural with an experienced writer, this book would be for you. Okay, so moving over to like, a totally different way of writing, we have Nita prose. Who Nita this book, her book, first book, The maid, came out a couple years ago, and it was a Good Morning America pick, and it won a ton of awards. It sold over 2 million copies. You might remember the cover. It's a bright red cover with a little keyhole with you can see like a maid's uniform, just just through the keyhole, and it looks like the maids in motion, running through the running past the keyhole. So I would liken this book to Amelia Bedelia. So I don't know if you read medelia, Amelia Bedelia as a kid, but I sure did, and I loved it, and it's kind of a bit of a bumbling maid. And in in this book, her name is Molly Gray, and she's not like anyone else, or at all. She struggles with social cues and misreads everyone's intentions. And in the meantime, her Gran, who's her favorite person, passed away recently, and her grand, helped her interpret the world, and was sort of her guide. And the way she did that was she gave her these really simple rules to live by. And so while Molly is eventually when she's trying to solve this murder, her grand comes into her mind, and she still remembers many of the things that her grand would tell her. But anyway, back to the murder. One day, Molly is at the hotel where she works. She works at this elegant hotel called the Regency Grand Hotel, and she's stocking her cards with she's got little soaps and she's got shampoos, and she's going into different rooms, and she stumbles into the. Suite with the most kind of infamous and wealthy person currently staying at the hotel, Charles black. But Charles Black is found dead, so from there, a detective comes into play, Detective Stark, who doesn't get along with Molly and Molly starts to solve the mystery while also being a suspect. So it's quite hilarious, because you as the reader can see these horrible characters coming into Molly's world. They'll be literally a criminal with like a bag of money and firearms, and Molly doesn't read them as bad people, but she doesn't forget a clue. So you're kind of wanting to reach out and grab Molly and say, Wait, watch out for that person, and you can't help her, but at the same time, she's also one step ahead of you. And as Nita prose said in her her talk, that her biggest weakness is also her biggest strength. And Nita also said that she was influenced by the game Clue and also the movie knives out, which I totally see. So her latest book is much the same, if you like the Molly gray the first book you're going to love probably the second. I haven't read it, but Molly's back. She's been moved. She's become the head she's become the head maid at this point. But this time the there's a new murder, and it is the mystery author, JD, grim Thorpe, and he's found dead on a hotel tea room floor. So Molly's old foe comes back. Detective Stark Molly herself is again considered a suspect. There's a new maid in training that can be a suspect. There's the author's secretary, the hotel's beloved doorman. There's nobody who's not kind of under scrutiny So and then, oh, another thing Anita revealed is that she's got, I mean, this woman's on a roll. She's got a third book in the series coming out in April. You can pre order it now, and it's called the maid's secret, and this will be the last so it will be a trilogy in this series, and it's a heist story. But what this is about is it does a deep dive into her Gran. It's a Gran's life, and I guess her Gran was the only daughter of a wealthy magnet, and she fell in love with the son of her father's Butler. And it's the little clue is it's a dashing young man who dear readers might very well recognize. So that's kind of interesting. So there's a little bit of a love story combined with that. But a little thing that Nita revealed in her talk, that I thought was interesting is she had been an editor and a writer, and she was on a business trip at a hotel, and she came into her room one day and accidentally stumbled and startled a maid that was cleaning her room, and that just sort of gave her this idea. She's like, you know, I think I could write a book, and on top of it, this is my character, and so the story just kind of spilled out from there. Okay, so now over to Beverly McLaughlin. Beverly McLaughlin her book. She's written, she's written a memoir about her life. She's also written three books in the Jilly Truett series. And the Jilly Truett series features a lawyer, a young lawyer, who is flawed, but I would say, also quite noble, which I didn't really love, and I'll explain a little bit more. So what I did was I picked up the third in the series, and it's called proof, and I took it on vacation with me. I recently went to Mexico for a couple days, and I have my coffee here, and it's all water warped because I took it to the pool, and frankly, I didn't reach read it that much. Was at the pool, I spent more time eating chips and guac and drinking margaritas, but I took it nonetheless. And what this book is about is, it is, I won't reveal too much, because you might go back and read the first two, but it's a young i. A lawyer, and she has recently had a baby, and so she's on maternity leave, but she gets called out by she's very good at what she does. A da calls her and said, You've got to come back. I've got a case for you. You've got to check this out. And so she struggles, and comes back on the job, and she's got this young daughter named Claire. And throughout the novel, she's sort of struggling with really wanting getting to get back to what she loves to do, and then also being a brand new mom, which she's not feeling that she's like most moms that she's totally prepared for. So the storyline here is a daughter of a pop star named Tris Jones goes missing, and his ex wife Kate is charged with her kidnapping, and it seems sort of like a slam dunk, and then Jilly is asked to represent Kate. But all that happens right away. So of course, all is not as the as it seems. And so the mystery involved kind of unfolds, and we go to Vegas and but most of it is takes place in Vancouver, which is really fun. You don't need to be from here to enjoy the book, but it is really fun when a book has a sense of place that you recognize. And this book certainly does. It refers to specific beaches, walks, restaurants. I mean, there's just everywhere you turn. So that's really fun as a local to see that. And while the author herself is from Eastern I believe she's from eastern Canada, she's not from Vancouver. She's conducted most of her career here. So it really rang true for her to set, she said, to set her novels here, this book, what the weakness of the book I felt? I felt that all of the characters were a little too noble, and I wanted a little more grit in the characters. She does try to try to provide that, but I felt that it could have been a little bit grittier, and I just like that a little bit more in my mysteries. But what really did was really exciting was the way that she weaves in legal proceedings, the backgrounds, kind of the infighting between lawyers, just all the little nitty gritty, and I'll just give like a small example her her clients. Julie's client is going to be part of a police lineup, and so she prepares Kate for the lineup, and she sees all the other people that are going to be in the lineup, and she realizes that nobody in the lineup looks like her client, and her client's Almost Famous is also famous. So she realizes that undoubtedly, her client's going to be picked out the lineup, and it's not fair. So she goes to the opposing counsel and complains. So the opposing counsel says, All right, and then grabs and convinces the receptionist at the opposing Counsel's Office to jump into the lineup because she looks like Kate the suspect. But then, as soon as she does that, as he does that, she Julie regrets her decision because then she realizes that she can't have the lineup thrown out because it was more fair. So it's just a little thing, but there's, like, lots of details like that throughout that I really, really did enjoy. So I would give this book an eight out of 10. I would say, if you really like legal thrillers, it's worth it. And also, if you just it's kind of fun based to read a book from the former Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court. So that's kind of fun, but there, there was something a little bit missing for me. But with that, I wanted to conclude with the ending, which I thought was quite funny. And the moderator, Allison, asked the panel, well, what would be the perfect murder? And Anne Cleves, without hesitation, just interjects and says, Well, I know, because she's done so much research and held so many different jobs. She says, Well, it would be you push someone off a cliff, because what I've been told through my research and from other detectives. Actives, it's very hard to tell if someone's jumped or if they've been pushed. And everybody in the crowd started to laugh, because she just was a little too forthcoming with that information. You're kind of wondering, Is she planning her own murder of somebody? So with that, I'm going to conclude the latest episode of The Red firm book review. And I hope you know, I think what's fun, it was three female writers. They all offer something different, and I hope I found something that you can sink your teeth into as we move into the holidays. So thank you so much, and I really appreciate your feedback. You can reach me through Buzzsprout. You can send me a message. It's called voicemail. And if you, if you see that on the buzz if you, if you google the name of my podcast, the Rev from Book Review and Buzz sprout, which hosts my podcast, it'll come up, and then you can press something called voicemail, which will allow you to send me a text. And you can give me feedback. You can suggest books that I might want to follow, or if you've read or familiar with any of these authors, I would love to hear your own thoughts on these books. So with that, I want to thank you for tuning in, and I'll be back in a couple weeks. I'm going to be featuring my friend Mary Ann, who works for book warehouse, which is a local, wonderful indie bookseller, and she's going to have her favorite books for holiday giving. So thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you soon. You