What Italy taught me about Texas

by Terry Shames
Author of A Killing at Cotton Hill

Everyone who leaves a comment this weekend will be entered in a drawing for a free copy of Terry’s novel.

Recently someone asked me if the six books I wrote before I wrote A Killing at Cotton Hill honed my skills so that I was prepared to write the book that finally “made it.”

The answer is decidedly yes. But there is another life experience I had that added immeasurably to my arsenal of tools when I sat down to write this particular book.  

It took eighteen months of living in Italy for me to appreciate some of the subtleties of small-town Texas. I can hear everyone groaning and saying sotto voce, “She’s kidding, right?” I’m not kidding, and I’ll explain what I mean.

Living in Italy, I grew accustomed to the beauty and grandeur of ancient architecture, the wonder of sculptures and paintings done when Texas was still a wilderness. My taste buds savored Italian cuisine. I loved walking in the streets and hearing the Italian language, so lyrical and lilting. I grew to love the way Italians seemed to embrace life on every level--how they laughed and cried and fought with passion. Italian history glowed from the old buildings. 


When I went back to Texas to visit after being away for the longest I’d ever been away, I saw the places I knew so well through fresh eyes. I began to appreciate that the unique culture of Texas reflects its history as fully as Italian culture does. A much shorter history than Italian history, but still one that is unique. In small towns I took a fresh look at houses that I had seen all my life, and had never really understood that they were structures that echoed the hardscrabble life that many settlers of Texas endured.  Unlike Italian architecture, these places were simple and unadorned—places to serve as shelter, not because people didn’t want beauty, but that they couldn’t afford the time or the money to build grand structures when they were struggling just to survive.

These dwellings have common features, like a big front porch where people can sit and talk in the evening when it cools down and everyone is home from work. A lot of them have porch swings. Most of them are only as big as need be for the people who lived there. Often there were only two bedrooms: one for the parents, another for the kids. Utilitarian was the word that came to mind. Why had I never noticed the fact that these old houses bore this testament about Texas:  We are people who don’t have money to spend on frills. We work hard. We rely on ourselves and don’t live beyond our means. We are proud.



As Texas prospered the architecture and cultural life changed, but just as in Italy you can see the rich culture left by old wealth, in Texas there’s evidence of the culture of austerity left by people barely scraping by. And this heritage is ingrained in many small town residents.

When I decided to write a book set in Texas, these are the people I wanted to present to readers. The common lore is that you should write what you know. And you can’t know a place quite as well as the one where you grew up. I love New York and San Francisco and grand European cities. I love the pulse of them and the opportunity for endless entertainment and cultural novelty. But there’s a certain point at which I get overwhelmed by “city-ness.” Put me in the countryside, and I’m at home.

In Italy we lived in a small town outside of Florence. I went to Florence almost every day, reveling in the delights of that ancient, beautiful city. But I was always happy to get back to my small town haven. By the time I left there, I was acquainted with many of the residents and shopkeepers of the town, and even now when I go back, people still recognize me. That’s small town life.

So writing a novel set in small-town Texas came naturally to me. The opening lines of A Killing at Cotton Hill are these: “I watch Loretta Singletary hurry up the steps to my house. She hasn’t seen me on the porch in my beat-up old rocker where I often sit to catch any early morning breeze.” Samuel Craddock lives in one of those plain houses, drives an old truck and wears a stained old hat. He grew up among people who rely on themselves. It’s those people I celebrate in my novel.

Leave a comment and you’ll be entered in a drawing for a free copy of Terry’s novel.

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Terry Shames grew up in Texas. She has an abiding affection for the small town where her grandparents lived, the model for her fictional town of Jarrett Creek. Now a resident of Berkley, California, Terry lives with her husband, two rowdy terriers, and a semi-tolerant cat. Her second Samuel Craddock novel, The Last Death of Jack Harbin, will be out in January 2014. Find out more about Terry and her books at http://www.terryshames.com.

Small Towns Can Be Deadly

Sandra Parshall

Agatha Christie didn’t have a lot in common with Grace Metalious of Peyton Place fame, but both ladies understood one thing well: the placid surface of a small community can hide some wickedly entertaining secrets. Christie ensured her own immortality by adding murder to this eternally intriguing milieu.

We may joke about Cabot Cove syndrome – an astronomically high murder rate in a tiny community such as Jessica Fletcher’s home in the Murder, She Wrote series – but readers are more than willing to suspend disbelief in exchange for likable characters, an appealing setting, and lots of juicy small town secrets.

“If I had to choose a favorite sub-category in the mystery field, it would have to be small town mysteries,” DorothyL regular Kaye Barley told me. “I get completely caught up in the intricacies, entanglements, and complexities that exist under the surface in simple, small town living. And if it happens to be a small town in the south -- oh my, that can only ratchet things up. I'm a complete push-over for eccentric southern characters found in small town mystery novels.”

The village has always been a favored site for British mysteries, and M.C. Beaton and others continue that tradition, but U.S. and Canadian cozy writers are probably more successful at making readers fall in love with their settings. From coast to coast, North America is dotted with tiny fictional communities so charming that readers long to set up residence despite the crime rate. “If I thought for one minute that this place really existed,” a reviewer wrote of Louise Penny’s Three Pines, Quebec, “I’d be packing the car.”

Most small towns in mysteries are invented, but writers inevitably draw on their fond memories of actual places. "I've set the Orchard Mysteries in a small town that is based on a real one I know, although I take liberties with some details like where the highway is," says Sheila Connolly, whose protagonist winds up in rural Maine after she inherits an apple orchard. "Using this place helps me visualize the story, but I chose it primarily because it is a classic New England town (a town green, big white church, old houses), and the town itself plays a major ongoing role in the books. Now I'm having fun populating the place, a few characters at a time. This parallels my newcomer heroine's process of getting acquainted with her neighbors. So far I haven't created any evil residents--in fact, the ‘real’ police chief wrote me to say he was flattered by my depiction."

Lorna Barrett, author of the New Hampshire-based Booktown Mysteries with a bookseller protagonist, has also consciously created a setting that readers will find welcoming and soothing, even in the middle of a murder investigation. “My little village of Stoneham is like a character itself,” Lorna says. “From its brick storefronts to its little park with gazebo, it’s a throwback to better times.”

The physical charm of the place is only one plus for writers and readers, though.

“The benefits of a small town setting are bountiful for a cozy-style mystery,” says Mary Ellen Hughes, author of the Craft Corner series, set in Maryland. “The suspects are, for one thing, right there, conveniently available to be questioned or watched. Then, your on-going characters get to be familiar and (hopefully) enjoyed, which can bring interested readers back for updates on their lives.”

Denise Swanson, author of the Scumble River series set in Illinois and featuring school psychologist Skye Denison, loves to explore what lies beneath the pretty surface. “In most small towns there is a tacit agreement to live as an insular society,” Denise says. “Vital components of this agreement are the secrets, assumptions, and shared background knowledge of the citizens. The interrelationships are more intense, because often entire extended families live within the town's boundaries. For story telling, this setting provides both the mystery and the solution. There is a golden opportunity for a story within a story plot, and the public versus the private details are an ideal way for the amateur sleuth to be a credible part of the investigation.”

In these days when many people don’t even know their next door neighbors, there’s a certain nostalgia in reading about residents of a community going through a crisis together. The impact of murder in a small town creates an immediacy that is often missing in big city settings. “It’s a place where everyone knows your name, knows what you’re up to -- and talks about it,” Lorna Barrett says of her village of Stoneham. “When something like a murder happens, the citizens take it personally, whereas murder in an urban area is just a fact of life.”

To emphasize the unique qualities of a small community, many mystery protagonists are outsiders -- either newcomers to the area or natives returning after a long absence. Some series, such as Julia Spencer-Fleming’s, have both. These characters can view a place with fresh eyes and provide perspective for the reader.

Setting a story in a small community allows the writer to focus more on human relationships and less on technical details. If the police force is small, the investigating officer is likely to know both victim and suspects and may be caught in the emotional crossfire. If there’s no forensics lab on site and evidence has to be sent elsewhere for testing, developments can be driven by personal revelations before the lab’s report comes in.

Cozies may come to mind first when we think of crime novels set in small places, but authors like Julia Spencer-Fleming, Margaret Maron, and Nancy Pickard, whose traditional mysteries have more of an edge, also mine the riches of communities where both loyalties and enmities have deep roots.

Then there are the small towns where no reader in her right mind would want to visit, much less settle down. Karin Slaughter’s dark, violent Grant County series, which has a police chief and a medical examiner as protagonists, uses a fictional Georgia setting far from the bustle of Atlanta. Gillian Flynn’s brilliant and disturbing debut, Sharp Objects, takes place in a hellish little town called Wind Gap, Missouri. Val McDermid’s modern gothic masterpiece, A Place of Execution, is set in a tiny English community so isolated that it might be a medieval village in the thrall of a devilish overlord. McDermid’s chilling tale of twisted desire, decades-long conspiracies, and shocking secrets brings to mind Sherlock Holmes’s observation in Copper Beeches: "The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

For all its creative possibilities, the small community setting does pose challenges for the mystery writer, especially in a series. “Anyone new to town will be automatically suspected,” Mary Ellen Hughes notes. “Plus, we can't have the town population shrinking as the series goes on and murders continue, can we? Or have the town looking like too dangerous a place to live in? That's the tricky path the author of a small-town mystery has to navigate.”

The author won’t be alone on that path. She’ll have plenty of readers eager to keep her company.

Interview with Julia Spencer-Fleming

Sandra Parshall

Julia Spencer-Fleming began her career with In the Bleak Midwinter, which was published after winning the St. Martin’s Press contest for best first mystery novel and went on to win a string of major awards. Julia’s series about the Rev. Clare Fergusson and Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne, who solve mysteries together in Millers Kill, NY, while struggling with their forbidden love for one another, has grown in popularity with each entry. Her fifth book, All Mortal Flesh, is a current Agatha Award nominee for Best Novel.

Congratulations on your latest award nomination. You've had so many nominations and wins -- does it ever get old? Are you blase about it now?

Trust me, having readers, critics or fellow writers say they like your work never gets old. Nor does it make me blase--I assure you, I'll be as nervous as anyone else at the Agathas Banquet at Malice Domestic. What those past nominations or wins do give me is perspective--I know if I win, I'm not going to wake up the next day any richer, wiser or more beloved, and I know if I lose, I haven't lost any of the support of my readers, my friends, and my publishing company. And I know that either way, I'll be in the bar afterwards!

What changes have you seen in your writing over the years, and what aspects of craft have you consciously worked to improve?

With each book, I find I'm more and more letting go of rules and trusting in my own voice, my own choices about language and structure. In In the Bleak Midwinter, for example, I bent over backwards to ensure no adverb ever got past my keyboard, because I knew the rule is to convey everything through the dialogue and through active verbs. I've loosened up on that. I trust myself now to use adverbs for color and clarification, not as a crutch for lazy writing.

When I started, I worked very hard to improve my scene setting. Members of my writer's group told me my characters seemed to be talking in a gray fog somewhere! Consciously addressing that weakness obviously helped--critics have frequently commented on my vivid sense of place. Now, I'm working on paring my descriptions down, while still giving readers a clear image of the setting. I've been rereading Lee Child's work to help me with this--Lee is a master at giving you just enough to make the setting come to life,without throwing in a single extraneous detail. I'm trying to figure out how he does it. I suspect, like most of writing, it's practice, practice, practice.

What writers have influenced you most?

Margaret Maron, Archer Mayor and Sharyn McCrumb for their regional settings. Lawrence Block, Steve Hamilton, and Elmore Leonard for language and dialogue (although I'll never manage to be as spare as they are). Outside the genre, Lois McMaster Bujold, Joanna Trollope, Jodi Picoult--women who create the perfect reading experience for me.

Everyone who has read All Mortal Flesh is dying to know how you'll get Clare and Russ through the situation you set up at the end of the book. Can you give us even a tiny hint of what's to come for these two?

Boy, do I wish St. Martin's had put a burst on the cover of All Mortal Flesh: NOT THE LAST BOOK! It came out last October and I'm still getting four or five emails a day asking me if this is the end of Russ and Clare. No. It's not. I'm finishing up the sixth book, (very) tentatively titled When A Stranger. (Or maybe A Stranger Wandering. Or Now the Silence. Or In Mercy Broken.) It opens a few weeks after the end of All Mortal Flesh and takes us through a whole year in Millers Kill, NY. We get to see the Van Alstyne family expanding their dairy farm (with the help of illegal migrant workers), how Clare's life and ministry are affected by her decision to join the National Guard, and we're introduced to the MKPD's first-ever female officer. And of course, there's lots more Russ and Clare, as they struggle to come back from the terrible events of All Mortal Flesh.

You've reached the stage where a lot of writers try stand-alone novels. Do you have plans for one (or more)?

Definitely. I'm committed to a seventh Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne book, and then I'd like to turn my hand to a project I've been researching on and off for a few years. In 2002, Maine closed its 178-year-old state prison in Thomaston. Secretly, over the course of a few nights, every maximum security prisoner in the state was transferred by bus to the new SuperMax facility in the neighboring town of Warren. In February. When Maine gets some of its worst winter weather. I started thinking: what if one of the terrible ice storms we sometimes see blew in suddenly? What if the roads iced over, the power lines came down, the state troopers' cars and the busses went skidding off the narrow county highway? What if the last load of men and a handful of civilian observers were trapped together in an unlit, unheated, unsecured antiquity of a prison?

I can't wait to dive into that and see what happens. I also have other ideas, including a possible series featuring a sort of "anti-Clare Fergusson"--an Episcopal priest who's so burned out by 20+ years of ministering that she retires to what she hopes will be a hermit-like existence on a Maine island. And I'd love to do something lighter and more romantic, set in Alabama, where my father's side of the family is from.

Visit Julia's web site at www.juliaspencerfleming.com.