Author Q&A with Amy Patricia Meade

I’m so happy to share this interview I did with Amy Patricia Meade. I recently discovered her writing when she kindly contacted me to see if I was interested in reviewing her culinary cozy mystery, Cookin’ the Books. I accepted and enjoyed her book so much (you can read my review here) that I asked if she would also do an Q&A and here it is!

Tell us a little about yourself.

I am a cozy mystery author who was born and raised on Long Island, New York. My first novel, Million Dollar Baby, which was part of the Marjorie McClelland mystery series, was released in 2006. Since then, I’ve published nine mystery novels, the two most recent of which – Cookin’ The Books and The Garden Club Murder – are the first two entries in the Tish Tarragon Mystery series. Cookin’ The Books was released in the US and Canada on March 1, 2019. The Garden Club Murder is slated for ebook and UK release May 31, 2019 and US/Canada hardcover Sept. 1, 2019.

I’m also an American expat currently living in Bristol, England. In 2017, my husband and I and our two cats, Scout and Boo Radley, made the move from Williamsburg, Virginia to the UK. It’s taken some time to settle in, but we really enjoy living here.

List three fun facts about yourself that we wouldn’t read in your ‘official’ bio.

• I’m so clumsy, I could probably trip over a line in the carpet.
• I once wrote catalog copy for The Vermont Country Store, wherein I described such items as flannel nightgowns, canned beef bourguignon, and decidedly unsexy underwear.
• I read cookbooks like some people read novels. Seriously. I think I might need an intervention.

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

I realized it quite early in life. Probably around age six or seven. Not only was I an early reader who always had her nose in a book, but I would borrow my grandfather’s Polaroid Instamatic camera and take photos of things in the yard or garden and then write stories about the objects I’d photographed.

Who are your favourite mystery writers?

I’m a fan of the classics. PD James, Dorothy Sayers, and, of course, Agatha Christie. I’m also a fan of the ‘new classics’ such as Peter Lovesey and Martha Grimes.

I love that Tish in your new series, the Tish Tarragon Mysteries, is a ‘literary caterer’. If you could create a dinner party with a literary theme, what would it be and could you share some of the dishes/drinks you would serve?

Oh, that’s a tough one, Stephanie. A party based upon The Great Gatsby might be fun for the fashions, the music, and the cocktails. However, the menu described in the book, although delicious, sounds far too expensive and lavish: “At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.”

I also don’t know enough people to invite to such a shindig.

I recently created a Secret Garden themed menu for the second book in my Tish Tarragon series, The Garden Club Murder, which made my mouth water. The menu consists of traditional English picnic food: scones, clotted cream, sausage rolls, prawns with Marie Rose sauce, Coronation chicken salad, cucumber and egg sandwiches, and some delightful floral scented miniature cakes in flavours such as rose cake with raspberry frosting, lemon and lavender loaves with lemon drizzle, and gluten free orange blossom cake with honeysuckle frosting.

But, since a roast chicken or roast turkey dinner with all the trimmings has always been the ultimate comfort food for me, I’d go for a menu influenced by Louisa May Alcott’s short story, An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving. It’s a story suitable for young readers, but its description of this warm cozy cabin filled chock-a-block with hook-neck squash, nuts, cured hams, and shelf after shelf of seasonal fruit pies truly conveys the abundance of the season.

We’re hard pressed to find a turkey in England in November, so I do the traditional turkey dinner at Christmas: stuffed roast turkey with sage and giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts, red cabbage, and squash followed by plum pudding or mincemeat pie.

I know this will be a tough one, but which of your characters is your ‘favourite’? If you can’t answer that one, then which one do you identify with the most?

Tish’s best friend, Jules, is my favourite. I hate to say it, but Jules almost writes himself. He’s outrageously fun, so there’s no real boundaries on what he might say or do, and yet he’s such a loyal and devoted friend, that you can’t help but love him.

As for the character I identify with the most, it would be Tish. We’re both blonde, roughly the same age, and we both have a thing for cooking. But moreover, when I created her character – a character who has just moved to a small town to start her life over – my husband and I had just moved to Virginia from Vermont and I was trying to resurrect my writing career. A lot of Tish’s fears about her business succeeding echoed my fears in finding a new publisher.

Why do you think cozy mysteries are so popular, especially culinary cozies?

I think cozies are popular primarily because they offer comfort. I know it sounds odd to call a crime novel comforting, but I believe they offer a way for us to deal with the outside world. We, as a society, are inundated with news of war and violence and man’s inhumanity to man on a nearly constant basis. Although it’s good for us as a people to stay informed, doing so can often lead to anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. A cozy mystery might portray the same crimes and inhumanities that we see on the nightly news – i.e. murder, blackmail, greed, theft – but it does so without the sense of hopelessness or randomness. When a crime has been described in a cozy mystery, the reader understands that crime is part of an intricate puzzle that will be solved. There are no cold cases. No matter what other crimes and secrets are revealed along the way, the reader knows that by the end of the last page, everything will be explained, justice will prevail, order will be restored, and the protagonist and his/her family of secondary characters will, most likely, live to fight another day.

I think adding a culinary element to a cozy mystery amplifies that sense of comfort and helps to make the protagonist and secondary characters that much more human and familial. We can imagine the smell of bacon frying in Tish’s café or the taste of Celestine’s Guinness chocolate cakes. We can compare a character’s recipe for New England clam chowder with the one our grandmother used to make and, in the process, we equate these characters with memories of hearth and home.

In your opinion, what is the hardest part of writing or being an author?

When, after plotting an entire book, you’re faced with the actual task of writing. I think Agatha Christie said it best when, in Dead Man’s Folly, mystery writer/sleuth, Ariadne Oliver, complains, “I mean what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and then when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it.”

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do for fun?

See Question 2, section C, above. I also enjoy watching cooking shows, reading books, and getting to know our new home. Bristol is an incredibly vibrant, culturally rich, and ethnically diverse city, so there’s no shortage of museums, galleries, shops, and restaurants. However, unlike other cities its size, Bristol isn’t surrounded by the traditional suburban sprawl, so a thirty minute drive from the city centre finds you in the middle of sheep pastures, dairy farms, and quaint villages. Also nearby are the cities of Bath and Cardiff, so it’s truly the best of all possible worlds.

Aside from your upcoming books, are there any other projects you’d like to share with us?

It’s not a project, but I am terribly excited to be participating in the first annual Greenway Literary Festival at Agatha Christie’s holiday home in Brixham, Devon on June 5, 2019. Discussing my books at the home of the Queen of Crime is not only both a tremendous honour and thrill, but it’s also completely surreal and more than a bit intimidating.

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What are some of your favourite Amy Patricia Meade books? Was there anything in this interview that you found interesting or surprising?