Five Questions with Abby L. Vandiver

The cozy mystery author talks food and publishing

Abby L. Vandiver, who also writes under the pen name Abby Collette, authored some of my favorite cozy mysteries of the past few years.

For the uninitiated, cozy mysteries almost always feature an amateur female sleuth living in a small town attempting to solve a murder that affects her personally. The books have a theme — often baking, cooking or crafting — that connects to the sleuth’s profession or hobby. I’ve read cozies about everything from snow globe collectors to interior designers. As the genre name suggest, cozy mysteries avoid gore, explicit sex and coarse language. They’re the perfect books to curl up with under a blanket while sipping on a cup of tea.

Abby’s books are the platonic ideal of a cozy mystery series. The Ice Cream Parlor Mysteries star Bronwyn Crewse, a recent MBA grad who has taken over her family’s ice cream shop and, unfortunately, keeps stumbling over dead bodies. And Abby just kicked off a new series in November with Body and Soul Food (puns abound in cozy mysteries), about a pair of recently reunited twins who attempt to solve a murder while opening their new bookstore and café.

Abby also served as the editor of Midnight Hour, an anthology of crime stories written by authors of color, published last November. It includes a number of creepy, chilling installments, including one that author David Heska Wanbli Weiden first previewed in a Q&A with me last summer.

Abby was kind enough to talk with me about all things cozy mystery and her path to publishing. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve self-published books and published traditionally. What was your path like?

I never thought of myself as a writer. I said that to my ex-husband the other day and he said, ‘I did.’

I used to be a lawyer and an economics professor. I was a persuasive writer. I could win things on appeal. I knew if I had to write a motion or a pleading, I had a good chance of winning because I was good at that, but I never associated writing with a profession other than law.

Then, I got sick and I couldn’t get out of bed. It took four years for them to find out what was wrong with me. While I was sick, my daughter called and said, ‘We have your book in my garage.’ I thought she was talking about a library book, but it was a book I had written probably 12 years earlier. I decided to re-type it because it was something I could do in bed. As I retyped it, I was really enjoying the story, so I decided to self-publish it.

Self-publishing had gotten really easy because of Amazon. You could just upload that book. It was that easy.

I submitted a copy of one of my self-published books as a part of a giveaway a small press was running. That small press, Henery Press, came to me after and asked to publish my book. I said no because I didn’t want to tie up those earnings in a publishing house. Instead, I wrote the first four chapters of what became my Romaine Wilder series. They liked it and published it.

What draws you to cozy mysteries?

Initially, I just had a book in my head. I don’t know where I got it from. It was the first book I wrote. And the title, In The Beginning, shows you I didn’t know what I was doing because if you Google it, I’m competing with God.

It’s a sci-fi mystery and I felt it required some violence and swearing that I wasn’t comfortable with. I wrote three books in the series, the Mars Origin series. Then I started to look around for other mystery genre options.

I found the cozy mystery and it had everything for me. They have their own formula. Quaint city, quaint little town. They're a lot of times humorous. They're lighthearted. They're quick, fun, short reads, and it fit what I wanted to do, but it still was mystery oriented, where my heart lies.

I recently wanted to write something with a bit more heft, so I tried to write a dark mystery. But then, someone sent me a story about where wild peaches grow. It has the backdrop of Natchez, Mississippi and I thought ‘I’m going to write that book.’ So, I branched into woman’s fiction. Where the Wild Peaches Grow comes out in August under the name Cade Bentley.

I sometimes find heroines in cozy mysteries a little infuriating. They keep putting themselves in danger! How do you go about crafting a smart sleuth like Bronwyn?

I am an advocate of staying away from danger. Who walks into danger? Who says I'm going over to the killer’s house? No one does that.

I always try to make my protagonist smart. They always have a graduate degree of some kind. So, they're just not going to walk into danger. In all of my books, my amateur sleuth is always reluctant. There's someone that pushes them because there's always someone in your life who says ‘Let’s do it. I’ll go with you.’

In my self-published books, you’ll never see a protagonist going to the murderer or having to face any kind of danger. When I got to Penguin [a publishing house], I wrote one of my regular cozy mystery books, with a reluctant sleuth and no danger at the end. They asked me to add some drama, so I added the scene you now see at the end of Deadly Inside Scoop.

Culinary mysteries like yours are really popular with readers. Why do you think that is?

Culinary lit makes you feel a part of the story because you can connect with it. I think it’s a sensory thing. You know how the food that’s described smells and tastes. It draws you in and makes you feel like you're there.

How do you balance the food part of your books with the mystery?

Food is required in my life. I've always been overweight, but everything coupled with food. When I'm sad, I need food for comfort. When I'm happy, I need food to celebrate.

It's my culture. As Blacks, we get together and make big pots of food. It's just something we do. There are lots of cultures that are like that. We don’t have to have a reason to celebrate. It’s such a part of my life; it was easy to intertwine them.

And I think it makes the stories more realistic. I read in an article once that your characters should deal with money, go to the bathroom and eat something. It makes them real.

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Thanks to Abby for talking with me. You can purchase her books here and follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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