I admit it.
I don’t care for cat mysteries and mysteries where the sleuth is a candymaker, a veterinarian’s assistant or a scrapbooker. But there is a market for these. There are people who love them, people who would no doubt think I’m really strange if they knew I didn’t share their passion for these light reads.
But then along comes Jess Lourey, a fine storyteller from Minnesota who writes mysteries that are light confectioneries, mysteries that are—to me—funny. She writes them because these are the mysteries she likes to read. When Lourey can murder Princess Kay of the Milky Way—Minnesota’s version of Wisconsin’s Alice in Dairyland—in a butter-carving room at the state fair, you and I as readers know we’re in for a rollicking good time.
I caught up with Jess when she came to a book and film festival just up the road from where I live. Read on and enjoy the story that grew out of her presentation and our conversation afterward.
Oh the things we say
We value our writing time, and no one more so than Jess Lourey, the creator of the humorous Murder by the Month mystery series.
She’s a single mom and holds down a full-time teaching job, teaching sociology and English at a junior college in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Lourey once told a magazine writer interviewing her for a story that she doesn’t shower on weekends because showering would take too much time away from her writing.
“And wouldn’t you know,” she told fans at the Edgerton (Wisconsin) Book & Film Festival, “‘She Never Showers on Weekends’ became the headline for the story. I was so embarrassed.”
Lourey broke through in 2006 when her agent placed May Day, the first book in what would become her series, with Midnight Ink. She followed that with June Bug, Knee High by the Fourth of July, August Moon, and September Mourn. September Mourn will come out in September 2009. All the stories are set in and around the fictional town of Battle Lake, Minnesota, which Lourey is quick to say is similar to Paynesville, Minnesota, the small town where she grew up.
“I wanted to write a locked-room mystery,” she said of September Mourn, “so I have Princess Kay of the Milky Way [who comes from Battle Lake] killed in the locked butter-carving room at the Minnesota State Fair.”
Someone murdering Princess Kay in the butter-carving room? Sounds like a plot from the board game Clue. Colonel Mustard did it with a rope. You know Lourey is going to have you laughing.
“I write humor because I would rather read humor than a straight ahead, serious crime novel,” she said. “My strong suit is humor. For example, I don’t think I could write a thriller, and I don’t need to because there are other writers doing that just fine. I have something to contribute with the humor.”
Several fans asked whether Lourey is committed to finishing the series, meaning does she intend to write seven more books for October through April?
Maybe.
“I have ideas for five novels to work on, including a new series—a literary mystery series about a professor who recreates Poe murders on a college campus,” she said.
But those may have to wait because Lourey is writing the second draft of a historical novel tentatively titled Till the Rivers Stop Running, about a Lakota girl taken from her family and shipped to a government-run boarding school. The school’s aim was to forcibly assimilate Indian children into the white culture, thus destroying tribal life. “That was a practice that shattered families and cultures and continued until as recently as the 1960s. The setting for my novel is South Dakota because the cold beauty of the landscape reflects instead of absorbs a lot of the horror of the practice and because I can drive over to do firsthand research,” she said.
Lourey’s target is to have that novel to her agent by December 2009.
To fill the time between finishing September Mourn and the big push on Till the Rivers Stop Running that is months away, Lourey is doing something she said at the Book & Film Festival she would not do. She’s writing a thriller. Said Lourey two months later, “When a good idea comes knocking, you have to write it.”
* To find out more about Lourey and her novels, go to her website: jesslourey.com
© Jerry Peterson.
