Mindy Quigley

Category: Uncategorized

  • Most Likely to Succeed… in Murder

    With the launch of my latest Deep Dish Mystery, Sleep in Heavenly Pizza, I’ve been getting ready to trot out Ye Olde Dog and Pony Show once again. I’ve observed previously that being a professional writer is essentially running a small business. Things like creating social media content, preparing for events, doing my taxes, and tending to relationships with booksellers, editors, bloggers, and readers—are necessary parts of the job. A lot of writers especially hate the task of pimping a new release, figuring out ways to get it on readers’ radar screens without looking like a shameless huckster.

    I get it. For some writers, doing publicity smacks of lacking writerly integrity. Surely, James Joyce would never do an Instagram reel where he pretended to be several different varieties of cheese??? For many others, promoting your work feels too much like promoting yourself, which can be a terrifying prospect. Writers are often sensitive, introspective, and introverted, qualities that are at odds with the demands of publicity.

    Can I tell you something?

    <<looks from side to side>>

    <<lowers voice>>

    I actually like doing publicity.

    Yes, sometimes promotion feels like time stolen from the actual writing. But mostly, I regard it as a welcome break, a chance to build my creative muscles in a different way. Plus, as my sisters will surely aver, I’ve always been an attention-hogging ham (aka middle child) and almost nothing embarrasses me. Thus, I will gladly enlist every resource at my disposal in the service of getting the word out. Puppies, adorable children–it’s all fair game.

    All this is to say that I was delighted to appear recently on the Midwest Writers Room podcast for an episode of Chapter Break and do funny character voices. I hope you enjoy it!

    I also had the pleasure of being featured on Fresh Fiction’s “Character Most Likely To…” segment.

    Here’s a little taste of that. You can click the link above to read more.

    Most likely to be an agent of chaos?

    Butterball the cat! This chonky orange mischief-maker is a staple in every book. Whether he’s knocking over crucial evidence in SIX FEET DEEP DISH or unexpectedly leading the way to a clue in ASHES TO ASHES, CRUST TO CRUST, Butterball’s accidental heroism is legendary. Just don’t be fooled—his real priorities are snacks and snuggles, solving murders is just a side gig.

    Thanks for reading. Now it’s time for me to harness the dogs and ponies (and adorable children), because we’ve got more shillin’ to do!

  • Feral cats, kosher wine, and other terrifying topics

    Feral cats, kosher wine, and other terrifying topics

    I was interviewed a few weeks ago for writer Tara Laskowski’s blog. In addition to being quick-witted and kind-hearted, Tara is also a master of twisty suspense.  Her novels include The Weekend Retreat and The Mother Next Door,  which the NYT Book Review called a “polished and entertaining read.” As it happens, Tara herself is also polished and entertaining. She’s won the Agatha Award, the Macavity Award, and the Anthony Award and has been a finalist for a butt-ton of other fancy awards. 

    And now, on to the interview!

    Tara: What is your greatest fear as a writer?

    Me: Where to start? That everyone will hate my books. That I’ll become mentally or physically ill and not be able to meet my deadline. That I’ll forget how to write. That I’ll write something that pisses people off and then they’ll hate me. That I’ll be a failure and have wasted my life pursuing this dream. That I’ll be a success and not know how to handle it. That the mild arthritis in my fingers will become debilitating and I won’t be able to type my books. That my poor eyesight will become even worse and I won’t be able to see the computer screen. That I’ll make a stupid mistake in a book and no one at the press will catch it and it’ll go to print that way and everyone will think I’m dumb and careless. That my writing peers will hate my books. That readers will hate my books. That my family will hate my books. That I’ll die alone and stray cats will gnaw at my decaying corpse for weeks before someone calls the cops about a suspicious stench and they come and shovel what remains of me into a five-gallon bucket. Wait, what was the question again? 

    Tara: What’s your favorite horror movie or television series?

    Me: When I was younger, I was obsessed with Dark Shadows. Maybe that’s more of a gothic romance than a pure horror show, though? Anyway it’s got sexy vampires and a governess-wealthy dude romance à la Jane Eyre, and a dual timeline sitch that’s akin to Outlander. BUT DID I MENTION THE SEXY VAMPIRES?

    To find out my plans for world domination and learn why I’m careful what I say into a mirror, read the rest of the interview on Tara Laskowski’s “What Scares You” blog!

    What Scares You, Mindy Quigley?

  • I, for sure, never made a chinchilla live in a Barbie camper van.

    Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by CanvasRebel Magazine. Read below for my take on Eighties parenting, Norman Lear, and writing lessons learned (and unlearned)….

    CR: Mindy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

    MQ: My childhood spanned the 80s and 90s, when benign neglect was the dominant parenting style. My mom and dad didn’t micromanage my schoolwork or bog me down with organized extra-curriculars. For a good portion of my childhood, they probably didn’t even know where I was.*

    That parenting style freed me to read and watch TV for countless hours every day, unfettered by parental expectations. The fact that they worked the kinds of jobs people without college degrees tend to work—secretary, restaurant server, auto parts store manager, etc.—was also a blessing. When it came time for me to get a job, I chose work that interested me, with no fear that my parents would judge my choices and no expectation of making giant sums of money.

    *Definitely not climbing into that broken storm drain by Jenny’s house! Nor “borrowing” Christine’s brother’s chinchilla and trying to make it live in a Barbie camper van! Those things for sure didn’t happen.

    Read the rest of the interview on the CanvasRebel website…

  • Made you LOL!

    Made you LOL!

    My favorite kind of reader feedback is when someone tells me they laughed out loud at something I wrote and scared their dog/spit their soda/made fellow passengers on the subway doubt their sanity.

    LOLs are my love language.

    So I was especially heartened when Holly Adams, the awesomely talented narrator of my Mount Moriah Mysteries and my Deep Dish Mysteries, sent me this outtake of her recording a scene from Ashes to Ashes, Crust to Crust.

    For reference, the dialogue in question involves sous chef Sonya talking to her uncle Avi, an attorney who has come to Geneva Bay to help a friend caught in a sticky situation with the local police. The scene is supposed to read as written below.

    “Why did you let her talk?” Sonya said. “You named your dog Miranda, for God’s sake. The only dog in existence named after a constitutional procedure. You always told me not to answer questions if I ever got arrested.”

    Avi threw up his hands. “So I’m supposed to tackle your lady friend and stuff a gag in her mouth? I told her to shut her yapper. She didn’t listen to me. Just like your Aunt Ruthie, or little Miranda for that matter. She ate a full tube of your aunt’s red lipstick, did your mom tell you? Now I gotta buy new carpet for the rumpus room.”

    Ashes to Ashes, Crust to Crust

    I admit that I, too, sometimes get a giggle out of my characters. The reaction is weirdly detached. I don’t feel like I’m chuckling at my own cleverness or patting myself on the back. I’m laughing at this hilarious group of people who happen to be fictional and live inside my head.

    My husband walked by my office one day and caught me in the act–alone, laughing at my computer screen. “You won’t believe what Butterball did!” I said, pointing to the Word document. When I set out to write that scene, I had a vague idea of where it was going, but I had no inkling that Butterball the cat, out of nowhere, would decide to pull off some guffaw-worthy acrobatic antics. That scene is near the end of book three in the series, Public Anchovy Number One, which hits bookstore shelves on December 26th. Hope you’ll find it as LOL-able reading as I did writing.

  • Thanks for nothin’, J.R.R. Tolkien – More of my interview with audiobook narrator Holly Adams

    When I’m thinking up a new character for one of books, I tend to give a lot of thought to how the person talks. In the Deep Dish Mysteries, for example, you know that if someone says, “For Pete’s sake…” that’s Wisconsin farmgirl Melody Schacht. And if a character busts out a witty play on words that makes you laugh and groan at the same time, that’ll be straight from the mouth of sous chef/BFF Sonya. I’m also fascinated by accents, especially unusual ones like the dialect of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, which features heavily in A Death in Duck, from my Mount Moriah Mysteries Series.

    As I’m inventing this panoply of distinctive voices, I should probably spare a thought for my longtime collaborator, audiobook narrator Holly Adams. Over the years, Holly has gamely voiced whatever characters I’ve thrown her way. From a gravelly old man on his deathbed to a toddler squeaking out her first complete sentences. A lesser narrator might balk, but not Holly. Bulgarian accent? Sure. Mobster with a pro wrestler physique and a hockey mom inflection? Bring it on. I’m lucky to have her talent at my disposal. Holly has previously shared some of her secrets for giving each character a unique voice. But coming up with accents and voices isn’t the only challenge audiobook narrators face.

    In addition to cozy mysteries like mine, Holly records a lot of non-fiction and a LOT of fantasy books. It never occurred to me how challenging it is for a narrator to cope with page after page of made-up names and places. Can you imagine being handed a book from the Game of Thrones series and having to say Daenerys Targaryen five times fast? Harder still, in her non-fiction work, she has to cope with real people’s names in languages that she doesn’t natively speak. In those instances, she has to be even more diligent about getting things right, because there are actual people (besides the author) who’ll know if she gets it wrong.

  • Tongue Gymnastics with Holly Adams

    A few weeks ago, I sat down on Zoom with the extraordinary actor and performer Holly Adams. Holly has narrated almost 200 audiobooks, including both the Mount Moriah Mysteries and the Deep Dish Mysteries. Holly and I covered a lot of ground during our chat, from the challenges of pronouncing made-up place and character names in epic fantasy novels to ways to subliminally make your audience hold their breath.

    I “met” Holly in 2014, when I heard her audition tape for the Audible recording of A Murder in Mount Moriah. You can hear an excerpt of her performance here. Her vibrant personality just zinged out of my computer speakers. There was no question of hiring anyone else once I heard that audition. Everything about that audition tape was great, but one thing that absolutely blew me away was Holly’s ability to give each character an instantly-recognizable way of speaking.

    I’ll be posting more soon, but here’s a sneak preview of Holly showing how she moves sound around her mouth to create distinct character voices without changing her accent.

  • I found the perfect place to kill a bunch of people.

    I found the perfect place to kill a bunch of people.

    In my last post, I wrote about stumbling upon the adorable town of Maysville, Kentucky, which is in fact so cute it could be the eighth member of BTS. Today, I will tell you about my quest to find a similar place, so that I could kill people there.

    Warning for readers who are sensitive to disturbing cow trivia: This post will also feature details about history’s only mass-murdering bovine.

    When I originally pitched my latest series to St. Martin’s Press, I knew I wanted the restaurant at the heart of the books to serve deep-dish pizzas, which to me, necessitated setting the series in the home of deep-dish: Chicago. Fairly early in the process, I’d settled on centering the action in the Hyde Park neighborhood. It’s an interesting part of town, culturally rich and ethnically diverse. I always like to throw real tidbits of a place’s past into my books, and Hyde Park teems with fascinating history. I decided to make one of the main characters a great-grandson of the legendary Chi-town gangster Al Capone, who frequently conducted business in Hyde Park’s Shoreland Hotel.

    The overall feedback from the editor on my pitch was reassuringly positive. The publisher loved the characters, the chonky cat, and the deep-dish pizzas. The only thing they didn’t love was the setting. This type of book usually takes place in a small, tightly-knit community. As my agent said, “somewhere people can relax and take a mental vacation.” I resisted. One of the most popular and durable cozy mystery series out there, Cleo Coyle’s Coffeehouse Mysteries, is set in Manhattan! How could I do a deep-dish murder mystery series without setting it in Chicago?

    My aunt Sandra and my husband arrived at the answer independently, both encouraging me to consider relocating the series to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I resisted at first, but as I delved deeper into the area’s history, I began to see the appeal.

    Lake Geneva is nestled in rolling, lake-dotted countryside about 90 minutes’ drive north of Chicago. The Chicago connections are myriad. European settlement around the lake developed in several phases. One was as a series of “camps” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the middle classes in the Chicago area grew, they started forming associations called “clubs” or “camps,” in which members would group together to buy land where members could hunt, fish, and boat. Some of the camps were formed around employees of one particular business or from one particular town or area of the city. For example, Lake Geneva hosted an “Elgin Camp” and a “Congress Club” where people built cabins or houses or even collections of mansions where they and their families could pass the summer holidays.

    Another big driver of growth happened following the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. The fire, which urban myth attributes to the errant kick of a lantern by one of Mrs. O’Leary’s cows, killed 300 people. The veracity of the cow story is highly questionable and rooted in the anti-Irish bias of the time. Hard to believe that the Irish were kind enough to share their magically delicious cereal and their adorable accents with America, and all they got in return was decades of vicious prejudice, amirite? Although the bovine origin of the fire is almost definitely false, what is not disputed is the utter destruction caused by the blaze. It destroyed more than 3 square miles of the downtown, including 17,000 structures. One hundred thousand people were left homeless.

    As parts of the city would be uninhabitable for years as the city was rebuilt, many of Chicago’s wealthiest families shifted their operations to Lake Geneva. Some expanded pre-existing dwellings. Others built brand-new mansions. The fire coincided with the completion of a rail line from Chicago to Lake Geneva, making travel back and forth easier than ever.

    Speaking of transit, another quirk of geography and history deepened Lake Geneva’s Windy City connections. From 1920 to 1933, a constitutional amendment prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages throughout the U.S. So of course all Americans immediately stopped drinking as soon as that amendment was passed.

    Hahahahahahahahaha! <<wipes tears>> Just kidding.

    As anyone with even a borrowed brain cell could have guessed, it was a super dumb idea that allowed underworld criminality to thrive. Figures like Al Capone became extraordinarily wealthy, a billionaire in today’s money, by controlling the illegal booze supplies that poured into the Lower 48 from Canada. Capone also ran any number of other criminal enterprises, from brothels to casinos to protection rackets, and the availability of booze underpinned those businesses as well. The vast majority of Chicago’s alcohol came via routes through Michigan and Wisconsin.

    Lake Geneva and its surroundings proved not only a convenient pit stop along this smuggling route, the area was also considered a good place for gangsters like Capone, Baby Face Nelson, and Bugs Moran to lay low when things in the big city got too hot.

    Today, the Chicago -><- Lake Geneva connection is as strong as ever. About 80% of the tourists that the lake’s economy thrives on are visitors from the Windy City.

    After I got over my initial reluctance to move the DEEP DISH MURDERS out of Chicago, I realized that glamourous, scenic, and idyllic Lake Geneva (rendered in the books in lightly fictionalized form as “Geneva Bay”) would be the perfect place for me to start my murder spree.

    So look out Wisconsin, here I come!

    The first book in the series, SIX FEET DEEP DISH, is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

  • I discovered the Hello Kitty of towns

    The Quigley clan traveled to England over Christmas to see my husband’s family, so our miniature Schnauzer spent the holidays with my parents. She had a fantastic time and gained a mind-boggling amount of weight. Like three pounds in six weeks. That’s about 15-20% of her body mass. Was she running an IV drip of bacon grease? Did she discover a hidden cache of Egg McMuffins buried under my parents’ garage? There will be a future blog post on America’s pet obesity epidemic.

    Anyway, when it was time for us to reclaim our dog, my parents kindly offered to meet us halfway between their house and ours. Ten hours separate Blacksburg and Chicago, so I spent some time with Google Maps trying to find a location that would not only be roughly halfway, but also a nice place to spend the New Year’s weekend. I discovered Maysville, Kentucky.

    Maysville, Kentucky is cute AF.

    Y’all, this town. I’ve traveled extensively in the eastern US and have spent a lot of time in Kentucky over the years. And yet I had never even heard of Maysville — a town so adorable, it makes Hello Kitty look like a mangy old fleabag in comparison. I’m talking quaint storefronts. I’m talking cozy cafés. I’m talking a bustling Main Street, all tarted up for Christmas.

    At this point, you may be asking why my writing blog has suddenly become a travel blog. You may be asking if I’ve been paid off by the Maysville Chamber of Commerce. Alas, no, but I do want to use this opportunity to let it be known that I am very amenable to bribery in any form.

    There’s not a lot around Maysville. Like if a medieval cartographer drew the area around it, they’d draw some squiggles and a sea monster in that part of the map and call it a day. Maysville, it turns out, benefitted from some fortunate geography, being one of the few Kentucky towns along the Ohio River that could host a steamboat port. That led to it becoming a hub for commerce. Industries, such as wrought iron manufacturing, grew, and the town flourished. Over time, more transport links developed and the town became a regional hub. Somehow, although Americans no longer have a great appetite for steamboat travel or decorative ironmongery, the town has retained its charm.

    Which brings me to my writing, and to a town that is near and dear to me: Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Wisconsin has lakes by the absolute pantsload. You can barely move in that state without squelching your flip-flops into some little swimming hole or another.

    Like many working-class kids from the Chicago suburbs, I often spent summer weekends at my friends’ and family members’ lake houses in Wisconsin, passing days tubing, canoeing, and cultivating the kind of radioactive, three-alarm sunburn that was probably outlawed sometime in the late 1990s when parents collectively discovered SPF.

    All around Lake Geneva, there are nice little towns with nice little lakes. But if you were visiting, say, the nearby town of Elkhorn, you’d have no idea that you were mere minutes away from a really incredible place. Don’t get me wrong. Elkhorn is lovely. In fact, I got married there. But that part of Wisconsin goes like this: cornfield, little lake, bunch of cows, dinky town, GIGANTIC EFFING MANSIONS AND SPLENDIFEROUS LAKE, cornfield, little lake, bunch of cows*, dinky town, etc. You’re hypnotized by the monotonous repeat loop of cows and corn and then you hit Lake Geneva and Hubba-Waaaah….? Mansions.

    In the late nineteenth century, Geneva Lake drew Chicago’s lords of the realm—the Wrigleys, the Schwinns, the Vicks. These folks built straight-up, thirty-guest-bedrooms-and-a-butler-named-Jerome mansions around the lake. Why did they pick that spot? Why did Lake Geneva grow into the same kind of lovely, random pocket of affluence that Maysville, Kentucky did? And what does any of this have to do with my writing?

    Stay tuned. I’ll answer these and other burning* questions in my next post…

    *Burning. Cows. It’s a clue!

  • How I became Julia Child(ish)

    How I became Julia Child(ish)

    You may know me from such culinary disasters as:

    • That time I set a baguette on fire

    • That time my oven broke on Thanksgiving Day and I hacked apart a frozen turkey and cooked pieces of it into a rubbery jerky using my toaster oven

    • That time I set a kitchen towel on fire

    • That time I put a rancid pork loin in the crockpot without realizing it had gone bad and came home to a dead body smell that permeated the apartment walls for weeks

    I am not known for my cooking. Or maybe I am, but not in a good way. When my girlfriends and I used to have regular potlucks, I got put in charge of bringing the salad. Then I was demoted to buying the bread. Finally, I was told that there was no need to bring anything that might actually be ingested–my sparkling company would suffice.

    So naturally, I am now writing a mystery series set in a restaurant, featuring a protagonist who is an incredible cook. When the opportunity to create the Deep-Dish Mysteries came my way, I thought to myself, “You’ve written stories about murders without ever killing anyone, surely you can write about cooking without really knowing a choux from a roux.” I could already describe basic techniques, having been a Food Network obsessive since Emeril’s first Bam! So I took a deep dive into research about cooking, culinary school, and becoming a chef. I hit up friends for stories about working in restaurants, and got behind-the-scenes tours of working kitchens. I inhabited the headspace of a chef, and tried to capture in words what the world looked like lit up in a technicolor of scent and flavor.

    Then the series editor told me off-handedly that I would need to write original recipes related to dishes described in the book, because “it’s good for marketing.”

    Imagine you managed to write a pretty decent book about Mozart. You’re feeling good about it. The fairytale beauty and courtly intrigue of 18th-century Salzburg sparkles on the page. You’ve found fresh ways to describe the hectic, almost giddy melodies of his overture to the Marriage of Figaro. You’re confident readers will weep at your description of the final, tortured months of the great composer’s life as he succumbed to his fatal illness. Then your editor is like, “Oh, by the way, score an original symphony so we can include it in the back matter for marketing.”

    Okay, maybe writing pizza recipes isn’t quite on a par with that, but suffice it to say, the Quigleys have been eating a lot of deep-dish pizza this year. There were notable highs, like when I finally hit upon a crust recipe that reliably rises or when I had the profound epiphany that there really is no limit to the amount of cheese a deep-dish pizza can contain.

    You can’t put too much cheese on a deep-dish pizza.

    There were also, however, many, many lows, like the time I set out to make a bratwurst and cheddar pretzel crust pizza and instead produced a cardboard bowl containing a greasy orange slurry.

    I was fortunate in a way that the global pandemic pushed back my publication date to Fall 2022, giving me extra time to research recipes, refine ideas, and practice, practice, practice. And all that kitchen time has heightened my understanding of my characters. I now really know that yeast is a mysterious little beast of an organism whose vicissitudes can make or break your whole day. I know with painful clarity that finding the perfect balance of salt and spice in a sauce can be damn tricky. I inhabit these people in a way I could not have if I hadn’t been forced to do their work. Makes me wonder if I should try to pull off a couple of murders as research? JK, future law enforcement folks!

    In sum, while I can’t promise that I will never set fire to another loaf of bread, I can take pride in the fact that the poundage I packed on during the pandemic was for a higher purpose. Marketing.