Small towns provide fertile ground for mysteries by Dean L. Hovey

 Before the first chapter of "Taxed to Death" I inserted a quote to help the readers understand life in a rural area. 

"Living in a small town is like living in a large family of rather uncongenial relations. Sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes it’s perfectly awful…” -Joyce Dennys

My purpose in chosing Pine County as the setting for a series of books was simple: There are enough books about New York, L.A., and San Francisco. There is a unique "texture" to life in a small town. If your parents weren't born in the town, you'll hear, "You're not from here," more often than a city dweller would ever believe. On the other hand, if you are "from here" you can never escape your heritage. Any crime or social gaffe ever committed by your parents, aunts, uncles, or cousins is assumed to be part of your genetic makeup. I'm serious! "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

Having moved from the suburbs of St. Paul/Minneapolis to the area where my mother grew up, has offered me the benefit of having local roots, while being able to step back and see the foibles of life in our small town. 

I love my morning commute. If it's rush hour, I may see two pickup trucks on the way into town. I love sitting in a cafe or coffee shop pretending to write on my computer while listening to the conversations around me. If I were ever to run out of plots, all I'd have to do is listen to the conversations and I'd have something new. When I introduce myself as the local mystery writer and say I've run out of material, I can't capture the ideas as fast as they're fired at me.

During a recent lunch with friends, a reader walked up to me while we were eating and told me how much she'd enjoyed "Fatal Business" the 9th Pine County mystery. After the reader left, my friends from the big city kidded me about having meals interrupted by my adoring fans. I assured them that I loved hearing from people, and stepping away from lunch for two minutes to get some spontaneous praise is a true pleasure.

One challenge of using small-town settings is creating "nefarious criminals" who aren't identified by readers as "local characters". During a recent book event, a woman asked me to sign a book for her sister. I agreed and asked for her sister's name. Her sister is Charlene Jensen, the same name as CJ in my Pine County mysteries. That's happened repeatedly, and in all but one case, we laughed about me creating a fictional character who happens to have the same name as a real person. In the one other case, one of my consultants read a manuscript and fired an email back to me. "You CAN NOT name the drunk art instructor in Whistling Artist after my high school art teacher. Change that character's name!" What are the odds that I'd choose a random name for a tipsy artist and have it be an actual person who had the same occupation as one of the book's more colorful characters. I do put in a disclaimer that my books are entirely the fictional product of my imagination and any resemblance to actual people or events is unintended and coincidental. That's not just boilerplate, it's true.

Returning to "Taxed to Death", I touch on a number of uniquely small-town issues, like someone apparently getting food poisoning after eating at a charity food booth. Or local residents being suspicious of a reclusive religious group, they call a cult, who've purchased an old farmstead. Mix those together with a biker gang who are camping out in a house that's for sale, a missing mother and daughter who left a bloody knife on the kitchen floor, and I had more than enough to keep the Pine County Sheriff's Department occupied for 400 pages.

Check out "Taxed to Death" and my other Pine County mysteries, the Doug Fletcher mysteries, and my Two Harbors cozies at:

Hovey, Dean - BWL Publishing Inc. (bookswelove.net)