An Interview with Maya Corrigan

Scam Chowder

Val Deniston loves the historic Chesapeake Bay town where she lives with her grandfather, the Codger Cook. Running the fitness club’s Cool Down Café—and salvaging the five-ingredient dishes Granddad messes up—keeps her busy. She’s used to his catastrophes in the kitchen, but not in the dining room.

Granddad throws a dinner party to expose a swindler who preys on retirees. When the scammer goes face down in the chowder, his death puts Granddad in the soup. As the other guests clam up, the police gather the ingredients for a murder conviction against him. With his freedom on the line, Granddad and Val dredge up secrets that could save him or get them both killed. 

                                                              http://www.mayacorrigan.com/mystery-series-9660.html

I had the pleasure of chatting with Maya Corrigan at the Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda, Maryland. Maya is the author of the Five Ingredient Mystery Series, featuring Chef Val Denison, who specializes in dishes with only five ingredients. The first book in this delightful series, By Cook or By Crook, was published in 2014 and recently came out in a large print edition. Her second book, Scam Chowder, was released just days ago and she is busy doing book signings. Her five-ingredient recipes are so much in demand, one of them was included in the Mystery Writer’s of America Cookbook. If all that's not enough, Maya's The Art of Deceit (a previous Daphne winner) just won the 2015 New England Readers Award for Unpublished Mystery/Suspense. Congratulations, Maya.

Please welcome Maya Corrigan to WWK.                                                                   Grace Topping

Maya Corrigan

Scam Chowder was so finely plotted that I didn’t know until the final pages the identity of the killer. You amazed me with the number of red herrings you included. Did you start off knowing the identity of the murderer? Which leads me to the question, are you a plotter or pantser?

First, I want to thank you for inviting me as a guest to the Writers Who Kill blog. You came up with great questions, Grace.

Before I write the first chapter, I have a high-level outline of the whole book and know who the murderer is. For every other mystery I’ve written, I’ve ended with the same murderer I started with. Scam Chowder is the exception. When I began, I had a different culprit in mind, but after writing five or six chapters, I changed the murderer and the motive. I guess that means I’m a bit of both—plotter and pantser.

You used clever methods for showing the main characters age and appearance. For example, “It would take a lot to turn [Val’s] cinnamon-colored hair blond.” Do you think it is important to describe a character’s appearance? How much description of characters do you like to read in a book?

Descriptions of the point-of-view character are always tricky. Everything is filtered through the mind of one person, who would not describe herself in the process of an action. It’s hard to imagine anyone thinking “I swept my wavy red hair off my forehead” or “I blinked my blue eyes.” The way around the problem is to make description part of the character’s thoughts about herself. The line you brought up occurs in a scene when Val is sizing up a woman who could compete in a Miss America contest. While admiring the woman’s blond hair woven into an elaborate French braid, Val thinks about her own hard-to-tame brownish hair. She concludes she doesn’t have the patience required to turn her hair into a thing of beauty. With that, the reader doesn’t just get hair description, but a sense of the character’s personality. When reading, I tend to skip over detailed descriptions of characters. I’m never going to remember a character’s eye color unless it’s crucial to the plot or personalities in the story. If it’s not, it shouldn’t be there.

In Scam Chowder, you addressed several social issues: the scamming of senior citizens, adult children or grandchildren moving in with family members to help care for them, and geriatric care management. Can you tell us a little about why you addressed these issues?

Scams against seniors are rampant, underreported, and under-prosecuted crimes. Everyone in my generation has stories about attempted (and often successful) scams against older relatives or neighbors. I tried to incorporate several varieties of scams into the book. The more we are aware of the warning signs of this crime, the better the chance to prevent it. With a 95-year-old mother and a 99-year-old mother-in-law, I have encountered a variety of caregivers and geriatric care managers. My personal experience of the good and the bad among them definitely entered into the book. Neither I nor anyone in my family has ever had an adult child or grandchild move in, but as a member of the sandwich generation, I’ve had a chance to observe interactions between my children and their grandparents. I wanted to capture the grandchild-grandparent relationship in the book because it’s unique and doesn’t enter into many mysteries.

Murder is always a serious subject, but Val’s witty comments made me laugh. Do you purposely include humor, or does it just creep into your writing? Do you have any techniques for injecting humor?

Thank you for saying that. I like hearing that something I wrote made a reader laugh. Most of the humor arises out of the situation and the interactions between the characters as I’m writing. I’ve deliberately set up some recurring opportunities for humor. They include the squabbling between Val and her grandfather, his attempts at cooking, and the fad diets and quirky food preferences of Val’s friends. 

One thing in particular in your writing is your excellent use of good, strong verbs, which I think is one of the hallmarks of good writing. Scam Chowder could be a textbook example for anyone studying writing. Were you a writer before you started writing mysteries?

Using strong verbs is a carryover from my former careers as a writing teacher and a nonfiction writer. Those experiences helped me write fiction, but weren’t sufficient because fiction requires other writing skills that nonfiction doesn’t. Though I’d published academic essays, instructional materials, and brief humorous pieces for a newspaper, I spent years trying to crack the fiction nut. I attended conferences, took workshops, and read how-to books written by successful fiction writers before I arrived at the point of writing a publishable mystery.

Do you do a lot of cooking like your main character, Val? The recipes in your books call for only five ingredients. Do you keep your cooking that simple?

I began collecting easy recipes as a Mom with two part-time jobs and two preschoolers. I also simplified other recipes that had many ingredients so I could cook fast. After the kids were older, I had the time to make more elaborate meals, but I rarely found complicated recipes with many ingredients worth the effort and time. These days I don’t even read a recipe if it has more than a dozen ingredients. The recipes I use over and over have between five and eight ingredients.

You are a strong advocate of people signing up to be organ donors. Can you tell us why this cause is near and dear to your heart?

My grandson required a liver transplant when he was six months old. Fortunately, my son was a good match. The transplant team worked from early morning to until late at night to excise part of my son’s liver and make it work as a replacement for my grandson’s diseased liver. The baby also needed blood vessels from an unknown donor, who helped save a life simply by checking a box on his driver's license. Signing up as an organ donor is a way to give the gift of life to others.  My grandson starts kindergarten in the fall, thanks to his father, the anonymous donor, and his own indomitable spirit.

You’ve set your book in the Chesapeake Bay area. Is this an area you know well, and do you feel using this location helps shape your books?

I enjoy visiting the Eastern Shore of Maryland with its historic towns, the majestic water views, and a cuisine based on local produce and fresh catches from the bay. It’s a rural area that attracts city visitors. The waterfront estates of weekend visitors aren’t far from modest houses and trailers where the less well-to-do live. On the streets of St. Michaels or Oxford, Washington bigwigs bump into watermen, those who make a living by fishing and crabbing. The dynamic between tourists and locals makes the Eastern Shore a great place to set a mystery series. The books take place in a fictional town, Bayport, named for the locale of the Hardy Boys mysteries.

Trivia questions appear in your book and on your web page. Like your characters, are you a trivia quiz competitor and anagram solver?

Anagrams generally defeat me. I like trivia board games though I don’t compete in trivia contests on a regular basis. Subjecting my children to Jeopardy! paid off when my daughter appeared on the show and won, as she put it, the equivalent of two-thirds of her yearly salary in 20 minutes. She’s the trivia queen in the family.

You’ve said “Granddad … may just take over the series if Val doesn’t watch out.” What’s next for Val and Granddad?

In Final Fondue, coming out July 2016, Granddad has rented his spare bedrooms (and Val’s bedroom!) to tourists visiting Bayport’s Tricentennial Festival. He serves chocolate fondue to the arriving visitors, members of a wedding party. For the sweet bridesmaid, the fondue welcome is also a fondue farewell. She’s found dead the first night of the festival under circumstances suggesting the killer might have mistaken her for the bride-to-be…or for Val.

Tell us a bit about your writing. As busy as you are, is your work area tidy or messy?

That’s a question I’d like to skip. You can probably infer the answer from my reluctance to respond. Thank you again for hosting me on your blog.