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that's not enough, Maya's The Art of Deceit (a previous Daphne winner) just won the 2015 New England Readers Award for Unpublished Mystery/Suspense.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
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?
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?
