Hooked on Mysteries with Quirky Characters and Curious Careers

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It was at a small writer’s workshop in New York City when one of the instructors, Paula Munier (senior agent for Talcott Notch Literary Services and the USA Today bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mystery series) introduced a literary agent to our group of twenty.  The idea was to pitch our work to the agent in hopes he might want to represent one of us.  I think of pitches like the Hunger Games of publishing—survival depends on slashing your competition to bits with just a few short sentences that you hope are lethal enough to convince an agent that your book is better than the rest and worthy of publishing.

Midway into my pitch, the guest agent, Adam Chromy, President of Movable Type Management interrupted and said, “No-one likes Luke.”  Luke was my protagonist, an online reporter and quite frankly, as I came to learn–boring.  Chromy then said that if I would write my secondary character, an obituary writer, as the protagonist, he would sign me on the spot. My jaw would have dropped if my mouth hadn’t been uttering the words, “Don’t you want to see if I can write first?”  

My future agent had done his homework and already knew I had made a career as a freelance writer so he was less worried about my skill than he was about my willingness to change my entire book. From the moment I began rewriting my Deadly Deadlines series about an obituary writer who solves mysteries in her Hallmark worthy small town, I recognized the opportunity my character’s profession offered.  Who would be better positioned to stumble upon murder than Winter Snow, an obituary writer with deadly skills. 

That experience led me to take stock of some of my favorite books and I began to see a pattern in the novels I liked to read.  The most memorable characters had jobs I knew little or nothing about. Whether I’m reading about a crossword puzzle author, a bookbinder, a forensic anthropologist, a bartender, or a psychiatrist, I tend to lean toward stories whose protagonists lead me down new and interesting paths. These books have main characters who are positioned to come across mystery and murder.  And these are books with characters driven by their unique personalities and use their distinctive skills to solve a crime.   

Take A Death in Door County and Death in the Dark Woods, the first two Monster Hunter mysteries in an exciting series by Annelise Ryan, as an example.  When her contract for her Maddie Winston and Helping Hands series was not renewed, Ryan wanted to find a character to write about who would give readers a taste of something they probably wouldn’t sample in their daily lives. The idea for cryptozoologist Morgan Carter was born during a conversation with her agent who “loved the idea.”  Reading Ryan’s book sent me straight to google to confirm that yes, cryptozoology is a real profession.  In short it is the study of animals rumored to exist—think Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster.  You don’t need special education or training to start searching for “cryptids” as they are called. Ryan, however, loaded her character with scientific degrees, hands on training and a strange family history thereby giving her cryptozoologist plenty of opportunity to confirm or disprove the deaths pinned on the rumored beasts.  

There’s much to be learned about the not-so-unusual creatures in TM Dunn’s psychological thriller Her Father’s Daughter.  It would be a spoiler to even hint at how Dunn’s loving father/daughter exterminating team use their special skills in this book.  However, suffice to say, it is their interesting profession that allows them to move around in places most of us don’t usually go. Dunn came up with her idea because her father was an exterminator and she “loved listening to his stories about the people he met or the strange situations he encountered on the job.”  

Speaking of parents, my mother was a neat freak on steroids. When my sisters and I cleaned the room we shared, I would make them stand in the doorway with eyes closed and then the second they blinked open, they had to identify the first thing they saw. Often it was an offending hairbrush slightly askew or a crinkle in the bedspread that no-one but our mother would ever notice.   Unless, of course, you are Molly Gray, the hyper-orderly housekeeper who lacks social skills in The Maid by Nina Prose.  Molly’s profession, fed by her quirky personality puts her in a place where she notices everything that is amiss, whether it is an interrupted routine or a pillow out of place.  Molly’s job as a maid at a large hotel positions her to notice the subtle clues a murderer has left behind. 

Each of the four main characters in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series have interesting former careers.  Joyce was a nurse who can identify a possible cause of death before the coroner even arrives.  Elizabeth is a no-nonsense ex-spy.  Ron is a former union activist and Ibrahim a psychiatrist.  These characters are thrust together in Cooper’s Chase, a retirement home.  Their often-peculiar personalities and varying backgrounds make the likelihood of repeatedly finding trouble more believable.  Even better, their former careers take readers down a number of interesting paths while the characters bring a variety of crime-solving skills to the table.

Protagonists with distinctive professions certainly keep Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn moving at a fast clip.  Four women assassins who’ve aged out of their jobs get forced back into it when their lives are threatened.  InDeath Comes to Marlow by Robert Thorogood a crossword puzzle creator who likes to swim nude uses her puzzle solving skills to recognize a murder and identify the killer.

The right profession creates memorable characters that readers love and can take a plot straight where it needs to go. Consider some of these additional favorites: the high-powered realtor and her single-mom daughter in Mother-Daughter Murder Night; the owner of a bar as in Cathi Stoler’s clever On the Rocks series; a forensic anthropologist in Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan thrillers; or a single mom struggling to make ends meet as a romance mystery writer in Elle Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan books.  And hopefully an obituary writer named Winter Snow in my debut novel, The Last Word (February 2024) by Gerri Lewis.  

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