Everyone has a back story, a reason for being where we are and how we got there. Characters in books have back stories too. Before Barbara and I wrote The Cemetery Club, Flora and Darcy had a life. Darcy was an investigative reporter for a Dallas newspaper. Her husband Jake’s death was the reason Darcy came back home to Levi, Oklahoma. Flora had been living in the hundred-year old farmhouse in Levi for many years. Her husband, Andy Tucker died twenty years before the story opened, and her dear friend Ben Ventris, just before the opening pages of the book. Both Darcy and Flora had made friends and, in Darcy’s case at least, a few enemies. Of course, there was the romantic attraction between Darcy and Sheriff Grant Hendley that happened years ago but was still a part of their lives. All of this was the back story, or the reason that The Cemetery Club took place when and where it did.
In the first book of my new series, Moonlight Can Be Murder, Nettie returned to her hometown of Ednalee, Oklahoma, because her uncle summoned her. But, Nettie had lived in Atlanta and had witnessed a kidnapping there which just might haunt her in Ednalee. Then, there was Uncle Javin’s house. It is a Victorian and it is old and has a history of its own. There’s a wicked rumor floating about of a young lady who disappeared from the house many years ago. Did she actually elope with a lover or was there another reason she vanished? And, how about the forty-year old murder for which Uncle Javin went to prison? How did that tie in with past events and what’s happening in the present?
Past events, actions of our ancestors and others, our hopes for the future shape who we are today. The connection between past and present is a story of its own. A good back story shapes a good cozy mystery and makes us as readers keep turning pages to find out not only what happened before, but what is going to happen next.
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