An Interview with Caroline Taylor

No stranger to the thriller world, veteran author Caroline Taylor is back with her latest thriller with more action, adventure, and narrow escapes. Death in Delmarva (Black Rose Writing, March 21, 2019) will keep you turning the pages until every secret is revealed.

We are delighted to feature this interview with her!

Tell us a little bit about your experience as a female author of the thriller genre. What has it been like for you?

I don’t consider myself a thriller writer, more of a mystery writer whose characters sometimes find themselves in really scary situations. My tendency, unfortunately, is to want my characters to avoid peril, so I waste a lot of time helping them figure a way out of the dilemmas they find themselves in, but often that makes the scene fall flat and the story stumble. I have learned that if my pulse isn’t racing after reading certain scenes that I’ve written, they need a serious injection of terror.

Can you tell us how Death in Delmarva began? The original title was Dead Ringer, correct? Can you walk us through your original vision for the book and explain why some of these changes were made?

My original vision was to have Daphne Dunn be asked to find Charlie Jansen, who, it turns out, is her dead ringer, except for the lip ring and a nasty drug habit. She talks herself into believing that Charlie might actually be related, so the title Dead Ringer was perfect. In early versions of the story, Daphne does not work in a grocery store run by a cousin, so the various elderly characters were a later addition. I kept my early idea of showing the plight of undocumented workers in the poultry industry, how jobs that awful tend to be filled by people who are so desperate they will do anything to survive. In the early version, Beatriz Cabeza de Vaca is already dead on page one. Readers don’t have a chance to get to know her, except through flashbacks. In the revised version, Beatriz herself has a chance to speak, and her story emerges as one that readers can identify with—a woman who married the man she loved and was ostracized, paying a terrible price that ended in her death.

The version that was a finalist for the 2016 FREDDIE award was titled Dead Ringer. But when Black Rose Writing picked up the novel, I discovered that there are literally hundreds of mysteries—some by well-known authors—with the same title. Since I’m a relative unknown, I knew a novel with the same title could not possibly compete.  

Was Death in Delmarva easier to write than the books in your P.J. Smythe series? What unique challenges did you face with this book, if any?

I consider the actual writing to be fun, but it’s never easy. The first P.J. Smythe novel, What Are Friends For?, is a sort of noir spoof, which meant P. J. Smythe had to channel Philip Marlowe while still being 100 percent female. I wrote Jewelry from a Grave very quickly because I wanted it to come out close enough on the heels of the first one that readers would make the connection. The challenge with that novel was having P.J. grow a bit while not actually maturing. With Death in Delmarva, my unique challenge was to transform P.J. Smythe into someone else. That took several rewrites and lots of agonizing about whether it would survive the attempt.

Daphne Dunn, the lead in Death in Delmarva, is a strong female icon. Can you tell us about how you came to write her character?

I happen to believe that women are strong and tough in ways that often do not mimic men—and in ways that do not diminish their femininity. Daphne, like a lot of young women her age, is seeking her place in the world while also trying to make a living. She’s working in a job far beneath her education, but instead of latching onto drugs or alcohol or other self-harming escape mechanisms, she struggles to muddle through—buoyed by the lucky chance to do something fun and challenging: find a woman who looks just like her. In writing the character, I tried to show that she has a big heart, a stubborn streak, and a vivid imagination and displays some very creative thinking about how to solve the problems that confront her.

Are there any similarities between Daphne and P.J. Smythe?

Absolutely. Daphne started out as P.J. But the publisher of the series decided it would no longer publish mysteries. I tried to get an agent or publisher interested in carrying on the series, but one agent told me he had been “burned” when he tried to pick up a series midstream. That was when I decided I might have better luck with a stand-alone. Readers of the series will definitely see a similarity between P.J. and Daphne, between Alicia and Dorothy, and, in some respects, between Uncle Alex and Cousin Andrea.

In Death in Delmarva, there is a female character who commits crimes against undocumented workers and is willing to kill anyone who gets in the way. Why did you choose to make the villain a woman? Do you believe in breaking the old adage that a well-written female character is a likeable one?

I chose to make the villain a woman because the villains in the first two novels were men, and I don’t hate men. I didn’t know there was an adage about female characters having to be likable. One of my favorite characters is Olivia Manning’s Guy Pringle, a good-hearted self-centered academic who isn’t exactly evil, but you don’t like him much. Men certainly don’t have a monopoly on narcissism or sociopathy, after all, so I thought I’d try move beyond the  stereotypical Wicked Witch of the West and create a woman driven by greed and insecurity to commit unspeakable crimes.

Tell us about why you chose to highlight crimes against undocumented workers in this book. Did you want to draw attention to these crimes as they occur in the real world?

Illegal immigration is a “crime” that arises from the desperation of people seeking to escape poverty and danger and find a new life. Unless we are 100 percent American Indian, we are all descended in some fashion from immigrants. The America we live in today was largely built by immigrants. It is still being supported by them, whether they are documented or not. Undocumented workers are employed in jobs that many people will not do: crab picking, chicken processing, housecleaning, picking fruit and vegetables, driving a taxi. Because of their undocumented status, these people are often paid less than minimum wage. They have no way to appeal mistreatment in the workplace, including having their wages shorted. And yet they are guilty of wanting what any normal human being in their position would want: a decent and safe life for themselves and their families.

Did you do any substantial research for Death in Delmarva?

I’d like to say that I did, but it was mostly relying on Google to answer specific questions as the story unfolded. I became familiar with the Delmarva Peninsula from traversing it to the beach every summer. I also consulted a former boyfriend about motorcycles and my sister-in-law about the Spanish that appears in the book

Will you be writing more female-driven books? More of Daphne, perhaps, or more of P.J. Smythe?

Loose Ends and The Typist are both definitely female-driven. I have also written a novel about a woman trying to cope with setbacks during the Great Recession in 2009 Washington, DC, and another novel with the theme of racism and fracking that also started life as a P.J. Smythe mystery. Given my experience with a series, I think I’ll stick to stand-alones.

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Formerly from Washington, D.C., Caroline Taylor is an award-winning writer and editor living in North Carolina. She has written five mysteries–What Are Friends For? (Five Star-Cengage, 2011), Jewelry from a Grave (Five Star-Cengage, 2013), Loose Ends (Moonshine Cove, 2017), The Typist (Black Rose Writing, 2018), and Death in Delmarva (Black Rose Writing, 2019). She is also the author of Enough! Thirty Stories of Fielding Life’s Little Curve Balls (Literary Wanderlust, 2018) and Publishing the Nonprofit Annual Report: Tips, Traps, and Tricks of the Trade (Jossey-Bass, 2001). Her short stories and essays have appeared in several online and print magazines. She is a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, Sisters in Crime, and Mystery Writers of America. Visit her at www.carolinestories.com

Death In Delmarva

FREDDIE Award Finalist for writing excellence

Daphne Dunn works as a lowly stockroom clerk in her cousin’s Foggy Bottom grocery store. She’s also required to play bill collector to customers who aren’t paying for their food, including pregnant Beatriz Cabeza de Vaca, who used to keep house for Daphne’s family in better times. When Beatriz is stabbed to death outside her apartment, Daphne learns the baby has survived and sets out to find the baby’s missing father.

She gets sidetracked when a friend facing life-threatening surgery asks Daphne to locate his sister, Charlie. Except for the lip ring and a nasty drug habit, Charlie could be Daphne’s twin. The search for both people leads Daphne to the Delmarva Peninsula and a woman so desperate to cover her crimes that she will kill anyone in her way, including Charlie and quite possibly the girl’s mirror image, Daphne Dunn.

 

 

 

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Category: Interviews