The Courtroom—or the Kitchen?

Writer with Two Big Hats!

The blog posts of prize writer Leslie Budewitz will show you she and I have two mutual loves—mysteries and cats. And the LAW, though she IS THE LAW and I am merely an avid reader…

As a skilled lawyer, a graduate of Notre Dame Law School, Leslie has also become famous as a prize-winning mystery writer! Though she practices part-time as a Montana lawyer, she has won two Agathas for both her fiction and non-fiction.

She is Vice president of SinC—Sisters in Crime—and has been a featured speaker at Bouchercon, Malice Domestic and Left Coast Crime. Her short stories have been published in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, as well as other publications, and her novels are gaining popularity: Death Al Dente, Crime Rib, Butter Off Dead, Assault and Pepper, Books, Crooks and Counselors, Writes of Passage (Ed. by Hank Ryan), The Cozy Cookbook, the MWA Cookbook, among other works.

When I begged her to write more novels about crime and the law, she sent the post for our blog you will now read.

I am delighted to share this astounding person with all you dear readers of Crime Writer's Chronicle today. Please welcome our talented, warm-hearted associate, Leslie Budewitz, of the Law, the World of Crime and Montana!

Thelma Straw

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As often happens in the writing world, I’ve been acquainted with my blog host, Thelma Straw, for years, though we’ve never met, and we’ve shared a kinship through our love of mysteries and cats. When she invited me to be her guest, she asked why I didn’t write about lawyers and judges.

One reason I enjoy writing mysteries is that it’s a break from the writing I do as a lawyer. These days, I practice part-time for a small firm doing mainly personal injury and business litigation, although I’ve done my share of criminal and employment law over the years. Most of my work now is research and writing. I like it and I’m good at it.

But it’s not nearly as much fun as making up people and solving their problems to my own satisfaction. Plus I can kill on the page without worrying about prison. (I’ve been to prison. It’s dreadful, even when you know you can leave any time.)

Truth, is, after 30+ years in the field, stories about lawyers don’t interest me the way they did when I was a student and a young lawyer. I imagine long-time chefs aren’t much moved by foodie fic, and PIs don’t read a lot of PI novels. What new is there to say to us?

My first several manuscripts, all unpublished, featured a single woman lawyer in a small town on an Indian reservation in western Montana—guess what my life looked like at the time! That woman appeared in two published short stories, and she’s a good character. I doubt I’ll revisit her, though, except perhaps as a secondary character.

These days, I’m much more interested in the concepts of community and social order that I can explore through a cozy, than in the courtroom or the external order that the legal system serves. Community is the heart of a cozy mystery. Murder disrupts the social order. The amateur sleuth investigates because she has a personal stake in the crime and in making sure the right people are brought to justice. She may think law enforcement officers are on the wrong track, or her role in village life may give her insight and information they lack. The professionals’ job is to restore the external order by making an arrest and prosecuting. Hers is to restore internal order within the community.

But characters with knowledge of the law are useful, and I keep a few close by to help my protagonists with the occasional legal bugaboo. In my Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, Bill the herbalist left the law after a trauma, but he’s willing to offer Erin Murphy a little guidance when needed. In my new Spice Shop Mysteries, debuting this month with ASSAULT AND PEPPER, Pepper Reece owns the Seattle Spice Shop in the Pike Place Market. Thirteen years managing staff HR for a giant law firm prepared her to handle the people aspects of her new business, but not for the shock of discovering a man she knew dead on her shop’s doorstep. In her investigation, she calls on a legal assistant-turned-mystery bookseller, a part-time law librarian, and her BFF’s husband, a corporate lawyer who would really rather Pepper kept her nose in the bay leaves and paprika.

That, alas, isn’t possible. Because Pepper’s career change—like my own—brings her nose-to-nose with trouble every day.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

© 2015 Leslie Budewitz

A Toast to Spellcheck

The Lawyerly Death Al Dente…

This gifted lady comes back to visit us—she last stopped by with Bob K. September 30, 2012. An attorney at law who specializes in civil litigation in Montana, she also writes dee-lightful fiction like Death Al Dente, a new series in the Food Lovers' Village Mysteries for Berkley Prime Crime and a new novel to come out in May, 2014, Crime Rib. Our good friend Hank P. Ryan says of Leslie's Al Dente, "…A tempting concoction of food, fun and fatalities."

She is also working on Spiced to Death for the Seattle spice Shop Mysteries. Wow! Such energy and talent!

Another reviewer wrote of Al Dente… "a novel strong enough to stand beyond the confines of its genre…"

I admire Leslie as a writer, a lawyer, a very generous giving member of MWA and SinC…but she has a permanent place of honor in my life for something else very precious. After the death of my beloved red Persian, Miss Priss, she sent me her story "Hail to the Queen", about the advent and passing of her orange tabby, Autumn… who died peacefully at the age of 17… " She returned deliberately… to a place where life and death often meet…"

Leslie, I hope one day to do a children's book on Miss Priss and I will place your name in the dedication.

Welcome again to the abode of Crime Writers' Chronicle…

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

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Shakespeare spelled his name at least six ways. In his journal of the famous expedition, Capt William Clark spelled mosquitos 23 ways.

After copyediting Death al Dente, first in the Food Lovers’ Village mysteries, I sympathize. (If I were British, I would sympathise. Especially after all the debate with my editor and copy editor over whether it was Food Lover’s or Lovers’.)

Is drugstore one word or two? (One.) How do you spell kaleidoscope? (Word Perfect told me when I got it wrong, but could I trust its correction? Yes, as it turns out.)

Spell Check thinks bee-line has a hyphen in it. My copy editor (two words) disagrees. She wins!

Macintosh is the Apple computer. McIntosh is the apple tree in my protagonist Erin’s family orchard, the tree her father built a treehouse around using stilts. She still goes there occasionally, alone or with her five-year-old nephew, Landon. Or perhaps she goes to a tree house. I work in Word Perfect and convert to Word to submit to my editor; the two programs disagree.

(They also disagree over whether kidnaped should have one p or two; I go with one.)

Erin and I are foodies. Spell Check is not. It even puts one of those infuriating red squiggles under foodie–and tapenade, gnocchi, crostini, bruschetta, and Pellegrino. The darned thing couldn’t even spell pesto or fettucine, let alone prosciutto. And Caprese salad? Really?

Spell Check and I disagree on how to spell vinaigrette. Its helpful suggestion in response to my version? Vinegarweed. O-kay.

And all this foodie talk doesn’t even make Spell Check hungry, darn it!

Erin runs Glacier Mercantile, aka The Merc, a specialty local foods market located in her family’s hundred-year-old building, the original grocery in the lakeside Montana community of Jewel Bay. Next door is Red’s Bar, run by the formerly red-headed Ned Redaway, often called Old Ned, and his son Ted. Ted and Erin have known each other since kindergarten and he knows how to get under her skin but good. She thinks of that as getting her Jell-O up. We’d had a lovely discussion over whether the past perfect tense should be spelled Jell-Od or Jell-Oed. I resolved it in favor of peeved. When in doubt, revise.

The biggest challenge was Hank the Cowdog, Head of Ranch Security, and hero of a series of books written by John R. Erickson. Landon has been reading the books—well, his parents and occasionally Auntie Erin have been reading them to him. So naturally, when she decides to investigate, she wonders what the cow dog would do. Most dictionaries and dog books spell it two words. I’ve belonged to Border collies, and I do what they tell me to do, which is to make it two words. But the famed detective’s own publisher had used one word. Oh, what to do?

That seemed like a one-time problem, until I wrote the second installment, tentatively titled Crime Rib and scheduled for release July 1, 2014. Erin finds a copy of the children’s classic, Goodnight Moon, in the murder victim’s things. Normally we write “good night,” but Margaret Wise Brown and her publisher chose otherwise. (The book first appeared in 1947; spelling conventions may have changed.) So, it’s “good night” in dialogue, and Goodnight when referring to the book.

And how do you spell sixty-fivish? Five-ish?

Then there are the words you can never remember how to spell that Spellcheck doesn’t know. Tattood or tattooed? Embarassed or embarrassed? (The latter in both examples.)

After the first draft was completed, I realized I didn’t want to write a secondary character with the name of a major mystery writer. So I changed Ian Rankin to Ian Randall—and am very glad I didn't hit "replace all." Crankiness would have become crandalless, which would have made me really cranky!

What about words you make up? Frufalla, a variation of Turkish delight made by that vision in pink, Miss Candy Divine. The Merc’s former manager, Claudette Randall, ran off to Vegas with Dean Vincent, the local chiropractor and Elvis impersonator (he prefers “tribute artist”), who is studying for a Ph.E., a doctorate in Elvisology.

Put a squiggly line under that, Mr. Spell Check—SpellCheck, Spellcheck, SpelCzek—at your peril.

© 2013 Leslie Budewitz

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Death al Dente, first in the Food Lovers' Village Mysteries, debuted from Berkley Prime Crime in August, and is already a national bestseller. The town of Jewel Bay, Montana—known as the Food Lovers’ Village—is obsessed with homegrown and homemade Montana fare. So when Erin Murphy takes over her family’s century-old general store, she turns it into a boutique market filled with local delicacies. But Erin’s freshly booming business might go rotten when a former employee turns up dead…

Leslie is also a lawyer. Her first book, Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law & Courtroom Procedure (Quill Driver Books) won the 2011 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction. Leslie’s second series, The Seattle Spice Shop Mysteries, will debut in early 2015. She lives in northwest Montana with her husband, a doctor of natural medicine and singer-songwriter, and their cat Ruff, an avid birdwatcher. Visit her online at http://>www.LeslieBudewitz.com or on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/LeslieBudewitz/Author

The Change of Life

I was intriqued by Leslie Budewitz’s double-life as Montana lawyer, cozy novelist and author of the tell-all insider’s book, Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law & Courtroom Procedure. It’s the real deal. Reviewed next month — Robert Knightly

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Like most writers, for years I stole bits of time from myself–and my day job–to write. Half a dozen published stories, four mystery novels in boxes in the closet, and a notebook filled with ideas–one line, two paragraphs, three pages.

So the thrill of selling a book was doubly strange, because my first book intermingled my two jobs. Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law & Courtroom Procedure (Quill Driver Books, 2011) is aimed at the writer–of novels, stories, screenplays, and more–who recognizes that a legal thread runs through the fictional world, and that getting key details wrong can unravel the entire plot. It’s also useful for nonfiction writers who want a primer on the criminal and civil legal systems.

Now that I’m making the transition from practicing law to writing full-time, I’ve been thinking about how my day job of nearly thirty years has influenced my writing. Most notably, my legal work gave me the subject matter for Books, Crooks & Counselors. It gave me first-hand experience with many of the issues of criminal and civil law I wrote about, the skills to research what I didn’t know, and the ability to identify what writers needed to know. It enabled me to give them real-life examples, and ideas for using legal issues to complicate and deepen their own work.

It's given me discipline and experience writing on deadline. You can’t tell a judge you’ve got writers’ block.

It's taught me to think about my readers and what they need to know–whether it’s to make a decision about a case or get caught up in a novel. As a civil trial lawyer, I might write to a client, an insurance adjuster and his or her supervisors, opposing counsel, a trial judge or an appellate judge—each with different interests and needs. That experience has taught me to think ahead to what my readers will do with the information I give them, and plan my own next steps. It's also taught me how to read more carefully.

While my legal career has been a boon to my nonfiction, it's also a great help for writing fiction—even in my cozy mysteries, where lawyers take a back seat to small-town shopkeepers, artists, and chefs. Lawyers can choose to solve problems—or make them worse. And since story depends on giving our characters goals, thwarting them, and repeating the process for 300 pages, it’s great to be able to analyze both sides. And while making things worse is an irresponsible choice in real life, what fun in fiction!

Writers, how has your day job benefitted your writing? And readers, does knowing what an author does–or did–by day influence your book choices?

Thanks to Bob for inviting me to join you today!

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Leslie Budewitz is a mystery writer and practicing lawyer. Her first book, Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law & Courtroom Procedure (Quill Driver Books, Oct 2011), won the 2011 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction, and has been nominated for the 2012 Anthony and Macavity Awards. Read an excerpt and more articles for writers on her website (www.LawandFiction.com) and blog (www.LawandFiction.com/blog), or join her on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/LeslieBudewitzAuthor.

Her cozy series, tentatively titled The Food Lovers Village Mysteries, set in a small lakeside community in Northwest Montana and featuring the manager of a specialty local food market, will debut from Berkley Prime Crime in 2013.

Leslie lives in Northwest Montana with her husband, a doctor of natural medicine, and their Burmese cat Ruff, an avid birdwatcher.