Lucy Burdette’s Key West cozies feature a magazine food critic called Hayley Snow, her husband’s nosy dog, Ziggy, and an indomitable sidekick, Miss Gloria, who’s rapidly becoming a reader’s favorite, all that set in page-turning beautiful action in Florida’s laid back tropical archipelago.

Hi. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And today on Binge Reading, Lucy talks about the joy of combining two of her loves in life, food and Key West, in an award-winning best-selling small town mystery series.

Mystery, Thriller and Suspense Giveaway

Our Giveaway this week as a selection from a group of authors, Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense Giveaway, including Sadie’s Vow, Book #1  in my own Home At Last trilogy.

It’s San Francisco, 1872. Sadie McGillicuddy’s word is her bond. Swearing to her dying mother to always protect her wilful sister, she’s soon tested when her beautiful younger sibling runs off into the night.

You’ll find a link to download these books in the show notes for this episode on the website, the joys of binge reading.com. That’s a Free Download Give away for holiday reading.

DOWNLOAD FREE MYSTERIES

And remember if you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best form of recommendation and it will help people find a show that recommends books they’d love to discover and read.

Links to items mentioned in the show

The Bobbsey Twins, Laura Lee Hope:  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/DMJ/the-bobbsey-twins/

Nancy Drew. Carolyn Keene: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/NAD/nancy-drew/

Frank Bruni, Born Round: https://www.amazon.com/Born-Round-Family-Ferocious-Appetite/dp/014311767X#

Ruth Reichl:  http://ruthreichl.com/about/

Dr Laurie Santos: Yale class on happiness:  https://www.drlauriesantos.com/science-well-being

Dr Laurie Santos: Happiness Lab podcast:

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos

Ann Cleeves:  https://www.anncleeves.com/

Rhys Bowen, Lady Georgiana Royal Spyness series: The Proof in the Pudding, www.rhysbowen.com

Love Marriage by Monica Ali, https://www.amazon.com.au/Love-Marriage-Monica-Ali/dp/1982181478

Ragnar Jonasson, Reykjavík, https://www.amazon.com/Reykjav%C3%ADk-Crime-Story-Ragnar-J%C3%B3nasson/dp/1250907330#

Where To Find Lucy Burdette Online

Website: https://lucyburdette.com/

Facebook: @Lucyburdetteauthor

Instagram: @Lucyburdette

Jungle Red Writers Blog: https://www.jungleredwriters.com/

Introducing mystery author Lucy Burdette

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Lucy. Hello there, Lucy, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Lucy Burdette – Her latest book in the Key West food critic series made the USA Today bestseller list

Lucy Burdette: I am so happy to be here and I really appreciate being invited.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s lovely. the wonders of technology to think that you are in Key West, Florida and I’m in New Zealand. It’s great, isn’t it?

Lucy Burdette: Crazy, Yes. Two islands.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. Lucy, you’ve got a flourishing career writing these Key West food critic mysteries. You’ve just published number 13 in those. How did you get started on fiction writing?

Lucy Burdette: It’s a strange story, but your listeners might not know that I’m a clinical psychologist. That was my career before writing and when I met my now husband of 31 years, he was a big golfer and I was not, but I wanted to do whatever it took to spend time with him.

So I started taking golf lessons, and I was just horrible, terrible.

I made every mistake. It was embarrassing. I started thinking about what could I write that would combine psychology and learning golf. I began to pitch some non-fiction stories about the psychology of golf.

I had a few published, but it’s very hard as a freelancer to get picked up by magazines.

Why don’t you try writing a mystery?

I was talking to a good friend from graduate school about this and she said why don’t you try writing a mystery?

Because we’ve always read mysteries since The Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew and passed them back and forth.

I said, that sounds like an interesting idea. I knew nothing about how to write a novel, but I could immediately picture this first protagonist, who was a neurotic lady golfer who desperately wanted to play on the Professional Ladies Golf Tour, but she had too many issues that would keep her from doing that.

That was the first thing I tried, and I found an agent after about a year and I was taking classes and I found a writer’s group.

My agent was able to sell that series not too long after that. The trouble with the Golf Lovers Mystery series, as they were called, is that readers tend to hate golf and golfers tend not to have time to read. So, it wasn’t a perfect intersection. There were five books in that series, and then I tried writing one that was set in Connecticut that had to do with a lady psychologist. There were three of those.

And then finally, I heard about this editor who was looking for a food critic mystery, preferably in a tropical setting. We had just started traveling a lot to Key West and thinking about moving here at least half time.

I pitched the idea of this series set in Key West and she took it and said, would you consider changing your name because the other eight books were published under my real name, which is Roberta Isleib.

I said, sure. I chose my grandmother’s name. She was Lucille Burdette.

And that’s how it got started. It was a crazy midlife crisis.

Learning what a food critic likes and does

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting. You must have already had the feeling you wanted to write something. If that happened to me, I’d probably just give up golf.

Lucy Burdette: I’m a very stubborn person, it turns out, and also a slow learner. You talk to writers and some of them have this feeling that they always wanted to be a writer. That was not me. I’ve always read like mad and love reading, especially series books because I like to start with a character and follow along ways with her.

But no, I never thought about writing fiction. I have a PhD in clinical psychology, so I know how to write that sort of thing, but this was all new.

Jenny Wheeler: And the Key West Series does really require somebody who has a genuine passion and interest in food. Was that you at the beginning?

Lucy Burdette: I have always loved to eat. That’s my main claim to fame. And I was a decent cook. But I have to say that following these characters, the main characters, Hayley Snow, who’s the food critic, and her mother, who now lives in town and is a caterer, following them I have had to expand my horizons and try new things, because as you’ve seen, there are recipes in the back of the book.

I have to make what I am imagining they might make. And then the other part of the research is that we have to go out to eat a lot, which is not too onerous.

I try to make some things that I really love from the restaurants that we’ve been to. I’m passionate about eating and I will cook if need be.

Jenny Wheeler: And with a food critic character, you have to stay on top of food trends, don’t you? Because restaurants are always wanting to be a little bit ahead of the latest trend.

Key West offers a colorful community

Lucy Burdette: Yes, at Key West, probably not so much as you might find in a place like New York City, but yes, I read a lot about food critics.

There’s a wonderful book by Frank Bruni, who was the food critic for the New York Times called Born Round. It was a memoir of his life and his experience as the food critic.

So I read things like that. Ruth Reichl, who was also the food critic at the time, She’s written a series of wonderful memoirs and novels. All that helped me get into the head of what my character might be noticing and thinking about writing.

Jenny Wheeler: Key West itself is practically a character in the series. There’s very strong sense of location, so I guess it’s not surprising that you’ve really integrated yourself into that community as one of its citizens.

Lucy Burdette: Yes, we are here half the year. We have a lot of friends and I am now the president of the Friends of the Key West Library, which really helps me feel connected to the community.

And as far as Key West the character? I always say, if you can’t walk around town and find something to write about, you’re not trying very hard because it’s a very nutty place,

Jenny Wheeler: Is it?

Lucy Burdette: Yes. With many layers. It’s an expensive place. It’s getting worse as time goes on. And you have a lot of conflicts between the people who are spending a lot of money to buy property here and there are homeless people here because it’s warm all the time, so why not?

And then there was a whole group of people who feel like this is their happy place and they come down to unwind. And so there’s a lot of tension between all of that, and that’s very good for a mystery writer.

Food as a window into relationships

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Yes. In the book before this new one, A Dish To Die For, Hayley makes a statement that I love so much that I jotted it down in a notebook at the time. It says, “Food is a window into relationships,” and I thought, Wow, what? A lot is packed into those few words.

Could you unpack that for us a little bit and explain more fully what you mean by that?

Lucy Burdette: Sure. I suspect this is not true of all families, but in my family you show your love and affection for people according to what you serve them. And often it’s something that you’ve made and it’s a way to connect with them and really enjoy something together. My, mother’s family – they weren’t great cooks, but they were very food centric.

I think that’s where it comes from.

Jenny Wheeler: There’s also quite a sense in that book of loving what grandmothers wrote and having a sense of culinary history as it relates to families as well. That probably is something that also is a personal thing of yours?

Lucy Burdette: Yes. It was so interesting with that book, which is called A Dish to Die For, because I’m always looking for something new about Key West that I haven’t written about that people won’t necessarily know about.

And we had a visitor a couple years ago who went out on her own one day and came back saying she’d visited the Key West Women’s Club, which we had never even walked inside.

It’s a absolutely beautiful old building that they’re working on restoring, in a very vibrant community who gathers there.

And this was during the pandemic that I was writing this book, but the president agreed to meet me over there – it wasn’t open to the public – and show me around.

So then of course I’m thinking, oh, this is where you could find a body. It’s always a terrible mindset to have, but I can’t help it. It’s my profession.

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The Ingredients of Happiness

And at the end, she gave me an old cookbook they had resurrected, of all the recipes and stories from women who had belonged to this club.

That was enough to get me going. for the backstory of this book.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. You’ve written other standalones under that name of Lucy Burdette. Including one that you’ve just fairly recently published, called The Ingredients of Happiness.

It’s a mild social satire of the happiness industry, I think you’d call it, I wondered how that fits in with your alter ego as Roberta Isleib.

Lucy Burdette: Roberta is the real psychologist and I have been wanting to write this book for years. It’s a story about a clinical psychologist. I did my internship and post-grad work at Yale, so I know that community pretty well, and I wanted to tell the story of a new psychologist who’d landed a job at Yale and had a career researching happiness.

But she turns out not to be happy herself. I wouldn’t say that I specialized in happiness, but you’ll see a little bit of my dissertation in there about attachment between mothers and infants. It’s a lot harder to write this contemporary women’s fiction because it doesn’t have the structure that a mystery has.

There’s going to be a murder or some kind of crime, and then there are going to be suspects, and then there’s going to be a detective, and it all has to be unraveled and tied up at the end.

It’s a lot harder when you don’t have those points along the way. This one probably took me about 20 years to get into some kind of shape where a publisher would actually buy it, but I really hope to write more like that because it’s an adventure and it’s a stretch for my writing muscles.

Jenny Wheeler: Every chapter has a piece of sage advice observing things about life and what makes people happy or unhappy. And the very first one is from a real person. After that, they’re all. I think mostly anyway, fictional characters.

But the first one is from Dr. Laurie Santos, I’ve heard some of her shows.

She’s a real award-winning podcaster who calls her show The Happiness Lab and the advice that you quote her giving is so “profound.” In quotes. It is ‘There are two things in life. The stuff you can control and the stuff you can’t.’ And you think, Wow, what a revelation that is.

This is a little smile up your sleeve at the whole industry, I think, isn’t it?

Happiness Lab – Yale’s most popular class

Lucy Burdette: Yes, but at the same time, what she said is really brilliant because if you start by realizing that and you let go of trying to manage the things that you really are not under your control, then life is a lot less stressful. It sounds simple-minded, but I think that’s why people love her.

She teaches at Yale. She teaches an undergraduate class in happiness which is the most popular course in the history of that university.

You can go look it up and see it. In fact, I think you can sign up to take it.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, fantastic.

There’s no doubt that in the world we are living in now post Covid, it’s a different world and there’s a lot of people who have not regained their equilibrium. We haven’t talked at all about this new book, and I’d like to give you a chance to tell us a little bit about the very latest one, A Clue in the Crumbs.

It’s about two Scottish sisters who come to Key West, isn’t it? Tell us about this story.

Lucy Burdette: Yes. So A Clue in the Crumbs is number 13 in the series, and it came out in August. And always I’m trying to think about which of the characters I’ve used before should come back. Into the story and one of the ones who have has probably turned out to be the favorite of everyone I’ve written is Miss Gloria, who is my main character’s next-door neighbor.

My character Hayley and her police detective husband have been to Scotland for their honeymoon, where she helped solve the murder of one of the sons of one of these Scottish sisters.

It turns out they have unexpectedly become a TV sensation in a sort of Great British Baking show only, of course, I couldn’t call it that.

And they’re coming to America to find the next great baker. My characters convince them to come to Key West and at least practice one of these TV sessions there, and of course it turns out to be a disaster and people are murdered.

But those three ladies were so much fun to write and I can’t tell you how much feedback I’ve gotten about them.

Miss Gloria – a role model for senior citizens?

Some people call Miss Gloria the role model for senior citizens because she and the others – they take naps, but they’re so full of energy and so funny that I had a lot of fun with that book.

There’s a scene towards the end which I don’t know if you know what a tiki boat is in New Zealand, but it’s like a little motorboat, but it has a tiki boat with a straw hut roof on top of it and they motor around the water at sunset and they look extremely silly.

But that’s where the denouement is. So that’s the kind of research my husband does with me, is to go out on a tiki boat cruise and then go out to dinner.

It’s really not bad at all. That one hit the USA Today bestseller list, which has never happened before. I owe all of that to those three ladies, I’m sure of it.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Mentioning your husband, does he still play golf?

Lucy Burdette: Oh, yes, he plays, yes, I don’t have that much time to play anymore, but he plays at least three times a week.

Jenny Wheeler: You did mention how it all got started, but I’d also like to know if you had any goal for your writing when you first began, and if so, if you’ve realized it.

Lucy Burdette: I think I’ve gone well past any goal that I thought I had. It,starts just wanting to be able to write the story and then, after I’ve written it, wanting to get an agent and then wanting to get it published, and it’s just been beyond my wildest dreams.

You had asked a question in the group of questions that you sent me about do I wish I had done anything different?

And I would say not really, except that I didn’t have my first book published until I was 50. If only I had started earlier, I’m just not nearly done.

The secret of Lucy Burdette’s success

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s great. Yes, that was probably going to be my very next question, so it’s wonderful that you’ve anticipated it. Tell us though, if there is one thing that you would credit as the secret of the success, what would it be?

Lucy Burdette: I’ll tell you two things. One is the writing community that I’ve connected with because I had no idea, really what I was doing.

They have been very helpful and supportive. And the other thing is writing is really a lonely occupation. You’re sitting by yourself with your computer and so having other people that you can talk to along the ways is absolutely important.

And the other would be, I think you probably have to have some talent, but I don’t know how much if you keep at it and keep working at it.

It’s a very discouraging business, so you absolutely have to be stubborn. That would be the other thing I would say. And you have to take feedback, which I am pretty good at.

I’ve hired editors along the way. Sometimes they’ll send pages and pages back and you just have to go lie down for a few minutes to recover from the onslaught. But then you say, oh she’s pretty smart. This is going to be a better book after I work on these things. So those are the things I would say.

I belong to a blogging group called Jungle Red Writers, which is seven crime fiction writers and they are a huge support. If you’re having a bad day, you can send off a text or an email and get a lot of help.

Jenny Wheeler: I think I might have first picked up your books through Jungle Red Writers actually. I think I’ve had quite a number of them on the show now.

Lucy Burdette: Oh, terrific.

What a typical writing day looks like

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about what a typical writing day looks like and is it different when you’re in Key West to your other home?

Lucy Burdette: Probably not too different because I’m more of a morning person than a night person. we have a dog, so I’ll get up, have a cup of coffee, walk the dog, look at email, and then get to work. Usually, it’s a matter of having  – and this is from my psychology background – having a small goal for each day.

If you start to think, oh my gosh, I have a novel due in five months, how am I ever going to do it? Then you’re going to get freaked out. But if you think I have to get 500 words today, or even 200 words, or a thousand words. Then they start to add up, and then you can always fix it later.

But if you have a blank page, you can’t fix that. So that’s probably my morning. If I don’t spend a lot of time surfing the internet or looking at Facebook then I can get a thousand words done in a couple of hours. It just depends on how disciplined I am.

Jenny Wheeler:  We always like to ask our authors about their taste in reading. This is a popular fiction podcast and we always are interested to hear if you are a binge reader and what sorts of reading generally you do, but particularly in the popular fiction area that other people might like to follow on with.

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