This week Crime Cymru’s Cathy Ace tells us about – well the headline “does what it says on the tin”. There’s some very exciting news which I certainly didn’t know about in here, which will delight fans of the Cait Morgan series in particular.
THE JOYS AND CHALLENGES OF WRITING TWO LONG-RUNNING SERIES
by Cathy Ace
Hello folks, I’m delighted to be able to chat with you again, having last done so back in September 2022. For me a great deal has happened since then, including the publication of three new books in the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries, which are all set in the Wye Valley.
Sitting down to write this blog – which I’m doing when I should, really, be getting on with the next WISE book – has got me thinking about what it takes to just keep going…about how authors have to sit themselves down and WRITE when they need to.
For me, there’s no luxury of waiting for the muse to visit; twenty years of working in marketing and advertising taught me that the client gets what the client wants, even if that’s three different sets of copy for an advertisement between 6pm one day and 9am the next. So there’s a discipline involved, which I employ to this day…in the same way that folks with ‘real jobs’ (yes, I still think of my writing as a dream job rather than skilled labour) have to get up and go every day.
That, in turn, made me wonder what it is that I do, personally, to have been able to have twelve Cait Morgan Mysteries published, and to now be joyfully working on my eighth WISE Enquiries Agency Mystery. And I think I have the answer: it’s the refreshment of writing two very different series with two very different sets of challenges that spurs me on.
First of all, I should mention that I’d already written five Cait Morgan Mysteries before I began the WISE series, so knew when I sent my proposals to the publisher for the new series that I wanted it to differ from what I was already writing.
The Cait Morgan Mysteries face my titular Welsh Canadian professor of criminal psychology with a puzzling murder to solve in each book – of course! – but each book is set in a different country (or at least a very different part of a country if she’s visiting the same one…for example, she’s in Las Vegas in The Corpse with the Platinum Hair and in the Arizona desert in The Corpse with the Turquoise Toes, two very different parts of the USA). Although they are set in the modern day, the books are ‘Golden Age’ in style and shape – so there’s a corpse within the first two pages, lots of suspects (a new cast of characters for each book) though they all fall within the classic ‘closed circle’, clues and red herrings aplenty, and a denouement where the culprit/s is/are unmasked and there are real comeuppances (Cait’s a great believer in justice, and sees herself as acting on behalf of the victim…even if that victim was a generally unlovable type).
With Cait Morgan and her partner in life and crime, Bud Anderson, tripping over corpses in exotic locales in one established series, I wanted to create ‘the opposite’ for my second series. Thus, I also write about four professional female private investigators (one of whom is Welsh, one Irish, one Scottish, and one English, hence the WISE acronym for their company) who all appear every book. The setting for every book always involves the place where they live and have their office – those places being the village of Anwen-by-Wye, and the estate of the seat of Chellingworth, where the Twyst family have been Dukes since Henry Tudor granted them the land and title back in 1489. The other characters who live in the village or up at the Hall are also in every book, and we celebrate births, marriages, and deaths (though not always in that order) with our beloved ‘friends’ as we live life with them, and through them…and solve crimes large and small along the way (there are several, sometimes connected, cases in each book, though the books are novels not collections of stories).
It’s a delight to write about a bucolic Welsh village and the historic Chellingworth Hall and Dower House rather than the luxurious (yet always deadly!) parts of the world Cait gets to visit.
One key challenge when writing the Cait books is how to transport the reader to yet another location with its own layered identity, where the plot fits so well into the landscape and culture that it really couldn’t have taken place anywhere else.
With the WISE books it’s about making the reader want to return to join a cast of characters they have come to know like friends, who live in a place that – while it seems idyllic – is believably able to host challenging cases for four women who need to earn a living from their investigations. So, yes, I send them away to work sometimes…as far afield as other parts of Wales, or even off for a trip to Ireland, Scotland, or England, on occasion. But, no, they won’t be bumping into Cait Morgan any time soon – whose last trip to her Homeland of Wales was in the fifth book in her series where she and Bud tried to get married at a castle on the Gower peninsula…with deadly consequences, of course.
It’s fun to work on such different series, and they do say that a change is as good as a rest. However, the past few years have been a bit of a weird mix, to be honest: I wrote four Cait books in quick succession, and have followed that with three WISE books; I’m working on the next one right now, as I mentioned. You see, I wanted to focus on Cait to support the forthcoming TV series (yes, the script for the first two-hour movie is wonderful, and yes you’ll certainly know the work of the actors who are now ‘attached’ to the series who’ll appear as Cait and Bud) for a while, but then I needed a bit of a change. Wonderfully for me, I have found that the appetite for the WISE women is both eager and global: thanks to everyone who’s read them all, and sent each of these books to the top of the Amazon cozy mystery charts around the world. Yes, I promise I’m writing as fast as I can (at least, I will when I’ve written this blog!).
The next book after this? That will be the thirteenth Cait Morgan Mystery. Will it be unlucky for her? Well, all I can say at the moment is that it’s going to be deadly for someone within her circle; this time she’s in Sydney and Katoomba, in Australia, so be careful if you have a trip to those parts planned for later this year (you can’t say I didn’t warn you).
Meanwhile, here’s the blurb for my forthcoming eighth WISE Enquiries Agency Mystery, which I hope whets your appetite. It will be published on 24th July 2023, so not long now, and the next Cait Morgan book will be published in October 2023.
THE CASE OF THE UNINVITED UNDERTAKER
‘HE LEFT A WREATH OF CONDOLENCE AT OUR FRONT DOOR, THEN VANISHED.’
The women of the WISE Enquiries Agency should be enjoying the early summer with their loved ones, but find themselves facing a truly baffling case: a mysterious figure has been spotted in Anwen-by-Wye, heralding tragedy. Nerves in the village are frayed, and the skills of all four of our private investigators are needed to work out what’s going on – aided by Althea, dowager duchess of Chellingworth, of course.
When death strikes far too close to home for our beloved enquiry agents the stakes are raised in what has become a fatal game of cat and mouse…revealing dark secrets hidden by a person everybody thought they knew.
Meanwhile, the duke and duchess are busy organizing projects designed to help revitalize the Chellingworth Estate, though their proposals aren’t viewed favorably by all, and – snatching time as a couple when they can – Annie and Tudor are considering their future, as are Christine and Alexander…though in different ways, and with some surprising outcomes.
The eighth book in this series presents the WISE women with challenges of both a professional and personal nature they’ve never faced before; join them to find out how they fare.
Cathy Ace was born and raised in Swansea. She migrated to Canada aged forty, where she lives with her husband (also from Swansea) on five acres of heaven, which they garden together. You can email Cathy, sign up for her newsletter (which, while it might be irregular, always gets her news to its recipients FIRST) and find all the links to her social media accounts at her website, which is here: https://www.cathyace.com/
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