Sherlock Holmes has Watson, Nero Wolfe has Archie Goodwin, Nancy Drew has Georgia…every detective needs a sidekick. In the Miranda Abbott mystery series, our sleuth has Andrew Nguyen, her level-headed, faithful, and often exasperated personal assistant who follows her from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood to the wildly eccentric (and totally fictional) town of Happy Rock, Oregon.
The setting was created to be the antithesis of Miranda’s past life in Los Angeles as the titular star of the (also fictional) network television series “Pastor Fran Investigates,” a show we imagined as a cross of “Murder She Wrote,” “The Father Dowling Mysteries,” and “Charlie’s Angels.” As in, Miranda Abbott played a traveling youth pastor who wandered from town to town solving murders and often ended up wearing a red bikini. If that sounds outlandish, let us all remember “BJ & the Bear,” a show about a truckdriver whose partner was a monkey, which was a slightly less ridiculous premise than the crime-fighting “Manimal,” who was a college professor who could shape-shift into different animals.
The town of Happy Rock is populated with an assortment of supporting characters: Atticus Lawson, a lawyer (in fact the only lawyer in town) with a debilitating fear of public speaking; Tanvir Singh, chairman of the local chamber of commerce and the proprietor of Singh’s Hardware and Bait Store; Mabel and Myrtle, the interchangeable partners who run the Cozy Café; Bea Maracle, who owns the local bed and breakfast, Bea’s B&B…
So where did they come from? Well, some of them are structural. They are required by the story. In the first book, “I Only Read Murder,” Miranda arrives in town because a postcard from her long-estranged husband summons her for what she erroneously believes is an offer of reconciliation. So, we created Edgar Abbott, along with his bookstore. If Miranda was going to channel her inner “Pastor Fran” crime-solver then local law-enforcement was needed. Hence Chief of Police (of a three-person detachment) Ned Buckley. We also decided that Happy Rock needed a newspaper, the Weekly Picayune, which meant we had to come up with a reporter. Done. Enter Scoop Bannister.
We also wanted to play with expectations a bit. Often in a comedic Whodunnit, the local police are portrayed as just a bit thick, bumblers, really, who get in the way of the amateur detective. Not our cop. Ned Buckley may be mild-mannered, and generally genial, but he’s also an excellent investigator. Scoop Bannister, despite her profession, is not cynical or the least bit hard-boiled, but has somehow managed to keep her innate naivete despite also being a shrewd journalist. And Edgar? The grumpier we write him; the more readers seem to be rooting for him and Miranda to get back together. Which, frankly, came as a bit of a surprise.
Then there are the characters who may (just maybe) seem to have probably (or possibly) been drawn from our actual lives. For example, the upcoming third Miranda Abbott Mystery, “Killer on the First Page,” takes place during a writer’s festival hosted by Miranda and Edgar. Readers may assume that some of the characters introduced are based on Will’s experiences at the multitudinous book events he has participated in. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, one of the authors appearing in the (again, fictional) First Annual Happy Rock Mystery Writers Festival is Lawrence Block. Will has never met him. And the harried publicist who may or may not be a suspect? Not at all based on anyone Will has ever encountered.
The second book, “Mystery in the Title,” involves a Movie of the Week shooting in Happy Rock. Again, a reader might think that one or two of the characters depicted are based on real people Ian has dealt with during a lengthy career in film and television. Absolutely not.
Not that we can’t understand why someone might leap to those sorts of ridiculous assumptions. For example, in the first book there is a character named Graham Penty, who attended a conservatory Acting school and now teaches drama at the local high school. But he has absolutely nothing in common with Alan Penty, who attended the same conservatory Acting school as Ian and who now teaches high school drama. The first names are completely different.
We did have another character in “I Only Read Murder” that we were, regretfully, unable to keep in subsequent stories since this character (who we’re not going to identify) was a suspect and having them appear in later books could kind of ruin a really, really good plot twist. Someone reading the series in a different order than written could figure out that this particular character could not actually be the killer in the first book, since they appear in the subsequent one. It’s a shame really, since we really like this character and are contemplating featuring them in a stand-alone novel (or “spin-off,” to use a term Miranda Abbott would employ) down the road, but we assure you the character in question is not based on any actual person, living or dead.
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