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Unraveling secrets in the Berkshires: mystery author on cozy crime novels and native plants

A woman in the Berkshires helps set up a community garden, only to find a body in one of the plots.

That's what North Adams, Massachusetts, writer Deborah Benoit conjured up in her mind and wrote in her novel "The Gardeners Plot: A Mystery." It won the Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award.

Benoit spoke with with NEPM’s Carrie Healy about her cozy mystery.

Carrie Healy, NEPM: So after you retired from a career as a legal secretary, you now have added award-winning author to your resume. What inspired you to write?

Deborah Benoit, author: I've always loved to write. And over the past few years, I have concentrated on mysteries and garden writing. So it seemed very natural to write a mystery novel that incorporated gardening.

Let's talk about your amateur sleuth, Maggie Walker, who annoys the police by looking for clues and asking too many questions. Did you draw inspiration from your real-life neighbors and overgrown gardens?

You know, my writing takes inspiration from anything and everything around me, and a lot of things out of the past. Maggie is a compilation. There's a little bit of me in there, but mostly not. I would never go searching for clues about a dead body! I'm not quite that brave.

But her love of gardening is something that I definitely share and that comes from me. She's a currently unaffiliated master gardener and I'm a current master gardener, so that's very important to me. And I wanted to share what being a master gardener is and loving the sharing of garden information with people. And I think Maggie does that as part of her character.

She does. She also drinks a lot of tea. She also does the thing that we all do, which is forget our cell phones at the worst moments!

Yeah, I am not a big fan of cell phones, and I've gotten a lot of chiding from friends about that. I thought [that would be] kind of interesting [to] put Maggie in some difficult situations, if she just really didn't like cell phones at all.

And part of her character was escaping back to a time when you weren't constantly connected to everybody and everything. So I thought that would be an interesting way to get her into some difficult times here and there.

And it did. What plants does Maggie adore, and do those actually do well growing in the Berkshires?

Maggie loves coneflowers. They do really well. They are a native plant and they're called purple coneflowers, or echinacea. But they're actually a pink flower that looks very much like a daisy. They're a very cheerful flower. She also loves roses that her grandmother planted. And she likes to do some vegetable gardening.

What are your favorite plants?

I love witch hazel, which is actually a small tree. It's the very first thing that blooms at the end of winter, while there's still snow on the ground. The whole tree becomes a mass of yellow spidery flowers. So it always makes you smile. I'm not a big fan of winter and I look forward to spring.

You've set this mystery in the Berkshires and that's where you live. What was the process for creating a novelized version?

Well, I really wanted to have a made-up town because I wanted to be free to place things where I wanted them. So I took bits and pieces of places I've been in the Berkshires and really made like a patchwork quilt. Some of the streets are streets here in North Adams. It was really a fun time piecing everything together to make the town that I wanted for the story.

There is an epically simple recipe for gnocchi in the book. It's like two ingredients. Is that true? Does it really work?

It really works! You just take any size container of ricotta cheese. Empty that into a bowl. Fill the container with flour. Empty that into the bowl, mix them up into a dough and then form the gnocchi.

Whoa. So, there's no potato in this one?

Nope. Totally potato-free! I was astonished when I heard the recipe. It was from someone who used to work at the law office I worked at, and she was talking about it. I'm like, there's no way that could actually be a gnocchi recipe, because my mother used to do the potatoes and the boiling them and mashing them and do the long, complicated recipe.

And I'm not one who likes really difficult recipes to do. And I thought, I got to try this because if I can get something that even remotely resembles what my mother used to do, this would be wonderful. And it's good!

So, getting back to your book, "The Gardener's Plot: A Mystery." I've had some conversations with colleagues, and I've been describing this book that I've been reading as a cozy mystery. That's generally when you have an amateur sleuth, like Maggie Walker, set in that close-knit community that coincidentally has some idiosyncratic characters.

And many cozy mysteries make that victim very unlikable. But you didn't. So is this not a cozy mystery? Or why am I, as the reader, not actively disliking the victims that you created?

Well, I wanted to make them a little more dimensional, maybe. I think that the victim who ends up being the corpse that's discovered is a rather unlikable person. But, to me, it's not necessary to have the victim be somebody that you really hate. I think if they aren't entirely unlikable, that it may be more difficult to find out who did it.

A row of lilacs in the Berkshires that author Deborah Benoit used as inspiration to separate the properties of neighbors, and gardeners, in her novel.
Submitted
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Deborah Benoit
A row of lilacs in the Berkshires that author Deborah Benoit used as inspiration to separate the properties of neighbors, and gardeners, in her novel.

Benoit shared a list of her favorite cozy mystery authors that she reads on her Kindle. Laughing, the novelist said if she didn’t read fiction on a device, she would have books piled to the ceiling.

I love Donna Andrews, which is great because she has such a long series. I think she's on No. 42 or 43 of her cozy mystery series.

I also enjoy Maddie Day. She has several mystery series, and they're all very fun. There’s Amanda Flower, who has some very good books.

Benoit added that she skims the synopses of many books and selects ones that “just look like it's going to be a fun read.”

Carrie Healy hosts the local broadcast of "Morning Edition" at NEPM. She also hosts the station’s weekly government and politics segment “Beacon Hill In 5” for broadcast radio and podcast syndication.
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