Greetings, Terrans, and happy Fourth of July.
Welcome to our first Between the Seasons episode, an interview with the brilliant, funny mystery writer, Mindy Quigley.
Woo!
Tagline, hi, Mindy.
I love that your tagline is, sometimes murder is a laughing matter.
And by the way, everybody, that's Mindy's dog.
It's MindyQuigley.com.
M-I-N-D-Y-Q-U-I-G-L-E-Y dot com.
Needless to say, I adore Mindy, especially because murder can sometimes be a laughing matter, and we have a lot in common.
Mindy!
Woo!
I'm gonna say a quick thing about your bio.
Mindy, quickly, is the author of two lighthearted mystery series.
Her latest, The Deep Dish Mysteries, minted to our St.
Martin's Press, was a Women's World Book Club pick, has been featured in Parade, Milwaukee Magazine, and the Seattle Times.
And here's one of the extra cool things about Mindy.
Mindy's non-writing career is stranger than fiction, having taken her from the US to the UK, where she worked as the personal assistant to the scientist, y'all know we love
scientists, who cloned Dolly the sheep.
And also she worked as a project manager for a research clinic founded by the author J.K.
Rowling.
And I don't know if you're still doing this, but you were working
with an incredible organization fairly recently that was focusing on understanding more about and curing brain tumors in dogs.
uh Isn't that right?
That's right.
Yeah.
So I work very part-time as a clinical research coordinator for the vet school at Virginia Tech.
And one of the grants that I work on is a brain cancer research grant.
It's amazing.
You're amazing.
Thanks Holly, the feeling is mutual.
So I think, first let's talk about your most recent mystery series and how you mix uh delightfulness and really incredible characters like seriously, uh any of these characters
could have their own little spin-off series.
That's how amazing these characters are in my humble opinion.
um And I'm enjoying us doing that for some of our Between the Seasons episodes.
We're following some of the characters on their own one-off.
And so that's how I was, that's where that thought came from for me.
I was like, I would love to know this one-off thing for Daniel, this one-off thing for Delilah, and so on and so forth.
So for our captivated listening audience, could you wax poetic?
or full of swears if you want, but they have to be PG swears, because as you know, we use Scott's whales and Ambergris in the series.
um Mindy and I share a love of swearing.
uh
do.
Yeah, so these books are in the cozy mystery vein.
this is mysteries that don't have a lot of swearing, even though I love to swear in real life.
em But they're the sort of like Hallmarky style mysteries.
But one thing I tried to do when I set out to create the deep dish mysteries was to make sure exactly what you're saying, that each of the characters was a fully realized person.
And part of that is em
kind of utilitarian because I wanted to make sure, like I knew this was going to be a series and I wanted to make sure that we had the major sleuthing bases covered because,
when you have a series, like a lot of times you're going to run into a time where you need a computer password cracked or you need somebody who's athletic to do a thing.
So I wanted to make sure that within that cast of characters, I had all of those people.
So I gave, you know, my my kind of second banana character
Delilah's best friend, this backstory that even though she's a chef, everybody else in her family is a lawyer and they're sort of famous kind of shy story lawyers, you the kind that
have like billboards where they're like, call me if you're in a truck accident and that kind of thing.
So her family is always on call if there's a legal question.
And obviously, Sonia knows a lot about the law, having grown up around that.
em So part of that, like I said, is just a choice that I made early on to make sure that there were
people expertise within the team that could help solve mysteries.
then following on from that, um the people just started to talk to me.
And I'm sure this is true, too, of uh you and other actors that, you know, once you get into it, then you find that you can access those people somewhere in your own psyche and
they take on a little bit of a life of their own to the extent that.
I will be writing a scene that I've carefully plotted and all of a sudden I'm like, nope, that's not what they want to do.
They want to do this other thing.
So let's just follow that.
love that.
um Reveal, I have had the unbelievable joy and honor to have narrated the books in this deep dish pizza mystery.
And I'm excited to be, I can't wait to see the manuscript for the next one, book five, at Death's Dough.
um I've absolutely loved all the other ones.
And TBH, I loved narrating the, uh
the first two books of that early mystery, like 10,000 years ago.
Yes, yeah, Holly and I have known each other forever.
I think for over 10 years.
um And I apologize for my dog.
I don't know why he's being, my dog is being such an idiot, but he is.
We just had a little echo there, that's okay.
uh
okay.
Yeah.
What's going on?
Nope, now it's good again.
Can you say that thing again about your dog and Holly and I have...
He's a yappy little 10 pound puppy.
And that, yeah, he just has decided that now would be a great time to start barking.
So that's what's happening in my house.
No worries.
So as we were saying, uh we've known each other forever.
uh Murder in Mount Moriah and Death in Duck were my first introductions to Mindy's wonderful, delicious brain.
One of the other things, I mean, obviously listeners of The Mysterious Chirp will know that there are official people who
our inspectors and sergeants and solve the crime.
And then we have the amateur sleuths, the Scoobies, um as I, I mean, who doesn't call them the Scoobies?
I mean, so one of the things I have always loved about your world um is that it's so inspirational to me how you have the Scoobies intersect with
the official people, like I really believe it.
And because there's sometimes I'm reading something and I'm like, you know, I kind of don't buy this at all, you know, or it's like the official people are stupid, which I also
sometimes find discomforting.
I'm like, no, these people are hard working in real life.
And one of the beautiful, beautiful things about all your work is that we don't see that, right?
It's not that, these people are stupid or oh,
they can't get along or, this improbable thing happens and somehow this amateur person is better.
It's not that at all.
And yet somehow you still manage to have the Scoobies and the officials coming at it from both sides.
So we get to, as a reader, listener, consumer, um be identified with the Scoobies and help us, you know, which is a lifeline to us following the mystery.
But you're not doing that at the expense of the official people.
And I worship you for that, just saying.
you part of that comes from living in a small town so I live in this town that's well it's not small small but it's like forty thousand people but it's a college town so more than
half of those people are students who only live here part of the year and I am friends with our retired chief of police who stepped down a couple of years ago and.
um
And when I get ready to write each book or usually somewhere like partway through writing, I'll sit down with him.
We have an annual meeting where we sit down and we talk about all of the policing that takes place in the books.
And I run things past him and sort of like as the chief of a small town police department, how would you be approaching this?
What would you do?
In this situation does this seem plausible and he's great because he knows that this he knows the kind of mystery that this is this is not a police procedural and that's that
level of detail and authenticity are not what my readers are interested in you know they're interested in personal stories and the characters.
So there are things where he's like maybe or like you could make it more plausible by doing x y or z thing but he's not somebody who gets caught up in like the nitty gritty of
things that.
I'm like, could they turn this autopsy result around this quickly?
And he's like, under perfect circumstances, if you asked pretty please, maybe.
So that's really helpful for me because I think that that kind of massages things in a way that gives it that level of realism.
And even just interacting with him, honestly, I've picked up a few things that have made their way into my detective character em because I just noticed how he is.
be in a coffee shop and he's always sitting with his back to the wall where he can see the entrances.
It's a very cop thing to do.
when we were out just actually a couple of weeks ago, there was a loud bang, some, was a cart that like kind of fell off the back of a truck.
And the way that he reacted to that, you could just see like it was just this in.
built response where he was immediately like, what is that sound?
What is my response going to be?
In a way, it wasn't like a startle reflex.
It was this like action reflex that certainly I didn't have and nobody else that was sitting near us had, but he had this.
So those are the kinds of things that having become friends with him and kind of seeing how the police operate at that closer level, because this is such a small town, I I
interact with.
you know, our mayor and things like that a lot more than I think a lot of people would.
em It allows me, I think, to want to be realistic and also want to present those characters in that kind of like good, hardworking light that you talked about, like these
are dedicated civil servants for the most part.
And, you know, talk a little bit about some of the less the less nice sides of policing, too.
You we talk about that a little bit to the extent possible within the cozy mystery genre, but
allude to flaws in the criminal justice system in the way that justice in a moral sense is different than justice in a legal sense sometimes.
I love that.
uh speaking of your characters, let's hear, uh I think the audience would love to hear more about the characters and the mysteries themselves because there are so many stinking
parallels and that's partly because of the things that we have in common.
You know what I mean?
Actually, it's entirely, you know, our respect for these characters and our interest in these characters.
And I think people who like the mystery aspect of the Mysterious Chirp,
will enjoy your mysteries because of your dedication to more probableness and uh character integrity and silliness.
the deep dish mysteries center on this hard charging perfectionist pizza chef and part of that.
em You know that's a cliche right that chefs are perfectionists but it's a cliche for a reason it's one of those things that's true and I thought like let's explore this you know
let's explore how she feels about this and how this impacts other aspects of her life so Delilah O'Leary is this workaholic chef who.
Moves from Chicago up to this resort town in Wisconsin to open her own Chicago themed deep dish pizzeria and at her side is her longtime best friend, Sonia Doctor.
She's the one who's got the family of lawyers and Sonia is much more creative, of follow her heart type of person, not as caught up in that level of detail.
She would never want to run her own business.
She would find it way too stressful.
em
And then we also have our detective who is Calvin Capone.
He's the great grandson of Al Capone.
And that was kind of a thing I threw in there.
I remember talking to my agent early on.
I'm like, yeah, I'm probably, you know, if I'm to do like pizza, I'm going to double down on the Chicago aspect.
And that's probably going to mean like bringing in the things that are em that people think of when they think of Chicago and obviously Al Capone and that old school mob, em
you know, golden age of mobsters is something that people think of.
So I threw that in a little bit as an afterthought as his backstory, but it's really become central to who he is as a person, because I thought, God, can you imagine having
that notorious forebearer?
And in Al Capone's own family, a long time, they changed their name.
So for decades, his son went by the last name Brown and other members of the family changed their names.
And only now, almost 100 years after his heyday,
Are they changing their names back to Capone because now it's kind of fashionable again and not as much of an albatross, you know, around their necks.
So that's something that I've explored in the books through that character.
em And then, you know, there's a bunch of side characters and one that has become a reader favorite.
That's yet another lens into the criminal justice system is em this character Rabbit, who is a person who was formerly incarcerated.
So he
comes in, Delilah doesn't really want to hire him for various reasons, mostly money, because she has a cash flow problem at the time that he shows up.
And she ends up hiring him.
the way that he, the background that he has experiencing the criminal justice system from the totally opposite side of what mysteries usually explore, especially cozy mysteries,
are usually not interested in the experiences of somebody who's been incarcerated.
That's allowed me to do some really interesting things in the book I'm working on now, which is book six in the series.
Those experiences that Rabbit had while he was incarcerated are going to become kind of central to the plot and help to solve the mystery.
em So all of those things are always kind of churning.
That's the undercurrent of what's otherwise like a really fun, funny, feel-good escapist mystery.
I love that.
I absolutely love that.
And that I think is uh another reason why I adore your work so much is that sure, it's delicious to consume like a cookie, sweet and yummy and fun, but we've snuck a lot of
social nutrition in there.
uh
want to write these unless I was able to do that.
And that's something my editor has been pretty supportive of.
And it's not that I ever want to be heavy handed or shove my views down somebody's throat.
It's truly just like, here's a person.
Here's a fully realized to the extent possible person.
And I just want you to walk a mile in their shoes.
And I want to walk a mile in their shoes.
And let's just see how that changes our experience of the world.
Because I really feel like that's
Art is one of the most effective ways to cultivate empathy in society.
Just seeing somebody who you invite into your living room, em either on the page or through a screen, and being like, wow, OK, I never thought what life would be like if I
identified that way or if I had had that life experience, if that were my financial situation or if I were faced with that choice.
And I think that uh we could certainly use a lot more empathy in society right now.
Yeah.
And along those lines, uh personally, I appreciate that uh Rabbit, the person who was incarcerated, and that's his nickname, by the way.
That's not his given name.
I appreciate that he's a white guy.
You know?
Like, yeah.
police detective Calvin Capone, who's biracial and his mom is uh Afro-Caribbean.
And then we've got Rabbit as a white guy.
And that was something I wanted to play with a little bit, too.
Just like, again, these are people that exist in the world.
And part of what shapes them is their race and where they come from.
And that plays out in different ways.
And um I also really appreciate uh why, for example, Daniel ends up in Wisconsin.
Or should I make sure I say this correctly?
uh Wisconsin.
And uh Melody, just like all the characters are so fully realized.
And I believe that
The girl who is straight off the farm would fall for uh the former uh Navy SEAL, right?
Navy SEAL or Marine?
Army, okay.
yeah, so the ex-soldier.
Yeah, so that's, yeah, he's definitely, and that's something that I've been interested to.
There's a relationship between some of the side characters, as Holly mentioned.
um Melody is this Wisconsin farm girl.
She doesn't have a ton of experience.
em And yeah, and Daniel is originally from Puerto Rico, but he served in the army.
So he's lived in various places all over the world and just much more worldly.
And he's the handsome bartender now um at the restaurant in the books.
And Melody crushes pretty hard on him.
And I've kind of like wanted to develop that relationship very slowly because I felt like it would not be realistic.
know, Daniel is a nice guy.
He doesn't want to take advantage of this naive farm girl.
But she just proves herself time after time to be so much more than that.
And many times is instrumental in solving the mystery or saving the day in some crucial and unexpected way that just proves.
And again, this comes from her skills on the farm, that she's good mechanically and with machinery.
She knows quite a bit about animals.
She just has a lot of practical knowledge.
And she's also got this artistic streak, too, em that we see play out in various ways that, again, kind of saved the day.
So she's somebody that I think
There's more to than meets the eye and it's fun to see that play out in the romance, you the little like backstory romance that's going on as well as in the main mystery plot in
each of the books.
Well, it's appreciated.
I totally, when I'm narrating your books, uh appreciate the dedication to the fullness of characters.
And when I'm enjoying your books just as a reader, as a consumer, I appreciate all of that.
It's much easier for me when I have real live people to sculpt around and their ideas, you know, and I can just like orient.
things towards how I know, but you have to have all of that cast in your brain.
And it's so, I just, I just wanted to shout out about that because you're so brilliant.
Where does your love of mysteries come from?
Gotta know.
of those kids.
mean, it's such a cliche, but I was one of those kids who was like Nancy Drew and all of the mystery books when I was when I was little.
And I remember like the first ever picture book that I really remember um was Nate the Great.
And he's a little kid detective.
em And the mystery is really fun.
It plays out in the artwork as well as through the words.
But the artwork in this picture book, you you can use it to solve the mystery if you're eagle eyed.
So I wish I had a deeper answer than that.
And I guess maybe I do a little bit that I also am somebody who wishes that the world was fairer and more just.
And creating stories where you get to control that em definitely gives me a little bit of power in a world where sometimes you feel like you can't control those things.
So maybe that's my deeper.
answer, but I'm also just a person who's always loved.
I remember, know, like Agatha Christie, probably from age 10, I was reading those em those classic Agatha Christie books.
Totally.
am a mystery.
And are you reading a favorite mystery right now?
I am constantly reading books, mostly sci-fi and mystery.
And it's more mystery than sci-fi, but I love sci-fi mysteries also.
But I'm usually reading like five things at the same time in addition to reading for work.
It's just a thing.
So what are you reading at the moment?
Well, I have a couple of favorites.
So right now, my son and I are listening on audiobook to this.
um It's the Myrtle Hardcastle mysteries.
So it's a Victorian um set mystery.
It's a Victorian England.
It's a little girl who solves mysteries.
She's maybe 12.
But the writing of these books, it's just outstanding.
They're like they could be literary fiction.
And I love everything about them.
You talk about characterization like these things are.
Every adult should be who loves mysteries, especially those Golden Age mysteries should be reading the Myrtle Hardcastle mysteries by Elizabeth Bunce.
They are phenomenal.
em And I'm sad.
I think there are only five of them.
And I'm to go back and start again when I finish because they're so good.
And then I am also eagerly anticipating.
So last year, one of my favorite books was this book Glory B by Danielle Arseneau.
And em this centers on Glory Broussard, who lives in Louisiana.
m
She's a black woman who really is just such an interesting character, both in her personality and her morality.
So she's like running a sports book at the same time as like the church services are happening.
But then she's also like a very committed church lady in these other ways, mostly to get em kind of get one over on some of her fellow church ladies who she feels like have
wronged her.
But even given
those maybe less than perfect, less than likable characteristics.
You cannot help but root for this woman.
She's so tough.
She has such an interesting voice.
eh I was captivated from the first page.
And the sequel to that Glory Days em just came out a couple of months ago.
So that is the next book on my TBR.
em It's a really fun setting.
And again, just the voice of the narration, you cannot help.
but root for this really funny, tough woman who sometimes is her own worst enemy.
Sounds amazing.
um Super quick before we talk sci-fi, do you have a favorite Sherlock Holmes writer spin-off?
I have to say I have a bunch of favorites, but my two favorites at the moment are Laurie R.
King's books.
um And yeah, that's the first one, yep.
And I also love Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's take on it.
my God, yes, there are.
He's written three and they are marvelous.
And they start with backstory.
So the very first book is about Mycroft as a young man, and it is brilliant.
Highly recommend.
because I love him as an essayist.
I've never read any of his fiction.
I actually didn't even know that he wrote fiction.
So the fact that he's doing mysteries just like I am delighted by that because em he is a delightful writer and a delightful human being from what I can tell.
So, yeah, I'm super excited about that.
So I'd say like my my spin off of recent years that I've really loved is the BBC Sherlock Holmes with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, just because I love
m the characterization of Dr.
Watson in that as just a little bit more of an active character.
He's always this blank slate, essentially.
And m they play with that a little bit in the Lori R.
King series, like what a numpty he is in lot of senses that em the female sleuth in those Lori R.
King books certainly does not think highly of Dr.
Watson.
I do, and I love that they made a little bit more of him in that BBC series.
Yeah, me too, me too.
All right, sci-fi.
I know that you have some passions for sci-fi and you know I could just eat sci-fi all day, as long as it's really good sci-fi.
I just finished, um I'm not sure how you say it, but it's I-M-A-G-O by oh Octavia Butler.
So that was delicious.
It was amazing, it was brilliant.
um Anyway.
I am a mostly television sci-fi consumer.
So I don't read a lot of sci-fi, but I watch a fair bit of sci-fi, especially when I was younger.
I was a nut about Star Trek The Next Generation.
em And that was probably my entry point into sci-fi.
And then my kids and I still really love Doctor Who.
So that's kind of the ongoing sci-fi love in my life.
But I still love the old Next Generation with Captain Picard.
I'd say that that's my major sci-fi that still exists in my life is uh through Doctor Who and the next generation.
I love all the Star Trek's, all of them.
um And I'm happily awaiting the next season of the, can't, my gosh, I can't remember the name of it, but it's the one with Pike.
It's wonderful.
it's so, so good.
And I'm currently rewatching Ahsoka, because I'm also heavily.
of in love with all of all things Star Wars.
So all things Star Trek, all things Star Wars, but also I consumed Battlestar Galactica when it was around um and Doctor Who and I would say even Hitchhiker's is sci-fi and like
I said Octavia Butler's work.
And television wise too, like there's so many things that are sci-fi right now.
I can't watch all of The Last of Us, but my husband watches it and what I can watch is brilliant, but it's a little too um all the babies and all the dogs are dying and you know
what I mean?
Like too much for me.
might not be what a lot of us are wanting to invite into our lives, know, more dystopia.
So yeah, I do love a good dystopia, especially like the classic dystopian short stories and novels.
em But yeah, just right now, that's not em I don't have space for that.
What if there was, you had a favorite sci-fi moment.
If you were on a spaceship and you can combine that with anything that you've read, what would be your favorite thing that would have happened?
Oh my gosh, OK, so I have a few.
mean, this is not one that I would ever want to experience in real life, but I refer to all the time the Weeping Angels episode of Doctor Who.
It's the scariest hour of television I have ever experienced.
And I don't know exactly why that is, because it's not like objectively, if you're like a horror watcher, it is not that scary.
But there was something just like existentially terrifying, and there are a ton of jump scares in this episode.
And it's about these aliens who look like em angel statues.
And if you don't look at them, they grab you.
So you have to keep your eyes on them open without blinking em in order to save yourself.
And that was just of like peak Doctor Who for me was such a scary episode.
But in terms of like episodes that I think about a lot, um I had to look it up just now.
But there's an episode of the next generation
called The Measure of a Man.
couldn't remember what it was called, but it's about um data.
The uh Android is being compelled by Starfleet essentially to be disassembled and have his memories, his software uploaded to create clones of himself.
And having worked in the space of cloning as the assistant to the guy who cloned Dolly the Sheep, it's something I've thought about a lot, the ethics of
genetic manipulation and what makes the self the self.
that episode is really great for distilling a lot of those debates about consciousness, like what makes you an individual.
em And now there are lot of interesting real science things happening about people who were considered to be in persistent vegetative states, for example, but can still think.
em So are you alive if you have that minimally conscious state?
And AI, obviously, just within the last couple of years, this episode prefigured these debates that we're having now by a good two decades em about what is dangerous about AI,
what could be helpful about AI, when does AI become human-like, and why does that freak us out so much?
And then even, frankly, slavery.
And this comes up in the discussions about cloning, too, that if you cloned yourself,
em How much are you allowed to manipulate the genes of your offspring em before that becomes damaging, like you're infringing on their personhood and their ability to exist as
a unique individual.
So all of those things, I make it sound like it's actually like a really fun episode to very interesting.
And it's almost like an episode of Law and Order because it's this trial.
em
But I think that just encapsulates everything that's cool about sci-fi.
that's awesome.
Yes.
And it's all the things that you and I are both dedicated to, all of those thoughts.
And I feel I totally agree with you.
Sci-fi is where we can, I wrote about this in a blog.
It's like, how can we talk about things that are really important social issues without people stopping the read?
And sci-fi is the answer because if you put it in a different world, in a different context, on another planet,
Any of that.
you know you maybe know this backstory, but I learned this recently that um Rob Serling, who created the Twilight Zone, which is another great classic sci fi that has been very
durable with new reincarnations.
But his initial plan.
So this is like well before he thought of the Twilight Zone.
He wanted he wrote a screenplay about the murder of Emmett Till.
So the brutal lynching of this young boy in the south.
And he wrote the screenplay.
Nobody would.
produce it, no uh TV station would touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Finally, he rewrote it, and a network took it.
But they changed almost everything about it.
I can't remember.
They made it about a Jewish peddler in Texas or something.
It was a totally different thing.
And almost none of what he wanted to put in there ended up in there.
And he was like, OK, how am I going to explore some of these issues that are so important to me?
em
And the answer was the Twilight Zone.
I'm going to put it 500 years in the future.
I'm going to make it with aliens or monsters.
And we're going to get at these things.
We're still going to tell these stories, but in ways that people find more palatable and that are going to be able to be produced in this climate of social injustice, where
somebody is worried about the southern viewer or whatever at that time.
I loved that backstory of the Twilight Zone that was explicitly, you that was not just an offshoot of what he was trying to do.
That was explicitly what he was trying to do.
And it grew out of his desire to uh share his horror, frankly, at what happened to Emmett Till.
I didn't know that.
That's awesome.
Yeah, wild, wild story.
Well, I really appreciate, again, even more about you.
And is there anything that you want to say or add or whatever before we wrap up?
I try to keep these episodes under 40 minutes.
So is
to gush over Holly because you're not only an incredible audiobook narrator and actor, but an amazing human being.
And it has been my absolute delight getting to know you better, uh both as an artist and as a human being over the last dozen or so years.
And long may our partnership continue.
Yay!
Thank you so much.
And uh listeners, the next episode of Between the Seasons will be The Child, which is a character follow of Lieutenant Luke Cannon on a different planet and in a different
adventure.
So thanks, everybody, for listening.
And thank you, Mindy Quigley.
Again, Mindy Quigley.
That's last name is spelled Q-U-I-G-L-E-Y dot com.
Get her books, get her audio books.
She is absolutely brilliant and a delicious, delicious read.
Thanks, Holly.
Yay!