When I transitioned from teaching and writing scholarly books to writing mysteries, I had no idea about the way the genre is sub-categorized. Hardboiled, noir, thriller, historical, PI novels, police procedurals. Where did mine fit? Cozies, maybe. Violence and sex off-stage. Profanity kept to a minimum. Cozies are set in confined spaces, not always locked rooms but not the teeming streets of a major city.
Mine sort of fit. Tour de Trace covers the four hundred miles of Mississippi’s Natchez Trace as its protagonist, English professor Susan Warner, celebrates her retirement on a bicycle trip with her daughter. Susan fits another characteristic of cozies–she’s a highly educated amateur sleuth.
Death of the Keynote Speaker is even more a cozy. Susan is confined in a storm on an island with a small group of scholars studying a long-dead writer only to discover the body of their newly-dead keynote speaker. Cemetery Wine takes place largely in Susan’s New Hampshire house and neighborhood after she finds the body of a visiting scholar of African-American literature dead on the sarcophagus of the local cemetery.
Perhaps these are historicals as well. Even if their settings are contemporary, they are grounded in history: Mississippi’s fraught racial past, the nineteenth-century of a woman novelist, New Hampshire’s role in the Underground Railroad. More likely, they’re straight up whodunits.
Although genre categories help, I’ve never wanted to pigeonhole a book. What, after all, is The Scarlet Letter but an attempt by townspeople to solve the mystery of who fathered Hester Prynne’s child? How about Moby-Dick? A thriller as Captain Ahab chases the white whale. Crime and Punishment? A police procedural.
My newest novel, Leaving Freedom, departs from all these sub-categories of mysteries. There’s no murder, no kidnapping, no theft. But its protagonist, Connie Lewis, discovers plenty of secrets as she leaves her hometown of Freedom, Massachusetts, to care for her mother in Florida and to seek a career as a writer. Set from 1973 to 1982, it’s historical, if not ancient.
Like a cozy, it centers on place, though not a single one. Leaving Freedom travels in Boston and suburban Massachusetts, Florida’s Gulf Coast and the swamps of the St. John’s River, Buffalo and Niagara Falls, California’s Jedediah Smith Redwood forest, Oregon’s high desert and coastline. It includes scenes at the Rajneesh commune that took over the tiny town of Antelope, Oregon, in the early 1980s, a section I’d written before the documentary Wild, Wild Country aired on Netflix. So what is Leaving Freedom? A quest novel? A family saga? A travelogue? Maybe all of these as it captures how Connie must leave Freedom to find freedom. Her journey includes sorrow and joy, its destination is not fixed, its story one of roads taken and roads not yet found.
