Please help me welcome today’s guest, Tammy D. Walker…
Do you have another occupation, other than writer? If so, what is it and do you like it?
I always marvel at people who have a linear career path, from their studies to their job. That’s not me! I studied, among other things, psychology, music, and English, and after grad school focusing on the last, I decided that I’d rather follow my interest in computers and work in tech. So I spent over a decade as a software developer, which I really enjoyed. I’m drawn to solving puzzles, which is why I like both writing code and penning mysteries.
Though I’ve gone back to teaching English, I still follow tech trends, and I use my tech background quite a lot as I write. Leslie, the main character in The Wing of a Bee, is in IT, and she’s working through the messy merger of her company with another while she’s also working on solving the jewelry thefts. So, I brought a lot of my own experience with potential technical problems to her backstory.
What I love about writing mysteries is that I can bring all my educational and employment experience to the books, both to the characters’ lives and the kinds of clues I weave into the stories.
Do you collect anything?
Radios! I have a small collection, since I enjoy listening to both broadcast radio as well as transmissions outside those bands. Living in Dallas, I can hear quite a lot on the air bands from the airports nearby. And weather radio is very important, as Dallas is in tornado alley. Mostly, though, my favorite is shortwave radio, which can potentially reach the world. I’ve curated and hosted shows for shortwave radio that featured poets reading their work, and I loved getting to combine those two interests to showcase contemporary writers to a broad audience. Radio plays a role in some of my mysteries as well.
What do you want readers to come away with after they read The Wing of a Bee?
For me, The Wing of a Bee was a way to explore questions about how to build community in a small town, in this case, the fictional Rosin in northeast Texas. Rosin, like the characters, undergoes significant change. Families move in from nearby Dallas with ideas about small town life not necessarily shared by those already there, while locals want to make the place better for the long-time residents without compromising their interests.
Leslie moved away after college, so she’s in both camps. She wants to both honor her grandmother’s legacy and her mother’s beliefs about what is “right” while building a community that is open, accepting, and, ultimately, supportive of the people who live there.
So, I’d like readers to come away from the mystery considering these questions, too. How do we make community better for everyone? Cozy mysteries should “return the world to order” after the crimes are solved. What, then, should that order look like?
I don’t claim to have the right answers to those questions, but I do want to contribute to some part of that conversation.
Beyond that, I do want to entertain my readers, so I hope they’ve had as much fun solving the mystery alongside Leslie and Veronica as I had writing it.
What genre have you never written that you’d like to write?
I love historical mysteries, and I’d like to write them. My cozies are contemporary and set in or tied to Texas. That said, I’ve been reading a lot about phone hacking in the mid-20th century, and the way phone phreaking—as it was called—was used as both a way to explore technology and build community fascinates me. Phones operate on a very different system now, so the methods they used would no longer work in a contemporary novel, of course. But I think phone hacking, especially dialing around the circuits and listening in on party lines, would be an intriguing way to enter a mystery.
I’d also like to expand beyond Texas at some point. While I’m a believer in “write what you know,” and I do know Texas as I’ve lived here all my life, I travel quite a bit through the Midwest and plains. So, I’d like to set a mystery in Western Nebraska at some point. The landscape is so different from the Northeast and Central Texas settings I’ve used so far, and the bluffs and plains could be characters in themselves.
What is the toughest criticism given to you as an author? What has been the best compliment?
I’ll start off the toughest criticism discussion whit a little background. I’m a poet, and most of my academic creative writing training focused on that genre. I used to write science fiction—heavy, thinky stuff whit a lot of symbolism and, unfortunately, without a lot of action—and I brought a lot of my poet’s mentality to that. So, I’d often get rejections from editors noting that while the writing was beautiful, the story just wasn’t there. So, that’s the toughest criticism I’ve had as a writer.
I’d read and watched mysteries, so I decided to teach myself plotting by writing a mystery. And, I loved it. I switched genres, and I’ve been writing mysteries ever since.
Two compliments have meant the most to me. First, I love hearing from readers and editors that my mysteries are well plotted and that the storylines work well. And second, that my cozies make people laugh. I love bringing whimsy and joy to my readers, and knowing that I’ve done so makes me very happy.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
My characters are definitely imaginary. I never base characters off real people. That said, I hope my characters feel real and that they encourage readers to ask questions about real-life situations.
I have had people I know ask my if they’re in my books before, though. Those questions were prompted by characters struggling with certain kinds of problems, and I can understand why they asked. That said, there are problems that are if not universal than widely experienced that it’s easy to see ourselves in the characters. Leslie struggles with work / life balance, like a lot of us do. Martin left a dream behind in his mid-20s to be able to better support Leslie and their kids. The families in the novel work through issues with aging parents, estrangement, and midlife upheavals. So, the characters are fictional, but their problems are very real.
Is there one subject you would never write about? What is it?
In my cozy mysteries, the crime is never murder. I’ve written about art fraud, property damage, fake identities, theft, injury, and vandalism, but no one is killed. I prefer to read mysteries that are less grim, and I know others out there do, too.
That’s not to say that the stakes aren’t high. I just raise them elsewhere. So, instead of “we have to catch the killer because the culprit killed someone,” the tension comes from the crimes’ effects on the entire community as well as the threat to the main characters and their family and friends.
The outline I have for the traditional, historical mystery I might write does involve death. If I do write that, then I’ll publish under a different name, as I do for poetry.
I want my readers to be assured that if they read a cozy mystery by Tammy D. Walker, the crime won’t be murder, but all the other elements that make cozies so lovely—the sense of community, the high stakes, and the amateur sleuth who can’t let the puzzle go until she’s solved it—will all be in the book.
She’s inherited a honey of a boutique from her queen bee grandmother, but can she solve the string of jewelry thefts before the culprit stings again?
Blurb:
Leslie had expected her grandmother’s funeral to buzz. Everyone who was anyone would be at the service for Evelyn, late owner of Butterfield’s Boutique and queen bee of Loblolly County.
What Leslie hadn’t expected was reuniting with her free-spirited cousin, Veronica. Or that they would inherit the coveted boutique.
When an influencer wearing jewelry from Butterfield’s is robbed, Leslie concludes the theft is a publicity stunt. But when the boutique’s window is smashed in violently, the cousins begin to investigate before worse happens to the shop—or to its clients.
With the help of reunited family, new neighbors, and old friends, Leslie and Veronica brave the swarm of suspects who all want the boutique, the jewelry, and their revenge.
Excerpt:
As she breathed in the scent of honeysuckle and the old-fashioned climbing roses, Leslie wondered whether the reception was what her grandmother would have wanted after her funeral. Cynthia, Leslie’s mother and Evelyn’s older daughter, had transformed the backyard of her grand house into a reflection of Evelyn’s life, of course. Cynthia had always been good at arranging events both fitting and tasteful. Guests flitted between tables laden with photos of Evelyn’s full life and tables bearing the weight of too much food, even for the large crowd here to pay their respects.
Well, pay their respects and hobnob with the eminent out-of-town guests and the elite of Rosin, Texas, if they were lucky. The film crew who’d shot the episode of the television show that had turned Butterfield’s Boutique into a magnet for collectors of jewelry and art objects from all over the world was there. As were a dozen jewelry designers, fine artists, and gallery owners, all of whom had flown in from out of town, out of state, or out of country. Anyone connected to the governments of Rosin and Loblolly County in which it sat reminisced about Evelyn Butterfield with the boutique’s moneyed clientele. Half the faculty and administration of nearby Northeast Texas University, which had brought Evelyn and her family to Rosin from their English cottage in Leicester a near lifetime ago, had come to pay their respects to Cynthia. Not that anyone at the university now had been there during Arthur Butterfield’s brief academic career in the US in the 1950s.
Leslie picked her way past a cluster of well-coiffed women in sleek black dresses, all wearing bracelets and necklaces purchased at the boutique. She resisted the urge to fan herself. Mid-afternoon July heat prickled her skin. But she knew her mother would be watching, and she resisted even the appearance that something might be amiss.
But amiss things were, at least for a number of people here.
Buy links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Butterfields-Boutique-Computer-Repair-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0GYT5P3DV/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/251577554-the-wing-of-a-bee
BN: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wing-of-a-bee-tammy-d-walker/1150033519?ean=9781509265961
IndieBound: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-wing-of-a-bee-tammy-d-walker/6c8d6123a9ceee4c
Apple: https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-wing-of-a-bee/id6764347998
About the Author:
Tammy D. Walker writes contemporary cozy mysteries that have roots in Texas. Her most recent novel is The Wing of a Bee. The author of four poetry collections and the Daw County Sisters Mysteries series, she loves weaving clues into her books that draw on her experiences as a software developer and English teacher. When she’s not working or spending time with family and friends, she’s most likely to be found in her garden, somewhere near a radio, or at her desk writing letters. Find out more at https://www.tammydwalker.com/
Social Media Links
Website: https://www.tammydwalker.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tdwalker_/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Tammy-D-Walker-Cozy-Mystery-Writer/100091886321062/
Author Alicia Dean 