Lambda Award winning author Nicole Kimberling is dishing up a three-course meal of mystery, murder, and romance in her new book Mystery on the Menu. A collection of three delectable culinary cozy mysteries, Mystery on the Menu is sure to satisfy the appetites of readers. Centered around Chef Drew Allison who, with the help hunky deputy “Big Mac” Mackenzie, must put his amateur sleuth skills to the test to solve a murder in which he’s the prime suspect, and avoid being cooked in the process, Mystery on the Menu is a feast for mystery fans. Mystery on the Menu will be available on May 23 at the Blind Eye Books website and in bookstores.
Too hungry to wait? As an appetizer, we’ve sat down with Nicole to find out more in an exclusive interview.
I know you worked for a long time in the food industry. Do you think that has influenced you as a writer?
Absolutely. My time in the restaurant industry instilled in me a sense of urgency and diligence that I don’t think I would have acquired if I’d only worked with books. But the biggest thing that I got from restaurant kitchens was a sense of teamwork and the importance of good morale—like keeping up morale is key to maintaining your stamina and endurance—which you need a lot of in order to finish a novel-length work.
I was really happy to write an amateur sleuth who is a chef as well because chefs, and restaurant kitchen staff in general, are so much more proactive and ingenious than people who are not in the industry imagine. They are the kind of people who are game for anything and who will try to solve any problems themselves, up to and including homicide. I wanted to show that sense of agency when I created Chef Drew Allison.
Mystery on the Menu is set in a small Pacific Northwest Island town, what drew you to this setting?
Mysteries are all about controlling tension and creating a sense of pressure and an island provides a naturally closed environment, which, heightens the level of stress on everything within it. Islands are—kind of societal microcosms. And the islands in the Puget Sound are mostly on this tiny tectonic plate that’s sandwiched between the North American and Pacific plates which means that they’re separate even on a geological level.
I don’t go into that in the book of course, because none of the characters are geologists or anything, but that knowledge did inform the way that I wrote about the characters and the place. The PNW also has a lot of active volcanoes that seem peaceful but still do occasionally erupt and cause carnage which I thought was an apt metaphor for murder in a small town.
How did winning a Lambda Award affect your writing and career as a writer?
Mainly by giving me a huge confidence boost. It’s nice to win awards. It means other writers like your writing, which feels good.
Do you think living in the PNW has influenced you as a writer, and if so, how?
Yes, I think so. The PNW is a temperate rainforest which, in a nutshell, means that it rains a lot and nature is everywhere. It doesn’t matter where you are, some plant or animal will find a way to be there with you. Like if you leave your broken car sitting in one place too long, it will be subsumed by foliage. Then that foliage will be eaten by a random roaming urban deer. Everything becomes intertwined. It’s not uncommon to see eagles and falcons just chilling by the interstate, or run into a whole pack of raccoons while taking out the garbage. All you have to do to see sea life is walk to the end of any dock and just look down into the water. It’s impossible to ignore nature or to separate yourself from it here even if, like me, you mainly see it from afar or through triple-paned glass.
A lot of writing is about taking thoughts and experiences that have no inherent narrative and arranging them so that they make some kind of sense and can be communicated to other people. When you’re just starting out writing, it can be easy to fall into the trap of writing because you want to be understood by others, or wanting to have your thoughts and experiences validated by others, rather than writing in order to help others understand your thoughts and to help them understand, through your fiction, that their own experiences are valid. It’s a subtle but important difference.
The pervasive presence of nature here helped me understand that there are things both beautiful and terrible that just cannot be controlled, only adapted to. And that helped me understand readers much better than I did before. A writer can’t control how a reader responds to their work or what comments they may or may not make about it any more than a gardener can control what seeds blow into their flower beds. But, like a gardener can choose what volunteer plants they allow to grow, a writer can choose which reader feedback to focus on.
What inspires you to write?
To be honest, the idea that a reader can enter a story that I made and relax and have a little fun in another world is what makes me want to take the time to write down sentences. That’s the basic idea.
I’m the kind of person who laughs really easily . . . and sometimes really inappropriately. I find many commonplace occurrences in life absolutely hilarious and I do my best to carry that feeling into the stories I write. I try to bring readers more laughter than tears.
In terms of what inspires the content of those stories—like what I want to write a story about—I always write about the same thing, which is the interconnectedness of people. Mysteries are a great format for exploring very complicated relationships between people that include, their environment, their money, their goals and aspirations and, always, their great loves whether those feelings of love are toward another person, a place, a time or even something random, like pickles.