Guest Author Daisy Pettles
I turned 60 this year and promptly retired. I’ve always loved to write, and for the last 20 years focused on writing for a practical niche area–-education and Internet marketing—where I could do what I loved and still pay the bills.
Retirement put me back in that great and rare place where I suddenly had endless days without responsibilities. Everything was possible again—a luxurious feeling that I’d not had for a few decades. Better still, I had the amazing trio of treasures—time, money, and experience—required to launch into riskier passion projects, like fiction writing.
I’ve devoured books my entire life, but fiction writing was a new adventure and a huge challenge. I love mysteries, romance, and humor so I decided to try my hand at humorous mysteries that harked back to my rural origins in southern Indiana.
Because I love to laugh, and am a bit quirky myself, I knew humor would under gird my first fiction project. I’d write what I wanted to read and see if I could pick up a readership from there.
That’s how my small-town Indiana setting, Pawpaw County, came into being for my award-winning “Shady Hoosier Detective Agency” series. I grew up in a tiny river town full of nosy neighbors, quirky characters, and kind-hearted souls.
Like many Baby Boomers born in rural America in the 60’s I found myself growing nostalgic for an America that never did exist, but that many still hope for. I wanted to write something light-hearted that celebrated small town living.
I deliberately set out to replicate the “feel good” mood of vintage Hillbilly TV sit-coms, those set in rural America. My childhood was awash in the silliness of great comic series like The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, Gomer Pyle, and Green Acres.
When it came to creating leading ladies I decided to abandon the safe cozy mystery formula of the thirty-something, college-educated woman escaping to a simpler life in the country.
I created instead aging and somewhat cranky heroines who would love to retire but lack the resources to do so. They are very street smart, but lack the varnish and subdued manners that often accompany college and urban living. I love them to death.
My leading lady detectives, Ruby Jane Waskom and Veenie Goens, are working class, high-school educated, both with a prior chain of everyday jobs as factory and farm workers. They share a house, overdue bills, and laughter. They co-exist on social security, taking jobs as detectives in-training hoping to scrape up a little “Twinkie money” on the side.
They are much older than the genre usually allows: 68 and 71, to be exact. (Every literary agent I talked to loved the series and the writing but were horrified by the age of the women.) My leading ladies are unusual—and therefore very risky—for the cozy mystery niche today.
While the books are labeled cozy mysteries, their strongest element is humor. They are true crime comedies. One critic called Daisy Pettles the “hillbilly Janet Evanovich.” Another, in “Shelf Discovery” tagged them “a wildly entertaining (detective) team—like an elderly Stephanie Plum and Lula.” My senior crime fighting duo, Ruby Jane and Veenie, are very much a silly Lucy-Ethel gal pal team.
Much of what is good in the Shady Hoosier Detective Agency character-driven series is the way the two senior sleuths slide along together through life, and their cases. Their get-it-done “gal pal” energy enlivens the series.
My one goal as a writer is to entertain. I love it when people laugh, and feel even better when I might be cause of that laughter.
I have found enough of an audience with the Shady Hoosiers that Book 3, “Chickenlandia,” is coming out as I write this. Book 4,”Catfish Cooties,” is now steeping in the stew pot of my imagination.
Writing humorous fiction with mysterious twists is truly my retirement heaven.
AUTHOR BIO: Daisy Pettles’ debut humorous cozy series, the Shady Hoosier Detective Agency, set in fictional Pawpaw County, Indiana, won the 2019 Gold Medal as Best Humor Book from the Indie Reader, The Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and the American Fiction Awards. Prior to retiring and taking up writing she was a therapist and an Internet entrepreneur. The Chickenlandia Mystery is Book 3 in Daisy Pettles’ Shady Hoosier Detective Agency cozy humor series, which the Indie Reader describes as “Murder She Wrote meets the Golden Girls … where the fun is infectious.”
Visit her anytime at https://www.daisypettles.com
CONTACT: Daisy@daisypettles.com
TWITTER: @DaisyPettles
FB: https://www.facebook.com/daisypettles
Chickenlandia Mystery: Shady Hoosier Detective Agency (Book 3)
Release Date: 9/15/2019
PLOT: Pawpaw County, Indiana, is all atwitter about Ma and Peepaw Horton’s annual Chickenlandia Festival. The mood turns dark though when the Horton’s prize-winning rooster, Dewey, and his best laying hen, Ginger, vanish, leaving behind only a ragged trail of tail feathers. Also missing: Gertie Wineagar, local sourpuss, and BBQ chicken cook-off queen. Senior sleuths, Ruby Jane (RJ) Waskom and Veenie Goens, suspect Hiram Krupsky, Pawpaw County’s self-proclaimed Chicken Wing King, of master-minding the crime spree in an attempt to sabotage the Horton’s free-range chicken ranch. The sleuths get an unexpected “in” when Hiram commences to court a reluctant RJ. Follow the Hoosier senior snoops as they attempt to sort the good eggs from the bad in this hilarious, small-town crime comedy.
Shady Hoosier Detective Agency – AMAZON BUY LINKS
Ghost Busting Mystery (Book 1)
Baby Daddy Mystery (Book 2)
Chickenlandia Mystery (Book 3) – Due out 9/15/19 check link before posting