When your protagonist investigates murder and her kids are way too interested.
I have known for a few years that book 9 was going to be a Christmas mystery. I mentioned last month that the idea in my mind’s eye for A CHRISTMAS GUIDE TO FAMILY AND MURDER was that my characters would discover a body in the snow. When that didn’t work, I still liked the idea of moving my characters to the countryside, so I sent them to Fiona and Robert’s country estate in Norfolk.
They have two children; Gregory who is ten and Grace who is nine. Frances’ daughter Rose is also nine. I always knew the children would be there and because it’s a holiday and everyone would be in the same place, I ought to have known that the kids would be more prominent in the story.
And I ought to have considered— but somehow, I didn’t—how to manage three children while investigating a murder. I barely mentioned them in the outline I sent to my editor. They weren’t really needed for the main plot of solving the crime. My editor approved it, and I started writing. It wasn’t until I had written 100 pages that I realized the children were completely side-lined. This book was meant to be about family, and I had already lost that thread. Somehow, I had to work them into the plot, which brought up the important question:
Can your protagonist involve children in her murder investigation AND still be a good mother?
The words of Rhys Bowen came to me (and I’m paraphrasing here); If your protagonist has a baby, that baby better show up at least once a day or you will get letters accusing your sleuth of being a bad mother. I always tried to present Frances as a loving mother, and I didn’t want to blow it now.
I wasn’t worried about the two young ladies; George’s ward, Lissette, age fifteen and her sister Christine, age twenty. They had already been part of a murder investigation and knew the ropes. But the younger ones presented a conundrum. I had to come up with a way to involve them without stretching your credulity to the no-mother-would-let-her-child-
Am I going to tell you what I did? No, that would ruin the story for you! You’ll have to read the book and tell me if I got it right. What I will tell you is that for the first time ever I had to completely rewrite an outline and send it in to my editor. I changed the story too much for him to rely on the original. And I think I changed it for the better. All of the family is involved, and they each contribute something to flushing out the villain. In that way murder, or the investigating of it, becomes a true family affair.
