Interview with Leslie Budewitz, author of Between a Wok and a Dead Place

It gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview Leslie Budewitz, whose cozy crime novel, Between a Wok and a Dead Place has its debut on July 18th.

Between a Wok and a Dead Place is the latest installment in your cozy mystery series, The Spice Shop series. What can you tell us about the setting - and the food?

My Spice Shop mysteries are set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where Pepper Reece runs a spice shop and solves crime. I fell in love with the Market as a college student and made it my mission to eat my way through the place. Happily, it’s always changing, so I’ll never be done! The Market was founded in 1907 and saved by the voters from “urban removal” in 1971. History lives there, in the architecture of the mismatched buildings, the cobbled streets, and the way traditions and trends are intertwined. That long, twisty history is the perfect series backdrop.

But I also like taking readers to other areas of the city. A few years ago, Mr. Right and I visited Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum, chronicling the history of the Asian community in the Pacific Northwest, and toured the Kong Yick Hotel, a community center and residential hotel dating back to the 1880s. Naturally I started to wonder: What if a body was found in the basement of an old hotel? What other secrets might linger in a building where so many people had lived and worked—and died? So I created the Gold Rush Hotel on what was, when I last saw it, a vacant lot in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District.

Each book has its own flavor---here, the food includes a few Chinese classics that Pepper and her friends sample at the Lunar New Year food walk that opens the book. As a food retailer, she loves to explore new tastes and recipes, as do I. Like me, she has fun trying new things---and like all of us, she occasionally turns to food for comfort. The cozy can be thought of as the comfort food of the mystery world. And who doesn’t love mac ’n cheese now and then?

What inspired you to write a mystery series with a culinary aspect?

We write what we love, right? I enjoy a wide range of fiction, including domestic suspense, historicals, and more, but I particularly love the premise of the cozy mystery. Crime disrupts the social order of the community. In a cozy, an amateur sleuth, usually a woman who runs a business or is otherwise deeply involved in the community, uses her skills, talents, and connections to solve a crime. Her unofficial investigation runs alongside the official investigation. She can ask questions, make observations, and go places the official investigators can’t. Her goal is to help bring the criminal to justice and to restore the damage to the social order. And what does that better than food?

Do the books feature recipes - or ingredients - that your readers can look up afterwards? Do you make the recipes yourself?

I love learning about food and spices and sharing that with readers, in the story, the chapter epigraphs which provide bits of spice lore and history, and in the recipes at the back of the book. Every recipe is one I have created or adapted myself, and cooked many times. No recipe makes it into a book if I don’t think the average home cook---that’s me!---can make with ingredients she or he can find, and if I don’t think it totally yummy!  

Your protagonist, Pepper Reece, owns the Spice Shop in Seattle's Pike Place Market. Who is Pepper and how did she come to be there?

My first published mysteries are the Food Lovers’ Village series, set in a small town in Montana much like the town where I live, featuring Erin Murphy, a young woman who grew up there, left, and returned. It’s a common Montana story---it’s my own---and I enjoyed exploring it through the lens of a much younger woman.

With Pepper and the Spice Shop series, I wanted to flip that, setting a cozy series in a city. The Market perfectly embodies the “community within a community” that’s crucial to an urban cozy. At 40-something, Pepper is older than Erin---older than the typical cozy protagonist. She grew up in Seattle in a Catholic peace and justice community modeled on one I knew as a young adult. That upbringing gives her a passion for justice and a belief that the individual has a responsibility to make a difference whenever she can.

But life often jolts us, and when Pepper discovered her husband, a Seattle police officer, and a parking enforcement officer practically plugging each other, she left him and bought a downtown loft. Then the law firm where she managed staff HR imploded in scandal and took her job with it. She bought the Spice Shop, fulfilling the promise of her childhood nickname, never expecting, as she says, to find solace in bay leaves. Best thing she ever did!

The action of Between a Wok and a Dead Place takes place at the time of the Chinese Lunar New Year in Seattle’s Chinatown–International District. What draws Pepper to the festival?

Food, of course! And time with her mother and a friend---who turns out to have an eye on one of the lion dancers. Pepper loves community events like this, and enjoys attending one not in the line of duty---that is, not selling or talking spice. Little does she know . . .

It’s not long before Pepper has a new mystery on her hands when her friend Roxanne stumbles on a body in an abandoned hotel. Tell us about the Gold Rush. Is it a real place? How did you research the book?

After the tour I mentioned, I kept thinking about the Chinatown-International District, or CID. This series often includes social issues in the background or subplots, such as homelessness and domestic abuse, and as I researched the CID and the residential hotels, I learned a lot about the role they played in the immigrant community and their importance in Seattle and the region. I also realized that the pressures of development that had squeezed and even partially relocated the community were still a threat. Add to that the secrets of an old building, and I was hooked. Much of the research came through books, oral histories, and websites, but I also drew on my deep love of the city, even though I no longer live there, and cherished an afternoon walking the streets and alleys again last fall.

Pepper sets out to investigate what happened to the dead man. Without giving too much away, what can you tell us about the mystery itself? How does she proceed and what obstacles does she face?

At first, Pepper thinks she’s mainly going to help Roxanne research the Chinese pharmacy in the basement of the Gold Rush and figure out why it’s been closed up for so long. That’s not a job for the police, but it does matter to Roxanne and to several other characters. (No spoilers!) But it turns out that old conflicts have present-day consequences. She interviews elders, traces the history of the Gold Rush, asks questions, and follows her nose. But the owners have their own conflicts and don’t all want the same things---and they don’t necessarily want it all out in public. It’s twisty and turny and I hope it’s a lot of fun.  

There is something else on her mind – questions about the relationship between Roxanne and Pepper’s boyfriend Nate, who is on a fishing holiday in Alaska. How does Pepper deal with the possible heartbreak while running a business and investigating a murder?

Nate is a professional fisherman who works in Alaska much of the year. In Chai Another Day, 4th in the series, he introduced Pepper to Roxanne, his ex-wife’s younger sister, a museum curator he thought might help her identify a missing murder weapon. It’s Roxanne who finds the body in the Gold Rush, while she’s cataloging its contents for its owners, and she turns to Pepper for help. Pepper begins to suspect an old tension between Roxanne and Nate, even though the two have stayed connected. It turns out to be very different from what she---and readers---might have feared, and in the process, she learns even more about the character of this man whose love she sees as an unexpected mid-life gift. She also learns a few things about herself, which is always good even if occasionally painful!

Is Pepper, an amateur sleuth, putting her own life at risk?

You’d think she’d know the risk by now, after 7 books! I am careful, though, to not put her in physical danger or injure her in every book.

You have won three Agatha Awards. Tell us about that.

Such a thrill! The first was the 2011 Agatha for Best Nonfiction for my guide for writers, Books, Crooks and Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure. That was my first book, and the award confirmed that I’d found a need and filled it. Death al Dente, the first Food Lovers’ Village Mystery, won the 2013 Agatha for Best First Novel. Ten years later, I’m still smiling. And my first historical fiction, All God’s Sparrows, set in Montana Territory in 1885, tied for the 2018 Agatha for Best Short Story. In all the years the Agathas have been given, there had only been one tie---and that night, there were two!

You have a pen name under which you write moody suspense novels, Alicia Beckman. What challenges are there to writing a very different type of fiction?

The word “moody” pretty much says it. The cozy worldview is that all will be well; an individual can make a difference, and the damage done by the crime can be healed. In suspense, as in thrillers and many other kinds of crime fiction, that is not a given. I very much enjoyed that ambiguity and the chance to write about higher stakes and topics that don’t fit the cozy model. Alicia’s two novels to date are both standalones, meaning no continuing subplots or storylines, and that was a change as well.

What are your plans for the future and how do you see the series developing?

I’m delighted to say that there will be at least two more Spice Shop mysteries, in 2024 and 2025. I’m also working on another Alicia Beckman suspense novel. And that historical short story I mentioned will be part of a collection coming out next year, all featuring “Stagecoach Mary” Fields, a real-life historical woman born into slavery in Tennessee in 1832, who came to Montana in 1884 with the Ursuline sisters who ran a school and convent outside Cascade, in north central Montana. She’s fascinating, and I’m loving exploring this slice of American history through her.  

Thank you for hosting me. And remember, stories are the spice of life!

Amazon

About Leslie Budewitz:

Leslie Budewitz blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in two cozy mystery series, the Spice Shop Mysteries, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in NW Montana. She also writes moody suspense under the pen name Alicia Beckman. Leslie is the winner of three Agatha Awards—2013 Best First Novel for DEATH AL DENTE, the first Food Lovers' Village mystery; 2011 Best Nonfiction, and 2018 Best Short Story, for “All God’s Sparrows,” her first historical fiction. A past president of Sisters in Crime and a former board member of Mystery Writers of America, she lives and cooks in NW Montana.   

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