Ashley Weaver is a mild-mannered Louisiana librarian who enjoys creating mayhem in her Amory Ames mystery series, presenting husband and wife amateur sleuths reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s Poirot - complete with country houses, elegant parties and unexpected death.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Ashley talks about the tricky relationship between Amory and her playboy husband Milo, and gives her take on why cozy murders are so popular.

Six

things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Why she feels she was 'born in the wrong era'Things she's learned in six years of writingWhy in whatever she writes "someone gets murdered."The appeal of the 'Golden Age of Mystery' Her reader's reaction to Amory's "complicated" marriageThe writers she admires the most

Where to find Ashley Weaver: 

Website: https://www.ashley-weaver.com/

Facebook:  @AuthorAshleyWeaver

 Twitter: @AshleyCWeaver

What

follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for

word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny: And now, here’s Ashley.  Hello there Ashley and welcome to the show.  It’s great to have you with us… 

Ashley: Thank you so much for having me!

Jenny: Beginning at the beginning – was there a “Once Upon a Time” moment when you decided you wanted to write fiction??  And if so what was the catalyst for it?

Ashley Weaver

Ashley: Well I was always an avid reader growing up. My parents read to me a lot, and took me to the library. I think I was in elementary school, and I don’t remember if it was a little school project but they had us write a story. I remember having a click in my head that I could take ideas from my own brain and put them on paper, and make my own stories. That was kind of the beginning of when I realized I could take a story from my head and put it on pages, and make my own books so to speak. I’ve been kind of writing ever since then.

I wrote my first full novel starting my freshmen year at high school, and it was sort of what I’d call a gangster mystery romance, set in a prohibition area of Chicago. I would write a few pages after school and on weekends, and I’d bring it in for my friends to read. They would read it at the lunch tables during break and give me feedback, so that was kind of my first taste of writing for an audience. Ever since then, I’ve just enjoyed writing stories and putting them down on the page.

Jenny: So you say freshman year - how old would you be for people who aren’t so familiar with the American education system?

Ashley: Around 14, my first year of high school.

Jenny: You’ve now got six historical mysteries published in the Amory Ames series – set in England in the 1930s.   Why choose the mystery genre and this historical period?

Amory Ames #1 Mystery

Ashley: Well for one thing - the time period thing - I've always felt like I was born in the wrong era. I've always enjoyed reading historical books and watching historical shows set in different times and things like that. We were watching a lot of movies from the 30's and 40's, so when I was young I liked that Ginger Rogers aesthetic with the women in the evening gowns and the men in tuxedos, dancing in fancy night clubs.

As I got a little older and learned about the period between the wars, and moving from the older social structure into the more modern 20th century and that push and pull of modern progress, the time period became even more interesting to me. That's why I settled on the 30's.

As far as mystery - I've dabbled in a lot of things, I've tried a few genres but I kind of found that consistently, whatever I wrote and whatever I've written, somebody gets murdered in it! So it was like mystery was sort of my thing. Mystery has always been something I've enjoyed reading from the time I was really young - I read Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, and then I grew up and got into Agatha Christie.