My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is crime writer Priscilla Paton.

Check out our discussion of her Twin Cities mysteries and the inspiration behind her dual detectives Eric Jansson and Deb Metzger.

Download a copy of the interview in PDF.

Debbi (00:51): Hi everyone. My guest today is originally from Maine, but now hails from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which invariably evokes images of Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat in the air for me. If you’re a person of a certain age, you’ll understand. Anyway. Some of you may understand that reference. And in any case, she is a college professor from that area and she’s now an author of the Twin Cities Mystery series. It’s my pleasure to have with me today, Priscilla Paton. Hey, Priscilla, how you doing?

Priscilla (01:29): Well, I’m doing really great. I’m actually in Arizona right now escaping some of those famous Midwest winters. Just for a very brief time though, I’ll be getting back to the greater Twin Cities experience very quickly. I’m now retired from teaching, which gives me more time to make mischief and at least in my head, get into trouble.

Debbi (01:56): I love it. Yes. Isn’t it wonderful when we can write out these things on the page as opposed to actually committing crimes?

Priscilla (02:05): Right.

Debbi (02:07): Let’s see. Tell us about your series. You have dual detectives, detective Eric Jansson and Deb Metzger. How was it that you came up with these two characters?

Priscilla (02:20): Well, as you noted in your introduction, I’ve been transplanted to the Midwest. I’m been married to a Midwester for decades, and I’m both an insider and outsider there to some extent. Eric Jansson represents the Scandinavian Midwest as I’ve come to know it. He does have dark hair, but he still has blue eyes and the dark hair goes back to the Sámi people in northern Norway. So I got to play with his experience, his immersion in that Scandinavian-American culture, and I came up with him first. He was still a bit of a stoic. Scandinavians and New Englanders both are. So he was stoic. He wasn’t that given to free and open expression, though he may have had a lot of renegade thoughts running through his head. He’s kind of a rural bender, and I started writing, exploring what I could do with that character, and I found it was a little too quiet, a little too internalized.

(03:30): Though he is physically active, he’s athletic, and I put him aside for a minute and started writing about a woman who finds a PI type, who finds her cases by looking at the boards and coffee shops. As I was coming up with her, I was sitting in a coffee shop looking at a board, and I think that idea lasted as long as my cup of coffee and I went and then sort of like Athena bursting out of Zeus’s head, Deb Metzger came to me. She … as somebody who would rile Eric. Not necessarily be, not that they would necessarily hate each other, they don’t by any means, but someone who would push him. In fact, in one of the novels that their chief joked something about, she says something about Eric being so quiet. He says, that’s a good job for you. Draw him out. In a way she does it by annoying him. So it’s sort of a vinegar and oil couple. But I tried to give them slightly different skill sets as usually happens when you have partners in real life and in fiction. So Eric is a little bit more the puzzle solver, a little bit more.

(04:46): A couple of times, once he played, pretended he was a waiter. He is a little more on the edge of, I don’t know if I want to say deceit, but he can be a little cagey here where Deb is more forthright and she is tall. She’s about six feet in shoes or boots. She has kind of spiky blonde hair. She’s lesbian. She can’t hide easily. So she sort of knows people have to confront her and she has to confront them. And yeah, some experiences in life have given her a chip on her shoulder, which include some prejudice from a past boss, but also some disappointment in love because you have to have disappointment in love in a detective novel. You can’t make them too happy from the get go.

Debbi (05:38): Yes, so true. Yes. So their relationship is pretty much confined to professional. Correct?

Priscilla (05:49): Yes. A professional takes up enough time, and again, you can’t make them too happy. But I wanted them also to be normative enough that they weren’t like these … I was kind of making fun of the noir type where the detective is so damaged and his mother, one love, son, dog had been killed by terrorists and he’s on a revenge path now. Eric though he is divorced, does have a young son and he has a family that’s far too wholesome back in Iowa. So he plays off that a little bit. And so he has family obligations that keep him busy. And Deb is still, Deb though she’d been in the Twin Cities for, she came up from another city in Iowa. So they’re both from Iowa because how noir is that? They both know about corn. So she’s a little more finding her way. And I think having them together during, there are a few times as the books go along when they’re more apt to see each other in a social situation, not so much that they’re inviting each other places as they happen to run into each other. In my very first book that happens at a party, at their chief’s house, where in very odd ways they defend each other and debate over the quality of the line.

Debbi (07:11): Well, that is really cool. I love the sound of that. What subgenre would you say your series falls into? Is it more like a police procedural or more hardboiled? Softboiled?

Priscilla (07:28): I make, there’s some times when I sort of make fun of the hardboiled tropes. That’s cool. I consider it a warped procedural. There are police and there is procedure, but often the case is that I’ve been in bureaucracies, enough educational ones, nonprofit ones that I know what good work they could do. I also know the grind of committee meetings and things like that. So they’re often pushing. I mean, I think in the first one there’s an anger management seminar that Deb, as a new hire in this agency is supposed to attend, but it never happens, which makes people angry, keeps getting postponed.

(08:10): And another one, she’s on what we used to call a DEI thing where mostly the other participants want to all strangle each other because that happens on these committees. So I have some fun with procedure, but at the same time I realize that it’s there and they realize it’s there for a purpose, and though they may grate against it. And when I do get into more procedural things, I try to give it a little humor or a little edge so you’re not just bogged down by it, but both the necessity of it and the anguish of it and the comedy of it.

Debbi (08:47): That’s awesome. I like the sound of that, and I love that you’re kind of pushing against the usual tropes of the detective. Totally damaged, can’t deal with drugs and alcohol and all of it. But yeah, I mean it’s nice to see something different and fresh in that area.

Priscilla (09:09): Eric may be a little addicted to his workout because he’s a runner and he works off some of his excess. So instead of talking when he gets angry, he usually runs another mile or something like that, and Deb’s a swimmer. So they kind of vent themselves that way and by being snarky with each other, not necessarily healthy. The other thing I might say about my series in general is they do derive from real crimes or circumstances, but at the bottom they’re about relationships. Relationships between the detectives, relationships among the people involved in the crime from the murderers themselves to those impacted to those who are maybe not quite as honest as they should be, because I think of murder as the ultimate sign of a failed relationship. Something’s gone terribly wrong, and can the detectives work with each other’s oddities enough to solve the case? And I do pay quite a bit of attention. I usually have four points of view in a book, one, Eric’s point of view, Deb’s point of view, and then two people close to the crime and generally to up the suspense who are threatened or in danger. And partly that way, you get to see, I think the latest book, which I believe you received, When the House Burns.

(10:47): I was writing that during the COVID shutdown and when George Floyd had been murdered in Minneapolis. And I had to have my detectives react to that in some way, even though I don’t actually mention those specific names in the book. And when you have the secondary characters in the one, even before COVID, the one Should Grace Fail, which has characters of color, they are very suspicious of the detectives. And you sort of get to see how that can impede the investigation, but you also understand why they do it and how their own experiences have led them to that point. So it’s a lot about, sometimes you hear a book described as character driven, I think of mine as character driven, but the characters are often terrible drivers and they crash into each other.

Debbi (11:36): Yes, yes, exactly. That’s when you get that wonderful, all that tension, all that conflict that you need in a novel, and those types come together and just boom, even in small ways. Do you have a set number of books you’d like to write for the series, or are you just taking it book by book?

Priscilla (12:02): I’ve been taking it book by book because I’m not a fast writer in part. I mean, I’m not writing three books a year, I’ll put it that way, every two years. So sometimes things like the pandemic slowed down almost every writer I talked to just because the stress of dealing with it, the unknowns. If you were writing a book as I was with a contemporary setting, you didn’t know is the pandemic going to be over? Is it not going to be over? And I dunno, maybe you had that same experience.

Debbi (12:36): I did actually. It’s really weird. Yeah, it happened. The pandemic happened and I was writing something where my protagonist was going to pretend to be a census taker, I think. And then I couldn’t do that because the census takers couldn’t go to the houses. And I was like, oh, okay, I can’t do that then. And the timing was just wrong. I know.

Priscilla (13:06): And When the House Burns, I originally, that was not, I didn’t have a title originally. Often, I don’t always have a title when I start, but it was going to be on a very different topic, which I may get back to. But then, and I wrote about this in the post on your blog, there was the shutdown. So we were all stay at home. So home was, and did you have a safe home was a very big deal. And I actually had to move during the pandemic because my basement turned toxic. And like a reader, a writer, excuse me, I couldn’t let that detail go by. And in the novel When the House Burns, the detectives have to suddenly get out of their agency building because it’s suddenly gone toxic. And so they’re displaced. So many people are displaced, but so you sometimes have to adapt to circumstances.

(13:59): And the book I’m working on now involves the MedTech industry. I was inspired by nonfiction, by exposes of the pharmaceutical industry, and particularly a sub-subplot, and this is nonfiction, I’m talking about real people in that plot. One of the big moneymakers, questionable people in the pharma industry had a family. He divorced the wife, but they didn’t take a settlement. I mean, this was a wealthy man. They just sort of disappeared, changed names and everything, would have nothing to do with this person. And you begin to wonder why. And it’s a little bit like Succession only nobody wants it. So I have that sort of disappeared family, and I already had this idea. It started writing it when I began having some health issues of my own. And there my life was imitating my book a little bit and has happens to so many writers and people in life in general. Some post COVID health issues slowed me down for quite a while, and it put me very in touch with the pharmaceutical and MedTech industry. And things are much more resolved right now, but …

Debbi (15:29): Oh, good.

Priscilla (15:30): I got a different view of things. And it’s always hard to keep a book on path, the path you think it should be on. And then, you know this as a writer, to adapt when your book does fall off that path. And I had to kind of restart it at some point. And fortunately, it’s at the phase now where it’s being read by people. So that’s good. That’s fantastic.

Debbi (16:00): Excellent. Do you do a lot of research when you write your novels either before or during?

Priscilla (16:10): I do research throughout. I do quite a bit before. I think that’s my old academic habit. And a lot of times when I’m stuck, I find research helps me out. Now the research can be of different kinds. Some of it I’ve written about: addiction; privacy issues; homelessness; arson; and now the MedTech industry. And some of it can be pretty dry, almost academic. I mean, looking at FDA websites about drug recalls for example, or looking at statistics on homelessness and you don’t want that part in it. But some of my research is much more fun going to restaurants and thinking, well, could a couple have a fight here? What would it be like? So I’ve sometimes gone to restaurants. I’ve gone to quite a few parks in the Twin Cities. I mean, the Twin Cities is a city of rivers and parks.

(17:10): And I’m trying to think of, I did talk to a cadaver dog trainer occasionally. I like to get personal interviews when I can. I can’t always get them, but I’ve talked to cadaver dog trainer, social worker, a person who works helping the native community with issues in Minneapolis. And in fact, one of their issues is right outside the center there’s a homeless encampment with drug issues. So even though some of their own people are homeless, they want that area to be safer. So you get the double, you get that it’s a multi-sided problem right there.

Debbi (17:50): Yeah, my goodness.

Priscilla (17:53): And as I said, some of it, like for When the House Burns, it was COVID, but I looked online at a lot of houses for sale, and I got hung up on one where there was a very ugly looking deer mount in the basement along with, oh, I can’t remember what else was in it now, but some very strange things. And the most fascinating one was a very nice house, which has sold by now, but it had a mission style bent stairway. And that meant the bottom was dark wood wainscoting, and the top was painted plaster. But someone had done a very realistic mural over the plaster that showed a dragon going up the stairs. And if you went upstairs and you could do this online, follow the curve, you had Wonder Woman fighting the dragon at the very top of the stairs. So yes, a lot of people out there have wonderful imaginations, and I like to tap into that when I can.

Debbi (18:49): That’s fantastic. It sounds like you really kind of explore the Twin Cities in your work.

Priscilla (18:56): Yes, yes. I try not.–

Debbi (18:58): That’s really cool.

Priscilla (19:00): Well, partly, I don’t live right in the Twin Cities, and it gives me an excuse to go in and hang out in cool places.

Debbi (19:07): That’s really cool.

Priscilla (19:08): And yes, anyone who writes does a lot of nerd things. They may not like to admit that they may. I remember hearing your talk with Gregg Hurwitz, who goes to explosions and things. I can’t say that I’ve done that, but one thing I did is agencies that rehab houses, some for-profit, some nonprofit, including Habitat for Humanity, did this program in the Twin Cities several years ago. We could go on this housing tour and that included Habitat for Humanity, houses in low income neighborhoods, a neighborhood with a public housing project where yes, some of the cars parked around the streets were on blocks and didn’t have wheels and also very high end places. And most people just went to the few kind they were interested in. A lot of people who went to the lower income ones were actually interested in supporting agencies and Habitat for Humanity, but I remember you actually had to fill out a little card and someone says, you’re going to every single one of these. Well, it was a great way, it was open houses on economic range, and there was one that had, it was only about 12 feet long, but one of those little swimming pools where you swim against the current, it was inside. And I kept thinking, haven’t used it yet, but wouldn’t that be a way to murder someone, is to crank up that they go smash into the wall. That’s the way writers think.

Debbi (20:44): Yeah. I’m afraid that is exactly the way writers think. What if, especially with these books, it sometimes kind of scares yourself thinking about these things. Let’s see. Is there an author that has influenced your writing greatly? Somebody in the established authorship that you look up to as a kind of inspiration?

Priscilla (21:09): They’re a great deal, and I’ll come to the more contemporary ones in a minute, but I think I read mysteries as a kid a lot. My husband has always read a great number of mysteries, including Nero Wolfe, classic Archie Goodwin, and actually it’s Rex Stout is the writer, Nero Wolfe and Archie.

Debbi (21:30): Yeah.

Priscilla (21:33):But then when I was still teaching, I read some PD James novels, we’re talking back in the nineties when she was very big. And if readers don’t know her, she’s extremely brilliant. And I may make fun of her detective in a very indirect way in my series because her Detective Dalgliesh is brilliant himself and also a published poet. In my series, Eric Jansson has a sister who’s a published poet, and her poetry, which is erotic, always embarrasses him. Anyway, and Donna Leon with her Italian series. But Minnesota and Wisconsin have a fantastic writing community. So I’ve felt supported by people there like Mindy Mejia, Matt Goldman who narrates mysteries, but used to write for television, including for Seinfeld, Alan Eskens. So there’s quite a community in the Twin Cities.

Debbi (22:36): That’s awesome. I read Mindy Mejia’s To Catch a Storm, I think it is.

Priscilla (22:43): Yes. And I think A World of Hurt, I think is the one that’s out now. I have it, I plan to read it any minute now because I think she’s coming out with more, but she does very intense thrillers with characters who have very unusual backstories, and she’s a wonderful writer, wonderful stylist.

Debbi (23:10): Excellent. Yeah. What advice would you give to anybody who’s interested in having a writing career?

Priscilla (23:20): Persistence is in some ways more important than talent. I’ve been to, before I had written or finished a book or maybe even, I was very scared of starting a fiction book. I went to conferences and I hear these people read these fantastic beginnings, and I thought, nothing I’ve written so far nearly has the punch of that. But then I never see their names on the published list. So you can sometimes be overwhelmed by the brilliance of someone else or just how thrilling it is. Persistence matters more. Can you get it done? And you have plenty of time. I still have a hard time. I think partly it’s my academic career or I did do editing myself. I have a hard time turning off that internal editor and just getting out that lousy first draft.

Debbi (24:10): That’s right.

Priscilla (24:12): I say, oh, this is going. And you just have to sort of say, and I’ve heard other writers say this, you just have to tough it out.

Debbi (24:21): Just keep going.

Priscilla (24:23): Yes.

Debbi (24:24): Start and keep going.

Priscilla (24:26): Right.

Debbi (24:29): One of the things I always think is good is to keep a journal, because you kind of tend to find your writing voice when you’re writing in a journal,

Priscilla (24:37): Right? Yeah. I do that off and on. And actually what I kept more of was, and this doesn’t seem to have that much to do with my mystery series, more of a nature journal and combined with photographs of what’s blooming and what birds are coming through. I live with a view of the Mississippi River, a giant flyway, though that only indirectly comes into the books in that I know the flora and fauna pretty well, and again, I get characters, it’s bird watchers who discover a body in the very first book, but you have to keep in the habit of writing. And I realized that when I was stuck and very frustrated. I just didn’t feel up to writing. But you have to keep in the habit of writing or I know I listened to a lot of books when I couldn’t. You have to keep reading too. That’s the other thing. You have to keep reading, and you have to read people who write like you and people who do not write at all like you do.

Debbi (25:42): Yes, absolutely. I agree with all of that. That’s fantastic advice. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Priscilla (25:54): I’ll try to think. I think, yeah, I think also you have to be serious about writing, but you can’t take yourself as a writer too seriously. I think one thing about my detectives is at some point they realize they can’t take themselves too seriously. They have to lighten up a bit. And even though the crimes may be grim, I am not someone who gets real graphic about the murders. I’m more in the traditional category there, but I think not take yourself too seriously, even when you’re in a real dilemma as a writer, just like the detectives, at some point, what they have to do is, I think there’s, I can’t remember which novel it is, but there’s one where both Eric and Deb, they’re in their street clothes, but they’re standing in a lake. How they got in that lake is a good question, but they’re standing in the lake and Deb is trying not to cry. She doesn’t want to cry in front of her partner. Her partners don’t cry in front of each other. That’s one of the codes. But she is very upset and at some point she just says, I wanted be to crime what Meryl Streep is to acting or something, and suddenly Eric says, well, I’ll be Roger Federer, the Roger Federer of crime, something like that.

Debbi (27:11): But that’s really cool.

Priscilla (27:14): They had to break out of that moment.

Debbi (27:16): That’s cool. I love it. Well, thank you so much for being with me today to talk about this, to share this with us.

Priscilla (27:25): And thank you so much, Debbi.

Debbi (27:27): I appreciate it, and it’s my pleasure, believe me.

Priscilla (27:31): Okay, well, I’ll continue watching.

Debbi (27:34): Awesome. Thanks. And to anybody who is listening or watching, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review where you listen to podcasts or watch on YouTube, wherever. Also, consider joining my Patreon page, becoming the supporter on Patreon, where I post bonus episodes, excerpts for my work, writing excerpts, short stories, what else? Lots of things. Crime related, bits and bobs, a newsletter. I got things going, all sorts of things going. Anyway, our next guest will be Carter Wilson, and until then, take care and happy reading.

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