Ritter Ames is a USA Today best-selling mystery author  who’s equally at home in the world of fast action international art fraud  - as in her Bodies of Art series, or in small town Vermont in the traditional cozy “Organised Mysteries” series  – featuring amateur sleuth Kate in a small town setting.

Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today we are talking to Ritter about  the secrets of her success, life before fiction and why she loves London and Cary Grant movies.

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

The book that gave her a "light bulb" moment. (She was in fourth grade.)

How Ritter got published and the rebirth of cozies

What she's learned in five years of marketing fiction

Ritter's favorite place in London

The writers she admires most

And the new series she can't wait to get started on

Where to find Ritter Ames: 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RitterAmesBooks/

 Twitter  @RitterAmes

What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

But now here’s Ritter. Hello there Ritter and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

Ritter: Hi Jenny Than you for having me on today.

Jenny: Beginning at the beginning . . . .Was there a "Once Upon A Time" moment when you realised you had to write fiction or your life would somehow be the poorer for it?  Was there a catalyst?

Mystery author Ritter Ames

Ritter: Honestly, the first time I realised books were written and I know this sounds completely ridiculous as an adult, but in fourth grade I read Little Women. Until then everybody was like "what do you want to be?" I would say a teacher, a nurse; whatever anyone said sounded like a good idea.

When I read Little Women and I read the part where Jo March made her living as a writer, I identified with Jo in the books so that was part of it too. It was like all of a sudden I realised, somebody actually writes all these books! I had read books from the time I first started reading, and I would see the author's name but it didn't register that somebody actually sat down and wrote it.

They were just magically appearing in the library and I would go check them out. So that was the catalyst where I thought, I can do this! People make a living at this. It was a long journey from fourth grade onwards!

But at that point, I realised it was something I wanted to do, and so everything I did despite doing the same studies as everybody else;  I still tended to pay more attention to English and more attention to structure. So I guess early on I was already training to be what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Jenny: You’ve so far published two mystery series, both of them very well received and well reviewed.   Four books in the Bodies of Art series and three in the Organized Mystery series. Which came first?

Ritter: Actually, the Bodies of Art came first. I had written about 50 pages of the first book, and had completed the story arc I had developed for that. A publisher wanted to read it, and so I sent the first 50 pages off and she said "I want this by the end of the year, I'm going to start a new press. This would be perfect, I've got it in my Chick Lit Mysteries."

I really hadn't written it as a Chick Lit Mystery, I was just having fun with it. I loved reading everything by Elizabeth Peters, and I especially liked the Vicky Bliss series and the way she travelled all over the place. I had a whole idea on how to build a history for my main character Laurel Beacham, and so in doing that it fitted into this publisher's idea of a Chick Lit Mystery series.