Dear Reader, Love Author: Dear Reader, Love, Susan McCormick

Dear Reader…

The Fog Ladies is a cozy murder mystery with a group of spunky older women and one overworked, overtired, overstressed medical intern who all live in an elegant apartment building in San Francisco where old ladies start to die. The story morphed quite a bit as my writing progressed, but the name of the book and the idea for the group of women came to me instantly, before anything else about the story. The women call themselves the Fog Ladies because you can count on them like you can count on San Francisco early morning fog burning off by midday. I tried to create a memorable cast of quirky yet identifiable characters and concocted murders around them. Mrs. Bridge falls off a stool cleaning bugs out of her kitchen light. Mrs. Talwin slips on bubbles in the bath and drowns. Plausible, like the young intern thinks, or murder, like her feisty elders assume?

Years ago, I lived in an apartment building much like the one in The Fog Ladies, minus the murders, when I did medical training in San Francisco. Elegant apartment buildings are found throughout San Francisco, especially in Pacific Heights, where the story is set. Being a life-long cozy lover, I always thought this would be the perfect setting for a mystery, with tenants of all ages living together for years, providing a cast of characters and cozy-type enclosed setting ripe for a series of murders. The victims and the killer are all known to each other and it is hard to hide.

Though I thought I knew my characters well, during the magic of writing, the tale took unexpected twists and turns. One of my characters, Enid Carmichael, discovers Starbucks lattes at the ripe old age of eighty. She loves the bitterness, the froth. I wrote that. Then she craved more, and the next thing I knew, she was stealing Starbucks coupons from her neighbor’s newspaper to feed her addiction. She did that. Not me. A character wrote herself onto life support and expected me to cure her health issues. This is my favorite part of writing, when characters I created do unexpected things and get themselves into trouble.

The Fog Ladies’ characters and setting were planned out in advance, but I am happy I gave the ladies space to be themselves, because the surprises they brought delighted me and I hope they delight you, too.