Karen Dukess is the author of the new novel Welcome to Murder Week. She also has written the novel The Last Book Party. She lives in the New York City area and in Truro, Massachusetts.
Q: What inspired you to write Welcome to Murder Week, and how did you create your character Cath?
A: The novel was inspired by a trip to the Peak District in England that I took with my sister in 2022. We spent a week staying in a cottage in the village of Bakewell in Derbyshire and exploring the countryside.
The entire time I felt like I’d stepped into the pages of my favorite British novels. Walking a footpath across a field, I felt like Emma Woodhouse on her way to bring a basket to a woman in need. Exploring the quaint villages of the Peak District, I felt like a character in one of my favorite British mystery shows on Britbox and Masterpiece Mystery.
It constantly amused me how the first reference points for everything and everyone I encountered were from fictional worlds.
After that trip, I knew I wanted to write about Americans in England having a similar experience seeing the English countryside through the lens of classic fiction and popular culture.
Having just set aside a novel set in Russia that drew on my years as a journalist there in the 1990s, I wanted to write something lighter and more fun, something that would be a pleasant escape from world events for both me and my readers.
My initial idea was to send a writing group of diverse characters on a retreat to the English countryside, but when a friend gently suggested that a novel about people writing might be less than exciting, I hit upon the idea of having my characters solve a fake murder mystery.
As far as creating Cath, who narrates the novel, I wanted to write from the perspective of someone who was not a mystery lover and who wasn’t sure precisely why she was participating in this week-long murder “adventure.”
Cath is a reluctant traveler, going on a trip that her late, estranged mother bought for her for some unknown reason. I liked the idea of putting her among a bunch of fanatic mystery lovers with great knowledge of classic British mysteries.
She’s the skeptic of the bunch and also the Watson character, a little slow on the uptake and needing to have things explained to her.
Q: The writer Catherine Newman said of the book, “An aching family mystery wrapped in a comedic whodunit with a delicious dose of travelogue and romance to boot? That's Welcome to Murder Week: steamy, grief-struck escapism--as genre-defying as it is delightful.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love that description because I think the book is all of those things. I wasn’t thinking about genre when I wrote.
I wasn’t trying to stay within the confines of a traditional mystery but nor was I trying to blend different genres in a specific way. I was just writing the novel I wanted to write, bringing in the elements that felt right and felt fun.
Not having written a mystery before, and not having ever planned to, I wasn’t constrained by any of the conventions of the genre. I love that the end result is genre-defying.
Interestingly, the genre blend turned off some editors, who weren’t sure how to sell the book. But the mix of genres was precisely what made my editor love the book. She loves that it’s a book for mystery lovers and also for people who don’t think of themselves as mystery lovers. I’m happy with whichever shelf it sits on in a bookstore!
Q: As you worked on the novel, what did you see as the right balance between Cath’s own family mystery and the murder week mystery?
A: The first draft leaned more into the fake mystery than the family mystery, but it became clear that the family mystery had to be equally if not more important given that it was “real.”
It was very satisfying when I realized I could braid the two mysteries and make the solving of each one reliant on the solving of the other.
If Cath and her cottage mates hadn’t been trying to solve the fake murder mystery, they wouldn’t have solved the real mystery about Cath’s mother. And if they hadn’t been trying to solve the mystery about Cath’s mother, they wouldn’t have figured out the fake mystery.
Q: Who is your favorite mystery writer?
A: My favorite contemporary mystery writer is Anthony Horowitz. I love his Hawthorne and Horowitz stories because of how he inserts himself as a character. And I adore his Susan Ryeland series – they’re very meta, with a novel within a novel. He’s clearly having fun writing both series and they’re so much fun to read.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a sequel to Welcome to Murder Week. In Murder Week, the main story is Cath’s, but her two cottage mates have story arcs as well. The new novel is narrated by one of them, Amity Clark, a romance novelist with writer’s block.
At the end of Murder Week, she’s got a new outlook and life plan and the new novel picks up on her story, back in California, and is narrated by her. There will be a mystery solved, not a fake one, but I haven’t yet decided if it will be a murder or some other kind of puzzle to solve.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: In keeping with my love of British literature, I have a story included in Ladies in Waiting: Jane Austen’s Unsung Characters, a collection of short stories about minor characters in the novels of Jane Austen.
The collection comes out on Nov. 4 from Gallery Books and includes new works by Adriana Trigiani, Elinor Lipman, Eloisa James, Sarah MacLean, Audrey Bellezza, Emily Harding, Nikki Payne, and Diana Quincy.
My story, "What Georgiana Wants," is about Georgiana Darcy, Mr. Darcy’s younger sister, who doesn’t actually have any quoted lines in Pride and Prejudice. My story, narrated by Georgiana, imagines her having a sort of mid-life crisis at the age of 27.
The collection is a lot of fun, a perfect way for Jane Austen fans to celebrate the 250th year since her birth.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Karen Dukess.
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