Phyllis Gobbell is the author of the new novel Notorious in Nashville, the latest in her Jordan Mayfair mystery series. She lives in Nashville.
Q: Why did you choose Nashville as the setting for your new Jordan Mayfair mystery novel?
A: Notorious in Nashville is the fourth in the mystery series. The other three were set in foreign locations: Provence, Ireland, and Italy. I had spent time in all of those exotic places, soaking up the ambiance, and I assumed I’d travel somewhere for the fourth.
But COVID changed my plans. I wrote another book, not in the series, during the pandemic when I wasn’t traveling anywhere, but I wanted to do another Jordan Mayfair mystery.
My friends convinced me to set the story in Nashville, where I live. I’ve spent my adult life here and know the city well. I also had some things I wanted to say about what is happening here. So Nashville became the setting of the latest book in the series.
Q: How do you think your character Jordan has changed over the course of the series?
A: In the first book of the series, Pursuit in Provence, Jordan was turning 50. She had raised her children as a single mother and was an accomplished architect, but that 50th birthday was daunting. She was never a risk-taker until this first trip with her travel-writer uncle.
Each book requires Jordan to show more courage than she believes she has in her. She met Paul Broussard, patron of the arts, in the first book, and their long-distance romance has not been easy. That’s a thread running through the series.
Possibly Jordan has not changed as much as simply revealed herself, so that readers continue to see her many dimensions.
In Notorious in Nashville, readers find out the lengths to which she will go to save a daughter who is in danger. It is the most perilous situation she has faced.
Q: What inspired the plot of Notorious in Nashville?
A: There had to be music. After all, Nashville is Music City. But there is a collision of the old and the new in Nashville that informs the book. An old, washed-up songwriter and a young, hopeful singer. Historic buildings and new sleek towers. Old money and new money. I could go on.
A reporter writes about skyrocketing taxes, crooked developers, housing that Nashville residents can no longer afford, and he becomes the murder victim.
Much of what Nashville is experiencing has to do with architecture and real estate. So I used the conflict between old and new that is real, and put Jordan, an architect, in the middle of it all. Once again she uses her architectural skills, even as she is trying to save her daughter.
Q: Did you need to do any research to write the novel, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I used authentic locations in almost every case (one exception being the studio that I imagined). Scenes take place in many Nashville neighborhoods, restaurants, and businesses that I know well, so it was not like being in a European city where everything is new to me.
But I always research online sources for added details, like actual street names and items on the menu. I made several trips downtown, for the flavor of Lower Broad, and I’ll leave it to Alex, Jordan’s uncle, to talk about what it’s like now in the heart of downtown Nashville.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My Southern novel, Prodigal, will be released this fall, so I am working on pre-production publicity, and I am writing another Southern novel, The Princess of Almost Alabama. I will go back to Jordan Mayfair’s adventures in a fifth mystery, but for now I have these two other books in the works.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: In addition to writing books, I write short stories and creative nonfiction. A memoir-type piece came out in Well Read Magazine last year. “What We Keep, What We Throw Away” will be in an anthology, due for release in April: Well Read, Best of 2023. The anthology will be available on Amazon.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Very cool! Write on.
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