Meet Laura Childs, the Queen of Cozy Mysteries

Gerry Schmitt has written 29 mysteries set in a Charleston tearoom, 16 mysteries set in a New Orleans scrapbooking shop and nine mysteries whose setting is a bookstore/café in a small Midwest town (some New York Times best-sellers), under the pen name Laura Childs.

Packed with local lore, customs, sights, street and restaurant names and insider details, her books are a sheer delight to any fans of these Southern cities (or tea or scrapbooking).

In the Charleston mysteries, the Indigo Tea Shop is named after a major plantation crop, its owner and amateur sleuth, Theodosia, is named for a South Carolina governor's wife, and her tea sommelier, Drayton, bears the name of a leading local family, who owned Drayton Hall, a 1738 plantation.

The books end with lengthy resource lists: recipes for dishes the tearoom chef bakes and cooks in the book, themed tea party ideas from literary or floral to Chinese, and tea plantations in the U.S. to tea purveyors. Events like the Spoleto Festival, charming alleys like Longitude Lane, houses from mansions on the Battery to cottages, and customs like "rat teas" (a public health measure to promote sanitation decades ago where parties had servers dressed as rats) figure into the plots.  

You assume she lives in either city. Or has a second home there, or visits often. And is a fanatic tea drinker and scrapbooker. You'd be wrong.

"I'm a good little sponge. I've seen each city about five or six times," explains Schmitt, who's lived in the Midwest her entire life, now in the Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth, but raised in rural Minnesota outside Jordan. "Once I see something I never forget it. I don't write it down. When I sit at my computer it starts flowing."

She didn't start writing books until she was 50+: She worked in advertising for 30 years, owned the Minneapolis ad firm Mission Critical Marketing for 10 years, and also co-produced a reality TV show about Hawaii ("Big Island").

The books ("Death By Darjeeling" was first, 2001) began by sheer happenstance, with a heaping dose of chutzpah. An editor at Berkley Prime Crime wanted "something about tea," and asked her agent if she knew anything about it. Her agent had sold other books to the editor, who liked Schmitt's manuscript for an unpublished thriller.

"Listen, I said — I've been to China, Japan, I've seen tea plantations. Well, once I was on the bullet train in Japan going 200 mph, and my husband said, 'Look up honey, there's a tea plantation.' I did research, found there's a tea plantation near Charleston, learned it's a fabulous old city, you got haunted cemeteries and huge plantations, and came up with the idea of a quaint tearoom - it's a perfect setting," Schmitt explains.

Her books are cozy mysteries, a popular genre whose books are themed — like bookstores, culinary or pets — and devoid of gore. Yes, there's a murder, tastefully rendered, and instead of a hard-boiled, pistol-packing male PI, the sleuth is a genteel, likable amateur, generally a woman you'd like to befriend. A CozyCon takes place May 18 near Boston, while Ashland, Oregon, a town famous for its Shakespeare Festival, has a cozy mystery festival this October.

But publishing didn't have many cozies at that time, and teashops were opening like crazy - 200 tea shops opened that year in the U.S., she read.

"It was a tsunami of tea. I'm a marketing guy at heart, who really does my research, and it brings up fun facts. I was really excited, and banged out three chapters and an outline in 48 hours." When the editor loved it, she pushed for a three-book deal, and got it, inspired by Mary Higgins Clark's three-book deal for $6 million.

Her latest tearoom mystery, "Murder in the Tea Leaves," is out this year. Quite an achievement for a woman whose first tea experience was fairly negative, an event at St. Catherine University, a women's college in St. Paul, where you had to pour tea from a samovar at a great height. Little did she know she'd end up writing 27 mysteries about it (or be named one of 15 "Notable Figures in Tea" by Teatime, a magazine with a column devoted to tea mysteries). 

Later, she offered the editor a cozy series set in the New Orleans French Quarter, whose first was "Keepsake Crimes" (2003).

"My husband had a proverbial Army buddy who lived there, who invited us to come visit them during Mardi Gras. He was in the Rex and Comus krewes, and his wife's dad had been Mayor, so we got to visit the float-building dens, visit a float-builder at home and marched in Mardi Gras." (A float-building den is the scene of a murder in "Fiber and Brimstone" and a float-builder is later murdered.)

She adds, "The whole scrapbooking phenomenon just exploded. I researched it, and found 1,000 stores just opened in the U.S. and five magazines devoted to it. The publisher loved it - they had no idea."

And yes, she won another three-book deal.  

Recipes are in the back of her books, 10-13 in each, either tearoom foods, New Orleans dishes or egg recipes. The latter are for the Cackleberry Club mysteries, where one title is "Eggs in Purgatory," poached eggs swimming in hot sauce. Set in a bookstore/café owned by three women, that series is an hommage to the Midwest, she notes.

"You're driving around, and end up stopping at a little roadside place, usually a café, and find out there's a book or antiques or yarn annex." Her inspiration: Mary Monica Pulver, the author of Minnesota-set needlecraft cozies that contain knitting patterns in back. "I thought, what a great idea, offering readers a little something extra." (A concept called lagniappe in New Orleans.)

Chinese art is often woven into the plots, from a murder at the gala opening of an 18th century Chinese teahouse at Charleston's Gibbes Museum in "Ming Tea Murder," to Shang Dynasty bronzes over 3,000 years old owned by a Mardi Gras krewe captain who's murdered in "Fiber and Brimstone." (Schmitt's husband Robert Poor is a retired professor of Chinese and Japanese art history at the University of Minnesota for 45 years; they wed in 1985.)

Dogs are always featured. The Charleston tearoom owner's dog, Earl Grey, is a "Dalbrador" (a Dalmatian-Lab mix), while the New Orleans scrapbook shopowner owns a Shar-Pei, a breed with adorably wrinkled faces, as do Schmitt and Poor.   

How can she be so prolific? "The imagination is a muscle. The more you use it, the more it stretches and the better you get," she says. "I think having an imagination is just my gift. I wrote and illustrated my first book when I was six. When I was in advertising at Bozell & Jacobs, I wrote fortunes on the side for the National Enquirer. I'll do lots of things for extra dough," she laughs.

Schmitt tends to write a book in three months, then tackles the next one. "I do seven to 10 pages a day, then go back and fill in the blanks with details about research and history. I'm busy with plot points and moving the story forward, and don't get bogged down in the research," she says. "In advertising, I had 16-20 clients at a time, and each one had a different campaign - some had TV, some public relations, some writing. I try to stay really focused. But some people don't get it at all."

As for writer's block – balderdash. Schmitt doesn't believe in it: Never did, never will. "In advertising I'd get a crash-and-burn assignment at 10 AM and end up producing it in the afternoon. You just have to get it done by the deadline," she says.

Murder happens fast in her books. "I always start the first chapter with a real bang – exploding Mardi Gras floats, SUVs crashing through windows, maybe death by electrocution or someone falling out a window," she says cheerfully. "Another murder often happens midway - when readers think someone is the prime suspect, I kill 'em off. I like to shake things up. With other books I hate that by chapter five nothing's happened."

Not a member of the snooty literati, she adds, "Books are entertainment – they compete with TV, casinos, shopping centers. I'm an entertainer - I don't do fine literature." She likes how in James Bond movies, something exciting happens before the credits. She tries to cast suspicion on almost every character, the sleuth's boyfriend and friends included.  

Her husband thought up her pen name: a sly move so "Childs" would appear before Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark and Agatha Christie in mystery sections, and "Laura" for a gracious Southern-lady name. "Dr. Bob did good," she smiles.