The daughter of a law professor and a potter, Leslie Karst learned at a young age, during family dinner conversations, the value of both careful analysis and the arts—ideal ingredients for a mystery story. Putting this early education to good use, she now now writes the Sally Solari Mysteries (Dying for a Taste, A Measure of Murder), a culinary series set in Santa Cruz, California.
Originally from Southern California, Leslie moved north to attend UC Santa Cruz (home of the Fighting Banana Slugs) and after graduation, parlayed her degree in English literature into employment waiting tables and singing in a new wave rock and roll band. Exciting though this life was, she eventually decided she was ready for a “real” job, and ended up at Stanford Law School.
For the next twenty years Leslie worked as the research and appellate attorney for Santa Cruz’s largest civil law firm. During this time, she rediscovered a passion for food and cooking, and so once more returned to school to earn a degree in culinary arts.
Now retired from the law, she spends her time cooking, gardening, cycling, singing alto in her local community chorus, reading, and of course writing. Leslie and her wife and their Jack Russell mix split their time between Santa Cruz and Hilo, Hawai‘i.
Q: Congratulations on the release of your latest book, A Measure of Murder. To begin with, can you gives us a brief summary of what the story is about and what compelled you to write it?
A: In A Measure of Murder, the second book in my Sally Solari series, Sally is busy juggling work at her family’s Italian restaurant, Solari’s, and helping plan the autumn menu for the restaurant she’s just inherited, Gauguin. Complicating this already hectic schedule, she joins her ex-boyfriend Eric’s chorus, which is performing a newly discovered version of her favorite composition: the Mozart Requiem. But then, at the first rehearsal, a tenor falls to his death on the church courtyard—and his soprano girlfriend is sure it wasn’t an accident.
Although the prime focus of my Sally Solari mysteries is on food, cooking, and restaurants, there’s also a secondary theme to each of the books in the series: one of the human senses. The first, Dying for a Taste, concerns (obviously) the sense of taste, and A Measure of Murder delves into the sense of hearing—more specifically, music.
Music has long been one of my passions. I studied clarinet as a youngster, later fronted and wrote the songs for two different bands, and for the past seventeen years have sung alto in my local community chorus. So when it came time to plot the story about the sense of hearing, there was no question but that it should focus on music.
As with Sally, one of my favorite compositions is the sublime Mozart Requiem. But in addition, the piece is perfect for a mystery novel, as the Requiem itself is surrounded by secrets and mystery: who commissioned it, who completed it after Mozart died, which parts were composed by whom. So, truly, how could I resist?
Q: What do you think makes a good culinary mystery? Could you narrow it down to the three most important elements? Is it even possible to narrow it down?
A: Having been trained as a lawyer, I have no problem narrowing issues down to whatever elements are required by the situation. Here are my three:
- Any good mystery requires that perfect balance between being possible to solve (i.e., the proper placement of clues) yet being sneaky enough to make the solution tricky, all without being unfair. To my mind, this is by far the most difficult aspect of writing the book.
- But to make the story truly engaging, I believe it needs more than simply a clever whodunit. My favorite crime novels also incorporate themes and subplots that are woven into the mystery and which give the reader a glimpse into some new culture or way of life. Dorothy L. Sayers was a master at this, with her peeks into the worlds of London advertising (Murder Must Advertise), bell ringing (The Nine Tailors), and academia (Gaudy Night).
- Lastly, a good culinary mystery must, of course, abound with food and cooking, the more delectably described the better. In the best of the genre, the food is at the heart of the mystery, but as long as the reader is left salivating and hungry, I’d say the author has done her job well.
Q: How did you go about plotting your story? Or did you discover it as you worked on the book?
A: I think of myself as an absolute plotter (as opposed to a pantser—someone who flies by the seat of their pants). I usually first come up with a basic idea, next a group of three to five suspects (one of whom will be my eventual murderer), and then a series of plot points and events that will occur during the book. Organizing these plot points into an effective story arc is crucial but rarely easy. With A Measure of Murder, I had compiled a multiple-page list of events and occurrences that I knew I wanted in the book, but which were in a completely random order. I printed out the list and cut the events apart with scissors, then spread them out on the dining room table. Over a period of several days I arranged and rearranged the order of events until I had a rough outline I was happy with. I then glued them back together onto new sheets of paper. A literal cut-and-paste job.
Things don’t always work out exactly the way you expect them to, however, when plotting a mystery novel. For example, I knew for a certainty before I started writing A Measure of Murder who would be the killer. But then about a quarter of the way through the first draft, that character forcefully informed me, “I am not your murderer.” Realizing they were absolutely right, I changed the plot accordingly. (But I also completed a brand new, detailed outline through the end of the story before continuing on with my writing, so I’m still most definitely in the “plotter” camp of writing.)
Q: Tell us something interesting about your protagonist and how you developed her. Did you do any character interviews or sketches prior to the actual writing?
A: Sally Solari is an ex-lawyer who, after losing her mother to cancer, reluctantly returns to the family fold to help her dad run his old-school Italian restaurant, Solari’s. She’s not yet forty and already experiencing erratic hormones and hot flashes. As a result, she can tend towards over-the-top emotions and sarcasm (though cycling and bourbon help). But she’s also smart, stubborn, and resolute, and rarely takes no for an answer. So when Sally sets her mind on tracking down a murderer, you do not want to be the one who gets in her way.
Perhaps I should have done some character sketches before I started the first Sally Solari mystery (Dying for a Taste), as this would no doubt have allowed me to avoid a fair amount of reworking of the manuscript. But instead I jumped right in. The idea for Sally came to me nearly fully-formed—she’s a conglomeration of many different people I’ve known over the years (including parts of myself). But having just turned in the m.s. for book number three, I can say that her character is still growing and evolving in my head, and in the stories, as well.
Q: In the same light, how did you create your antagonist or villain? What steps did you take to make him or her realistic?
A: I can’t really answer this question without giving away important spoilers. But I will say that several of the suspects—as well as the deceased—in A Measure of Murder are members of the community chorus Sally has joined. And having sung in my own local chorus for many years, I have a pretty good understanding of the dynamics that can arise within a tightly-knit group of artistic, passionate, and ambitious people. The egos, competitiveness, and romantic tensions that occur in the book, though sometimes perhaps slightly exaggerated, are all based on reality.
Q: How did you keep your narrative exciting throughout the novel? Could you offer some practical, specific tips?
A: Raymond Chandler once dismissively said of his time writing detective stories for pulp magazines, “When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” Taken as a metaphor, this actually isn’t bad advice for the crime writer, since it’s good practice to periodically throw in a surprise to keep your reader on edge. But the way I see it, an engaging story is one that is constantly moving forward. Every scene should advance the plot in some way, and the end of every chapter should leave the reader eager to learn what happens next.
In addition, as I noted above, subplots and underlying themes serve to flesh out your mystery novel and make it more exciting. A Measure of Murder is, at its most basic level, simply the story of Sally trying to figure out whether the tenor was murdered and, if so, who did it. But other parallel plot lines keep the story moving forward as well: How will Sally juggle managing Gauguin, the restaurant she just inherited, as well as working at Solari’s, with all her chorus rehearsals? Will she be able to extricate herself from having to help her dad run Solari’s, and how will this effect her relationship with her father?
Q: Setting is also quite important and in many cases it becomes like a character itself. What tools of the trade did you use in your writing to bring the setting to life?
A: The setting for my Sally Solari mystery series is based primarily my own experiences. I moved to Santa Cruz after high school to attend UCSC, and never left. At the time I arrived here in 1974, it was still a sleepy beach town, home to Italian fishermen, ranchers, retirees, and summer vacationers drawn by its famous redwood trees and Boardwalk. But over the years, largely because of the advent of the university, Santa Cruz has experienced profound changes, and these days the town is teeming with hipsters and hippies and urban professionals. And along with these newcomers, the food movement has descended full-force upon the surprised old-timers.
As I witnessed (and participated in) the advent of this “foodie” revolution and its effects on our once-sleepy town, it hit me that the juxtaposition of these two cultures would make for a terrific backdrop to a mystery story: What would happen, I wondered, if a local Santa Cruz gal suddenly found herself caught between the world of her family’s traditional, old-fashioned Italian restaurant, and that of the newly-arrived, politically-correct food activists?
Q: Did you know the theme(s) of your novel from the start or is this something you discovered after completing the first draft? Is this theme(s) recurrent in your other work?
A: I was aware of the themes before I started writing the book. As noted above, the sense of hearing plays an important part in A Measure of Murder, with Sally not only joining the chorus to sing the Mozart Requiem, but also along the way learning the importance of truly listening in general—listening to your inner feelings, and paying attention to what’s going on around you.
In addition, themes that recur in all the Sally Solari mysteries concern family and the food movement, in particular, how the two create a conflict between Sally and her father. The Solaris are descended from one of the original Italian fishermen who arrived in Santa Cruz in the 1890s, and Sally’s dad is fiercely proud of the family’s traditional, old-school Italian seafood restaurant out on the Santa Cruz Wharf. But Sally is also very much aligned with the food-conscious folks who have arrived in town over the past two decades—even more so now, after inheriting her aunt’s trendy restaurant, Gauguin.
This dynamic between Sally and her father—who is hurt that his daughter no longer wants to work at Solari’s, and who thinks she now looks down on her family heritage—is very much at the forefront of both Dying for a Taste and A Measure of Murder.
Q: Where does craft end and art begin? Do you think editing can destroy the initial creative thrust of an author?
A: The two are inseparable, as far as I’m concerned. Most great art involves a certain amount of craft, in addition to “inspiration” or “muse” or whatever you want to call it. Even art that may appear spontaneous and free—such as a crazy drawing dashed off by Picasso on a scrap of paper—is generally the result of years of training and craftsmanship.
A first draft is to an author like the initial sketches or undercoats to a watercolorist. Once you have the basics down, the next step is to go back in and fine tune your work, adding highlights, details, embellishments. But there’s no reason editing can’t be as enjoyable as composing the first draft. In many ways, I actually prefer the revision process to the the initial getting-it-down-on-paper stage of writing. To me, that’s where much of the magic happens. Like the buffing of a shoe after its blacking has been applied, the editing process is when the book finally emerges from its rough finish to become a gleaming work of art.
Q: What three things, in your opinion, make a successful novelist?
A: Imagination, hard work, and perseverance.
Q: A famous writer once wrote that being an author is like having to do homework for the rest of your life. What do you think about that?
A: Ha! That reminds me of what I’ve always said about my past career as a research and appellate attorney—that it was like writing a term paper every single day of your life.
The life of an author is indeed similar to having homework all of the time, in that the work never ends. At any given time, you’re simultaneously promoting your last book, editing and revising the current one, and plotting and outlining the next one. But I never much minded homework during school and college, and I must say that the homework that comes with writing mystery novels is ever so much more fun than what I had to do as an attorney.
Q: Are there any resources, books, workshops or sites about craft that you’ve found helpful during your writing career?
A: I have to give a shout-out here to the wonderful organization, Sisters in Crime http://www.sistersincrime.org/, and its chapter, the Guppies (for the Great UnPublished http://www.sinc-guppies.org/). I truly believe I would not be a published author today but for the advice, feedback, generosity, and all around support I received from the SinC and Guppy members as I was learning the craft of mystery writing and wandering dazed through the labyrinth that is the literary publishing world. If you write crime fiction, I encourage you to check them out (and they eagerly accept misters as well as sisters!)
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share with my readers about the craft of writing?
A: My advice to all aspiring authors is this: Never give up and never stop believing in yourself as a writer. As the fabulous developmental editor, Kristen Weber, said to me when I became discouraged after receiving more than eighty passes on the manuscript that ultimately landed me my publishing contract, “You can get hundreds of rejections, and many writers do. But remember: It only takes one yes.”
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