Earlier this week I reviewed the second book in Elizabeth Crowens' Golden Age of Hollywood mystery series: Bye Bye Blackbird. Today she's back with an interview. Don't forget to enter the giveaway if you didn't last time! Check out a review and the giveaway HERE.
Jodi: The Golden Age of Hollywood mystery series is described as "soft-boiled". Can you tell us what makes a mystery "soft-boiled"?
Elizabeth: I try not to cringe when people call my mysteries cozies, because they are not. They are “soft-boiled.” When I think of a cozy mystery, I think of Murder She Wrote, Jessica Fletcher, and Cabot Cove, or one of the many series that are popular on the Hallmark Channel. These are stories that take place in a small town and with amateur sleuths. When the protagonist first comes to town, they (usually a female) are a fish out of water and have to go through a series of adjustments. Often they inherited a bed-and-breakfast, a book or candle shop, or invested in a bakery. Many times they have an animal sidekick that can solve crimes or be a magical talking cat in the ones with a paranormal bent.
On the flipside, my female owns her own licensed detective agency and has a male partner. They are both former actors and live in a large city—Los Angeles. They do have a soft spot for rescuing animals, but that’s only because the person who I based my protagonist on did so. As opposed to noir, where no one wins in the end, and everyone seems to have a price to pay whether or not they get justice for the crime, my stories don’t have the hard-boiled edge of detective stories that were popular during the 1940s like those of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or James M. Cain.
Hammett, however, went soft-boiled with The Thin Man, with the light and whimsy characters of Nick and Nora Charles. I patterned my two PIs more after them. My books, however, like cozies, steer away from graphic sex, violence, and swearing. Any hints of these, for the most part, are done “off camera,” to use a cinematic term, since that is my background. In fact, both Dashiell Hammett and the actors who play Nick and Nora Charles appear as characters and potential suspects in Hounds of the Hollywood Baskervilles, the first book in my Golden Age of Hollywood mystery series.
Jodi: So far your new series has featured the stars of The Thin Man and Sherlock Homes movies as well as The Maltese Falcon. How did you choose which movies and stars to write about?
Elizabeth: Hounds of the Hollywood Baskervilles, the book involving the first two films, fell into place organically. When I created my main character, Babs Norman, she was based on a real person who was an actress during the forties in Hollywood, but she wasn’t a private eye. However, the real person, who I knew when she was in her eighties and nineties, loved mystery novels. She watched Law & Order, NCIS, and TCM all of the time, along with animal shows like Nat Geo Wild and Animal Planet. She also told me stories all the time about rescuing animals and about the dogs and cats she owned. When I first met her, she owned two Maine Coon cats. Each weighed over twenty-five pounds.
Jodi: Now I'll be wracking my brain, trying to figure out who this animal and mystery loving actress is! So how did Hounds of the Baskervilles fall into place?
Elizabeth: Since I had previously written three books in the Time Traveler Professor series which featured Arthur Conan Doyle, I already had a lot of knowledge about Sherlock Holmes and reader fans. When I decided to do my Babs Norman series loosely based on my friend and start it in 1940, who was the most well-known actor at the time playing Sherlock Holmes on film? Basil Rathbone, but I had to figure out what kind of crime would occur.
When I read my first biography of Rathbone, he constantly mentioned that he was a major dog lover and always had at least five dogs, several cats, and canaries around the house. Not even thinking, at least consciously, that dognapping was becoming a serious current-day crime, I figured that he could be pulled into a case to solve with my PIs if someone had stolen his dog. Could you imagine him going to the police or the pound to ask for help? They’d laugh in his face and say, “Sherlock Holmes has lost his dog? You’re the world’s greatest detective. Go find him yourself!”
I started off with that premise but realized I needed more. Then, it just so happened that The Thin Man was on TCM that evening, and that’s when the lightbulb went off…someone will steal Asta! Then my PIs will rope in Myrna Loy and William Powell…and so the story begins. During the course of the novel, other celebrity dogs disappear. While doing my research, I realized that Humphrey Bogart was also a major dog lover. When all sorts of celebrity dogs start to disappear, I have the thieves dognap his Newfoundland Cappie. At the end of the story, when all the dogs are rescued and returned to their owners, Babs’ partner, Guy, has a conversation with Bogie and gives him his business card before they part.
Hounds of the Hollywood Baskervilles ends toward the end of 1940. Since I had a three-book deal with my publisher, I needed to decide which film to focus on in 1941. Well, Humphrey Bogart had a big hit, The Maltese Falcon, so I dropped a hint in the last chapter of Hounds that he and my private eyes would meet again.
Jodi: Your latest, Bye Bye Blackbird involves a favorite of mine Humphrey Bogart and his
movie The Maltese Falcon. Do you have a favorite Bogart movie?
Elizabeth: That’s a hard one to answer. I love The Maltese Falcon, because the characters are priceless. I’ll watch any film with Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet, playing his first role on film at the age of 61 as Kasper Gutman, was so intriguing. It was also Bogie’s first film where he’s the leading man and plays the hero, even if he walks a fine line. For years, he got typecast an ex-convict, or a gangster, or someone on the wrong side of the law, and often he gets killed. He even talks about his previous roles in my book, Bye Bye Blackbird. By the way, you’ll learn a lot about film history by reading my books. He proved himself as Sam Spade, and became a romantic hero in Casablanca, or a “sentimentalist” as Captain Louis Renault, played by Claude Rains, would say. But talking about Casablanca…how could I not love that film. However, Bogie plays an entirely different character in each and, therefore, a tough choice to say which is my favorite.
Jodi: Will we be reading any more Time Traveler Professor adventures, will we be returning to the Golden Age of Hollywood or something new?
Elizabeth: Book Three in my [Golden Age of Hollywood] series will be called Round Up the Unusual Suspects, and it’s based around the production and actors involved in the
making of Casablanca. Stagehands find a person murdered on the Warner Brothers studio lot,and Jack Warner worries who might be next. He hires Babs and Guy again, since they helped him solve the crime in the Blackbird Killer Case, but for some reason everything else happening in the world, including the bombing of Pearl Harbor, tends to conspire against the PIs from solving the crime. Currently, I’m about 80K words through the first start-to-finish draft. It’s due to come out on January 6, 2026.
There will be one last time travel book, but no date is planned at the moment. Right now, I’m under deadline for the Hollywood series, so that takes priority.
Readers, if you sign up for my mailing list, I giveaway free eBooks every month based on a
popular caption contest I have daily on Facebook.
Jodi: Check it out readers - the photos are wildly unexpected and the answers even more fun. Now I want a Viking dining room table.
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