Ellen Byron is the author of a number of mysteries including her award-winning Cajun Country mysteries, the Vintage Cookbook mysteries, the Catering Hall mysteries, and, now, the first in her Golden Motel Mystery series, A Very Woodsy Murder. Tuesday is release date for that one. Ellen was also kind enough to give away two bears here since a bear is integral to her new book. You can find out more about her at her website, https://www.ellenbyron.com/.

Today, though, we’re lucky enough to have her here for a Sunday Spotlight. Thank you, Ellen, for taking time to answer a few questions.

Ellen, Would you introduce yourself to readers, tell us just a little about what you did
before you started writing mysteries, and tell us about
your various mystery series?

I’m a native New Yorker but I attended college at Tulane
University, where I developed the passion for Louisiana and New Orleans that led to my Cajun
Country and Vintage Cookbook mysteries. I got a Theatre Arts degree and spent a couple of
years pursuing acting but when your competition for short brunette roles is Holly Hunter, you
pivot! I became a playwright and scratched the performing itch by doing voiceovers and comedy
improv through a form called Theatresports. I supported myself as a freelance entertainment
journalist, then decided to take the plunge and move out to Los Angeles to pursue a career
writing television.

Would you give us the elevator pitch for A Very Woodsy Murder?

Ex-sitcom writer Dee Stern impulsively buys a rustic motel in a tiny California Gold Rush town and when a guest’s
body is found straddling the property line she shares with a national park, Dee finds herself
juggling two new careers: motelier and amateur sleuth.

Here’s my follow-up. You know all about Dee’s former career. Tell us about your career as
a sitcom writer, please. Any funny stories you can tell?

Working mostly with a TV writing partner, I spent twenty-five years in the TV trenches, writing on a variety of hit shows like Wings and Just Shoot Me, as well as many non-hit shows. We wrote pilots for all the networks and
several cable outlets. It was a great experience but also a very tough one. I came up during the
1990s, when there was basically a token woman’s slot on a show – if that. I joke that if I wrote a
memoir, I’d title it They Have Their Woman, because I cannot tell you how often that was the
response from our agents when we’d tell them about a show we’d heard was staffing. The hours
were arduous and the writers’ rooms incredibly competitive – given we’d be working with as
many as a dozen guys, it was sort of a comedy locker room with the language to go with it! I’m
drawing a blank on specifically funny stories but I will tell you that when I shared a couple of the
colorful expressions I’d picked up in the room with my husband, his jaw literally dropped. “I
played hockey in high school and college,” he said, “I spent a lot of time in locker rooms and
I’ve never heard the language you bring home!”

I will add that sitcoms are notoriously ageist. (I gave examples of my own battle with ageism to
Dee in the book.) There is a bit of a reality to this. Comedy is constantly evolving. What made
people laugh in past decades often won’t make them laugh now. So if you write comedy,
especially for TV, you have to keep your sense of humor current. BTW, I’ve worked with writers
who were hip at seventy and writers who were old farts at thirty. Still, the thirty-year-old will get
the job over the seventy-year-old, unless the older writer has an evergreen credit – aka, Friends –
they can take to the bank. Perception is everything in Hollywood.

Here’s the tough question. Tell us who your favorite author is, and why. Not your favorite
book, but your favorite author.

This is so tough!! I think the best way I can answer this is to share the only writers I seem to re-read: Agatha Christie (who’s my all-time favorite), Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights has been my lodestar since I bought a used copy when I was a teenager at a store called The Haunted Bookshop in a tiny village in Vermont), and Shakespeare.

I think Dame Agatha is underrated in terms of how dark she can go, but also for the sly hints of
humor she drops into many books. In terms of Emily Bronte, her ability to release passion on the
page is unmatched, although I have a very different attitude towards Heathcliff now than I did as
a teen! I see him more as an abuser than a romantic anti-hero. And I never, ever tire of
Shakespeare’s poetry and subtle humor. My favorite sonnet is #130, which kicks off with the line
“My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun,” and goes on to basically make fun of typical love
poems. If you compare this sonnet with the lyrics for Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,”
I think you’ll agree with me that they were fans of this sonnet too!

Thank you, Ellen!

A Very Woodsy Murder by Ellen Byron. Kensington, July 2024. ISBN 9781496745354 (hardcover), 288p.