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Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books podcast, where we talk about mysteries in all of their forms from classic golden age novels to contemporary cozies. I’m mystery author Sara Rosett, and this is season one, episode nine, and it’s all about The Good Byline by Jill Orr.

So The Good Byline was published in 2017, and it’s book one of four. Now the word “byline” is not, it’s one word. It’s not two separate words. It’s “byline”, as in the byline on a newspaper article. The last book just came out in this series very recently. But as is our usual modus operandi, we’re going to go back to the beginning of the series and talk about book one, so we won’t spoil anything and we won’t miss anything.

Book Blurb

Here is the blurb: Riley Ellison, a young library assistant, has become known in her hometown of Tuttle Corner, Virginia, as Riley Bless-Her-Heart. Ever since her beloved granddaddy died and her longtime boyfriend broke up with her, Riley has withdrawn from life in an effort to rejoin the living. She signed up for an online dating service and tries to reconnect with her childhood best friend, Jordan James, now a reporter at the Tuttle Times. But when she learns that Jordan committed suicide, Riley is shaken to the core. Riley agrees to write Jordan’s obituary, hoping to find out why a young woman with so much to live for would suddenly opt out. But Jordan’s co-worker, a paranoid reporter with a penchant for conspiracy theories, convinces Riley that Jordan’s death was no suicide. He leads her down a dangerous path toward organized crime, secret lovers, and suspicious taco trucks.

Love that touch of humor there at the end. The first line of the book is “Nothing says ‘you’re going to die alone’ like being asked to judge the three-legged race at the Tuttle Corner Johnnycake Festival because you’re the only one without a partner.”

Themes

For this episode, we’re going to do things a little bit differently. We’re going to jump right into theme first, because that first line just encapsulates the theme so well. The theme of The Good Byline is Loneliness, Finding Someone, Being Disconnected. All of those things play into the theme of the story, and I just love it. The first line launches right into it right away. Riley is not happy where she is. She is not in a good place. And all she can see when she goes to this three legged race is that everyone else has a partner and she’s alone. She feels like a loser. And at the end of this first chapter, she decides she doesn’t want to live this way anymore and she’s going to be proactive and try and make some changes. That’s basically launching her on this quest to become a partner with someone to find her place in the world to connect and not be disconnected.

Story Behind the Story

So while we’re here talking about being disconnected and some of the themes, let’s go ahead and look at the story behind the story and the fun facts that I was able to dig up about this book. Riley agrees to write the obituary for her friend who has died, and that launches her on this journey of becoming an obituary writer. I don’t think that’s a huge spoiler because she’s writing her friend’s obituary, and her grandfather was an obituary writer for the Tuttle Times. In an article in the Columbia Tribune, Jill Orr describes how she came up with the idea for this story and this whole series. She realized that there is a whole subculture of obit readers and they were fans with message boards and conferences that they went to, and they discussed different obits that would come up. And it was just this amazing subculture that she hadn’t heard of and I hadn’t heard of it either. I think it’s fascinating. And I can see why she would delve into it for a book. Orr said, “To read obituaries in this manner — strangers, people you don’t know — is a hopeful and optimistic pursuit. They’re looking into these people’s lives — ‘What can I learn from these people’s lives?’” This is a really interesting angle to come at a mystery and to come at an amateur sleuth. It’s actually genius. I’m so impressed that she came up with this because it’s perfect for an amateur sleuth.

Riley, as she works on these obituaries, will be coming into contact with death in a professional way. So that’s one of the huge problems: when you write a cozy mystery, an amateur sleuth is “how do you have your person come into contact with death and mysterious death over and over again” because most cozies are a series. So this is just brilliant. As an obit writer, she will be informed of these things, and she will have a reason to look into them, to ask questions and to poke around in people’s lives. And that’s always an issue when you’re writing a cozy mystery is “why is the sleuth so interested in this and how is she going to get people to talk to her?” So this solves both of those problems. And it’s interesting, no one… I hadn’t written or hadn’t read a book about an obit writer, so I think it’s really interesting.

Another interesting aspect to this book and this series is that Riley has a robust character arc and that’s a bit unusual in cozies. She definitely goes through a change from book one to book four, and she completes her change–it’s kind of the hero’s journey–she completes that at the end of book four. And most cozies are structured in a way that can be more episodic. And they have a flat arc character where the character doesn’t change much, but the world around the character changes. Or another way to look at it is the sleuth, or the main character, the flat arc character comes in by solving the crime, changes the world. So it’s the other characters who go through a transformational journey, not the main character. But in this case Riley does transition through these different stages. She’s a different person at the end of book four than she was at the beginning of book one. Now, if you’re a writer and you’re interested in the flat arc versus robust character arc and, you know, how that plays into a story and, you know, what the different types of character arcs are, you can check out my book, How to Write a Series. I’ll link to that in the show notes in case you’re interested, because I explore all that and list out, you know, the pros and cons of each type of character and which genres they have a tendency to work best in.

Tropes

Next up, let’s talk about tropes. This book has so many fun tropes. First and foremost is the setting: it’s the Southern trope. And there’s so many Southern references. You saw it in the name of the festival, the Johnnycake Festival. Southerners are not going to say something rude specifically. They’re going to say “so-and-so, bless their heart.” And that is conveying, “Oh, my goodness! Their life is so messed up, but I won’t say it aloud. I’ll just say ‘bless their heart,’ and you’ll know exactly what I mean.” So it’s a kind way of saying somebody is just not doing well. So there’s so many Southern tropes in this, and I won’t dig into all of them because we have a lot more to go through.

A related trope to the southern trope is this Small Town trope. A lot of times this trope goes along with the Being-Down-and-Out. Things are not going well for her. She’s lost her boyfriend. She’s got a job that’s kind of sort of a dead end job, and she’s not making progress in her life or her career. And we have all of the fun tropes that come along with the Small Town trope. We have the fact that everyone knows everyone. Riley has history with like the sheriff, with the person who manages the library. She’s got, she knows some people on staff at the newspaper. So she’s got all these connections with people in town and that can be good and bad. So she has positive and negative connections with all these people. And a lot of times that really feeds into good history and good conflict. So you get, gradually you get the back story as your character meets these different people throughout the story.

Another fun trope in this is the Kooky Parents. It doesn’t necessarily have to be parents; it could be the crazy aunt, the crazy grandmother. But these her parents, Riley’s parents are very funny. I won’t spoil the, what they do and what their history is, but they’re just really kooky and great source of comic relief.

We also have in The Good Byline, the trope of a Single Girl Looking for Love. We’ve talked about that a little bit in the theme that she’s looking for, you know, someone that she can be with. She wants to be a pair, not a single person. And there’s a strong, you know, Bridget Jones feel to this, a strong chick lit feel. And she’s trying really hard. She wants to be with somebody, but it’s just not working out.

And then as far as the mystery trope goes, we have Suicide But It’s Suspected Murder. And that’s a really common device in these amateur sleuth cozy mysteries is that you have a death, but it’s either the amateur sleuth or someone in the person’s life who died suspects that it wasn’t actually suicide, it was murder. So that’s really common. And it blends really well with this obit job that she has as she digs into her friend’s life. She’s going to uncover more and more things that don’t really fit with a suicide.

We have one last thing, and it’s not really, it’s not really a trope, I would call it more a framing device. And it contributes a lot of humor to the book because Riley is dealing with some very, very dark things and she’s not in a good place. And this framing device, are: it’s emails from her romance concierge at Click.com. And she’s, this is part of her effort to meet somebody, to connect with someone. So we don’t see Riley’s emails to Click.com. We just get the emails from her romance concierge and they are just hilarious. And they provide so much humor in the book. They really, they highlight Riley’s desire to find someone and to find a connection. But it also showcases just the absurd aspects of our Internet culture. There’s these problem-solving promises that are sometimes absurd. You know, like can something you buy online really solve, you know, these problems, these deep seated problems that we have? And then we have, there’s always like the content up-sell and there’s hilarious hashtags in the emails from her concierge. I’m going to give you a little snippet of one of these email replies. It says, “My name is Regina H, and I will be your personal romance concierge here at Click.com, your electronic gateway to love.” And then I’m going to skip her sales-y company, speak and go down to this next paragraph. It says, “I’d like to thank you for filling out the 23 page questionnaire, uploading the requisite photos and setting up the monthly auto debit. I’m thrilled to report your hard work has already paid off. A highly eligible Click.com member has already placed an arrow in your quiver #thatwasfast #yougogirl.” I think the fact that we only see the replies back to Riley, it lets the reader connect the dots and figure out what has happened in between; it’s very funny.

Quotes

All right. Bonus in this episode you get two quotes because I always like to end with a quote and I want to end with thoughts that Riley is thinking as she’s at the three legged race. It’s a first person narration, so you get to hear her thoughts. She is composing her own obituary throughout the book. She mentally is editing her obituary as she’s going through these different experiences in the book. So this is her first obit for herself. “Riley Ellison, 24, shelf clerk at Tuttle Corner library, died of loneliness and shame during the annual Johnnycake Festival as a crowd of races hopped toward her, two-by-two, highlighting the fact that she was single in a world meant for doubles, a solo act among a sea of duets, an a la carte menu item in a combo-meal world.” So that, in a nutshell, is what Riley is struggling with. And throughout this book, and the series, she will try to come to terms with being single in a sea of duets. Which, you know, I just love the wording of that. And you can see that she’s struggling with serious issues and her identity. But at the same time, there is a lot of humor and there’s a light tone.

So my question for you for this episode is, what is your favorite mystery series set in a small town? I hope this podcast has let you revisit a favorite book or perhaps helped you discover a new author to try. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, I hope you’ll tell a fellow mystery reader about it. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.

Bloopers:

OK, let’s talk about tropes this po–bleh Who are looking for the best way to forge lasting relationships meaningful to blehbleh.

Links:
Jill Orr’s Website