I never thought, when I wrote my light hearted mystery story “How Mary’s Garden Grew”, that it would be picked as a finalist for the Derringer Awards. The story, with its Agatha Christie loving heroine, was so much fun to write, and it’s very gratifying to find that so many people have singled it out. It has resulted in personal emails, a review via a Facebook post, and was even picked for Rabia Chaudry’s podcast on the Alfred Hitchcock-Ellery Queen Mystery Hour. Thank you so much to Janet Hutchings for choosing it to be published in EQMM in the first place, and thank you to all those who have let me know how much they enjoyed the story, including, of course, those wonderful judges who have singled it out as a Derringer finalist.
I love to read mystery stories, new ones hot off the press and old favourites from times past. Currently, I am revisiting much-loved Agatha Christie classics and enjoying the intricate twists and turns of her clever tales. My husband, who shuns fiction—he’s an accountant who considers The Financial Post light reading—says that reading a steady diet of murder mysteries makes me paranoid and that I see sinister plots everywhere, but, ironically, the one time that I became involved in a murder, I had no idea that death was in the air. I observed nothing more than a disturbing case of elder abuse. It was only near the end that I realized foul play had been the intention all along.