St. Louis writer Jo Hiestand sets her mysteries in Britain.  She is an admirer of the great British mystery writers, such as Agatha Christie, whose novels seem more layered and dense than many novels by American writers.

Hiestand answered questions from a fellow “Sister in Crime” member, Claire Applewhite.

By Claire Applewhite

A blustery winter day and a hot cup of tea — these are a few of her “favorite things.” For Jo Hiestand, author of “Horns of a Dilemma,” anything British will do. During her college years, this American author initiated a lifelong fascination with England. Since then, she has returned on a regular basis to visit and work.

Hiestand is a writer with many interests. With interests in classical, big band and baroque music, she was groomed as a classical pianist. She plays the harpsichord and the Martin 12-string guitar and has performed as a vocalist in the United States and England.

She returned to Webster University in 1999, where she studied English with an emphasis in writing as a profession and graduated in 2001. Since then, she founded the Greater St. Louis Chapter of Sisters in Crime and continues to spin those “Murders Most English,” a term dubbed by Hiestand herself.

An intimate knowledge of British tradition characterizes her Taylor and Graham mysteries. “Horns of a Dilemma” is the fifth novel in the series.

Q: What do you feel gives your novels their appeal?

A: English customs! I use a different one as the backbone for each book’s plot. Many customs are incredibly fascinating and quite funny to American readers. For example, watching for villagers’ spirits walking in the churchyard at midnight — how did that ever get started? It’s traditions like this that allow me to set up an interesting event around which the mystery revolves; the reader gets a little bit of history and information about that custom, too. Also, I’m very familiar with Derbyshire, the section of England where the series is set, so I describe in detail the villages and countryside. I think that brings a sense of authentic place and mood to my books.

Q: How long does it take you to write a novel, generally speaking? When you begin a new novel, what goals do you set for yourself? What is your writing method?

A: It sounds like human birth, but a book usually takes me eight to nine months to complete. I know in advance what custom I’ll use, so in January I plot the story and more or less complete the research. I try to begin writing Feb. 1. After I’ve finished the first draft, I fill in bits to make it fuller, such as weather descriptions or additional dialogue. With rewriting and editing, I normally finish the second draft in September or October.

I then send that draft to my police friend in England. He’s a retired detective-superintendent. He makes certain my English police procedure is spot on. He also catches any American words that may have slipped into the British English. He returns it, nicely marked up, and I correct anything that needs fixing.

As far as goals…. I’ve never thought about goals per se, but in each book I tell something about that particular custom, such as Guy Fawkes Day or Turning the Devil’s Stone or a St. Nicholas festival, while producing a good story. I also want my readers to feel they are actually in the village or tramping through the moors. Description is very important, in my opinion — that’s how the reader can see or feel what the characters are experiencing, how the reader can become one with the narrator. It’s very personal that way.

My method of writing consists of constructing three parts to each book: a main plot, a subplot, and a personal story of one of the characters. I do this on the computer, writing phrases in paragraph form, like “Graham holds briefing of various teams, tells about postmortem. The vicar comes to incident room, tells them that John is missing. They get particulars about when last saw John at the Turning. Lloyd said John wasn’t going to a mate’s house….”

When these three parts are completed, I take sequential chunks of each one, cutting and pasting into a new Word document to create the entire story, weaving them together so the focus shifts constantly among the three elements. I then color-code every paragraph in this master plot: blue for action scenes, red for police discussion, purple for personal plot, teal for dialogue, etc. This is a great visual when I leaf through the 30-plus pages. I see at a glance if I have too much dialogue lumped together and it needs to be broken up with action.

Q: How does research fit into your writing?

A: As I mentioned, a detective-superintendent friend — former head of CID — reads my work for police procedural errors. He and another English friend of mine, a working detective-sergeant, answer all my police questions. Closer to home, a local police detective, Paul Hornung, currently works with me. He not only writes several chapters per book as one of the characters but also supplies answers to universal police questions: how do I write a realistic fight scene (trust me — the stuff portrayed on television is NOT true!), what would an officer feel if a fellow officer was injured …. Things like that. A pathologist/coroner friend gives me medical information (weird things, like what a body would look like if buried in a snow bank for 48 hours) and a death scene cleaner describes the residue of death for me. As for general research into the English customs or odd bits that are needed for each book, I do that. It’s extremely important to me to get everything right. That’s how you establish believability.

Q: I read an interview with a writer once in which she said that the two hardest things for her were naming her characters and determining the narrative structure, so she did those things last. What do you find most difficult?

A: That’s odd to me because I begin my book by creating the characters, since they drive the story. I assemble a group of interesting people, give them histories and relationships, then see who would have cause to kill one of the others.

The names seem to automatically grow out of each character’s personality. (Think how you’d view the personalities of Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes if their names were switched!) My books are always told first person from the female detective-sergeant’s point of view. The reader hopefully understands her emotions and discovers the clues along with her.

The hardest part for me is catching the criminal. I’ve concocted this great plot, have all the clues littered cleverly throughout the pages, but I can’t legally catch the guy! The case must be water tight, able to stand up in court. You can’t convict the guy on a confession; that’s illegal in the United Kingdom. So I scratch my brain for days sometimes, trying to get some concrete piece of evidence the defense attorney isn’t going to destroy. I don’t like to rely on forensic evidence to nab my bad guy, either; I want the detectives to win the case through brainpower.

Q: How did you become intrigued by the British mystery? What influenced you? What was it about the genre that attracted you?

A: I’ve loved Britain for as long as I can remember — the folk music, the sound of the accents, the history, British classics such as those written by Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson…. I think the English mystery fascinates me for two reasons: first, of course, it fuses the elements I love. Great atmosphere, landscape, historic great houses, foggy London streets and a sense of adventure in a ‘foreign’ land.

But I’m also drawn to the English mystery from reading the Golden Age authors (Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie). They give you a superb read, certainly, but they wrap it in a Novel of Manners, revealing contemporary social conditions and ways of life. The British mystery seems to have more layers than a lot of American books. I like that.

Q: Some people feel that genre novels are formulaic. Do you agree?

A: Sure, they can be formulaic. After all, you have a crime, usually a murder or burgled jewelry, and you have to discover whodunit. But you can layer your story with other dimensions: personal problems of the main characters, social issues connected with either the main crime or a character, work-related or personal problems for the police. Then add some pieces of other information.

.Q: Is there one particular book of yours that is your personal favorite?

A: Yes, my current novel, “Horns of a Dilemma,” because the personal situations confronting my police and the night scene in the rainy forest are quite emotional and vivid.