An Interview with Emily Toll

Q: We did a bit of research before this interview, and couldn't find any references to Emily Toll prior to 2002 and the publication of Murder Will Travel.

EMILY TOLL: The simplest answer to that is that I didn't really exist before then. And I don't really exist now, either, except as a kinder, gentler version of Taffy Cannon. She's a little rough around the edges.

Q: And you aren't?

ET: Mercy, no. I came into being, fully polished, after Taffy's first travel mystery, Guns and Roses, was published by Perseverance Press in 2000. Guns and Roses was set on a tour of the History and Gardens of Virginia, with particular attention to Colonial Williamsburg. The fictional trip was plagued by mishaps and apparent pranks.

Q: I've heard of that one. Guns and Roses was quite successful, wasn't it?

ET: Taffy is so glad you asked that. Yes, it was a success both for the book and for the movement toward small press publication of mysteries. This was in the beginning stages of Perseverance's revival from an earlier incarnation, and they published only two books in 2000, Guns and Roses and The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn by Eric Wright. Between them, those books were nominated for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Macavity and Arthur Ellis awards. Not a bad season.

Q: And Taffy's nominations were?

ET: The Agatha and Macavity for Best Novel of 2000.

Q: This led to the new series?

ET: Not directly. Before any nominations, Berkley Prime Crime expressed interest in the book and initially considered continuing what Taffy had believed was the beginning of a series. But it turned out that Guns and Roses was considered insufficiently cozy for the Berkley line, though they liked the premise of an amateur sleuth/tour guide.

Q: Insufficiently cozy?

ET: Alas. "Foul language" was cited, always a weakness of Taffy's. But she was annoyed at the accusation and did a global search of the manuscript. (Computers are so handy sometimes!) The F-word showed up once, when a young woman told her mother, "F--- maturity!" That seemed reasonable, so Taffy searched on. "Shit" showed up many times, but mostly in the context of a plot incident involving dogshit. "Hell" was all over the place, but largely because it is part of the word "oystershell" and oystershell is what the paths in Colonial Williamsburg are made of.

Q: And "damn"?

ET: She was guilty as charged on that one.

Q: Didn't sales force issues enter into the decision to use a pseudonym?

ET: Not directly, but that was a reason given for not continuing where G&R had left off—not wanting to confuse the sales people by publishing the second book in a series when somebody else had the first.

Q: So where does Emily Toll enter into this?

ET: When it was clear that Berkley's interest was more in a travel series than in a Taffy Cannon series, it seemed easier to simply write the new series under a different name. It was accepted from the start that this new Booked for Travel series would fit the parameters of cozydom, and would therefore be a bit softer than the books Taffy customarily wrote. So she invented me.

Q: And where did you get your name?

ET: She chose family names. Emily was her grandmother's name and her own legal middle name. Toll was her mother's maiden name. They fit together rather nicely.

Q: Well, now that that's all cleared up, tell me about the books themselves. Who's your protagonist?

ET: Booked for Travel is an agency run by a charming, youngish widow named Lynne Montgomery. Her husband died suddenly while surfing one January morning and left her with enough money to buy the travel agency where she'd been working part time. The agency is based in the town of Floritas, California, a beach town north of San Diego that Taffy created for an earlier mystery series featuring California State Bar attorney-investigator Nan Robinson. But back to Lynne. She grew up as a somewhat itinerant military brat and it's part of her passion to love travel. So naturally she wants to conduct some of the tours herself.

Q: You picked some interesting locations.

ET: That was the point, wasn't it? To write books about places that readers would visit if they could, and would happily visit as armchair travelers if they couldn't. Throw in a murder or two and it's just about perfect.

Q: Murder Will Travel was the first, involving a tour of Sonoma Wine Country. I suppose this required exhaustive location research?

ET: Of course. I've long believed that it's necessary to suffer for one's art. I went to many, many vineyards and wineries in Sonoma, trying to get the details just right.

Q: Including wine tasting, I presume?

ET: Well, yes, but in reality I'm a beer drinker, so it was a little difficult to shift gears. A special friend who has a boutique vineyard in Sebastopol came with me to a lot of the places I visited. After a while, she turned to me and said, "You know, I can't remember when I've been to so many wineries without actually drinking anything." So we spent a bit longer at the next place we visited and tasted some very nice wines.

Q: Did you have favorite wineries?

ET: That's kind of like asking which child or pet is a favorite. Some were ostentatious and pretentious, but for the most part the Sonoma wineries are quite charming and have distinctive personalities. I did particularly enjoy Korbel, which makes sparkling wines that we would call champagnes if it weren't for the French being persnickety about international labeling. Gundlach-Bundschu Winery was another favorite. They have a great attitude and some wonderful ads. Also splendid wine.

Q: Which brings up a question. Was this research tax-deductible?

ET: Research is a necessary component of realistic writing. But it would be wrong to say that it's fun. For the benefit of any IRS representatives who might be reading this, let me assure you that research for all of these books was tedious, tiresome and not at all enjoyable.

Q: You went from wine country to Gold Rush country in Murder Pans Out. Why there?

ET: Well, one reason was that my editor suggested it. Also this is a very interesting and important element of California history. The problem I soon discovered was that many of the Gold Rush sites and towns are long gone. They were transitory to begin with, usually a few tents to start, and highly susceptible to fire. A lot of these towns burned down repeatedly, and few of them became anything that we would consider stable for quite some time.

Q: But there was a central area, right? A place where most of these miners went?

ET: Actually, the reality is that significant Gold Rush towns cover over a hundred miles from north to south. There's a north-south highway running through this region, named Highway 49 in honor of the Forty-niners who came seeking their fortunes. That was my original title for this book, actually. Highway 49 Revisited. But the publisher thought that was too obscure.

Q: How long did the Gold Rush last?

ET: Events were telescoped into a few short years. Once gold was discovered, everything moved very quickly. People were coming from all over the world, either overland from the eastern United States or by ship around Cape Horn. The sailing ships sometimes got becalmed a few hundred miles west of San Francisco and just sat there stuck for weeks. When they did get into port, usually the crew would abandon ship and head off to search for gold themselves. Some of the abandoned ships were turned into buildings and hotels as the Bay was filled in to accommodate the housing and mercantile needs of the Forty-Niners.

Q: But people did strike it rich, didn't they?

ET: Yes, but the most reliable path to riches was not to search for gold, but to sell supplies and food to the folks who were searching. A lot of the financial giants in California history started out providing services to the miners: Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Levi Strauss. The period when you could just pick up gold off the ground or out of a river bed ended pretty quickly. That was replaced by various methods of panning or sluicing, using water to wash away lighter weight materials and leaving a nice glitter of gold at the bottom of the pan.

Q: That doesn't sound like very hard work to me.

ET: You're romanticizing the whole business. Say you're panning in a river. The summer heat is well over a hundred degrees in most of these areas, and the water is composed of melting ice packs coming down from the Sierra Nevada. So you broil to the waist and freeze the rest of the way down.

Q: I guess the Gold Rush ended at some point. We don't hear much about it any more.

ET: What happened was that it became harder and harder to find gold. Then silver was discovered in Nevada and gold prospecting in California went into a hydraulic era. Most of the remaining gold was deep inside mountains, so the forerunners of today's environmental spoilers came up with the concept of simply blasting mountainsides into mud. They created what looked like gargantuan hose nozzles, brought water from higher in the mountains, and blew the mountains apart. The first environmental legal decision in California after the downstream towns became choked with mud. It's been an ongoing battle ever since between environmentalists and what is usually called "progress."

Q: Where did Lynne's tour group go on this trip?

ET: Well, for starters it wasn't a typical tour group. This was a special trip she put together for a group of schoolteachers from her home town of Floritas. Some were personal friends from the days when her kids went through that school system and others were friends of friends. Some of them taught Gold Rush in fourth grade, where it's part of the California state curriculum. And for the most part they were good sports about the various problems that ensued on the trip.

Q: It's kind of a leap from summer in central California to autumn in New England, where Fall Into Death was set.

ET: Ah, but it's a wondrous leap. I think that autumn in New England is an experience everybody should have at least once, and this was my turn.

Q: But this trip was actually designed to set up another trip, wasn't it?

ET: Lynne's mother, Priscilla, had purchased a run-down boarding house in a small town in southern New Hampshire and she intended to open it as a bed-and-breakfast. Priscilla's idea was that Lynne was supposed to bring tour groups to stay there from California. This necessitated doing some research around New England for interesting destinations. However, it turned out that there were some bodies encased in concrete in the basement of that potential B&B, which created complications.

Q: How can you know what locations or attractions to include in these fictional tours?

ET: This actually turned out to be much more trouble than I anticipated. I think that it is extremely difficult (and rather stupid) to try to write a novel about a place where you haven't spent a lot of time. You have to get to know a place over the seasons and over the years. But it is possible to write a pretty good yarn about somebody who is taking a tour of someplace. The only catch is that you have to visit at least twice as many places as you're going to be able to include, and you can't tell until you actually get to most of them whether or not they'll work for your plot.

Q: Ah, yes. The plot.

ET: I was afraid you were going to bring that up. There's a huge problem with plotting a travel mystery, and again it's something that I didn't think of until I was deeply committed to the series. Two problems, actually. The first is that any tour guide who routinely takes out fifteen tourists and returns with fourteen is going to have trouble getting clients pretty quickly. That's very bad for business. The second problem is that in real life when somebody is murdered on a tour, one of two things will happen. Either the entire tour grinds to a halt, or the group moves on, minus the decedent. Working around these limitations was very challenging, because it was important to me to create books and situations that could actually occur.

Q: But these are cozy mysteries, right? You're not expected to be entirely realistic.

ET: I do believe in realism in mysteries, cozy or no. I'm not particularly fond of books where a cat solves the mystery, or where an amateur sleuth runs around telling the police what they ought to be doing. For that matter, any amateur sleuth who continually stumbles over dead bodies is likely to become an object of some interest to those aforementioned police. I have yet to stumble over my first, and it's not because I wasn't looking.

Q: But you stayed cozy. Lynne went from New England to the Florida Keys, still cozily.

ET: Well, as much as anything in the Florida Keys is cozy. A lot of South Florida is a law unto itself, where creative crooks can get away with almost anything. Key West in particular is like New Orleans in this respect. They're both places where the rules tend to be relaxed and the edges softened. Murder is discouraged, of course, but lots of illicit activities have historically occurred in both of them.

Q: Such as?

ET: Many of the first residents of Key West were "wreckers," people who watched from rooftops for ships that would founder on the coral reefs surrounding the islands, then race down to claim whatever cargo those ships might have been carrying. A lot of the time, former crew members of those ships would stick around and become wreckers themselves. It beat working.

Q: The keys are actually islands, aren't they?

ET: They're a string of islands moving out into the western Caribbean and connected by Highway One, which was itself built on top of a remarkable railroad line envisioned and implemented by Henry Flagler. Flagler made a fortune as partners with John D. Rockefeller, then spent big chunks of it developing Florida's eastern coast and linking these places to the northeast.

Q: Why?

ET: Because.

Q: Is this just another instance of somebody with too much money finding something silly to fritter it away on?

ET: You could probably make that argument. But Flagler really did have a plan. At the time, South Florida didn't have a deep water port and Key West, way down at the end of that string of islands, did have one. Flagler believed that if he could connect Key West with the rest of Florida, he'd be able to reach a lot of international markets through the Panama Canal.

Q: And this happened?

ET: Not precisely, though the rail line was built and it opened in 1912. And the building of the Overseas Railway was an amazing feat of both engineering and imagination. Seven-Mile Bridge, for instance, actually stretches for seven straight miles with nothing but water on any side. And while catastrophic hurricanes have scoured this area several times, the bridges have all held. They blew up part of one bridge for the movie True Lies, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he segued into politics and made that title a reality.

Q: How do you learn all this stuff?

ET: It's a process of total absorption. I do as much research as I can before I take the actual research trip and I have a plot loosely worked out. Then I visit sites and collect literature and take tours and eat local foods and immerse myself as totally as possible. I take lots of pictures. I talk to people, but usually about what they are doing, not what I'm up to. Since I started traveling with a laptop (Fall Into Death), keeping notes is much easier, though nothing could replace the piles of paper I always gather. My rule is never to throw any of it away until I'm at home, because the piece I pitch will invariably be the one I need later. I do eventually discard a lot of it, but I've got great files on Sonoma, Gold Rush country, New England and the Keys.

Q: Do you travel with guidebooks?

ET: Absolutely. I always bring way too many. Guidebooks are highly variable, though. I've seen a lot of good ones and plenty of stinkers. The all-time best guidebook I've ever seen for anywhere is The Florida Keys: A History and Guide by Joy Williams. She's a novelist and it shows.

Q: I understand that there's been plenty of smuggling in the Keys. You studied that?

ET: Oh my goodness, yes! I learned about all kinds of fun things researching this book. Smuggling. Piracy. Hurricanes. Parrots. Diving. Cuban food. The Marielista boatlift. I already knew about Jimmy Buffett, and while I'm not enthralled with the Parrothead movement, I'm delighted by his success. I appreciate and regret the irony that the simplicity of the island lifestyle that began Buffett's career has pretty much vanished from Key West.

Q: I understand this was a particularly meaningful trip for Taffy, too.

ET: Yes, it was. Twenty years earlier, she was visiting the Keys when she learned that she had sold her first novel, Convictions. The experience of selling a first novel is like nothing else on the planet.

Q: But you sold a first novel, too.

ET: Only in theory. It was never a secret that Emily Toll was actually a pseudonym for Taffy Cannon, who had already sold quite a lot of novels by then. I thought it was important to keep the identities separate, but crucial to keep the awareness of duality. I didn't want to lose Taffy's readers, and for the most part they've come along with my adventures.

Q: Where are you going next?

ET: Actually, I've retired.

Q: NO!

ET: Not necessarily forever, of course. But I had a revelation while I was in the Keys trying to find Key deer and see the hucksterized sunset at Mallory Square, and find stone crab claws and learn about scuba diving and water fowl and generally pack three times the customary activity into a week's research trip. I realized that writing these books was starting to take the joy out of traveling. I wanted to be able to go someplace as a tourist and not be responsible for anything but having a good time.

Q: And have you done that?

ET: Indeed I have. My family went to New Orleans last Easter. I didn't take a single note or pick up a single piece of literature. It was a fabulous trip, full of great experiences that I didn't need to worry about fitting into a book. I do hope someday, however, to be able to work in the Gay Easter Parade we saw in the French Quarter. It was quintessential New Orleans.

All content © 2005-11 by Taffy Cannon.