Old Habits Die Hard includes tropes familiar to any mystery reader. The amateur sleuth can’t stop themself from meddling and helps solve the case. Generation gap. Close-knit community. Eavesdropping, snooping, everyone’s got an axe to grind with everybody else so they’re all
suspects. My opening scene tickles me still, Bernie returns to The Abbey: Senior Living one night to discover a body dead in the hallway and the detective called to the scene is her former student. Of course they’ll work together! It’s her turf and his case! Brilliant!
I was in a giddy state of mind writing this book. It was my first time working off a clear outline and knowing exactly how the story ended. Everything slotted into place as neat as you’d like. I sent out my requisite hundred queries to agents and editors and thought I was done. I’d written my first murder mystery, and it wasn’t nearly as challenging as I’d feared. Feeling cocky (and obviously very overconfident) that I’d nailed it in one shot because I am a genius, I got to work on another project involving four women fighting a big corporation from stealing their town’s water. Months later, responses to my queries started coming in: Clever concept, great story, what’s book two about? And three? That’s when I learned a sobering truth. To get this book published, I needed to pitch more Bernie and AJ adventures. Suddenly this project became Much. More. Difficult.
Repeatedly offing the residents at The Abbey: Senior Living is unsustainable for obvious reasons. It was a great idea once, but I’m no Horowitz with Midsomer Murders. Even the great Agatha Christie moved Poirot and Marple around to new settings. I’d foolishly paired the
amateur sleuth, a retired nun who lives in senior apartments, with a detective in his late twenties. Any case they work together requires colliding their worlds. AJ’s end of things is easy, as a detective he can take any case I assign to him because solving a crime is literally his job.
Bernie’s more challenging because her world must overlap so she has a stake in solving the murder, access to key clues, and a plausible way to be involved in the investigation. Oof. I couldn’t have made this tougher if I’d tried! At least the vicar in Grantchester can help Geordie
because of course people will confess their sins to him. There’s a reason most amateur sleuths are writers or reporters because they can always fall back on While I was researching… But a retired nun living in senior apartments? Where do I find her point of entry for the next murder? And the next? And even the next?
Writing Old Habits Die Hard gave me a bigger mystery to solve because I had to figure out whodunnit, how, and why over and over again within very narrow parameters I’d naively set for myself. Thank God I’m a fiction writer, I can make this stuff as I go along, right? Now I’m
constantly on the lookout for an idea that would conceivably pull Bernie and AJ back together. In the next book, Dropped Like a Bad Habit, the murder takes place in the neighborhood, down the block from The Abbey. (I confess, I might’ve gotten a little carried away because the bodies kept piling up in that book). In A Regular Habit I send Bernie and AJ out of town where their paths cross as they solve another murder. The Nun the Wiser Mysteries will continue as long as I can keep coming up with credible reasons to bring Bernie and AJ together.
About the author
Melissa Westemeier grew up around the edge of nerd culture, but marriage and motherhood with three sons immersed her in it. She’s fluent in Marvel, DC, Dr. Who, Star Wars, Godzilla, and more thanks to their influence. Her fiction work includes rom-com and a trilogy loosely based on her experience tending bar on the Wolf River in Wisconsin. She’s thrilled to realize her childhood dream of writing murder mysteries. Her books blend her humor and appreciation for nerd culture while tackling serious themes and unpacking the puzzle of whodunnit (and how and why!). In her spare time, Melissa needs to be outside or near a window. Her passions include hiking, swimming, biking, reading, and fantasizing about her next vacation destination.
