Interview with Author Kellye Garrett

 

Welcome Back, Booklovers!

I'm back with another interview with one of my favorite mystery authors Kellye Garrett. If you've been following me for awhile you've heard me talk about her series. It's one I highly recommend for people just starting to get into the mystery genre but not quite sure how they feel about it. She actually gifted me an arc of Hollywood Homicide back when I getting back into consistently reading. And I still have it on my bookshelf to this day. I want to do another series reread before I post a blog review but I wanted to introduce you to the author I always rave about. She gives an update on the continuation of the Detective by Day series, reflects on her work in television writing and talks about her involvement with Pitch Wars and Crime Writers.

What drew you to the mystery genre?

I’ve always loved it since I picked up my first Encyclopedia Brown book. Cozy mysteries (aka lighter weight amateur detective novels) were among the first “adult” books I read as a pre-teen. (I also read Jackie Collins but shhh.) I have an overactive imagination so lighter mysteries let me get my mystery fix without having nightmares about kidnapping and torture.

How has your experience as a TV writer helped shape your experience as an author?

Overall, it helped temper my expectations of what my career would be. I think a lot of debut authors think they’ll be the next Stephen King. As someone who was not the next Shonda Rhimes during my TV career, I knew that the odds for instant bestseller success with my book were slim. So I was--and still am--able to enjoy the smaller successes I have like when my book is on the TODAY show or when it wins an award.

As a writer, it helped me with plotting. For example, TV has what they call “act outs” which were a climatic moment right before the commercial break (remember those?) to make you sit through toothpaste commercials to find out what happens next. For me I try to do that with all my chapters so you’re like “Ooh let me stay up and read a few more pages.”

What is your writing process like? And how long did it take you to write Hollywood Homicide?

My writing process is doing everything else I can think of on Earth including cleaning my and your toilet before I finally force myself to write. I’m not one of those people who consistently churn our 5,000 words a day. I don’t even write everyday. And I’m finally allowing myself to be okay with that.

I got the idea for Hollywood Homicide around 2011 after being dead broke in L.A. and driving past a billboard offering a $15,000 reward for info on a murder. My first thought was “I should try to solve that.” Dumbest idea ever for real life. But it turned out to be a great idea for a book.

I finally finished a draft in 2014. My agent started trying to sell it early 2015 and every publisher said no. One even said no twice! We finally sold it to a mid-size publisher in 2016. It came out in 2017. So not quite an overnight success over here. 

How much say did you have in the cover designs of Hollywood Homicide and Hollywood 

Ending? 

Hollywood Homicide wasn’t actually the original title. I originally was going for an acronym theme because I thought I was cute so I named it IOU. (The acronym theme is still heavy in the book including all the main characters' initials are acronyms like SMH for Sienna Michelle Hayes.) My agent hated that. So we switched it to Pay Day, which I loved.

My publisher originally went with a more traditional cozy cover but ended up hating it. So they switched to the cover that we got, which is more graphic novel-looking and focused on my MC. I loved it because you never see a black woman on the cover of a cozy. But because of the cover, they switched the title to Hollywood Homicide so people knew it was a mystery.

The covers for Hollywood Ending and Hollywood Hack (which is still a file on my computer thanks to my publisher closing but still has a cover I cannot get removed from the Internet despite my best efforts) were both my ideas.

Will you be continuing the Detective by Day series?

Not at the moment. My publisher still owns my rights to the first two books and they stopped releasing new books before I could finish the third one. It’s great because it means my two books are still available for purchase but it also means that another publisher won’t pick up the series if they can’t get all the rights to all the books in the series.

How would Dayna and her friends be dealing with this pandemic?

I love this question! Let me think.

Emme refuses to leave her house anyway so she’d be fine. Sienna would be miserable because she couldn’t go out partying every night and when she did go out, she’d have to cover her face. Aubrey would be on Mask patrol, yelling at all the Karens who refused to put them on. 

And SPOILER....I said SPOILER. STOP READING if you don’t want to be spoiled. Dayna and Omari would be holed up together in his place eating tons of pizza and having lots of sex.

You were the 2018 managing director for Pitch Wars and still serve on the committee. What made you get involved with it?

For those who don’t know, Pitch Wars is an online mentoring program where more established authors spend three months helping an unagented author revise their manuscript for an agent showcase. 

I was a mentee in 2014. Hollywood Homicide was actually my Pitch Wars Book. I then became a mentor in 2015 and have mentored six amazingly talented people in the past five years. All six have agents and five of them have book deals. So as a Pitch Wars success story myself, I know the benefits. I think we’ve had over 400 success stories since Brenda Drake founded it in 2012, including Tomi Adeyami’s Children of Blood and Bone and Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient.

Are there any writers you’ve connected with through Pitch Wars that we should keep on our radars?

Yes, all of them. Lol My 2017 mentee is named Mia P. Manansala. Though she didn’t sell the book we worked on, she sold the one after it! Her #ownvoices Filipino-American culinary cozy debut, Arsenic and Adobo, will be out with Berkley on May 4, 2021. 

I’m reading it now and it’s very smart and funny. Plus it has some amazing Filipino food. Don’t read it hungry.

You are also the cofounder of Crime Writers of Color. Can you explain the purpose of that group for those who are unfamiliar?

Because of my experience with Pitch Wars and mystery organizations like Sisters in Crime, I knew the value of community and knowing people going through the same things you are. And I was surprised that there wasn’t already a Crime Writers of Color. So Walter Mosley, Gigi Pandian and I formed the group in June 2018 just as a safe space for crime writers of color to network, support each other and discuss the unique issues of trying to write in a genre that doesn’t always value our voice.

Today we have over 250 members in all stages of their career as well as a podcast. You can check our some of our books and podcast here: https://www.crimewritersofcolor.com/.

Can you name some of your favorite mystery books?

I’ll go old school. The the three authors who made me really want to write a mystery were Sue Grafton and her Alphabet series about a white woman PI; Barbara Neely and her Blanche White series about a deeper complexions black maid; and Valerie Wilson Wesley and her Tamar Hayle series about a black woman PI in my native New Jersey. 

I never got to meet Sue Grafton but I did get to correspond with Barbara before she passed. (I was fangirling more and more with each email we exchanged.) And Valerie and I have an event along with Rachel Howzell Hall (another amazing black woman author who has a new book out called And Now She’s Gone) on October 10. Check it out here: https://www.facebook.com/events/2800168216880543/.

Do you have any projects you’re currently working on that you can talk about?

Yes though it’s still a work in progress. I have been getting into more domestic thrillers/suspense lately, which is another genre that desperately needs more diversity. The genre is interesting because of the tropes--a woman who goes missing or loses her husband, etc.--aren’t going to work for black women. Like if my baby goes missing, they are putting me in jail. So I decided to see what would happen if I wrote a domestic suspense with a black woman main character. My pitch: Like A Sister is a Megan Miranda-esque #ownvoices domestic suspense novel about a woman looking into the overdose death of a one-time reality star found within blocks of her house—her own estranged younger sister.

You can follow Kellye on Twitter @kellyekell , Crime Writers of Color @CrimeWoC, and Sisters in Crime @SINCnational