Debra Goldstein

Have you Always Wanted to Write a Book?   I could never get above a B in Honors English. My family had moved to a ritzy suburb, and I’d transferred from a rougher, less prestigious high school into a swanky one where girls wore matching shoes and purses. I wore army fatigues and boots. The kids

Debra, thanks for inviting me to “It’s Not Always a Mystery.”  I’ve loved mysteries since I read my first Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew books many moons ago. When I picked up my first Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Akroyd, I fell head over heels in love. I jumped into the deep end of

Recently, I read a blog post by writer Annette Dashofy in which she mentioned an idea that gave me pause. “As writers,” she wrote, “we tend to mine the emotional moments in our lives for story fodder.” This thought certainly rang true with me, but I hadn’t connected it to my most recent mystery series.

I write two mystery series, one set in the 1950s and one in current times. In plotting the mysteries, I start digging—researching actual events at the time and location of my story’s setting. For example, my upcoming Sydney Lockhart mystery, Murder at the Pontchartrain, is set in New Orleans, a city rich in culture and