Falling in Love with Mysteries Again
Sandra Jackson Opoku will sit on a mystery writing panel at the Write On the Door Mystery Writing Conference, October 22-24, 2021, in Fish Creek, Wisconsin. In the following blog, Falling in Love with Mysteries Again, she writes about her introduction to and love for writing mysteries.
By Sandra Jackson Opoku
I’ve been an avid reader of Agatha Christie since the age of ten: Tommy and Tuppence, Harley Quinn, Hercule Poirot and his occasional sidekick, Ariadne Oliver. I especially admired the unassuming yet shrewd Jane Marple. Her humble spinster persona concealed a razor-sharp wit; she never failed to figure out “whodunit” and get her man or woman in the end.
Yet growing up Black in a large American city was practically the polar opposite to Miss Marple’s quiet village of St. Mary Mead. My experience was even light years distant from the Horeshoe Bay of plucky American girl sleuth, Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boy’s Bayport. However fun these characters may have been, I came to realize that I’d never seen myself or anyone I knew in the pages of a mystery novel.
I studied journalism in college then began writing poetry and eventually mainstream fiction. By the time my first novel was published, I had rediscovered crime novels. There were many more options available, from Sara Paretsky’s “V.I. Warshawsky” to Walter Mosely’s “Easy Rawlins.” Valerie Wilson Wesley and Eleanor Taylor Bland were revolutionizing the police procedural genre with their Black female detectives “Tamara Hayle” and “Marty MacCalister[TJB1] .”
Christie’s aforementioned “Miss Marple” books were the first in a category that came to be known as cozies: mysteries that feature an amateur sleuth. The first Black cozy mystery was published in 1992. Barbara Neeley’s Blanche stories were a quartet of novels featuring a plump, dark-skinned maid: Blanche on the Lam, Blanche and the Talented Tenth, and Blanche Cleans Up, and Blanche Passes Go. I grew up with plump, dark-skinned older relatives who, like Blanche White, did domestic “day work.” As country women with limited education, they did the best they could with what they had[TJB2] .
My great aunt Oceal had left Mississippi in the 1940’s during the Great Migration North. Remaining single for most of her life, she was remarkably self-sufficient and resourceful. In addition to day work, she ran a rooming house out of her spacious three-bedroom apartment and operated several soul food diners on the West Side of Chicago. Aunt Ceal wasn’t a huggy-kissy, sentimental kind of woman; she was stern, no-nonsense and shrewd. Yet I was inspired by her brand of entrepreneurial savvy combined with country wit and nurturing domesticity.
Both Nealy and Aunt Ceal inspired the creation of my protagonist, soul food restaurateur and amateur sleuth, Sapphire Summers[TJB3] , nicknamed Savvy. She also has an otherworldly sidekick, her deceased Great Aunt Alice Slidell. Sweet Potato Crimes is the first novel in what I hope will become The Sapphire Summers Soulfood Mystery series. I’m also working on the Double Trouble series, featuring Afro-Mexican twin detectives, Terri and Trina Robles. A stand-alone novella told from the viewpoint of their cousin, Lalo appeared in Both Sides: Stories from the Border, an anthology of “border noir” listed as one of the “The Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020.”[TJB4] https://www.amazon.com/Both-Sides-Anthology-Border-Noir/dp/1947993879/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr
About Sandra Jackson Opoku
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of novels, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny (and the Women Who Loved Him). She coedited the anthology Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic works are widely published and produced. Jackson-Opoku’s awards and honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Award for Younger Writers, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Fiction, NEWCITY Lit50: Who Really Books in Chicago 2020, and a Chicago Esteemed Literary Artist Award. Her work has earned a Pushcart Prize nomination.