Kathleen Marple Kalb writes cozy mysteries under both her own name and as Nikki Knight.
She has had a long and varied career as an author, and seems to be at the point where her work is taking off.
We had the pleasure of visiting with Kathleen at Malice Domestic 36 in April 2024, and the following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
All errors are our own.
CozyMystery.com: You have the perfect name for cozy mysteries.
Kathleen Marple Kalb: Marple is really my maiden name. I was really born Miss Marple. Working in radio people think that you know, you changed your name, whatever, but I was born Marple.
CM: It’s probably caused you lots of problems.
KMK: I’ve spent my entire adult life showing my driver’s license saying yes, I really am Miss Marple.
On writing, radio, and rejection
CM: You have a wide-ranging career.
KMK: I refer to myself as an author, anchor, mom, not in that order. Because that’s pretty much what I did. I married kind of late, after I’d already established my radio career. I was lucky enough to be able to work part time on weekend mornings. It’s a grueling, horrible schedule, but it enables me to be a full time mom during the week. And I pick up extra work in the summer and then holidays, I have not been home with my family on Christmas Day, probably ever, but that’s okay, we’re Jewish. We celebrate Hanukkah.
CM: So how did you get started with writing?
KMK: When my son was very small, it was just the radio and the mom-ing. And then when he started kindergarten, which is a long time ago now, I suddenly had five hours a day, when I didn’t know what to do with myself. And I remembered that when I was 16, I wrote a novel and I thought, you know, well, why don’t we go back and try it again and see if I can do it as better as a grown up. And indeed, after three tries and 200 rejections I got into print.
Rejections
CM: 200 rejections!
KMK: I keep them in my email. And you know, at this point, the collection of them makes me laugh, but the most recent one or two make me cry because it still hurts. Whatever you’re, you know, you’re an old hand at it. But every once in a while, and sometimes it’s like, okay, fine, you know, you don’t like my work, fine, whatever. Have a nice day. Other times, it’s still very painful.
CM: Still, 200 is a lot of rejection.
KMK: Yeah, I pitched a lot as I do a lot of short story work too. The submission cycle is much faster. Everything in the cycle is much faster. But you also get paid a whole heck of a lot less. And every once in a while I get a short story that I just absolutely adore that I can’t sell, and that’s upsetting. There’s one particular publication that I pretty much stopped submitting to, because no matter what I send them, they don’t want it.
CM: Give it time and it might happen.
KMK: I’ll get an idea that’s so out of the box that they won’t know it’s me until it’s too late.
On Family life
CM: So you started writing when your son was young. How old is he now?
KMK: My son is 13. He’s gonna be starting high school in the fall. Oh, my God.
CM: One of the more interesting times for a parent.
KMK: And he’s five-nine, for those of you who are keeping score. I have a very, very tall child. I’m a very, very tall person. Well, he’s already passed his dad. And I’m a bit taller than my husband. He’s already passed his dad and follows his dad around patting him on the head. But they have a wonderful relationship. So it’s fine. But now he’s attempting to pick me up since he found out that he weighs more than I do, just a few pounds more, but he does. And so now he’s running around trying to pick me up.
CM: You now live in Connecticut.
KMK: We actually have a house and I mow the lawn and my husband runs a snowblower.
CM: Do you base your books on where you live?
KMK: The places that I write have a suburbia area. The two towns that I write, Alcott is in the Grace series and Unity is in the Stuff of Murder. They’re both Connecticut towns, inspired by two different real towns. Both of them have, again, a very middle class area. Unity particularly has the property values come up a lot in the Stuff of Murder books, because there’s a character who is the PTA princess and a realtor. And so you can’t have a conversation with Sally without it coming back to property values.
The Birds
CM: You also seem to have a thing for birds.
KMK: My uncle was a bird watcher and a wildlife photographer. That was his hobby. And so I picked up the fondness for owls from him. I’m just a snowy owl fan from way back.
CM: And that’s why they appear in your stories?
KMK: Blanche the owl appears in one story, Owl Be Damned, that was published in Tough magazine, in a Crimeucopia anthology, and also on a podcast. That story is the one in which Blanche helps solve a murder.
On Writing
CM: When do you have time to write?
KMK: I write during the week, mostly. I try every week, whatever my schedule is, I normally work two days, Saturday and Sunday, 2am to 11:30am in the city, with a three hour commute on either end. So basically, my weekend is shot. But, you know, Monday through Friday, a lot of times I’m working, writing, I write Monday through Friday during the day while my son’s at school. And other times when I have ideas, you know, just whenever I have five minutes, I’m writing.
CM: Not a daily schedule then?
KMK: So it’s not I must be at the desk at 9am and write for two hours. I can’t really expect that in myself. I have some markers. You know, every morning I get up and I do my social media work that is like the the the standard stuff that I do for myself to maintain my presence. And if there’s anything to do for Sisters in Crime national, I’m on the national social media team, I handle the threads feed. So if there’s anything that needs to be sent out for SinC, I’ll do that too.
And then after that, I kind of set up my day. And then a lot of times, particularly early in the week, if it was a hard weekend, I’ll get my son off to school and take a nap for a couple hours till my brain’s working. And then get down to work.
Ideas
CM: When do your ideas come?
KMK: If I get a really terrific idea, while I’m walking from the office to the train, that’s after the shift, I’ll write it down and email it to myself and pick it up later when I have, you know, brainpower.
CM: It’s hard to be on a schedule sometimes.
KMK: You know, one of the wonderful things about writing is that there’s no wrong way to do it. There’s not “the way.” You don’t have to follow the sacred way. As long as you get, as long as it works for you, it works.
The Books
CM: Okay, tell us about your books.
Ella Shane
KMK: I have the historical series, which is the Ella Shane series that’s really better described as historical and cozy. There’s a lot of historical grounding in it. But you know, it’s a little bit more, I don’t want to say serious because you still have a very good time. But Ella has a little bit of PTSD from growing up an orphan in the tenements. And there’s a lot of stuff about women’s roles in the 19th century. If you like history, if you like social stuff, then you’ll like the social history.
The Old Stuff
KMK: The Old Stuff series is a modern cozy, diverse cast. Like the main character has two dads for example, and her son has a photographic memory and type one diabetes. So trying for some diversity in the cast. And in November, Stuff number two, The Stuff of Mayhem, in which the whole Stuff of Murder group returns to solve a mystery that begins when something goes very, very wrong at the Fourth of July cannon firing in town.
Grace the Hit Mom
CM: You also have a pen name.
KMK: As Nikki Knight I have the Grace the Hit Mom series. Wrong Poison is out and Hound of the Bonnevilles is on preorder.
CM: We have debated over whether Grace is cozy or not.
KMK: Yeah, the publisher called it, and I think they’re right, they call it the cozy with a twist. It’s not really a conventional cozy because [usually] the main character doesn’t run around killing people. Right? I mean, Grace doesn’t kill people who don’t have it coming.
CM: But she does kill people!
KMK: And we have clear rules for who deserved it and how that’s set up. So Grace clearly doesn’t take anybody out who’s not deserving. She’s the sister who takes out, you know, Harvey Weinstein types, or that kind of evil men who manage to elude justice.
CM: Still a hit person though.
KMK: It’s still got a main character who is a hit person. So I do everything I can do to make her relatable and to have some comic relief in Scotchie the Giant Dog, who in the first book, he discovers that he likes the taste of blue poster paint. And so at every opportunity Scotchie is getting into the blue poster paint and as day follows night…
CM: We finally decided Grace counts as cozy.
KMK: Grace fits very much from a content standpoint, there’s no question. It’s obviously cozy. There’s no explicit violence or sex or anything like that. But from a sensibility standpoint, something very bad happened, we are going to find out what happened and put things right, without anything too terrible happening to the people we like. And that part is a big deal with Grace. But that said, I have yet to meet somebody who doesn’t love the idea of Grace.
Vermont Radio
CM: You used to live in Vermont, where you based the Vermont Radio series.
KMK: I love Vermont. I lived there for six years when I was in radio. You’re gonna shovel and you’re gonna plow, or you’re going to have to live somewhere where that is done for you. There is no question. But it’s a beautiful place, and the people are welcoming. And everybody has a wonderful personality.
It is also a very small state and people don’t race out to welcome you immediately. It’s New England, it will take time. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. And they will never be mean to you, or any such thing. But you will know that you’re not one of them. You know?
CM: How is the series going?
The next Vermont Radio mystery is coming out this fall, after two years of trying to find a new home for this series and writing a lot of Vermont short stories that did sell. I was really ready to self publish it, and then I just saw a flyer. I submitted it to the Wildrose Press and they said oh yeah, let’s try this and see what happens. So Live, Local, and Long Dead is coming out in the fall.
Planning to Write
CM: As you write, do you plan your books?
KMK: I do. Normally I’m sort of a semi-pantser or semi-plotter, pick one, and about half and half. I’d get the opening and the end. First, I figure out the opening. I start where I want to go. Maybe a key scene or two in the middle, like related to the relationship or something. And then I work in to the middle, because I think of writing a mystery is like from my journalism background or like building a legal case. So you need to know which pieces of evidence and when they reveal and that kind of thing.
CM: But it can cause problems?
KMK: I wrote the original draft of Stuff of Mayhem during NaNoWriMo, the thing where you write 50,000 words in a month. And normally that’s terrific for finishing a manuscript that you have. It’s not a great idea if you’re just starting from scratch, at least not for me. Because I wrote this lovely 70,000 word manuscript in which I killed the wrong person. Never kill an adorable 90 year old woman who’s getting ready for her bat mitzvah. I realized when I did the read-through of the draft that I didn’t want this woman dead. I wanted her around. And so I threw out two thirds of the book. And now the climactic scene takes place at her bat mitzvah.
And Finally…
CM: Who is your favorite cozy author?
KMK: Elizabeth Peters always and forever. Die for Love, which I read like as a teenager in the 80s. It’s about murder at a romance conference. And I mean, having been to a conference, you will laugh yourself stupid. To some degree, she set the pattern both for light, traditional, cozy, however you wanna call it, and historical. Amelia Peabody and her husband, Emerson, the Egyptologists. That series pretty much set the standard for modern historical mysteries.
A Fatal Reception, the newest book in the Ella Shane series, is out now!
Thank you to Kathleen Marple Kalb for taking the time to talk to us!
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