As a mystery writer, I deal with murder every day, typing away at my laptop, dreaming up intricate motives and researching true crimes. I don’t write about the actual process of killing someone. My murders take place “off screen.” They’re discovered after the fact.

For me, the fun of writing mysteries is the intellectual challenge of creating a compelling psychology and interesting motives for the killer, as well as developing an empathetic personality and causative circumstances for the victim. And of course, inventing a protagonist to cleverly sort through the red herrings and complexities.

Mystery is one of the most popular genres among readers. It’s fun to be scared when you know you’re safe, hence the popularity of roller coasters, sky diving and zip lining. I’ve loved mysteries since I was old enough to read and today my Kindle holds more mystery novels than any other genre.

So, all in all, murders have existed in the abstract to me for a long time. Until today. This morning I learned that the granddaughter of one of my good friends was murdered this week. A cruel, unnecessary and unforgivable death. Close up, murder isn’t fun. It’s not something to enjoy like a puzzle. It’s the reality of a life taken.

My heart is broken for my friend and her family. I’ll never feel distanced from murder again. Behind each victim are people who will love and miss them forever. Something I won’t forget as I write.

A few months back, I hit a roadblock trying to work out a theme for my next novel. Like many writers, I have a folder full of writing project ideas, but none grabbed me. Many hours plodded by, staring frustrated at a legal pad full of crossed out, brain-stormed thoughts.

Then one afternoon, feeling betrayed by my imagination and worrying that I didn’t have another novel in me, I walked into town. Past the Victorian homes lining Main Street, where downtown begins, I noticed a new “For Sale” sign on an old antiques store–Clarkston Country Store. I lifted the lid on the container holding the realtor’s description of the property, pulled one out, and read that an apartment existed on the top floor–something I didn’t know. Surprisingly, the store was open that day. It rarely had been for the past few years. I stepped in.

I hadn’t visited the place for at least twenty years, not being interested in the garage-sale type “antiques” sold there. Smiling at the owner, who stood behind the counter I did a walk through. Not much had changed, but I couldn’t help looking though a basket full of photos with a sign inviting me to “Choose a Relative.” I didn’t–I have more than enough of my own.

Back at the counter, I asked the owner about the history of the place. He told me that in the early 1900s, the building housed a woodworking shop on the first floor and a photographer’s studio above. Mid-century, it became an antiques store, and the photographer’s studio was converted into an apartment.

Excited, I rushed home, my brain spinning all the way, and googled the store. As it turns out, my adopted town has a historical society website where I discovered more information about the building. Gratefully, the legal pad was soon covered with potential stories about hidden photographs, small town scandals and secrets, and unreliable witnesses to crimes.

That day I learned that it’s not only big flashy ideas that inspire a novel, but sometime it’s places, buildings and objects right under our noses.

Old fashioned confessionals. Boxes of secrets with beautifully carved doors, tall and straight, set within ornate panels.

Behind the central door sits the secret keeper, wearing a purple stole. Behind the doors on either side, kneel the secret creators–the sinners, waiting in the dim light for comfort and forgiveness. The essence of wrong doing floats from them like smoke from a swinging brazier. The priest opens a small wooden window separating him from the sinner and leans toward the masking screen, waiting for words to pour into his ear and permeate his brain.

Like Russian nesting dolls, confessionals are nestled within the opulent body of the church, with its own ecclesiastical secrets and sins.

Many churches are dying. But although they stand ruined and abandoned in dying neighborhoods, their confessionals continue to harbor sins and secrets, lurking within dark corners like haunts. Living on forever like cockroaches.

Note: I wrote this piece during a writing workshop where the topic was “Obsessions.” And having attended a parochial school for twelve years, churches have a yin-yang vibe for me.

If this is the first of my blogs you’ve read, please check out my other, somewhat more light-hearted, blogs at janicerydzon.com and click on “Blog” at the top of the page.

Patient’s Rooms on either side of hall

When I was in my early 20s, a friend and I visited her father in Wayne County Psychiatric Hospital, aka Eloise. It was a sobering experience seeing him, once handsome and distinguished, reduced to a slack-jawed zombie. I remember following a nurse down a long corridor toward the men’s dayroom where we’d meet with him, passing blank-eyed shadow-people, sitting along the walls on chairs and the floor, moaning and calling to us, and hearing the swishing, sliding rustle of paper slippers as other shadow-people wandered the hallways.

Even though many years have passed, I can still see the dayroom–the high ceilings, the tall arched windows secured with what resembled chain-link fencing, the tables and chairs scattered willy-nilly around the room like those in an elementary school cafeteria, the misery stamped on the faces of everyone, including the staff.

 I was young and I was afraid, imagining being trapped in place where despair hung about like an unhealthy fog. But something touched my heart that day and I knew that I’d write about the sights, sounds, smells and emotions emitting from the shadow-people like ectoplasm.

Heat Grate in Patient’s Room

This past year, 2016, I finally began writing a historical/suspense novel featuring an abandoned mental asylum. Research took me on a tour of Traverse City State Hospital, another abandoned mental hospital, part of which was resurrected as upscale condominiums, boutiques and restaurants. Most of the buildings, which once encompassed the hospital campus, remain deserted and decayed, and it is in some of these buildings the pictures for this article were taken. A few times I lagged behind the tour to absorb the atmosphere and could almost hear the whisper of paper slippers gliding by.

Patient’s Room

It was on the tour I learned that many patients collected “treasures,” which could be anything from a bit of string, to a book, to a dinner roll. Some stored their treasures behind heating vents in the their rooms or hidey-holes in the lavatory, not discovered until the hospital was abandoned. This inspired me to write about a female patient, Ruth, who in 1944 hides her journal, sketches and a rosary in the space behind the vent cover in her room, and a reporter in 1966 who finds them. I hope to complete the novel by spring, 2017.

Two weeks ago, my husband, Tom, and I were lunching at a tiki bar with friends in South Florida when my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number and almost didn’t answer it. But I’m thankful I did. It was our security monitoring service.

I moved away from the drone of boats passing by on the Intercoastal Waterway and the chatter of other diners to a quieter location. Jack, the guy from the security company, said smoke alarms had alerted on the first and second floors of our Michigan home. He wanted to know if he should call the fire department. Of course I said yes. He said he’d call back when he had a status from the fire fighters.

Like a zombie, I returned to our table and told Tom and our friends the horrifying news. Since the upstairs alarm was located almost directly above the one on the first floor,  I pictured a column of flames starting in the basement and tunneling through the roof. While Tom and our friends discussed our next move (Jump on the next flight home? Call someone–but who living near us might be home right now?), all I could think about was how grateful I was I’d brought my laptop on vacation with me. It contains all the novels I’ve written over the years.

As it turned out, there was no fire. My wonderful neighbor, who was thankfully nearby, had access to our house and was able to let the fire department inside (so no damage to the doors). Apparently, our fire alarms concurrently decided to let us know they needed to be replaced.

Later, thinking back on my reaction, I thought it interesting I hadn’t worried about any objects in the house. Everything home-wise I truly needed was with me—Tom, and my laptop. All else was replaceable.

Non-writers may not understand the laptop part, but the files on it represent years of my brain’s outpourings. And even though I have an offsite computer backup service, I wouldn’t have felt the same measure of relief if my laptop had melted away on the desk in my writing room.

I learned a valuable lesson about myself that day–that in a moment of crisis, most material things are not important to me. If I was at home, my house was on fire, and Tom was safe, I’d only grab my laptop before rushing out the door. What about you? If your house was on fire, and your family and pets safe, what would you rescue first?

When I spotted a deserted run-down motel on my hunt for a lakeside mansion to feature in one of my novels, I yelled (nicely) at my husband to stop the car. 

Paradise Pines was a blast out of the 1950s, with the kitschy charm of an old black and white movie–the original Psycho, perhaps.

The permanently vacant standalone cabins, scattered around the pine-cleared expanse of gravel, resembled a giant Monopoly game with abandoned pieces not correctly aligned to the board’s squares. The whole place was dilapidated to the point of being creepy-cool.

Once, this was someone’s idea of Paradise, with a capital P. Miles away from auto factories and steel mills, from the changing Detroit vibe and everyday hassles, the air was pure here, it smelled of pine with a tinge of lake water, the sounds muffled by the forest. The darkness, absolute.

I wouldn’t consider Paradise Pines a paradise now, although I have to admit, I like creepiness up to a point. Exploring abandoned houses, inactive insane asylums, abandoned motels/hotels and ruins of old civilizations gets my mind working. Who lived or visited there? What were their lives like? I like constructing stories about those strange sad places and Paradise Pines will definitely show up in a future novel.

Back to Paradise. I think it comes in many colors. Mine is the blue serenity of water–a lake, ocean, or backyard waterfall, where I can relax, think and write, with a bit of vino on the side, please.

Paradise Pines might have been ideal for me in its heyday since Lake Michigan throws its weight around on the far side of the park across the road. But not now. It’s too thought-provoking, too questioning, and my personal paradise has all the answers I need.

What color is your Paradise?

Do you have books you’d never toss no matter how book-deep and pile-high your shelves are getting? Books that aren’t necessarily your favorites, but hold some special meaning? Mine are pictured–Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, The Hidden Staircase, a Nancy Drew Mystery by Carolyn Keene, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and last but not least, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. My  copy of Jane Eyre with wood engravings was published in 1943, Wuthering Heights has a leather cover and was published in 1923, my sentimental favorite, The Hidden Staircase, with its illustrated cardboard cover, was published in 1959.

Only one is among my favorite reads of all time, Rebecca. It pops up in most of the stories I write, as do old houses and abandoned institutions. I couldn’t tell you why Rebecca is so special to me. Maybe it’s the dark moodiness of the novel, or the naïve young Mrs. de Winter, or the creepy Mrs. Danvers, or Manderley, Max de Winter’s exquisite mansion. I can’t imagine reading Rebecca on a Kindle or in a 21st century printing. My paperback copy was printed in 1943 and carries these words on the page preceding the title, “In order to cooperate with the government’s war effort, this book has been made in strict conformity with WPB regulations restricting the use of certain materials.” I don’t know what “certain materials’ weren’t used, but I love turning the yellowing paper-thin pages which are now becoming loose from the glued backing.

Our home library is always filled to the gills with books even though we’ve donated hundreds to our local library over the years. And although I love my Kindle, I’ll always find a place in our library, and in my heart, for the physical books I cherish.

I’m on the second step from the bottom

Writer or not, if you’re like me, there’s always been a story rattling around in your head you’ve told to your family or friends, but haven’t written down. Mine was about my grandmother, an unhappily married woman, who travelled from Detroit to Los Angeles, leaving behind a husband and four children, including my dad. According to family stories, her health was suffering and a doctor recommend she go to California for a month. But a few years ago I learned from a family friend she’d wanted to visit a male friend who’d recently moved there.

Six weeks later, on the way home to Detroit, her train derailed in Arizona. She considered it a sign that God wanted her to stay in California, so she caught a train back to LA.

Over the years, she played bit parts in several movies, co-owned “Moon Over Miami,’ a dining, dancing, polo club frequented by movie stars, and played housemother to UCLA students in one of the mansions she somehow managed to acquire.

When I was seven, I met her for the first time. My parents piled my sister and me into our Buick Special and drove Route 66 to California. I still remember walking into her house the day we arrived, astounded by the largest and most beautiful house I’d ever seen in my short life. In the party-size foyer, a marble powder room nestled under the grand staircase. There were rooms I’d never heard of: conservatory, maids’ sleeping rooms, a nanny’s suite, a butler’s pantry. The children’s nursery, where my sister and I slept was larger than the living room at home. Three of the six bedrooms had fireplaces, as did the living room.

I spent my twelfth summer with her and she fascinated me with stories of growing up on an estate in Russian Poland, where my grandfather would ride his horse to the balcony off her bedroom and toss roses to her. But she also scared me. She always thought someone was trying to kill her and before bed she’d padlock the refrigerator, and lock every exterior and interior door in the house. Twice while I stayed with her, she’d wander from room to room, waving a smoking sage bundle and chanting under her breath to clear away evil spirits. After two months I was ready to go home to parents I’d grown to appreciate much more than I had before.

Still, she, her stories, and her home continue to tickle my imagination. Two years ago, I drafted a mystery staring my grandmother and her granddaughter (loosely based on me). It’s fiction and flips between her crazy flapper days and me exploring the house after her death. The unedited novel is stagnating in a computer file for now, but next year I plan to resurrect it. It’s the story I’ve always wanted to write–and this time finish.

What is the story you’ve always wanted to write down in a journal so you wouldn’t forget, for your children to understand you or your family better, for others in the form of a memoir? Why haven’t you written it yet?