THE WRITE PATH with Julie Eberhart Painter

THe Write Path

Julie Eberhart Painter

In this series, my guests talk to me about their books. Today I welcome author Julie Eberhart Painter, who will be discussing Kill Fee with me.

So let me hand over my mic. The next voice you’ll hear will be Julie’s.

1. What is your book, Kill Fee, about?

Author interview

The mystery unfolds, starting with feisty bridge players, many older and more brave as they age. They have nothing to lose.

Although it’s a murder mystery, the underlying pulse is “What do people do in a pinch, and how do they handle their ambitions and far-reaching goals?”

Always in the background are the suspects, villainous Dorian and the avaricious relatives with agendas that have nothing to do with bridge.

2. What do you think attracts readers to your main characters?

Ishmael Merlin Dickey is a poet with an overwhelming desire for fame—and a little drinking problem. He wants to be the next Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Pulitzer Prize winner for Omeros, his epic poem. Ishmael has no lid on his desire to make himself famous, and latches on to the action any way he can.

The McNishes, two very old sisters and bridge partners in the game the heroine, Penny, runs, are the busybody gossips. They can make anything worse. When Penny’s uncle dies during the opening scene, they’re the first to tell the police he was murdered. The man was in his eighties.

The comic relief, as if this bunch needed any, is Penny’s Indian Hill Mynah bird, Bilgewater, the foul-mouthed fowl. He spent his formative years in a waterfront bar where he learned the expletives he uses to shock Penny’s visitors, especially Don, her new boyfriend and attorney.

Everybody loves Bilgie; he’s over the top. All my characters are colorful. Women can relate to Penny. “Pretty” Penny is deemed to be “too pretty,” but she’s a smart and determined sleuth.

Although it’s well animated, readers who don’t play bridge might not “get” the specifics of the duplicate game, where the object is to play the hand better than other pairs with your chosen partner.

Kill Fee is not a Tickets to the Devil kind of book, about duplicate tournaments. I doubt anyone would read the book for that information. This story is about a group of conflicted adults who sometimes resort to nefarious behaviors.

When Penny attends an environmental conference of magazine editors to sell her story, we see her away from the bridge table and plunged into a more serious situation when another body drops. The two deaths are linked, but the reader must pay attention at the beginning to figure that out. In my writers’ critique group only one person out of ten immediately picked up on the clue to the motive.

Author interview

3. What message do you hope the reader takes away from your book?

Reviewers like a good time, and the book was well liked. The publisher, Champagne Books, awarded it Best Book for 2011 in April of 2012. My Medium Rare novella was a runner up at Champagne Books in April in the humor category.

The message develops naturally. The old folks think Penny is a tart, but they will come to respect her and race to her aid by the end of the book. One could say part of the message is about fair play and starting over.

4. What do you think was it about your book that convinced your editor to publish it?

In a few words, it’s funny.

For me, I loved this character, Penny. When I wrote the first draft, I sent it up to Atlanta to a very good friend, my former duplicate bridge partner. We met in 1967 during her frisky years. She was beautiful and daring. I thought of her as my Little Iodine (from the old comic strip). As a divorcee, she did all the things that I didn’t have the starch or the freedom to do.

After reading the book, she phoned me here in Florida, where the book takes place in contemporary time.

“Julie, I just love Penny!”
“You’d better,” I responded. “She’s you.”

5. Comparing the ideas you had before writing the book with the finished product, would you change anything if you could travel back in time?

This book would never have taken so long if I had written it today. It was my first mystery. While my husband scuba-dived around St. Lucia, where Derek Walcott lived before becoming a Harvard professor, I sat on the porch at the topmost cabin of the Anse Chastenet and began to write. I must have rewritten the book fifteen times, especially after I developed the sequel, Medium Rare. That book brings with it Penny, Don and Bilgewater, but the other characters from Kill Fee are background as Penny meets new challenges when her friend, the psychic associated with the local hospice where Penny volunteers is stabbed to death with her own knitting needles.