We visited with Kate Holmes, the author of The Picker
Who Perished, A Too Good to be Threw Consignment Shop Mystery, recently in the back room of The Woman's Exchange, a not-for-profit consignment store in Sarasota FL. Kate volunteers at the shop, and she'd been hard at work rearranging merchandise when we arrived. We settled into one of the pricing booths off the sales floor and talked.

Q: You’ve made a good career out of writing how-to books. You're the author of Too Good to be Threw Complete Operations Manual for Resale & Consignment Shops, and dozens more books and booklets for the resale industry. Why would you branch out into fiction?

A: Everyone likes a challenge, right? I once met a woman...in my consignment shop, of course...who said she changed careers every seven years. I mean, big changes, like from a nurse to an accountant to a yoga instructor. So maybe this is my change, not so big, but still, something new.

Q: What was hardest about writing The Picker Who Perished?

A: Lying.

Q: Lying? What do you mean?

A: With the operations manual, and all my other shop aids, the goal is to be perfectly transparent, to write so that every little thing is understood, is clear to the reader. You can’t do that in mystery stories, you’d ruin the story. So I had to learn to lie. To hide the truth.

Q: How did you manage to do that?

A: Oh, Lordie. Mostly by luck. I tried every method of organizing a mystery story I’d ever run across: the wall-sized chart, the different colors of ink for red herrings and misdirections and plot twists. Post-It notes and piles of ideas around the edges of the room. In the end, I reverted back to my how-to technique, colored index cards.

Q: How does that work?

A: I’m rather renowned in the resale industry for constantly harping on collecting your ideas and inspirations one by one on index cards, so you can organize and sort them. Colored index cards just take it a step further: Pink for red herrings, green for scene-setting, and so on. Then I can shuffle to my heart’s content.

Q: Interesting. So you just go through the cards, one by one, and write your story?

A: Heavens, no. That never happens! Here’s what happens. I'm at the keyboard. Those cards are neatly arranged on my left. I read the first little phrase, let’s say it’s "Wendy Sam finds out she can get to the lawyer in a social situation." So I start storifying about say, the illusive lawyer’s getting married, so there’s a rehearsal dinner, right? So W.S. volunteers to help her friend the caterer with the party. I go off merrily on that road, then refer back to the pile of index cards. 

Oops, the next card says "M-in-law invites WS to cocktail party". Well, that’s not so bad, I can back out of the catering job idea, so I do, delete those six pages of story and rewrite with WS as a guest at a cocktail party. She gets the groom drunk and he spills the secret. 

Then the third card says "Lawyer’s a teetotaler, so he isn’t at his own party, he’s out hiding the main suspect from the law." Oops. Another twenty pages to delete.

Q: So you don’t quite have all the kinks worked out of the writing process.

A: (Laughing) Nope. Ain’t it grand? It’s such an adventure, writing. Almost as good as real life. You never know what will happen!

The Picker Who Perished
A Too Good to be Threw Consignment Shop Mystery

Published by Katydid Press, paperback, 5.5" x8.5", 272 pp, © 2004. (ISBN 0-9755886-0-5) $12.95

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