Pure Escapism: A Guest Post by S.D. House

When a double murder strikes a small Southern community, a pair of unlikely allies works to unravel the deadly mystery. This atmospheric whodunit delivers the secrets, the clues and the blues. Read on for an exclusive essay from S.D. House on writing Dead Man Blues.

I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t a writer. From an early age I listened to the many natural storytellers in my family and learned that the best way to draw in a listener—or a reader—was to create a world for them they could see, hear, taste, feel, and smell.

Nowhere provided richer material for me than Dale Hollow Lake, a 28,000 reservoir that straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky border. All my life my family has spent as much time as they can on the lake, and when I look back on my childhood my best memories are located there. I can see its wide, clean waters; hear its thick, wild night sounds. I can taste the morning mist and feel the small, sharp rocks of its banks in my hands. Most of all there was the aroma of its musky cedars.

The lake was a place of beauty and wonder but sometimes it was creepy, too, and even frightening. There was a different kind of darkness there that not only allowed for unparalleled stargazing but within the trees created an inky, thick blackness. Ghost stories were often told around the fire late at night. We were always daring each other to venture into the woods without a flashlight to see who could last the longest without being terrified.

Once, we saw an old houseboat floating first on wide water, then up in a lonesome cove where it stayed for a couple days. By the third time encounter we figure it had come unmoored, so we reported it to the local marina. Two dead bodies were found aboard. I was haunted by the fact that we had been in such close vicinity to it over the past week, not realizing the horror within. One day I hope to write a mystery that revolves around that case.

After a lifetime of devouring masters of mystery I decided I wanted to try my hand at the challenging task myself. Right away I knew the lake would make a mysterious, haunting setting full of possibilities of both darkness and light. So, I created Cedar Lake, a fictionalized version of Dale Hollow, and populated it with a rich cast of characters whose lives are defined by their vicinity to the water.

I wanted my mystery to be pure escapism that was also driven by precise language. I positioned it on a lake very similar to the one I know best and I sat the book in the 1950s, a time that is simpler on the surface but much more complicated—and problematic—when we go deeper. The action of Dead Man Blues takes place during the perfect-weather summer of 1955, when all is well on Cedar Lake except for a grisly double murder that makes just about everyone in the surrounding area a likely suspect.

Setting it  seventy years ago allowed me to make it rich with pop culture (Elvis and the blues, poodle skirts and milkshakes at the local diner) and allows the reader an escape while also remaining firmly rooted in reality. The lack of modern technology also forced my detective to be much more creative than if he was relying on DNA and CSI.
I am hopeful that Dead Man Blues will be the first in a series of mysteries set on Cedar Lake. I have so many more stories to tell of lake life and I hope readers will be anxious for more of them when they turn the last page of the novel. I want to keep going back to this mix of reality and escapism myself. I want to return to those shimmering waters and dazzling darknesses every chance I get and hopefully, readers will join me for the ride.