What If?: A Guest Post by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White
Authors Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White had a crazy thought — what if they put their heads together and wrote a murder mystery? Thus, The Author’s Guide to Murder was born, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Discover how this co-authorship came to be and what made them want to write it, down below.
Hardcover $30.00
The Author's Guide to Murder: A Novel
The Author's Guide to Murder: A Novel
By Beatriz Williams , Lauren Willig , Karen White
In Stock Online
Hardcover $30.00
If you liked Knives Out, read this book. An ode to locked-room mysteries and classic, cold-blooded cases, The Author’s Guide to Murder is a treat.
If you liked Knives Out, read this book. An ode to locked-room mysteries and classic, cold-blooded cases, The Author’s Guide to Murder is a treat.
Two years ago, the exquisite calm of a Newport afternoon was broken by the sound of loud chortling, and possibly some indecorous snorting of coffee. Yep, that was us, Team W (Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White). We were visiting this historic seaport to polish up The Lost Summers of Newport, our fourth collaborative novel. While getting a bit loopy over coffee and cookies on an editing break, we’d been laughing over how often readers ask us if we’re just pretending to be besties, or if we’d really been put together like the Spice Girls.
What if, we asked, as writers do, leaning together over our coffees. What if we put three authors claiming to be besties on a Scottish island, supposedly to write a book together, and then someone was found murdered. What if?
After all, it’s a What If that started us off in the first place. Back in 2012, the three of us were hanging out at a conference, boozing it up in the bar, discussing how much more fun we were having here— together—as opposed to the lonely slog of book tour, where it’s just you, your battered itinerary, and a truly alarming amount of room service. What if? we asked each other, after the second bottle of wine. What if we wrote a book together?Then our publisher would have to tour us together, obviously. And—oh, happy thought!—pay our rapidly mounting bar bill.
It was a crazy idea. We’d all written scads of books on our own, but we had no idea how to write with anyone else. Most of the time we felt like we hardly even knew how to write on our own. But the lure of the girls’ trip was strong, so, once we’d recovered from our hangovers and dealt with our most pressing deadlines, we convened at a teashop in New York City, just to toss some ideas around. That idea-tossing turned into roughly sixteen pots of tea, a few dozen scones, an artery-clogging amount of clotted cream, and the outline for the book that was to become the New York Times bestseller, The Forgotten Room.
We joke that writing the Team W books defies the laws of time and space. When we’re writing together, there seems to be more time in the day; the words come faster; if you fall down a plot hole, your friends are immediately there to tug you out. It’s the magic of having three brains in place of one: or, as we like to call it, the Unibrain. With each book, we meet together, brainstorm, plot, outline, and then retreat to our corners of the world (Georgia for Karen, Connecticut for Beatriz, New York for Lauren) to start our round robin writing process, chapter by chapter. And if we ever get stuck, the Team W text chain is constantly buzzing.
With The Author’s Guide to Murder, we’ve come full circle, revisiting our own origin story of “three authors walk into a bar”. But did these fictional three authors actually meet in a bar? Why are they really in Scotland? Why are they pretending to be besties when they clearly can’t stand each other? And what’s their relationship to the murdered man—an award-winning author found killed in multiple different creative ways? It’s a satire of the publishing industry, it’s a locked castle mystery…but, most of all, it’s a book about friendship and found family.
Because, sometimes, you walk into a bar and find your people…and then you write five bestsellers with them.
