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I’m thrilled to have Murder at the Blue Plate Café included in
the boxed set, “Small Town Charm, Love and Mystery,” published by Turquoise
Morning Press. But it strikes me there’s some irony in a lifelong city girl
writing about small towns.
Coming from Chicago, where I’d been
raised, I thought I’d met small towns when I moved to Kirksville, Missouri
(pop. 1960s about 12,000). But I didn’t really know about small towns until the
late 1970s when I started visiting Ben Wheeler and Edom in East Texas (some say
not far enough east to earn that designation). My good friends, Charlie and
Reva Ogilvie, had a guest ranch outside Ben Wheeler, and we ate at The Shed in
Edom frequently.
Ben Wheeler bothered me. It was then
almost a ghost town, with boarded up store fronts, though I understand it’s had
a renaissance, thanks mostly to the man who bought Arc Ridge Ranch from the
Ogilvies. It was like many small towns I had driven through: it needed a coat
of paint. We went once to a dilapidated roller skating rink (my kids loved it)
and more often than I liked to a dismal grocery store, since boarded up, where
I trusted neither the cleanliness nor the temperature of the refrigerator and
freezer units. Don’t even talk about the freshness of the vegetables. For real
grocery shopping, we went to Canton, but
I guess that’s a feature of small-town life—going to the nearest good-sized
town for a lot of things.
Edom, on the other hand, delighted
me. We went several years to the annual craft fair, and other times we wandered
the main street which featured craft shops—pottery, leather workers, jewelry
makers, and a wonderful women’s clothing store. I was amazed that the main
street, a state highway, had neither stoplight nor stop sign. You took your
chances, and you ran like hell.
The best thing in Edom to my family
was The Shed. I suppose The Shed isn’t much different from lots of small-town
cafés with chicken-fried steak, fried catfish, glorious meringue pies (Charlie
told me it was all air so no calories, and
I reminded him about the pudding bottom), and huge breakfasts. The thing
I loved most was that everyone knew Charlie and Reva and greeted them happily.
We basked in a small afterglow of fame because we were their guests.
Once my youngest daughter and her
husband were with me at The Shed for Sunday breakfast, after a visit to the
ranch, and Christian said he wanted to drive around Edom to look for his
grandmother’s house. He’d spent many happy days there as a child. We drove, and
it didn’t take long to find out that he didn’t recognize a single house. When
we got home, his grandmother told him it’s right next door to The Shed.
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That café and that town became so
firmly embedded in my mind that they formed the setting for the Blue Plate Café
Mysteries. I changed the town name to Wheeler, but no one from that part of the
state will be fooled, and I was careful to note that the murders there were
from my imagination and reflected in no way on Edom or its residents. But the
fictional counterpart of The Shed is central to the story.
A friend who grew up in Granbury,
Texas wrote me, “You nailed small-town life.” It was the biggest compliment I
could have gotten.
About Murder at the Blue Plate Café
When twin sisters Kate and Donna
inherit their grandmother’s restaurant, the Blue Plate Cafe, in Wheeler, Texas,
there’s immediate conflict. Donna wants to sell and use her money to establish
a B&B; Kate wants to keep the cafe. Thirty-two-year-old Kate leaves a
Dallas career as a paralegal and a married lover to move back to Wheeler and
run the café, while Donna plans her B&B and complicates her life by having
an affair with her sole investor. Kate soon learns that Wheeler is not the
idyllic small town she thought it was fourteen years ago. The mayor, a woman,
is power-mad and listens to no one, and the chief of police, newly come from
Dallas, doesn’t understand small-town ways. Kate is suspicious of Gram’s sudden
death, “keeling over in the mashed potatoes,” as Donna described it, and she
learns that’s not at all what happened. When the mayor of Wheeler becomes
seriously ill after eating food from the café, delivered by Donna’s husband,
Kate is even more suspicious. Then Donna’s investor is shot, and Donna is
arrested. Kate must defend her sister and solve the murders to keep her
business open, but even Kate begins to wonder about the sister she has a
love-hate relationship with. Gram guides Kate through it all, though Kate’s
never quite sure she’s hearing Gram—and sometimes Gram’s guidance is really off
the wall.
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