Bestselling author Karen Dukess returns to the podcast to discuss her delightful and heartfelt new novel, WELCOME TO MURDER WEEK, which was inspired by a trip to the English countryside with her sister, her love of British mysteries, and a desire to write something purely fun! The novel follows a reserved 34-year-old American woman who travels to a small British town after discovering tickets her estranged late mother had purchased for an immersive murder mystery simulation. Karen explores themes of grief, complicated mother-daughter relationships, the loneliness of feeling like an orphan in adulthood, unexpected friendships, how travel can shake up one's identity, and ultimately, the process of healing.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Karen. Thanks so much for coming back on Totally Booked with Zibby now to talk about Welcome to Murder Week. Congratulations. 

Karen: Thank you so much. It's great to be here. 

Zibby: Okay, so when did the last book Party come out? When did we last talk? 

Karen: The last book party came out in 2019. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Karen: It's been a while.

Zibby: It's been a little while, but that's okay. It feels like yesterday. 

Karen: I know. Sort of. 

Zibby: Okay, so what has happened between the last book party and now and how did you arrive at this book and this story? 

Karen: Well, between the last book party and now, there was another book I, I spent several years living in Russia and working as a journalist and I tackled that book, which wasn't honestly a lot of fun to write.

It was hard. It was hard to write. I had like second book syndrome. This is my Russia book syndrome. And then I think, as you know, I was submitting the story shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia wasn't anyone's favorite topic, including mine at that point. And the story felt anachronistic to me.

I was nervous about submitting it, but I'm like, okay, I worked on this for two and a half years, I'll give it a go. And it did not go so well. And after one round of submissions, I said to my agent, you know what? I don't wanna revise, I don't wanna keep, I don't wanna keep trying. Let's just set this aside.

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: It just kind of, you know, upsetting. But I had had sort of like a reverse career. My first novel just like flew through the whole process and it was amazing. And so I remember thinking when this one didn't succeed, I thought, okay, well most people get the rejection first, and then they have the success.

So now this is why, this is where I'm gonna figure out like, am I really a writer? Am I gonna get up and keep going or am I gonna buckle? And not only did I get up and keep going, but I, I think because of my experience writing that novel, I felt like, okay, if I'm doing another novel, I have to have fun.

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: If I'm gonna spend, you know, a couple years writing a novel, it has to be just what I truly wanna do. And I had just taken a trip with my sister to the Peak district in England. I didn't go there for research. I went there for fun. But I had such a great time there. I felt like I had walked into the pages of like all the British novels I had read and all the, and, and into the sets of a million mystery TV shows that I had watched and even the British Baking Show. I had never been in the English countryside before. I've been to London and I came back and I wrote Welcome to Murder Week, which is a story about a young woman, 34. My kids don't think that's young, but I do, um, discovered after her estranged mother died that she then her mother had bought two of them, uh, tickets to go on a week long adventure in the English countryside to solve a fake English village murder mystery. And off she goes. And while she's there, she teams up with two roommates, very unlike herself, two cottage mates. And they not only solve the fake mystery, but they solve the real mystery of why her mother wanted to go.

And I have to say that I don't think I would've written this novel if I hadn't failed with the Russia one. It was really liberating. It was really like, I'm doing this for me. I'm just gonna have fun. I wanna write a book that's fun and captures the sort of joyous experience I had with my sister in England where everything just was funny to us.

And I wrote this book in a little over a year and it was actually fun and here it is. 

Zibby: Wow. Well, it was also fun to read and a total adventure in so many ways. The Murder Week concept itself is so unique. I mean, are these things actual trips? Like do they have these? 

Karen: I don't think so. I've heard of mystery weekends where you book a stay like in a castle or some fancy house.

I know there are mystery, murder mystery dinners you can book, but I, I think in England they also have weekends. So you can go and there are actors there that stage a mystery while you're staying in like a grand country house. I totally made this up. I haven't heard of one. I'd love to know if there is, but in mine it's like the whole village comes together and some of the villagers are participating playing roles, some are playing themselves, but they're part of the game and some are just there, kind of tolerating this invasion of Americans, uh, who are living out their mystery solving fantasies.

So I don't know. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh, what a cool concept. I mean, I could see why it's fun to write because you basically get to trump through a village, you get to enlist whatever characters you want to be part of it or not. There's always the, is this person an actor in the thing? 

Karen: Yeah. 

Zibby: Or not. And so at every corner there's like.

A plot twist essentially. 

Karen: Yeah. And that was kind of like, I mean, when I was with my sister, I didn't know that England had like public footpaths all through the countryside. So you can walk, you walk across people's property. Um, we walked all over and I mean, I, I just loved sort of playing with this idea, this experience that we had where like we'd see somebody and we'd be like, oh my God, look a vicar.

You know? And like I had only seen a vicar in like Midsummer Murders or grandchester something on Brick box. Um, so everything was seeing it through the lens of fiction. Like maybe some people go to England and they see it through history, you know, they know their wives of Henry VII and all of that, or what happened in the Tower of London.

For me, it was all like, I'm walking across the field like Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, or I'm throwing myself into the Moors like Jane Eyre, and it was really, yeah, that's the kind of thing that I wanted to play with in the novel with these Americans there sort of, you know, just playing with American views of Britain and also, you know, how much we learn about a place through fiction.

And not knowing what's real and what's not. So,.. 

Zibby: And you have one of her cottage mates is a romance writer, so of course she's seeing things through that lens as well. 

Karen: Yeah, yeah. I love the idea. I, my original idea was I just wanted some Americans to go to England, and I love the idea when you bring people together, who wouldn't ordinarily be together.

So I have Cath, who's 34, and she lives kind of a quiet life a lot in reaction to her sort of flaky mother and then, um, 40-year-old Wyatt, who is unhappily working in his husband's birding store, and his husband sends him on the trip. He's unsure why. And then Amity, who's 50-year-old, recently divorced romance writer.

And I love that the, the idea that like these people never would've met, they never would've come together, if not for this uh, mystery, but they, they work together and they live in a cottage together and they become like unlikely friends. And I just love that kind of scenario. So my original idea was a writing group. They were members of a writing group. 'cause that same kind of thing can happen in a writing. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: We'd come together. You're from different walks of life, but you get to know each other really well when you're sharing your writing. 

Zibby: Yep. 

Karen: And I was actually talking to a friend when I first had the idea and I said, I think I'm gonna send these, this writing group to the English countryside and, and they're gonna have this experience there.

And she said, okay. But what are they gonna do there? You're right. Like that's not gonna be very interesting. And then that's how I hit on the mystery idea. 

Zibby: Wow. 

Karen: Very good question. 

Zibby: Wow. Yeah. Hope that, uh, she gets an advanced copy, you know, framed or some framed covers of the.. 

Karen: Absolutely. 

Zibby: There's a lot about the role of grandparents and I think it was so interesting how you said that.

Cath is essentially an orphan and she's like, can I be an orphan? When can you stop being an orphan? At what age type of thing. 

Karen: Yeah. 

Zibby: Because I think that so many people, you can feel like an orphan losing your parents in middle age in, in whatever age. And of course, Cath is raised by her dad's mom after her dad is killed by a drunk driver, which is so sad. And then her mom leaves her at age nine. And so you have that relationship. You have relationships that unfold throughout the narrative, which we don't, we won't talk about, but the role of a grandparent and, and sort of a, an elder statesman in picking up the pieces plays a big role.

So tell me a little bit about grandparents, the role of a grandparents, your own grandparents, all of that. 

Karen: Yeah. That's interesting that, that you asked that. No one has asked about that specifically yet, but yeah, I liked writing. So Cathy's a very solitary person. She doesn't have family because she was an only child. Her father died when she was young, and she and her mother moved in with her father's. Parents, and then her grandfather died. And this is all like, you know, you learn this all after the fact. Um, and I, the grandmother's sort of this presence only in her memories and very nice memories. I think the grandmother really stepped in to do her best, but it's left Cath very much alone.

I don't know. I, I like, I I, the grandmother's not a. Strong. Like you don't get to know her. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: In great detail in the novel, but you get a sense that she was a good parent, a wise parent, she raised Cath well, and I always seem to write about, like I always have an older woman in my book. I like these sort of wise, older characters, and I think that's sort of what I think of more than even a grandparent.

I mean, I love my grandparents. They didn't raise me. You know? 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Karen: But I've always, even when I was little, like I always liked talking to the older people. You know, I always, uh, maybe it's sort of like the grandparent figure or the older friend can be sort of like the ideal idealized parent or something, you know, that unconditional love you get less complicated. 'cause her relationship with her mother was really complicated. Her mother was, you know, not out of her life, but not in it. Would fl in and out, would come to visit, would leave early, um, would make promises, let's take trips and then they wouldn't happen. So when Cath finds out that her mother bought this trip to England, it seems like another flaky thing, but she goes, and it ends up changing a lot for her in a good way. 

Zibby: That feeling though of being abandoned by a parent. Like you have a scene where she gives Cath a badminton set and then the next day. 

Karen: Yeah. 

Zibby: You know, she's, she's gone. And just the longing and there's one part where you just say, you know, she didn't, you know, she didn't want a gift.

She just wanted her not to leave, not to keep leaving. 

Karen: Yeah. Yeah. 

Zibby: Where did all that come from? 

Karen: That's a really good question. You know, this book, my mother was very present, so this book was really more fictional than anything I've written. You know, I mean, obviously there's me and all of these characters, but maybe Lisa or Cath, and what I was interested in exploring with Cath is this fact that she thought she didn't have to grieve her mother. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: How she felt like. My mother left me a long time ago, like when she tells her new cottage mates, Amity and Wyatt, that her mother was dead, that she booked this trip and then she died.

They feel so bad for her, and Amity says to her, you know, oh, that must have been so terrible to lose a mother at such a young age, and Cass says, you have no idea. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: Because she really lost her when she was nine. So she feels like she doesn't really have to grieve her 'cause she's grieved her so much.

But I think that grief is often more complicated when the relationship isn't good. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: You know, when the relationship is good. You obviously are really sad, but there's a sort of beauty to that sadness because you're missing, you know, the wonderful person that was there in your life and now how do you go on without them?

But I think grief can be even more difficult when it's not resolved, and that is sort of what this story. I mean, I set out to write this really fun story and I did have a lot of fun with it, but I also like a story that has like an emotional heart to it. And you know, after the first draft I kind of realized, well, the real story has to be the heart of the story.

Like the fake murder is fun, but, you know, talk about low stakes. It's fake. And that the, the real story is sort of her grief journey. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: Which makes it sound depressing. I don't think it is, but.. 

Zibby: No, it's, it's really coming to terms with who you are as a daughter and 

Karen: Yeah. 

Zibby: What, what your family background means and the ability to, to shift how she thinks about it, right?

Yeah. You can, like the narrative you tell yourself about. Your relationships is one. 

Karen: Exactly. And that's very much what this is about. Because Cath has lived her life in a very narrow way. She has the same job that essentially that she's had since high school. She lives in the same house where her grandmother raised her, and she's kind of living that way because she has this idea of her mother as like my mother was always chasing passion.

She was flitting from man to man. She was changing what she was doing all the time and it never worked out. And I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna make a fool of myself chasing after some fantasy life. I'm gonna like stay in this lane, which is pretty narrow and on this trip, she learns something about her.

She, what she learns about her mother is completely different than what she thought. And she gives, you know, by getting a new understanding of what made her mother tick, she realizes she doesn't have to live in reaction to that anymore. Yeah, and that's something I feel like I'm often writing about is sort of the narratives we tell ourselves about our families or our role in the family, or why we are the way we are.

They're not always right. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: You know, like we can base them on emotional things that can be very limiting and also can be wrong, and it can be very liberating to be able to like give yourself a new narrative. So that's sort of what I felt like I was giving Cath. 

Zibby: And you gave Cath a new opportunity emotionally to be open to the love relationships that she had. 

Karen: Yes. 

Zibby: Been rejecting from the start in a very blatant way. 

Karen: Yeah. She was like, I'm not interested in romance, you know, but of course there's a romance in there. Fun to write. It was just fun. I just had fun with this book. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. I love it. So does now, do you wanna start going on more of these adventures?

Are you gonna organize a murder week and 

Karen: I am not gonna or organize a murder week? No, because in the last book party there was like a big costume party and where people dressed up as authors and people are always like, have you been to a party like that? I'm like, no, I actually don't like costume parties.

I would like to go on a, I've never even done like a murder dinner, you know? 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: I would like to do one, not organize it. Participate in one. 

Zibby: Right. Yeah. 

Karen: A really good one, though. Not a hokey one. No, but I am gonna continue with, well, I think I'm working on a book now, which sort of continues, but it's, it's Amity's story, so it's taking 

Zibby: Oh, interesting 

Karen: character.

So. In this book, Cath, Wyatt and Amity all have their own arc, but it's really Cath's story. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: So in the next book, it will really be Amity's story 'cause she's changed in this one and she's going to change further. So a plan, 

Zibby: I love that. Okay. And Amity, of course, is divorced. Her kids are grown and flown and uh, she, I like how you include the book she doesn't write in here too, like the plots that were those plots you had thought about writing as books yourself? 

Karen: No. No. It was just fun thinking about them. It was just fun. Yeah, she was a, I don't know. I just like these three characters together. I mean, it's just fun putting these three such different characters together.

There's also, I think there's something about like when you, you go away 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: And you meet people who know nothing about you. Like they literally only know like what you tell 'em and you are as you present yourself to be and it can be very freeing. And I think that's sort of what I hope I captured in this book, that they just kind of arrive in the cottage.

Like, here I am who I am right now, and they get very close, very quickly. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: Because of that, or at home they might have been more of like, you know, where are you? Where do you fit into my life? Or in the social world or whatever. 

Zibby: And how did you pick these backstories? Cath works in an eyeglass store and is helping people try on in, you had some joke in the beginning, like, like she was in such a bad mood, or she was so distracted that she almost let some woman like wear glasses that she knew looked terrible on her. And I was like, do people do that? 

Karen: Like I think so you know that character is actually, so there's a woman who own, who's an optician in a town near me town where I grew up and she's been there for really, really long time. And I think I got glasses around the time when I wrote the last was writing the last book party. And I told her about it and she said to me, you know it, she's the only person there like, she runs the store. She owns the store. And she said, I always have a book under my desk here. And I'm always reading when the store is quiet, I'm reading. And so you've gotta, you know, gimme a copy of the last book party and I did. And, and so I, and she told me, we were chatting once and she told me how she had started working there. I should tell her name's Josie Fanelli and it's Kurt Sour Opticians in large. She gave me this character. She started working there in high school as a part-time job, and it was owned by an older man, and she worked there and started learning about being an optician, which involves cutting lenses as well as like fitting people and figuring things out.

And she eventually went to school to learn to be an optician. And then when he wanted to retire, he basically gave her no interest loan. So, and she could work there and pay off the loan until she owned this, this until she owned it and now she runs it, I think he's died and she's been there for, you know, since she was in high school.

So I went in and I talked to her and got more details on this story and I'm like, oh, basic character on you, just this part. So I have to bring her the book. I haven't brought of the book yet. 

Zibby: Aw. 

Karen: Yeah. I borrowed her story and gave her a little adventure and romance. I mean, the character is not her, just the career setup is her.

Yeah. I just, I don't know. I wanted something that was sort of, you know, she'd been there a long time and I liked the story. 

Zibby: So amazing. And then, was it easy to then sell this one? Did you, was it like you finished it? Were you worried after the last one, or were you just felt really good about it? 

Karen: I mean, I was, I was not wor Well, you're always worried.

'cause you know, once you have the experience of, like my first experience was like, you woo, your agent loves it, and then woo, you sell it at auction. Whoa. That's how it goes. And then the second one was not like that. So now I'm like, oh, okay. Well my agent likes it. Great, but we'll see. It wasn't easy to sell, but it wasn't hard.

It was pretty quick. It was interesting though, some. Editors were like, it's fun, but I don't really know what it is. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: Like, I'm not sure where I place this. It's not a straight up mystery 'cause it's fake. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Karen: It's like people want their fictional mis, their fictional murders to be real. It's very meta.

You can get very confusing about that. It's a little romance. It's a little like personal grief story. It's a little mystery. And so the exact reason that some editors didn't want it, my editor loved it. She was like, I love this because I feel like it could be a mystery, but then people who don't read mysteries could also read it.

So it was pretty quick, but I was unsure. I think because I was really indulging myself in writing this novel. It was like, I'm not writing the novel. I think I should write. I'm not trying to impress anybody. I'm not, you know, like the Russia one. I felt like I've gotta say something about Russia, even though it wasn't purely about Russia.

I just felt like. I think it's funny, so I'm gonna hope other people did and I do. And I didn't know that they would, you know? So it was a good lesson to me to just like, you know, play your natural game. That's all you can do. And hopefully there'll be other people there who wanna play that game too.

Zibby: Totally. 

Karen: Yeah. 

Zibby: Were you always gonna call it welcome to Murder Week? Or what were some other options if there were? 

Karen: No, you know, it's so funny, it seems like such a, I love the title and um, it seems like, why didn't I think of that right away? I had an enormous list of titles and the phrase Murder Week was in there.

I can't even remember what it was now. It was something like Your English Village Murder week, or I don't know, something not great. And I agonized over it. And then after my agent read it and liked it, he was like, but we need a better title. And I was going over so many of the titles and then I don't even remember it was if he suggested or I, it was just like, well, we like the murder week part.

And then I think I said, well, how about Welcome to Murder Week? And it was like, oh my God. Finally, like you brainstorm a list of 50 titles and there it was, and then everybody loved it was never changed so destined. And I think it's the right tone because it's like,.. 

Zibby: Yep. 

Karen: You know it's not gonna be really dark.

Zibby: Right. 

Karen: Welcome week. 

Zibby: Exactly. Oh my gosh. Well, I love it. It's funny, I had it on, I. Next to the current issue of Town and Country. I should, I left it in the other room, but actually the cover of Town and Country has the same like girl with her head off to the side. 

Karen: Oh really? 

Zibby: Color background. And I had them next to each other and I was like, oh, look at this.

Welcome to Murder week. It's so on Trent. So it's amazing. Well, and congratulations. I really love the way you write and this was such a fun book, and thank you for sharing it. 

Karen: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's nice to be back after all this time. 

Zibby: Yay. Okay. Take care. Bye-bye. 

Karen: Bye.