On any given day, you might find Diane Mott Davidson visiting the local morgue, concocting a murder plot at her computer, or working in the kitchen on an exotic, new recipe. It's all just part of the job for the author of a quirky series of "culinary mystery" novels.
Twelve years ago, Davidson, '70, created a caterer named Goldy Bear, a reluctant amateur sleuth who pauses in the midst of solving a murder to whip up a Collectors' Camembert Pie or a Mediterranean orzo salad. What made this book unusual was that Davidson decided to invent original recipes for Goldy to prepare -- and include them in the text.
The literary concoction worked: With more than a million copies of Davidson's seven culinary mysteries now in print, a handful of other writers have decided to give the formula a try. Davidson's most recent book, The Grilling Season (Bantam Books, 1997; $22.95), hit the New York Times bestseller list last fall. Described by the Baltimore Sun as "a cross between Mary Higgins Clark and Betty Crocker," she has a contract with Bantam for four more culinary mysteries.
Davidson's writing career got off to a slow start. In the early 1980s, she found herself married and raising children in the small town of Evergreen, Colo. She'd given up plans to pursue a PhD in art history because there was no program in her area, and she began tutoring at the local correctional facility as well as counseling rape victims. "I won my volunteer-work badge," Davidson says.
In 1981, she wrote a short story for a course she was taking to prepare as a Bible-study teacher. "It was an eye-opening experience," Davidson says. "It was so deeply satisfying, so incredibly enjoyable." She scaled back the volunteering and began writing in the few spare hours after dropping her children at school. She brought her work to a local café to avoid the ringing telephone at home. But it took her a while to find her voice: She wrote two novels about relationships, which no one would publish. "Writers should look at what kind of reading they love in order to figure out what kind of writing they should do," Davidson says. "And I loved to read mysteries."
For her third book, which she began writing in 1986, she decided to try her hand at murder. "My first two books were weak on plot," Davidson says. "But the mystery reader wants a puzzle, and it has to be well constructed." For practice, she took one of her favorite mysteries, Strike Three, You're Dead by Richard Rosen, and reduced it to a 17-page outline. The exercise gave her the confidence to structure her own book. She chose for her heroine a caterer who is raising a young son on her own and trying to overcome a troubled past. Because Davidson had encountered so many battered women in her volunteer work, she decided to make Goldy a survivor of abuse at the hands of a loathsome ex-husband.
As for the food angle, it came naturally to Davidson, who learned to cook at Stanford by working her way through the Sunset cookbook series, and later by watching Julia Child on television. "Cooking is very relaxing to me, and it's a way of showing love. I'd found myself in my first novels describing how food is used to comfort people," she says. "But it can also be used to express mood." In the Goldy mysteries, the cooking is used as a break in the action -- an opportunity for Goldy to reflect on the crime. The recipes -- usually 10 per book -- are slipped in following the appearance of a dish in the story.
Davidson's first culinary mystery, Catering to Nobody, in which Goldy investigates an attempted poisoning when she is catering at a wake, was published in 1990. The book was an unexpected hit, and since then, Davidson has been writing one Goldy Schulz novel a year. (In the series, Goldy Bear marries Tom Schulz.)
"Mystery readers are voracious," Davidson says. It's a grueling pace, but Davidson doesn't seem to suffer angst about her work. If a plot doesn't excite her, she drops it. "I don't know what writer's block means," Davidson says.
How Davidson comes up with those ideas is often a story in itself. While on tour signing copies of The Cereal Murders in 1993, Davidson noticed a woman scrutinizing her face, then looking at the book jacket. When the woman arrived at the front of the line, she said to Davidson, "This picture is very flattering."
"You get that all the time," Davidson says cheerfully. Still, she stopped for a makeover when she returned to Colorado, and stumbled on the subject of a future book. While chatting with the woman at the cosmetics counter, she became fascinated by the cutthroat competition among the makeup vendors. That led to Killer Pancake, published in 1995, about the cosmetics industry, animal rights activism, makeup testing and murder.
Of course, it was also about Grand Marnier cranberry muffins, turkey curry with raisin rice, and fudge soufflé. "People love reading about crimes, but it's dark material," Davidson says. "I think the food makes for a life-affirming balance."
Jennifer Reese, '88, is a freelance writer living in San Francisco.
