Book fair people inspired booksellers’ new mystery novel

By Charlene Ball & Libby Ware

As booksellers, we often thought we’d like to write something about the antiquarian book world and the interesting people who sell, collect, and buy antiquarian books. We like to read mystery novels, and the first quarter 2024 first quarter 2024 book lovers’ paradise magazine idea of writing a bibliomystery — a mystery involving a book — would be fun.

On our first book together, we started by one of us writing a chapter and sending it to the other. The recipient would edit that, write the next chapter, and send it all back. This worked for a while, until Charlene sent Libby a chapter that put Libby’s point of view character in a room with a dead body and no way out! We decided we needed to plan more. So we started meeting in coffee shops to plan the next few chapters.

We write without a fixed outline, discovering who the murderer is as we write. Writers talk about being a plotter or a “pantser” — flying by the seat of your pants. We are definitely pantsers. We are character-driven: we enjoy finding out what our characters will do and who they are by writing without a rigid outline. We admit that we are more interested in character and setting (and books!) than in plot. Yet both our mysteries seem to have plots that keep a reader reading and that have their share of surprises.

A mystery novel has a certain structure already built in: there’s a crisis — the murder or crime. Then there are complications — investigating the crime, going down blind alleys, discovering clues. Finally there is the resolution discovering who committed the crime. For us, we follow the characters, and they lead us to it.

What inspires us? Maybe the books themselves. Charlene loves children’s books from the Golden Age of Illustration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is captivated by the work of the great illustrators like Kay Neilsen, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, or Jessie Wilcox Smith. Libby is drawn by books about the occult, including witchcraft, spiritualism, theosophy, tarot, and mysticism. Our characters reflect these interests: Molly sells occult while Emma collects children’s and illustrated classics from the Golden Age of Illustration. first quarter 2024 book lovers’ paradise magazine first quarter 2024

Murder at the Estate Sale, the first Molly and Emma Booksellers mystery, centers on occult books, and before each chapter a different antiquarian occult book is described. Murder at the Book Fair, which takes place in the St. Petersburg area, focuses on children’s illustrated books.

We both are inspired, too, by the idea of books as activism. The recent surge of book banning and restrictions on what books can be read in schools and libraries appalls us both.We feel strongly that books themselves are important and that people should have free access to books.

So we suppose that books themselves are our Muses. They excite us, inspire us, entertain us, and keep us company. We love writing about them, and about the people in the world of bookselling.

Charlene Ball is the author of Dark Lady: A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer, winner of the Sarton Award from Story Circle. She has published short stories and articles in academic and literary journals. She has worked as a college administrator and instructor. She is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club and the Georgia Writers Association. She is a fellow of the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences.

Libby Ware’s debut book, Lum: A Novel, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, a gold winner of the IPPY award and was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award. She is the owner of Toadlily Books, an antiquarian book business. She is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), and is president of the Georgia Antiquarian Booksellers Association (GABA). She belongs to the Atlanta Writers Club and the Georgia Writers Association, and is a fellow of The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences.

Charlene and Libby were married in 2016 and live about a mile from each other in Atlanta.