Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I had two goals: to teach history and to write novels that would bring others the joy that Georgette Heyer’s historical romances and Mary Stewart’s suspense novels brought me. Degrees in history from Oberlin College and Kent State University got me started on the first goal, preparing me to teach high school history; but the arrival of the women’s movement taught me to set my goals higher, and I headed west with my husband to obtain a doctorate in history from U.C. San Diego. Throughout those years I continued to read historical fiction and the growing work of women writing mysteries and science fiction, daydreaming about writing someday.
In 1979, while working on my doctoral dissertation on late nineteenth-century western working women, I was inspired by a passage in a diary by a domestic servant that suggested a perfect setting for a cozy “locked room” mystery. The germ of the plot of my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, was born. (You will have to read the book to find out what role that servant and that locked door ended up playing!)
I spent the next ten years finishing my doctorate, raising a daughter, and teaching at a series of colleges in the southwest, and, when I had time, working on the first draft of Maids of Misfortune. In 1989, just as I completed the first draft, I got a full-time job teaching at San Diego Mesa Community College, where I taught U.S. and women’s history for over twenty years. My first goal to teach history had been satisfactorily achieved, but the fiction writing had been put on hold.
In 2009, semi-retired from teaching, I finally returned to my second childhood goal, to write light, romantic, suspenseful fiction. I rewrote Maids of Misfortune, and, after researching the new opportunities in independent publishing and ebook publishing, I published Maids of Misfortune in December 2009 as both an ebook and print book.
Maids of Misfortune was a finalist in the historical fiction category of the 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and in July 2010 rose to the historical mystery best seller list on Kindle. Sales of Maids of Misfortune were strong enough that I retired from teaching completely and began to write full time, finishing Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to Maids of Misfortune, in October 2011. Since then I have published six more novels in the series (Bloody Lessons, Deadly Proof, Pilfered Promises, Scholarly Pursuits, Lethal Remedies and the latest, Entangled Threads) along with four novellas, Violet Vanquishes a Villain, Kathleen Catches a Killer, Dandy Delivers, Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime, and eight short stories.
Deadly Proof won first place as an historical mystery in the 2018 Chanticleer Mystery and Mayhem Award, and Pilfered Promises is a finalist for this award for 2019. The boxed set of the first four books in this series became a USA Today bestseller in 2018.
In 2015, I joined with several other independent authors to create an open-source science fiction world called the Paradisi Chronicles. As part of this collaborative series I have published four books in the Caelestis series, Between Mountain and Sea, Under Two Moons, Through Ddaera’s Touch, and Tides of Acerba, and the novella, The Stars are Red Tonight, which I co-wrote with my daughter, Ashley (pen name Rey Wright), as well as a short story in the anthology Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi.
For those interested in my journey, you might check out these talks and interviews, this one is a talk I did in 2010 at the beginning of my indie author career, when I was still teaching, this is a podcast I did seven years ago, while this interview was done last year about my science fiction series.
I am still living in San Diego, with my husband and a rescue dog, Leeza, enjoying being a writer and the grandmother of two grandsons.
I am a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors and an active member of the Historical Fiction Authors Coop.
I love to hear from readers, about my books, about my blog, or about Victorian San Francisco. So do drop me a line. You can contact me at mlouisalocke at gmail.com