Olivia Blacke is…On the Writing Block!

Sherry Ickes
Jan 20
3 min read

As the cold wind blows outside, and we look for new books to read in this new year, allow me to introduce fellow Mystery Author Olivia Blacke…

Olivia Blacke (she/her) is the Anthony Award-winning author of the Ruby and Cordelia Mysteries, as well as the cozy Record Shop Mysteries and the Brooklyn Murder Mysteries. She had her first ghost encounter when she was five, but wasn’t involved with an active crime scene until much later, when she accidentally stepped into a chalk outline on a Manhattan sidewalk. Armed with a Criminology degree, she channels her love of the supernatural and passion for writing into darkly humorous supernatural mysteries. She wants to be a unicorn when she grows up.

Do you have a writing schedule, or do you write whenever you can squeeze it in?

I tend to lock myself in my office and write on the weekends. I’ll be in there for hours on end and when I emerge from my writing cave, sometimes it takes me a minute to shake it off. This is especially true if I’m writing a blizzard scene, like the one at the beginning of A New Lease on Death, in the middle of June or I’m writing a scene in Death at the Door set in downtown Boston while I’m at a writer’s retreat out in the woods, and then I’m craving Dunkin’ but I’m twenty minutes from nowhere.

Do you always know who the killer is, or do your characters surprise you in the end?

I’m a plotter, so I usually have a killer in mind when I start the story. However, I want to make sure that there are always at least three viable suspects with a strong motive so that it’s not too easy to solve. Sometimes that means that I get to the end of the book and I realize that I got the killer wrong. When that happens, the real killer has usually been there all along. For example, in Rhythm and Clues, the third book in my Record Shop Mysteries, I’m a hundred percent sure of the killer and while I was focused on them, the real murderer almost struck again. Then, when I went back to make sure there were enough clues and motivation throughout, they were already there because they were the real killer all along, even if I didn’t realize it yet.

How much is based on real life versus made up?

I write about ghosts, so most people assume it’s all made up, but I do believe in ghosts, and if ghosts can exist, why can’t there be a ghost out there trying to solve murders? But everyday real life does inspire a lot of my writing. The infamous bus scene in A New Lease on Death was heavily inspired by a real-life event that happened to me on a DC metro train. The puggle in Death at the Door bears a striking resemblance to my own dog. And I don’t know what this says about my putt-putt skills but the mini-golf scene in Death at the Door is my excuse for why my score is always so bad.

Do you prefer pen and paper, or computer for writing?

I start out writing notes to myself longhand on scraps of paper, and I’ll start to organize them in a notebook or on notecards, but when it’s time to really get to work, everything from the first draft onwards is on my computer. In Death at the Door, Ruby (the living roommate) can’t read the sloppy, cursive handwriting of Cordelia (the ghost), and Cordelia can’t be anywhere near a computer without it going kablooey, so while they make a great mystery-solving team, I don’t think they could actually write a book together.

What is Death at the Door about?

Can Ruby and Cordelia navigate the fine line between the dead and the living to bring a killer to light? In Death at the Door, a ghost and her living roommate must find a way to work together to solve a murder. Cordelia and Ruby return with an all-new supernatural mystery, available now at your local bookstore.