Author Interview: Alice Wendover
Alice Wendover joins me today to talk to us about her writing and her new book, A Line Struck Through. Happy Release Day, Alice! I'm so happy that you are here with me.
Alice Wendover writes mysteries for people who read with a pencil. She is interested in paper: ledgers, receipts, sign-in books, the margins where someone wrote what they really thought. The Wrong Ambrose Hearne, her first novel, began with a question — what would a second-hand bookshop’s records prove, if anyone ever read them properly? — and ended with a body on the stockroom floor the night before an auction. It is the first of the Marrow & Vine Mysteries.
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Tell me about yourself. Where are you from?
I write mysteries for people who read with a pencil. I'm interested in paper: ledgers, receipts, sign-in books, and the margins where somebody wrote down what they really thought. My series, the Marrow & Vine Mysteries, is set around a second-hand bookshop in an English village, and its detective, Bridie Quell, is a former proofreader who solves murders by reading every line. As for where I'm from, I keep that side of things private and let Wychcombe, the village in the books, do the welcoming instead. It has a pub called the Bell, a church, a care home down the lane, and a village Trust busy with its centenary.
What genre do you read? Who's an author you read? Name your top 5 authors.
Mystery, and specifically the fair-play kind: every clue on the page, an amateur detective who has to think rather than wave a warrant card, and an ending where some small detail you skimmed past turns out to have been holding the whole thing up. That last moment is the one I read for. It's also why I write the way I do: if I love being beaten fair and square by a detective, I owe my readers a real chance to get there first. I'll spare everyone a top five; I'd only spend a week regretting the names I'd left off.
How long have you been writing?
Not long at all. The Wrong Ambrose Hearne is my first novel; it came out this autumn, and the second, A Line Struck Through, is out on 30 October. Being new, I'm still learning from readers. When one of my first reviewers said the jumps in time had slowed her down, and that she'd have liked more of the village around her, both books went back for another pass: every chapter now opens with its date, and there is more of Wychcombe itself on the page. That is exactly what early readers are for.
What is your writing process like? Are you more of a plotter or a pantser?
A plotter, without question. Before a word of chapter one exists, the whole mystery is planned: who did it, how, where everyone was and when, and where each clue sits. Each clue is written down once, with the suspect it rules out, and goes into the book word for word. Then the part I want to be up front about: I work with an AI model. The AI and I make those planning decisions together, the AI writes the first draft of each chapter from the plan, and then the AI and I check and revise every chapter over several rounds for fair play, the timeline and the prose. So yes, much of the finished wording is AI-drafted text that has been edited, not prose I wrote from scratch myself.
How did you come up with the ideas for your series?
The first book began with a question: what would a second-hand bookshop's records prove, if anyone ever read them properly? I wanted a mystery where the reader has everything the detective has, and paper is the fairest evidence there is, because I can show it to you exactly as Bridie sees it. A bookshop and not a library, because a shop's buying ledgers, order slips and till rolls belong to its owner, while a library's lending records are other people's private business. And a proofreader for a detective, because she has spent twenty years noticing the thing that doesn't agree with what was said three lines up.
What would you tell a writer who is just starting? What program do you use for writing? What advice would you give to a writer working on their first book? What's your writing software of choice?
Software first, since it's the honest place to start: the first drafts come from an AI model working from a detailed plan, and everything lives in plain text files. The covers are AI-generated too, as are the images, animation and music in my trailers. The decisions about the puzzle and all the checking are work the AI and I do together. My advice to anyone on a first mystery: decide the ending before the beginning, write down every clue and exactly what it proves, then check the finished book against that list, line by line. And if you use AI, say so plainly. Some reviewers will say no, and that is their right. I would rather be told no than have anyone feel misled.
How do you organize everything and find the time to sit down and write?
Organising is most of the job. Each book has a small library of its own: a calendar of the story's days, a table of where every character was and when, a ledger of clues, a chapter-by-chapter map, and a running list of what each finished chapter has settled. Once a chapter is finished it is frozen: every chapter after it has to live with what it says. As for finding the time: since the first drafts come from the AI, the hours go into the plan and the checking instead, which the AI and I do together. A mystery stands or falls on that part.
As an author, what would you choose as your spirit animal?
The cat in my books. He chose a bookshop over a person, sits on the counter, watches everybody who comes through the door and never explains himself. Bridie maintains that he is not her cat; he has heard her say so, and sits on the stock regardless. That seems to me exactly the temperament a mystery writer needs: sit still, watch the door, notice everything, and keep your conclusions to yourself until you are quite sure.
How do you name your characters?
With care, and with a rule: each new surname is checked against all the names already in the series, not only for exact matches but for names that begin the same way. The rule came from a near miss. While the second book was still being planned, a check turned up a minor character in the first book whose surname began just like a new family's, so the family was renamed. A reader holding a houseful of suspects in their head shouldn't have to wonder whether two of them are related. Beyond the rule, I want names you can tell apart at a glance.
Tell us about your current release.
A Line Struck Through is the second Marrow & Vine Mystery, out on 30 October on Kindle and in paperback, and a fine place to start. Every fifth of November, Wychcombe wheels a stuffed guy to the bonfire in the village Trust's hand-cart. This year the guy in the chair is Roland Askew, who chaired the Trust for fifteen years. He has not been stuffed. Bridie Quell is proofing the Trust's centenary history, so when Sergeant Ankerdine brings her a torn scrap of those proofs, with Askew's name struck through in a proofreader's mark, the sergeant wants to know whose mark it is. Expect fair play, a very English November, and a cat that is still not the shop's.
Happy Reading!
Melissa
