Tracy:  You’ve written many novels under the name Eve Sandstrom, but moved north and created the Chocoholic Mysteries under a pseudonym.  Now are the “Chocoholic Mysteries” as much fun to write as they are to read?  Research for this series has to be a blast!

Joanna:  Research for this series has not been hard, because I have a daughter in the chocolate business. She's assistant to the president for Morgen Chocolate, in Dallas, and I've copied both their product line and their physical set up in the books. If I get stumped I call her. She's not only efficient as a business manager (she hires, fires, orders supplies, suggests new products, etc. It's a small firm.), but she's also imaginative and has great suggestions. Such as telling me that breaking up ten-pound bars of chocolate sounds like a gunshot.

Tracy:  The move from Oklahoma to Michigan must have taken some getting used to.  What did you find most challenging when it came to adapting to a new area and climate?

Joanna:  I've always been a fan of regional mysteries. I try to think of just what makes each area interesting to an outsider. This may have been harder to do when I was writing about Oklahoma, where I've lived nearly all my life, than in writing about Michigan, which I never saw until I was an adult. Of course, now I've visited western Michigan every summer for more than 40 years, so it seems pretty familiar, too.

At first, I think, I thought of regional mysteries as focusing on terrain. It took me a couple of books to see that the differences in culture and customs are really more important than the scenery. Luckily, I have many Michigan friends, and I e-mail or call them and ask questions. Do Michigan people take food to bereaved families? (Okies do.) Do Michigan wedding receptions include sit-down dinners? (Okies don't.) Other things, such as local politics, tend to be pretty much the same anywhere.

Tracy:  Your cozy mysteries are totally engrossing.  Do you have any desire to tackle another genre down the road?

Joanna:  I still hope to tackle a historical someday.

Tracy:  With the Chocoholic Series, you’ve had to find unusual trivia about chocolate.  To date, what have you found to be the most surprising?

Joanna:  The history of chocolate is fascinating.  Did you know Montezuma drank chocolate before he visited his harem? I've also learned chocolate gets a bad rap nutritionally. It won't give you acne. And while high-quality chocolate contains a lot of fat, it's no more fattening than any other form of fat. I prefer it to potato chips, myself.

Tracy:  Your first two series, written as Eve Sandstrom, are also cozy mysteries.  Can you share a bit about them?

Joanna:  The DOWN HOME books were the ones I thought would be the only series I ever wrote. I'd mulled the idea over for twenty years. But that didn't work out. Then I wrote my "big" novel, THE VIOLENCE BEAT -- more action, longer, all that other stuff that supposedly makes a novel "big" -- and it turned out to be a series mystery, too. Actually, I've been told that neither of these series is exactly cozy. One bookseller told me that because the victim in one of the DOWN HOME books has young children it definitely wasn't cozy. She was heart-broken about the children being orphaned. And I thought the  Nell Matthews-Mike Svenson books had way too much sex to be cozy. It's all in the eye of the reader.

Actually, I loved both these series. The DOWN HOME books made me learn about rural life in the part of Oklahoma where I've lived since I got out of college. (I'm a small-town girl, maybe, but I've never lived on a farm. And the Nell-Mike books let me get a lot of opinions about newspapers off my chest. I was a reporter, columnist, and editor for twenty-five years, so I had a lot of opinion to share.

Tracy:  How do you organize your writing day?  Do you write during set hours or when the mood suits?

Joanna:  If we're being honest here, the only organizing I do is to put it off as long as possible. I only wish that were a joke. The only way I get anything done is to force myself to write a certain number of pages before I can go to bed. If I want to go to the movies, I have to do it in the morning. If there's football on television and I don't think my long-suffering husband will notice if I'm in the living room or not, I'll put it off til after dinner. I'm terribly undisciplined. Or maybe the word is lazy.

Tracy:  When you have some spare time, who are some of the authors you enjoy reading?

Joanna:  It's hard to do this and not leave out a friend. :-) Let me list some books I've read in the past year or two that I really enjoyed. A LETTER FROM HOME, by Carolyn Hart; WHO INVITED THE DEAD MAN? by Patricia Sprinkle; SHOP TIL YOU DROP, by Elaine Viets; DEAD UNTIL DARK, by Charlaine Harris; PERHAPS SHE'LL DIE, by M.K. Preston; A TEST OF WILLS, by Charles Todd. You may notice a pattern here; I'm way behind in my reading. Some of these books have been out several years, but I'm just getting to them.

As for as my all-time list, DEATH AND THE JOYFUL WOMAN, by Ellis Peters, plus A CORPSE TOO MANY, the third (I think) Brother Cadfael book; SILVER PIGS, by Lindsey Davis; A IS FOR ALIBI, by Sue Grafton; BUCKET NUT, by Liza Cody; BUM STEER, by Nancy Pickard; CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK, by Elizabeth Peters; THE BLESSING WAY by Tony Hillerman (though THE LISTENING WOMAN has the best first chapter ever written); WHEN IN GREECE, by Emma Lathen; ONE FOR THE MONEY, by Janet Evanovich.

As for series, John Putnam Thatcher, by Emma Lathen, has to be my favorite. And anything Agatha Christie. And Sherlock Holmes. And Donald Westlake.

I'm sure I've left someone out who's important to me. Hillerman and Arthur Upfield originally inspired my love of regional novels, I'm sure.

But as for day-by-day reading, I confess that I have about fifty books I've read over and over. I call these my sleeping pill books. The authors include Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Robert van Gulik, Manning Coles. Now some of these books are good and some are simply awful. That doesn't matter. They lull me to sleep.

You may notice one omission here -- I deliberately do not read culinary mysteries. I used to love them, but since I'm writing them I don't want to be influenced my other writers in that field. So if I copy someone's plot, it's inadvertent.

Tracy:  What’s up next for you?

Joanna:  I just turned in THE CHOCOLATE PUPPY PUZZLE, and I've got to get started on THE CHOCOLATE MOUSE MYSTERY.

Tracy:  Thanks so much for spending a little time with us.  If you have anything you would like to add, please don’t hesitate.

Joanna:  The only thing I could add is that I think writing mysteries is a worthwhile profession. It's not brain surgery or social work or fighting world hunger, or something else that has an obviously good effect on the world. But the world has plenty of problems. If my sleeping pill books keep me sane -- and if the books I write can help someone else hang on by giving them a few hours of escape -- I'm willing to settle for that.

 Best,

JoAnna Carl/Eve K. Sandstrom