Votive portraits featuring the artist’s patrons were common in religious paintings of the 15th century. Votive literature in the 21st century, not so much. But in her debut mystery novel, Front Page Teaser (Down East, Oct.), Rosemary Herbert does exactly that. The former Boston Herald book review editor, who edited several mystery anthologies, including A New Omnibus of Crime (Oxford) with Tony Hillerman, pays tribute to Mary Higgins Clark, who encouraged her to write a book of her own.
“I’d been wanting to write a mystery novel since the fourth grade,” said Herbert, who found it hard enough to be a single mom with three daughters and work full-time. A few years ago, when she interviewed Clark, she told her, “Come on. The only way to do it is to do it.” The following Sunday Herbert sat down and began writing Front Page Teaser, which she completed in a year of Sundays. Initially she worked on two stories, one an edgy thriller, the other a more traditional mystery about a reporter looking for a missing mom, then realized that the two could work together.
Set in and around Boston, Front Page Teaser draws on Herbert’s background writing features on kissable lips and an angel made out of a potato chip bag and a garden destination column for the Boston tabloid. Not only does her reporter/sleuth Liz Higgins at the fictional Beantown Banner get assigned to a similarly diverse beat, but Herbert also uses another of her jobs, as a librarian, most recently in the children’s room in Thomaston, Maine, for the setting of the scene with Clark. Herbert’s fictional and real worlds collide when Higgins is assigned to cover a mystery writers meeting at a local library, where Clark is on the roster. The real-life Clark edited the scene in chapter four, and tweaked the line where she provides Higgins—and Herbert—with mystery-solving advice: “Always, always look for the overlooked domestic detail.”
Herbert is being published by a former employer, Down East Books, where she handled publicity. Now she’s doing publicity for her own book, and has scheduled events for now through early December at libraries from Maine to Greater Boston—including the Boston Public Library, Worcester Public Library, and Cambridge Public Library—and at stores ranging from Buttonwood Books & Toys in Cohasset, Mass., to Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass.
Beside Clark, Herbert called on other mystery writers to get her book writing career going. In fact Robert P. Parker sent her a blurb just 10 days before he died. In it he praised Herbert as “a fresh and compelling new voice in crime fiction” and compared Front Page Teaser to a shot of good whiskey, “short and bracing.”
