I’m so pleased to have Raquel Reyes on my blog this week.  She is truly a mistress of funny short stories, a talent she’s using to write a novel length humorous cozy mystery, and it sounds like a real heehaw.

 

Author RV Reyes

I asked her as I do many of my guest bloggers, “What’s so funny about murder?”

 

Raquel answered: My answer is the same as many of the other authors in this guest series — nothing. There is nothing funny about murder.  Murder is horrible. It is something that a sane and caring person has a hard time wrapping their mind around and from that comes gallows humor. All humorous cozies are not gallows humor but I think there is a sprinkling of it in them. As humans we have to find a way in, through, and around the tragedy. Comedy is the best remedy.

I started reading cozies after I had a child.  The world was just too harsh for the sweet babe I help in my arms. I did not want to read about life’s tragedies. I wanted to read about community, helping a person in need, better one’s emotional outlook, friendships, foreign places, and I wanted to learn new things like scrapbooking, quilting, candle making, birding name a craft/hobby  and there is a series about it. Does that sound like a checklist for a cozy mystery? Yes!  But what about the murders, kidnappings, and tragedies that pepper all cozies? Well, let’s be honest, a cozy is a lot less gory and detailed about murder than the nightly news!  Sometimes the murder only takes two sentences and then the madcap puzzle-solving begins.

I write Latina mysteries. I have a diamond appraiser series that is making the agent rounds and will hopefully find a publisher soon. In that series, the murder takes place off-stage but what happens right before the death gets everyone that’s read it laughing. It is a cat fight between a mean girl and a bully in the middle of the shoe department of a snazzy store. Two grown women acting like their worst high-school selves is funny.

In my Ossie Piñero P.I. short story series, Ossie’s humor is more corporal. Not only does she have a sharp tongue but she has other assets and that asset gets her into trouble when the stars on her short-shorts draw the attention of a mafia boss named “El Jefe”.  The Private Eye genre has a great history of tongue in cheek repartee that is one of the reasons I am writing the Ossie series. I love a wise cracking dame with a dry delivery. Ossie spices it up a little with her Latina flair but the humor in universal.

Find Ossie on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Itunes.

You can follow me on twitter  (@writerRVR) and on Facebook.

My blog is Cozy in Miami.

Lesley says:  Be sure to follow Raquel’s blog.  It is a funny and lovely hommage to Miami by writers who visit and fall in love with the city.

 

A reminder: The boxed set, What’s So Funny About Murder? is still available and still only 99 cents, so you use only a bitty, bitty bit of that Amazon gift certificate you got.  What can be better than six humorous mysteries for less than one dollar?  And you’re right.  This can’t last forever.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Funny-About-Murder-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B00N038P1K