Interview with Lori Robbins

“Lori Robbins began dancing at age 16 and launched her professional career three years later. She performed with a number of modern dance and ballet companies, including Ballet Hispanico and the St. Louis Concert Ballet. The opening work in her On Pointe Mystery Series, Murder in First Position, won first place in the Indie Book Awards for Best Mystery, was a finalist for a Silver Falchion, and is short-listed for a Mystery and Mayhem Book Award. Murder in Second Position was released in November 2021. Her debut novel, Lesson Plan for Murder, won the Silver Falchion Award for Best Cozy Mystery. Short stories include “Accidents Happen” in Murder Most Diabolical and “Leading Ladies” in Justice for All. She also is a contributor to The Secret Ingredient: A Mystery Writers Cookbook.

As a writer, an English teacher, and the mother of six, Lori is an expert in the homicidal impulses everyday life inspires." -Lorirobbins.com.

As with last September’s profile of Wendy Corsi Staub, your host has decided to once again go back to his roots to interview Brooklyn-born Lori Robbins, author of the On Pointe and the soon-to-be reissued Master Class mystery series.

15) Lori, as stated in the introduction, you’re a former ballet dancer. Aside from giving you an informed motif for the On Pointe mystery series, how had dance contributed to your development as a writer?

     Both professions require enormous discipline. The training I received as a dancer informs everything I do and isn’t limited to my writing. Testing the limits of what you can achieve, in dance or in any art, requires quite a bit of mental fortitude, which has stood me in good stead as I’ve transitioned to writing full time. Equally important is the attitude one brings to both pursuits. There’s a fascination with the difficult that grabs you and doesn’t let go.

14) They say, “Write what you know.” As with yourself, Leah Siderova’s a ballet dancer of Russian descent. What do you see as her strongest and weakest qualities and what makes her such an effective and compelling detective?

     Leah’s strongest quality is her single-minded persistence, which enables her to transcend her weaknesses through sheer force of will. She’s afraid of all sorts of things, like rodents and high places. She doesn’t know how to drive a car, and dance-related injuries have made her physically vulnerable. And yet, the discipline that enabled her to successfully pursue her career as a ballerina is, of course, the very thing that allows her to track the killer.

     Her imagination is her other great asset. When she’s afraid, she adopts the persona of one of her fictional roles. So when she finds herself perched on a fire escape, she overcomes her agoraphobia by pretending she’s a fearless Firebird.

     Leah’s weakest quality is her belief that her career is what defines her. Because that career is fully dependent on how the audience views her, she has to fight for an identity that isn’t dependent on others. By the end of the novel, she learns there’s more to life, and to her, than being onstage.

13) What authors had you read while growing up and had any of them gone on to influence your work?

     I’ve always been a voracious and indiscriminate reader. My favorite book as a little girl was Harriet the Spy. Harriet is an eleven-year-old kid who spies on her friends and neighbors and writes everything down in a secret notebook. Her goal is to become an international spy, but of course, what she is and will be, is a writer. It’s a remarkably unsentimental children’s book. Strong female characters continue to inspire me, from Jo March to Jane Eyre.

12) Even though the reissue of Lesson Plan for Murder won’t be available until this June, explain Liz Hopewell’s character for us. What makes her such a good detective?

     Liz tries to live within the confines of her conventional life, but that life doesn’t return the favor. She’s an outsider and an outlier, with an unsentimental perspective that enables her to see past the lies people tell each other and themselves. Having said that, she’s also an unreliable narrator who isn’t immune to both forms of deception.

     At heart, this ordinary wife, mother, and teacher is a rebel, who comes into her own when she finds the dead body of her fellow English teacher. The murder investigation forces her to reexamine her own past and the mysterious death of her mother. The pursuit of justice, which intersects with, but isn’t limited by the pursuit of truth, motivates her.

     Liz’s husband cautions her that real life isn’t the same as fiction. He’s wrong. She uses her love of literature, and the analytical skills she’s honed as a passionate and informed reader, to solve the mystery. This is her secret power.

11) So, what recipe did you contribute to The Secret Ingredient?

     My recipe is for green noodles and spinach. I love to bake, and am happy to forego dinner for dessert, but there were so many sweet recipes in the book, I went for something completely different. This monochromatic dish tastes a lot better than it sounds! (The recipe is also on my website.)

10) You don’t write much short fiction but you did contribute a short story in Justice for All: Murder New York Style, edited by a former Author of the Month, DM Barr. Was the protagonist a series or standalone character? What was the throughline?

     The two central figures began as standalone characters, but I fell in love with both and almost immediately wrote another short story featuring Julie and her Nana. My inspiration for “Leading Ladies” was my grandmother. She was a card-counting gambler who loved poker, blackjack, and canasta. My grandmother lived to a ripe old age, which she attributed to her diet of candy and cigarettes. In keeping with my love of improbable heroines, this pair uses their shared love of Broadway musicals and crossword puzzles to solve the mystery.

9) Plotter, pantser or plantser?

     I’m a hybrid. I plan the bare bones of each book and then let the characters take me where they will. I aspire to be a plotter, but my characters are all rebels and resist doing what I want them to. That bare bones outline gets fleshed out while I’m writing.

8) Aside from the 1988 remake of D.O.A., literary academia just doesn’t lend itself to homicidal passion. How do/will you make this seem plausible in the Master Class series?

     Amateur-sleuth heroines always come with the challenge of plausibility, but as I note in Lesson Plan for Murder, if you want to inflict the kind of pain that festers forever, consult an English teacher. They know all about suffering.

     Liz Hopewell, like the killer she tracks, is hiding from her own past. She’s an unreliable narrator who is more at home in fiction than she is in real life. This complicates all of her relationships, including the one she has with herself.

     When she finds her dead colleague’s lesson plans, she’s realizes they contain a coded message, which only another English teacher could understand and figure out. She recognizes who the killer is while teaching a class on Hamlet, that master of disguise. The whole thing was great fun to write, and I’m excited about being able to take Liz on at least two more adventures.

7) Describe your typical writing day, if there is such a thing. Do you exclusively write in a notebook/journal or on your laptop or both? Do you set a word goal and, if so, what is it?

     I plot in a notebook and on post-it notes, which I try not to use as coasters. The actual writing gets done on a laptop. My word count is upwards of 1,000 words a day, but when I write more than the minimum, I reset each day and start at zero. Thanks to a compressed production schedule, my goal is now 10,000 words a week.

6) You have a family of eight. Do any family members read your books?

     Everyone in my family reads my books, both before and after publication. Once the first draft is done, the manuscript goes to my kids. They’re excellent readers and editors and provide most of the critical feedback, while my husband does a final read. He’s the least critical of the bunch, for reasons I’ve elected not to question.

5) They say that dancers are always in pain. Is the same true for writers, albeit in a different sense?

     That is definitely true for me. The two forms of pain share quite a few similarities, and both respond well to caffeine and Excedrin. No matter how good the execution, there’s always a nagging feeling the end product would benefit by more practice. A well-executed pirouette is gratifying but is inevitably followed by one less elegant. Same with writing. Once a book receives its final edits, I avoid reading it. All I can see are flaws and things I want to do over. The pursuit of perfection, and the constant desire to do better, is painfully endemic to both.

4) If there was any one common impetus that made you want to pursue dance and writing other than abstract self-expression, what would you say it was?

     Falling in love. Many people tell me they always wanted to be a dancer, or always thought they could write a book. Both endeavors are too difficult to accomplish when the motivation is a general desire for a perceived outcome. You have to be in love to survive the heartbreak that inevitably goes with the territory. Dancing and writing are drugs, and like any other addiction, the habit is hard to break.

3) You said you’d lived in Brighton Beach, aka Little Odessa, for a while in your childhood. Do you plan on setting any of your fiction there in the future?

     It’s already the setting of one of my short stories and I plan to write more about the characters who live there. As for the novels, Murder in Second Position introduces Olga, who lives in Brighton Beach and may or may not be working with the Russian mafia. You can’t go home again, but you can mine that landscape forever.

2) What do you consider your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

     Technically, I have to guard against overly long and complex sentences that get in the way of the story. By nature, I tend to digress, and that impulse is also one I have to resist. The same applies to descriptions. Every book has tens of thousands of words I’ve had to delete and consign to a separate file that hopefully, I can use as a resource for other stories. Some day, my epic Ode to the Perfect Bagel will find a home.

     My strengths are my characters and their relationships with each other. While I’m not good at plotting out the narrative in advance of writing a book, my characters are fully fleshed, with complex and compelling relationships, before I begin.

1) So, what’s next for Lori Robbins?

     Lesson Plan for Murder will be re-released in June, and Murder in Third Position will be released in November. A short story, “Accidents Happen,” is in the upcoming Murder Most Diabolical anthology; the publication date of that work will coincide with the Malice Domestic conference in April. Going forward, the next three years will see a new book in each series.

If you’re interested in learning more about Ms. Robbins and her work, please make use of the links below.

https://www.lorirobbins.com/

https://linktr.ee/lori robbins mysteries

https://www.instagram.com/lorirobbinsmysteries/

https://www.facebook.com/LoriRobbinsMysteries

https://twitter.com/lorirobbins99

https://www.amazon.com/Lori-Robbins/e/B077TTSCBH

https://www.pinterest.com/lorirobbinsmysteries/_created/

Murder in First Position

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08GQBDLN9/

Murder in Second Position

https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Second-Position-Pointe-Mystery-ebook/dp/B09FM1JTFL/

Justice for All: Murder New York Style

https://www.amazon.com/Justice-All-Murder-York-Style/dp/1685120059/

The Secret Ingredient: The Mystery Writers' Cookbook

https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Ingredient-Mystery-Writers-Cookbook/dp/1685120474/