Although mysteries were what made Sharon Fiffer fall in love with reading as a child, she never planned to write them—even after she grew up to be a writer. She’d already written a book on grassroots activism with her husband, Steve, and edited three collections of literary memoirs, also with Steve, when she started a two-week residency at Ragdale, the artists’ retreat in Lake Forest, in 1995. She was hoping to start on a collection of short stories set in her hometown of Kankakee and based on people who frequented the EZ Way Inn, the neighborhood tavern her parents owned for 30 years. But writer’s block set in, and to break it she started describing the antique doorknobs in her room at Ragdale. “I don’t consider writing magical or mystical—I consider it really hard work—but I just started writing,” she says.
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By the time Fiffer completed that novel, about an antique collector and garage sale addict who solves the mystery of her next-door neighbor’s murder, she still wasn’t convinced she was a mystery writer. She was thrilled to get a “great” rejection letter from an editor at Harper Collins, who loved the book but thought she should “yank the bodies” out of it and recast it as a literary novel. But an editor at St. Martin’s Press liked the book as a mystery, and Fiffer signed a two-book deal that has since expanded to include the rest of the series so far.
Many of them are based on people she knew in Kankakee. Fiffer’s given Jane Wheel not only her hometown but also her parents (deceased in reality, but not in the books) and the childhood she spent at the EZ Way Inn tavern. Jane Wheel’s mother, Nellie, is based on Fiffer’s mom—”a real feisty, seemingly unemotional tough gal” who disapproved of drinking and was always trying to send her customers home. Steve warned Fiffer after reading the first book that Nellie didn’t come off too well, so she asked her mom, then in her mid-80s, whether that would bother her. “Honey, I don’t give a damn,” she replied. “I’m not going to read it.”
Fiffer considered making Hollywood Stuff the last in the series—she admits to needing a break—but when it ended Jane was in California. “I’ve got to get her back to the midwest,” Fiffer says, “just for my own neurotic feeling of closure.”
