Writing novels wasn’t something Marjorie Mathison Hance planned on pursuing, although she’d done a lot of business writing during her career as the national sales manager for Honeywell and as vice president at St. Catherine University.
In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Hance recounted how a year after her first husband died, she was at their family’s lake house on a rainy vacation by herself.
“I didn't know what to do with myself and I started thinking about all of these characters at our beach. And I wrote about them. Just for fun…My mother came out to the lake for a weekend, and I had her read it and she said, ‘Well, you can't print that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don't plan to print that--I just did it for fun because I didn't have anything else to do.’ And then I thought, ‘Why not do something I could print?’”
Hance’s daughters helped her along by buying her a course on writing murder mysteries at The Loft in Minneapolis, and she was off running--in 2018 her first book Murder at Pelican Lake was published. Hance followed that book with Cormorant in the Net (2021) and The Man Three Cottages Down (2022), all part of her North Lakes Murder Mystery Series. A new book in the series, Under the Ice, is due out in 2025.
The series protagonist is Carley Norgren, a woman who has suffered much loss in recent years: the death of her father, the loss of her job, and a breakup with her significant other who was the love of her life. She escapes to the lake to regroup. Hance explains, “Throughout these four books, you'll watch Carley’s relationships grow and change. [They] help her find herself, be vulnerable and grow over time.”
Hance noted that the character of Carley is not based on anyone in real life, but that she is really her own person. She explained, “There's a really weird process that happens in writing... It's as if the story goes on out here somewhere. And you walk into the story and you get to learn the characters. It's not like you just make them up. It's like they exist... And so as I got to know her over time, she took her own shape and was really her own person.”
You can learn more about Marjorie Mathison Hance and her books on her website.
Bonus content: Marjorie Mathison Hance talks with What We're Reading's Tammy Bobrowsky about what she loves about writing and connecting with her readers.
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