Is it possible to enjoy a mystery series and be jealous of the author at the same time? You tell me. Please welcome C. Hope Clark to Help From My Friends Friday. ~ Donnell
By C. Hope Clark
I just returned from a week at Edisto Beach, which is a small, two and a half square mile stretch of sand at the end of Edisto Island, South Carolina. A working vacation, because I base an entire mystery series on that patch of real estate. Nothing like heading to the Atlantic to write your next book.
Serious logic went into selecting Edisto. My publisher wanted to diversify my talents and create a second mystery series with one remarkable locale in the South. After serious thought, I selected a beach unlike all the others in South Carolina. The beach I went to as a kid and gravitated back to as an adult, where commercialism is frowned upon, and the natives and tourists alike leave their problems on the other side of the big bridge.
A setting where I could walk the streets, the beach, the jungle infringing at its edges, and envision characters at work, at play, and up to no good. On the water, on the sand, and in each other’s business.
I know where Police Chief Callie Jean Morgan lives, because it’s the home of one of my dear friends on Jungle Road where I’ve escaped many a time to put my life back in order. I’ve sat on her porches and had drinks, eaten boiled shrimp at her bar, and laid on a starfish quilt and listened to the rollers coming in at high tide.
However we needed mystery.
But Edisto’s life is simple, crime nonexistent, and time slow. Tourists wishing they lived there. . . the natives dependent on tourists but not overly anxious to see them pour over the bridge.
Hurricanes, humidity, and hundred degree days. Nature 
phenomenally unique, from the five-hundred year old live oaks with draping Spanish moss to the sea creatures that include mammals, fish and fowl. Reptiles. Gators. And the constant challenge to avoid development to preserve it all.
Readers don’t have to ask if I use reality to paint the setting in my stories if they have been to Edisto. After few pages, they envision where Callie lives, the police station stands, and the bodies are buried.
The bodies. Therein lies a challenge. Edisto crime is little more than speeding golf carts and inebriated renters finding their way to their cottage, and a police force of six, each chief usually on his last tour of duty before retirement. Which only made me want to use this setting more.
Here are hundreds of residents and thousands of rotating tourists expecting Nirvana. Enough so to leave their doors unlocked, windows open, and belongings on the porch. No neon, no motels, no franchises.
Insert a flawed detective, a woman who ran away from her native South to spite her parents and lost almost everything, including a husband murdered by the mob she chased in Boston. A woman who’s seen enough death in both her personal and professional life to steer her clear of law enforcement forever. Never again. So her parents hand her the keys to the family cottage and tell her to go heal on Edisto. Like anyone who knows anything about Edisto does.
But she sees crime nobody else does. Crime nobody wants to see. She’s a godsend to some and a nemesis to others who’d prefer things as they were, when the criminal element remained invisible.
And the real Edisto people love the relationship.
This last trip to Edisto I hired a boat captain to take me out on the
waterways at dawn, to research the creeks that divide the sea islands. I studied monkeys on Morgan Island and lucked up witnessing Spartina grass flats that occur best at a king tide, enabling the redfish to suck out fiddler crabs. Saw tarpon leap three feet out of the water and royal terns pose on buoys in their last days before heading south for the winter. Took a plantation tour then ate lunch at a local historic church built for slaves, a rocking gospel choir offering free entertainment as thanks.
Of course there’s always the beach strolling, this trek spotting a fisherman haul in a large stingray and another reel in a hammerhead. And the restaurant lurking, listening to the conversation dynamics, hunting stories in plain public view.
But the most fun is the book signing at the Edisto Bookstore. I do one whenever I visit, several times a year. That’s when souls from near and far approach me asking which house is Callie’s, is there a real Sophie the yoga mistress, and is that dead officer really buried behind the historic Presbyterian where the ghost of Julia Legare guards a mausoleum. Was there really a pirate related to Blackbeard, and what happened to Grover’s, a restaurant now titled Ella and Ollie’s.
It’s at these signings I experience the extra special sensation that readers adore stories about their little corner of the world. To them, it’s all real.
BIO: C. Hope Clark’s latest Edisto mystery is Edisto Tidings, released October 2019. She resides in the South Carolina midlands on Lake Murray when she isn’t scouting for story ideas at the beach. You can find the entire list of Edisto Island Mysteries as well as the Carolina Slade Mysteries at www.chopeclark.com in addition to Amazon and wherever books are sold.
I live on a barrier island so much of this description feels like home. I’ve lived and still live in a community where locking the doors isn’t the rule and crime is dogs off leash and fishermen parking their trucks on the public roadway. But I’ve never been to Edisto and one of these days I am going to spend time there. Gotta keep an eye on Callie Morgan and her friends.
Same here, Skye, about Edisto. Callie is a very worthy protagonist:)