Lynn Slaughter

My extended family is peppered with jazz musicians, so not surprisingly, I found Winona Kent’s Jason Davey series irresistible. Having just released her fifth mystery in the series, Winona talks about her writing career and process, followed by her bio and buy links:

First off, congratulations on the release of Bad Boy, the fifth book in your Jason Davey series. Can you share with our readers a bit about the book and the series and what inspired them?

Thank you! And thank you so much for featuring me today!

I like to think of Bad Boy as a “well-scrambled mystery”—falling somewhere between soft-boiled and hardboiled, with a touch of noir.

My main character, Jason Davey, is a professional musician and an amateur sleuth. He’s done all the courses that would enable him to be licensed as a private investigator in the UK—he just hasn’t got round to writing the final exam. And I’m not sure he ever will—as you don’t currently need to be licensed in the UK in order to work as a PI. And the cases Jason takes on are always “bespoke”—he does them as favours to others, or to satisfy his own curiosity.

This story takes place just after Jason’s returned home from a 34-day tour of England with his band. He’s tired, he needs a break, when—suddenly, and very unwillingly—he’s thrown into a situation where he has to fulfill a dying man’s last wish. That wish involves tracking down a collection of scores by Sir Edward Elgar, Britain’s most famous composer. The scores were originally stolen, but the dying man (who is actually the original thief) wishes to return them to their rightful owner. Unfortunately, two other individuals also have an interest in getting their hands on that collection—a Russian gangster, and a notorious Soho crime lord who Jason’s had previous dealings with.

This is the fifth book in my Jason Davey Mysteries, and the entire series was actually inspired by a book I wrote more than ten years ago called Cold Play. That was the story of a musician working on board a cruise ship sailing between Vancouver and Alaska. The musician was Jason Davey—and he was inspired by a real-life entertainer my husband and I met and chatted with when we went on a cruise to Alaska in 2009. When I was thinking about a new direction for my writing, one of the suggestions I got was to bring back Jason from Cold Play, and make him into an amateur sleuth—as well as letting him continue to make a living as a musician. So that’s what I did. All of the books have a musical theme which acts as a backdrop to the actual plot.           

Your protagonist, Jason Davey, is a professional jazz musician. What led you to make him a musician? Is music something you have a background in, or did you do a lot of research to bring authenticity to your portrayal of him as a professional musician?

Jason’s always been a musician (see my answer above, about the entertainer I met on a Holland America cruise to Alaska!) I did actually learn to play the guitar in high school, and my husband played in bands when he was in school, too. I had four years of classical piano lessons (Western Board of Music and Toronto Conservatory), along with a couple of years of theory, so I can read music and understand how everything works on a printed score. I also took part in lots of onstage performances and in high school and university I belonged to a couple of choirs.

I do actually do quite a bit of additional research to help with the authenticity of my books. I often download the sheet music for certain pieces that Jason chats about or performs. I also watch a lot of YouTube videos of different versions of those tunes—the more unique or unusual, the better. Without giving too much away, a very popular and instantly recognizable tv theme shows up in the last chapter of Bad Boy. I actually found a site that had the theme deconstructed into its various instrumental parts, which I then had Jason discover and tell us about, and then I found an absolutely stonking electric guitar solo that someone had done, playing along with that theme on YouTube—and that became the basis of the adapted piece that Jason presents to his band in the final pages.

As someone who’s always written stand-alone books, I’m fascinated by authors who maintain readers’ interests in series. How do you go about keeping your series fresh and engaging for your readers?

I actually started out writing standalone books, but I always ended up feeling, at the end of them, that I loved the characters so much, I wanted to give them another adventure. That’s what happened with Skywatcher, my first novel—I felt like I wasn’t finished with the Harrises (a family of spies!), so I wrote a sequel, The Cilla Rose Affair. My third book, Cold Play, actually did exist as a standalone for many years—until I brought Jason back as an amateur sleuth for the current mystery series. I wrote an accidental time travel/gentle romance called Persistence of Memory—which was actually adapted from a screenplay I’d written. I had no intention of writing a series, but my publisher at the time really wanted me to do one, so I agreed. Unfortunately, by the time I had the second novel written, my publisher had gone out of business! I really liked the characters and felt like I still had stories to tell about them, so I wrote a third time travel book—and it was around that time that I started to explore the idea of bringing Jason back as a sleuth—and that definitely was a deliberate decision to write a series of books.

I use a piece of software called Plottr that enables me to create a “series bible” – which is a concept I learned at film school. Whenever a tv series is created, there’s always a big folder that’s maintained by the writers and other creatives that contains every little piece of information about the show—peoples’ mothers’ names, favourite foods, addresses, hobbies, etc. I have something like that for Jason, his friends and family, so that I don’t waste a lot of time looking up details that get repeated in multiple novels, and if I use the same piece of information in all of the novels, I can easily rewrite the description so it’s fresh and not just a straight copy and paste.

I also refuse to adhere to a certain template with my Jason books. They aren’t in any way predictable—the only thing that’s consistent is Jason, narrating in the first person, and the fact that he’s a working musician. I don’t write about murders—although people do die in my stories. It’s just not the inciting incident. So, for instance, in Disturbing the Peace, the story involves Jason being asked by his son to track down a musician who’s been missing for a couple of years. In Notes on a Missing G-String, Jason’s asked to find out what happened to a large sum of money that was stolen from a stripper’s locker in Soho. In Lost Time, Jason’s rehearsing to go on a 50^th Anniversary Tour with his mum’s old band, and he ends up investigating a cold case involving a young girl who disappeared in the 1970s. In Ticket to Ride, Jason’s actually on tour with the band—and someone with a very serious grudge is trying to kill him. And in Bad Boy, which takes place immediately following the end of that tour, Jason’s approached by a fan who hires him to track down a stolen collection of musical scores, and return them to their rightful owner.

And with each of my books, I tend to throw in a lot of quirky stuff, unusual details, things that catch my interest while I’m writing. For instance, in 2022, I went to England with my sister to scatter my late mother’s ashes. The places I went on that trip show up in Bad Boy—The Shard, Primrose Hill, a number of villages in Derbyshire, a four-hour walking tour of musical venues in Soho.

In what ways has Jason grown and changed as a character since the series began?

When he started out, in Disturbing the Peace, he had no idea he was about to become an amateur sleuth! He had no experience investigating anything. He was literally learning on the job, using his own curiosity, to find a musician who’d disappeared two years earlier. Four novels later, and he’s much more confident in his sleuthing skills. He knows quite a few “tricks of the trade” and knows when to ask the right questions—and when it would be wise to stay silent and keep information to himself. He still makes mistakes, though! And those mistakes often land him in trouble!

I noticed that you took a break from writing mysteries to write some time travel romances and then returned to writing mysteries. What drew you back to the mystery genre?

When I wrote my third novel Cold Play—the book that introduced Jason to the world—I didn’t actually think of it as being a mystery. In retrospect, I can see that it very definitely fits the genre! I didn’t have any intention of turning Cold Play into a series, so I went off to explore time travel. After three novels, I’d satisfied my curiosity, and when my friend in England suggested I bring Jason back, I leaped at the opportunity. But first, I had to learn a few things about sleuthing myself—I actually completed a couple of courses designed to train PI’s—and I also had to find out whether I could actually handle plotting out a true mystery, and, more importantly, whether I would enjoy writing one. The result was Disturbing the Peace. I discovered I really did enjoy writing mysteries—and here we are, celebrating the fifth novel in the series!

What is your writing process like? Are you a seat-of-the-pants writer, more of a planner, or somewhere in between? And as an award-winning author of both short fiction and novels, as well as screen writing experience, are there differences in your process depending on what you’re writing?

I’m very definitely a plotter when it comes to my novels. I learned how to write a proper outline when I was at film school, because it’s Step One when you’re writing a screenplay. I wrote screenplays for about seven years, but I gave it up because I really much preferred writing novels.

I was working full-time in an unrelated job while I was writing most of my novels—my-writing took place at night and on weekends—and I found having an outline really came in handy, because you never lose track of where you are. And there’s nothing that says you actually have to stick to that outline—in fact, I often stray from what I initially plotted out, and revise the outline as needed. As I mentioned, I use software called Plottr, which helps me to visualize my story elements—it’s sort of like having an entire wall of re-arrangeable Post-it Notes on my computer screen.

I don’t usually outline my short stories in advance, because they’re short enough that I can visualize the entire plot in my head and keep everything straight.

Now that you are writing full-time, what is a typical writing day like for you?

I get up at 830am, make some breakfast, and read the news and catch up on emails until about 1030am. Then I spend about 90 minutes writing, editing, researching or arranging marketing/PR—it really depends where I am in the overall process of a particular novel or short story. I have lunch around noon, and spend that hour with more emails and more news (which also includes spending entirely too much time on Facebook 😊). From 1pm until about 4pm I do more writing, editing, researching or marketing, and by then my brain is usually exhausted. I’ve tried to define my creative hours a little better, and slot specific times for research, or advertising and other specific times for straight writing, but it’s been five years since I retired from my full-time work, and I just don’t seem to be able to confine my creative brain that way. So it all gets lumped into “creative time.”

What are you currently working on?

I’m plotting out my next Jason Davey mystery—I don’t have a title yet, but I’m pretty certain it’s going to take place at a crime writing conference in Vancouver and will involve Jason’s sister, who writes cozy mysteries under the pseudonym Taylor Feldspar.

Do you have any advice for aspiring mystery writers?

The best advice I can give to emerging writers is to join as many workshops and peer-groups as you can. That’s how I learned the craft, starting when I was an undergrad at university, and continuing on to my Masters degree in Creative Writing, and at film school. I can’t say enough about the advantages and insight you gain when you share your writing with a group of like-minded individuals, especially if there’s a skilled person in charge, who can guide the discussion and offer their own insights and knowledge. You also gain incredible knowledge about your own writing by offering feedback on other peoples’ writing. And the process teaches you how to accept constructive criticism with grace, humility, and an open mind. I’d also suggest joining a few good online discussion groups, as their shared advice and their pipeline into opportunities for emerging writers knows no bounds.

Anything else you’d like to add, or wish I’d asked you that I didn’t?

I’d like to thank you once again for featuring me today!! And I’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to read this…and I hope you’ll be inspired to check out my Jason Davey Mysteries! 

Winona Kent bio:

Winona Kent is an award-winning author who was born in London, England and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she completed her BA in English at the University of Regina. After moving to Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing, and a diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School.

Winona’s writing breakthrough came many years ago when she won First Prize in the Flare Magazine Fiction Contest with her short story about an all-night radio newsman, “Tower of Power.”

Her debut novel Skywatcher was a finalist in the Seal Books First Novel Award and was published by Bantam Books in 1989. This was followed by a sequel, The Cilla Rose Affair, and her first mystery, Cold Play, set aboard a cruise ship in Alaska.

After three time-travel romances (Persistence of Memory, In Loving Memory and Marianne’s Memory), Winona returned to mysteries with Disturbing the Peace, a novella, in 2017 and the novel Notes on a Missing G-String in 2019, both featuring the character she first introduced in Cold Play, professional jazz musician / amateur sleuth Jason Davey.

The third and fourth books in Winona’s Jason Davey Mystery series, Lost Time and Ticket to Ride, were published in 2020 and 2022. Her fifth Jason Davey Mystery, Bad Boy, was published in 2024.

Winona also writes short fiction. Her story “Salty Dog Blues” appeared in Sisters in Crime-Canada West’s anthology Crime Wave in October 2020 and was nominated as a finalist in Crime Writers of Canada’s Awards of Excellence for Best Crime Novella in April 2021. “Blue Devil Blues” was one of the four entries in the anthology Last Shot, published in June 2021, and “Terminal Lucidity” appeared in the Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Women of a Certain Age (October 2022). “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”, will appear in the upcoming Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Dangerous Games (October 2024).

A collection of Winona’s short stories, Ten Stories That Worried My Mother, was published in 2023.

Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent , a screenwriter and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. Winona’s currently the National Chair of the Crime Writers of Canada, and is also an active member of Sisters in Crime – Canada West. After many decades working in jobs completely unrelated to writing, Winona is now happily embracing life as a full-time author. She lives in New Westminster, BC with her husband, and a concerning number of disobedient houseplants, many of which were rescued from her apartment building’s compost bin after being abandoned by previous owners.

Buy Links for Bad Boy:

Amazon Kindle
UK – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D9PFYXB4
US – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9PFYXB4
Canada – https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0D9PFYXB4

Amazon Paperback
UK – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1739046110
US – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1739046110
Canada – https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1739046110