What if you were to start a mystery series?

In May and June of 2013, my husband and I walked 440 miles of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain (path Camino Francés). Because of a too-recent meniscus surgery on my husband’s left knee, his doctor advised us against starting the journey with the treacherous pass over the Pyrenees. To my husband’s regret, we began our camino in Pamplona, Spain, instead of St. Jean Pied-de-Port, France; but I wasn’t too devastated that we skipped out on the first 40 miles of an already grueling walk. All in all though, we can attest that it was the transformative experience that I’m sure anyone else who walked the camino will doubtless evangelize it as. Honestly, we haven’t met anyone who ever said, “Meh, that walk was just so-so.”

But why am I talking about a super long quasi-pilgrimage* on this newsletter about mysteries?

The answer relates to a semester-ending writing assignment for my course on Detective Fiction. While I have been teaching this course for almost 20 years, it’s only in the last five years that I included an option for students to choose a term project that is creative in nature as opposed to the typical research-based analytical paper. To keep things fresh and ensure that students followed specific directives for each semester, the nature of that creative option has varied in the three times I’ve offered that choice. First semester, only a handful—about a quarter—of the class went with the creative option. Then, half of the class. To my astonishment, for this last semester which ended in December 2023, only three out of 20 students did NOT pursue the creative project!

I will spare you the myriad exacting details of the creative prompt, but it would suffice to say that students were asked to provide a detailed portrait of a new series detective, write the first 4-5 pages of the debut storyline introducing that detective, then addend a critical reflection about the role their new detective occupies in the trajectory of detective fiction we studied in class. Frankly, I was overwhelmed by the positive responses—and some wonderfully unique stories.

In the aftermath of this assignment, I found myself wondering whether I should have attempted to incorporate our camino experiences into a longer piece. Sadly, a quick search yielded returns not only about a tragic real-life 2017 murder of a walker from the U.S. but also a 2021 fictional murder mystery set on the camino. I stopped my search there, but doubtless there are others as well, and it appears I’ve missed my opportunity at new series detective stardom.

Regardless, A Murder on the Camino (or presumably something like that, right?) is probably where I would have started since such a novel would have allowed me to feature various sites along the route (Logroño! Léon!), offer up some fascinating history of the pilgrimage (à la Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods?), along with snippets of insider knowledge (how French walkers responded to the Spanish cuisine, what all those young walkers from South Korea talked about).

And if that debut novel about a Korean-American literature professor who finds murder on her sabbatical sold thousands of copies, I might have moved on to Death on the Milford Track (a New Zealand hike we completed in 2003), and so on, and so on with the theme. More walking and more mysteries. Again, alas!

And you? What might you write—or have written already as the case may be—and, perhaps more importantly, WHY?

---

*Probably the majority of the walkers were like us—on the path more for the cultural and touristic rather than its spiritual significance. However, we also truly appreciated the enthusiasm and expertise of other walkers who marveled at all the small and large churches we passed by.