New mystery author Cornelia Read is proof positive that writing groups aren’t just for scribblers.

Mrs. Read recently told The Bookworm Beat that thanks to motivation and support from a writing group she released her first mystery novel ‘A Field of Darkness’ published in May 2006 by Mysterious Press.

“I first joined the writing group when I got laid off from a dot-com job,” said Mrs. Read. “I was on-line, looking for work, when I stumbled across a guy saying he wanted to start a mystery writing group.

“Our first meeting was at a coffee shop. I volunteered to turn in part of a story the next week. I thought ‘what will I write about’. I decided to write about Syracuse.”

Even though Mrs. Read is now a published author, she still uses the feedback from her writing group.

“They are wonderful,” she said. “Having come out of journalism it is so great to have the structure and the deadlines of a group. When you are working on a long piece of fiction you have no idea if anything will ever happen with it. It feels like a hobby. To know that it is my turn next week and I have to have this many pages made me focus more and get it done.”

‘A Field of Darkness’ is set in Syracuse, New York in the summer of 1988.

Fledgling journalist, Madeline Dare, is desperate to escape Syracuse, which she sees as a backwater. When a set of dog tags turns up linking a member of her family to the scene of a decades-unsolved double murder, she may have found that longed-for ticket out of town. The book is loosely based on her experiences living in the upstate New York town, one summer.

“My father-in-law told me about a double murder at the state fair,” she said. “I was working for a newspaper at the time. I thought Syracuse would be an interesting place, because it is a very noire town.”

She spent over five years writing the book. Another member of her writing group gave her a list of 50 agents, and she found one to work with her in 2004.

“I sent my work out to about 35 of those agents,” she said. “I thought I would be lucky if I got a rejection letter back. I had a positive response from four people, based on the quality of my writing.”

The book has been doing very well since it hit the shelves last year. Mrs. Read was lucky enough to meet thriller writer, Lee Child, who liked her book.

“He asked me to go on tour with him because his book came out at the same time,” she said. “That got a lot of attention because he is well known. He wrote the blurb for me so that made the editors more interested.”

Her second book involving amateur sleuth Madeline Dare, ‘The Crazy School’ is due out in January, 2008.

“In this book, Madeline and her husband Dean are living in the Berkshires,” said Mrs. Read. “She is working as a teacher at a boarding school for emotionally disturbed kids, but the administration is sort of a cult. I worked at a similar school. The kids were sweet and needed help and the guy who ran the school was taking advantage of parents and students.”

Mrs. Read said she learned a great deal writing her first book, which she is now applying to her second one.

“I learned mostly not to digress so much,” she said. “That was something I learned during the course of the first book. To start with, I had about 15 pages on the history of the Erie Canal. “My cousin said if you don’t find a body floating in the canal, you get two sentences. It is not a term paper. You have to figure out how much to add to give it local flavour without impeding the story.”

Mrs. Read attended Sarah Lawrence College in New York, which is known for its writing programme.

“They don’t have majors or grades,” she said. “There were no exams. So you write long papers and stuff. My concentration was in fiction writing. Luckily, I discovered that I was a terrible poet and I moved onto fiction. That was great.”

One thing that makes ‘A Field of Darkness’ stand out from the glut of mystery novels on the market is the humour. Unfortunately, Mrs. Read said it is not always easy to get the literary community to respect humour.

“Humour reveals something,” she said. “You can reveal pain through humour. It is not necessarily shallow to be funny. It is not necessarily deep to be horrible.”

Mrs. Read said she tried writing literary fiction in college, but found the stories never gelled for her. Instead, she was drawn to mystery writing.

“I was interested in writing about my family and background, but in order to have a novel you have to grow and change and learn something,” she said. “There was never any narrative arc to my family stories. I liked the form of mystery and crime fiction. It is almost like having a sonnet. You have a form that you have to fulfil. That was very helpful to me as a writer.”‘A Field of Darkness’ is available at the Bermuda National Library on Queen Street. For more information about Mrs. Read go to http://www.corneliaread.com/.