You’ve written across very different modes — cozy mystery, comic crime, and novels set in the Belgian Congo. Do you see those as separate parts of your writing life, or as expressions of the same sensibility?
It was never my intention to be a writer. From the age of three, I was a good drawer — that is to say, I never drew “stick figures” of people. My people and animals always had limbs with flesh on them. I wanted to attend art school after high school, but my parents were not supportive, so I resigned myself to possibly becoming a teacher.
In the meantime, I enrolled in an art class my freshman year of college and received such a nasty critique from the professor that my still-tender soul dropped the class. That very day I resolved to become a writer instead. At that stage of my life, I had no idea that writers received reviews!
I certainly never set out to be a crime writer or a mystery writer. I wanted to write literary fiction. After all, I’d finished my education with an MA in English, with double minors in Russian and Yiddish Russian literature in translation. I thought I knew how to write a good book, but it took me twenty-three years of constantly submitting manuscripts before an editor grabbed one of mine off the slush pile and gave me a chance.
That was only after I had discovered my “voice,” through trial and error over more than two decades of trying. Loving encouragement from my husband is what kept me going. I was fortunate to meet him when I was still just fifteen, on my first day attending high school in America. For me, it was love at first sight. That will be sixty-two years ago come September 9.
You were born and raised in the Congo. How did that early experience shape the emotional core of your fiction?
My parents set out to be missionaries in the Belgian Congo in 1932. It took them two and a half months to reach their remote mission station of Ndjoka Punda. It was a time when one-sixth of white people never survived their term of service.
My father was given three months in which to learn enough of the local language to preach a sermon, or they would be shipped back to America. Both he and my mother quickly became fluent in the Tshiluba language. I was raised bilingual. During the next eighteen years, they had four daughters, all born in Africa. I was the youngest.
After those eighteen successful years at Ndjoka Punda, when I was just two years old, my parents were asked if they would be willing to become the first family ever to establish a mission among the Bashilele, a tribe known for headhunting. The tribe practiced ritual headhunting as a rite of passage for young males. Think of it as a “Bar Mitzvah” for headhunters. Upon reaching puberty, a boy was sent into the territory of another tribe to kill a man, remove the flesh from his skull, and return home with it. He now had a drinking mug from which to drink palm wine, and was eligible to join the men’s social circle around the campfire.
There had been one previous attempt to establish a mission among this tribe, by a Roman Catholic priest. Unfortunately, he took a machete to the tribe’s sacred Tree of Life, which grew in the center of the village, telling them it was “heathen” and “idolatrous.” In short order, the priest’s skull became a drinking mug. As you will see, machetes became a theme in my African life.
At any rate, my parents knew better than to hack away at a sacred tree. Over the next ten years, they built a school, a church, and a clinic staffed by a nurse that supplied basic medical care, including stitching up machete wounds. We never had running water or electricity, and several times we had to evacuate our house in the middle of the night because we had been invaded by driver ants. These vicious insects move in columns of more than a million and are more than happy to clean a human down to the bone if they can.
At any rate, my preschool years were happy years — except for the time I ventured into the forest near our house at age seven and was chased by a headhunter wielding a machete.
You were sent away to boarding school at a young age. How did that experience affect you?
Just before my eighth birthday, I was shipped off to a boarding school that was a two-day trip away by truck. My sisters and I rode in the back of the truck with six other missionary children gathered from other stations. We had our steamer trunks with us, filled with bedding and clothes.
At one point, we had to cross a shallow river that was home to crocodiles and hippos. It was the dry season, and a ferry manned by men whose fathers had been cannibals came to take us across. The ferry consisted of three dugout canoes with wooden planks across them. At one point the river became too shallow for the loaded truck, so we children had to get off and wade through the water, singing hymns, until the ferry found deeper water. It was scary.
Boarding school was a Dickensian experience. I was severely beaten my first day there for inadvertently getting out of bed before the “first bell.” Beatings, thrashings, whippings — all were commonplace. Boys, girls, it didn’t matter. But worse than the physical punishment was the psychological torture: the fear of burning in Hell for all eternity.
I had no understanding of eternity — who does? — but I knew about fire. My best friend, a headhunter’s daughter named Kahinda, had just been burned to an unrecognizable crisp in one of the massive savannah fires that the tribe started at the end of each dry season as a hunting method. Now the school principal was telling me that I was going to burn, screaming in pain, because of my sins. But what sins?
Your childhood took place against a backdrop of colonial violence and political upheaval. How much of that stayed with you?
The Belgian Congo churned and gurgled like the guts of a giant that had been force-fed a poisonous diet for a century and was about to throw up. By and large, Belgium had treated its colony atrociously. When my parents first arrived, they saw men hanging from trees — men who presumably had not completed a compulsory work quota. A generation before that, men had their right hands chopped off if they failed to produce a quota of rubber sap from the forest.
Against this backdrop, anti-white sentiment began to be expressed openly. At one point, I was briefly taken hostage on the two-day trip back from boarding school because an empty tin can I had given to some children caused a scalp bleed when they fought over it. My mother didn’t have nearly enough money to pay the ransom, and the men finally let me go, but they threatened that their tribe members would chop me up with machetes as our road passed through the next village.
A week later, while we were eating lunch, we noticed that the Chief of the Headhunters, Chief Kashosho, and a group of his warriors, armed with spears and machetes, were looking through the window at us. My father went out to speak with them, and when he returned, his jaw was twitching, but he went back to eating.
“What did he say?” my mother demanded.
“He said that on Independence Day he is going to return and collect our girls so that they can be his new wives.”
When my mother asked what he had said when my father told him no, my father replied, “He said that then he would burn us out. He’d get the girls that way.”
“Daddy, what are you going to do?” my second-oldest sister cried.
“Eat your soup,” my father said.
That was the end of the conversation. Thereafter, “eat your soup” became a humorous tag line for us sisters during tough times. It became our substitute for “keep a stiff upper lip.”
Did humor become a kind of survival mechanism for you?
Absolutely. My childhood was not a happy one. But somewhere along the way, I began to find a lot of life funny — and absurd.
For example, the Roman Catholic priests who had come to convert a neighboring tribe, whose forefathers had been cannibals, were attempting to teach them the doctrine of transubstantiation. I’ve often been accused of writing wacky characters, but that’s because I find everyone a bit wacky, including myself.
Humor became my survival mode. It was either that or hiding under my bed for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, try as I might, I can’t keep humor out of my writing. That, my dear, has been my downfall as a writer, because no one takes my books seriously enough to nominate me for awards. Any awards. I do, however, perform stand-up comedy from time to time. One would think that Malice Domestic would ask me to be their keynote speaker. I’m just saying.
When you write about Africa, are you trying to recover a world from memory, or are you more interested in interrogating memory itself?
Magdalena Yoder describes herself in the most unflattering terms, and unfortunately, they are all loosely based on truth. If you clapped a saddle on my back and yelled “giddyap,” I might break into a trot.
That said, I have a prodigious memory. I can remember as far back as age two. When I was three, I saw a man die a violent death. When I was eleven, I witnessed a slave boy being used as a human footstool for the local chief. The sights, sounds, and smells of my Africa are easily accessible to me, but to remain emotionally stable, I must keep the door to that memory room closed most of the time.
When I got the contract for the four African novels — I tried so hard not to make them mysteries, but my editor prevailed — I shifted the setting from the bush to the town where we lived after Independence. Even then, writing those books was emotionally draining. I began thinking again in my first language, Tshiluba, and old fears returned. If it had not been for the humor I injected into my character Cripple, I could not have written them.
Your Pennsylvania Dutch mysteries became beloved for their humor and strong sense of place. What first drew you to that world?
They say write what you know. Besides Africa, I knew what it was like to be raised as a Mennonite.
My father came from a Jewish background and converted to Mennonite, but my mother was born into an Amish family. Her ancestors were among the first Amish wave to settle in America in 1738. They landed in Philadelphia after fleeing religious persecution in Switzerland.
The Amish have a practice called “shunning.” If a member of the flock sins and is unrepentant, that person is shunned by the entire community, including their family. Most often, people who cease to be Amish join the Mennonite faith, as it is similar in many respects, just not as stringent.
My Amish mother, who was born in 1908, spoke only Swiss German until she started school. Two years later, her Amish father, who drove a horse and buggy as all good Amish did, found himself seduced by the automobile. He bought one. He was unrepentant and consequently shunned. After that, not only did he and his family leave the community and join the Mennonites, but so did his siblings, his parents, his grandmother’s ten siblings, and even her mother.
At any rate, this was a world I was quite familiar with by the time I wrote Too Many Crooks Spoil the Broth, my first book.
Magdalena Yoder is such a vivid and memorable character. Did she arrive fully formed, or did she reveal herself book by book?
Friends and family members who read my books say that Magdalena is me. I have felt so from the very beginning.
It took me forty years to feel like a real American. You can take the gal out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the gal. Magdalena’s struggle is between the strictures of her faith and the call of reason and modernity.
Humor can be deceptively difficult on the page. What do you think makes comic mystery work?
A friend once told me that “if you can tickle yourself, you can laugh whenever you please.” Frankly, I just enjoy making myself laugh. Sometimes I laugh so hard at what Magdalena says that I almost pee my pants.
That some fans have stayed with me for so many books is heartwarming. I’ve received lots of starred reviews from Kirkus and great reviews from Library Journal, but my detractors have written that I couldn’t plot my way out of a paper bag. No wait — did Magdalena say that?
Your work often balances light entertainment with sharper observations about culture, faith, family, and human folly. Has that balance always come naturally to you?
Oh, Andrew, you are so perceptive! What a wonderful summation your first sentence was. I just love that. Why didn’t you write my reviews?
To answer your question: that balance is what I always strove for. Especially the human folly part.
Looking back, do you feel readers sometimes underestimate the seriousness underneath humorous fiction?
Yes, I very much feel this way. That is why I feel cheated of any sort of recognition over my long career — forty-nine novels and one children’s book written under my middle name, Dawn Myers.
In each of my Magdalena novels, there was a lesson for her, or for another character, to learn. Magdalena grew in the series because I did. Although Magdalena was always accepting of LGBTQ+ people from the beginning, because, as she said, “Jesus never once said anything negative about them.”
Thanks to Magdalena, I received a letter from a mother telling me that she was going to reach out to her gay son. A gay man in his twenties said one of my books gave him the strength to come out to his parents. I also received a letter telling me that I was going to burn in Hell for being an influencer of the gay agenda.
Has your sense of mystery — as a genre and as a way of seeing the world — changed over the course of your career?
The world has been going to Hell in a handbasket over the course of my career — but then again, that’s always been the case. Unfortunately, I was initiated into the dark side of humanity at an early age, so my answer is: it hasn’t.
Were there particular writers who gave you permission to blend wit, suspense, and darker undercurrents?
I had never even tried writing mystery until the day I walked into Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. While I was browsing, I came across the novel The Thin Woman by Dorothy Cannell. I bought it, and while reading it, I laughed repeatedly.
That experience changed my life. Until then, I had no idea that a mystery could be humorous. That’s when I wrote Too Many Crooks Spoil the Broth, and within a year I had been offered a three-book deal by Doubleday.
When you think about your body of work as a whole, what threads connect the books?
Social justice. Kindness.
What still surprises you about the writing life?
As I’ve mentioned, I couldn’t plot my way out of a paper bag. Therefore, I don’t outline my chapters, although I do draw character sketches of everyone in the book — just never Magdalena or Abby. I let my characters do the writing, and they often surprise me. That fills me with moments of joy.
As for the life itself, I’ve read that it is supposed to be a lonely life, but I crave solitude. My supportive husband, whom I’ve loved for more than sixty years, my animals, my garden, and a very few very good friends — that’s all I need. Oh, and a nearby library.
Is there a book of yours you feel deserves to be rediscovered by readers?
Yes. I wrote a standalone novel published by Bella Rosa Books, a small press. The Dark Side of Heaven is about a teenage Amish girl who is shunned by her community, a town called Heaven.
Anna’s sin is that God bestowed her with artistic talent, which was apparent at an early age when she sold pencil sketches to tourists who stopped to buy from her mother’s produce stand. Anna’s talents cannot be beaten out of her, and eventually she chooses to paint landscapes and scenes of Amish life rather than stitch neat seams along articles of somber clothing.
A kindly but frustrated bishop takes the girl to the bus station, hands her an envelope containing one hundred dollars, and puts her on a bus for Pittsburgh. That’s when the story really begins, and Anna uncovers the dark side of the heaven she left.
What are you working on now, and what continues to excite you creatively?
I will be seventy-eight soon, and after fifty books, I have finally retired. There are rows of books in public libraries that I haven’t even strolled through. Even when I wrote two books a year, I would read two hundred books a year. I also enjoy sculpting and playing the keyboard. Oh, and there is so much television to watch these days!
However, my last writing task is going to be a long-overdue letter of complaint to Barbara Kingsolver. When The Poisonwood Bible was published, and Hillary Clinton said it was the best book she had ever read, and Oprah had Barbara Kingsolver on her show, I was livid.
Barbara had lived in the Congo for exactly one year, and that was when she was seven. The woman knew nothing about the country, or what it was like to be a teenage missionary girl during the Independence period. For her place names, she must have just pointed at names on a map.
When Oprah held her book lunch with Barbara Kingsolver as her guest and advertised on TV for readers who wanted to join that lunch, I emailed the show. I wrote that I had grown up in Congo in the same area and during the same period as the book. My intent was to put Barbara on the spot during lunch.
I was quite surprised when the show called me, and I got an interview. The interview went very well until the gentleman asked what I did for a living. When I replied that I was a writer working on an African book of my own — boom, that was the end of the interview.
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