• Interview with Priscilla Paton – S. 10, Ep. 20

  • Feb 23 2025
  • Length: 30 mins
  • Podcast

Interview with Priscilla Paton – S. 10, Ep. 20

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  • My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is crime writer Priscilla Paton. Check out our discussion of her Twin Cities mysteries and the inspiration behind her dual detectives Eric Jansson and Deb Metzger. Download a copy of the interview in PDF. Debbi (00:51): Hi everyone. My guest today is originally from Maine, but now hails from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which invariably evokes images of Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat in the air for me. If you're a person of a certain age, you'll understand. Anyway. Some of you may understand that reference. And in any case, she is a college professor from that area and she's now an author of the Twin Cities Mystery series. It's my pleasure to have with me today, Priscilla Paton. Hey, Priscilla, how you doing? Priscilla (01:29): Well, I'm doing really great. I'm actually in Arizona right now escaping some of those famous Midwest winters. Just for a very brief time though, I'll be getting back to the greater Twin Cities experience very quickly. I'm now retired from teaching, which gives me more time to make mischief and at least in my head, get into trouble. Debbi (01:56): I love it. Yes. Isn't it wonderful when we can write out these things on the page as opposed to actually committing crimes? Priscilla (02:05): Right. Debbi (02:07): Let's see. Tell us about your series. You have dual detectives, detective Eric Jansson and Deb Metzger. How was it that you came up with these two characters? Priscilla (02:20): Well, as you noted in your introduction, I've been transplanted to the Midwest. I'm been married to a Midwester for decades, and I'm both an insider and outsider there to some extent. Eric Jansson represents the Scandinavian Midwest as I've come to know it. He does have dark hair, but he still has blue eyes and the dark hair goes back to the Sámi people in northern Norway. So I got to play with his experience, his immersion in that Scandinavian-American culture, and I came up with him first. He was still a bit of a stoic. Scandinavians and New Englanders both are. So he was stoic. He wasn't that given to free and open expression, though he may have had a lot of renegade thoughts running through his head. He's kind of a rural bender, and I started writing, exploring what I could do with that character, and I found it was a little too quiet, a little too internalized. Eric Jansson represents the Scandinavian Midwest as I've come to know it. He does have dark hair, but he still has blue eyes and the dark hair goes back to the Sámi people in northern Norway. (03:30): Though he is physically active, he's athletic, and I put him aside for a minute and started writing about a woman who finds a PI type, who finds her cases by looking at the boards and coffee shops. As I was coming up with her, I was sitting in a coffee shop looking at a board, and I think that idea lasted as long as my cup of coffee and I went and then sort of like Athena bursting out of Zeus's head, Deb Metzger came to me. She ... as somebody who would rile Eric. Not necessarily be, not that they would necessarily hate each other, they don't by any means, but someone who would push him. In fact, in one of the novels that their chief joked something about, she says something about Eric being so quiet. He says, that's a good job for you. Draw him out. In a way she does it by annoying him. So it's sort of a vinegar and oil couple. But I tried to give them slightly different skill sets as usually happens when you have partners in real life and in fiction. So Eric is a little bit more the puzzle solver, a little bit more. (04:46): A couple of times, once he played, pretended he was a waiter. He is a little more on the edge of, I don't know if I want to say deceit, but he can be a little cagey here where Deb is more forthright and she is tall. She's about six feet in shoes or boots. She has kind of spiky blonde hair. She's lesbian. She can't hide easily.
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