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by
B.B. Haywood Aka Beth & Rob Freeman
Welcome
to the coastal village of Cape Willington, Maine, founded
in 1737. Take a stroll down Main Street. Stop in at the Main
Street Diner for a bite to eat, and catch
up on the local news. Further along the street, you can visit
the Black Forest Bakery for authentic German pastries. Then
head down Ocean Avenue to see the historic Pruitt Opera House,
the Lightkeeper’s Inn, and Town Park. Later, you can
drive along the Coastal Loop for beautiful ocean views and
a breath of fresh, salty sea air. And don’t forget to
spend some time at the English Point Lighthouse and Cape Willington
Historical Museum.
Through
the course of five novels in the Candy Holliday Murder
 Mystery
Series, including the upcoming Town in a Strawberry Swirl
(available everywhere on Feb. 4th), Cape Willington has served
as the setting and background for the series, and often as
a character itself. And although it’s a fictional village,
it has come alive in many ways, for it is based on real places,
and many of its citizens and activities are drawn from actual
people and events.
Writing under the pen name B.B. Haywood, we’re
the series’ creators, Rob and Beth. In 2004, we decided
to work together to write a cozy mystery set in a small village
in Maine. Beth had grown up in New England, and both of us
had lived in several small towns in New England for more than
20 years. As we began to develop the first novel, Town in
a Blueberry Jam, we drew on events from real life and mixed
them with fictional characters and events. Beth even used
the names of towns we’d lived in to create the name
“Cape Willington,” which is a combination Cape
Elizabeth, Maine, where we lived at the time; Williamstown,
Mass., where Beth grew up; and Hopkinton, N.H., where we lived
before moving to Maine.
The village of Cape Willington had its beginnings
on scraps of notebook paper stuck between the front seats
of our family car. As we drove around Maine and the other
New England states, we began to make up the town and the main
characters. Beth recently spent some time looking through
those scraps of paper, which say things like “Candy
Holliday-Halloween,” “sidekick” (who became
Maggie Tremont), “baker” (who became Herr Georg),
“general store like the one we love in Vermont,”
and “Candy selling her blueberry goods to make extra
money for the farm.” Portions of Cape Willington resemble
such real-life Maine villages as Blue Hill, Boothbay Harbor,
and Bar Harbor. We also created long lists of possible titles.
The name
“Holliday” came from some pre-made address labels
that arrived in the mail one day. After settling on the name
Candy Holliday for our protagonist, the other characters fell
into place. Henry “Doc” Holliday is loosely based
on a wonderful historian Beth met while working at the Portland
Head Light museum in Cape Elizabeth, just south of Portland.
Herr Georg and the Black Forest Bakery are based on a bakery
in a small Alpine village-like shopping center we used to
visit in New Hampshire. Once, when we visited Acadia National
Park in Maine, someone actually did fall off the cliff trail
into the ocean. We were on the beach when the rescue team
came and cleared the area. Jock Larson took that same fall
in the prologue to Town in a Blueberry Jam.
We had chickens at the time, hence Candy’s
“girls.” Beth once saw a woman flossing her teeth
while driving! That was the inspiration for Elsie Lingholt,
now of hula hooping fame. While looking at homes to buy in
New Hampshire, we really did encounter a woman with a bottle
collection like Wilma Mae Wendell’s (from Town in a
Lobster Stew). And when Beth came upon a local snow plow rodeo,
she at first had no idea what it was. As she watched the plows
drive a twisty course between orange cones topped with tennis
balls and other obstacles, she thought it was more fun than
the State Fair. And Wanda Boyle! For now, we’ll say
no more about her, except that she is certainly a fun character
to write.
So that’s how the people and events
we encountered while driving around New England for many years
with our family turned into the growing fictional town of
Cape Willington, filled with characters we love to write about.
We hope our readers love them too, as they follow Candy, Doc,
Maggie, Herr Georg, and the other residents of Cape Willington,
Maine, from book to book.
NOTE: Other titles in the national bestselling
series include Town in a Wild Moose Chase and Town
in a Pumpkin Bash. All are available in print or as ebooks
from Berkeley Prime Crime. Large print editions of all the
books and an audiobook of Town in a Blueberry Jam are
also available.
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