Mummy Dearest.
A Holly, Jolly Murder.
Deader Homes and Gardens.
They're just a quirky sampling of the 40-plus mystery titles that Arkansas native and best-selling author Joan Hess generated. Hess, who lived in Fayetteville for 60 years, died from pulmonary fibrosis on Thanksgiving at age 68 in Austin, Texas, the city she called home the past seven years to be near her daughter Becca King and King's twins. Her son Joshua Hess also has two children.
As for how Hess, a University of Arkansas graduate and one of the first teachers at The New School in Fayetteville, got started writing mysteries, King says her mother first tried romance writing: "She kept getting rejection letters saying, 'Too much plot and not enough sex.'"
An agent told Hess, "'Why don't you write what you like to read?'" King says. "And so she wrote her first mystery, Strangled Prose in 1986" and made it her career.
Hess' last book, The Painted Queen, came out in August and made The New York Times Best Sellers list. In September, she attended her 50th reunion at Fayetteville High School and, while there, held a book-signing at Barnes & Noble.
Her enduring series, The Claire Malloy Mysteries and The Maggody Mysteries, both were based in Arkansas -- Farberville, a take on Fayetteville, and the fictitious mountain town of Maggody (a little country town where the mayor is having an affair with the preacher's wife and they make moonshine in the hills, King says). A TV pilot based on the Maggody series aired on CBS, starring Kate Jackson as heroine Arly Hanks, but the show never took off.
"She wrote murder mysteries, but they were funny," King says. "She called them 'cozies.' Meaning, that it's more about the characters than about the death."
Hess was a character herself.
"My mom was very creative," King says. "She and her writer friends were all very funny. They had 'sheep wars.' They would send each other these very random sheep things. This went on for years. While I'm cleaning out my mom's house, I found these glow-in-the-dark sheep, a million different stuffed sheep. ... She created some mystery award -- the Whimsy Foundation -- and it was a stuffed groundhog, like a dead groundhog that they made costumes for. And they passed along the dead groundhog to whoever won the award. Like, who comes up with that? My mom, clearly."
Speaking of awards, Hess, former president of the American Crime Writers League, won many. On her mother's behalf, King will accept the Amelia Award at the Malice Domestic conference in the Washington, D.C., area in the spring where she expects there will be a memorial cocktail party in Hess' honor.
A similar party will be held in March in Fayetteville -- or "Farberville."
Email: jchristman@arkansasonline.com
SundayMonday on 12/03/2017