Retail
Murder, the summer 2025 issue of Mystery Readers Journal, is out! The
issue is packed with dozens of entertaining and informative articles and essays
talking about mysteries of all kinds that involve retail in one way or another.
Mystery Readers Journal is the
quarterly thematic journal of Mystery Readers International, the largest
mystery fan/reader organization in the world. The journal and the organization
are the brainchildren of Janet A. Rudolph, a tireless supporter of the mystery
community. My essay from the Retail Murder issue is shared here with
permission.
A
Shell of a Lot of Fun by Molly MacRae
Right
off the bat I’ll agree that working retail can be hell. Batty, too. Been there,
have wanted to run screaming from it. Luckily for me, I can pretend I remember
more of the good times than the stressful or wretched. Or I’ll whitewash the
stressful and wretched times with a coat of humor. Call me a shop half full
kind of person rather than half empty. Call me opportunistic too, if you want. I
treat my retail background as compost and happily shovel bits of it into my
stories as they grow.
Like
my mysteries, my experience in retail sits firmly at the cozy end of the
spectrum. I landed my first retail job in 1970 at the Chalet Food Shop, owned
and run by Chuck and Judy. Why “Chalet” in a small northern Illinois town
surrounded by farms? Because Chuck’s sister painted a picture of a Swiss chalet
on the shop’s wall clock. The Chalet was a deli/grocery smaller than the gas
station convenience stores you find along interstates today. Chuck and Judy said
they hired me because they’d see me pass by every day on my way home from
school and they could tell how cold out it was by how red my nose was. When I
applied for a job they said they felt like they already knew me.
Chuck
and Judy were two of the hardest-working, most good-hearted people I’ve ever
known. Stir those two good people together, in one of their large cooking pots,
and you get café owner Mel Gresham in my Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries. Step into
Mel’s café in Last Wool and Testament (or any of the books in the
series) and you’ll smell the fresh cinnamon doughnuts Chuck made every morning,
the slow-roasting beef Judy slipped into the oven, and the pot of bean soup
simmering on the stove. You might meet a few of the Chalet’s more memorable
customers, too.
The
yarn shop in those books has a secondhand name—the Weaver’s Cat—borrowed from a
small shop my parents had for a few years. The yarn shop is also based on a
shop my grandmother had, from the late-30s through the early-50s, called the
Little Wool Shop. I never saw Granny’s shop, so the Weaver’s Cat in the books
is very loosely based on it. That’s part of the fun of writing. Some writers
are into world-building. I go for shop-building and small town-building.
My
favorite retail experience was managing a small independent bookstore in an old
grocery store in northeastern Tennessee. The bookstore was owned by another
hard-working, good-hearted couple named Gary and Marie. They believed in
getting books into people’s hands, supporting local authors, and giving back to
the community. People LOVED that place, appropriately enough named The Book
Place. The day Gary and Marie made the hard decision to close the store was one
of the saddest ever. It was two years after Amazon caught on with the public
and at the same time that every single big box store moved to town—with their
oodles of wares and deep discounts—and opened their doors in the weeks before
Christmas. The Book Place hung on as long as it could but in the end the shiny,
the new, the big, and the cheap won out. That was thirty-six years ago and I
still hear from people who mourn The Book Place. I mourn it, too.
 |
| Spot the Dog (Molly) and a young reader coloring at The Book Place May 27, 1995 |
But that brings up another good thing about writing—it can soothe the mourning soul. Still missing The Book Place, I built a new town, put a thriving little bookshop in it, and let four women pool their money to buy the shop. The catch for the women? The bookshop is in a town on the west coast of Scotland and the women live in central Illinois so they’ll have to uproot their lives. But it’s Scotland! The Highlands! A bookshop! What could possibly go wrong with such an idyllic opportunity? Quite a lot, it turns out, including murder, but the women sort it all out in Plaid and Plagiarism, the first book in my Highland Bookshop Mystery series. That series is my way of returning to bookselling and to Scotland where I lived in the mid-70s.
My
newest retail/writing adventure is the Haunted Shell Shop mysteries. These
books are set on Ocracoke Island, a real place, one of the fragile Outer Banks barrier
islands off the coast of North Carolina. Ocracoke is known for its pristine beaches,
pirate history, wild ponies, historic lighthouse, the resilience of the people
who live there, and the village dating back to the early 1700s. When we lived
in Tennessee, my husband and I took our boys there every summer. We’d walk to the
lighthouse, walk down our favorite street—single lane Howard Street paved only
with sand and oyster shells—eat lunch at the Jolly Roger on the harbor, and always,
always stop in the shell shop.
That
shop is gone, but don’t worry. I’ve built a shell shop of my own, called the
Moon Shell, and put it in an old Ocracoke house on Howard Street. Recent widow
Maureen Nash owns the Moon Shell. She’s a storyteller and a malacologist—a
scientist who studies shells and the creatures who make them. You can visit her
and the shop in Come Shell or High Water and There’ll Be Shell to Pay.
If you’re lucky, you’ll also meet Emrys Lloyd, gentleman, pirate, and ghost.
Real-life
retail is hard work and, quite often, a heartache. Writers can make life a bit
easier for their shopkeeper sleuths, but those sleuths do have real-world
problems. They have bills, inventory issues, staffing problems, problematic
customers, murder. And then there’s the sad fact that they can’t always drop
everything and run after clues during business hours. A writer’s workaround for
that problem is to give the sleuths sidekicks of one sort or another. Ghosts,
for instance. It turns out that ghosts aren’t all that different from the other
characters in a book. They just happen to be dead (which has its own set of
problems).
I
like small things. I’m not all that big myself. And ever since learning about
microcosms in a long-ago high school English class, I’ve liked them, too.
Hearing the definition – a larger world or society illustrated in the form of a
small world – flipped a light bulb on for me. That world-made-small
construction is exactly what I love about stories and it’s probably why I
gravitate toward mysteries in small towns with small shops. A shop, whether
it’s selling books, sliced cheese, or seashells by the seashore, can give us
the world in a compact package with all its friction, drama, failures, and
triumphs. Throw in an unexplained death or two and retail mysteries can be a
shell of a lot of fun.
The
Boston Globe says Molly MacRae writes “murder with a dose of drollery.”
She writes the award-winning, national bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries,
the Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries, and the Highland Bookshop Mysteries.
