A podcast interview with Chris Wieland on The Growing Readers Podcast, a production of The Children’s Book Review, presented in partnership with The Smart Aleck Press.
Award-winning writer and filmmaker Chris Wieland is the mastermind behind the captivating Kat Dylan Mysteries, a series set around your new favorite and formidable girl detective.
In this episode, Chris takes us on a journey through the intricacies of his second book in the series, The Body on the Beach, shedding light on the process of crafting high-stakes scenarios in the fictional setting of Crabtree. Kat Dylan grapples not only with external mysteries but also with internal struggles that intertwine with the lives of those she holds dear. The result? A narrative with page-turning layers that captivate readers from the get-go. As we unravel The Body on the Beach with Chris (no story spoilers included), we discover a thematic undercurrent in his work—the powerful fusion of mind and heart to triumph over evil.
Discussion Topics:
Chris Wieland talks about:
- The ongoing commitment to developing a resilient female protagonist, charting her evolution over time, and exploring the profound impact she has on other characters within the series.
- His satisfaction in crafting narratives with high-stakes scenarios.
- The intricacies of the enchanting setting of Crabtree.
- How emotional stakes heighten for Kat in Body on the Beach as she grapples with individuals she knows and cares about, introducing a poignant emotional struggle to her character development.
- An exploration of how a murder, specifically of someone Kat’s age, reshapes the investigation’s scope and prompts Kat to reflect on her place in the world.
- Weaving setting and backstory into the narrative without it feeling forced and the importance of organic storytelling to avoid imposing elements into the story artificially.
- The significance of creating authentic, flawed characters for young readers, fostering relatability.
- Using intellect and compassion to triumph over evil, steering clear of resorting to violence.
Join us in this exploration of mystery, emotion, and resilience!
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Transcription:
Bianca Schulze
Hi, Chris. Welcome back to the Growing Readers podcast.
Chris Wieland
Hi, Bianca. Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be back here.
Bianca Schulze
Well, it’s a pleasure for me. I know last year we chatted about the Crab Tree monsters, and now you’re back on the show to talk about the second book in your Kat Dylan Mysteries, which is The Body on the Beach. So, last time we chatted, you spoke to the idea and enjoyment of creating a strong and intelligent girl protagonist for tweens and young adult readers. So, is that still what’s driving you as you delve deeper into these characters and the setting of Crabtree, or has it shifted at all?
Chris Wieland
I don’t think it’s shifted at all. I think having a strong tween girl protagonist who is smart, who is tough, and who can solve things that the adults can’t is still my primary focus. I think that what I’ve really tried to do in the second book, and I will continue to do as the series goes on, is that kind of strength, that kind of smarts, that kind of toughness is not static. And so, what I hope you see as a reader in Body on the Beach is that she still is tough and smart, and she still is the best teen detective around.
But Kat is evolving, too, and she’s growing up, and she is affected by the things that happen to her from one book to another. And so, her perspective changes a tiny bit each time. She’s still driven by the same things that she’s always driven by, but she’s a fundamentally different person, as we all are every three or four months as 13, 14- and 15-year-olds. The status quo doesn’t really exist for someone who’s going through these kinds of tumultuous changes.
If there’s been anything that I would say has shifted a little bit from my view the first time around, is I went in thinking all Kat all the time, and I do feel like I’ve gotten some liberty as the series goes on to also really play with the other characters. So little Brother Alec gets probably about the same amount of page time that he got in the first book, but he’s a different kid, too, than he was in the first book. And he’s coming into his own a little bit, in part because of the way Kat is pulling him, but in part in reaction to the way that she’s pulling him. And we see this with their friend Tom, and we see this with their grandfather.
And I really love the idea that I have this series in which I can play with these characters, and they’re not immovable objects, that they are affected by the things that happen to them. And that’s something that I hope really sings out to my readers because they’re not static. They see their parents or the adults in their lives changing. They see their friends changing. And so, I want to reflect that in these books.
Bianca Schulze
That answer, I actually felt that a lot when I was reading The Body on the Beach. So, everything you just said that absolutely comes across to the reader. So well done.
Chris Wieland
Well, thank you. Well, look, I mean, one of the other things I think that is going on for so many of these readers is that when you’re 13, 14 years old, or 10 or eleven years old, the stakes seem so high for everything that you do, every friendship, tweak, every argument with your parents, every whatever it feels like the world is like the stakes are at ten out of ten or eleven out of ten, and everything is so high. And so, what we get to do in this story is reflect on that and show these characters going through that when the stakes really are life and death. And everybody’s felt like their life is life and death stakes, but Kat and Alec are really living through that.
So, there’s a metaphor piece to it, but it’s also watching my own family and watching how people adjust over time and getting the chance to illustrate that and play with it.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, absolutely. Well, The Body on the Beach, as you said, there’s murder in there, right? So, it’s really gritty, but it’s really fun, and it’s very exciting, and it definitely keeps the readers guessing and turning all of those pages right till the end. So, just in general, how fun is it to stay with these characters and revisit them every time?
Chris Wieland
I love sticking with the characters. I love these characters, and I am a regular over-writer. I write probably two to three times as much Kat and Alec dialogue as what ends up in the actual book. And it’s because I love them so much, and I could write a book—I feel like I don’t know if anybody would want to read it—that was just the two of them chatting forever because I do love them so much.
And the characters that are on the outside of the two of them, I love them so much. But I’ve really found that I love the grandfather. He’s got real depths to him that I’ve been able to explore. And Tom, God love him, even though he makes a fool of himself half the time. God love him. He has these things that I love to play on and that. Yeah, I don’t get tired of them.
Crabtree is interesting to create. It’s based on real places, but it’s a fully created town, so it can be sort of whatever I want it to be. And I don’t think I knew I was going to love it as much as I do when I started writing the series. I wanted sort of a type of place, and as I got into writing about this place and the people who live in it, I ended up talking about things I had no idea were going to end up in this story. There’s real depths to this small town that the kids hate, but that is a real breathing, living place where people live, and their lives are upended by the things that these kids are involved in. Yeah.
Bianca Schulze
And let’s be clear. It’s not the reader kids that hate it. It’s Kat and Alec living in the town of Crabtree. And they hate it because they’re from Los Angeles and they’re used to the warm, beautiful weather, and it’s miserable and cold, and.
Chris Wieland
They don’t, you know, and they’re still finding their way with friends, and there’s still not very much to do. And they feel hemmed in because they’ve been free-range kids in this big city before, and now the boundaries are not quite so far away. It’s a lot of difficulty for somebody. And you and I talked about this before. I feel like we’ve spent so much time in literature over the years looking at stories of the country mouse that goes to the big city and how different it is. We don’t spend nearly as much time talking about the city kid who goes to the smaller town and really feels that culture shock, and it’s just as stultifying for them. Right. It’s just as big a deal.
Bianca Schulze
Absolutely. And I think something related to that is during the pandemic, I think a lot of families, mostly the parents, realized, actually, I can work from anywhere.
Chris Wieland
Right.
Bianca Schulze
And a lot of parents did pick up their families and move them from bigger cities into more nature-filled areas. And so, a lot of kids would be experiencing that.
Chris Wieland
I think that’s absolutely true. That’s what it is. And there’s this sensibility of, well, it’s smaller, thus it’s safer. Obviously, we’ve turned that a little bit on its ear in Crabtree now; Kat and Alec have been there for six months in this. You know, they’ve already been a part of two violent, crazy capers. They’ll be going through another one before it’s nine months, and so on. That turns it a little bit on its ear. There’s danger everywhere, right?
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I have to ask you this. Did it take you more or less time to write the second book? So, was it easier to write The Crabtree Monsters or easier to write The Body on the Beach?
Chris Wieland
It was easier to write Body on the Beach than it was to write The Crabtree Monsters. It did take less time. Remember, Crabtree Monsters was a script first, and I changed the gender of the main character. It was not a girl detective when I first wrote the story many, many moons ago. So, in Crabtree Monsters, I had the plot, but I really changed everything else in this one. I was able to start from the character, and that makes a huge difference in filling the space. Right. Once you know, basically, where you’re going.
And I knew that I had to get grittier than I did in the first book. I knew that one of the things that was important to these characters was continuing to put them through things that are harder. You love your characters. As I said, I love Kat and Alec so much, and yet the goal is to continue to put them through trials that really test their limits. And if it feels repetitive, it’s not doing the job. So, I started with a lot more this time around, and it was fun. I still rewrote the whole thing a couple of times from a page one edit because things needed to creak out. Or I liked this bit, but not that bit. I made my villains too evil. I made them not evil enough. That sort of thing.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah.
Chris Wieland
Who the villains are.
Bianca Schulze
No. Right. That’s the thing with mystery books: you can’t give away any spoilers.
Chris Wieland
Right? Right. No spoilers.
Bianca Schulze
Otherwise, the fun gets diluted. But I think something that you just touched on, too, that’s just important. Anybody who’s lived life long enough knows that our biggest growths do come from adversity. And so, I loved what you said, which is that the stakes are a bit higher for things that Kat and Alec experience in this story. There is a body on the beach, as the title says. Not to be a spoiler, but the title says so. So, you know, obviously, the stakes are high so that we can experience maybe some different sides of the characters, and that definitely happens.
So, in case listeners are new to the podcast and they didn’t listen to our first episode of The Crabtree Monsters. So, in my opinion, I think obviously the Kat Dylan Mystery series should be read in order. So, The Crabtree Monsters first and then the body and the beach, but it is also a standalone story. So, I’m curious what your thoughts are, and are you hoping everybody goes and reads the first book? I feel like that’s sure.
Chris Wieland
I hope that everybody reads both of them and reads them in order because I do think that’s a better experience. But if you happen upon Body on the Beach and you haven’t read The Crabtree Monsters, you will get the Gist. And I did work fairly hard to get the facts of the first book that you would need to know to get up to speed on the characters in there. You learn about all the people who are returning, and there’s a lot of returning characters, but all of them work on their own.
And that’s how we’re going to run this series. I really want to have each book be a standalone story that is a better read if you read them all in order and you really see the progression of the character over time, but each of them should stand on their own. I don’t want to do a lot of two-part, three-part, whatever series because I remember being a kid and coming on books that were really great, but I could find number three, but I couldn’t find one and two or whatever.
And the challenge was like, okay, I love this, and I still don’t know what the heck is going on, too. I want everybody to have every book to be a point of entry. It’ll work in that regard.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah. Something that will occasionally irk me about book series is when there’s too much telling of what happened in the first book. And I thought you nailed it. Like, you did such a great job of just getting over the points and making sure that everybody understood that Kat and Alec are living with their grandpa Nick, their parents are separated, and their parents are in different places. And so, these things you made sure the reader knew, but without rehashing basically the whole first book.
Chris Wieland
That’s right. I didn’t want to have previously on the Kat Dylan Mysteries. Right. I wanted you to be able to jump right in and get it. And I felt like that was an important thing to weave through. But yeah, it goes back to that idea of my plan to do at least six books in this series, hopefully more. And the more that we have, the more chance you’re going to run across one of them, but not necessarily the first one, and hopefully, you read the one that you get, and you think, wow, I need to go back and read all these other ones. But there is that ability for you to just pick up and get started.
Bianca Schulze
In our last chat, we explored your heroine, and we’ve done a little bit more today. So, we know she’s tough, we know she’s smart, she can be really sarcastic, but she’s also empathetic. And occasionally, she has a little self-doubt that creeps in like any teenager, like any human being. So, in The Body on the Beach, she goes through an emotional struggle. Do you want to speak to her struggle in this book and how you feel it makes her more heroic?
Chris Wieland
Yeah, well, so to speak, to her emotional struggle, I think that we were talking earlier about stakes, and the stakes in this book feel different to Kat, which is one of the things that I really wanted to play. She. In the Crabtree Monster, she was motivated to figure out who the monster gang was because that would set her grandfather out of jail. And it was also the best shot that she had of getting home to LA at any point. Right. Those were the stakes. She had one goal: she had blinders on, and she was going to achieve that no matter what. Or she thought she was going to try to achieve that no matter what.
Now this is the place where she lives, and she knows these people. They’re not just off to the side. The people around her really are a part of her life. Whether she likes them or not, they’re a part of her life. She understands their know.
Bianca Schulze
We had.
Chris Wieland
We had two murders in The Crabtree Monsters. They are much more off-the-page murders. They happen, and they’re referred to, but Kat doesn’t really see the results. This is a murder—and again, without spoiling everything—of someone who is Kat’s age and who Kat sees as a peer, whether, again, she likes this person or not, it’s a peer. And that changes the scope of things. And her grandfather is free, and he’s good at his job, and he’s investigating this. And so, it makes her investigation more complicated. She could, if she chose to do it if she could do it, which, I mean, I think we could probably argue that for an hour of whether she could actually walk away from it. But theoretically, she could walk away.
And at some point or another, she believes her grandfather could probably figure this out. Obviously, not as quickly as she does it. His book would have to be, like, 500 or 600 pages, as opposed to 300. But she believes that he’s competent to do what he does. And she’s affected by this fact of, like, now I’m seeing not a bank robber who will kill somebody because they’re trying to get away. And it’s that kind of occasional thing, somebody who’s willing to kill someone like me and has done it now, and there are real adults in the room. Maybe I’m not needed in the same way. And it helps her reflect on what her place in this world is, too. Like, she doesn’t have to be the sole hero. She ends up being, in many ways, the sole hero, but that changes the way that she has to look at things, and it changes, I think, the way she thinks about who she wants to be, how she wants to be a part of this world, and how she wants to keep fighting for the things that are important to her. So, I think that’s really important.
The other thing is from high school English; you have the protagonist against an adversary. You have a protagonist against the world, or you have a protagonist against themselves. And in Crabtree Monsters, we had an adversary in the world. The world is still there. We still have an adversary in this book, but this was the first time that she really got to fight against herself. Know, and that’s why it was so important that Alec grows in this book, too, is because he’s gotten to a point now where he’s like, look, I’m not just a good-looking sidekick. I am pushing back on you when you’re making mistakes. And that keeps her honest along the way.
So, every complication we can throw in her path, including self-doubt, which every teen has, which every grown-up has, makes her a stronger, better hero because I want my readers to read that and be like, yeah, I felt like that. I’m not as tough as I pretend I am, but I can still do what’s important.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, well, let me ask you this. As a writer and a filmmaker, what are the elements of story—there’s a great book, and I’m totally blanking on the author, but The Anatomy of Story. But what are the elements of story that you think about as you’re writing or the elements of story that maybe when you run into a problem with your character on where to take them or the plot on where to take it? What are the elements of story that you fall back on to help you work your way through?
Chris Wieland
I mean, it’s a really good question for me. My first fallback is always character. I’m writing the third book right now, and it’s something that happened to me just in the past week where I’ve gotten up to a certain point in the book, and I know what’s going to happen in another certain point, and I’ve got to bridge the gap. I didn’t outline well enough or figure it out well enough. Right. I had an idea, but I don’t like it. Now. That gets me from point A to point B. And so, a little bit of it is reflection on other books and other authors and thinking about how authors I value have done similar problems. So, I’ll go back, and I’ll go through the books that I really loved growing up, especially in this genre.
But at the end of the day, it’s really either a conversation with myself or a conversation with my kids about, okay, I know that Kat and Alec are going to get here. What would they do at this point to get them? And it becomes this conversation about who they are because they’ve always got to be true to those personal traits. What would make them move in that direction? Because you can only have so many.
There’s a Raymond Chandler quote about how when you run out of character development, that’s when you have someone jump into the room with guns blazing. And that works. And certainly, I’m guilty of using that, but you can’t do it every time. The character has to drive it. And so, I think that is a big piece.
Setting obviously comes into it a little bit. And then the other thing is just the idea of pacing. And this is where the film piece, I think, serves me really well, is if getting myself from point A to point B is going to take too long or it’s going to be like, okay, I’m going to go get a snack kind of moment, then we got to find a better way. Right? We’ve got to figure out a way to get them there quicker. That’s still logical, but that makes those things happen.
I think about all of those things, and I’m always thinking, too, about just how to make it visual so that when my reader is going through it, can they see what we’re talking about. Can they imagine the scene, even if it is them going through newspaper clippings and trying to figure out the backstory of whatever? What does that look like? Okay, can you see yourself doing that? Great. And how do we get ourselves out of that? Like, what’s the top and the bottom of every scene that way?
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, absolutely. Well, when I was reading it, there were a few moments where I realized I was thinking very visually in my mind. Again, no spoilers, but there is an icebreaking scene. And that one, I could totally see it. I saw it cinematically. It looked like a movie in my mind. So well done.
Chris Wieland
Thank you. That’s one of my favorite sequences in the book. It was one of my favorites to write, and it doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally, you get to write things that have suspense in them, where you’re in suspense as you’re writing them like you want to maintain as you’re typing away that feeling that you’ve got, where the blood is pumping really fast, and you’re feeling like you don’t know what’s going to happen next.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah. All right, well, I might be putting you on the spot here, so if we need to skip this, we can.
Chris Wieland
No, it’s okay.
Bianca Schulze
Do you happen to have a copy near you that’s possibly, like, a passage that you would want to read that would be a highlight for you?
Chris Wieland
I can go get a copy of it, and I didn’t prep for that, but we can figure it out only.
Bianca Schulze
If you want to, because I get it. So, we can chop this little bit right out.
Chris Wieland
Well, let me see what we can do.
Bianca Schulze
All right, perfect. I’ll wait.
Chris Wieland
Okay. I’m going to take something from pretty early in the book because of the spoiler phenomenon. I think that there’s too much risk of throwing out a fact or something that would give it away. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to read from chapter three. This is The Body on the Beach. This is where Kat is meeting up with a girl from her class named Gabby, who has, out of the blue, approached her. They’re not friends, and Kat can’t possibly believe that what she’s being approached about could be anything. But Gabby is persistent, and so I think this is a fun place to read and cut me off if I go too far, if I keep going forever, and you’re just like, God, stop. Okay. So, this is the chapter: [Listen to the podcast or read the book for the chapter.]
Bianca Schulze
I loved that you read that particular section because I think it does a really great job of showing who Kat is—the main protagonist. She’s got attitude, she’s got sass. She thinks about things. It’s got your setting. You know what the season is, you know that it’s winter, there’s snow. We’ve got a sense of time. Right? So, I love that you’re able to weave that all in. And then also what we talked about before, about when it is a series in there. For anyone who hadn’t read The Crabtree Monsters, we actually learned a little bit about what took place without having to rehash The Crabtree Monsters.
Chris Wieland
That’s right. That’s what I tried to do, was to try to insert pieces of it where it would naturally, organically fit so that we didn’t have to be like, okay, and this is the story of what happened, blah, blah, blah. But it would come up three months later. And it’s funny. This week, for the virtual book tour that we’re doing with Children’s Book Review, I did a guest blog posting, or I don’t think it’s gone up yet, but I wrote it.
And there were so many scenes that also referred to Crabtree Monsters without, again, spoiling the plot or getting us off track. And there’s one that absolutely killed me to cut out, but it was really long, and it was just a red herring about the current plot. And I felt, like, great that I’m able to put that out there in the world because I really did like the scene. But, yeah, it’s got to be organic. It’s got to feel like it makes sense in the world. And not that it’s like, oh, here’s the author writing something so that you can hear his voice. You don’t need to hear my voice.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, absolutely. And you know what I’ll do in the show notes of this episode: I’ll include the link to the Lost Chapter. So, anyone who wants to go read what Chris ended up chopping out, I’ll have that in the show notes.
Chris Wieland
I love it. Thank you so much.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, you’re welcome. All right, well, what have you learned about your audience, the readers, since you started writing the Kat Dylan mysteries? And how has it changed the way you write or what you include?
Chris Wieland
I think the thing that I’ve learned for the good, definitely, is that the people who I’ve spoken to, the kids that I speak to who have read the book, are really hungry for this kind of work. And you and I talked about this before. I am a true-blue detective fiction lover. I have been since I was a little kid. It’s a genre that I feel is particularly poignant at this age where you’re in middle school, where the whole world feels like a mystery, and it exists more or less in the world that we experience. I’ve definitely heard a hunger for that that is really refreshing and really energizing as I write through in terms of what I’ve changed about it.
I think that hearing from my readers, adults and kids, has definitely buoyed my sense of wanting to round out the rest of the world and to sort of give some depth to the supporting characters that I certainly didn’t try to skip on when I started the series, but that it becomes more and more important to me that they really are fully drawn characters and know again, without spoiling even mean Girl Ava has some depths to her that we find in this book, and we’re going to see her again and again and again. But being able to try to make them into full people so that they don’t just seem like types or characters, that’s been super important to me.
The other thing I think that’s been really interesting is to talk to adults and hear their views on the characters. I was sitting with a reader who I know just last week, and he’s read both books now. And he said, in that first book, I loved the book, but Kat really annoyed me because she was so, like, she fought back against every adult. And he’s like, in the second book, I feel like I get it more because the mom is really shrill at times, and the dad seems like he means well, but he’s ultimately disappointing, and the adults don’t carry the water. And I was like, if I’ve done that, then I feel like I’ve done my job right.
And again, I think we’ve talked about this before, too. This sensibility that my girl protagonist, at 13 years old, confronted with the demons and monsters that she’s figurative and real that she’s dealing with should be. This ray of sunshine is not what I experience with my own kids or with the kids that I know. It is tough being a kid. And the more that we can reflect on that, the more that we can make kids prickly at times and difficult at times and be envious of other people. Kat is envious of her brother, even though he’s younger, even though he hasn’t saved the day as many times as she is. But he’s more popular than she is, and he seems more resilient at times than she is. And those things drive her. It doesn’t take over her life, but it drives her nuts at times.
I like seeing those sorts of ways that we have created characters that are not. You’re not necessarily always rooting for them. They do screw up over and over and over again, but that’s the way that they learn how they’re going to be the heroic people that they are.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you’re a dad of two, right?
Chris Wieland
Yes.
Bianca Schulze
And I’m a mom of three. And I don’t know if this is something that irks you, but for me, sometimes I feel like the world puts all this pressure on kids to behave in a typical way or to even be perfect. Some kids put that on themselves naturally, but I think the world is like— if a kid misbehaves or doesn’t perform in the classroom in a typical manner, there’s just so much pressure. And it’s the adults that put that pressure and tell everybody what typical should be. And it is so rare that any adult acts perfectly.
Chris Wieland
Absolutely.
Bianca Schulze
Sometimes, I feel so frustrated with this societal pressure on what is typical. And so, I love that your characters are gritty. You see who they are, and because they live in a world where maybe they don’t have a lot of parental input, they actually get to be who they are. And I love that.
Chris Wieland
I think you hit the nail on the head. I think kids are under. Certainly, we thought we were under pressure when we were growing up, and I’m a Gen Xer. Growing up in the 1980s, I certainly felt like there was pressure on me, the kind of pressure that kids today feel to, like you said, perform in the classroom, perform on the field, perform and be this sort of, like, perfect angel friend to their parents, like, whatever the little adult is out there. And honestly, I keep expecting to see kids burn out from this because it’s so much. And you’re right. So many kids put pressure on themselves anyway. Kat and Alec certainly do, although it exhibits in different ways, but they don’t have. I mean, they get in trouble.
Bianca Schulze
There are consequences.
Chris Wieland
There are consequences every time they do something along the way, but they’re willing to take the consequences if it’s for the right thing. And that’s the other piece of it, is, I think, that we’ve created, societally, this universe where it’s like you should really be afraid of all the consequences. And it’s like sometimes the consequences are what teaches you the lesson. Maybe you got a failed year on your test or whatever, and that taught you that you need to study harder. Or maybe it’s something more where it’s like you got a consequence for your action, but you knew you were doing the right thing. I think of older than Kat and Alec but young people who protest for causes that are just in the world. Right. And that may mean that you end up in jail. That may mean that you end up in trouble with your school or your parents or whatever, but if you’re doing what’s right, you’re willing to take on those consequences.
And I feel like, yeah, we’ve created this thing where the consequences are so scary, so terrible, that we’re missing a lot of the boat.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah. And maybe people aren’t being as true to themselves as they could be.
Chris Wieland
That’s right.
Bianca Schulze
So, then the other topic I want to bring up is it is a murder mystery, and people all around the world are always looking for reasons as to why not read a book. A murder mystery is a genre, and I love that it exists because it is a real thing that actually happens in the world. Young people do get murdered. People of all ages get murdered. It’s a sad truth. And I think having books like yours out there are an introduction to explore these topics in a safe place in a fictional world, so that when you do maybe encounter it, maybe the news is on in your house, or you’ve had a moment to sort of process on how people cope with that and things that do happen out in the world. Anyway, that’s my take on it. But obviously, you just love the murder mystery. But do you have anything you want to add there?
Chris Wieland
No. Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. I also think that one of the things that I think we can do in this genre, and that worries me about some other genres, is I don’t want my kids living in a world where, in their entertainment, death and consequences and violence have no resonance in the world. Look, I take my kids to every Marvel movie and whatnot, and we love them, but there’s so many people who die on screen, and it’s almost cartoonish, which is appropriate because it’s all comic books. But I think there is something that you can do in a murder mystery that you cannot do in a lot of fantasy and a lot of those kinds of books where these are real things that are happening to a fictional person. But she could be a real person.
And what’s important to me is that there can be this sort of real-world recognition that these things do happen. And I think you’re right. I think it’s an opportunity to really explore what the world is like from a safe distance. Obviously, you’re reading it in this book, but that’s something that I think has resonance for our characters. And I have definitely heard from people where they say, gosh, do you want to do gritty for nine- to 13-year-olds? And in general, my response is, as nicely as I can put it, that the world is gritty for nine- to 13-year-olds. They are aware of many more horrible things than I put into my books.
And there are certain places I’m not going to ever go with violence. There’s got to be a safe distance that we are able to have. But look, my kids have been through lockdowns of their schools, and my kids have been through seeing the world for what it is and what I don’t want to do. It’s twofold. I want to be able to explore that there’s meaning to that and that you can still protect yourself and you can be safe. And all that’s don’t. One of the things I’m really conscious about with Kat and Alec is there’s never a point where they pick up a gun or a weapon, a real weapon, and go after the bad guys and get deadly. They’ll pick up a stick or a chair or something like that and defend themselves, but they are not themselves using deadly force. That is something that happens, that bad guys and cops are involved in that and not them.
And I think that’s an important point that I want to make, too, is like, we don’t want to create this imaginary hero narrative where it’s like all the world needs is for all of us to take up arms against all the evil forces of the world. I want to tell a story for kids about how we use our minds and our hearts and our camaraderie, our fellowship with other people to defeat the evil in the world. In these books, it is metaphorical, but the idea is that these kids count on their minds, count on their friends or their loved ones and that they stand up but are not themselves. This sort of, like, miracle swordsman or gun-blazing Harrow, that’s not of interest to me.
And I feel like that’s what makes the grit acceptable, is that we still keep that distance, and we don’t turn it into a cowboy, whatever. And not to demean cowboys, but it’s not this sort of like eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It’s much more cerebral than that.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, absolutely. It’s that problem-solving with heart and knowing when to fall back on your community and that there is a community there to support. Well, as you’ve mentioned, which is exciting news, there’s the third Kat Dylan mystery book. It’s Turnabout. Do you want to just speak a little bit of the overall arc between the crab tree monsters and getting to Turnabout?
Chris Wieland
Sure. So, one of the things I decided really early on in the series is that my characters were going to age, but they weren’t going to age in real time because it takes me too darn long to write a book and to get it published. And so, crab Tree monsters came out a year ago. They would already be a whole year older. I would lose this sort of fresh time to talk about the stories of these characters at this age. So, Body on the Beach takes place three months after Crabtree Monsters. Turnabout again takes place three months after that. So, we’re doing seasons. So, fall, winter, and spring will be next, and the next books will be in summer. So that’s a piece of it.
The other thing that happened as I was finishing up Body on the Beach occurred to me in writing Turnabout; I already had the plot, and I was already starting to sketch it out, but I decided to set these books in an actual year. And originally, I was going to just make it kind of a timeless series. Right. It’s vaguely now they all have cell phones, so it’s not the long ago, but they all have laptops. But I was going to kind of be not sure of when it took place. But after I wrote Crabtree Monsters and it was published, we got out of the war in Afghanistan, which is where their mom is stationed, and the world continued to sort of churn and change. And the next thing that happened after that was we were in COVID. This doesn’t spoil anything except that it’s in he end of The Body on the Beach, it takes place in January of 2020, and the next book will take place in April of 2020, which is when we were all in lockdown.
And I didn’t know that I wanted to do that when I started sketching out Turnabout. But then I realized that for so many of my readers and so many of their parents, that was a life-altering event. And I feel like now that it’s over, we tend to look back on the pandemic as like, oh, remember during the pandemic, we did this thing, but it’s over now thing, and it’s fine. And that’s not what the experience is for young people at all, right? That was a year plus of their lives where they didn’t get to go to school; they didn’t get to do the things that they wanted to do if they were older; they didn’t get to go to the prom. Or graduate with their friends if they were younger, they missed out on friendships and so much else. And so, I thought, let’s talk about that world and what that was like for tweens, and let’s be really real about the loneliness of it, and let’s be really real about how frustrating it was and how immersive it was.
And then let’s put a mystery on top of it because how much more challenging and fun is that going to be for Kat and Alec and their friends? If not, only are they stuck in their houses, and they can’t go to school, and they’re missing out on all the things that they take for granted, but also, on top of it, there’s something else that they have to figure out. There’s a puzzle that they have to solve, and there’s real consequences. Again, we’re going to put them through their paces.
But that’s something that I really felt like we needed to do, is we needed to talk about these feelings and, for lack of a better way, injury to self that that pandemic time did to so many young people and give it voice. And from the safe distance of a murder mystery, right from the safe distance of, wow, we’re going to read about this, but we can hear what Kat’s thinking this time. We can hear what Alec is thinking. So, we’re playing with that and what it’s like to be locked up in that house and what it’s like for Grandpa Nick, who’s a police chief and who is now pulling triple duty. Right. Because cops and first responders had so much on their plate. Let’s play with, like, let’s play with what the teachers in the school are going through. Let’s play with how disruptive it was to our whole world because. And then it becomes a piece of the mystery.
And I’m about halfway done. I’m going to try to be done by the end of the calendar year. I’m super excited about doing this because it’s something that is so real for my kids. I know it’s so real for so many of my readers. And that’s something that really can make a difference for what Kat Dylan is all about.
Bianca Schulze
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s like what we just said, too, is when you are able to explore a topic within a fictional story, it’s safe, and it’s a great way to maybe process and move through your own feelings. And also, just in terms of connecting with a character the kids are going to love, they’re going to really relate to their own experience. They’re going to have a whole lot more empathy for the characters, too. I can just.
Chris Wieland
And, you know, it’s funny, one of the things that we do very early in the book, again, these are not spoilers, but now Kat and Alec are full-on masking up. Not everybody does in Crabtree watching. The difference between that and watching people they know get sick watching. There’s an early comment in the book that Kat makes about, like, I thought this town was dead already, but they’re walking places, and there’s nobody out. And how eerie that was. And I remember that feeling and how spooky it felt to be in a downtown of a city or in your main drag of your suburb or whatever, and there’s nobody there. So, it’s a really fun, atmospheric thing to do, and it’s really fun to juxtapose with spring because things are coming back to life, but it’s so quiet and eerie. Yeah.
Bianca Schulze
I just was imagining Grandpa Nick having to wash down his V8 juice bottle before he bought it in from the supermarket.
Chris Wieland
Again, spoilers. But they have the table because we’re still at that point in the pandemic. My household had. We had a table, and I would go to the grocery store and bring everything. I put it on the table. We had a clean table from the store table. Contaminated, contaminated table. I would take off my clothes in my backyard and then go in and take a shower immediately after going to the grocery store. And so, all of that, those rituals were a part of our kids’ lives for a year. Yeah.
Bianca Schulze
I love it. My eyes are literally watering. I mean, I’m glad you’ve said it in that time.
Chris Wieland
Thank you.
Bianca Schulze
Well, let’s see. Okay. As an award-winning writer and a filmmaker and the father of two children, like we just discussed, do you ever struggle with finding time to sit down and read?
Chris Wieland
Oh, heck yeah.
Bianca Schulze
Sorry. Hold on. Let me rephrase that. I meant to say, do you ever struggle to find time to sit down and write?
Chris Wieland
Heck, yeah. The answer is the same. Heck yeah. And philosophically, I know there’s time. And when I’m operating on all cylinders. I did an exercise a few years ago. I heard about it somewhere, and it really resonated with me. And that is the idea that there’s 24 hours in the day and you sleep for. Well, I sleep for, like, seven of them, and you work for, like, eight of them. And there’s picking up and dropping off stuff for, let’s say, two or so. And then there’s another hour of eating and whatever. There’s another hour if you’re lucky, exercise, and you put out some time. What I ended up doing when I did an inventory of my day-to-day life, most days, I really come out at, like, 21 or 22 hours. And so that means there’s 2 hours or more that I could be writing. And so, I run out of excuses very often.
It happens. Occasionally, I have days where; I have days where I get stuck. But in the long run, it feels like there’s no excuse. And that’s become a mantra for me, is there are enough hours in the day you can get these things done. You have to stay on track. You have to remember what it’s all about, what’s important to you. And also, this is where I have to stop pounding my chest and trying to outdo myself. There was a time in my life when I could write five pages, eight pages in a day, like, just rattle them off. Right now, it’s more like three, but it’s more about the time and putting it in than it is about anything else.
So, it’s definitely an exercise, and there’s definitely days where you get to that point in the day where you’re like, it’s time for me to write.
Chris Wieland
But it is a challenge that is worth taking up because at the end of the process, if you put in that hour, if you put in more, whatever it is, just like putting in the time to exercise, just like putting in the time to drive your kids wherever and spend time with them in the car, that way it pays off. There’s dividends to it. So, like I said, I’m not 100%, but I do generally stay focused on that, remembering that there is enough time. You just have to take it. That’s what I’ve been operating on, definitely through all of Body on the Beach, and I’ve been trying to do it for Turnabout as well.
Bianca Schulze
I love it. I’m a big quote person. If I come across a quote I like, I’ll write it down. And I have a quote right next to me where I’m working. And there’s always time for what’s most important.
Chris Wieland
That’s right.
Bianca Schulze
And I think it was Marie Forleo who said it. I like to give credit when I remember. I’m pretty sure it was Marie Forleo, but there’s always time for what’s most important, and you just have to know what it is you want to prioritize.
Chris Wieland
Yeah. And you have to be willing to go on the journey. I think when I was a younger writer, I spent so much time thinking about the destination, when I was going to get that project done, and when I was going to get whatever response from it that I was going to get. And maybe partly because my kids do get involved in the editing process with these books, and they do give me ideas about the voices of the characters, but the journey is really the rewarding piece of it. And so, if you think about it in those terms, doing that hour a day, churning that out is much more rewarding than, like, God help us if you get to the end of that manuscript and you’re like, oh, I don’t even like it. You’re going to have those moments. Here’s another quote. Writing is like ordering an extra-large pizza, is what my writing teacher in grad school told me. He’s like, so you get to the end of it, and you’re just like, imagine if you ate the whole pizza, right? And you’d be like, oh, my God, I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. You feel kind of sick, but he’s like, but you didn’t, right? You ate a piece of it, and then you ate another piece of it, and then another and another. And that’s the process. And if you think about it in those terms, it becomes less about the whole and more about just the work that you’re doing. And that’s super.
Bianca Schulze
All right, Chris, what is the one most important thing if listeners were just to take away one thing that we spoke about today?
Chris Wieland
Sure.
Bianca Schulze
What would you want that to be?
Chris Wieland
Look, I hope that the listeners check out the crab tree monsters and The Body on the Beach. I hope they enjoy the ride of that process. But also, I want to speak again about the way that the mystery genre is so valuable to readers at this age that it does exactly what we talked about with raising the stakes and creating moral decisions for its heroes to have because that’s what our kids are going through on a day-to-day basis. And the stakes may not be as high as murders and kidnappings and bank robberies, but symbolically, they are.
And in the importance that everyday life has to our kids who are going through all of their challenges, the challenge of every day, of school, of friends, of all the other things. The mystery genre really helps kids to understand what they’re going through, helps them to feel like they’re not alone, and, along the way, solve the puzzles that they’re trying to solve in their everyday life, even if it looks on the page like they’re figuring out who the big bad is or figuring out how they’re going to save that person. That’s what’s so great about this genre, and I hope that I can deliver a little bit of that to my readers.
Bianca Schulze
You absolutely do. Thank you so much for writing your books.
Chris Wieland
Thank you.
Bianca Schulze
Oh, a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m really invested in the characters of Kat and Ali, so I can’t wait to meet them again in their next exciting mystery. So, thank you so much.
Chris Wieland
Thank you. This has been great. I love coming back here. Thank you so much to you and to the children’s book review. Bye.
About the Book
The Body on the Beach: A Kat Dylan Mystery
Written by Chris Wieland
Illustrated by Leanne Franson
Ages 9+ | 360 Pages
Publisher: The Smart Aleck Press (2023) | ISBN-13: 9798985701326
Publisher’s Book Summary: In this sequel to 2022’s The Crabtree Monsters, thirteen-year-old girl detective Kat Dylan and her little brother, Alec, are back!
Even after cracking the case of the century, Kat and Alec are still stuck in Crabtree, Michigan, and suffering through a long, cold Midwest winter. When Gabby, a middle school “mean girl,” approaches her with a problem, Kat can’t imagine it’s worth her time—or that there’s a chance Gabby’s problems will lead to the next big mystery. But when Gabby becomes the focus of the local police, especially Kat’s Grandpa Nick, her interest is piqued. Before Kat can get to the bottom of things, she finds Gabby lying dead on Crabtree’s frozen beach.
Suddenly, Kat is awash in questions. Who killed Gabby? Could Kat have saved her if she’d paid closer attention to the mean girl’s troubles? From there, Kat, with Alec in tow, sets out to find answers and bring the murderer to justice. Along the way, she learns that Gabby’s case is tied to another investigation: the kidnapping of a rich kid from Chicago whose family is intertwined with the people who own most of Crabtree.
As she and Alec dig, they find themselves at odds with kidnappers and killers, private eyes and cops, and more than a few kids and adults who would just like them to go away.
The Body on the Beach is a strong sequel in what is proving to be an engrossing middle-grade mystery series.
Dr. Jen Harrison, The Children’s Book Review
Buy the Book
Show Notes
Chris Wieland is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. He is also the father of two fierce children, including a tough, smart tween who helped him find the voice of his protagonist, Kat Dylan. He lives in Southern California with his family.
Resources:
For more information, visit https://www.thesmartaleckpress.com/
Thank you for listening to the Growing Readers Podcast episode: Chris Wieland Talks About The Body on the Beach: A Kat Dylan Mystery. For the latest episodes from The Growing Readers Podcast, Subscribe or Follow Now.
