Photo by Casey McCormick

Short Version

Long, Drawn–Out Version

One of the most frequently repeated bits of writing advice is: Write What You Know. But Toni L.P. Kelner managed to avoid doing so for many years, until she first began writing mysteries.

Toni started writing in the ninth grade, receiving her first rejection slip while she was in high school. Realizing that writing fiction was hardly the most reliable way to make a living, Kelner looked for a way to both write and pay bills, and settled on technical writing, specialized in software documentation. She also kept writing on her own, and published a few articles and limericks while working on fiction and collecting many more rejection slips.

Since Toni’s parents are native North Carolinians, and she has family scattered all through the South, it surprised everybody when her technical writing career and a romance with future husband Steve brought her up to Massachusetts in 1987. It turned out to be just what she needed to jump-start her writing, and to convince her to follow that hoary writing advice.

What did she know? She knew the South, and living away from it for the first time in her life, she finally realized that it was worth knowing. Feeling nostalgic, and more than a little homesick, she started writing a mystery novel set in the fictional mill town of Byerly, North Carolina. Down Home Murder, the first Laura Fleming mystery, appeared in 1993. Other novels have followed. Wed and Buried, the eighth in the series, was released in 2003.

At first, Toni wasn't sure if people outside the South would appreciate the flavor of her writing. (As she puts it, she was "writing with a Southern accent.") She needn't have worried. She's got fans in all corners of the country, and has received fan mail from as far away as the Netherlands. The mystery community has been just as approving. She's been nominated for an Agatha, an Anthony, and a Macavity for short stories, and Death of a Damn Yankee was nominated for a Romantic Times BOOKclub Reviewers' Choice award for Best Amateur Sleuth Novel. Kelner was nominated for a Romantic Times BOOKclub Career Achievement Award for Mystery Series in 2002, and won the award in 2003.

After eight Laura Fleming books, and several short stories set in and around Byerly, Toni was ready to move in a new direction. Once again, she’s decided to write what she knows and is drawing on a fascination with the entertainment industry and a misspent youth watching too much TV. For her new series, she created Tilda Harper a freelance entertainment reporter who specializes in “where are they now?” articles about the formerly famous. Unlike Laura Fleming, who is usually by aunts, uncles, cousins, and more distant relations, Tilda’s only nearby relative is a stepsister. Instead of a happily married mother of two like Laura, Tilda lives with a roommate she doesn’t particularly like and is enthusiastically single. And in perhaps the greatest departure of all, Tilda isn’t even a little bitSouthern. Toni is having a wonderful time writing about her.

Toni's husband Steve, the reason for her move north, is a consultant in knowledge management at the executive search firm Egon Zehnder International and a writer in his own right. His first short story appeared alongside one of his wife's in the anthology Undertow in 2003, and his book Motivate Your Writing! was published by the University Press of New England in the Spring of 2005.

It’s too soon to say Toni and Steve’s daughters, ten-year-old Maggie and seven-year-old Valerie, are going to follow in their parents’ footsteps and become writers. If they do, and decide to write what they know, Toni expects them to produce books on Pokemon, Neopets, computer games, and of course, living in New England.