Interview #40: The Baseball Mystery Writer
Nicole Asselin, mixing murder and baseball, a time-honored tradition
Intro
Nicole Asselin writes what are called “cozies”, which she explains in the interview. But the quick definition of a cozy mystery is: “a sub-genre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur offstage, the detective is an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.”
After my talk with Joyce Miller, she said I should reach out to Nicole, who was one of her favorite people she’s met since she got into the baseball world with her book.
She has a day job where she writes all day as well, three cats (which, to a certain someone reading this who only has two cats… see how happy she is with three???), a diehard Boston fan card that she just got to enjoy a Celtics championship with. We talked about growing up a military child, Boston sports and her whole writing journey, from process to ideas to getting it published.
Her books can be found here:
Murder at First Pitch (Amazon link)
Concession Stand Crimes (Amazon link)
If you’d like to learn more about her or reach out, check out her website:
https://nicoleasselinwriter.com/
The Road to Massachusetts
Where are you from? You don't have an accent, so I know you didn't start in Boston.
No. So my grandfatha, there you go, there's the accent. My grandfather, Grandpa Asselin, he grew up in New Hampshire. They ended up in Meriden, CT, which is, if you're looking on the map, it's by Hartford. So it's in smack dab in the middle of the state. So you get half Red Sox, half Yankees fans.
My dad and my mom both grew up in that city. Grandfather was always a Red Sox fan, which he then passed to my father, which then passed to me and my brother. So we were always Red Sox Nation from the jump. At the time in the late 80s, 90s, they didn't have the New England Sports Network (NESN). They only had the Yankees network, the YES network. So we would listen to all the Red Sox games on the radio, which to this day is still how I prefer to listen to baseball. I think it's just cause that's how I grew up listening to it, and you can kind of do other things while you're doing it and not miss anything really.
I was born in Connecticut, at the naval sub base in Groton, so luckily I have the New England blood even though I was raised everywhere else. My brother, on the other hand, and if he hears this, he's going to be mad that I mentioned him, but he was born in Georgia. So he was always our Little Rebel, our little bulldog. He’s in DC now. We're all sort of Nationals fans. I worked in DC for six years when they moved to the new stadium.
So you grew up in Connecticut, moved to Hawaii…
Here we go. Ready for this? Started in Connecticut. I think we moved to Tennessee for 18 months. I don't remember that because I was a baby. My dad was on a submarine in Connecticut and he was a supply officer, so they have depots throughout the country. He was in a depot in Tennessee, the Naval Supply School was in Athens, which is where my brother was born, in Georgia. Then we moved to Hawaii for three years. And then then we moved to Monterey, CA for 18 months. The Naval Postgraduate School is there. So we lived on base in Monterey. Then we moved our first go-round to Mechanicsburg, PA because there's a supply depot there.
I did 4th, 5th, 6th and the beginning of 7th grade. Then we moved to Jacksonville, I did 7th and 8th grade in Jacksonville, and then my dad had the choice of Guam or back to Mechanicsburg, and I was like, I don't wanna go to Guam. Like, what am I gonna do in Guam? So we went back to Mechanicsburg for nine years and he retired out of Norfolk, VA. Then I moved to DC and then Boston and then DC and then Boston.
(if you’re scoring at home, that’s 13 moves I counted, give or take)
Where did you go to school?
I went to school at Curry College in Milton, MA. I knew I didn't want to stay in Pennsylvania at the time. I was like, I want to get out, I want to go to school in the city. Curry just came up and I just loved it. Milton, MA is right on the border of Boston, so they would have shuttles into the city, and it was a small campus and it was contained. So I liked the idea of being able to walk everywhere. I would take the shuttle into Boston every weekend. And my friends who grew up in Massachusetts, their moms would get so nervous, they're like, Nicole is going to the city by herself? I go in the middle of the day, I'm going to Starbucks. Like I'm not going to Newberry St or the Common or something.
The Common is a dangerous place? I took a nap there once!
I was gonna say everything's dangerous in a certain situation. Would I go to Boston Common at one in the morning? No. Would I go at 11 in the morning and just set up a blanket with a book? Yeah, no problem. I'm not doing crazy stuff. I was a college student. I couldn’t afford to do crazy stuff. I didn't enjoy my first year-and-a-half, I was like I'm going to transfer, I don't want to be here, I am not making any friends that I want to be friends with anymore, like it's not my thing. But I stuck it out and then sophomore year, I made friends with my friends who are still my friends.
The first year I was going for child psychology and I was like, I freaking hate kids, what am I doing? Let's change to sport psychology because I love baseball, love analyzing people. And then I was like, well, I don’t wanna go to school for 10 years, so I was like, no, let's do English, and the rest is history. Here I am now with an English degree in creative writing and a dance minor, so nothing that I can use in the real world, really.
Note: I remember my freshman year there was a brief period in the spring I wanted to come home. My roommate and I had gotten sick of each other, core classes were boring and I didn’t party enough to keep up with the friends I’d made there. Then my dad drove down and took me out golfing. We didn’t talk about anything until the 13th hole when he said I should stick it out and that good friends are harder to find but they last forever. And now 20 years later I’m still close with several of them. And then he recommended I take an extra club for the wind and I blasted it over the green. So he was 1/2 on fatherly advice that hole.
That’s a lot of moving. Growing up, we moved once, and it was literally 3 miles down the road. I could’ve walked half my stuff to the new place. It’s kind of wild how in the military, so much of where you’re stationed is random so you never know where you’ll be and when, so Nicole could’ve wound up in Nebraska or Florida or Houston and we’d have Minute Maid Park murder mysteries… But she seems like she was always destined for New England and it’s working out pretty nicely.
The Baseball Bug
How did you get super into baseball?
That's a great question. I always kind of had it in the background. In college because, again, before the World Series, it was like $10 bleacher seats. You can go when you're young, you just drink beer and sit in the sun all day. My friends would come up from Pennsylvania, we went to a Red Sox-Yankees series and it was like $15 bleacher seats. I started as I came back up here for college, going to more games. That was also the era of Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy, on the NESN broadcast, which everybody knows they were magic together. And so I think I fell in love with everything there.
(here is my favorite Orsillo/Remy moment)
Then 2004 happened and, if we want to really get deep, 2003 happened while I was still in college in Milton. We’re getting personal… I had mono, I lived in a suite with two singles, two doubles. All my roommates were in the common room watching the 2003 (ALCS) Game 7, Pedro, Grady Little, Tim Wakefield game. I was in my room watching by myself. We all had our windows open. Aaron Bleeping Boone hit the home run. It was dead silent in Milton, MA. It was eerie how silent it was. So that was a bummer. Then I moved home to Pennsylvania, and they won the World Series. And I just remember through the whole Yankee series, coming back from three down, I would stay up till two in the morning, and then the next day I'd call my grandpa and I'd be like, did you watch the game? (oh, this home run?)
And so we started connecting a lot through that. I mean we were connected. He was a great guy and we would always have fun, but this was something that him and I had together, like I would just call and be like, “Oh my God, did you see that game? Oh my God, Grady Little sucks.” Probably for a lot of people of a certain age, 2004 was the pivotal moment. I know these guys, like they almost feel like they’re family. They have such personalities. Tim Wakefield just seems like a great guy. Manny was Manny. David Ortiz looked just like a big teddy bear. Like that's a cool group to hang out with. From then on, I would buy the MLB package so I could watch every Red Sox game in DC. Then I finally remembered I like listening to it on the radio. So it's a lot cheaper if you buy the radio package.
It just always felt like home in New England. And as I became more and more, dare I say, obsessed with baseball, it just seemed like a perfect fit to move up here. We have Joe Castiglione as our radio guy and he's been at the Red Sox for 40 years. So his voice is still the same voice that I heard with my grandfather so it kind of connects me that way. So it's it's all like a little comforting hug.
Now I feel like I've become that New Englander who's just entrenched in it. I listen to sports radio every day, which is annoying, but I can't help it.
What keeps you a baseball fan?
I think it's a little bit of everything. It's the nostalgia factor of growing up with it. Maybe less this year than other years, even when they're losing, there's still players that you root for. It's just the people you're rooting for. I always rooted for Terry Francona as the manager. Now, even though he's injured, Tristan Casas is my new favorite player. There's always new, fresh meat, new blood in the game. Raffi Devers just is adorable so I cheer him on. It's more of the players, maybe, than the team because obviously we hate ownership and wish they would spend more money.
It's a comfort thing, too. I know what I'm going to get. It's comfort, and I feel like baseball is a good sport with that; even with the changes, with the pitch clock, the sport itself is still the same. It's also like real people sports. Like football, I would never play in my life, but if someone invited me to go to hit a few balls at the batting cage, I could probably do that. Maybe not hit anything, but I would go and swing a bat. It's one of those nostalgia sports, reminds me of my grandpa and I feel closer to him when I'm watching it.
They're just people that I have come to be friends with in my own head and so I want them to do well. I want Tristan Casas to do well. I want Bobby Dalbec to do well, even though he's striking out a lot. They're your guys, you know, they're your guys.
Nicole is a nice and friendly person, and a diehard Boston sports fan. Somehow those two things coexist. Check another box for the “background baseball” as a mental health aid theory. If baseball wasn’t in the background on TV or the radio in so many homes, who knows what this country would be like. *shudder*.
Also, it was nice hearing about how the team was a way for her to bond with her grandpa. And it’s true, a likeable, fun team, as those 2004 Red Sox were, have a lasting impact on fans. It’s the reason people love sports, rooting for your guys as if they were your own best friends and wanting them to succeed. It’s why we get too emotionally attached sometimes and keep wanting Bobby Dalbec in the lineup when he probably shouldn’t be. But without fan favorites, you’d just be some corporation going through the motions on the ballfield, kinda like the Yankees.
All About Becoming and Being an Author
How many books have you written?
So I've got two out. Murder at First Pitch and Concession Stand Crimes.
They're mystery novels?
They’re cozy mysteries set in the fictional world of independent baseball in Massachusetts. I made up my own team. I made up my own little league. When I first started writing the book, somebody's like, what did you want to write about? I love baseball and I don't know of any cozies, or mysteries really, that are set in the world that I like, which is baseball. So I wrote it, and then I was like, I don't think they'd want me to kill anybody at Fenway Park, and I also would like to be able to go back there, although “The Town” had a big heist at Fenway. Maybe they would have been cool with it, I don't know, but this is more fun because I get to live my fantasy of owning a baseball team and killing people… she said as a mystery author.
“Fever Pitch” was kind of a crime, too.
I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I really enjoyed it when it came out. I haven't watched it since, but-
You don't need to.
It hit all the good nostalgia feels for Red Sox fans.
What is a cozy?
I call it like “Murder, She Wrote” type of mystery. So it's a contained, usually it's an amateur sleuth, usually a woman of a certain age, usually it's someone who goes back to work for a family business, you know, a cozy environment like a tea house, a book shop. And they put their noses into everybody's business and start solving crimes. And at the end, there's a sense of justice. There's very rarely a cliffhanger in a cozy; you're going to get a self-contained. Yes, there’s series, but you don't have to, you know, oh my God, I need that book right now because what happened? the TV show “Psych” would be considered a cozy, “Monk” would be a cozy-type show.
Usually it's a quick read. Mine are about 200, 250 pages. It's not something you have to sit and think about.
So you made up your own league? What about the Cape Cod League?
No. Again, I want them to like me. So I tried not to use anything real. They do get a mention in the book though, but I also made-up a cape league that's similar. I did want to make ballparks throughout the South Shore area, which is where I live, so there is a Barnstable Barnstormers. My mom lived in Barnstable. We have a house in Barnstable, so I made up that team. But for my team, I called them the Abington Armadillos, and before people come for me, I know armadillos are not native to New England. I know that; I'm not dumb. There is a story, and I do talk about it in book one so you know why they're called the Armadillos.
So I wanted to do a team like that where it's just four or five teams, all kind of locally, where they have community nights and families can come. I love the MLB, don't get me wrong, but it is a corporation. And I feel like a lot of the independent league teams, have more freedom to do different events. One of my favorites is the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs did a Cats Night and they rebranded as the Cats, and I was like, well, I have 3 cats, so that's right up my alley.
Nobody brought their cat, did they?
No, but I just saw the (Rocket City) Trash Pandas, they had a Caturday where people brought their cats. None of my cats would make it; they would hate every second of it. But there are cats that like to take walks, so no judgments. I would go just to see the cats; I think you got a coupon for like cat food to go home with.
That's kind of why I wanted to create a team, because I can have more freedom. The Savannah Bananas have exploded since I started writing, and with all their fun stuff, I wanted to be able to put some of that stuff into my team. I put it in Abington, which is where I live, it's a real town. There is no ballpark, and I tell people that. Like, don't come on a road trip to my town because there's no ballpark yet. Unless it sells to Netflix, then I might buy one. I know exactly in town where it would be. I even made it little cozy maps of my book town, so it's like my town with some real stuff. And then the made-up stuff that I get to put in there which is super fun.
What got you into writing mysteries? Had you written before?
Well, sort of. I did graduate college way back in 2004, which bananas that it's 20 years, buh-nanas. At that time it was a majority angsty poetry, you know, 20 years old, life is so hard, everything's the worst. But I was always a reader and my grandmother, Grandma Asselin, lived in Connecticut. She would always keep a stack of books by her table and we would visit in summers and I would just watch her plow through mystery books. so she was always an inspiration, and then in 2016, I was visiting my dad down in Bowie, MD. And there's a conference called Malice Domestic, which is a mystery readers conference down in Bethesda, MD.
So we went and I met a whole lot of mystery authors, bought some more books, and that's when they asked the question, you're here at a mystery conference, what would you write? And that's when the baseball thing came to me. The person I talked to, Shelley Dixon Carr, her father is a noted mystery author, she's a noted mystery author, and as soon as I said baseball, she's like, you're a New England girl after my own heart, like that would be perfect. So as soon as I got back from that conference in 2016, I put pen to paper, metaphorically, because it was computer. I banged out the first draft of Murder at First Pitch in 6 months because it was just right there on the top of my head. It was fun because I got to develop characters, I got to put little Easter eggs in for people. There's three cats in the book. I have 3 cats. The cats in the book's names are Dewey, Pedey and Papi, who are my three favorite Red Sox players.
Dwight Evans, David Ortiz is Papi, who’s Pedey?
Dustin Pedroia. Hey, come on, Arizona.
Well, I'm not from here.
So you had to build this little world, then you had to incorporate baseball and solve the mystery, a mystery that wouldn't be too easy to solve and also not too unbelievable.
Mysteries are hard, I will say. I just finished the third book and sent it to the publisher. Let me start by saying I don't plot out my books. I don't outline. I usually know broad strokes. I know who I want to get dead and I know who I mostly want to be the killer.
So the third book, as I'm writing it by the seat of my pants, spoiler alert, there's no murder in it. It's mainly like sabotage and heist, that kind of that stuff. So it was a little bit different because, I mean, let's be honest, if anybody watches murder shows like I do, it's pretty easy to kill somebody. Not that I would. Disclaimer: not that I would not that, hello FBI.
They're already watching.
When you're reading a mystery, there's going to be a death. One of the tips that a lot of authors have given me throughout the years is usually it's a 5 prong approach. You get 5 suspects, 5 red herrings, 5 motives; if you kind of follow that rule as you're writing the mystery comes together. But it is hard for me as a “pantser”, as we call it because we write by the seat of our pants, to remember what happened earlier in the book. I do a lot of note taking as I'm writing. I find my hardest part of writing is days of the week.
I find the mystery sometimes easier to write because you can do whatever you want. There are no rules other than in a cozy you have an amateur sleuth, it's a small town, it's not too excessively violent. You're not watching “Breaking Bad” or “Game of Thrones”. There's a guy dead with a bat lying next to him. Hmm, what happened? There's a lot of poison in cozy mysteries because, they call it the woman's murder weapon because it's very often women are poisoners rather than men. Fun fact. Yeah, I'm definitely going to be put on a watch list after this. I do have two books on poisons in my house and I ordered them on Amazon, so they probably already got me flagged somewhere.
Why do you think baseball works for mystery novels?
There's more women involved in the sport now than there's ever been. When you look at like mystery novels, it's always centered around a place, so why not baseball? The ballpark’s a big entity; there's hidden doors, there's storage, there's dugouts, there's clubhouses, there's outfield. There's the Green Monster. There's so many places to kill people. Why not use it as a basis of a murder mystery?
There are so many baseball fans out there who are women who like to read mysteries, who want to see a woman in a mystery in a ballpark. I would probably like to branch out into other sports, too, because obviously I'm a giant Celtics fan, I'm a giant Bruins fan, Patriots fan, etc. But I feel like baseball goes across generations. You have baseball moms who love it. You have people that played in college. You have the girl I met at Barnes and Noble who plays softball.
So you went to school for English. What was it like when you decided, ok, I'm going to write a book?
The first one? Super easy to write. Then there's what we call the “Query Trenches”. So you're sending it to agents. You're sending it to publishers. You're sending it to editors. At the time I was doing a couple of conferences to kind of learn how to write a perfect pitch letter, no hits. I had an Excel spreadsheet of like 100 people that said, not really my thing, I like the voice, but not really what I'm into.
So I took the book back. It was a six months first draft, took the book back. I rewrote it to different tense, so it was first person, which is I, I, I, me, me, me. Then I rewrote in third person, which is, Madeline did this, Madeline said that. Still no hits on the query. I didn't query as many, but still no hits. Then, before it turned into X, Twitter had these pitch events called #pitmad. And basically what you did, it was 140 characters, you pitch your book, and editors, agents, publishers, if they like the tweet, then you e-mail them and they ask for your 50 pages or whatever. So my pitch was “Take Me Out to a Murder, Will Madeline Strike Out Trying to Find a Killer?”
And one of the people that liked it was at Panda Moon Publishing. So I reached out to her, she's like, send me the whole thing, I want to look at it, I'm a baseball fan, so this is perfect for me. That happened in probably 2017, I think, so about a year and a half, after I wrote the book. She was like, oh, I'm a Red Sox fan, and I love JD Martinez, I'm so in, let's work on something. I'm still with Panda Moon, so it's still a good relationship. But it was nice because they're a small publisher, they do all the hard stuff, the editing, the cover, the binding. First one came out in the summer of 2019.
Then the pandemic hit, and I was in the midst of writing book two. I got sent home from work for work from home in March of 2020 and it was so hard to put pen to paper for this stuff, like for the fiction stuff. I'd be writing all day for work and then I'm like, I don't want... I just want to lay, and there was no baseball on, so, there's nothing to kind of draw inspiration from.
The second one took a little bit longer, two years. Concession Stand Crimes came out in June 2022. I immediately started book three because I was like, I don't want to wait that long in between books again. But that took another year; so I sent it off to the publisher at the end of 2023, and now we're on the schedule for some time this year.
But I like to get it out of my hands because then somebody else is kind of taking my baby and teaching it things and then I will take it back and then fix the things. I am drafting book four, but again, there's just been a lot going on. You know, yard work, and still working from home, and trying to get things done. I lost my mother in November, so I'm like trying to still deal with that, and so book four is probably gonna be a little longer to come out because I'm only about 2,000 words in out of a 60,000 word novel.
So now that you've been “in the game” for five or six years, is it what you thought it would be? Did you think you'd be this far along? Being asked to write a fourth book, this is four in seven years.
I would have just been happy to have my book in the library, have my family read it, my friends read it and sell a couple books. As an indie author, I'm going to dispel any dreams that people have: you don't make money doing this. There's a reason I work full time. But when I go to the library, I’m now best friends with all my librarians, so I go to the library and they’re like, oh my God, we put your book on the front facing shelf. I'm like, Oh my God, that's so exciting. If you go into it knowing that that's what you want, like I want people to go like, I love baseball.
This year was the first year Barnes and Noble, I bug them every year, and I'm just like, hey, I'm an independent author, I live on the South Shore, so like my book fits in, and usually they're like, oh, we can't stock independent books. This year, they got a new manager who's very into independent local authors. So he scheduled signings, so he emailed me and I went in. I brought my wheelie bag of books, my inventory with me because I'm always carrying them around. And they had ordered the books, so there's books on the shelf. And I'm like, oh, my God, my books are on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. And now I go once a week to visit them, just to say, hey, they're still here.
The last time I went in, she goes, “We're almost out of book one” and I was like, oh, like people are buying it, that's so bananas. And of course, I take a picture every time, and I'm like, look, it's my books and they’re still here. A girl came up and she goes, “Oh my God, I play softball and I love mysteries, and this is perfect.” I'm explaining it's like a Hallmark murder mystery, not very violent, there's a little romance, a little kidnapping, that kind of stuff. She goes, I'm reading the back right now, can you hurry up and sign it? My dad doesn't know I'm buying books. And I'm like, oh, you're so me and I love this so much. She’s like, he thinks I'm just buying Starbucks, but I'm buying books, too. If I'm one person's favorite author, that's bananas. Next week I'm doing event with the Animal Protection Center of Southeastern Massachusetts, they're having their annual Paws in the Park, and adoptable dogs and all that. All my cats are rescues, so I'm like, yeah, if I can do something like that just spend a day outside and sell some books.
Do you ever get burned out? You write for fun and for a job.
I mean, I do. I haven't written in probably a month. I’m going to Nashville in August for a conference and that’s when I can recharge to write more because I’ll be in a hotel room by myself and I can just type away.
Do you write when you want to or do you have to force yourself to sometimes?
Especially as I get closer to the end of a draft because I want to get it done. Recently, when I sent the first draft to my publisher, he was like it's missing something in the beginning to kind of tie it together. And so then I had to force myself to sit on my couch and say, OK, fix this so that you can get it back to him. I did that within a week. So there are times when I can force myself to do it. A lot of times it has to come when it comes. I'm one of the writers that, there's some writers that are like, you have to write every day.
I don't buy into that, and a lot of my friends don't buy into that. You're a writer if you write. Whether it's two words a day, zero words a day, 1,500 words a day, you're still writing. I'm not going to gatekeep how you write like. I’m not the god of writing. Like, if it works for you, it works for you. I have friends who churn out like every six months, which is great for them, but it doesn't work for everybody.
So your first book you said, seat of your pants and you said you're still kind of that way, but have you gotten more efficient? Is there anything that was harder and now it's easier? Looking at your writing today, how do you compare it to what it was?
I think one of the easier things is to put myself back into the world. Obviously, book one, I was creating the whole world of the Abington Armadillos. So I had to think about everything. I think what's gotten easier is the characters. I know the characters so well now that I've written three books. That's easy. I don't have to worry.
This is going to sound like I have voices in my head; I don't have to worry about what they're going to do because they're always going to act consistently when I write. Like for book three, where I had to create a whole nother ballpark, I don't want to say it was easier, but it was because I had already done it once. There are so many great ballparks out there that it's really easy to draw inspiration from. It was almost like recreating book one in a different location because I had to create new characters. My old standbys couldn't be there because, like, they're not there. But that was fun too, in a different way. I did try to outline my third book, and I had beat by beat by beat. I sort of stuck with it. There are definitely times when the voices in your head tell you to go in a different direction. And so I've learned to trust that instinct that I didn't have when I started writing, which is if it's telling you to go left, go left. You don't have to follow what you set out three months before. The book will guide you, which is kind of fun to do to let the book kind of speak for you.
So you have gotten some structure it sounds like.
I'm trying to, but the 4th book, threw that out the window.
Even though I’ve written two books, I learned a lot about the whole process from Nicole. All I did was throw it on Amazon and let Jesus take the wheel. I should’ve done what Nicole did, but I was scared of getting rejected and, after hearing her talk about the number of her rejections reaching past 100… I would’ve deleted the whole book after like 3 rejections.
Also, hearing about how each book is a way to stay creative and challenge herself. The first one, she was new and created an entire world for the mystery to take place in. The second one she already had that world, so got to focus on the story a little more and characters. Then she stretched out in the third and a new setting, challenging herself by putting characters in new situations and building a separate world.
It was very cool to hear her go from, “hey, why don’t you write a book?” to finishing one and trying to find a publisher, to then doing signings and getting on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. It seems so straightforward looking back, but that’s a lot of work she put in and continues to. It’ll be exciting to see how her career looks in five years (maybe the Red Sox will even have made the playoffs again by then).