Linny tells Nancy this is the first mystery she’s ever read. Nancy is amazed that Linny never read Nancy Drew, even. Nope. Linny feels good about The Thursday Murder Club being her first mystery, especially since our well-read guest says it may be her favorite. Today we interview Dr. Karen Roggenkamp about The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. Karen is a Professor of Literature and Languages and Interim Dean, Honors College at Texas A&M University-Commerce. She has written and taught about Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture. Karen has written two books published by Kent State University Press: Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business (2016) and Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction (2005). We contacted Karen because of her research and teaching on crime in American literature, but when Nancy did, Karen mentioned she’s originally from Nebraska, of all places! Karen tells us how a small-town Nebraska girl ended up getting a PhD in English, specializing in American Literature and Culture, and moving to Texas. Karen went on a 4-H trip to the East Coast which opened her eyes to the world beyond Nebraska. She decided, at her high school teacher’s prompting, to go to the University of Michigan. She thought Michigan would get her away from Nebraska’s obsession with football. Nancy laughs. Then Karen went to Minnesota for her graduate studies. She then went to Texas for her teaching position. Karen loved history growing up and also thought she might be a prosecuting attorney. A scholarship from the Willa Cather Foundation sealed her decision to major in English, however. She loves American culture and history. She knew, in graduate school she wanted to look at literature in the context of history, especially the interplay between journalism and fiction. Linny was familiar with Nellie Bly, a subject of Karen’s first book, because of her writing about asylums. Karen tells us articles about asylums were not new. What was new was a woman writing these articles and in a more sensationalistic time. Karen’s first book was from her dissertation. She was fascinated that journalists in the 1880s were really taught to be sensationalistic, using the devices of fiction, really almost in competition with fiction. Karen researched the women who were clawing their way into newspaper staff, beyond society news and children’s columns. Karen taught an undergraduate class called Studies in American Narrative: Mystery, Murder, and Mayhem. She thinks we love murder mysteries because it is a valve of sorts for our spirit of perversion, the term coined by the unreliable narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat. Linny feels like she is drawn to understanding this spirit of perversion. Karen’s first memory of reading this sort of journalistic exploration of perversion was when her older sister gave her a copy of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Karen tells Linny and Nancy about a Saturday Night Live skit that plays on this interest with women watching murder shows when their husbands are out. The Thursday Murder Club is our August book, and it is a cozy mystery. Nancy asks Karen why these are so popular. Karen recalls that cozy mysteries have been popular since even before Agatha Christie. Karen tells us it’s comforting to not be exposed to the gore, but we also love the intellectual puzzle of trying to solve the mystery. Karen thought The Thursday Murder Club was especially good at putting us in the setting and introducing us to characters that we end up loving. Karen likes how good mystery novels highlight human intelligence. Karen says her favorite character in the book was probably Joyce, with her diary and her normal everydayness, but there is something coldly clinical about her. She also was intrigued by Elizabeth and her thrilling past. Like Linny and Nancy, Karen fell into the author’s trap of leading us to think Joyce was the killer. The three of us debate about the club’s decision to not turn in one of the murderers. Karen thinks in the world of this story, he is a good person. Linny thinks the club members have a different perspective, given their long lives. Nancy points out that Elizabeth plans to turn in John and Penny, who she loves, unwilling to overlook their murder. The three of agree that the author does an incredible job bringing in death, not in the murders, but in the lives of the characters. And also facing their physical and mental decline and those of loved ones. Karen feels that this depth puts The Thursday Murder Club in a different category than other cozy mysteries. Linda asks Karen for her favorite mystery novel. Karen says this is a hard question, but that The Thursday Murder Club is right up on the top of her list. She enjoyed the British wit in the novel, too. Nancy says she went through an Agatha Christie phase in middle and high school. Recently Nancy says she’s enjoyed two mystery series based in World War II Britain: the Maggie Hope series and the Maisie Dobbs series. Now that she’s stepped down from some administrative responsibilities, Karen tells us she is looking forward to editing a volume for Oxford University Press on Jack London’s unpublished journalism. She’s also working on two digital humanities projects. One on a famous female journalist from the late 19th and early 20th century, Elizabeth Jordan. The other on an American children’s author, Lois Lenski, who wrote during the middle of the 20th century extensively of the experience of children in different time periods and geographies throughout the United States. Karen especially loved Judy’s Journey and Prairie Girl. Nancy asks Karen what literature excites college students right now. Karen tells us she has taught and will be teaching this fall, a class that presents students with primary materials, such as historical and court documents, and the fictional representations of the cases. Nancy observes this course is a perfect combination of Karen’s young interest in being a public defender and historian. Nancy suggested the Chief Standing Bear trial would be a good addition (from episodes 57 and 58).