H. Terrell Griffin, Author of the Matt Royal Mystery Series

Please welcome, guest blogger H. Terrill Griffin, author of the Matt Royal Mystery Series.

It is my good fortune to live on Longboat Key, an island off the southwest coast of Florida about half-way down the peninsula. It is a small place anchored in the turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The island itself is about ten miles long and a quarter-mile wide. During the off-season, that is the months from May to November, it is a very small town of about 2,500 people.

It is this island and its people that give me the ideas for stories. The people are an eclectic bunch, hailing from every part of the U.S., with a sprinkling of Canadians and Europeans. It is a stew in which many stories germinate, some true tales of former lives in far off places, and others only fables told over a beer, perhaps the lives that the fabulists wished they had lived.

It is during the hot summers, when the Gulf breezes barely cool the island, that the locals gather in the bars, laugh a lot, tell their tales to the local author, and enjoy the friendship that attaches in small towns the world over. The islanders are my muses and my most extravagant supporters. It is from this milieu that I draw inspiration, solace when needed, and so many wonderful characters to grace the pages of my novels.

My books are centered on Longboat Key, but the mystery always takes the protagonist Matt Royal to other places. I try to bring a sense of our island in all its wonder and beauty to the printed page. There is almost no crime on the key, so I have to manufacture murders and the bad guys who commit them. I try to weave the fictional crime into stories that include the islanders as characters, most thinly disguised. My friends enjoy trying to figure out which one of them is the character with a different name.

Writing is a joy for me, a joy that is enhanced by writing about the things I love, my island and my friends. I hope that I do both justice, that the island is described so that the reader will fall in love too, and that the characters give the reader a true flavor of my part of the world. And if the mystery is one that the reader can’t put down until finished, then I’ve done my job.

For more information about Terry Griffin and his books, visit his website at www.hterrellgriffin.com.