DEBORAH TREFTS
Staff Writer
What’s not to like about cozying up with an intriguing mystery set in one’s go-to summer place, especially when there’s an entire series to enjoy?
Chautauqua’s very own murder mystery writer, Deb Pines, will give a presentation for the Chautauqua Speaks lecture program titled “The 5 W’s of a Chautauqua Murder Mystery Writer” at 9:15 a.m. Tuesday at the CWC House.
Applying journalistic fundamentals, Pines will share the “who, what, where, when, and why” behind her novel writing. Maybe, if asked, she’ll also talk about the H – “how” she writes.
She said she will “explain why Chautauqua stands apart from even the most iconic fictional locales, including Agatha Christie’s St. Mary Mead and Murder, She Wrote’s Cabot Cove.”
“I was born in Brooklyn, [New York], but raised in Miami Beach, Florida,” Pines said. “I went to high school there, and then to Brown University [in Providence, Rhode Island].”
After graduating from Brown, she married, and she and her husband Dave — a Chautauquan — tag-teamed following each other around for their careers.
“First, I followed him to [Washington,] D.C. and did the reverse commute to Gaithersburg, Maryland, to work for the Gaithersburg Gazette,” Pines said. “Then I [got a job at] The Indianapolis Star, and he came too, until I wanted out of there. It was a stepping stone paper in the era of lots of papers.”
When her husband landed a job in New York City, she began working in the Gannett chain for the Westchester and Rockland papers, serving the lower Hudson River area.
“I was a crime reporter for a long time and really loved covering the courts,” Pines said. “Then I worked for the New York Law Journal. I loved covering federal courts.”
About 20 years into her career, the “mystery-writing bug” bit her. “A friend who was also working in the courthouse said, “Don’t you think two people working in the federal courthouse could write a John Grisham novel faster than one person?”
By now, they both had children.
“My friend was a gifted writer; she was a clerk to a law judge,” Pines continued. “I loved research. We decided to write a legal thriller together. I have no complaints. She just could not meet a deadline, so we never could finish the book. … I decided to write a mystery myself to show I could do it and meet a deadline.”
The experience was more challenging than anticipated. During her “blue period” of writing unpublished novels, she said she got an agent (Barack Obama’s), but that person couldn’t sell her book. So she found another agent. Although three books were sold to Bantam Publishing, the deal fell through.
“It’s hits and misses,” Pines said. “This is the life of artists. I was pretty worn out. I’d written four to five books in that period.”
That’s when she decided to self-publish. “I thought that at Chautauqua I might have a niche; an ability to sell it on its own. After all these years of trying to publish traditionally, I wanted my name on the shelf. A huge number of books are self-published. Young people choose [that path], but I was … resistant to [it].”
No longer; she said she’s even taught Special Studies classes at Chautauqua on this topic. “Seven of 10 books are self-published now,” she said. “Colleen Hoover and Frieda McFadden’s books are huge bestsellers.”
Pines published her first of 12 novels to date, In the Shadow of Death: A Chautauqua Murder Mystery, in paperback in 2013. On its back cover, she wrote: “Mimi Goldman, a reporter and single mom, leaves New York City in 1997 for a small-town newspaper job in the middle of nowhere, Chautauqua, New York.”
Meaning — to be perfectly clear here — Pines’ protagonist is a reporter and copy editor for The Chautauquan Daily. Her “sidekick” is 90 years old.
Back to her first back cover: “When [Goldman’s] landlord drops dead at a community race she’s covering (for Old First Night?), Mimi suspects foul play. And soon she’s in a race of her own to catch the killer … before the killer catches her.”
The 12th novel in Pine’s Chautauqua Murder Mystery series — hot off the press — is Tossing Seas.
“When Simon Cole, a wealthy widower, takes up with Jeanine Davis, a woman who claims to have known him from childhood Chautauqua summers, Simon’s family is dubious. They enlist Mimi Goldman, ‘Chautauqua’s Miss Marple,’ to prove she’s a gold-digging fraud.”
There’s more: “[W]hen Simon turns up dead after his 65th birthday bash on a local steamboat (the ‘Chautauqua Belle’ no doubt), Mimi has a new mission: finding his killer among Chautauqua’s high-minded talks and charming cottages.”
The Chautauqua Bookstore began carrying and selling Pine’s self-published mystery novels, at first “modestly, then each year a little more.” She added, “My sweet spot for sales are people who love both Chautauqua and mysteries.”
According to Pines, one need not begin with In the Shadow of Death and progress chronologically through the series for fear of missing essential information. Digging into any of her mysteries in any order is fine.
“My [style] isn’t Michael Connelly,” she said. “Mine is more in the Agatha Christie vein. … I’ve learned a tremendous amount as I go along, though it’s hectic to finish writing [each book] in a year. People write me and send suggestions, so I feel like I’m starting to connect.”
In addition to her dozen novels, Pines has also written Where’s the Beef: A Chautauqua Mystery Novelette (c. 2014), Gone Fishin’: A Grisly Chautauqua Short Story (2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic), and The Dead Zone: A Mimi Goldman Chautauqua Short Story (April 2025).
“All this time, I’ve been working,” Pines said. “When I got on the path of writing the mysteries and left the New York Law Journal, my husband was doing well enough so I could work part-time and mix with mystery writers. I wrote course-catalog listings for The Learning Annex and was the online copy editor for XXL magazine. They needed someone with good grammar skills, but they tired of me because I didn’t know anything about hip-hop.”
She continued: “Then I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to work for The New York Post and use my grammar skills for headlines and editing. I work from 4 to 8 p.m., but it’s a really hectic 4 to 8. You can barely get up. I like the deadlines and the rush. I don’t agree politically with the newspaper, but I know legal stuff because of the Law Journal, so I do court stories. And I do culture stories because I’m a Chautauqua snob. Others do most of the politics. It fits.”
As it turns out, Pines’ headline writing has been recognized. According to the bio on her website, “she continues to edit tabloid stories and write award-winning, snarky, pun-filled headlines including: … FLAKE NEWS (for a forecasted NYC blizzard that never happened) and THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN FREAKING (for a JetBlue pilot’s mid-flight mental breakdown).”
So, what’s not to like about cozying up with an Agatha Christie-like Mimi Goldman murder mystery set at — and partially written at — Chautauqua?
