Welcome back, my fellow creatives! I’m thrilled to continue sharing some lovely indie authors I’ve met in our community–it’s so great to connect with folks again. This month, please welcome Mark and Wendy, the creative cozy-mystery-writing duo behind Wenark Green!

First, let’s explore a bit about you two, for the pen name you share here is actually a combination of your first names, Wendy and Mark. What was the inciting incident that brought your writing forces together?

Pre-Covid, we mooted an idea to write a series of middle-grade fantasy books, but the idea never came to fruition. During Covid, we discussed a series of murder mysteries, with several influencing factors, including Christie, Midsomer Murders, and Jonathan Creek. Again, nothing materialised. Wendy’s health deteriorated, ultimately leading to an MS diagnosis, which was the catalyst to do, not don’t. Wenark Green and The Windy & Darling Mysteries were born.

That is amazing to see you take what would deter so many and transform it into such tenacious determination! It’s also cool to hear you enjoy reading Christie and Doyle, but seeing you cite the Midsomer Murders series as a source of inspiration made me happy. Do you have any particular favorite stories from these uniquely different mystery collections you’d recommend readers check out?

Christie: Death on the Nile. Murder on the Orient Express. Evil Under the Sun. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. 4:50 from Paddington.

Doyle: A Study in Scarlet. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Tales of Unease.

Midsomer Murders: We both prefer John Nettles as Tom Barnaby, and Wendy has seen every episode (81) from the first 13 series at least once. She has many favourites she’s seen countless times, including the pilot episode The Killings at Badger’s Drift, Destroying Angel (Series 4), Market for Murder and Ring out Your Dead (both Series 5), Painted in Blood (Series 6), Orchis Fatalis (Series 8), and Master Class (Series 13) to name a few.

So many great recommendations! But let’s talk about YOUR books now. 🙂 Both Deadly Dough and Fatal Fungus bring baked goods into deadly situations. What inspired this unique approach to your cozy mysteries?

Though marketed as cozies, we see our mystery books as hybrids, fuelling Agatha Christie’s intricacy and satire, Richard Osman’s warm, British humor, and Holmes’s cerebral logic. The mysteries contain elements of cozy, but aren’t twee or vacuous, and feature serious topical issues.

We’re both avid watchers of The Great British Bake Off (amateurs and professionals) and both love baking. It seemed prudent to have a culinary theme to our stories, incorporating this paradigm into the book’s title. We also desired a strong social commentary centred around current affairs. 

Oh man, baking and I have a tough relationship. I like making a huge variety of cookies for Christmas, but during the rest of the year, nnnnnnnnope lol. I like discovering neat bakeries, though!

You each immerse yourselves in unique passions, be they hats, vocabulary, pylons, or ice cream. How do your passions influence your storytelling setting and/or characters?

Jon and Wendy, who morph into amateur sleuths, Windy & Darling, are loosely based on us, with many of the same traits, passions, and quirks woven into our books, including personality and idiosyncrasies.

Mark has many geekish pursuits, including pylons, maps, roads, and his latest, lamp posts. He also has an incredible sweet tooth (a cake and cookie monster), enjoys creating new or tried and trusted desserts, and loves tea, coffee, and the odd glass or three of wine/gluten-free ale.

Wendy: “When the mood takes a cruciverbalist, words rule, OK,” she says, believing her love of everything wordy got her while in the womb. As a former legal eagle and now pro-editor, she has an extensive vocabulary, learned to read before she could speak, and has a penchant for wordplay, including aptagrams, anagrams, ambigrams, and acrostics. Wendy’s insatiable zeal for hats, nurtured since childhood, is often a fetish too far. She owns 100+ and feels naked without one. She also has a zest for healthy food, history, and wine.

Both animal qwackers, with an admirable appreciation of nature and Mother Earth, our lifestyles, beliefs, and passions greatly influence our stories throughout.

Your passion surely shines bright when it comes to animals and the environment! As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/ spirit animal?

Wendy: Great question, and I have a myriad of answers, so I’ll choose my top three in no particular order: Sakura. Tiger. Calla lily.

Mark: I’ll do the same: Pine tree. Grey seal. The British L2 pylon. (Is that allowed?) 🤣 

Sure it counts, lol. What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

Mark’s visited Abbotsford House Museum, the former home of Scottish author, Sir Walter Scott, born in Edinburgh in 1771, several times. He last visited in 2013

Living near Edinburgh means that when the mood takes us, we can get inspired by the Sherlock Holmes statue on the redeveloped Picardy Place island junction. Following demolition in the early 1970s of 11 Picardy Place, the house where Arthur Conan Doyle was born, they erected the statue in honour of the author and famous detective. When we’ve exhausted our conversation with Holmes’s effigy, we sometimes unwind and talk mystery and logic in The Conan Doyle, the pub opposite. It’s elementary.

I have to admit that I’m jealous you can visit such an inspiring place when you wish. And how fun you can explore the lore and logic of Holmes together! I always found the Holmes stories set outside London to be more fascinating because those rural settings remind me of my own Wisconsin.

Speaking of settings, Deadly Dough, your first novel, is set in the picturesque English village Tor. Your setting reminds me of Holmes’ somber dialogue with Watson on how the countryside carries far more menace than the city (“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”). Are any landmarks/locations in Tor inspired by locations you two know personally?   

Our fictitious county, Treetonshire (Treet), and the eight Linkville villages where each book’s set, are like Midsomer. Malice, mayhem, and murder. We ask you. Who’d want to live there? 🤣

Tor—Honest Tor to give its Sunday name—is, like Treet, steeped in history, and there are many gorgeous villages we’ve visited that act as inspiration. Meysey Hampton in the Cotswolds, Wrea Green, Lancashire, Clapham, North Yorkshire, and Bamburgh, Northumberland are a mere handful of England’s glory. All have a common denominator: a pub, shop, and church, quintessential features of a typical English village. What better aspiration?

I’ve always admired mystery writers’ ability to weave hidden clues into the plot so that when the Whodunnit’s revealed, we readers can go “Ooooh” and nod as the clues are laid bare. I imagine that this means planning the story is of vital importance…or is it possible to create a mystery on the fly and then add the clues in later? What do you think?

The old plotter or pantser debacle, and a pertinent question.

Our debut, Deadly Dough, had limited plotting, resulting in a spontaneous discovery of the story. The second book, Fatal Fungus, was a tad more structured, although not completely outlined before writing. We completed Horrid Herbs, book three, in the same vein and look to query this in Summer 2026. Mystery four, Brutal Beans, our current WIP, has undergone more plotting, primarily to reduce editing time.

Given our writing history, we believe it’s possible to create a mystery on the fly, adding in clues, red herrings, etc prior to or at the structural edit stage. Being a plotter offers organised structure, while pantsers value creative freedom and organic character growth. We see ourselves as plantsers, combining both methods, which works for us.

Are there any special writing resources or publications you’d love to recommend to your fellow writers here?

Online:

Jericho Writers: creative writing courses for every writer – whether you prefer expert-led tuition or a self-paced approach 

Kindlepreneur: Proven Self-Publishing Tips, Straight to Your Inbox Each Week

Books:

Robert McKee: Story

Dr Gareth Moore: The Perfect Crime Puzzle Book, The Amazing Sherlock Holmes Puzzle Book, and The Great Sherlock Holmes Puzzle Book. (For authors of crime, mysteries, and thrillers.)

Thank you so much for taking time to chat with me! Let’s end on some reflection and inspiration. If you could tell your younger writing selves anything, what would it be?

Wendy: A writing career in my younger days might’ve felt destined, but timing matters more than passion alone. Despite literary know-how, I lacked the life experience that deepens perspective to give work resonance. The publishing world’s confusing—demands unclear without guidance or patience—and when younger, tolerance wouldn’t have been an ally.

Any competing priorities—education, financial stability, personal growth—would’ve limited the focus needed to persist. For many months, I was also my late mother’s carer, and my life carried enough trials without adding more stress. Interests evolved, too, and what once felt like a calling shifted with time. I look at my choice not to pursue writing earlier not as failure, but a well-timed investment in maturity, clarity, and a stronger, more grounded voice. While the universe bided its time, I believe my eventual diagnosis of MS channelled me into becoming the published author I’d always wanted to be. As a pro-editor, I was halfway there. I have no regrets.

Mark: It’s easy to look at your youth with the benefit of hindsight. The first thing that springs to mind is never give up, keep going, etc, but truthfully, like Wendy, my younger self lacked life experience, so any attempt at writing would’ve lacked depth and substance.

In school days, me and a friend liked making films with an 8mm camcorder, and if the tapes had survived, I know I’d cringe at our ideas and writing back then. All action with no depth or character development. Yes, I definitely wasn’t ready to become a writer, let alone a published author, when younger.  

My thanks again to Wendy and Mark for taking time to chat with me! I’m excited to see where their series goes next–book three is in the works, folks!

You can connect with them on Instagram.

Coming up, we’ll visit the Story Empire and listen to another podcast. I’ve also got some music to share along with an upcoming guest post from Blondie. And let’s not forget summer is coming, and that means…

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!