Rick Bleiweiss Delights Historical Mystery Fans with 'Murder in Haxford'

Former musician, song writer, and music producer, Rick Bleiweiss, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss the second book in his Pignon Scorbion series, Murder in Haxford. Set in the fictitious town of Haxford, England, this historical detective mystery takes place in the summer of 1910, and occurs about a month after Chief Inspector Scorbion arrives in town. “So Pignon Scorbion is the head of police in the town of Haxford in the countryside, England, and Calvin Brown…is the owner of Brown’s barbershop and that’s the barbershop where Scorbion and all these other amateur detectives solve the crimes, interview the witnesses and the suspects..” While Murder in Haxford is the sequel to the first Pignon Scorbion mystery, The Barbershop Detectives, it can also be read as a standalone. Additionally, it contains not just one, but two and a half murder mysteries. As a fan of short stories, Bleiweiss found that having more than one mystery in each of his books was almost like having several interwoven, connected short stories.

Before taking on detective mysteries, Bleiweiss had a full-fledged career in music and he explained how he transitioned from one creative outlet to another. “I’ve written in one shape or form or another most of my life… for my bachelor’s degree, I studied filmmaking so I was writing scripts for my student films and then even while I was in the music industry producing records… I still liked writing and I did nonfiction writing. I wrote some magazine articles, some newspaper articles, music and other things… After I retired from the music industry in 2002, and I moved from New York City to this small rural area of Ashland, Oregon, I started writing columns for a local news magazine, but again, it was all nonfiction. What really drew me into writing novels was when I moved to Ashland, my next door neighbor was a poet and we became friends and she told me one day early on, she said, ‘You know, I’m in a writing group here… and I think you’d like the people who are in the group. I think they’d like you and maybe it’ll stir your creative juices to be around other people who are writing… and so I joined the group and it totally got my juices flowing… and I started writing fiction and that’s how it started.”

For Bleiweiss, the excitement of going after a story has always been part of the allure and challenge he sought out as an author. “One of the things that has kind of defined my life is chasing the pot of gold at the end of rainbows. I’ve done that my whole life. I get bored easily so, you know, I love doing that so even though I was working in what I’d called regular jobs, I was still doing independent ventures and I always found that the chase was more exciting than when I found the pot of gold or didn’t, and I found the pot of gold sometimes and I didn’t others but I loved the chase and writing to me is part of that chase. Especially now that I’m older, and it’s ‘ok, I’m still chasing another rainbow…'”