I'm pleased to welcome Lila Blake to Cozy Up With Kathy. Lila writes the Telegraph Hill Mystery series. THE FILBERT STEPS is the first book in the series and will be released tomorrow!
Kathy: In THE FILBERT STEPS Vivian Salvatore returns to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco to rebuild her life. Did you ever have to reset your own life?
LB: Mine wasn't dramatic. Nobody left and I didn't move.
I've had a desk job my whole working life. What changed is that I started getting up early to write instead of promising myself I'd do it on the weekend.
Then I was out on the Filbert Steps one morning, stopped on the third landing to catch my breath. It gets quiet up where the concrete ends and the steps turn to wood at Napier Lane. I stood there and thought, if a body turned up right here, everybody on this hill would know by nine. I went to work and thought about it all day.
Vivian's reset is a lot bigger than mine. She's newly divorced, her daughter is on the other side of the country, and she's starting over at fifty-two in four rooms she picked out by herself.
Kathy: Setting plays such an important role in a mystery. Some cities are a character unto themselves. Why choose San Francisco, and more specifically Telegraph Hill, as the setting for your series?
LB: The stairs! You can't drive the Filbert Steps. Vivian climbs two hundred and seventy-three of them twice a day, and everybody she runs into is on foot and can't get away from her. If you write mysteries, that's a dream.
North Beach also still runs on the same square mile of people. Sal opens the espresso bar at Coppa's before six. The Caruso family has been behind the deli counter at Bay Cypress for eighty years. The wild parrots scream in the plane trees and Coit Tower sits up there keeping the time for everybody. I've been walking those blocks for years and the same faces are behind the same counters.
And most of it is real. Liguria Bakery, Washington Square, Saints Peter and Paul, Caffè Trieste, the climb up Filbert from Sansome. You can walk the whole book in a morning. There's a walking key in the back so you can do exactly that.
Kathy: What first drew you to cozy mysteries?
LB: Louise Penny. I read the Three Pines books and wanted to move there. That's my whole test now. Do I want to hang around these people?
I also love Cleo Coyle's coffeehouse books, because her narrator likes people and comes right out and says so.
My favorite kind of mystery is the one where the detective knows the victim's grocery order. Vivian figures things out because she notices that Sal has a pastry waiting for the widow from Green Street every morning and never lets on that he set it aside for her. That's the kind of detail my books run on.
Kathy: Do you write in any other genres?
LB: Just mysteries, and San Francisco ones. All my books come from the same idea. Four women meet in a night writing class at City College, the class ends, and they keep showing up anyway, each one writing down her own neighborhood. That's the Fog & Quill Society. Vivian has Telegraph Hill and North Beach. Lola Quintero has the Mission, River has the Haight, and Nora Sullivan has my neighborhood, the avenues out by the ocean. I want to write all of them.
Kathy: Tell us about your series.
LB: The Telegraph Hill Mysteries are atmospheric whodunits set in San Francisco, for readers who like their cozies a little darker and a little slower, with a setting vivid enough to get lost in. Steep stairways, hidden gardens, neighborhood cafes, fog.
Vivian Salvatore is fifty-two and newly divorced. She's back on the hill to write a book about Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco, and one October morning the steps below her apartment hand her a body. After that it's old secrets, unexpected connections, and a woman starting over who lands somewhere she never expected.
There are four coming: THE YEAR OF THE GOAT, A NOTE FOR THE MISSING, and THE LAST SITTING. Every one ends with recipes. I don't think a book set in North Beach has any business ending without them.
Kathy: Do you have a favorite character? If so, who and why?
LB: Maria Vitale. She's 78 and she's lived in the same North Beach apartment since 1971. She has an Italian greyhound named Pippo who she's totally devoted to. He's old enough now that she stops at the same three corners every time to let him rest.
Vivian couldn't solve a thing without her. Maria has been watching this neighborhood her whole life and she catches what doesn't get written down, who is wearing new jewelry, whose story has changed. She also tells you the punchline first and makes you ask for the rest. “He proposed in a parking lot, eventually.” She's my favorite to write and it isn't close.
Kathy: Did you have a specific inspiration for your series?
LB: Two things. One is the Grace Marchant Garden. Grace was sixty-three when she started clearing trash off that hillside in 1949, and she kept at it for thirty-three years, right up until she died at ninety-six. Now it's one of the prettiest places in San Francisco and people walk past it every day with no idea.
The other is a plaque in Burritt Alley, right off Bush Street, marking the spot where Miles Archer was shot in The Maltese Falcon. It's a memorial to a murder that never happened, to a man who never lived, and people still stop and stand in front of it. I put it in the book because I love it.
Kathy: What made you decide to publish your work?
LB: I finished THE FILBERT STEPS and then sat on it for a while, which I think a lot of writers will recognize. What got me off the fence was that I kept wanting to go back to Coppa's. If I wanted to spend more mornings there, other people might too.
Then it came back with five 5-star Readers' Favorite reviews and I stopped second-guessing myself.
I like this book. That's a weird thing to say out loud.
Kathy: If you could have a dinner party and invite 4 authors, living or dead, in any genre, who would you invite?
LB: Dashiell Hammett, because I've spent four years in his San Francisco and I have a lot of questions about that apartment at 891 Post Street. Agatha Christie, because I want to watch her plot something at the table. Louise Penny, for the company. And Armistead Maupin, because he'd keep everybody talking.
I'd seat Dashiell Hammett next to Agatha Christie and let them fight about whether a detective should have a private life.
Kathy: What are you currently reading?
LB: THE SERIAL KILLER GUIDE TO SAN FRANCISCO, by Michelle Chouinard. I'm really enjoying it! Some of the murders take place right near my house at Land's End. On a side note, last year I met a retired detective who works old cold cases part time, and he told me he's been working several that happened out there in the 1970s. Now I spook myself a little when I'm walking around out there. Ha!
Kathy: Will you share any of your hobbies or interests with us?
LB: I walk the city constantly. Most of what ends up in the books I noticed on a walk first.
I cook every recipe before it goes in the back of a book, so if a dish made the final pages it worked in my kitchen first. And I design my own covers. That started because I'm picky and turned into my favorite part of the job.
Kathy: Name 4 items you always have in your fridge or pantry.
LB: A wedge of real Parmigiano-Reggiano, Meyer lemons, good olive oil, and coffee beans.
Kathy: Do you have plans for future books either in your current series or a new series?
LB: Lots. THE YEAR OF THE GOAT is out in October, A NOTE FOR THE MISSING comes in November, and THE LAST SITTING lands in December, so Vivian has a busy year ahead of her. After that the Fog & Quill Society books move across town to the Mission, the Haight and the Outerlands.
Kathy: What's your favorite thing about being an author?
LB: I like showing people a San Francisco they haven't seen. Most visitors get the bridge and the cable cars and go home, and I get to hand them a whole neighborhood instead. I also like that my daydreaming counts as work now.
***************************************************************************
The Filbert Steps (The Telegraph Hill Mysteries)
by Lila Blake
About The Filbert Steps
A body on the steps. A neighborhood that saw nothing.
Vivian Salvatore came back to Telegraph Hill with a cat, a divorce settlement, and a book she cannot seem to write.
At fifty-two, newly single and trying to rebuild her life, she has settled into the rhythms of San Francisco’s most beautiful staircase: coffee at the corner café, morning walks on the Filbert Steps, old neighbors on three corners, and the comforting illusion that everyone knows everyone.
Then, on a bright October morning, Vivian finds one of the city’s most ambitious developers dead on the third landing.
The police are ready to call it a fall. But Vivian spent twenty-seven years reading teenagers’ faces for a living, and she knows when a story does not fit. A coat buttoned wrong. A cigarette ground out where it should not be. Storefronts quietly sold to a post-office box in Delaware. And a neighborhood full of people who had reason to want one man gone.
As Vivian begins asking questions, she discovers that Telegraph Hill has been keeping secrets for years — about money, loyalty, grief, and who really gets to call a place home.
The Filbert Steps introduces Vivian Salvatore, a sharp-eyed, warm-hearted sleuth who notices everything and forgives almost as much.
Perfect for readers who love older women sleuths, atmospheric San Francisco mysteries, neighborhood secrets, found community, and fair-play cozy mysteries with literary depth.
About Lila Blake
Lila Blake writes San Francisco neighborhood mysteries about foggy stairways, old houses, found family, and the secrets people keep when a place begins to change. Her Telegraph Hill Mysteries begin with The Filbert Steps, a literary cozy mystery featuring Vivian Salvatore, a fifty-two-year-old former teacher rebuilding her life after divorce. Lila is published by Sutro House Press, an independent fiction imprint based in San Francisco.
Links:
Website: lilablake.com
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/71129242.Lila_Blake
Purchase Link: Amazon
