Long before true-crime podcasts and streaming mystery series became a cultural fixture, Carolyn Haines was building a devoted readership one Sarah Booth Delaney novel at a time. The prolific author, who has published more than 30 books, has spent years splitting her creative life between the cotton fields of the fictional Mississippi Delta town of Zinnia and the classrooms of the University of South Alabama, where she has taught creative writing while making her home in Semmes.
In a wide-ranging interview conducted in Mobile, Haines discussed the origins of her long-running mystery series, the evolution of her amateur-detective heroine, and her outlook on both the publishing business and life in Coastal Alabama. The conversation offered a rare look into the mind of a working novelist who has managed to sustain a decades-long career while remaining rooted in the Gulf Coast region.
From Hattiesburg to the Halls of South Alabama
Haines was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and grew up in the small town of Lucedale in George County. Her path eventually led her to the University of South Alabama in Mobile, where she earned a master’s degree in creative writing. That academic grounding would later inform her teaching career at the same institution, giving her a dual identity as both a widely published novelist and a mentor to aspiring writers in the region.
The University of South Alabama’s creative writing program has, over the decades, served as a launching pad for numerous regional writers, offering workshops and mentorship that blend rigorous craft instruction with an emphasis on voice and place. Programs like it are common at regional universities across the Gulf South, where a strong sense of geography and community often shapes the literary output of graduates. For Haines, that emphasis on place became a defining feature of her fiction.
Building Zinnia and Sarah Booth Delaney
Haines’s best-known work is her long-running mystery series set in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Zinnia, featuring amateur detective Sarah Booth Delaney. Asked how she developed the character, Haines pointed to a lifelong love of the mystery genre, citing influences ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the more youth-oriented series Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys.
“Mysteries require the reader to participate emotionally and intellectually,” Haines said. “They bring a sense of justice to a crime.” That philosophy has clearly shaped her approach to storytelling: characters, in her telling, are inseparable from the land they inhabit. She described Sarah Booth Delaney as being “as much a part of the Mississippi Delta as the cotton and the heat,” a description that captures the regional specificity for which Southern mystery writing is often known.
The mystery genre has a long and distinguished tradition of using setting as a character in its own right. Southern mystery and crime fiction in particular has often leaned into the region’s history, class dynamics, and landscape to create atmosphere, a tradition that includes writers working in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the broader Gulf South. Haines’s decision to root her series so firmly in the Delta places her within that broader literary lineage, even as she carved out her own fictional geography with the town of Zinnia and its ensemble of recurring characters, including the ghostly figure Jitty, who appears alongside Sarah Booth throughout the series.
Haines noted that her heroine arrived on the page essentially fully formed. She described Sarah Booth and Jitty as arriving “rather unexpectedly, bickering at each other,” a dynamic she recognized early on as the foundation of two distinctive characters worth following. Over the life of the series, she said, Sarah Booth has acknowledged many of her personal flaws and grown beyond some of her earlier opinions, while also becoming a sharper investigator, even as she remains, by design, an amateur rather than a professional detective.
Is There Any Mobile in Zinnia?
Given that the interview took place in Mobile and Haines herself lives just outside the city in Semmes, it was natural to ask whether any of the Gulf Coast found its way into her fictional Delta setting. Haines was direct in her answer, explaining that the Mississippi Delta represents its own unique geography, one whose particular history shapes the fiction set there in ways that are distinct from the Alabama Gulf Coast. It is a reminder that for many regional novelists, the specific texture of a place, its history, economy, and social fabric, is not interchangeable with a neighboring region, even one as culturally connected as the Delta and the Alabama coast.
The Mississippi Delta, a flat alluvial plain stretching across northwest Mississippi, is broadly recognized as one of the most historically significant regions in American cultural life, closely associated with the birth of the blues and with the sharecropping economy that followed the Civil War. Its literary output, from William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County to more contemporary crime and mystery writing, has long drawn on that layered history. Haines’s Zinnia novels fit within this tradition of Delta-set fiction that uses the region’s landscape and social history as a backdrop for storytelling.
Beyond the Mystery Series: An Anthology and Other Genres
While the Sarah Booth Delaney novels have been central to her career, Haines discussed other literary projects underway at the time of the interview. She said she had edited an anthology of short stories centered on Mississippi Delta blues culture combined with a crime-noir sensibility, titled Delta Blues. According to Haines, the collection was set for release the following spring, with a launch event planned at the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a venue with deep ties to the region’s blues heritage.
Haines said the anthology included contributions from an array of well-known authors working in mystery, thriller, and Southern fiction, including James Lee Burke, John Grisham, Ace Atkins, Charlaine Harris, David Sheffield, and Tom Franklin. She directed readers interested in a complete list of contributors to the anthology’s dedicated website. Clarksdale, the anthology’s launch site, sits at the historic crossroads long associated with the origins of Delta blues music, making it a fitting location for a collection blending musical heritage with crime fiction.
Haines also spoke about her work outside the mystery genre, noting that she had written general-fiction novels titled Touched and Summer of the Redeemers, as well as more literary works of crime fiction, Penumbra and Fever Moon. Together, these titles reflect an author who has moved fluidly between genre fiction and more traditionally literary forms throughout a long career, a versatility not uncommon among prolific novelists who sustain decades-long publishing careers by working across multiple imprints and genres.
Advice for Aspiring Writers
Asked what advice she would offer young writers along the Alabama coast, Haines emphasized the foundational importance of reading widely and reading attentively. “Read, read, read,” she said. “But read with your gut. Be aware what touches you emotionally and then figure out why it does. This is how you learn to write effectively.”
She also encouraged aspiring writers to attend conferences and seminars where working writers, editors, and literary agents discuss the realities of the publishing business. Her framing, that writing is fundamentally a creative endeavor while publishing is fundamentally a business, echoes advice commonly given in creative writing programs and literary conferences nationwide, where the distinction between the craft of writing and the commerce of publishing is often treated as a critical, if sometimes uncomfortable, lesson for emerging authors.
A Broader Message About Community
Beyond questions of craft, Haines used part of the interview to reflect more broadly on life in Coastal Alabama. She argued that community has historically been a vital part of Southern life but suggested that sense of community was eroding. Her advice was practical and rooted in everyday civic life: support local businesses, look out for neighbors and neighborhoods, practice basic courtesy while driving, reduce pollution, and spay or neuter pets. “We live in an incredible part of the world,” she said, “let’s value what we have.”
That sentiment, an appeal to civic-mindedness grounded in appreciation for the region’s natural and cultural resources, is one echoed frequently by writers, environmentalists, and community leaders across the Gulf Coast, an area long recognized for its unique estuarine ecosystems, historic port cities, and blended cultural heritage stretching from Mobile Bay into the Mississippi Delta and beyond.
A Regional Literary Legacy
Writers like Haines who maintain deep ties to a specific region while achieving broader commercial and critical success play an important role in sustaining local literary culture. University creative writing programs, regional literary anthologies, and independent bookstores across the Gulf South have long relied on the visibility that established authors bring to a region’s literary identity. Haines’s dual role as both a widely published novelist and a University of South Alabama faculty member reflects a common pattern among successful regional writers, many of whom continue teaching even after achieving significant publishing success, using their classrooms to pass along both craft lessons and an appreciation for regionally rooted storytelling to the next generation of writers.
For readers along the Alabama Gulf Coast, interviews like this one offer a window into the literary life taking shape just beyond the region’s borders, in the Mississippi Delta and the university classrooms of Mobile, while also reinforcing the deep cultural and historical threads connecting South Alabama to its neighboring Delta communities.