Q & A
This interview first appeared in the September 2008 issue of First Draft, the newsletter of the Guppies—the Great UnPublished branch of Sisters in Crime. My thanks to Susan Evans, editor of First Draft, and a great interviewer.Q: Is Sweet Man Is Gone your first novel, or do you have a few unpublished stories or books tucked away?
A: I wrote my first mystery, which was also my first novel, in 1989 over winter break from my college teaching job. It came pouring out as if it was writing itself. It was a mystery set on a college campus, sort of in the Amanda Cross vein, but not as classy because the college wasn't a fancy Ivy League place like in her books. I got an agent for the book and she worked quite diligently to sell it but didn't succeed. Then I wrote a mystery featuring a young man as an amateur sleuth. I got a lot of feedback to the effect that he wasn't very manly—though my women friends liked him, which tells you something about what women really want. After that I wrote three and a half mysteries with my Maxx Maxwell character. It took me a long time to get plotting figured out. I wanted to make the stories involve music, and sometimes I included more about music than most people would want to read.
Q: What writers influenced you? Who do you read?
A: I love Raymond Chandler and the other noir guys. I like the stripped-down language that manages nonetheless to be poetic, and I love the odd worlds that Chandler explores. I also like the classic academic mysteries like Dorothy Sayers and Amanda Cross, mostly because of my background in academia. Lately I'm reading every mystery I can find that has music in it because I'm preparing a talk called "Musical Mystery Tour." While researching that I discovered John Harvey, who's really great. He writes British police procedurals and his sleuth is a huge jazz fan.
Q: When you write, how consciously do you work? Do you outline?
A: I outline religiously. I figure out who did it and how and why, and I also decide who the other suspects will be and work out motives and clue trails for them. I spend a few months making notes and charts and lists before I start the actual writing. The mysteries that I read are traditional mysteries and that's the kind I want to write. I want the reader to be really puzzled all the way through with all kinds of red herrings and then surprised at the end.
Q: Why blues? Where did you get your taste for the music? What does it say to a college professor from New Jersey?
A: I got the taste for it when I was living in the Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s. It seemed much more genuine than the pop music of the '50s and early '60s—though now I recognize that rock and roll developed from the blues and I hear that in it and like it. The blues also talked about sex in a way that pop music hadn't talked about sex for a long time, if ever. So an appreciation of blues merged pretty well with the sexual revolution that was going on.
Q: Had you studied music at all before you took up the guitar in adulthood?
A: I took piano lessons as a child, but my teacher was a European-trained classical pianist and her students weren't allowed to play things that were fun. Rock and roll was just coming into existence then and she was horrified by it.
Q: What blues performers do you enjoy? Any musical favorites besides blues?
A: I love the three Kings: Freddie, Albert, and B.B. And I like any kind of blues-flavored music, like R&B and Soul—and I love Bebop. It's the only kind of jazz I genuinely like. I like the classics—all the Robert Johnson songs, and the whole Chicago blues tradition. When I had my band, we did "Sweet Little Angel" and I tried mightily to learn the "real" B. B. King lead parts.
Q: What made you decide to learn guitar by playing in a band rather than taking lessons and practicing at home? There's a big difference between learning to play and risking the embarrassment of performing live.
A: I took lessons and practiced at home for a few years before I ever tried to play in a band. My first experience with that was at a summer workshop in Connecticut, and then in a class at the New School in New York City. I wanted that ensemble experience—each person is playing their own part and it all comes together as a whole. Watching bands play before I started taking lessons, I would feel a terrific pang of longing because being in a band seemed a way of cooperating wordlessly with other people to create something wonderful. Very different from sitting at a computer writing.
Q: Were you ever worried as a woman for your safety, going to some of the dives where you rehearsed or performed?
A: No. The band was three guys and me, so I always had protection. Anyway, those places aren't very scary. Three quarters of the people who practice at those NYC rehearsal studios are in real life doctors, lawyers, teachers, whatever. Our first gig was at the Orange Bear, down by where the World Trade Center used to be. It's gone now, but it was the scruffiest place you could ever imagine. The gig was a birthday party for a guy named Jeff who worked at the New York City Department of Finance. Jeff had been debating whether to have the party at the Orange Bear or at the Yale Club, where he was a member.
Q: When in the process of learning to play guitar did you decide to write a book, and why?
A: I've always felt that things weren't real until I put them into words. I was having such a terrific time with the guitar playing and learning about the blues and the culture of being in a band and having that camaraderie with your bandmates—and I wanted to tell a story in which that was a big part. And that world is one in which people are often living on the edge, and so a story set in that milieu can have more tension than one that happens, say, in suburbia. I've always had a terrific sympathy with outsiders, too. I get angry when people make snap judgments about a person based on appearance or what the person does for a living.
Q: Have you started on your second novel?
A: The sequel was finished before I sold Sweet Man Is Gone. In fact, one agent was more interested in the sequel, and for a while I thought it might sell first.
Q: What did you learn about plotting that helped you craft Sweet Man Is Gone?
A: Everything has to lead somewhere. Scenes can't sit there on the page without a purpose. I worked out the clues and wrote them down in lists. When I planned scenes, I planned what clues would be worked into what scenes. As the reader's mind processes clues (even if they turn out to be red herrings), excitement builds because the reader sees an explanation taking shape. And the reader reads on to flesh out the explanation.
It seems to have worked. Several people have described Sweet Man Is Gone as a "page-turner." That's exciting to me, because my book doesn't feature much danger or violence. It's cozy, despite the setting. So the page-turner quality must come from excitement about the various explanations for the murder that are taking shape.
Q: Have you written short stories about Maxx?
A: I have a flash-fiction story about her coming out in Mysterical-E in the spring. It's called "Maxx Nails It." And I wrote a Maxx Maxwell story called "Blues Clues" that I made up into a booklet to use for promotion. One of the things I did with it was to mail copies to blues-society presidents. I'm halfway through another Maxx story that I plan to send to Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock.
Q: My favorite single line in the book is Doretta's. ". . . you got to remember that the blues ain't pretty." Would you care to elaborate on what you meant?
A: When it flourished in the Mississippi Delta in the early decades of the 20th century, blues took the place of theater in African American culture. It was about everything that life is about, and the point wasn't to make pretty sounds or create pretty images but rather to deal seriously with the stresses and strains of life as a black person in America. The themes aren't pretty and sometimes the sounds aren't even pretty—the point is to be as expressive as possible, and sometimes sounds that are expressive are also kind of disturbing.
Q: You have three storylines at least?the murder and its solution, the band's struggles, and Maxx's backstory with Sandy and Doretta. When you started the book, were those threads clearly identified? How did you get to them?
A: The first thread that I developed was the murder and its solution, but with an amateur sleuth you need to explain why this person gets involved. So that led me to develop the thread of the band's struggles. Maxx fears that losing Jimmy has destroyed the band, and the band means everything to her. So that's one more reason—besides her crush on him—that she wants to figure out who killed him. The Sandy thread got into the Maxx material in an earlier, still unpublished, Maxx Maxwell mystery. Doretta got in there when an agent asked me why Maxx liked the blues so much, so I thought bingo—I'll use the Sandy stuff and merge it with meeting Doretta.
Q: The Doretta-Maxx thread feels the most thematic. "The set could have lasted five minutes or a year. I am so caught up in it that I have no sense of time passing, yet when it ends I feel like I'm much older than when I came in, like by living through those songs with her I've received a transfusion of her grit and power." Is the power Maxx feels coming from the person or the music?
A: As I said, the blues is really theater for African-American culture, not that different from the role of Greek tragedy in ancient Greece. A singer like Doretta is a performer who brings the eternal verities embodied in the songs alive through her talent.
Q: Stan is a remarkable character. Have you known anyone that dumb and insensitive who was that talented? What are you saying about musicians and music that so many of them are such creeps but they can create joy with their music?
A: Stan loves music to the point that he doesn't think about anything else and doesn't understand the niceties of human interaction. Those nimble-fingered guitar guys are often like that because playing guitar is all they do—and there's definitely a musician subculture in which, for those guys, playing louder and faster and with fancier licks takes the place of more macho things that jocks might do—it's the testosterone in action. I think a guy like that can cultivate his chops and be searching or longing for a different sound but just not know what that sound is. A real life example is my extremely cool former guitar teacher, Steve Tarshis, who was the model for the Josh Bergman character (except Steve is happily married to a really nice woman). Anyway, he told me about coming to Manhattan fresh from Berklee College of Music, with the whole Berklee chops thing imprinted into his brain, and discovering a little combo playing around the corner from where he was living. He said he'd go there night after night after his own gigs and listen—and the combo actually turned out to be Cornell Dupree, who is an amazing player. Steve said the playing was so simple, but you just sat there and held your breath waiting to hear what came next because the solo lines were like a story. He said that was what made him see that chops were nothing without something behind them.
Q: Race isn't mentioned in your book, but I am assuming Doretta is black, as are most of the bluesmen. Again, I'm wondering about a white Jersey girl creating such a powerful bond with an old black singer.
A: That was perhaps a bit fanciful—though for the past four years I've taken classes every winter in the Jazzmobile program in Harlem, where everyone—students, teachers, staff—is black except for some Asians and about ten white people. I can't tell you how gracious I found everyone I met there to be—so welcoming and encouraging and totally generous about sharing their beautiful music with anyone who wants to learn.
Q: Did any of your characters come alive for you, move the plot in a way that surprised you?
A: Stan just came out of nowhere, and everything he did seemed to be naturally what he would do. I think his character shaped a lot of the eventual plot.
Q: You broke a few rules in writing this book. It's in present tense and you used dreams or half-sleep sequences to tell much of the Doretta sections. You also changed person in the epilogue. Did you have any trouble finding an agent or selling the book because you chose to ignore conventional wisdom?
A: I didn't know present tense was controversial till the book was all done. Then I learned that people on DorothyL say things like, "I'd never read a book in present tense." But I'm making a collection of other people who do it. Chris Grabenstein and Hank Phillippi Ryan are two—and Chris won an Anthony and Hank won the Agatha last year. And lots of writers use dreams. I've never been able to understand why the rule mongers have decided that using dreams is evil. When I get in critique situations and people start invoking "rules," I become furious. If it works it works. I don't think changing person in the epilogue is a very serious infraction, not like switching back and forth all the way through the book—though lots of good writers (John Le Carré for one) do that. You put your finger very nicely on what I was trying to do when you commented earlier, "Also liked the way you switched to third person for the epilogue. The distancing gave a performance feel to that scene that was very clever."