By Jody Ewing
07/24/2003
Mystery
writer J.A. Jance knew she wanted to be a writer before she finished
second grade. After reading L. Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz" series, a
bestselling author was born. Yet it would take more courage than
destroying a wicked witch before the South Dakota native found
publishing's Emerald City.
J.A. Jance
Online: www.jajance.com
During the 1960s at the University of Arizona, a professor refused
Jance entry into the creative writing classes, citing that girls "ought
to be teachers or nurses" rather than writers. Jance then married a man
who was allowed into the program, went on to get her degree in English
and Secondary Education, and in 1968 wrote her first book.
"It was sort of an 'out there' children's book, and would have been
edgy in 1968," Jance said in a telephone interview from her home in
Seattle. "I received a nice letter from an editor in New York, saying
if I would make some changes she would consider publishing it."
Jance showed the letter to her husband.
"He read it, handed it back to me and said, 'there's only going to be
one writer in our family, and I'm it,'" Jance recalls. "So I put my
writing away, and other than writing poetry under the dark of night I
never tried writing again until I was a single parent, with two little
kids, no child support, and a full-time job selling life insurance. I
wrote from 4 o'clock to 7 o'clock every morning."
While Jance's dream of being a writer came true by believing in
herself, her former husband's didn't. He died at age 42 of chronic
alcoholism - a year and a half after Jance divorced him - without ever
having published a thing.
Jance now has 30 published novels, including Seattle's J.P. Beaumont
series and Cochise County, Arizona's Joanna Brady series. Her two
sleuths finally met up in last year's "Partner in Crime."
"Over time, I've had two very distinct groups of readers; the ones who
read Beaumont and the ones who read Brady," says Jance, who alternates
between her Seattle residence and one in Tucson, Ariz. "My publisher
came up with the idea of trying to get both sets of readers to read the
same book at the same time by me writing a book with both of them in
it."
Fans also had asked if the two would ever meet, though Jance's initial
reaction had been to dismiss the whole idea.
But when four prisoners later escaped in real life from Arizona's
Cochise County Justice Center with one captured years later in Tacoma,
Wash., Jance suspended that disbelief and set her own crime in motion
to bring her characters together.
The book was fun to write, says Jance, and indeed had the effect of
merging her sets of readers. Fans of both series grabbed up "Partner in
Crime," and now are reading the others. It resulted in a tremendous
bump to the backlist.
"Because I have stayed with the same publishing house all these years,
all of the books are still in print and readily available in paperback
form," Jance says. "When I do get a new reader, they can go back and
read all of them."
In "Partner in Crime," Beaumont teams up with Brady to investigate the
murder of local artist Rochelle Baxter in Bisbee. The artist's next of
kin turns out to be the Washington State Attorney General's Office,
where Baxter, aka Latisha Wall, was an industrial whistler-blower in
the federal witness protection program pending testimony at a trial.
Furthering the plot is the use of sodium azide, a fatal chemical used
in car air bags. Though Jance doesn't set out to write "issue" books,
she says she uses issues as frameworks for her stories. It works;
readers buy up her novels at the rate of 30,000 books per month.
"They're sort of 'stealth' issues," says the author. "I write about
things I'm interested in and things I know about. Alcoholism is in my
books because my first husband died of chronic alcoholism. When I read
about [sodium azide] in my alumni magazine, I thought, 'Whoa, this is
dangerous stuff! How come I never heard about it before?' So I put it
in the book, and now a lot more people who never knew about it know
about it."
In "Exit Wounds," Jance's new thriller released on July 22, she tackles
two other discomforting social concerns: "hoarders," who take in large
numbers of animals by convincing themselves they are saving them when
in fact they are unable to feed or care for them, and "coyotes," the
people smugglers who take money to bring illegal aliens to the U.S. and
who then abandon their charges to die of heat prostration or
suffocation.
Jance - who first learned of hoarders through her sister, head of
animal control for Pinal County, Ariz., - says that although she writes
crime novels she steers clear of using real crime events.
"I learned early on that real murders affect real people," says Jance.
"It's not just the person who is dead, it is all of the people
connected to the person who is dead. I'm interested in how those people
respond to this watershed occurrence in their lives, how they deal with
the aftermath of a death, how they handle a funeral and how they handle
the grieving process."
The author met with family members from a serial homicide case in 1970
in Tucson, and says the people are still broken. "They never get over
it, ever. It doesn't go away. That's one of the reasons I stay away
from true cases," she says.
Instead Jance focuses on characters she finds interesting, which
usually include police officers. "It's clear to me that police officers
are people before they're cops," she says.
In "Exit Wounds," she wants readers to remember that it is only a
story, and it's there for entertainment.
"Maybe they'll learn something along the way," says the longtime dog
lover and owner, "but my real job is to entertain."