WRITER2WRITER A CONVERSATION WITH JAN BURKE Jan Burke is one of the most respected crime writers working today. She's a winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Novel for Bones. Her bestselling mystery series, featuring Southern California newspaper reporter Irene Kelly has won her wide acclaim and readership. She is also the author of Flight, featuring Irene's husband, homicide detective Frank Harriman; Nine, a standalone thriller; and a collection of her short stories, entitled 18. Jan is also notorious in crime writer circles for having more hours in her day than the rest of us, given her extraordinary service to the Mystery Writers of America and as founder of the Crime Lab Project, an effort to win greater funding for forensics labs. Her latest novel is Bloodlines. Visit Jan's official site here. Jeff: You ran a manufacturing plant for several years, which is a rather unusual job for a fiction writer. How did that experience influence your writing? Or the way that you approached your writing career? Jan: Writers will write, whatever else it is they do to make ends meet before, during, or after being published. In my case, I worked at a number of different jobs before taking on the one I was working at when I sold my first book. The manufacturing plant was a family business sold to a major corporation. I'm so grateful. I learned all I need to know about why people want to kill each other while working in corporate America. Jeff: Writer requirement #1: you should have had one truly, deeply, horrendously soul-sucking job once in your life. Jan: And I grew to hate corporate politics so much, I became more serious about writing. You asked about influences. I think coming out of the corporate world gave me a better appreciation of the differences in the creative and the business aspects of writing. A published writer is like a person who must take a journey over land and then by sea. Each requires its own equipment. A boat won't get you from Wichita to Los Angeles. A car won't take you from Los Angeles to Honolulu. The creative process and the business process are different and should be kept separated. Jeff: How? Jan: The creative process should not be caught up in commercial considerations. By this, I do not mean you should fail to communicate something of interest to your readers, or aim to become known as a misunderstood genius. I mean that you have to put the book first, and not get caught up in thinking about the market or agents or reviews or advertising. At the time when the book is published, you become a partner with your publisher in a commercial enterprise, and simply adoring your own prose and trusting that everyone will think as highly of your work as you do yourself will not get you where you want to go. You need to keep these two aspects of a writing career balanced. I've seen writers get so wrapped up in promoting, they fail to pay attention to the writing. Jeff: At times I think that's endemic. Promotion alone is not the Holy Grail. Jan: Or perhaps they enjoy what a friend of mine referred to as being the "capital A Author" more than being the "lowercase w writer." Others feel so dejected if they don't get a big crowd at their first few signings, they stop making efforts to promote their work. The other is that you must understand that no one is going to take care of your career for you. You have to stay informed and make changes when needed. If your agent isn't doing what needs to be done for you, who is to blame if he still isn't doing what needs to be done a year later? Jeff: You have given a great amount of time, effort, and thought into keeping Mystery Writers of America a vital organization, from creating innovative programs for chapters, to adding new benefits for members and ensuring that the organization follows its own bylaws. Why is MWA so important to you? Jan: Among writers, our genre has a reputation for camaraderie. That comes in no small part, I believe, because sixty years ago, writers in this genre got together and formed Mystery Writers of America. Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, Margaret Millar, Ellery Queen, Anthony Boucher — those are just a few of the names of writers who gave time and energy to MWA. Thanks to those writers, the organization was there for me when I began my career. I'm just paying it forward. Jeff: What would you like every member of MWA to do to support the organization? Because it strikes me that part of the challenge is keeping the established writers really involved in MWA. It's easy, once you're published, to give your time to the many other demands that publication brings, and giving time to MWA can go low on that list. We've all seen it. Jan: As for what I'd like others to do for it, I'd like them to recognize its value and do something to make sure it stays valuable. Jeff: You're a noted short story writer. You published a collection of short stories, 18, with a small press, which was later picked up by your publisher. It's a great approach in that it gets your stories out in your own collection, which most publishers seem uninterested in for crime writers. Jan: I love the short story form, both as a reader and a writer. Single-author collections may not be as popular as multiple-author anthologies, but crime fiction publishing offers more chances to get a short story published for payment than "literary" fiction and probably most of the genres. (I don't know how science fiction short story markets are doing these days.) Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine have readerships beyond the usual crime fiction fan-base. One of the heaviest workloads in Edgar(R) Award judging is that of the Best Short Story committee, because so many stories are published each year. All of the stories but one in 18 were previously published elsewhere. (The eighteenth story was intentionally held off from the usual short story markets, and written especially for that collection.) I think the fact that the stories had each had at least one home before they were published in 18 says that there is a marketplace there. Jeff: Let's turn to your novels. With Bones, your Irene Kelly books really moved into mainstream suspense. Was that a conscious decision or just the way you wrote the book? Did you ever think of writing Bones as a standalone, as opposed to part of a series? Jan: Bones was imagined as an Irene Kelly story, and always part of the series. Jeff: You've kept Irene Kelly and Frank Harriman fresh and vigorous through several books. How do you keep a series from going stale? Jan: The characters continue to intrigue me. I suppose if I stop wondering about them and what they're up to and what they might do in a given situation, I'll stop writing the series. Tension between Frank and Irene occurs in part because of the tensions between their workplaces, so that helps. Jeff: But you've also taken risks. Flight, for instance, focused more on Frank, as opposed to Irene. Jan: I try to take risks with each book, not for the sake of risk-taking, but to push my writing to a better place, beyond where it was in the last book. To do something a little better this time out. That challenge is always before me. Whether I succeed or not, I leave to the reader to judge. Jeff: But let's be frank, no pun intended—for some writers, shifting to a different "main" character in a series would be like appearing on Fear Factor to gobble up scorpions. They would be worried about pissing off their core readers. Jan: I have a readership that tolerates this risk-taking. I feel both gratitude and respect for my readers for that. Some readers want to reread the same book again and again, and some authors are happy to give them the same book again and again, with just a few changes in props or puzzle. I would prefer that we all explore a bit of new territory. Jeff: Bad guys can make or break a book. Your villains are particularly memorable and nasty. How do you create them? Jan: I try to let them introduce themselves to me in the way any other character does. A supposedly minor villain in Nine, for example, surprised me and ended up playing a much larger part in the story than expected. I'm delighted when that happens. Jeff: But it can't all be a surprise as you write. You must have a foundation of sorts for your more warped characters in mind when you start. Jan: Most of my antagonists combine intelligence and special skills with some incredibly strong desire and a badly flawed perspective or area of emotional instability. Most evolve out of a mixture of studies of criminals, selected passages of the latest DSM, and behavior or impulses I've observed in myself or others. Jeff: The DSM—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I hope they spelled my name correctly in the new edition. Kidding. Jan: Greed, wanting to be important, jealousy, desire, rage, a thirst for revenge — most of us won't kill someone over such things, but most of us have felt them. The villains may have less impulse control, compassion, or conscience, and almost all are self-involved. But you ought to feel that they could be living next door to you, not that they fly up out of some cave at night. Jeff: You and I have both written about vigilantism—you in Nine, me in Cut and Run. We both imagined organized groups carving out their own version of justice. Does it surprise you that we haven't seen more of this in modern America? I keep thinking it will be the next disturbing social trend. Jan: For Nine, I asked myself two questions: if someone I loved was wrongly accused, and I knew he or she would not be treated fairly by the criminal justice system, and if I had any necessary skills and resources, what might I be willing to do to prevent them from going to trial? if someone I loved was tortured and murdered, and I knew who had done this, but also knew that he or she would never be convicted criminal justice system (perhaps had already been found not guilty), if I had any necessary skills and resources, what might I be willing to do to avenge my loved one? We all read or see news stories that make us aware that others have found themselves in the above situations, although not often with the "skills and resources" part. Idealized vigilantism is all around us, and from a young age. If you think about it, Batman is a vigilante. So is Superman. For that matter, so are the Mutant Teenage Ninja Turtles. A great many westerns are vigilante stories. A great many action films are, too. But I don't think the reality is quite so handsome or heroic. Jeff: No, it's not. It's a tear in the social fabric. Jan: Vigilantism succeeds only when people believe that the system of law enforcement and criminal justice aren't working. (Perhaps talk-radio hosts who spew apocalyptic pronouncements for the sake of ratings ought to think twice about this possible outcome. Oh wait—that implies they are thinking once.) Most of us don't think those systems work as well as they should, but that's not quite the same thing. Criminal justice in the U.S. is in urgent need of repair, but I don't think it fails as utterly as some would have it. Jeff: Tell me about your new novel, Bloodlines. It's getting great reviews. Jan: Bloodlines is a prequel to the series. In Goodnight, Irene, Irene's beloved mentor, Conn O'Connor, is killed on page two. But Irene was so fond of him, I missed him, too, so for years now I've pledged I'd write O'Connor's story. This is that book. The title has multiple meanings within the story, but mostly concerns itself with what we take from the previous generation and pass on to the next. It covers about seventy years of history, during which newspaper work, forensic science, and the landscape of Southern California changed dramatically. The book is told in three sections. The first takes place in the years 1936-1958, when O'Connor goes from being a paperboy to a young reporter. His mentor is Jack Corrigan, a hard-drinking newspaper reporter who takes a near-fatal beating one night in 1958 and comes to in a stand of eucalyptus trees, a windbreak between a farm and a road. He sees - or thinks he sees - a car being buried. Few people believe him. When he was found later that night, he was in marsh, not on a farm. Besides, that same night an infant heir is apparently kidnapped, the child's nursemaid murdered, and yacht the child's parents were on is missing. The police have their hands full, and not many leads to go on. O'Connor does what he can to find out who tried to kill Jack and what became of the yacht and its passengers, but many questions remain. The second section of the book takes place in 1978, when Irene is a green reporter, hired as the first woman in many years to work in the newsroom of the Las Piernas News Express. She's taking grief from the men who work with her, but her biggest detractor is Conn O'Connor, whose reporting has made him her hero — until now. She has a lot to struggle with, and her life becomes more complicated when two events occur. First, she's there when a buried car is discovered at the groundbreaking for a shopping mall — and must share the work on the story with O'Connor. Second, a young man takes an interest in her — one of the missing heir's family members claims the young man was the kidnapped child. Times and technology have changed, and she works with O'Connor to answer more of the questions from 1958, but other questions remain. The final part of the book takes place in 2000. Irene is now a mentor to young reporters. New events and new technologies both raise questions and promise answers, but it still takes good detective work on the part of Irene and her proteges to bring about justice. Jeff: Tell me about your creative process when you're starting a new book. Is it different if you're doing a standalone vs. an Irene novel? Jan: By now, I trust Irene to get me to the end of a book. Getting to know new characters is a challenge and sometimes on a standalone, I feel as if I'm working without a net. Jeff: Having just finished a standalone—yes, it's absolutely a departure from a comfort zone. You work out writing muscles you may not have flexed in a while. Jan: All the same, there will be new characters even in an Irene book — and besides, however frightening it may be at moments, on the whole I enjoy that challenge! Jeff: You've maintained a steady output of novels while being heavily involved in MWA and a program to fund forensics laboratories. Are you particularly good at time management? Or do you simply have powers over time and space? You seem to have more hours in the day than the rest of us. I think your Palm Pilot is nuclear-powered. Jan: Some tasks regarding organizations are ones I've been doing since I was in grade school. I am the daughter of a PTA mom. I know how to get things done. I should clarify that the Crime Lab Project isn't fundraising, it's an effort by a group of writers, producers, and others to make the public aware that it's not CSI out there, and we are all paying the price for that. Our local, state, and federal politicians need to get the message that funding labs needs to be a priority. We waste a lot of money by not properly funding crime labs. Your readers can learn more about that at http://www.crimelabproject.com My husband, Tim, is terrifically supportive, and that neither of us believe folding laundry should be more important than finding funding for things like — oh, say, a national system that would allow families of missing persons to place DNA on file, so that if a Jane or John Doe was found in another jurisdiction, a match might be made — something easily within reach, which we do not have now. Housework is not even more important than giving dogs attention, calling parents, or talking to friends. It's not more important than Tim playing music he loves or my having time to write. So you set your priorities and live with dust bunnies and only invite people who get the picture over to your house. Jeff: What have you not accomplished yet as a writer that you would like to do? Jan: I hope I will always have a better book or story in me than the last one I wrote. I love writing, and although I've been seriously pursuing it for a decade or so, I feel as if there is so much yet to explore.