Interview with Barbara D’Amato

Interviewer: Elizabeth Zelvin

Liz: Why don’t you start by telling us about your new thriller, Other Eyes I’m only one of many mystery lovers who rushed right out to order it as soon as we learned it was coming out. What’s it about, and what prompted you to tell this particular story?

Barb: The central character in Other Eyes is Blue Eriksen, an archaeology professor at Northwestern University. Her recent book Goddess, a scholarly account of female goddesses, became a bestseller, much to her amazement. In Other Eyes she is researching the use of hallucinogens in the development of ancient religions. In the course of this, she has stumbled on evidence that brief use of psilocybin can prevent or cure drug addiction. Although she doesn't realize it, this threatens an international organization dictating the transportation and sale of illegal drugs.

What prompted me? We have a panicky approach to consciousness-altering substances. I would hope someday we come to treat drug addiction as a medical problem, rather than a moral failing or a crime.

Liz: Some of us, including me in my “other hat,” do treat addiction as a medical problem. Unfortunately, there's a big disconnect between treatment and law enforcement.

I read and loved your Cat Marsala books long before I met you or wrote mysteries myself. It’s one of the series that comes up when avid mystery readers talk about characters they miss. Did you end that series by choice, or was it one of those things that publishers do? Do you ever consider bringing Cat back?

Barb: Thank you for liking Cat. After the ninth book, my editor, the wonderful Susanne Kirk, retired, and I think Scribner was considering dropping the series anyway. I don't see any other publisher picking it up. I'm afraid Cat had nine lives.

Liz: You’ve been president of both Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and won or been nominated for almost every recognized award, not only for novels but also for short stories and non-fiction. Is there any particular honor that meant the most to you, and why?

Barb: The Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction. Good Cop Bad Cop was an homage to The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh. His book was brutal and utterly non-PC, but the humor in it got me through a tough time in my life.

Liz: How did you get involved with Sisters in Crime? Were you one of the original founding goddesses? How important do you think it is to women writers that this organization exists and remains strong?

Barb: I was not at the Bouchercon where the first meeting took place, but as soon as I heard about it, I said "That's for me!" Sisters has accomplished much, much good. It's still important for what it does, and also for the sense of fellowship it provides. Many of my best friends I met through SinC.

Liz: Both your police procedural series and the private eye books were all set in Chicago. What makes Chicago such a great city to live in and write about? I hope it’s okay to reveal that I had a perfect first visit to Chicago, where I was lucky enough to stay in your fabulous apartment overlooking the lake. Or do Chicagoans say the Lake?

Barb: Probably most say lake. Chicago has everything. Every ethnic neighborhood known to the human race, every kind of ethnic cuisine [this is IMPORTANT], You can eat an English breakfast, a Punjabi lunch and a Peruvian dinner if you have the stamina. Chicago is a walking city, a city of neighborhoods. And that's not including the Art Institute, the Shedd Aquarium, Orchestra Hall, the planetarium, the architecture--I'd better stop now.

Liz: In the last few years, you’ve turned from mysteries to stand-alone thrillers. Has the switch made any difference in your writing process? In how you do research?

Barb: They both take research. I used to hang around a lot with cops, which I loved to do. What's changed in the last few years is the Internet. There are many things now you don't have to go see. I'm not sure that's all good, but it's certainly easier. And you don't have to look for a parking place.

Liz: You once told me how much you enjoyed writing your thriller Foolproof in collaboration with Jeanne Dams and Mark Zubro. Can you tell us about that?

Barb: We went into it thinking if it took each of us a year or so to write a book, surely three together could do it in six months. Nun-unh. It took five years. Part of it was the negotiation. Always friendly, but organizing, combining, and smoothing was a real challenge. We'd each bring in our work and read it and once in a while one of us would have made a double-entrendre so hilarious we'd scream with laughter and my husband would run in from his office asking whether somebody was hurt.

Liz: The bio on your website states that you have “worked as an assistant surgical orderly, carpenter for stage magic illusions, assistant tiger handler, stage manager, researcher for attorneys in criminal cases, and occasionally teaches mystery writing to Chicago police officers.” I want to hear about the tiger handling—and the stage magic carpentry too, if it’s as interesting as it sounds.

Barb: I got picked to help handle the tiger--note it says assistant handler--because the stagehands, usually so careful not to let anybody else touch the props, didn't want to get close to him. As to the carpentry, the big illusions get hard use on stage and need constant repair. I could tell you how most magic illusions are performed, but--

Liz: Among your many talents is as a writer of musical comedies. Did you write all of those with your husband? Was it fun? Do you sing and dance yourself?

Barb: I did write them with Tony. He was the composer. I wrote the book, and we argued over the lyrics. I took dance lessons as a child, tap and ballet, but I don't dance now and you DO NOT want to hear me sing.

Liz: You have a son who’s also a writer, Brian D’Amato, whose brilliant speculative novel In the Courts of the Sun explores the ancient Mayan prediction that the world will end in 2012. That’s only a year away. Should we be worried? Did your being a writer influence or inspire him? Do you connect as fellow writers? I ask because I know of parent-child writing duos who range from collaborating under a single name to saying they never talk about writing or read each other’s manuscripts before publication.

Barb: His second book in the trilogy should be out in a few months and will tell whether we should be worried. He's been reading my stuff since he was in junior high, and commenting. He used to draw corncobs in the margins where he thought I was being corny. We still read and help each other.

Liz: Would you like to tell us about your grandchildren? Any budding writers in the new generation?

Barb: You mean Best Female Grandchild on Earth and Best Male Grandchild on Earth? One is math and computer oriented and one is science-oriented. But they are still the best.

Liz: Um, I think you mean One of the Three Best Female Grandchildren on Earth. The other two are mine.

What’s up next for Barbara D’Amato?

Barb: I'm working on a book that just isn't responding, either to pressure or to being left alone to simmer for a while. I'm very frustrated with it, but I'm trying to live by the motto I've used before--"Surely something will occur to me."

Using Our Words

Elizabeth Zelvin

A feature of contemporary parenting as practiced by generations younger than mine that always tickles me is the way parents deal with temper tantrums by telling a screaming toddler, “Use your words.” It’s a pithy definition of what writers do.

This piece occurred to me as I sat around the breakfast table at a country inn in Oakmont, PA with two writer friends, Rosemary Harris and Barbara D’Amato, with whom I appeared at the Mystery Lovers Bookshop Festival of Mystery. It’s always great fun to schmooze with other writers, and we got to talking about what different kinds of writers do and how it’s not as easy as it looks to the people who perennially tell writers, “I’ve got a great idea, why don’t you write it and we’ll split the profits.”

I’ve done a significant amount of writing in four distinct genres, or five if you count short stories separately for novels: fiction, poetry, songwriting, and academic or professional writing—six if you count blogging, which I consider a form of journalism, though for some bloggers it’s rather a form of journaling, not at all the same thing.

As someone said at breakfast, it’s marvelous that there are so many words in the English language that each writer comes up with something unique on any given theme. Aspiring fiction writers don’t always realize this. Newcomers sometimes worry that if they send their manuscripts out to agents and editors, these professionals may steal their uncopyrighted material. I’m told this sometimes happens with movie pitches in Hollywood, but it makes veteran novelists laugh.

One, there are proverbially only seven original plots.

Two, the ideas are the easy part: imagination, craft, organization, and perseverance in putting the words on paper (or on screen) are what distinguishes the writer from the wannabe. (Note that this pejorative term becomes less ugly when defined by the writer’s ability to follow through and complete a work, not by publication status.)

Three, I've met at least one writer who expressed concern that his manuscript, also about a recovering substance abuser in lower Manhattan, might coincidentally be too similar to Death Will Get You Sober. I assured him it didn't worry me. I believe someone else has about the same chance of coming up with my characters, my dialogue, and my voice as those monkeys who are supposed to type Shakespeare’s plays if they keyboard long enough.

Poetry, a craft I’ve been practicing for more than thirty years, allows the individual writer to create a unique work by using fewer rather than more words. The challenge is to tell a story (or paint a word picture, depending on what kind of poem one writes) in 100 to 200 words if it’s a typical free verse one-page lyric poem, in seventeen syllables (three lines divided five-seven-five) if it’s a haiku.

Song lyrics are often equated with poems, but in my experience, the crafts of songwriting and writing poetry are distinct. Without demonstrating it here, I can assert with confidence that I can pair songs and poems I’ve written on a single theme—alcoholism, love lost or found, and death, for example—in which I address the theme in two entirely different voices and ways of using words. The power of good songwriting is not only that, like poetry, it’s condensed, but that it expresses what the writer wants to say not in the most original words but in the simplest and most basic words of one and two syllables, while managing to give this simplicity a fresh twist and depth of emotion that can move listeners in much the same way as a poem moves hearers or readers.

In contrast to all of these storytelling genres, professional writing requires the writer to use specialized language—a jargon or, more kindly, idiom—with a precision that will make it perfectly comprehensible to any colleague in the same profession—and do so without telling any stories at all that aren’t true.

Interview with author Barbara D'Amato

By Lonnie Cruse

I met Barbara D'Amato last February at the Love Is Murder conference in Chicago. I was quite nervous about appearing on a panel with such a well-known author, but Barbara is a lovely lady and quite comfortable to chat with. I appreciate her doing this interview. I think you'll enjoy getting to know her as well.

LC: I just finished reading HARD BARGAIN and I'm amazed at the amount of realism about police procedure you manage to slip into your book without overwhelming the reader or "dumping information." How DO you research your work?

BD'A: I do a lot of my research now on the net. But at the time of HARD BARGAIN that wasn't possible. Also, to get the feel of police work, you have to get out on the street with police officers. My friend, the wonderful writer Hugh Holton, was Commander of Personnel for the Chicago Police Department when I first met him, and later District Commander in the Third District. I rode around with him, and then did ride-alongs with patrol cops and Tac teams. You need to hang out with cops.

LC: Oh yeah! There is nothing like zipping down a major city street in the middle of the night at way over the normal speed limit. Ride-alongs are great fun. What led you to create the character of Cat Marsala?

BD'A: I had been working on the Donna Branion murder, both to try to free her husband, who had been wrongly convicted of her murder, and to write a book about the case, studying the autopsy report and crime scene photos and interviewing police officers and judges and so on. After a while, I realized that what I was doing was very much like the work of an investigative reporter. Cat grew from that.

LC: You wrote a true crime book about the case (which I'm dying to read, by the way) titled, THE DOCTOR, THE MURDER, THE MYSTERY: THE TRUE STORY OF THE DR. JOHN BRANION MURDER CASE. Given all the murder cases in the city of Chicago alone, what drew you to write about this particular case?

BD'A: Dr. John Branion was in prison in Illinois when his second wife, who he had married during the long period of review by the courts, came to see my husband. Tony is a professor at Northwestern Law School. He had just got a man out of a Mexico prison. Shirley Branion had seen a story on that in a newspaper. But that was international law, his field. And in any case, for any sort of Post-conviction or habeas corpus hearing, we needed new evidence. So I started to research the case. Slippery slope. I became more and more interested and more and more outraged that Branion was in prison.

LC: You write stand-alones and two series, how do you keep them all separate? Focus on one at a time, or just let fly?

BD'A: I always focus on one book at a time. I don't know how people can keep two in their heads, but it's wonderful that they can.

LC: I agree! What is your typical writing day like, assuming you ever have one?

BD'A: I used to insist to myself that I produce four pages a day. As I get older, I'm beating up on myself less if I don't make that goal.

LC: Hmmm, perhaps I should stop whacking myself over the head with my mouse? You've won several notable awards for your writing. Does that make it easier for you to write the next book, or raise the bar so high you have to grab a step ladder to reach it?

BD'A: Well, the awards don't, but thanks for mentioning them. What makes it hard is that I always want to do something different, so I'm always struggling with the new project.

LC: Happy to hear I'm not alone in that. Would you tell us a bit about your background? I'm particularly interested in the bit about tiger handling. And is writing mysteries easier or harder?

BD'A: Writing mysteries is WAY harder than tiger handling. I got into handling tigers when my husband and I had a musical comedy playing in Chicago. He was the composer and I wrote the book. It involved magic and was David Copperfield's first starring role. You know the illusion in which the beautiful young lady is changed into a tiger? Well, nobody wanted to handle the tiger except his trainer and it required two people to get him out of his travel cage, into the illusion cage and out of it. So I was drafted. I did this for quite some time, occasionally with a panther. But I have to emphasize that I was just a handler. A trainer is much more important and more skilled.

LC: What writers do you like to read and why?


BD'A: I love to read mysteries, and I read three or four a week. But I don't want to mention authors, because if I mention ten, there would be a hundred more I admire and I would feel guilty about leaving out.


LC: Wow, you ARE a fast reader! Does living in Chicago, amongst so many other authors, affect your writing in any way? Meaning knowing there is so much competition, and so many others writing about the same city?


BD'A: It's wonderful having other writers here to talk with. I remember the days when almost no crime fiction was set in Chicago. The publishing industry thought readers were only interested in New York and L.A. This is excellent.


LC: Anything else you'd like our readers to know about you or your novels?


BD'A: My website is at http://www.barbaradamato.com/ I also do a Chicago-flavored blog with six other Chicago writers, called: http://www.theoutfitcollective.com/ The others are Libby Hellmann, Marcus Sakey, Sara Paretsky, Sean Chercover, Michael Allen Dymmoch, and Kevin Guilfoile.


Quite an interesting group! Thanks for stopping by to chat, Barbara! My bookmark is about to slip into your book AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Can't wait to read it.