Lori Armstrong Introduces a New Heroine

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

Lori Armstrong, the Shamus Award-winning author of Snow Blind and three earlier novels in the Julie Collins private eye series, introduces a new heroine this month with the release of No Mercy, featuring former Army sniper Mercy Gunderson.

Lori’s first Julie Collins mystery, Blood Ties (2005) was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First Novel by the Private Eye Writers of America. The second book in the series, Hallowed Ground (2006) was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best Paperback Original and a Daphne du Maurier Award, and it won the Willa Cather Literary Award for Best Original Softcover Fiction. Shallow Grave (2007) was nominated for a 2008 High Plains Book Award and a Daphne du Maurier Award and was a finalist for the 2008 WILLA Award. The fourth book, Snow Blind (2008) won the Shamus Award for Best Paperback Original. Lori is a fourth generation South Dakotan and lives in Rapid City with her family. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked in the firearms industry. Visit her website for more information about her books and her appearance schedule.

Q. Congratulations on your Shamus win! What does the award mean to you as a writer?

A. Since my character Julie Collins is a PI, for me, the Shamus Award, given by the Private Eye Writers of America, is “the” big award in the mystery world. Snow Blind was the third book that’d been nominated over the last four years, so I guess third time’s the charm! I was thrilled and stunned to hear I’d won. I couldn’t attend Bouchercon due to deadlines, and I accepted via cell phone when my name was announced at the award banquet. At first I thought my friend Judy was pulling my leg. She said, “You won, I’m on my way to the podium right now, what would you like me to say?” I sort of fumbled through thanks etc., because I honestly hadn’t expected to win. When I heard afterward that all my writing heroes, like Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, had been in the audience, it was probably a good thing I wasn’t there as I might’ve gone all geeky fan girl on them.

Q. Tell us about the first book in your new Mercy Gunderson series, No Mercy.

A. Mercy Gunderson comes home to South Dakota on medical leave from the army. Her father just died, leaving the fate of her family’s large 100-year-old ranch in her hands. Problem is, Mercy left home at age eighteen because she wanted nothing to do with the ranch or that lifestyle. A body shows up on their land and the local sheriff is dragging his feet investigating, so Mercy gets embroiled in all sorts of situations that are just as dangerous as the ones she faced in war, but the stakes are higher because it’s personal.

Q. Has the Julie Collins series ended?

A. Snow Blind is the last book in the Julie Collins series. Hopefully I’ll be writing Mercy books for a few years. Right now I’m contracted for one other book in the Mercy Gunderson series, which I’m working on now.

Q. How do Mercy and Julie differ? What kind of stories can you write about Mercy that you couldn’t write about Julie?

A. Mercy is as cool-headed as Julie is hot-headed. As career army, Mercy is used to following orders. Julie doesn’t like anyone telling her what to do. Mercy worships her recently deceased father and holds herself to his standard. Julie’s relationship with her father is irreparable and she refuses to be anything like him. As far as similarities, they both lost their mothers at an early age. They’re both loyal, opinionated, tough and smart. They both like to drink and are attracted to men that maybe on the surface aren’t the best match for them. Mercy is one quarter Sioux, but she’s never embraced that part of her heritage, so I can explore that racial identity aspect more in this series.

Q. Both your series have Native American characters and themes. Are you drawing on personal knowledge, or do you have to research the culture? Do you have Native American friends you can turn to for advice?

A. I do a ton of research, hands-on mostly. One of the things I love about living here are the opportunities to do research, either formally, talking to Native people, or observing them in social and public situations. What’s been both enlightening and disheartening is the learning curve I’ve undertaken in the last ten years. To be honest, when I started research, I realized I didn’t know much about the Lakota culture after being a South Dakotan all my life. I’ve tried to rectify that. I have several friends who have helped me out immensely with Lakota language, traditions, and are willing to answer my oftentimes bizarre questions. I try to make everything as accurate as I can, but that means touching on some of the issues on the reservations and within the culture that aren’t pretty.

Q. What kind of work did you do in the firearms industry? Has that background come in handy in your fiction writing?

A. My husband’s family owns a firearms manufacturing business and I worked as a bookkeeper for ten years. On one hand, it’s great because I have gun experts at my fingertips; on the other hand, some people look at the words “firearms industry” and think I’m a gun-toting redneck. But the pros definitely outweigh the cons and my husband doesn’t balk at my bizarre questions any more.

Q. A lot has been written and said recently about violence against women in crime novels. Is this an issue you ever consider when you’re writing? Do you have any strong feelings one way or the other about crime novels in which women are usually the victims?

A. No. I have to turn off the internal editor, aka, worrying about what family, friends, readers, etc. might think when I’m working on a book and stay true to the story/characters/plot as I see it. I don’t back away from detailing violent acts. In most instances everything happens right on the page, rather than having my main female characters “hear” about a murder. Why? Because for me as a writer, it makes the stakes and reaction to the brutality more real, more immediate, and more dangerous, especially since I’m penning a darker rather than a lighter type of mystery. Violent death is horrible, regardless if the victim is a woman or a man.

Q. In addition to crime fiction, you’ve published a number of contemporary erotic western romances under the name Lorelei James. Why do you use different names in the two genres?

A. I get that question a lot, if I took another name because I’m embarrassed to write erotic romance (erotic romance is completely different than erotica, by the way). My answer? Absolutely not, I am just as proud of the romances as I am of the mysteries. The books have a plot, intriguing characters, a believable conflict and a world I can explore since I’m in essence writing a western saga, featuring members of the same family. I took on a pen name for the romances strictly for shelving purposes in bookstores and libraries.

Since I started writing toward publication in 2000, I knew I’d need a counterbalance in my writing life; switching back and forth allows me to write in first person point of view (mysteries) and multiple third person points of view (romances). Plus, writing mysteries takes me to some dark places. I figured if I was going to write about the worst aspects of life and humanity, murder, hatred and violence, then I wanted to write about the best aspects too, finding love, happiness with a happily ever after and the added bonus of some smokin’ hot sex scenes. I’m lucky I don’t have to choose one genre over the other and can write in both, but it does make for incredibly tight deadlines.

Q. Do you feel at all constrained in the way you can depict sexual relationships in your mysteries?

A. Yes. I took some hits on Shallow Grave for the very explicit sex scene. But it wasn’t gratuitous, and I won’t apologize for it because the scene furthered several important plots in the story line. My (former) editor at Simon and Schuster requested changes in the early edit stage of No Mercy, regarding a scene or two and I had no problem changing them. So the level of intimacy allowed in a series is subjective based on individual editorial preference. I’ll be working with a new editor for the second Mercy book, so it’ll be interesting to see what her editorial style will be when it comes to allowing me to explore the intimate side of relationships.

Q. What are your writing habits?

A. I write every day, without exception. I’ve been under extremely tight deadlines for the last few years, so I’ve had no choice but to hit a certain word count every day or risk being late on my deadline. I’ve taken very little time off. But with the state of the publishing industry, I will be the last person to complain about too much work! And I love it; I have the best job in the world.

Q. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who are still struggling to break into print?

A. There is no muse. Don’t wait to be inspired. Sit down, get to work and finish a project. Edit. Then edit some more. Rinse, repeat!

Hey, It's Different for Me

Reed Farrel Coleman (Guest Blogger)

I envy readers. No, I really do. When I see the sheer joy my wife gets out of reading, I confess to being more than a touch jealous. Between traditional reading and books on tape and CD, she goes through two to three books a week! Not me. For one thing, I may be a quick writer, but I’m a slow reader. Second, reading is no longer just about pleasure for me. For me, reading is part dissection and part analysis. It’s difficult to lose myself in a book the way I once did. An occupational hazard, I suppose.

I remember Orson Welles once being asked, by Merv Griffin of all people, if he enjoyed movies. “No,” he said. “I know too much about the process to be taken in.” It is no coincidence that Welles was an accomplished magician. Magicians don’t say wow, they ask how. The joy of the trick is lost on them. Writers ask how too.

When I wrote Lee Child to compliment him on One Shot, his email reply was very telling and much along the lines of Welles’ view. Although this isn’t quite an exact quote, it’s very close. “I take that as high praise,” he wrote, “from someone who knows how the man behind the curtain works the machinery.” When writers read, they are always looking behind the curtain for the Wizard of Oz.

There’s yet another factor that robs me of some of the joy of reading. As a New York based author and someone who’s held high office in Mystery Writers of America, I’ve had the great good fortune of meeting and developing relationships with a broad range of authors. Some incredibly famous. Some relatively unknown. Many, like me, in that murky mythical land of the midlist. The odd thing about my good fortune is that I often get to know the writer before I have the opportunity to know his or her work. So when I pick a book off my bedside stack, it can be a perilous activity. There can be a personal price to pay if I like an author more than his or her work. I have been lucky in that I have yet to come to blows or lose a friend over this issue, but I’d be lying if I said there haven’t been some pretty awkward moments on panels and at conventions.

It doesn’t end there. These days, I am frequently asked to blurb books—though I’m not quite sure why—judge books for awards, and to act as a first reader for some of my colleagues. Blurbs are a very touchy subject in the business and there’s a broad spectrum of opinion on the issue. In fact, blurbing probably deserves its own dedicated blog. I will say that people have been very generous to me with their praise, so that when I read to blurb, I read with both a critical eye and open heart. However, a judge and or a first reader needs, for obvious reasons, to leave his heart out of the equation. I would be doing a disservice as a judge and first reader to give anything but my most critical assessment. As you might imagine, these sorts of activities don’t exactly add to my reading pleasure.

There is still the rare occasion when I lose myself in a book and enjoy the act of reading the way I did before choosing the life of a writer. In the last two years, it’s happened three times. The books were Die A Little by Megan Abbott, Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, and Miami Purity by Vicki Hendricks. Although Megan and I have subsequently become good friends, we were only casual acquaintances when I first read the book. I’m also now an occasional first reader for her. I think Vicki and I have met in passing at a Bouchercon and I’ve never met Daniel. But I was so impressed by Miami Purity that I sent an unsolicited blurb to her new publisher and I sent an embarrassingly gushing fan letter—my first real fan letter—to Daniel Woodrell.

So, yeah, reading is different for me and I’m really kind of jealous of the freedom enjoyed by the casual reader or mystery fan. And those rare occasions when I can get in touch with that unbridled joy are marvelous, but they are few and far between. On balance, I wouldn’t give up my writing to regain my innocence as a reader. There are many days, however, when I struggling with a single paragraph or sentence, that it does seem like a deal I might be willing to make.

Reed Farrel Coleman's The James Deans won the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony Awards for Best Paperback Original. His new book, Soul Patch, is in bookstores now.

Interview with Sandra Scoppettone

Interviewer: Elizabeth Zelvin

When and how did you become a writer?

My father wanted to be a writer. He wrote one novel and several short stories. He never sold anything, but when I was a child I thought he would. I think I was trying to emulate him when I wrote as a kid and then decided that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I was twenty-five when something I’d written was first published, a novelty book called Suzuki Beane. The illustrator was Louise Fitzhugh who went on to write Harriet the Spy. We sold Suzuki overnight and that’s what I thought the writing life was going to be like. The joke was on me.

I wrote three novels after that and none of them got published.

You wrote your 1984 book A Creative Kind of Killer, which won the Shamus award and was nominated for an Edgar, under the pseudonym Jack Early. What made you decide to use a masculine pen name? What prompted you to let it go and write under your own name? What kind of impact, if any, did name and gender issues have on your career?

The voice in the book came to me as a man. And in first person. I thought it might be distracting to have a woman’s name on it. And although I’d published quite a number of novels by then…let’s just say it was time for me to reinvent myself.

I let it go after two more Early books because another voice came to me. This was a woman’s voice, again in the first person. Also, the book was about a lesbian detective and I didn’t think a man’s name on it would be very politic.

The Early books got great reviews and I was compared to some of the best male crime writers. That hadn't happened to Scoppettone before and it hasn’t since. In 1984 there weren’t a lot of women being nominated for crime awards. Can’t prove a thing, but I’ll never be dissuaded that using a man’s name on the book at that time accounted for its reception.

You were one of the founding mothers of Sisters in Crime. What was that like for you?

It was strange because I was Jack Early then. I can see a group of us in Baltimore, sitting around a table in a hotel room, I think. Each said who she was and what she wrote. It was very exciting because I’d read some of these women. We had no idea what SinC would become. It didn’t have a name then.

How effective do you think SinC has been in changing things for women writers?

I have no statistics but there was a period in there when tons of women were getting published and winning the prizes. I think there are over 3000 members now. It has obviously helped a lot of women know they’re not alone. As for actual sales you’d have to ask someone else. Getting reviewed in certain newspapers is still a problem.

Your work includes series and stand-alones, adult and young adult books. What have been the high points in your long and varied career? How about low points, if you’re willing to share?

A high point was selling my first novel. Once again it gave me a false impression of the publishing business because it sold in a week. This was my first YA novel. Another high point was being reviewed for the first book in my detective series in the daily New York Times. That’s a lot harder and more prestigious than getting reviewed in the NYTBR. At least, I think it is.

Low points? Plenty. Certainly writing under the name Jack Early was a low point, despite how it turned out. As I said, I needed reinvent myself. I couldn’t get arrested as Scoppettone. Another low was not getting a contract to continue my Faye Quick series. And right now isn’t too hot. I spent the last year writing over two hundred pages (without a contract) only to put it away because I couldn’t make it work.

How much of you is there in your various protagonists? Do you have a favorite among the characters you’ve created?

There’s a lot of me in all my protagonists. But I can’t write about myself directly. No memoir or autobiographical novel for me. I guess my favorite character is Lauren Laurano in my five-book detective series.

Your latest work is the Faye Quick series, set during World War II. What drew you to the period and to the noir style? What have been the challenges?

The forties has always been a favorite decade of mine but I’d never set a book then. The idea of a woman taking over a detective agency because her boss had to go to war just popped into my mind one night.

I don’t see these books as being in the noir style. Not at all. Noir to me is dark. The Faye Quick books are light and funny. I hope. But some reviewers have called them noir. I don’t understand that.

What’s the difference for you in working on a series book or a stand-alone? What have you learned about writing a series that has helped you with the latest one?

I don’t really like writing a series because the excitement of creating new characters is not there. Yes, each book has some new characters, but your protagonist is your protagonist.

A stand-alone is exciting. Everything is new. What I learned about writing a series is never to write more than four. This time it was decided for me and there will only be two.

How about your young adult books? What drew you to that audience?

I directed a play with kids for a community theater project, Youth On Stage. I don’t have any children but I was around teens for an entire summer. They gave me the idea. And two friends of mine were writing YAs so I thought I’d give it a shot.

How different was it from writing for adults? What demands did the genre make?

It was writing a novel. I didn’t feel there was any difference. Only the cast of characters. I can’t think of any particular demands. In my YAs I was able to write about all the topics that interested me.

Not all of your YA books were mysteries, though the last, Playing Murder in 1985, got another Edgar nomination. Was there a unifying thread in your YA books? Would you ever write another?

I don’t know. I think that’s for someone else to see. As for writing another, I don’t ever want to say no.

The Jack Early book Donato & Daughter was made into a movie. What was that experience like?

There was no experience. Not for me. I got the check and saw the finished movie on TV with everyone else.

You lived in New York City for many years before moving out to the North Fork of Long Island in 1998. How do you like country living? Do you ever get into the city? Has it become the proverbial nice place to visit?

I’ve lived here twice. Seventeen years apart. I like the quiet. It’s somewhat annoying during the summer when it’s not so quiet as this is a resort area. A number of my friends from New York also live here.

I get into the city about three or four times a year. I’m not sure it’s a nice place to visit. I think I had the best years of NYC. It’s impossibly expensive and seems dirtier than I remember.

What’s next for Sandra Scoppettone?

I have a new idea but I never talk about what I’m going to do. It’s dangerous for me to do that. If I talk about it then I don’t want to write it.

After all this time, what keeps you writing?

I don’t know how to do anything else and I’m a writer. That’s what I do.