Meet Author Jane Haddam
The past few months
I have been privileged to correspond through email with Jane Haddam www.janehaddam.com . She is always honest and humorous and responds to questions readily.
Jane describes Jane Haddam - Tumbling TBR Mystery Fiction Holidays as "my number one fan site." This is most flattering as these are the pages I created for her.
Ms Haddam writes a series of mysteries set around HOLIDAYS
and featuring Gregor Demarkian, a retired
FBI agent with an Armenian American background. The
books are usually set in the Philadelphia area.
The series began with a Christmas mystery,
NOT A CREATURE WAS STIRRING, in 1990.
Gregor is assisted by Tibor Kasparian, an Armenian
Orthodox priest, and Bennis Hannaford, a rich and
intelligent writer of fantasy novels.
Jane was born in Bethel, Connecticut in 1951.
Her latest Gregor Demarkian novel, True Believers, was published in May 2001.
Jane is listed in the 1994 edition of Great Women Mystery Writers by Kathleen Gregory Klein.
SYNOPSIS of TRUE BELIEVERS
"Early One Morning at St. Anselm's Church in Philadelphia, a parishioner sneaks the body of his wife into the sacristy and then commits suicide. The husband, known to be devoted to his wife, is presumed to have killed himself out of grief. His wife, a severe diabetic, is assumed to have died of natural causes - until the coroner discovers that she actually died of arsenic poisoning. The police close the murder case, believing that the husband was clearly responsible, but one of the nuns at St. Anselm's doesn't accept the prevailing wisdom. Sure that the husband is innocent, she asks Gregor Demarkian, the retired head of the FBI's Behaviorial Science Unit, to investigate." "With tensions mounting among the city's religious groups, agitated by outside extremists, Demarkian's investigation is made difficult by the environment. Bennis Hannaford, an acclaimed author and Demarkian's lover, is undergoing a crisis of her own while the many and various denizens of Cavanaugh Street - their Armenian-American neighborhood - are involved in various uproars themselves. But at the base of everything is a mysteriously murdered young woman and the most perplexing case yet for Gregor Demarkian."--BOOK JACKET.
I really enjoyed this book and the previous SKELETON KEY was a favorite
also. The first book I read was QUOTH THE RAVEN, which was not the first
one in the series but was a great introduction to Gregor Demarkian. I now have the other books and the characters are now "old friends."
Initially, Ms Haddam set each book around a holiday or special occasion and there was one for
Father's Day, Mother's Day, birthdays, wedding, Thanksgiving, Halloween,
Christmas,etc.
And now, an interview
with Jane.
1. Where do you draw your ideas from?
Agatha Christie is rumored to have tried to throttle someone who asked
her this...
But mostly I get ideas for people, not for plots. Character is what
interests me. How people think. Why they think the way they think.
I just get a lot of people in one place and see what they do to each
other.
2. Who are your favorite characters (male,female) from other writers?
My favorite character in all of literature is Isabel Archer in Henry
James' The Portrait of a Lady. She lives a terrible life--and I don't want
that life--but she has a kind of presence and self-acceptance I've always
wished I had.
But I find this question very hard to answer, because there are
writers I truly love--P.D. James; Anne Tyler--but I don't have a specific
love for the characters so much as I do for the writer's point of view.
3. Which of your main characters is most like you?
Bennis Hannaford. I made her prettier, and skinnier, and by now she's
a little younger, but her attitudes and her ideas are very close to mine.
4. If you could write another genre, what would it be?
Another fictional genre, or another genre of any kind at all?
If it's anything at all, then I wish I cold write history the way
someone like Barbara Tuchman did.
If it's another fictional genre, then I'd like to try a "straight"
novel. I've always been afraid that if I did try it, I wouldn't be able to
organize the work (mysteries are organized by the mystery). I do all right
with "straight" short stories, but they have the grace to be short.
5. How have the events of September 11,2001 effected you?
Well, the original worry was about friends--my entire professional
life is centered in New York, and I lived in Manhattan for a number of years,
and my closest friends are still there. So I started by running around and
checking on everybody to make sure they were all right, which mostly they
were.
But the odd thing was that I then realized I had to go back and
rewrite large sections of the book I was working on--not the next one out,
but the one after that--because the story in that book involves domestic
terrorism, and I couldn't have the characters NOT mention 9/11. It would,
naturally, have been the first thing on their minds.
5. Tell us about your current or new book.
The next book, due out in May, is called Somebody Else's Music. It's
my "high school" book. The story of a woman who was the absolute, bottom of
the barrel, hated "out" person of her high school class and who is now a
famous journalist with spots as a regular expert on a CNN show and several
books to her credit, and what happens to her when she comes home to deal with
her mother who has Alzheimer's disease and runs into all these people again.
My sons refer to this as "your revenge book."
Thanks, Jane, for sharing yourself with us.
Ladies, please stop by her site, pick up a book and enjoy…until next time. Anytime you need a good mystery, she has one that will fit the bill pefectly.
Please feel free to email me if you have a suggested author for me
to research and feature or if you have comments on my article, write me at sandiw@cox.net
Golden Hugs,
Sandi
More Mysteries
