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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 43 |
 Ron Miller with a close-up of best-selling author J.A. JANCE |
 JUDITH 'J. A.' JANCE |
Stalked by a serial killer?
It changed her life for sure!
of TheColumnists.com
Best-selling mystery writer Judith Jance--you know her best as "J.A." Jance--was inspired to launch her writing career when she learned she'd been stalked by a serial killer who actually came to her house three times, hoping to catch her alone. She figured that was too good a story not to be told.
That creepy situation developed many years ago when Jance was still living in rural Arizona, raising two kids, teaching school on an Indian reservation and only dreaming of someday becoming a writer. One day her husband hitchhiked a ride home with a stranger who seemed quite concerned that Judith was so often left home alone in their remote house in the country.
Later, the stranger was identified as a suspect in several murders in the Tucson area. That's when it dawned on Judith's husband that the man had been feigning his concern for her safety. What he really was doing was fishing for information about her daily routine. When evidence turned up that the killer had actually visited their property three times, obviously intending to rape and murder Judith, her blood ran cold.
As it turned out, Judith had a rare opportunity to watch a murder investigation unfold. Her husband remembered enough about the stranger to help the primary police detective on the case identify the killer, who eventually was sent to prison for the crimes. She remembered lots of details about that case, which had become so personal to her.
When she started trying to write about the serial killer in a slightly fictionalized version of the actual case, Jance was permanently infected by the writing bug, even though nothing much came of that first effort.
"It was never published by anyone," says Jance. "The editors who turned it down said the parts that were real were totally unbelievable, though the parts that were fiction were fine."
That was back in 1982. Like so many other great writers, Jance didn't give up just because nobody wanted her first book. She kept on writing, usually between 4 and 7 a.m. every morning, the only time she had to herself. Perserverance--and talent, of course--paid off. As of this summer, Jance had published 15 mystery novels about Seattle detective J. P. Beaumont, nine mystery novels featuring Arizona Sheriff Joanna Brady, two "stand alone" thrillers and her current best-seller "Partner in Crime" (Morrow, $24.95), the first mystery to put Beaumont and Brady together to work on the same murder case.
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"Partner in Crime," brings together her two series detectives--Sheriff Joanna Brady and Investigator J.P. Beaumont--for the first time. |
How successful is she? Well, let's just say she's considered a major player in the world of mystery just about everywhere and she's definitely not hurting for money.
"I bought my husband a Porsche Boxer for his last birthday," she says, which seems a good enough reason for all husbands to start dreaming about what might happen if their wives started knocking out a couple of best-sellers every year.
Jance also gives the impression she's a lot of fun to be around, in addition to being flagrantly generous to her husband. When I caught up with her at a recent book-signing engagement in Bellingham, Washington, I found her giving a performance that was part standup comedy act, part "Oprah Winfrey Show," part karaoke club and all very entertaining.
For example, Jance is in the habit of telling a lot of intimate details of her personal life at book signings, including some very painful ones about her 18-year marriage to her first husband, a chronic alcoholic, who died just a couple of years after she finally divorced him. He had always intended to be a writer himself, but never published a thing in his lifetime.
"My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway," she told the capacity crowd at her book-signing, "but he did it primarily by drinking too much and writing too little."
Though Jance doesn't take any anti-male posititions in either her books or her public appearances, she probably would have good reason to, considering some of the sexist attitudes she's had to deal with so far in life. For instance, she tells how the creative writing teacher at the University of Arizona refused to let her sign up for his class on grounds that women "ought to be teachers and nurses" and leave the writing to men. She paid him back years later by making a creative writing instructor the villain in her two "stand alone" thrillers, "Hour of the Hunter" and "Kiss of the Bees."
She also explains that she's known as "J. A." Jance simply because publishers at first balked at using her real first name because they thought male readers wouldn't be interested in any mysteries written by a woman. Her agent changed her first name to initials and publishers immediately liked her books better.
"For years my picture never appeared on any of my books and there was no biography of me in the back of the book," she said.
Much of the background in her two mystery series comes from Jance's real-life background. Joanna Brady's dominion is the territory around Bisbee, Ariz., where Jance grew up. She was an English teacher at Pueblo High School in Tucson for a couple of years and for five years was a school librarian for the Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Ariz. She knows Brady's world so well that she could walk those streets in her sleep.
But she eventually moved to Seattle, Wash., where she worked selling life insurance, married her current husband and started a new life as a mystery writer. So, she knows J. P. Beaumont's Pacific Northwest world equally well. She and her husband, a retired engineer, now divide their time between homes in Washington and Arizona, so she keeps up to date on both environments.
Jance describes herself as somebody who learned to be an "observer" of life at an early age. She also owns up to having to overcome lots of pain in her youth for being too smart for most boys and not attractive enough.
"By seventh grade, I was 6 feet tall and wore thick glasses," she recalls.
A highlight of Jance's book-signings often comes when she vents her feelings about being an insecure and lonely teenager by singing her a cappella rendition of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen," often still choking back tears at the memories.
One assumes that's all behind her, though, since Jance is now a stylish, attractive and immensely successful writer whose fans turn out in droves whenever she makes a public appearance.
When I asked her how difficult it was to bring both her detectives together in a single book after so many years in their own separate universes, Jance said she probably wouldn't have done it if her publisher hadn't insisted it would be an enormous popular literary "happening." Her first concern was matching the two story-telling styles.
"The Beaumonts are all written in the first person with the reader seeing everything from his point of view," she said. "The Bradys are written in the third person with different points of view."
How Jance solved the problem seems to be working for readers--"Partner in Crime" is already a huge best-seller--but probably would drive all her former English teachers nuts: She mixes both first and third person narratives, often in the same chapter.
Finding a gimmick to bring the two detectives together actually was the easiest part. Loyal fans of the Beaumont novels will recall that he once was married to a woman from Bisbee, Ariz., who turned out to be a serial killer. That gave Jance a reason to make Beaumont interested in finally seeing Bisbee in person--to visit the former location of his tragic love from the past. When a murder victim in Brady's territory turns out to be a key witness in an upcoming Washington crime investigation, it's only natural that the Special Homicide Investigation Team dispatch someone to Arizona to "help" poor little Sheriff Brady.
(By the way, not too many publications will use the acronym for Beaumont's new organization since he retired from the Seattle P.D., but we have no shame: It's SHIT.)
Jance didn't have anything to say about the dynamics of having her two detectives on the same team, perhaps because she wants you to read the book and see for youself. I'll just say that Brady and Beaumont get along about as well as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis did after their breakup, but even Martin and Lewis finally buried the hatchet--and Brady and Beaumont come close to taking that notion even a few steps further.
Jance admits that she started writing the Brady mysteries because she'd grown tired of writing Beaumont, but she says her interest in him was renewed once she had an alternate character to relieve the tedium of staying in the same groove too long. Her next book, "Exit Wounds," will be a Brady mystery and she says she doesn't know how soon she'll write another Beaumont.
"He'll be back," she says. "I just don't know when. The people in New York are the ones who tell me which book I'll write next."
© 2002 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel. The book
cover reproduction is © 2002 by William Morrow, Inc. The
photo of J.A. Jance is from her official website.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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