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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 4, No. 7 |
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Contender for the title: America's New Queen of Mystery  |
Former prosecutor writes
cutting-edge mysteries
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Linda Fairstein spent 30 years in the New York City District Attorney's office, prosecuting some of the nation's nastiest sex crimes for 28 of those years, so it certainly was no surprise that her literary alter-ego, Alexandra Cooper, wound up doing the same thing in a string of best-selling mystery novels.
In the fifth and latest of those dark thrillers--"The Bone Vault" (Scribner, $25)--Cooper has to find out who murdered young museum researcher Katrina Grooten and hid her corpse in an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus about to be shipped out of New York's world famous Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It's a first-rate thriller with a good, old-fashioned puzzle-style mystery at its center. But that's just the central track Fairstein's roller-coaster plummets down at rocket-like speed. All around her intricate mystery plot, Fairstein has wrapped layers of contemporary social relevance: The sometimes vicious feuding that goes on between New York's biggest museums over everything from budgets to bragging rights; the ever-increasing difficulty of getting justice in today's complex legal system; the alienation of workers in the teeming metropolis, knowing they must "live" their jobs in order to hang onto them in an ever more competitive economic system.
Fairstein, who's now retired from her full-time prosecutor's job, is such a polished writer of crime fiction that she's already a contender for the title of America's Queen of Mystery, along with her friend and literary mentor, Patricia Cornwell, and a handful of other female authors whose books crowd the best seller lists.
But Fairstein's ability to weave serious issues of today's world into her fiction is lifting her up to the level where her books now are considered cutting-edge novels, works that aren't meant to just be read during cross-country flights, then dumped in the airport trash basket when finished.
At a recent book-signing in Bellingham, WA, Fairstein explained how she goes about the business of creating mystery thrillers like "The Bone Vault" and giving them such a strong sense of reality.
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takes readers below the surface of two great New York museums, where grotesque crimes are being committed |
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For example, she likes to center her mysteries around some of the great institutions of New York City--places that just about everybody knows about like The Met or the Museum of Natural History, which also figures in her new book. Then she starts doing the research that goes behind the public veneer of these places, bringing out the fascinating detail that makes each of her novels so rich and textured.
"For instance, I learned that 90-95 percent of the things The Met owns are in storage and not on public display," she said.
In the book, she sends Alexandra down into the bowels of both The Met and the Natural History Museum, where hundreds of unknown people labor at researching, preserving and cataloging the exhibits. Fairstein herself tours these places in the company of savvy professionals, then gradually elicits the anecdotal stories that enrich her mysteries much the way a seasoned prosecutor works up her case through interviews with witnesses.
"If you had to kill someone in your department, how would you do it?" is a typical question Fairstein asks. The answers she gets are tantalizing things she never could have made up on her own.
Of course, word gets around about what the charming, if prying, Fairstein is up to, so she occasionally hears what one museum executive recently told her: "If you even think of killing someone in my museum...."
In real life, Fairstein was doing the kind of work that's regularly portrayed on producer Dick Wolf's "Law & Order: SVU" series on NBC. Like the prosecutors on that series, she works closely with NYPD detectives--and she has strong characters in her novels who mirror the real people she worked with in the Sex Crimes Unit.
By the way, Fairstein is very complimentary about the NBC crime series. She says producer Wolf is manic about accuracy--and also has contributed a great deal of his own money toward victims of sex crimes. She also says actress Mariska Hargitay, who plays a police detective specializing in sex crime investigations, is so committed to her role that she has gone through the formal training to learn how to treat sex crime victims--and does volunteer work where her skills can be put to use.
Fairstein said Wolf's writers stay on top of the headline sex crimes cases so closely that some defense lawyers now claim in court that it's difficult to select impartial juries when the real cases, already dramatized on the TV show, actually come to court.
When I asked Fairstein where she stands on the issue of having her own books turned into movies or TV shows, she pretty much came down on the side of "take the money and run." She's had some experience with that already. Her first Alexandra Cooper novel, "Final Jeopardy," was turned into a made-for-television movie by ABC, starring Dana Delany ("China Beach") as Cooper. Though she didn't exactly blast the movie version of her book, it's clear she wasn't enamored of it. It's easy to see why she wasn't. For example, Delany, who's a brunette, refused to go blonde to play Alexandra, even though everybody who knows the books knows that, like Fairstein, Alexandra is so blonde that one of the detectives she works with calls her "Blondie." The producers of that movie have an option to do another Alexandra Cooper movie with Delany, but the option will expire soon--and right now there's no immediate filming scheduled.
Another interesting aside about "The Bone Vault": There's a running subplot about a female stalker who has been harassing Alexandra. Fairstein says that's based on a real stalker who pursued her in much the same way. The bizarre events involving the woman are pretty much what happened in the real case, which is still moving through the courts.
Fairstein is one of many American mystery/crime writers who come from other professions and write with great authority about their former occupation. Some, like forensic pathologist Kathy Reichs, trial lawyers Scott Turow and John Grisham, and former policeofficers Joseph Wambaugh and Dorothy Uhnak have hit the best seller lists regularly. Fairstein believes it's a sign that readers are now much more sophisticated and no longer willing to give credibility to the "amateur" detectives of the old-fashioned "cozy" mysteries.
Fairstein herself read the Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle mysteries in her youth, but her father turned her on to the more realistic detective stories of Hammett, Chandler and the hard-boiled Americans while she was still quite young. She always wanted to write fiction for a living, but her father urged her to "get a day job." So she did and soon her law studies led her into an exciting and, ultimately, enormously successful career as a criminal prosecutor. So, she delayed her serious attempt to write novels until she felt she had accomplished what she'd set out to accomplish as a lawyer.
Now she's having a grand time putting her ideas down on paper, using all the knowledge she's acquired over the years. Unlike Alexandra, who's still single, Fairstein is married (to a lawyer) and living quite comfortably. Publishers like mystery writers to do series characters because it helps keep the backlist of earlier novels selling. Fairstein doesn't mind that practical reality about he writing game. She likes the idea of sticking with a single series character, stretching her out and deepening her as she goes. She's already finished with the sixth Cooper novel--"The Kills"--and isn't yet ready to move away from Cooper to do the "stand alone" novels that so many mystery writers yearn to do after awhile.
"I still like to work at it seven days a week when things are going well," she says.
If that's what it takes to keep mysteries like "The Bone Vault" coming our way, let's hope Fairstein never loses that head of steam.
©2003 by Ron Miller. The Ron Miller caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. "The Bone Vault" book cover was designed by John Fulbrook III, utilizing a photo by Debra Lill, and is ©2003 by Simon and Schuster, Inc. The Linda Fairstein photo is by Sigrid Estrada.
Ron Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," official companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently teaches classes in mystery and entertainment media at Whatcom Community College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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