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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 30 |
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talks with mystery writer TAMI HOAG about her latest thriller "SEND THE MESSENGER" and other pertinent things |
 AUTHOR TAMI HOAG |
Now in Los Angeles, Hoag
keeps the thrills coming
of TheColumnists.com
In her latest best-selling thriller, "Send the
Messenger" (Bantam, $26), Tami Hoag stirs up a whole new
atmosphere of suspense in a whole new environment for her novels:
Los Angeles. Works for her, works for me.
This roller coaster ride of a novel is all about a young bicycle
messenger who suddenly finds himself a prime suspect in the murder
of a low-end criminal defense lawyer. That bad news comes while
the messenger is busy running for his life from an awesomely
deadly professional killer who desperately wants a package the
messenger is carrying.
If you know Hoag's earlier best sellers, such as "Ashes to Ashes," "A Thin Dark Line" or "Night Sins," you know what this diabolical lady can do with that kind of a situation. She can make you feel like you're sliding down a 60-foot razor blade with an alligator pit at the bottom.
But in Los Angeles? Hasn't that location been pretty well used up by movies, TV shows and hordes of mystery writers dating back to Raymond Chandler? My thoughts exactly. Then I started reading--ironically, as I was flying south from Seattle to Los Angeles to attend a TV awards show.
My conclusions: Hoag has put a whole new spin on L.A. traffic by putting her hero on a bicycle. Suddenly all those familiar mean streets seem different. Try to imagine yourself on a bike, dodging in and out of L.A. traffic, being pursued by somebody who's just as happy running over you as he would be putting a few slugs into you.
"I first got the idea 6-7 years ago when I was still back in Minnesota," Hoag explained last Saturday night at a book-signing date in my home territory, Bellingham, WA. "A news magazine show was promoting a story coming up about bicycle messengers in L.A. and the role they play in the criminal justice system there. I'd never thought of bicycle messengers in terms of Los Angeles."
But the more she thought about it, the more sense it made: L.A. traffic is gridlocked so much of the time that messengers on bikes is often the fastest way to get packages from one place to another--especially for lawyers who must get documents filed in court by certain deadlines. The more she thought about it, the more it sounded like a great premise for a thriller.
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Tami Hoag thriller, 'Kill the Messenger' |
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Hoag just happened to mention it to her editor, who wanted her to drop everything and get going on it right away. Obviously, the editor saw what Hoag had come up with by accident: A drop-dead premise.
"Now all I have to do is come up with a story to go with it," Hoag said to herself back then. "And that's not as easy as it sounds."
But Hoag is a great plotter,
so what she came up with is marvelous:
Jace Damon, a young bike messenger, is an orphan who was left
with the job of taking care of his much younger brother, Tyler,
a prodigiously smart youngster who idolizes Jace. Fearful that
child welfare authorities will split them up, Jace has carefully
managed to keep them below the radar of all authorities. He works
for a seedy bike messenger service in downtown L.A. and has arranged
to be paid in cash only. He and Tyler live with a Chinese lady
in L.A.'s teeming Chinatown district, where there are probably
a kazillion undocumented aliens living below government radar
all around them.
The fact that nobody knows where Jace lives is crucial because lawyer Lenny Lowell hands him a package late one rainy evening, then gets himself murdered. The address on the package turns out to be an empty lot and an angry Jace is about to go back and complain heavily when he suddenly becomes the prey of a killer who will stop at nothing to get what's in that package--and will kill any number of people who get in his way.
The rest of "Kill the Messenger" is about Jace trying to keep from getting killed--or being captured by the police who also are after him because his fingerprints are all over the crime scene and he never returned to his messenger service office after the scheduled pickup.
Hoag has dreamed up a second hero to keep us going: L.A. Police Detective Kev Parker, who's on all the important shit lists at the L.A. P.D. and can't afford to rock the boat even one more time. Parker relentlessly goes after the murder suspect, but soon begins to wonder if the suspect isn't the quarry of someone even more dangerous.
Hoag's rendering of modern downtown L.A. is exceptionally good. She definitely knows the territory, even though she only recently moved there. When I asked her how she managed to handle the switch to L.A. so adroitly, with all its complicated police procedures and jurisdictions, Hoag explained she has built lots of strong connections with the criminal justice system in Minnesota and the other places she's lived and worked. Those sources helped establish her with retired L.A. cop John Petovich, who connected her with L.A.P.D. Detective Jeffrey Sandefur, who became her mentor and adviser as she learned the way things are done in L.A.
"I love L.A.," Hoag added, saying she feels like it's really where she belongs. A longtime equestrian, Hoag even was able to find a great place for her horses in Malibu.
My first thought was that she must have made a slew of movie or TV deals for her books and that would explain her presence in L.A. But Hoag says "Night Sins," which became a television miniseries in the 1990s, starring Valerie Bertinelli and Harry Hamlin, is still the only one of her novels to be filmed. (Two others were optioned, but never filmed.)
In the final pages of "Kill the Messenger," there's a scene where a movie producer suggests the events involving Jace Damon would make a great movie called "Kill the Messenger." Hoag says that, so far, that's just wishful thinking. Even though "Kill the Messenger" rocks with action and suspense and would be a super movie project, nobody has jumped on the movie rights yet.
Hoag is now one of the most widely-read of all thriller writers, male or female. Some of her fans are stunned to look back through her earlier books and discover she used to write lightly comic romance novels. Hoag said her evolution into a thriller writer proceeded slowly and finally came to fruition with "Night Sins," which she claims is about 50-50 romance novel/thriller.
Her next book, planned for sale next summer, will continue the characters she established in "Dust to Dust." Though she says she'll never write a series of novels about a single detective character, she confesses she really loves Kev Parker, the detective hero of "Kill the Messenger," so I won't be surprised if she brings him back a time or two in the future.
On the day Hoag visited Bellingham, which is just half an hour's drive from the Canadian border, the town was in the grip of a heat wave with temperatures in the low 90s. Fans were set up all over the bookstore and store personnel were apologizing for the uncommonly high temperatures for the Pacific Northwest.
"I know all about weather," Hoag said. "I'm from Minnesota. And that's why I now live in L.A."
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The book cover illustration is ©2004 by Bantam Books.
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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