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DARK CORRIDORS New Authors Series No. 2 |
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interviews
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By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Driving home one night along a winding country road in the rugged
country below Mount Shasta, young clinical psychologist Cassandra
Ringwald comes upon a terrifying moonlit scene: Skinheads viciously
beating a man nearly to death.
"I don't recall how the man came to be in my car," Cassandra tells us later, after picking up the beaten man. "I do remember the goo that used to be his left eye and the smell of feces and blood coming from him. I rolled down my window and gulped in the frosty air to keep from fainting."
Before long, "Cassie" Ringwald is fighting for her own life as she realizes she's suddenly very deep into affairs that some people will kill to keep from coming to light.
Cassie's plight is at the core of "Jackpot Justice," a new mystery published in April by first-time novelist Marilyn Wooley, a real-life clinical psychologist whose own practice is in Redding, a small community in Northern California. Wooley takes us down some very dark corridors of the human soul in "Jackpot Justice" as her heroine confronts some of the menaces lurking in the wooded mountains of Shasta County and its environs.
Though Wooley says Cassie Ringwald isn't her doppelganger, she readily admits to borrowing heavily from her own experience while creating her, especially the part about starting a new life in a remote and often intimidating new town, far from the big city.
"She's right out of graduate school and just starting her career," says Wooley. "She's about 27 or so in this book -- and very immature. I wasn't that immature at 27. I think I had it a little more together."
But Wooley recalls having the same "fish out of water" feeling that Cassie does when she arrives in the new town to start her practice.
"I had just finished my internship, received my license and started looking for a job," says Wooley. "I was a single parent at the time. Then I saw this ad for Redding. I didn't even know where Redding was. I turned out to be the first woman clinical psychologist to ever practice there."
In "Jackpot Justice," Cassie is hired to do a psychological profile of a troubled young Native American man who's accused of a grotesque murder. Though the evidence is stacked heavily against her client, he refuses to tell Cassie what he knows about the case. The more she looks into the Indian's involvement with the murder victim, the more Cassie begins to understand why he might have good reason to keep his mouth shut, regardless of the consequences.
"Jackpot Justice" is a realistic modern thriller with a heroine women, in particular, should identify with readily. Cassandra is the quintessential woman in jeopardy, but she also knows how to take care of herself -- an essential capability for someone living in what amounts to a frontier environment, only with doped-up skinheads and white supremacists in place of hostile natives.
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In 1999, Wooley's book won the annual "best
first novel" contest of the Malice Domestic mystery organization,
which is sponsored by the St. Martin's publishing house. The
winning novel is published in hardcover, so "Jackpot Justice"
launched
Wooley onto the mystery scene last April. She already has completed
a second Cassandra Ringwald mystery, "Covenant's Child,"
which is now in her agent's hands, and is busily writing a third.
"I have a couple more Cassandra stories in mind," says Wooley, who doesn't intend phasing out her day job as a clinical psychologist anytime soon, even if her mysteries catch on big, because, "I don't want to do just one thing. I really enjoy doing my job."
Like so many new mystery writers of the last 10 years, Wooley established herself first as a working professional in another field. Today's mystery readers want the realistic backdrop that kind of experience can provide. They want to believe the author really knows what she's writing about. Marilyn Wooley certainly does.
"Because 'Jackpot Justice' revolves around a legal case, I called upon the legal experience I've had while writing it," she explains. "But I've also discovered that some of the research I do as a writer has helped me in my practice."
For example, Wooley has delved deeply into the psychology of people who go on rampages in the workplace because that happens in her upcoming book. But she also is often asked to lecture on the subject of violence in the workplace, so her book research has come in quite handy for her regular job.
In a more bizarre case of her real experience serving her writing career, Wooley is currently working on a mystery in which Cassie is thrown down a mine shaft by the villains. She survives because she lands on a bloated, decomposing human corpse that breaks her fall. She then has to spend long hours alone with the stench of the corpse.
In 1992, Wooley went through a similar experience that came out of a family tragedy -- the death of her father.
"My father died in Scottsdale, Ariz., while I was at a conference and his landlord left the body in the house for five days while he ripped him off," says Wooley. "When I got back to Redding, the police contacted me, so my husband and I went down there."
Ultimately, Wooley and her husband, Phil,
ended up barricaded in her father's house while some "horrible,
horrible men," apparently determined to loot the place,
menaced them.
"We literally felt they were trying to kill us," she
recalls. "We were barricaded in there with the smell of
my father's dead body. It was horrifying -- a combination of
Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. Both of us got post-traumatic
stress from it. It took us a year or two to get over it."
Writing her way through the mine shaft scene, calling upon her memory of that Arizona nightmare, "was kind of my catharsis," Wooley now believes.
Though Wooley originally wanted to be an astronomer, she now can trace her love of mystery all the way back to her early childhood.
"I remember being a very small child, sitting in the dark basement of our home, watching Sherlock Holmes on TV and just loving it," she says. "I also loved Edgar Allan Poe. And I read a lot of comic books and used to make models of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man. We were a big reading family and my mom loved mysteries. I was reading Nancy Drew mysteries when I was about seven."
Some of the top female mystery writers of today, like Sara Peretsky, also were weaned on Nancy Drew, so newcomer Wooley is in good company.
"She was a big deal," she says of the teenage "detective" who dates back to the early 1930s. "She took risks and got herself in trouble, then got herself out of trouble. She wasn't afraid to stand up for things."
She might even be the teenage edition of Cassandra Ringwald, although Wooley purposely has given her Cassie a great deal of emotional and psychological baggage that Nancy Drew probably didn't have to carry into adulthood. Her relationship with Tony, a rugged cop who lives next door, often stumbles over either Cassie's hangups or his. Wooley doesn't envision them getting married anytime soon.
"He's kind of a wreck, too," she says. "They deserve each other."
Born in New York, but raised in Arizona, Wooley grew up in a household where achievement seemed to be mandatory. Her father was an electrical engineer, educated at M.I.T., who was one of the developers of radar during World War II. Wooley's mother, who still lives in Arizona, was a neuro-physiologist before retirement. She also has a grandfather who was a brigadier general.
"My becoming a psychologist was sort of the skeleton in the family closet," Wooley says with a hearty laugh.
That came about because Wooley took a class in psychology at Arizona State University from a charismatic professor who encouraged her to enter the field. In "Jackpot Justice," she makes us understand the moral dilemma that many clinical psychologists face when dealing with our justice system. Cassandra refuses to give the lawyers who hire her anything but her honest opinion. Though she's desperate to earn extra money from testifying in court, she won't change her psychological evaluation in order to help the lawyer out.
That means the lawyer often will "file" her report and simply hire another psychologist, who may or may not give him what he wants in terms of an evaluation. Wooley says this is the way it works in real life. She draws the same line against compromise that her make-believe heroine does.
"I wouldn't want to be on the stand, giving testimony I don't feel is right," says Wooley. "I'd get torn apart."
Haunted by the ordeal she went through after her father's death, Wooley began to write fiction seriously in 1994-95, partly to get her head straight again. Eventually, she joined a local writers' group and started turning out chapters of her first novel.
Though Wooley says Redding is "kind of a hick town," she now thinks it may be a big advantage to be starting her writing career there instead of in San Francisco or some other big city.
"You can't beat the physical beauty
of this area," she says. "I can describe the area and
it's going to be fresh for most readers. The other good thing
about being up here is the fact that there's nothing to do. If
I lived in the city, I'd be going out to the opera every night.
Up here there's nothing else to do but write."
© 2000 by Ron Miller
YOU CAN BUY "JACKPOT
JUSTICE" ON THE INTERNET AT: www.amazon.com
HER WEBSITE IS
AT www.wildwooleymysteries.com
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