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The Mystery Interview Talks with |
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Her veterinary mysteries borrow from reality
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
LAURA CRUM lives in a ranch-style house on a knoll in the hills
off Freedom Road between Aptos and Watsonville in rural Santa
Cruz County. When you visit her, you eventually wind up on a
short stretch of dirt road that takes you past a corral where
a big bay Quarter Horse named Gunner checks out all approaching
strangers.
It's exactly where you might expect Santa Cruz veterinarian Gail McCarthy to live her seldom quiet life between veterinary emergencies -- and those pesky murders that keep cropping up. In fact, Gail's horse looks just the same, though maybe a little younger, and its name is Gunner, too. But then Gail McCarthy is a make believe person, isn't she? Maybe I'll ask this nice-looking expectant mother with the broad smile who's coming to greet me.
"Well," explains Crum, who's used to such questions by now. "I definitely use my own life experiences in the stories, though they're wildly transformed by the time they get to Gail."
And, as a matter of fact, Crum also uses the life experiences of her good friend from childhood, male veterinarian Dr. Craig Evans, as a model for Gail McCarthy, the veterinary "detective" she created in 1994 with the publication of "Cutter," first of five Gail McCarthy mystery novels to date. Still another model exists for Gail McCarthy: Crum's team-roping partner, Sue Crocker. Crum says she's, "a very strong physical person who's the model for Gail's personality and appearance."
Yet one gets the uncanny feeling that Gail McCarthy picks up an awful lot of Laura Crum on the way to the printed page, often re-living some pretty amazing experiences Crum has piled up in some 40-odd years of living. Take that bizarre incident that opens Crum's latest mystery, "Slickrock" -- finding a dying man who has just shot himself in the chest and wants to be left alone to die.
"That really happened!" says Crum. "I have a horse pasture up in the foothills of Mariposa. One day when I was out there with some friends, having an evening barbecue, this little car drove into the far side of the meadow. It got darker and darker and the car just stayed there, so we all got curious. We all knew something wasn't right, so we got our guns and drove over there. Here was this guy lying by the side of his car, just like the guy in the story. He'd shot himself in the chest. He sat up with blood all over his shirt and said to leave him alone because he wanted to die."
In real life, the man was just a would-be suicide. In "Slickrock," though, Gail's gruesome discovery triggers a whole series of terrifying events. Though she started out just wanting to take a solitary packing trek through the Sierras with Gunner and Plumber, her two horses, Gail soon finds herself being stalked through the lonely mountains by someone bent on getting rid of her at all costs.
"Slickrock," which was published in hardcover last November by St. Martin's Thomas Dunne imprint, may be the most exciting page turner Crum has built around the Gail McCarthy character. It not only moves from one hair-raising crisis after another in crisp fashion, but it also advances the evolving story of Gail in a major way, pulling her farther away from her hardy boy friend Lonny Peterson and practically forcing her into the arms of a new man, the mysterious Blue Winter.
If you haven't yet discovered Crum's equine mysteries, you're in for a treat as soon as you can get your hands on one. They're smart, suspenseful and full of great horse lore. And Gail is a great character that the movies ought to dom something with at the earliest opportunity. If you love the best-selling mysteries by Dick Francis, the former English steeplechase "jump jockey," then you'll be at home with Laura Crum because he was her inspiration.
"I'd been a big fan of his for many years," Crum explains, "and I read each new book of his as soon as it came out. I hated having to wait another whole year for the next one to come out. Then it hit me: Maybe I could take my background in training western horses and do the same thing he did with his background -- write mysteries about it."
It wasn't that wacky an idea. Crum had trained as a teacher in her college studies at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, but also had run a cattle ranch in Northern California and had been training and showing horses for years. While doing all of that, she also had been messing around with writing.
"I tried a lot of different kinds of writing," she says. "I did poetry, journal writing and even made a few brief stabs at writing short stories and a literary novel that I never finished."
But Crum also had been reading mysteries for years and understood how they worked. If she could pump reality into her characters by borrowing from her own life experiences, she thought she might be able to do what Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman and other favorite mystery writers had done: Use a traditional mystery plot to tell us what she knew about the world of horses.
"I'm a firm believer in the principle that most plots have been done already," she says. "So, I'll work out a story that bears some resemblance to something I know about, then take a relationship or situation that's real and skew it around by making one person more violent or evil than in the real life situation."
Of course, it didn't turn out quite as easy as all that. Crum had this odd notion that nobody would buy a mystery with a strong woman character as the "detective," so she wrote her first novel with a male leading character. She also wrote in what she now realizes was an "affected" style that sounded like Dashiell Hammett filtered through Ernest Hemingway.
"I finished the first manuscript when I was about 30, but I don't think I got anything published until I was about 35," she admits. "I sent it off to half a dozen literary agents. They all declined it -- and most had nothing good to say about it. It took me about two more years to get up the courage to send anything else out."
By the time she did screw up the courage to try again with an agent, Crum had finished a second and third novel. She also belatedly discovered that new mystery writers like Sue Grafton and Sarah Peretsky had broken the barriers against strong female detectives and were hitting the best seller lists. So, she took one of her manuscripts, rewrote it with a female veterinarian as the main character, and sent it out to the one agent who had told her "your writing has merit."
It turned out to be Ruth Cohen, a former book editor, who insisted Crum go back to the basics and learn how to write with a more natural style. Crum recalls it as a tough period because Cohen at one point actually told her she hated her protagonist, her plot, her villain and her tone.
"Wow!" Crum told her. "Well, what DO you like?"
"I like that it's about horses and that it's set in Santa Cruz," Cohen replied.
Still, Crum persisted and got it right. The result was "Cutter," the first Gail McCarthy novel. Though it took Cohen another year to find a publisher, St. Martin's Press finally took it and Crum's mystery career finally was launched. "Hoofprints," "Roughstock," "Roped" and "Slickrock" followed. Crum's sixth in the series, "Breakaway," is due out next year and she already has the seventh mystery outlined and ready to write. In fact, she has at least a series of a dozen in mind.
Crum is a modest, unassuming person who's taking her career one step at a time. She knows she's not yet an "A-list" mystery writer, but she's proud of the fact that each Gail McCarthy mystery has sold more copies than the previous one and that her reputation as a very good writer is spreading, especially in the world of horse lovers. She now gets steady offers to write for the widely-distributed horse magazines and journals and currently turns out about several articles each year.
"My stories are very simple and I try to write them for a very broad audience," she says. "I sincerely hope people with an eighth grade education can enjoy the books as well as people with a college degree."
Crum
is right on top of the most obvious trend in the modern mystery
field: Pursuing the niche audience. Scores of novels are published
each month that cater to readers looking for insight into a special
field of endeavor, whether it be veterinary medicine, forensic
pathology, gourmet cooking, interior decorating or what.
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But Crum's novels have lots of levels of interest for different kinds of people. The fact that she actually sets her mysteries in a real geographical setting, often using all the real Santa Cruz County places as backdrops, makes her kind of special by itself. Crum says that was a conscious decision that she's glad she made. Her good friend and sister Santa Cruzan, mystery novelist Laurie R. King, has a popular series about a gay female cop in San Francisco. Crum says King constantly has to run up to San Francisco to make sure the street she used in a certain scene actually runs in the direction she described. Crum has a way around that common problem of using a real city.
"I always tell readers that I'm writing about Santa Cruz fictionally," she says. "I use real places and make believe places. I had this ranch in my third book that I had to warn people not to go looking for because I made it up."
Perhaps there's an overwhelming reason why Crum wanted to write about Santa Cruz County: Her family has lived there four generations. Her great-grandfather, James Brown, came there from Indiana to grow strawberries, but ended up running the famous Brown Bulb Ranch. The family now operates several properties as Golden State Bulb Growers. Her sister and father turned the original ranch into the Brown Ranch Marketplace, a busy shopping center. She's the only member of the core family that isn't in the family business, though her husband, Andy, is the family's begonia breeder and develops their new strains of plants.
"Nobody minds that I'm not in the family business," she says. "I'm considered the iconoclastic one. I have a rebellious nature and don't like following orders very well. I needed something to do for a living that wouldn't make doing things my way a nuisance for everybody else."
Taking up a successful career as a mystery novelist has worked well for everyone in the family, which is about to grow by one: Laura is in the final months of pregnancy with her first child. Is this a life experience she'll also make her single, bachelor girl character go through sooner or later?
"In the next book, Gail goes through a total crisis in her personal life, followed by a deep depression," says Crum. "I have her go see a shrink and do a lot of other fun things that amused me. It doesn't happen this time, but eventually I suppose I'll do one where she's pregnant, like the sheriff in 'Fargo,' still trying to solve a mystery."
© 2000 by Ron Miller. The photo of Laura Crum with Fergie is by Andy Snow. The photo of her team-roping with Sue Crocker is by Donna Johnson. The two book covers are from St. Martin's Press.
YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT LAURA CRUM AND WHERE TO FIND SIGNED COPIES OF HER BOOKS BY VISITING HER WEBSITE AT: http://members.cruzio.com/~absnow
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