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DARK CORRIDORS |
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interviews wildlife mystery series |
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Ex-soap actress creates a saucy, pro-social heroine
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
In the opening chapter of Jessica Speart's latest mystery novel "Border Prey" (Avon, $5.99), heroine Rachel Porter is awakened at 5 a.m. by a phone call from one of her informers, urging her to haul out of bed and meet him as soon as possible on a lonely country road outside El Paso if she wants to see "something big" going down.
"I'd been dreaming of Harrison Ford," Rachel tells us. "My reality was Timmy Tom Tyler. I was tempted to hang up the phone and roll over, picking up where Harrison and I had left off."
But Rachel is one of the most dedicated field agents currently employed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife service, so, despite a tongue "as fuzzy as a hairball" from drinking too many frozen margaritas the night before, she gets dressed and forgets all about Harrison Ford while racing out to that remote desert location near the Mexican border. When she finally arrives, she discovers a buzzard has beaten her to Timmy Tom, who's lying dead as the proverbial doornail, his cell phone brutally shoved halfway down his throat.
"I put my queasiness on hold and began to rifle through Timmy Tom's pockets," says Rachel.
Before long, Rachel realizes her informant's death is tied into the illegal smuggling of chimpanzees into rural Texas. The investigation that begins that night leads her to a huge Texas ranch where millionaires like to hunt exotic animals from overseas and ultimately plunges her into a nightmare scheme involving genetic engineering on a scale that perhaps only the late Bela Lugosi ever contemplated. All the while, Rachel's life, as usual, is in very, very serious jeopardy.
Rachel Porter may be the boldest, if not the best, of a new wave of female paperback heroes of the mystery genre. In a series of four fast-paced, witty and suspenseful novels that began with "Gator Aide" in 1997, she has gone after gator poachers in Louisiana, a top secret nuclear waste disposal scheme in Nevada ("Tortoise Soup," 1998), rare parrot smugglers in Florida ("Bird Brained," 1999) and now chimp smugglers in "Border Prey," set in the El Paso region of Texas.
Like so many of the new mystery heroes, most of them women created by women, Rachel doesn't just entertain us by taking us along with her on her extremely risky cases. At the heart of each Rachel Porter novel is a bundle of credible evidence, illuminating a real-life and genuine contemporary crisis in the field of wildlife protection. Read them all and you won't be blamed for becoming very pessimistic about our chances of protecting the thousands of endangered species now teetering on the cusp of oblivion.
"It's overwhelming; it really is," says author Speart, whose books point right to the main problems: A severe lack of funding and manpower for the fight against poachers, smugglers and exploiters of endangered species.
"I've become friends with a lot of agents," she explains. "They call me, basically to bitch about what's going on. Things are so bad, money-wise. They keep being promised they're going to get more money for enforcement, but it never happens. These poor guys are actually pleading, year after year."
Speart says there are only about 200 field agents in the U.S. and there surely will be fewer than that next year. She says it's typical for the agents to be tied down to a desk in a place like Hawaii, assigned to cover all of the Hawaiian Islands, Saipan and the islands in between.
"You can't do it," she says with impatience. "They do the best they can, but it's a really tough battle."
Speart knows what she's talking about. For about 10 years before "Gator Aide" was published, she worked as an investigative reporter for various science and environmental magazines, specializing in the plight of endangered species. She does exhaustive research for each book, visiting the actual locations and often taking some major risks getting up close and personal with the wild creatures whose fate has become her primary concern as a writer.
In Naples, Fla., she actually allowed somebody to put her into a cage with a mountain lion. A little further down the road, she found herself in a room draped with Burmese pythons. She has found ways to put most of these experiences into her novels, which also are peopled with some of the strangest, most bizarre people in contemporary fiction. She says most of them are drawn from real people she meets while doing her research. That even includes her weirdest new character in "Border Prey," the sinister Dr. Pierpont, a 21st century mad scientist with artificial arms and a dark soul borrowed from Ian Fleming's Dr. No or somebody much like him.
"I've been meeting a lot of really weird people," says Speart. "Maybe it's the places I've chosen to go -- or maybe I have this little neon sign over my head that says 'wackos, this way.' I swear to God, I'm like a magnet for them."
Though Rachel is consumed by the need to save animal species from extinction, she's not some otherworldly intellectual type nor a Yank version of Jane Goodall. Quite the contrary, like Speart herself, she's a comely strawberry blonde, a former actress who gave up her performing career to do something that would keep her a little busier and not so concerned with how she looked in the mirror each morning.
So far, Rachel's career as a civil servant hasn't been meteoric because she tends to defy authority and break all posted rules. Even when she catches some real bad guys, she seldom gets enough credit to keep from being transferred all over the States. It has wreaked havoc with her main romantic entanglement, a passionate affair with a Cajun cop named Santou that's currently in libido limbo because Rachel doesn't want to accept his marriage proposal and return to New Orleans.
As a hero, Rachel is quite effective, although she can exasperate you with all her rather bad habits, including her passion for the lowest level of junk food and an unhealthy rate of alcohol consumption. Speart freely admits she's the only model for Rachel, but wants everybody to know they're not clones.
"Obviously, there's a certain amount of me in this character," she says, "but she's taller than me and I hate her for that. I'm also totally health food and vitamin-oriented and I work out all the time."
But Speart was a reasonably successful New York-based actress, like Rachel, who finally decided to give up acting when the recurring character she played in the ABC daytime soap "One Life to Live" was killed off, sending her back to the fringe world of auditions and readings. Frustrated, she decided to blow her savings on a trip to Africa, where she spent most of her time in Kenya and Tanzania, looking at exotic wild animals up close. She returned to America jazzed up with the idea of doing something for a living that would involve wildlife. Her boy friend, George, a still photographer (now her husband) urged her to try writing articles about wildlife and suggested she try a science magazine called Omni.
Unaware that Omni was a tough market for experienced freelancers to break into, the novice Jessica sold them an article about in vitro fertilization as a means of saving endangered species, after getting the idea from a Dan Rather telecast and pretending she was an estabished writer to get the necessary interviews. With that article behind her, she was off and running.
Her decision to start writing mystery novels about a wildlife field agent came after Speart met Ken Goddard, a scientist who also writes thrillers like "Balefire," while working on a magazine article and was encouraged by him.
"He took me under his wing," says Speart of Goddard. "He's been my absolute total mentor."
Speart wrote "Gator Aide" without an agent or any professional help and just started mailing it arond. An editor at Avon picked it out of a "slush pile" of manuscripts and called her with a surprising request: "Can you write more of these?"
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Jessica Speart's four novels in Avon's Rachel Porter series
Writing the first one was a catharsis for Speart, who had become frustrated with the timidity of many magazines and felt too many of her reports were being watered down by publishers who feared lawsuits. By telling her real-life stories as fiction, she was able to do what she really wanted to do with her articles: Alert the reader to serious problems in our national commitment to protecting endangered species.
"With the articles I was writing, I was mostly reaching the already converted," says Speart, who believes the novels may be spreading her message of concern about wildlife to a much wider audience.
Speart has just delivered her fifth book in the series to Avon, which finds Rachel in the Memphis area and the Mississippi river delta, investigating the illegal caviar trade and its impact on endangered species that soon may become as close to extinction as the Caspian sturgeon, most prized source of caviar in the world. The tentative title is "Night Kill" and Speart says it probably will have "something on the cover that has absolutely nothing to do with the story," a pet peeve of hers.
Though the author's current contract with Avon is only for the five books, she's already poised to start researching No. 6, hopeful that an extension of her contract will come soon. She has plans to take Rachel to Hollywood and Hawaii in the near future and eventually to Washington, D.C., where she may be invited to become a senior resident agent.
"I have enormous fun writing the books," she says. Though, ideally, it would be nice to see the Fish & Wildlife service start winning most of its battles to save species, the grim outlook conveyed in Speart's novels does mean Rachel's future is secure. Says Speart, "I'll never run out of topics. You can go anywhere in the world and find something awful going on."
©
2000 by Ron Miller.
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