From Bisbee to the Bestseller List

J.A. Jance's love of books led her to write a string of successful mysteries—including a series set in southeastern Arizona. So it's no mystery why she'll keynote "Literacy Alive" in Silver City March 24.

By David A. Fryxell

Books—a book in particular—changed J.A. Jance's life. The bestselling mystery writer, who will be the keynote speaker at the Friends of the Library's "Literacy Alive" authors day in Silver City March 24, grew up in Bisbee, Ariz., as the third child in a large family. Four years younger than her next older sister and four years older than the next younger sibling, she says, "Being both too young and too old left me alone in a crowd and helped turn me into an introspective reader and a top student."

Author J.A. Jance now splits her time between Tucson and Seattle.

The book was L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Jance was in Mrs. Spangler's second-grade class in Bisbee when she read that first book in the Oz series: "I knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to be a writer," she recalls. "I could see beyond the curtain to the Wizard. Someone put those words on the page, and I wanted to be that person. That's never changed for me."

Though becoming "the Wizard" sometimes must have seemed impossible, today Jance enjoys success as glittering as Oz's Emerald City. She's published 17 novels about J.P. Beaumont, a Seattle homicide detective, and 12 in a series about Joanna Brady, the fictional sheriff of real-life Cochise County, Ariz. (That actually totals to 28 books, because both lists include Partner in Crime, a crossover featuring both detectives.) Jance recently launched a third series, focusing on ex-Phoenix TV anchor Ali Reynolds, with Edge of Evil; the second in that series, Web of Evil, was published in hardcover in January. She's working on the third Ali Reynolds book now and planning to write the next Beaumont mystery this summer, with a Joanna Brady in line after that. Plus Jance has published three thrillers and a book of poetry, After the Fire.

Not bad for somebody who was refused admission into the University of Arizona's creative-writing program because, as she puts it, "I was a girl."

Jance will open the March 24 event at the Silco Theater with a talk on literacy and the effect reading and writing has on people's lives. She'll join local authors for a panel discussion on "A Passion for Words: Why We're Driven to Write—and Read," while another panel of local authors, along with Denver Post book reviewer Leslie Doran, will discuss "The Future of Books in the Internet Age." Free afternoon sessions will feature awards presentations and readings, book sales and signings. Besides boosting area literacy efforts, the event benefits the public library in Silver City.

Jance, who now splits her time, much as she does her books' settings, between Arizona (Tucson) and Seattle, was born near Watertown, South Dakota. Her parents moved to Bisbee when she was little. "We left the farm on Jan. 29, 1949," she says. "It was 28 degrees below zero when we left South Dakota, though I don't remember that. The trip to Arizona took five days, including being snowbound in Enid, Okla.; I don't remember that, either. We stayed at the Shady Dell trailer park in Bisbee until our house was ready in mid-March."

The first day truly at home in Bisbee, that she does remember: "I remember hanging on the fence and feeling the warmth of the sun all over my body."

Though the Arizona warmth was welcome after the South Dakota cold, Bisbee could be a tough place to grow up. A copper-mining town much like Silver City, Bisbee had an outstanding school system, Jance says, but was still a small, company town. Worse, by seventh grade she wore glasses, had shot up to six feet tall and was smarter than just about anybody in her class. "That's not a recipe for teenage success," she says.

"Reading took me outside of Bisbee, beyond the confines of the mountains," Jance goes on. "It was years before television made it over the mountains and down the canyon to Bisbee, so my view of the outside world was limited."

But reading could be "a double-edged sword," she adds with a chuckle. She recalls reading British thrillers that talked about "rashers" of bacon, and longingly imagining a "rasher" to be a whole plateful she could gobble all by herself—a delicious contrast to the one-piece breakfast ration of bacon in her big family. "Actually," she says, a bit sadly, "a 'rasher' turns out to be just one piece."

Those reading adventures beyond Bisbee could continue all summer, Jance says, because her school library stayed open after the school year ended. The town also had an outstanding public library "that helped form my love of reading, which led to my love of writing."

She tried to pursue that childhood ambition to become a writer at the University of Arizona, attending on a scholarship that made her the first in her family to go to a four-year college. But her dream was frustrated by that creative-writing teacher, as she recounts on her author Web site: "The professor who taught creative writing at the University of Arizona in those days thought girls 'ought to be teachers or nurses' rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program, I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that was closed to me."

She'd later get her revenge on that creative-writing teacher, however, in the pages of her first non-series thriller, Hour of the Hunter. "Do you want to know why that's my favorite book?" Jance asks. "It's about a teacher on an Indian reservation who wants to be a writer. Her husband is dead, and there's a crazed killer—who turns out to be a creative-writing professor. The lesson there is do not make a writer mad."

Jance graduated in 1966 with degrees in English and Secondary Education, then added a master's in Library Science. She taught English at Pueblo High School in Tucson for two years and spent five years as a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Ariz., working on the reservation much like her future character.

But she never forgot her goal of becoming a writer, despite continued discouragement—now from her husband. "My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little. Despite the fact that he was allowed in the creative writing program, he never had anything published either prior to or after his death from chronic alcoholism at age 42. That didn't keep him from telling me, however, that there would be only one writer in our family, and he was it. My husband made that statement in 1968 after I had received a favorable letter from an editor in New York who was interested in publishing a children's story I had written.

"Because I was a newly wed wife who was interested in staying married, I put my writing ambitions on hold." Jance continued to write poetry, which she would one day publish, but only in the dark of night when her husband was asleep.

Finally, years later, after her alcoholic husband's drinking had landed him in the hospital nine times, she got a divorce and moved to Seattle. "I rented a U-Haul trailer and had an adventure in moving," she says.

She was a divorced mother of two with no child support and a full-time job selling insurance (an experience that would later play into her Joanna Brady books, which begin with Joanna working in an insurance office), living in a new city. But this was at last her time to become a writer—so she made the time. "My first three books were written between four a.m. and seven a.m. At seven, I would wake my children and send them off to school. After that, I would get myself ready to go sell life insurance."

Having grown up reading mysteries—the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls—Jance naturally thought of tackling her favorite genre. Reading John D. McDonald's Travis McGee novels showed her the possibilities of a continuing character like those in her childhood mysteries, except written for adults. But she didn't realize she was writing a series at first, and spent six frustrating months trying to write from the viewpoint of a female character.

When she finally tried telling the story through the eyes of the Seattle homicide detective, J.P. Beaumont, she knew from the first paragraph that she'd found her voice as a writer:

"She was probably a cute kid once, four maybe five years old. It was hard to tell that now. She was dead. The murder weapon was a pink Holly Hobbie gown. What little was left of it was still twisted around her neck. It wasn't pretty, but murder never is. . . ."

She recalls, "Suddenly I was walking around the scene in Beau's shoes, seeing it through his eyes. The story constructed itself in my head once I found the right point of view to write it." During a five-day spring break when her kids were off at camp, Jance penned the first 30,000 words of Until Proven Guilty in longhand.

Writing from the viewpoint of a male protagonist with a drinking problem wasn't a challenge, she says. "I'd spent 18 years trying to find out what made other guys in bars so much more interesting to my husband than I was. I'd just send my head back to those bars. . . . One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that everything—even the bad stuff—is usable."

Setting the series in Seattle was trickier, at least initially. When she began writing the Beaumont books, she'd lived in the city less than two years.

But she wrote both the character and the setting so convincingly, the rumor soon was that "J.A. Jance" was a retired Seattle homicide detective, like Beaumont, turned author. Her publishers didn't think readers would buy a "police procedural" novel written by a woman, so Judith A. Jance became "J.A. Jance," and her first six books were published without a photo of the author.

The week before the first of those novels arrived in bookstores, in 1985, Jance attended a widowed retreat. There she met a man whose wife had died two years to the day—nearly to the minute—of when her ex-husband had died. The coincidence led to a conversation and, six months later, to a marriage.

Even though Jance was now a published author, she says, it was a long time before her income from writing was anything but "fun money." Her new husband supported their blended family, while her books paid for vacations (Improbable Cause meant a trip to Disney World) and home improvements (the "Minor in Possession memorial powder room," the "Payment in Kind memorial hot tub"). Later, though, "The worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and take up golf and oil painting."

One thing didn't entirely change with Jance's bestseller success, however. Even after her books became popular enough that the publisher relented and added a photo of her, the rumor about the series' author persisted: Now the story was that she was just a front for the real author, who surely had to be a man and an ex-cop.

"You'd think that rumor would go away," Jance says with a sigh, "but it has not."

After nine successful mysteries starring J.P. Beaumont, Jance began to tire of the character. She told her publisher she wanted to kill him off—much as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to end Sherlock Holmes' fictional life and career at Reichenbach Falls. But her publisher reacted much as Doyle's fans did, and persuaded her to try writing something else instead. Then maybe she could give Beaumont a fresh try.

That was the genesis of Hour of the Hunter, her opportunity to skewer that creative-writing professor.

Still, though, she wasn't ready to go back to Seattle with her storytelling. Her publisher suggested launching a second ongoing character—and Joanna Brady was born. "I knew Joanna would be a continuing series," Jance says. "I expected she would be an amateur sleuth, but I had been writing police procedurals too long." The first novel in the series, Desert Heat, published in 1993, turned Joanna Brady into a single mom—a situation familiar to her creator—with the murder of her husband. The second, Tombstone Courage, saw Joanna elected sheriff of Cochise County in southeastern Arizona—county seat, Bisbee.

The decision to set her second series in the familiar territory of her childhood was an easy one, Jance says. "I had all this desert stuff walking around in my head. I use places I know because I'm essentially lazy and don't want to have to make everything up. If you know the landscape, the weather, you can easily fill in the background while keeping your eye on your characters."

Initially Jance developed two different sets of fans, one for each series. Then her publisher suggested writing 2003's Partner in Crime, a "crossover" mystery in which J.P. Beaumont comes to the desert Southwest to help Sheriff Brady investigate a crime. "Now most readers read them all," Jance says happily.

She hopes readers will likewise follow her byline to the new Ali Reynolds series, about a fired Los Angeles news anchor who moves to Phoenix to start over—and, naturally, becomes enmeshed in murder. Jance got the inspiration for the new continuing character watching television news in Tucson. Her favorite newscaster was Patty Weiss on KVOA-TV, the first woman to anchor the evening news in Arizona. "Then she got turned loose because she was beyond her pull date," as Jance puts it.

Once again, Jance saw an opportunity to make a point in her pages: "Remember, don't make authors mad." Reincarnated as "Allision Reynolds," the fired news anchor has a second chance, solving mysteries. (The real-life Patty Weiss tried a second career in politics, losing Arizona's 8th congressional district nomination to Gabrielle Giffords, who went on to win the open seat in November 2006.)

Now juggling three series, Jance says, "I'm fully employed. I'm not resting on my laurels." It's actually easier to maintain her enthusiasm for each character and series setting when she can rotate between three, she adds. "It's freeing to have more than one character, to get to go visit a different place and point of view."

Just as when growing up, she's still a big reader, but sticks mostly to newspapers and magazines when she's in the creative throes of writing a book. "I don't want to read anything that will impinge on what I'm doing in any fashion," she says.

When Jance hits the road to promote a new novel, she catches up on her book reading. She's a fan of the "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series by Alexander McCall Smith and the "Miss Julia" Southern comedies by Ann B. Ross. With the former set in Botswana and the latter in North Carolina, there's less danger the stories will interfere with creating Jance's next Seattle or Southwest mystery.

She has a ready response when asked if there's a book she's read that she wishes she'd written: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. "It's a wonderful book. Somebody gave me the book at a booksigning."

Those booksignings are as much a part of a writer's life in today's publishing scene as sitting at the keyboard. Jance recently returned from a long book tour and spent the night in her own bed in Tucson for the first time in a month. When she woke up in the morning, she says, the first thought in her mind was, "I want to stay HOME!" But Jance is a trooper, and will embark on yet another book tour in July, only a few months after her much-briefer jaunt to Silver City this month.

"Being a writer is several full-time jobs rolled into one," she says. "You have to go on the road and do all the promotion."

At least she doesn't have to deal with Hollywood. "I don't think there's enough sex and violence in my books to appeal to Hollywood," she says. "My books are generally PG-13, and that's the kiss of death. I'm happy writing books and not worrying about Hollywood. I've seen too many writers wear out their creativity trying to get Hollywood to match their vision." If movies or TV ever did come knocking, she says she'd take the money and pay no attention to how her work got adapted: "I'd take the attitude that I don't care if they turn it into a musical."

Asked if she has any advice for aspiring writers, Jance replies simply, "A writer is someone who has written today." She quickly adds, "And today I qualify"—even though it's only nine in the morning. Evidently the early-morning writing habits formed when she wrote her first books stuck with her.

"I have a deadline," she explains matter-of-factly.

But don't get the idea that J.A. Jance thinks finally being able to follow her second-grade dream is just drudgery. No, now that she's the Wizard behind the curtain of the story, she loves entertaining readers.

During her time as a school librarian on an Indian reservation, she says on her Web site, she learned "that the ancient, sacred charge of the storyteller is to beguile the time. I'm thrilled when I hear that someone has used my books to get through some particularly difficult illness either as a patient or as they sit on the sidelines while someone they love is terribly ill. It gratifies me to know that by immersing themselves in my stories, people are able to set their own lives aside and live and walk in someone else's shoes.

"It tells me I'm doing a good job at the best job in the world."

For more about J.A. Jance, see her Web site at www.jajance.com.

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure and was formerly editor-in-chief of Writer's Digest magazine.

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