Skeleton Canyon (41 page)

Cochise County, in southeastern Arizona, is eighty miles wide by eighty miles long. That means my department is responsible for six thousand square miles of territory filled with cattle ranches, mines, ghost towns, hordes of undocumented aliens, and even a genuine city — Sierra Vista. My department is spread far too thin to have any permanent partnership kinds of arrangements. Sometimes I’m thrown in with one or the other of my two chief deputies – homicide detectives, Ernie Carpenter or Jaime Carbajal. Chasing crooks with those guys is as new for me as having a female boss is for them, but to give credit where it’s due, we’re all making it happen.

Since I spend most of my work hours in a world of men, I find myself looking to the women in my life to provide balance. My best friend is also my pastor at Canyon United Methodist Church. No matter what’s going on in her own life, Marianne Maculyea, has always been there for me, and I try to do the same for her. I’ve also come to appreciate one of my newer and more unlikely friends, Angie Kellogg. Angie is an ex-L.A. hooker who ended up in Bisbee while trying to escape the clutches of a former boyfriend who turned out to be my husband’s killer. I helped Angie, and she helped me. We’ve been friends ever since. Another valued personal resource is Eva Lou Brady. Officially, Eva Lou is my former mother-in-law. Unofficially, she’s more of a real mother to me than my own mother is. She’s someone I can go to any time of the night or day with any kind of problem. I wish I could say the same for Eleanor Lathrop Winfield.

I was born and raised in Bisbee and have never lived anywhere else. High Lonesome Ranch, the place where my daughter and I live, is a few miles outside the Bisbee city limits and has been in the Brady family for three generations. My father, D.H. Lathrop, died when I was in high school. Dad started out as a lowly miner in Bisbee’s copper mines. Later he went into law enforcement and eventually was elected sheriff. That’s what he was doing when he was killed in a tragic Sunday afternoon drunk-driving traffic incident.

If I had to have a single role model in life, my father would be it. When D.H. was alive, I guess I always favored him over my mother — he was a lot easier to get along with. And that’s still true today. Dad didn’t live long enough to drive me crazy the way Mom does. Maybe it’s easier to gloss over his faults since I don’t have to look at them every day. What is it they say about distance making the heart grow fonder? Or does it have more to do with familiarity breeding contempt? I don’t know which is more applicable.

Pet peeves? Other than my mother, I can’t really think of any. I always thought I understood Eleanor Lathrop — thought I knew her like a book. Unfortunately, in the last few years, she’s proved me wrong time and again. First my long-lost brother showed up, and it turns out he was so long lost that I didn’t even know he existed. He was born before my parents tied the knot and was adopted out as an infant. Neither of my parents ever mentioned him to me, and that’s something I’m having a tough time forgiving. Then, as if that weren’t enough, after years of being a widow, my mother recently dived back into the sea of holy matrimony – without bothering to give me a single word of advance warning. Is it any wonder Eleanor’s my pet peeve?

Don’t ask me about hobbies. I don’t have any. Between working full time and raising my daughter (Jenny’s twelve going on twenty-one!) I don’t have time. Of course Jenny has hobbies – a pair of dogs named Tigger and Sadie, as well as a horse named Kiddo. Jenny expects to take Kiddo off on the barrel racing circuit one of these days. Inevitably, looking after the menagerie has become as much of a hobby of mine as it is Jenny’s. Still, I’m not complaining. I’m glad we’re able to live out in the country where owning horses and dogs – even porcupine-chasing dogs – isn’t as much of a problem as it would be in town. I’m a reasonably good cook. I’m a capable if under-motivated housekeeper. (If you had spent your childhood and adolescence living in my mother’s obsessively clean house, maybe you’d have much the same attitude.)

As I mentioned before, I’m a widow – something most people my age (early thirties) are not. Andy and I married young, but I expected to be married all my life. I didn’t intend to be thrown back into the so-called dating game. And I haven’t been dating – not exactly and not so far. It’s just that this wild and crazy guy named butch Dixon seems to have set his sights on me. I met Butch when I was growing up in Peoria, Arizona attending a law enforcement-training academy. I keep telling him I need more time to sort myself out before I can become involved in any kind of long-term relationship. The problem is, Butch doesn’t seem inclined to take no for an answer.

J.A. Jance on the Origin of Joanna Brady

After writing my first thriller,
Hour of the Hunter
, when it was time to go back to J.P. Beaumont I found that writing was fun again. That was when my editor suggested that I might consider starting a second series so I’d be able to alternate between sets of characters.

I had written ten books through a middle-aged male detective’s point of view. It seemed to me that it would be fun to write about a woman for a change. Because Beau was a Seattle homicide detective, most of the books took place in and around Seattle. Up to that time, I had spent the bulk of my life living in Arizona. And it seemed like it would be fun to use some of the desert stuff that was percolating in the back of my head.

In many of the books I’d read that featured female sleuths, I had found that the characters seemed to live isolated, solitary lives with maybe a cat and a single dying ficus for company. Most of the women I knew lived complicated lives that involved husbands and children, in-laws and friends. They juggled family responsibilities and jobs along with church and community service. I set out to make my character, Joanna Brady (Yes, yes, I know. Another J. B. name) into someone whose life would reflect that complicated act of juggling.

As a writer, I try not to be too buoyed by good reviews or too devastated by bad ones, but there was one review that came in on the Joanna Brady books that is still engraved on my heart. It came for
Mostly Murder
: “Every woman in America is obviously not a sheriff, but Joanna Brady is every woman.”

Thank you,
Mostly Murder
.

Joanna Brady to the Rescue

My elderly and increasingly frail parents still lived in Bisbee, Arizona when I wrote this. When the need for a helipad at the local hospital became critical, they, as members of the local Kiwanis Club, began trying to raise money to build one. Hearing of the helipad project, I offered to help by doing a local appearance and book signing. It was soon clear, however, that book signings and bake sales weren’t going to cut it when it came to raising the required $104,000 inside a two-year deadline.

Remembering how one person, Marc Alley of Seattle, had made a $10,000 donation to the YWCA for an appearance as a character in
Breach of Duty
, I offered to do the same thing for the helipad project in the next Joanna Brady book,
Devil’s Claw
. My mother was quick to point out, however, that the economic situation in Bisbee was far different from that of Seattle, so I offered people a spot in the book if they made a $1000 donation to the project. Twelve people signed up, and they’re all in this book, under their own names and doing things that are in keeping with their real lives.

As for the helipad: Phelps Dodge Corporation came through and offered to complete the project for $70,000 less than had been bid originally. And so, if you’re ever in Bisbee, Arizona, and have need of an emergency air-evacuation, you can thank Joanna Brady for being part of the process.

About the Author

J. A. Jance is the American Mystery Award-winning author of the J.P. Beaumont series as well as eight enormously popular novels featuring small-town Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady. She has also written two critically acclaimed thrillers, Kiss of the Bees and Hour of the Hunter. Jance was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington.

More about J. A. Jance

A s a second-grader in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway School class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. I read the first one and was hooked and knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to be a writer.

The third child in a large family, I was four years younger than my next older sister and four years older then the next younger sibling. 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. When I graduated from Bisbee High School in 1962, I received an academic scholarship that made me the first person in my family to attend a four year college. I graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and Secondary Education. In 1970 I received my M. Ed. in Library Science. I taught high school English at Tucson’s Pueblo High School for two years and was a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Arizona for five years.

My ambitions to become a writer were frustrated in college and later, first because 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. 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 forty-two. 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. Other than writing poetry in the dark of night when my husband was asleep (see After the Fire), I did nothing more about writing fiction until eleven years later when I was a single, divorced mother with two children and no child support as well as a full time job selling life insurance. 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.

I started writing in the middle of March of 1982. The first book I wrote, a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that happened in Tucson in 1970, was never published by anyone. For one thing, it was twelve hundred pages long. Since I was never allowed in the creative writing classes, no one had ever told me there were some things I needed to leave out. For another, the editors who turned it down said that the parts that were real were totally unbelievable, and the parts that were fiction were fine. Myagent finally sat me down and told me that she thought I was a better writer of fiction than I was of non-fiction. Why, she suggested, didn’t I try my hand at a novel?

The result of that conversation was the first Detective Beaumont book,
Until Proven Guilty.
Since 1985 when that was published, there have been fourteen more Beau books. My work also includes eight Joanna Brady books set in southeastern Arizona where I grew up. In addition there are two thrillers,
Hour of the Hunter
and
Kiss of the Bees
that reflect what I learned during the years when I was teaching on the Tohono O’Odham reservation west of Tucson, Arizona.

The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a poetry reading of After the Fire at a widowed retreat sponsored by a group called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June of 1985, it was five years after my divorce in 1980 and two years after my former husband’s death. I went to the retreat feeling as though I hadn’t quite had my ticket punched and didn’t deserve to be there. After all, the other people there were all still married when their spouses died. I was divorced. At the retreat I met a man whose wife had died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they’d do, and we got married. We now have four new in-laws as well as three grandchildren.

When my second husband and I first married, he supported all of us—his kids and mine as well as the two of us. It was a long time before my income from writing was anything more than fun money—the
Improbable Cause
trip to Walt Disney World; the
Minor in Possession
memorial powder room; the
Payment in Kind
memorial hot tub. Seven years ago, however, the worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and take up golf and oil painting.

One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that everything—even the bad stuff—is usable. The eighteen years I spent while married to an alcoholic have helped shape the experience and character of Detective J. P. Beaumont. My experiences as a single parent have gone into the background for Joanna Brady—including her first tentative steps toward a new life after the devastation of losing her husband in
Desert Heat
. And then there’s the evil creative writing professor in
Hour of the Hunter
and
Kiss of the Bees
, but that’s another story.

Another wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from fans. I learned on the reservation 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.