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  Death of a Dying Man - Chapter 1
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  Death of a Dying Man - Chapter 1
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  Deaths of Jocasta - Chapter 1
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  The Intersection of Law and Desire - Chapter 1
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  Lost Daughters - Chapter 1
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  Death by the Riverside - Chapter 1
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J.M. (Jean M.) Redmann grew up in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, a small town on the Gulf of Mexico. At eighteen, determined to escape the South, she headed north to attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

The day after receiving her degree in drama, Redmann boarded a train for New York City. Determined not to become just another rich yuppie, she embarked on a career in theatrical lighting. Riches never once threatened her doorstep. To this day, they remain far afield. Her theatrical work even included a stint as lighting director of the New York Playboy Club. (No, she never wore a bunny costume.) While living in New York City, she began writing the book that became DEATH BY THE RIVERSIDE.

Due to circumstances beyond her control (following a partner who had decided to go to law school) Redmann moved to the City That Care Forgot, New Orleans. She is the first to admit that this isn’t exactly what she had planned. When pressed, she will admit that few things are as she had planned.

Redmann currently works as the Director of Prevention at NO/AIDS Task Force, the largest AIDS service organization in Louisiana. She also presents workshops on safer sex , which gives her a great excuse to watch dirty videos, talk about sex and ask questions such as, “What do you do with that pink thing?” during a normal work day.

One of the few lesbian authors to have crossed over to the so called mainstream, two of her books, LOST DAUGHTERS and THE INTERSECTION OF LAW AND DESIRE, were originally published by W.W. Norton. 

THE INTERSECTION OF LAW AND DESIRE won a Lambda Literary Award, and was also picked by the San Francisco Chronicle as an Editor’s Choice for the year and featured on NPR. Other titles include DEATH BY THE RIVERSIDE, and DEATHS OF JOCASTA. 

Her books have been translated into German, Spanish, Norwegian and Dutch. 

Presently, J.M. Redmann lives, works and survives in the city devastated by Katrina-New Orleans. She lives just at the edge of where the waters stopped.

Reviews for Lost Daughters:

“A sophisticated, funny, plot-driven, character-laden murder mystery set in New Orleans.

as tightly plotted a page-turner as they come. . . . One of the pleasures of “Lost Daughters” is its highly accurate portrayal of the real work of private detection — a standout accomplishment in the usually sloppily conjectured world of thriller-killer fiction. Redmann has a firm grasp of both the techniques and the emotions of real-life cases — in this instance, why people decide to search for their relatives, why people don’t, what they fear finding and losing. . . . and Knight is a competent, tightly wound, sardonic, passionate detective with a keen eye for detail and a spine made of steel.”
 —San Francisco Chronicle

“Redmann’s Mickey Knight series just gets better. . . . For finely delineated characters, unerring timing, and page-turning action, Redmann deserves the widest possible audience.”
 —Booklist, starred review

. . . tastefully sexy . . .
 —USA Today

“Like fine wine, J.M. Redmann’s private eye has developed interesting depths and nuances with age. . . . Redmann continues to write some of the fastest -moving action scenes in the business. . . . In Lost Daughters, Redmann has found a winning combination of action and emotion that should attract new fans–both gay and straight–in droves.”
 —New Orleans Times Picayune.

“An admirable, tough PI with an eye for detail and the courage, finally, to confront her own fear. Recommended.”
 —Library Journal

“Few writers understand the human heart as well as J.M. Redmann. Lost Daughters manages the rare trick of being a mystery packed with surprises as well as a moving exploration of the pain of loss between parents and children. Don’t start reading Lost Daughters at bedtime unless you plan to be up all night.”
 —Val McDermid, Gold Dagger winner, author of A Place of Execution, The Distant Echo.

“The best mysteries are character-driven and still have great moments of atmosphere and a tightly wound plot. J.M. Redmann succeeds on all three counts in this story of a smart lesbian private eye who unravels the fascinating evidence in a string of bizarre cases, involving missing children, grisly mutilations, and a runaway teen driven from her own home because she is gay.”
 —Outsmart

The Intersection of Law and Desire is finally back in print. In the Big Easy, nothing comes easy, not life, not love . . . not justice. Two cases, one involving an innocent young girl and the other a jaded sophisticate who thinks the rules don’t apply to her, lead Micky Knight to a tawdry bar where two streets intersect, the corner of Law and Desire. When Micky finds out what is hidden in the dark rooms behind the bar’s façade, she will do anything to make it stop . . .Anything.

Lambda Literary Award Winner

San Francisco Chronicle Editor’s Choice for the year

Profiled on Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross, and selected for book reviewer Maureen Corrigan’s recommended holiday book list.

Reviews

“Superbly crafted, multi-layered . . . One of the most hard boiled and complex female detectives in print today.”
—San Francisco Chronicle (An Editor’s Choice selection for 1995)

“Fine, hard-boiled tale-telling . . .”
—Washington Post Book World

“An edge-of-the-seat, action-packed New Orleans adventure . . . Micky Knight is a fast-moving, fearless, fascinating character . . . The Intersection of Law and Desire will win Redman lots more fans.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Crackling with tension . . .an uncommonly rich book . . . Redmann has the making of a landmark series.”
—Kirkus Review

“Perceptive, sensitive prose; in-depth characterization; and pensive, wry wit add up to a memorable and compelling read.” Library Journal

“Powerful and page turning . . . A rip-roaring read, as randy is it is reflective . . . Micky Knight is a to-die for creation . . . a Cajun firebrand with the proverbial quick wit, fast tongue and heavy heart.”
—Lambda Book Report

She drifted around for a while, drinking too much, not able to find a job or career that really appealed to her. An out of the closet lesbian, Micky slept around a lot, but never really connected with anyone.

One job she ended up in was as a security guard for a warehouse. Her boss did some private detective work on the side and asked Micky to help him out several times. As they worked well together, he asked Micky to join him when he started his own agency. But he eventually wanted their relationship to be more than just professional, and Micky decided that it was time to move on.

And so the M. Knight Detective Agency was born.

1. No, It’s Not Okay to Email Your Four Hundred and Sixty-two Page Manuscript.

Or even your fifty page first chapter. The gods of Office Depot do not give editors price breaks on printer paper, toner cartridges, etc. If you, the author, aren’t willing to tend to your brand new spanking baby book, then it’s ever less likely that an overworked editor wants to take on the task. Think about it this way, the editor can pick up a nice, crisply printed manuscript, plop down in her favorite recliner and read, or she can squint at a computer screen that she’s been squinting at all day or spend her time, her money (on the cost of printer paper, toner, etc) on printing out your manuscript before she can finally plop down to read it.Which of those editors do you want reading your book? What does it tell an editor about your commitment and willingness to do the work required during editing when you’re trying to get out of even just printing it?

2. Follow Directions

While it may seem that publishers are in a conspiracy to force you to make changes every time you have to submit a manuscript, this is not the case. We’re not that organized . . . we make rules for several reasons, including, to discourage the, shall we say, very creative souls, who submit manuscripts in rosy Unique and Interesting Fonts, which are very hard on eyes over forty (and not fun for eyes under forty, either). A similar format also allows us to quickly find the information we need, as well as giving guidance to those who prefer to have concrete guidelines to follow. If you don’t follow the directions, we may assume that you can’t read, can’t be bothered or have unilaterally decided that the rules don’t apply to you. Not a good first impression. If there is some really good reason, like you are using a typewriter, and not a computer and it’s a royal pain to re-format, then you can be the exception. Note the ‘really good reason’ part. ‘It’s a pain and I’d rather spend my time writing’, ‘the Xena rerun/WNBA game was on and I was too tired afterward’, ‘my ex-girlfriend set up the computer for me and I haven’t a clue as to how to reformat’ are not good reasons. Life is a learning curve. Your next girlfriend may be into needlepoint and not computers, so you might as well learn how to re-format now. Keep in mind that many editors are also writers and we’d rather be writing than trying to decipher your Unique and Interesting Font. Boring manuscript guidelines are all part of the writing life.

3. We’re Human

The reality is that many of us reading your manuscript have other jobs besides book publishing. We also occasionally do indulgent things like eat and sleep. All these take big chunks of time out of our days and leave only small chunks for reading manuscripts (and a few other things like pets, girlfriends, watching important sporting events). It may take us a while to get to the reading of your submission. We are not doing this to drive you crazy. Really, we’re not. It may sound crazy that it takes us two months to read the fifty pages that you submitted, but keep in mind we may have 30 other fifty page submissions that came in before yours, plus a number of books that are in various stages of editing and printing, plus all the exigencies of running a business (correspondence, keeping records, promotion, meetings, etc.) plus our day jobs, plus things like the aforementioned sleeping and eating. (And you don’t want us hungry or tired when we get to your submission). We will get to you as soon as we can.

4. Don’t write ‘The End’, print it and sent it off.

Read it AT LEAST ONCE. Get your English major friends to read it AT LEAST ONCE. Find, create, crash a writing group and get them to read it AT LEAST ONCE. Notice a theme here?

5. What’s in a name?

Characters names shouldn’t change midway through the book. JoLene shouldn’t become JanAnne in the second half of the book. Nor should her eye color/hair color, etc., change. (If you read it AT LEAST ONCE, you have a chance of catching these things).

6. Who knows where the time goes?

It can take weeks of real time to write one day of novel time. It may be five days before you get back to writing a scene that happens five minutes later in the novel. Don’t skip from Monday to Friday without any explanation of where the time went. Also make passing time realistic. If your cop character gets woken up with a phone call at midnight, then goes to a murder scene, interviews several witnesses, goes back to the station to write a report, then drives by her girlfriends house, notices a light on, stops by, they make passionate love, and then the cop goes home, the following chapter shouldn’t start with the cop being again woken up with the phone, but this time it’s 4 a.m. on the same night.

7. What are crocodiles doing here?

If a Louisiana editor is reading along and come to a scene in a swamp outside New Orleans and you throw in some menacing crocodiles, we’re going to know that you didn’t do your research and that we can’t trust you to get your facts right. (Crocodiles are only in Southern Florida, all we have here are alligators.) After tripping over that, we’re going to wonder just what else you guessed at. You may think that the detail you’re fudging on is pretty obscure, but someone, somewhere knows how it really is. You don’t have to stop writing in the middle of a scene and look up the territory and range of large reptiles, but you do need to go back in the rewriting and make sure that you’ve gotten the details right.

8. Where did the woman in the red dress go?

If you open the book with a scene in which your characters follows a mysterious woman in a red dress, then that character shouldn’t just disappear without a trace for the rest of the book. Or as Checkov said, ‘If you put a gun on the stage in the first act, it should go off by the third act.’

9. Avoid clichés like the plague (ahem).

Unless you want your character to be someone without original thoughts, clichés are far too general for the specific story that you are telling.

For example:

She was as cold as ice.
She was as cold as the ice in a glass of off-label Scotch.
She was as cold as the ice that sank the Titanic.

It was quiet, too quiet.
It was quiet, the silence a gazelle heard just before the lion pounced.
It was quiet, the street deserted, the bars closed, the absence of the earlier drunken laughter and pounding music turned the street desolate and lonely.

While not likely candidates for future editions of Bartlett’s Quotations, the latter sentences do convey more specific images and information than the preceding clichés.

10. But wasn’t she just in Biloxi?

Transitions are important to help the reader place the characters in both time and place. ‘She kissed her good-bye, then hurried to her truck, having just enough time to make her flight to Oshkosh,’ is better then ending one chapter with two women kissing in Biloxi and then the main character suddenly in Oshkosh, by gosh. When your character heard the strange noise in the back yard, did she pause to put on clothes or is she out there investigation stark naked? Or if she’s pointing a gun at the bad guys, when and where did she get it?

11. Avoid the ’stupids.’

A character who has gone to town to pick up some milk, shouldn’t make a comment in any conversation that takes place while she’s away. Make sure if your character drives her car there, she leaves with it–and everyone else who came with her, or at least explain why they’re in the middle of the woods, but will get a ride with someone else. (”Waitin’ for the big bad wolf . . .” is better than stranding your minor characters in the middle of nowhere.)

12. Avoid the really ’stupids’.

Your main character must confront the bad guys in a dramatic fashion. So, you have this intelligent, insightful, competent character decide to go out to the graveyard in the middle of the night without telling anyone where she is going, forget taking a cell phone or a gun, she doesn’t even take a butter knife to defend herself with. Other than a plot need for a dramatic scene about right now, there is no compelling reason why this main character has decided that the confrontation has to happen now, or that she can’t call the cops or at least her entire softball team with every bat they own.

Yes, you can have your character in the graveyard in the middle of the night, but you have to set it up. For example, her cell phone battery is dead, her gun out of ammo, she has just learned that the kidnapped child and her two puppies are being held in the graveyard, the parents are about to hand over the ransom money and that the kid and the adorable puppies will be history the second that happens. No one else is close enough to the graveyard to get there in time. Instead of being stupid, your character has no choice.

13. Made up grammar rules are about as annoying as unique and interesting fonts.

A period is a stop sign. If you don’t want to drive in a world without stop signs, don’t make us read in one. If you don’t want to memorize the Chicago Manual of Style (and that, admittedly takes a special talent) cultivate dork English major friends. Buy them dinner/a decent bottle of Scotch/whatever it takes to have them read your manuscript and put the commas in the right place and to point out that people rarely use semi-colons the way you have.

14. Make a friend of pronouns.

“The tall, dark haired lawyer crossed the room to the shorter, blond dork English teacher. The taller woman put her hand on the blond woman’s shoulder, looking deeply into the blond woman’s blue eyes. The dark haired woman asked the blue-eyed woman her opinion on semi-colons. The shorter, slightly dorky teacher recited verbatim the relevant passages from three grammar reference books. The taller woman fell asleep midway through the first reference.” Name your characters early, between their proper names and the skillful use of pronouns, you can avoid re-describing them five times every page. Or remember your Strunk and White and “Omit unnecessary words.”

15. Some books to have on your special writing shelf:

A good dictionary. It doesn’t have to be the OED (Oxford English Dictionary–you know, the one in libraries with the magnifying glass chained to it) but it shouldn’t be high school level either.

Roget’s Thesaurus, yes, we know you mostly use whatever is on your computer, but sometimes you just need another word.

A good style manual. The Chicago Manual of Style is the one most used by book publishers. There are others, some more suited for academic work or journalism. Anything is better than nothing.

Strunk and White, Elements of Style. It’s short, and the advice is still good.

The Most Important Thing

The first rule–really the only rule, the one you can never break or get around, is that you have to do the work. A book doesn’t get written in a burst of inspiration. A book gets written day after day, page by page by page. Sometimes it takes years and you will have to claw time out of your days when too many things already demand your time. The part of writing that’s seen, open to public scrutiny–the book signings, readings, articles in the paper or on radio or TV–is about five percent of what an author does. The other ninety-five percent is sitting alone in our rooms starting at a computer screen or page in a typewriter or a blank sheet of paper.

My friends (and these are my friends, goodness knows about other people) think I’m strange. The last time I turned my TV on was when there was a major hurricane heading straight for New Orleans. My to-be-read stack has forced me to believe in reincarnation–two or more lifetimes is the only way I’ll get through it. I triage my social engagements, and often avoid all but the necessary ones–”Damn, two weddings and a funeral this month, I’ll never get any writing done.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration–sometimes I skip the weddings . . . .

For me the magic in writing occurs in those lone moments with the words on the page. Have I caught something, trapped a world with words, put people in it, real cantankerous people with messy needs and desires?

If you want to be a writer, the first question to ask yourself is: Can I cleave to the first rule? Do I have the discipline to write day after day–to have to miss a few days or weeks because of work or other commitments and still come back to the writing–day after day, month after month, year after year? If you think that writing is about having adoring fans waiting in hushed silence for your autograph and chunks of money being flung into your bank account–well, it might happen–meteorites fall from the sky, lightning strikes odd and improbable places. I know a number of writers, but only one who actually earns her living by writing (not me, alas). Write because of the words on the page, writing for riches and fame will not sustain you.

Character

Story comes from the intersection of who and what. Who the characters are will determine how they will react to the body in the parlor. We don’t expect the same response from Colonel Mustard that we get from Miss Scarlet. But don’t assume that Miss Scarlet will scream, while Colonel Mustard will remain stoic.

It’s okay to steal–borrow might be the better word, though you won’t be giving anything back–from people you know, people you’ve seen, people you’ve read about, but make sure that you don’t remain locked into, “But she would do it that way.” At some point your characters grow up and take on a life of their own. Real life isn’t fiction.

Know why your characters do things, even if it is an irrational why. If your dainty, 5′2″ female detective is going to chase down the ally after the three big thugs, we have to know why she would do something like that. “Well, there’s no story is she doesn’t,” might be the real reason, but you have to give the reader some reason to believe that she would do such a foolish thing. Revenge? They kicked her beloved dog? Because they hold the key to the case she’s trying to solve and if she doesn’t catch them, she doesn’t get paid and if she doesn’t get paid, she gets evicted and can’t meet her car note? And she really, really likes her car?

I don’t have a formula for writing character. Some people note down complete backstories for their characters–what they eat for breakfast, where they were born, their grade point average in high school–none of which appears in the books. I don’t. I tend to be at the far end of the spectrum of what I’ll call ‘head’ writers. I don’t do an outline for any book and my notes are confined to a notebook that I keep handy in which I occasionally scribble down ideas or plot lines or snatches of dialogue. But I can tell you what my characters have for breakfast, where they were born, etc. I just never write it down. However, pay no attention to how I do it, do what works for you. To be creative enough to write, you have to be creative enough to find your own way of writing.

To me the most important rule for character is to be honest. We’re all messy, mixed up people who sometimes do the wrong thing for the right reason and the right thing for the wrong reason. So will your characters, if you are honest with them. What fascinates me and keeps my characters interesting to me, is the internal struggle they wage–how do ‘good’ characters overcome their desires to be selfish, to be needy, and how do ‘evil’ characters succumb, what pulls them down, what do they get from it, how do they justify their choices? I think to be honest with your characters, you have to be honest with yourself–how were you able to spend a year taking care of your dying mother? Why did you cheat on the test? Did you pass on that bit of malicious gossip about your best friend’s new girlfriend that you don’t like or did you keep it to yourself? What pivot allowed you to forgive your brother? Acknowledge that you’re a messy person with conflicting desires and aspirations, angers and temptations, virutes and vices. Be willing to explore the far reaches of your soul and you will find all of your characters there.

Suspense

People often tell me that they ‘couldn’t put my book down.’ As with character, I have no formula for creating suspense. My best advice is to make it matter. Make us care about the people and what happens to them. If we care about the person killed or wronged–it doesn’t always have to be murder–it can be a poison pen letter, something stolen–if we care enough about the people in the book we will care what happens to them. (I personally don’t like using murder is shorthand for saying ‘this is important, of course a dead body means that the detective must solve the mystery.’ Make us see why this dead body is important and what compels your detective to have to solve the crime.)

There are a few ‘cheap’ tricks for ratcheting up suspense. Time is one of them. Give us a deadline. A kidnapped child who will be killed in three days. The bomb goes off at five p.m. just when the rush hour crowds will be leaving. Your detective has two days to prove her harebrained theory and then she’s fired/the computer is taken away/etc.

Add obstacles. In one of my books, I have my detective wounded in the leg, and having to escape from the bad guys by trekking through a swamp. Loss of blood makes her progressively weaker, she stumbles over snakes and sinks into mud holes. Make the obstacles real–to use my example, the snakes work in a Louisiana swamp, but might seem contrived on the streets of New York. (Unless earlier you’ve planted a very good reason for there to be mean snakes on the mean streets.)

Location, location, location. Some places are more suspenseful than others. Swamps vs. convents, for example. Put the detective in an unfamiliar place–or a familiar place that discombobulates your detective, such as the scene of a previous murder or the place her mother abandoned her. Make it a confined space such as a warehouse or on board a ship with no escape. Or have a scene of mayhem–the detective and the bad guys weaving through the madness of Mardi Gras, with masked people and surreal costumes on every corner.

Suspense isn’t just a madly rushing plot, page after page of bad men with guns going after your detective becomes wearying after awhile. Is it a .45 or an AK47 won’t keep most readers on the edge of their chair. For me, real suspense always starts with character, how does this person handle this problem? In The Intersection of Law and Desire, my character was given the task of investigating a possible case of sexual abuse. The questions I wanted to explore were: How did her past history of having been abused affect her handling of this case? Would she cross the line into obsession–doing anything to prevent what had happened to her happening to another girl? What damage would the forced revisiting of her past have on her, on her sexuality, on her relationship with her lover? It was her struggle with all these issues, not just finding out ‘who dunnit’ that made the story interesting for me to write, and hopefully, for others to read.

If the struggle of good vs. evil is easy–wonderwoman sucker punches the bad guys–then the end is a forgone conclusion and suspense is lost. If the struggle of good vs. evil is not only hard, but not always clear cut–the bad guys aren’t totally bad and the good guys have their faults and failings–then the struggle becomes a real battle and one that commands our attention. Keep your stakes not only high, but real. The destruction of the world is certainly high stakes, but unless the reader believes that the world may well be destroyed, the stakes are not real.

And Finally–

The only other rule is that if it works, it works. There are no other rules.

1/3 version

Bread Crumbs - about two of the supermarket canisters. 2/3’s one canister
5-6 big white onions 2 big white onions
3 bunches of green onions 1 bunch green onions
8-10 green peppers 3 green peppers
3 bunches of celery 1 bunch celery
3 bunches of fresh parsley 1 bunch parsly
2 quart containers of oysters (original notes—two big oyster things) 1 qt. oysters
6-7 lemons 3 lemons
sage
thyme
bay leaves
salt (if desired, I left it out this time)
pepper

Chop up everything. Put it in a big pot. Cook the veggies (onions, green onions, peppers, celery, parsley) in the big pot for about an hour, until they’re soft and that sort of army green color. Throw in the spices, about 5-7 crumbled up bay leaves, probably about a teaspoon or two of all the rest (except salt, go sparingly, there is probably enough salt in the bread crumbs). Mix it up well. While the veggies are cooking, chop up the oysters, squeeze the lemons (if you want to hew to the family traditions, grate some lemon zest, but I’ve found that the juice works just as well and is less messy).

Add the chopped oysters, the oyster liquid (check for shell bits, it’s not nice to crunch at Thanksgiving or X-mas) to the mix. Add the bread crumbs and the lemon juice (and zest and hope that someone will wash the grater for you). Mix it all together. It should have just a bit of tang in the taste, but not really taste lemony. Let it simmer for a bit, stirring between sips on your beer, wine, diet Pepsi or whatever it takes to get you through the holidays. It shouldn’t be soupy, but you still should be able to easily stir it.

At this point, you can stuff it where ever you would like to (assuming either consent or being dead, as in dead turkey or chicken, on the part of the stuffee). It can simmer happily along for a while until dinner is ready, unless dinner is more than twenty-four hours away.

Bon appetite.

The J.M. Redmann version of the recipe.

1. Why did you choose the mystery genre?

I’ve always read and liked mysteries. Now it probably seems hard to imagine, but when I started writing my first book, Death by the Riverside, there just weren’t that many lesbian detective novels out there, (certainly none that used the name Cordelia). I just wrote the book that I wanted to read. I wish I could say that I had some grand scheme, that this was all thought out and analyzed, but I really just followed the words on the pages. I’m as surprised as anyone at what came out.

2. Are GLBT mysteries as popular now as they were in the mid-nineties?  Or has the interest in them cooled off.

I think the readers are still out there, still reading, but perhaps some of the media and publishing attention has waned. My feeling is that a good mystery is a good mystery. I try not to get too wrapped up in what’s hot, what’s not (which is perhaps why I still have a day job) and just concentrate on what interests me to write.

3. How do you begin the process of writing a novel?  Do you outline?

A novel starts in my brain and it has to ramble around there for a while, with the conscious and the subconscious both adding their bits. At some point, it feels ready to write. That’s when I finally sit down to do it. For a long time I wrote in long hand–I know, I know, it makes me sound like a Luddite, but I was the student who mistyped DUCK in Sister Mary Magdalene’s typing class, I’m just not coordinated at the keyboard. Only after entering the longhand of my first four novels, am I finally fluent enough at the keyboard that it doesn’t (much) interfere with the flow of the writing.

No, I don’t outline. I did for the first book and then promptly diverged from it, never to go back again–the book just went in a different direction. I’m very much what I call a ‘head’ writer–I really keep most of it in my head. I have a notebook handy and occasionally scribble down ideas, but that’s about it.

4. Mysteries often revolve around social issues. Is this particular to GLBT writing, or to the genre as a whole?

I think we sometimes forget that social issues are people’s lives. I’ve never consciously set out to ‘tackle’ a social issue, I’ve always been interested in how people live their lives and often those lives intersect with social issues, child abuse, drug use, alcoholism, adoption. I think mysteries as a whole do a good job of looking at various issues, but GLBT writing comes from a unique outsider perspective. We’re both reviled and invisible–we still lack some pretty basic civil rights in this country, but we can also go to the grocery store, drive through Mississippi (I grew up there, I can malign it), get on an airplane and not be seen as gay or lesbian. Just by being a GLBT writer, and writing a character who is gay or lesbian is a social issue. (As it is for many other writers who are taking the icon of the detective hero and recasting her or him as black, disabled, female, etc.)

5. Are there areas where you cannot go as a gay writer — scenes or subject matter?

I just can’t do those heterosexual sex scenes . . . .No, I don’t think anything is off limits. Some things are hard–like how do I as a white woman write about characters of other races, other cultures. But if we can’t imagine it, how can we ever get to living it?

6. What writers have influenced your work?  Who do you read?

I am a reading slut. I will read most anything, including cereal boxes in the morning. (It really is very mysterious what some of those ingredients are.) I majored in theatre in college and I think having to read all those plays taught me a lot about dialogue. I worship Chekhov, the worlds he could convey in nuance. The desert island author is Jane Austen, I love her stuff, she manages one of the hardest things in writing–the believable happy ending. George Elliot, I’d die happy if I had written Middlemarch. Sarah Waters, Dorothy Allison, Jeannette Winterson, Adrienne Rich, we have a great wave of contemporary lesbian writers. Louise Erdrich, Michael Cunningham, Barbara Kingsolver, Pat Barker, E. Annie Proulx, Jim Grimsley, Keri Hulme, Octavia Butler, others I can’t think of at the moment. Okay, as for mysteries, Dorothy Sayers is the mother of us all, and Barbara Wilson and Katherine Forrest are our lesbian mothers. In no particular order: Sara Paretsky, P.D. James, Amanda Cross, Sue Grafton, Nevada Barr, Michael Connelly, Michael Nava, Ellen Hart, Manda Scott, Laurie King, Julie Smith, Greg Herren, Nicola Griffith, Kevin Allman, James Sallis, Ian Rankin, Pat Welch, Jaye Maiman, Abagail Padgett, Sandra Scoppettone, Patricia Cornwell, Val McDermid–like I said, I’m a slut.

7. What are the most important themes running through your books?

Power, how people use and how they abuse it. Evil isn’t just intent, it’s also having the will and means to carry out.

I’m also interested in the way the past twines around the present and the future, how our memories and experiences can either imprison us or free us. Shakespeare said it, “The past is prologue.” So did Falkner, “The past is never gone. It isn’t even past.”

8. Which element or elements of writing do you find the most challenging?

Sex and violence. They are so innately physical, beyond the realm of language and into the land of the body and touch and sensation–pain and pleasure. It is very hard to capture those two with only words and paper.

It’s also a challenge to capture the ’small moments’ of life. The stray thoughts, noticing something minor at the time, or just a quick conversation with meanings under the words.

9. Does it bother you that you’re writing about murder as entertainment?

No, because I don’t think that I’m writing about murder as entertainment. (It does however bother some visitors to my house if they stumble over that forensic pathology textbook.) I’m writing to change the world, not in a great flash, but like water wearing away stone. I think we all are. By we I mean all the writers who are telling our stories, especially those of us only now being allowed a voice, women, gays, blacks–all those ‘others’ who have so long been silent.

I don’t think mysteries are about murder as entertainment, but about the search for justice. Often in real life, it’s tainted and obscure–he said, she said, they said–no way of really getting to the truth. Fiction can bring us to justice, to resolution, to finally knowing in a way that real life rarely does. I think that’s the real appeal of mysteries, the triumph of a moral universe.

10. Is your main character based on you?

No. However, I will confess that there are two continuing characters that, while not really based on me, I can go to myself and say, what would I do in that situation, and that often works for them. But I can’t do that with Micky Knight. I have to get in her head and out of mine. (No, I’m not going to tell you who the two characters are, but if you’re really obsessive, I’ll drop some clues. One went to the same college I went to and the other looks like me–I’m a big boned descendant of German farm stock, so if you haven’t transmogrified this character into a willowy blond, as one reader told me she did, you might be able to guess.) I don’t think readers realize what scavengers we writers can be. I’ve only got my life to draw on, yet in a novel I’ve got wide range of characters, all with their own backgrounds and experiences–not that that all has to appear in the book–but still I have to come up with some reality for them. Stealing something from my own life and experiences is much easier that making something up, doing the research or trying to imagine something I’ve never lived. So, even when stay pieces of who I am pops up in the books, it well may not mean that I’m barring my soul fictionally, it just may mean that I needed a street like the one I used to live on, so I used that one instead of re-inventing it.

11. What are you working on now?

I’m in a position of creative flux, working on two novels more or less at once. These are not Micky Knight novels, but a whole new set of characters and, to make it short (as opposed to novel length) I discovered that I had to write the second book in the series to get to the where I needed to be to write the first book. The day job does make it take a while for me to write a book, so I’m not anticipating having anything anywhere near a bookstore for a while. I was collaborating with another mystery writer on a book that featured her character and Micky. We got ten chapters done, but then she was consumed with other things, so the project is just sitting in the shelf.

12. We all have preconceived ideas about what the writing life would be like.  What surprised you — both negatively and positively?

That it’s ongoing, there is no moment when you’re a ’success’, there’s always another book to write, to re-write, to edit, etc. This is a crazy life and the only reason to do it is for the words on the page, those lonely moments when it is just you and your writing. Everything else, being published, reviewed, winning awards (or not winning them) is capricious and ephemeral, and finally outside the writing.

Even though I don’t expect to ever make it to fame and fortune, writing has opened some amazing doors for me, including things like traveling to Australia and Europe, meeting people who have become great friends, having a far flung network of writing buddies. I even get invited to make a fool of myself answering questions on other people’s web sites.

Novels

DEATH BY THE RIVERSIDE,
Bella Books, reprinted 2002 (originally printed in 1990), ISBN 1-931519-05-6.
The first Micky Knight book, it introduces Micky and her circle of friends. Micky must confront both a sinister drug ring and her past.

DEATHS OF JOCASTA,
Bella Books, reprinted 2002, (originally published in 1992)
ISBN 1-931513-10-4
Lambda Literary Award nominee

The second Micky Knight book. What kind of monster would murder women by performing incompetent abortions on them? Micky has to find the killer before a close friend is blamed for the murders–and before more women are killed.

LOST DAUGHTERS
W.W. Norton, July 1999, ISBN 0-393-04028-3

Micky takes on two cases, one of a newly widowed mother looking for the daughter that she and her husband were estranged from, and that of an adopted young man, thrown out of his home for being gay, who wants to find his birth mother. These cases cause Micky to confront the mystery of her own mother, a women who abandoned her when she was five years old.

THE INTERSECTION OF LAW AND DESIRE,
Avon, February 1997,, ISBN 0-380-72819-2
paperback edition

THE INTERSECTION OF LAW AND DESIRE,
W.W. Norton, July, 1995, ISBN 0-393-03793-2, 1995 Lambda Literary Award

In New Orleans, there really is a street named Desire and one named Law and they do intersect. Micky takes on two seemingly unrelated cases, the blackmail of a high society playgirl and uncovering the reason behind the haunted look in the daughter of a friend.

Short Stories

“Ghost of a Chance”, SHADOWS OF THE NIGHT, edited by Greg Herren, Haworth Press, 2003

“Naked”, UNIFORM SEX, edited by Linnea Due, Alyson Books, 2000; ISBN 1-55583-545-7

“Maggie’s Hands” reprinted in Electric, Best Lesbian Erotic Fiction, edited by Nicole Foster, Alyson Books, 1999; ISBN 1-55583-500-7

“Maggie’s Hands” HOT TICKET, edited by Linnea Due, Alyson Books, July 1997, ISBN 1-55583-379-9

Essays

“Thirteen Hours to Texas”, Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans
by Paul J. Willis, Greg Herren, Hardcover, Alyson Pubns,
ISBN 1555839819

“Lost Daughter” The Milk of Human Kindness.
Author: Lori Lake. Publisher: Regal Crest.
ISBN: 1-932300-28-7.

German Editions

MISSISSIPPI,
Ariadne Krimi, Argument, 1994,
ISBN 3-88619-55-4

STIRB, JOKASTE!,
Ariadne Krimi, Argument, 1995,
ISBN 3-88619-569-4

SAG NIEMALS JA,
Ariadne Krimi, Argument, 1997, ISBN 3-88619-587-2

STEIN DER WAISEN,
Ariadne Krimi, Argument, 1998,
ISBN 3-88619-833-2

Spanish Editions

La sombra de la duda
J.M. Redmann, Egales, ISBN: 84-95346-74-5.

Yocasta (Deaths of Jocasta)
J.M. Redmann, Egales, ISBN-13: 978-8488052193

La confluencia entre Ley y Deseo
J.M. Redmann, Egales, ISBN: 978-84-88052-77-3