Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [147]
Eventually Diana woke up. “Good morning,” he said, smiling at her. “I’ll bet you’re tired.”
“A little,” she admitted. “How long have you been awake?”
“Not long,” he fibbed. “Only a few minutes. Thanks for the flower.”
Diana looked at the rosebud and then back to her husband. “That’s not from me,” she said. “It’s from Emma Orozco. She wanted to say thank you, but only relatives are allowed in the ICU.”
“If you see her again,” Brandon Walker said, “give her a message for me. Tell Emma both Fat Crack Ortiz and I say she’s welcome.”
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More about J. A. Jance’s thrillers
Mysteries are enduringly popular. I’ve read them all my life, from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, right on through John D. MacDonald and Lawrence Block. Mysteries work as stories with the required beginnings, middles, and ends. Those ends usually entail the bad guy getting caught and/or punished. That’s the rule. If the bad guy doesn’t get it in the end, you may be dealing with literature, and that’s another kettle of fish entirely.
In mysteries, the reader doesn’t know who the killer is until the end. In thrillers, the reader knows who the bad guy is from the beginning. The only question is how much damage he’s going to do before he gets caught.
I think many people who become writers do so because they’re ill-suited to having regular jobs. That’s certainly true in my case. And so, after writing nine Detective Beaumont original paperbacks in a row, by 1989 I was beginning to feel as though I had a regular job. When I threatened to knock Beau off in my next book, my editor was aghast. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Remember that first book of yours, the one that was never published?”
I remembered it well. My first manuscript had been called Hour of the Hunter. It was a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that had taken place in Arizona in 1970, and it was one in which my first husband had played a key role as a witness. The manuscript was universally turned down for good reason. For one thing, in it’s original form it was 1,200 pages long. But even after it was trimmed down by 550 pages to a mere 650, it still didn’t make the cut. Editors said that the stuff that was real was “unbelievable” whereas the parts that were fictional were “fine.”
My agent finally suggested that I try my hand at fiction, and that’s where J.P. Beaumont stepped into the picture. Between 1985 when Until Proven Guilty was published, though, and 1989 when I was having this conversation with my editor, I’d had an emotional encounter with some of the still-grieving family members from that series of murders in Arizona. Just meeting them one time was enough to convince me that real murders affect real people. I stopped writing true crime on the spot.
So when my editor suggested that I revisit that original manuscript, I didn’t want to bring up that awful time for that still fractured family. Not only that, the killer was still in prison in Arizona, and I didn’t want to write a book that he could point to and say to his friends in Florence, “Hey, guys, here’s a book about me.”
I ended up selling Morrow and Avon a book called Hour of the Hunter, but the only thing it has in common with that original manuscript is the title. And, eleven years later, of all my books, it remains my favorite.
WARNING: I believe my mysteries can be considered PG-13. The thrillers are definitely rated R. Don’t say you weren’t warned!
More about J. A. Jance
As 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.