Describe your first recognized success as a writer.
My first big moment was winning a national poetry contest when I was eighteen. The second was actually making a living writing Harlequin romances and short stories with my beloved mother PJ. In fact, the first time we used the PJ Tracy pseudonym was for a Christmas short titled “Lights of the Season” for Woman’s World magazine in the early 90’s. But Monkeewrench, published in 2003, was our big mainstream break-through. It was a New York Times and international bestseller and all ten books in the series are still in print. I recently finished the eleventh, The Deepest Cut, which will be released on September 9th of this year! It’s such a blessing to have created a series with PJ that has endured for two decades. I still pinch myself.
Aside from the obvious distance in where you and your mom were writing, describe the challenges with the Monkeewrench series.
As for the writing, there were no challenges, even though she was in Minnesota and I was in LA for most of the series. We had a bond and a unified voice that defied distance. We spent hours on the phone and I traveled back every couple of months. The hardest part was the intense pressure of producing a book a year while keeping a grueling book tour schedule. We weren’t remotely prepared for that, but we sure had a blast. When we were together, nothing was insurmountable.
They are rather sophisticated computer-related mysteries (thrillers?). Who or what were your inspirations or sources?
PJ and I loved computer games and murder mysteries and we wished there was a game that combined them. So we created a fictional one and decided it would be really creepy if somebody started duplicating the murders in real life. That was how Monkeewrench was born.
My father was a computer scientist and worked for Sperry UNIVAC his entire career. He was an invaluable source of knowledge and inspiration. We would come up with a crazy idea and ask him if it was plausible. He always told us: ‘If it’s not possible now, it will be before the book is on the shelf.’ How right he was.
Your mother, Patricia, was an accomplished and talented writer. How were you able to make the transition to writing solo?
It was a strange time. After she passed, I wondered if I could write another Monkeewrench book or if I even wanted to. I floundered for weeks in grief and uncertainty, staring at my computer screen. Then on a magical January night, I started writing and couldn’t stop. I finished the first draft of The Guilty Dead in five months (that will never happen again.) PJ was vividly alive in me, laughing and cracking wise. Honestly, I feel like she wrote that book. Writing is our enduring tether and I’m never closer to her than when I’m writing.
How did you decide to write the Detective Margaret Nolan series?
I lived in Los Angeles for ten years and had a treasure trove of experiences and observations that were clamoring to get onto the page. That’s when I knew it was time to take a break from Monkee World to keep myself fresh. I loved writing the Nolan series — it recharged my batteries and multiplied a thousand-fold the joy of reuniting with the gang in The Deepest Cut.
What do you think makes a good story?
Equal attention to characters, plot, and setting. This is the holy trinity. If a writer skimps on any of these, it’s a disappointment. Also, there’s a great saying in the screenwriting biz: At the end of every page, give the reader a reason to turn it.
When you start to write do you have an idea of the ending?
Never. Even if I did, my characters would do something unpredictable and ruin it. For me, the excitement of writing is finding out what happens next. And I figure if I don’t know how it ends, the reader won’t either!
Do your characters speak to you as you create them?
Constantly, even when I’m not writing. They are annoying chatterboxes.
Who are your favorite authors to follow?
I read everything — all genres of fiction and equal amounts of non-fiction. I couldn’t even begin to make a list. I know this is a cop-out, but I’m afraid I might forget somebody important.
Describe a typical day in your writing process – when, where, time of day, how often.
I’m an early riser these days, so I settle in at my desk with a banana and coffee often before the sun is up. (At least in the winter.) I play word games to wake up my brain and when I’m sufficiently coherent, I dive in. I’m at it all day, either writing, researching, or just thinking. When I’m on a roll, I can write for hours, other times inspiration comes in fits and spurts or not at all. It’s definitely not an exact science, but the one immutable constant is that I write 365 days a year. Not because I have to, but because I love it.
Are any of your characters based on real people? Any autobiographical?
They’re my little Frankenstein’s monsters — an amalgamation of real people and my imagination. And I believe all authors put pieces of themselves in characters – it’s impossible not to. But I stay far away from anything autobiographical so I don’t incriminate myself. Some of the statues of limitations haven’t expired yet.
How much research do you do for your books?
I love research and do a ton of it. I’m very fortunate to have so many wonderful sources who possess a wide range of expertise and generously share their knowledge. But I think reading is still the best research. Cold, hard facts provide unexpected fodder for creativity and often set me off in entirely new directions.
What would you say is the most difficult part of writing?
For me, it’s getting to the place where an abstraction finally comes to life on the page and the characters begin to tell their own stories. When I get to that point, I’m just a typist. It’s like trying to catch fog with your fingers, but when it happens, there is no greater adrenaline rush. It’s the writer’s version of BASE jumping or freediving.
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You and your mother published Monkeewrench 17 years ago. How has your writing changed in that time?
Seventeen years! It’s shocking to see that in print. Writing is a constantly evolving process – you’re always exploring, learning, growing, and refining. It also reflects the perspective and psychological state of the writer. When PJ’s health began to decline, I think our writing became a little darker and more introspective. When she passed and I carried on solo, my work became more emotional. You work through things when you write. It’s your internal therapist.
I’m always discovering new things about the Twin Cities. In recent years, I’ve been fascinated by the role of bootleggers and mobsters here during Prohibition. This was not just a place of illegal transit and commerce, it was a summer getaway for the most famous heavies. During my research, I found out that a friend’s mother worked as a nanny and maid for the gangster Leon Gleckman, known as the Al Capone of St. Paul. She was only fourteen at the time, and had no idea who he was, but when she found a gun beneath a pillow while making a bed, she quit a week later.
We also have deep Scandinavian roots and traditions here, and they’re very much alive in the community. Not to denigrate the rich cultural heritage of our dear and noble citizens of Scandinavian descent, but the lutefisk thing is fairly outlandish and I don’t believe I’ve ever written about it in depth. In all these years, I haven’t found anybody who actually likes it. When I’ve probed advocates of this ‘delicacy’ (commonly known as fish Jell-O – eew!), they confess they only eat it because it reminds them of Christmas with their grandparents. And I guess you can choke down anything if you douse it with enough melted butter.
Jane Eyre, which I’d never read before! I loved it. And it’s about as far from murder as you can get. I needed some balance in my life.
I think the scariest thing is that they exist. It’s really incomprehensible that there are human beings completely absent of emotion and morality. Some psychologists debate whether psychopaths and sociopaths should be differentiated at all. For those who do, psychopathy describes a hereditary anti-social disorder; sociopathy describes behaviors that are the result of environment. Nature versus nurture. However, not all psychopaths or sociopaths become serial killers; and not all serial killers are psychopaths or sociopaths. Just a little confusing.
It was exhilarating to write about an entirely different world populated by fresh characters. I felt like a painter with a palette of new colors. A lot of things happened with the characters that I didn’t expect because I was just getting to know them. There was a wonderful element of unpredictability during the process. And of course, PJ was enjoying it right along with me. She is and always will be with me when I write.
What are you working on now?
The second novel in the Deep into the Dark series. Almost finished!
The plotting aspect is like a hilarious ping-pong match, back and forth for weeks or sometimes months, and most of it we do when we’re together. This is an annoying phase for anyone around us because we never stop talking and find it hard to focus on anything else. Ideas come randomly and sometimes at inopportune times and must be immediately discussed. I’m sure our conversations have terrified innocent bystanders within earshot when we’re out together in public.
The actual writing is more solitary – we each decide what part of the book we’d like to tackle on any given day and hunker down in our home offices. The following morning, we meet to go over our individual work, discuss the next phase, polish and blend the pieces we’ve written separately, and repeat the process until the last page is written.
We have no work schedules. We are both equally and happily disorganized, slothful, and easily distracted. This was the only job we could get.
Most are romance novels! Yes, believe it or not, we started out loving before we moved on to killing. I think they’re all out of print, but I believe there are a couple internet used book sites that still carry stray copies from time to time. We wrote under Melinda Cross, Jessica McBain, and one novel under Mariah Kent.
We’ve had a lot of positive feedback on Iris, and we enjoyed writing about her. And the fun part about introducing new characters, and having an ensemble cast to begin with, is that you can always bring old favorites back, as we did with Sharon Mueller and Sheriff Halloran in DEAD RUN. As long as we don’t kill them off, there’s a good chance that they’ll make another appearance at some point.
We would love to see MONKEEWRENCH on the screen one day. In fact, when we write the books, we often envision them as movies. We’ve had some nice offers over the years, but we’re not quite ready to sell the children yet. But some exciting things are happening on that front at the moment, and you will be the first to hear any good news.
Yes, you will. In the new book, we spend much more time with the MONKEEWRENCH gang, and some secrets shall at last be revealed.
If they look like they were signed by the same person, they probably were, but they’re not forgeries – PJ and I often do events separately, in which case we have to sign ‘PJ Tracy’ in our own hand. However, when we’re at an event together, PJ signs her name, and I sign mine, hence the variation you might see in the signatures. For the most part, they’re probably all illegible, no matter who was doing the signing!
It’s true — we did add some material for the British version, about 18 manuscript pages. The Penguin U.K. publishing schedule afforded us a little more time to windbag, and this was an opportunity we just couldn’t pass up! But rest assured, the outcome of SNOW BLIND remains the same in both versions.
We send our deepest apologies to all of you who thought you were buying a new PJ Tracy book and didn’t get it. It certainly wasn’t an intentional ploy to sell more books. Title changes happen often when a book is published in a foreign market and it can indeed be confusing. Here’s the backstory: MONKEEWRENCH was published first in the U.S. under that title, but when Penguin U.K. bought the rights to publish, they felt their markets would be better served by a different approach, which included making changes in the presentation and title — much the same way Coca-Cola markets their products differently in the U.S. than they do in, say, Italy or China. But since then, we’ve all been working together to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Almost every one we’ve ever read.
Boy, a therapist could probably have a lot of fun with that one, but the fast, superficial answer is that each of us started writing as soon as someone taught us the alphabet. We are both ardent storytellers – it was the only way you could get away with telling a lie in our family, and we did love telling whoppers.
Everybody always wants to know what it’s like to write with your mother/daughter. We’ve agonized over this question, trying to think of a thoughtful answer, maybe even a profound one, but the truth is, there’s little profundity to be found in two women sitting around giggling over imaginary people. We have fun – always. We rarely disagree, we never argue, we laugh most of the time, and a lot of people hate us for this.
professionally?
It definitely requires passion, but the nuts-and-bolts of writing professionally are discipline, patience, and absolute dedication to the craft. Read everything you can get your hands on. Great books and horrible books all have a lesson in them. Above all, tell a story and let it flow naturally. If you give your characters a voice, they will guide you. Don’t just write to fill in the blanks of a plot you’ve come up with in advance.
Plots and stories are everywhere, we could find one looking at a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of somebody’s shoe. The story behind DEAD RUN is indicative of our creative proceses: we were driving through a seemingly deserted Wisconsin town on a beautiful September day, when everybody should have been outside soaking up the last of summer. We immediately imagined that something horrible had happened to the town’s occupants, but the sane third party in the car informed us the Green Bay Packers were playing and that everybody was inside watching the game.
But the incubation from general concept to finished novel is much more arduous and unpredictable. The old, hackneyed saying: ‘If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life’ is true only in that you don’t care that you’re obsessed with the current project and work 365 days a year, sometimes even in your sleep. You can’t ever take a vacation from your mind when it’s working on a book.
The plotting aspect is like a hilarious ping-pong match, back and forth for weeks or sometimes months, and most of it we do when we’re together. This is an annoying phase for anyone around us because we never stop talking and find it hard to focus on anything else. Ideas come randomly and sometimes at inopportune times and must be immediately discussed. I’m sure our conversations have terrified innocent bystanders within earshot when we’re out together in public.
The actual writing is more solitary – we each decide what part of the book we’d like to tackle on any given day and hunker down in our home offices. The following morning, we meet to go over our individual work, discuss the next phase, polish and blend the pieces we’ve written separately, and repeat the process until the last page is written.
I’m thrilled to announce the upcoming publication of Deep into the Dark, my inaugural venture into an entirely new fictional world. I will never desert the Monkeewrench gang – they are an enduring tether to my deeply missed writing partner and mother, PJ — but as life transforms after seismic shifts in circumstances, so do our hearts and minds and creative yearnings.
My decision to write about Los Angeles was easy: I lived there for a decade and had a capacious vault of experiences and observations just waiting to be opened. Exploring new characters and a new setting was exciting, energizing, and rewarding, and the book took shape in ways that even surprised me. The twists, turns, and general mayhem of the Monkeewrench series are all there in abundance, with the additional edge of Los Angeles’ urban zeitgeist.
My personal relationships with brave men and women of the armed forces inspired one of the main characters — Sam Easton — a wounded combat veteran suffering from PTSD. The battle after the battle is often the most difficult, the struggles tragic and complex; I wanted to explore the depth of Sam’s strength and courage as he manages this in the face of a devastating series of events in his personal life.
Murder brings two strong and complicated women into his life: Melody Traeger and LAPD detective Margaret Nolan, who both have demons of their own. Together, they navigate love, obsession, grief, and revenge in the City of Angels.
I hope you enjoy!
Here are the top three:
WRITE FASTER
We wish we could, but we’re tortoises. It’s in our DNA. And in all the lab experiments we’ve conducted thus far, we can’t seem to splice the hare gene into our genetic make-up.
WHEN ARE GRACE AND MAGOZZI FINALLY GOING TO GET TOGETHER OR MOVE ON?
It appears there are more romantics out there than we thought. But the truth is, if we go that route, it will be very anti-climactic. Of course, on the flip-side, the constant tension and lack of real movement in their relationship begs for some sort of progress. We’ve really kind of gotten ourselves into a pickle with this particular element of the MONKEEWRENCH series, which is a main reason we chose to give Grace some arc in both SHOOT TO THRILL and OFF THE GRID. We’re hoping that will unleash some potential for an interesting, unexpected twist in the future.
The third area of most concern for readers is Charlie the dog, and reader comments usually come in the form of a threat: IF YOU EVER KILL CHARLIE, I’LL NEVER BUY ANOTHER PJ TRACY NOVEL AS LONG AS I LIVE. Hey, trust us – we bow, we humbly defer! Charlie is officially immortal. He will outlive us all.
See what nice fans we have? They care about love and animals.
The entire creative process is constantly evolving; inspirations and the world around us are constantly changing, so we approach each novel with a unique perspective and strategy. A straighter answer is to tell you what hasn’t changed in our approach to writing a novel – it very simply begins with an amorphous blob of ideas and emotions that eventually gather and organize and spawn. If you’ve ever seen microscopic footage of a virus proliferating, that’s kind of what goes on in our heads. Except it takes us longer.
We love doing research for our novels and OFF THE GRID is no exception, but the heart of the plot was simply a matter of extrapolating a scenario from current events. We recognized the trend of more tech-savvy, opportunistic terrorism — lone wolves being inspired and directed via the Internet. Global, post-9/11 security has made the successful launch of another horrific, large-scale event unfeasible, but we believed that a coordinated, simultaneous attack on multiple soft targets nationwide could achieve a similar goal and was probably a more imminent danger. Our contacts confirmed our speculation – anything diabolical we could think of is probably already in the works.
Grace has been haunting us for a while – she is one of the major players of the series, and the relentless nature of her fears was starting to turn us both into neurotic messes. We love Grace, and we wanted to free her, allow her an arc. Most people make gradual changes throughout the course of their life, but the traumatized often remain static until they finally reach a tipping point, then the changes happen quickly and they can be pretty dramatic. We decided now was the time to finally unlock her dungeon and open up new opportunities for her future.
Gino and Magozzi are like dessert for us. They are constantly straddling a moral and ethical gray line and there is nothing like relentless existential conflict to bring out the dark humor in people.
We loved creating and writing Claude and the Chief, who are both mosaics of people we know. They served a very specific purpose for this particular book, but if there were ever characters we’d love to bring back at some point, they’re right up there on the list.
Some questions appeared in Mystery and Suspense.
ESSAYS
Why Crime Fiction Will Never Die
There are a lot of great things about being an author, like working on your own schedule, sleeping in when you want to, and making up stuff for a living. But these little luxuries are nothing compared to the joy of launching a new book. That’s when I’m allowed out of my garret to spread the word and engage with readers and journalists – real live people, oh boy! Okay, I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but writing is a solitary endeavor out of necessity, and I crave opportunities to get out into the real world and share my perspective on the craft that consumes my life. The questions I’m asked make me think about writing beyond the fiction I create, and those questions continue to make me better.
In a recent interview, I was asked about the continuing popularity of crime fiction. It was a seemingly simple question with an obvious answer. Who doesn’t want to decipher a puzzle? Assess evidence and follow it through to a logical conclusion? Whether you’re reading a mystery novel, doing the Sunday crossword, or trying to figure out why your cat or dog is eating grass, you are responding to a biological mandate to solve problems. It’s a genetically hard-wired skill that has kept our species successful for millennia. Without it, the human race would have died off long ago.
But the more I considered the question, the more multidimensional it became. Yes, we want to solve external puzzles, but we have to solve our own just to get through a single day. Sometimes, we just want to read about somebody else’s struggles, ones that are far worse than ours. And since it’s fiction, it feels safe. We like the thrill of a good scare, especially when we know we won’t find ourselves in such dire peril. Who among us will ever confront a homicidal maniac? The odds that we won’t are overwhelmingly in our favor. (But keep your doors locked anyway.)
And there’s another component to the popularity of mysteries: secrets. Large or small, everybody has them, and the voyeuristic aspect of our psyche yearns to know about other people’s, even if those people only exist in the pages of a novel.
Crime fiction satisfies our natural curiosity and instincts, which makes it timeless, even in this fickle world of trends. It will forever endure, not just because it feeds our nature, but because crime has always been with us and always will be, just like death. The subject matter is very human and very personal. And in the end, any good book, however you categorize it, is about people navigating life and all the good and bad that comes with it.
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A Tale of Two Cities
What do Minneapolis and Los Angeles have in common?
Not much.
I don’t mean that in a perjorative way. Different isn’t bad, it’s just…well, different. The zeitgeist, intensity level, culture, and lifestyle are about as bipolar as you can get. Minnesota is tribal and deeply rooted in stoic, northern European traditions, largely homogenous and humble. Strangers will not only help you, they’ll buy you a coffee afterwards. You might even become good friends, at least until you’re invited for Christmas dinner and they’re serving lutefisk. Do not go there.
Conversely, Los Angeles is a big, blowsy, lovable drama queen and a diverse city of transplants, human and botanical (the iconic palm trees are not native.) Dreams are outsized there, and the higher you aim, the farther you fall if those dreams don’t come to fruition. The city can be paradise on earth or a scuzzy, last-chance motel as wretched as the ones in Leaving Las Vegas. There are two different LAs, and neither one will buy you a coffee, but who cares? It’s a magical place and kindness from strangers is the last thing on your mind once you’re bewitched.
Both cities have abundant charms and which one you prefer depends on your mood. I love a smooth jazz track, but I also crave punk rock. Give me an honest, hard-working bar of chocolate with no pretense that it will be anything other than what it advertises, and I will find inner peace. But those gold-dusted bon bons with mystery filling plumb an entirely different part of the brain that has nothing to do with serenity and everything to do with sheer exhilaration.
I was thinking about this recently in preparation for the launch of CITY OF SECRETS, the fourth in Detective Margaret Nolan’s modern noir series set in gritty, glittery LA. How did a Minnesota girl who wrote ten Midwestern-based Monkeewrench novels (soon to be eleven) end up writing about Maggie’s life in the other, and by no means lesser, city of sin?
Because I’ve been fortunate enough to have lived for extended periods in both places. It’s embedded in a writer’s DNA to be a sponge, soaking up experiences and observations to exploit later, and it’s a dream to become fully immersed in two divergent cultures. Not only does it flip your perspective bum over teakettle, it doubles the creative fodder you can draw from, allowing you to type your fingers off with authority and authenticity. ‘Write what you know’ isn’t a hackneyed chestnut, it’s wisdom.
I serve the characters in each series as a parent does their children (they’re constantly needy), and like a real human family, they require different treatment. It’s surprisingly easy to shift between the two worlds, and ironically, I wrote most of the Monkeewrench novels while living in LA, and all of the Maggie Nolan novels while living in Minnesota. Once a place gets in your blood, you can access it anywhere, anytime.
I’ve been talking about the differences between the two cities, but there is a striking and predictable similarity – crime. Specifically murder. It’s always existed and it’s the same everywhere; a universal constant wherever there are human beings. There are no new motives under the sun. And no new methods, at least that I can’t think of, and I spend way too much time trying to come up with creative ways to kill people.
The evolution of technology has improved the tools, of course, but a nuclear bomb is still a bomb; nerve gas still a poison. Rudimentary or high-tech, a knife is a knife and a gun is a gun. People have been getting burned, bludgeoned, run over, and pushed off cliffs or out windows since biblical times. (I brought up windows because I adore the word defenestration, and it’s not something you can effortlessly incorporate into cocktail party banter.)
Murder is a base, prosaic act at its core, and I don’t write about it because I find it interesting. What drives my work is an obsession with the sweeping effects it has on people; the tragedy of the aftermath, which has also been the same since time immemorial. A single murder is a nightmare that resonates like a shockwave and knocks down everyone in the sphere of the victim’s life, including the people whose job it is to deliver justice. I want to know how Maggie and her partner Al cope with seeing the darkest, most depraved aspects of the human psyche on a daily basis without losing their minds.
I’m a Sturm un Drang girl at heart. Sturm un Drang (storm and stress) was an 18th century German movement where writers, artists, and composers rejected the fluffier norms of Neoclassicism to focus on the extremes of human experience and individual emotional reactions. Embracing this philosophy as a writer wasn’t a conscious decision but an organic process. When you don’t understand something, you’re bound to work it out on paper, and I can’t understand complete disregard for human life. Anyone who can is not a person you want as a neighbor. Yet killers hide in plain sight in various guises and they’re all somebody’s neighbor.
Excuse me while I go lock my door…
But I have some good news. Murder is statistically rare and most people are good. Wherever we live or whatever our background, we law-abiding citizens who understand that community is necessary for survival have enduring commonalities that bind us all. We want to love and be loved; we want a safe home and happiness; we want to be productive and contribute to our families and friends and society. Our hopes and dreams transcend our differences.
Light and dark, good and evil, have always co-existed, and getting to know Maggie and Al over four books has taught me that like every living thing, they seek the light and don’t let the shadows of their job eclipse the joy of sun on their faces. They’re eternal optimists because I am, and that’s one of the most valuable human traits because it enables you to survive anything.
I hope you enjoy reading CITY OF SECRETS as much as I enjoyed writing it. And I really meant it when I told you not to accept a dinner invitation when lutefisk is on the menu. My apologies to anyone I might be offending – if you love it, you have my respect.
