with Maxine Nunes
We are delighted to welcome mystery author Maxine Nunes to Omnimystery News today.
Maxine's debut novel is Dazzled (Five Star Publishing; October 2013 hardcover and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to catch up with the author to talk about the book.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to Dazzled.
Photo provided courtesy of
Maxine Nunes
Maxine Nunes: Dazzled is a mystery about Nikki Easton, a former teen runaway who's trying to set down roots in LA when her closest friend disappears. One of the great things about writing a mystery is that the genre gives you a really powerful engine to pull the reader through. But at the same time, paradoxically, the tight structure gave me a lot of freedom to explore themes like friendship, love, betrayal, and how hard it is to free ourselves from the past.
OMN: Are mysteries the books you turn to for reading pleasure?
MN: When I want to be entertained, a good mystery is my drug of choice. I got over more than one broken heart with Travis McGee.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience did you bring to the storyline?
MN: I think what I did was take the real streets and locations of LA and populate them with imaginary people. And I used some of my (very brief!) experience with acting in the story. Also, like Nikki, I once drove an old MG and lived in a cheap but charming little sun-filled cottage. But while fiction does tear fragments from the raw materials of your experience, it mixes with imagination and is completely transformed into something else. Hopefully, it will not only be entertaining, but carry some meaningful emotional truth beneath the fiction.
OMN: How do you research the plot points?
MN: I love research. (The best excuse to get away from the computer!) I'll go anywhere and talk to almost anyone to find out what I need to know. And I like to experience things first-hand if I can. You can watch a thousand CSI episodes, but it's nothing like being at the Coroner's — the really intense smell, the racks of frozen bodies wrapped in plastic and the way the staff jokes around like the crew at Starbucks while the corpses come in and out. I also learned to shoot a gun, so I'd know what I was talking about when Nikki used one. I even go on little field trips to revisit places I think I know, because little details will jump out that make a scene really come alive as I'm writing it.
OMN: Have any specific authors influenced what and how you write today?
MN: When it comes to contemporary mystery and noir writers, my personal favorites are Benjamin Black (the pen name for Man Booker Prize–winner John Banville) and Megan Abbott. They've mastered everything — story, character, and especially language. But the authors who've had the greatest influence on me personally, the writers who really live inside me, who both mirrored and changed the way I see the world, have set the bar impossibly high. Marcel Proust, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald. Three very different writers, but they're all pure genius.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
MN: Every kind of book. I devoured everything, from comics to classics like Treasure Island. I was one of those kids who snuck a flashlight into bed so I could read in the dark. Then, I discovered a few, um … interesting … old paperbacks in my parents' bookcase. Racy stuff for a 10-year-old. In sixth grade, the teacher asked me my favorite writer, and I said Harold Robbins. She nearly dropped her dentures! But you know, it would be fun to write one of those trashy, sexy sagas one of these days.
OMN: What kinds of films do you enjoy watching?
MN: I love old black-and-white films, American noir, European new wave. One of my favorites is Darling with Julie Christie. I'm working on a standalone mystery that takes place in 1968, and Darling is one of the inspirations for it, along with a best-selling novel from those days, The Best of Everything — the book, not the movie, which is pretty unwatchable after the first fifteen minutes, though you can see it's influence in the first episode of Mad Men.
OMN: If you were casting for an actress to play Nikki Easton, whose agent are you calling?
MN: Clare Danes would be perfect. She's a lot like Nikki — a little tomboyish and not really pretty, yet somehow beautiful at the same time. She's also got a combination of toughness and vulnerability and integrity that is exactly right. Not to mention that Clare Danes' talent is off the charts.
OMN: What's next for you?
MN: I want to spend a year in Paris — and since Nikki's acting career will take her on location, I'll just have to do it. For research. Right?
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Maxine Nunes is a New Yorker who's spent most of her life in Los Angeles. She has written and produced for television, and currently writes for several publications including the Los Angeles Times. Her satiric parody of a White House scandal won the Pen USA West International Imitation Hemingway Competition.
To learn more about the author and her work, visit her website at MaxineNunes.com or find her on Facebook.
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Dazzled
Maxine Nunes
A Nikki Easton Mystery
During a brutal L.A. heatwave, four people are murdered in the Hollywood Hills and Nikki Easton's best friend Darla Ward has disappeared. The police think she might be one of the victims.
No stranger to life's rough side, Nikki survived the streets as a teenage runaway and now brings that edge to her acting roles. But she has never seen anything like the battered girl on the gurney. Could this really be Darla, her beautiful face so damaged it looks barely human, her path to stardom ended in the county coroner's morgue.
In her relentless search for the truth, Nikki discovers the hidden side of her friend's life, laying bare secrets buried before Darla was born, and uncovering widening layers of corruption that reach far beyond Hollywood to the highest levels of government.
Click on the Amazon button to see also the special Whispersync offer associated with this title.
