with Jean Heller
We are delighted to welcome author Jean Heller to Omnimystery News today.
Jean begins a new thriller series introducing Chicago journalist Deuce Mora in The Someday File (December 2014 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the chance to talk more about it with her.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to Deuce Mora.
Photo provided courtesy of
Jean Heller
Jean Heller: Deuce Mora has auburn hair, green eyes, and stands six feet tall. And boy, does she have an attitude. That's what appeals to me most about her. Like so many real people with artistic leanings, Deuce is a bit neurotic, never quite certain she's up to the challenges life throws at her. She sees the world in ways a little more skewed that most people. She is funny, often when she doesn't mean to be. She is frightened, even when she wants to be brave. She is brave when she should be frightened. And heaven help anyone who gets in the way of the twin senses of commitment and justice that drive every move she makes.
OMN: Your first two books were stand-alones, with The Someday File being the first of a series. What criteria do you use to decide whether a book will feature a series character or not?
JH: The first two books simply felt sufficient as stand-alone stories. The Someday File didn't. I wanted to do more with Deuce, largely because the same profession forged us both. I have a lot of material from which to draw. And because so much of me is reflected in Deuce, I feel as though I know her better than my other protagonists, and I don't want to let that sense of familiarity, empathy, and friendship slip away. We have a lot more work to do together.
OMN: Into which genre would you place your books?
JH: My second novel, Handyman, was definitely a horror thriller, an up-close-and-personal look at a brutal serial killer as he worked. Several readers told me it was the scariest book they ever read. One reviewer said readers might want to take showers and Valium after reading the first chapter. I took all that as complimentary because it's what I was striving for. The first novel, Maximum Impact, was a political thriller of sorts. It was scary only in the sense that you wouldn't want to read the opening chapters on an airplane trip. The Someday File would probably fall into the suspense category. At least I hope it does. I don't try to categorize my stories. I don't see any advantage to labeling them. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
OMN: Give us a summary of The Someday File in a tweet.
JH: What happens when the profession you love threatens to kill you, but guilt, grief, and overwhelming curiosity won't let you walk away?
OMN: Tell us a little more about your writing process.
JH: I tried outlining Maximum Impact and wound up feeling confined by it. The outline became an artificial rut. Sometimes stories or characters like to go off on their own for a bit, a right brain phenomenon that most often results in some sterling work. I found if I tried to confine the story to the rut, I lost a lot of good stuff. So I don't really write anything down beyond maybe a one-page synopsis. I know what the story is. I know the beginning and the end and most of the middle. From that bare-bones beginning, I let the story develop organically. I know who the main characters will be, and their roles in the story. I develop secondary characters as I go. So the cast expands, except when I kill someone.
OMN: Where do you usually find yourself writing?
JH: My writing environment is my office. It is filled with hundreds of reference books and music sources and a dog that barks when there's someone at the door. I have a 27-inch iMac on the desk, but mostly I use my solid-state MacBook Pro. Since I live in Chicago, working outside isn't an option for six months of the year. But from April to September, I like to take my iPad to a park or out along Lake Michigan and doodle ideas. Being in a different environment for a while is mentally stimulating, at least for me.
OMN: How do you go about researching the plot points of your stories?
JH: Since I'm a former journalist, fact-checking is very important to me. I rarely take liberties with anything. I try very hard to stay true to reality and history. I often spend days scouting locations, just the way they do for movies. When the subject turns to something with which I'm not intimately familiar, I call for help. The manager of a skyscraper office building in Tampa spent an entire day showing me what they call "the dirty places," the areas from which high-tech buildings are run. The director of the FBI's SWAT team in Tampa taught me a lot about guns and spent an hour showing me around the division's gun vault. I held weapons I didn't even know existed. I'm a pilot in real life, but for Maximum Impact I had to call on airline pilots and air traffic controllers for a lot of help. For a book I haven't published yet I asked the director of the pharmacy at a major hospital to teach me how to inject a poison that would kill someone almost instantly yet leave no trace. In Chicago, I worked with a linguist at the University of Chicago to decipher the secret of a real Chicago accent. Often, the people I call on start out thinking I'm some sort of whacko, but when they get into the story, they love it. It's a total departure from what they usually do all day. The most challenging topic I ever researched was the mind of a serial killer, for which I had help from someone who actually ran a real-life hunt for a serial killer. My most exciting topic to research was how it felt to fly a huge jetliner. United Airlines was kind enough to loan me some of their mammoth simulators and their chief training pilot for a couple of hours.
OMN: The Someday File is set in and around Chicago. How true are you to the setting?
JH: The answer to this question is an addendum to the last answer. The reason I try to stay so true to locations and environments is because it would adversely affect the characters if I didn't. Readers who know the areas I write about would recognize the lack of reality, and it could spoil the creative tension for them. And the characters wouldn't fit. An example. A key character in The Someday File is Vinnie Colangelo, a low-level mobster living on beer, bourbon, and regret for the one mistake he made in his life that cost him everything. Deuce Mora meets him in a neighborhood bar in Cicero, a working class Chicago suburb. I'm not much of a drinker, but I had to spend a whole lot of time in neighborhood bars in working areas to get a feel for the atmosphere where a guy like Vinnie would feel comfortable. I'm hoping to make enough money on the book to cover my bar tabs.
OMN: What are some of your outside interests? And have any of these found their way into your books?
JH: My hobbies are photography, reading, flying airplanes, and playing my five guitars, though not all at once. So far, no, my hobbies have not shown up in my books.
OMN: The Someday File has a very interesting cover, and seems to tell a story all on its own. How involved were you in creating it?
JH: I had a lot to do with creating the cover for The Someday File. I knew I wanted it set in a run-down bar. I sketched out my idea for the designer and she took it from there. I took control over the cover because I hated the covers the publisher did for my first two books. Maximum Impact was a story about the horrific crash of a brand new class of airplane, and the publisher put a 747 on the cover. The cover I wanted for Handyman was rejected as too spooky. How can the cover of a book about a serial killer be too spooky, huh? So for the first time, I'm happy with a cover. And when Maximum Impact and Handyman are reissued later this year, each will have a brand new cover.
OMN: Have any specific authors influenced how and what you write today?
JH: The list of authors who influenced me goes on forever. But I will tell you this. When I go back now and read Maximum Impact, I can tell you exactly which authors I was reading for pleasure when I wrote specific sections of that book. I think one of the reasons I like The Someday File and Deuce Mora so much is that I feel I've finally found my voice. And I think writing in the first person did that for me.
OMN: When selecting a book today to read for pleasure, what do you look for?
JH: Right now, for the third time, I'm re-reading everything Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. But when I'm not up to my shoulders in Sherlock Holmes, you'll usually find me with my nose in a thriller, though I detour fairly often into something totally different. Recently, All the Light We Cannot See held me captive for three days.
OMN: What's next for you?
JH: Next for me is the second Deuce Mora book, tentatively titled The Genesis File. But don't hold me to that title. Later this year I'm taking my fifth trip to Alaska just for fun with some friends. And between now and then I'll be doing book signings and personal appearances for whomever asks me to come visit. Maybe I'll see you around a mall somewhere.
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Jean Heller's news career included serving as an investigative and projects reporter and editor for The Associated Press in New York City and Washington, D.C., The Cox Newspapers and New York Newsday in Washington, D.C. and the St. Petersburg Times in Washington, D.C. and Florida. Jean has won multiple awards, including the Worth Bingham Prize, the Polk Award, and is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.
For more information about the author, please visit her website at JeanHellerBooks.com and her author page on Goodreads, or find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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The Someday File
Jean Heller
A Deuce Mora Thriller
What happens when the profession you've known all your adult life threatens to kill you, yet suffocating guilt and insatiable curiosity won't let you walk away?
That's pretty much what happens to Deuce Mora, a columnist for the Chicago Journal, a big-city newspaper struggling to stay solvent in a world that seems to have outgrown newspapers and left them in ruin.
What Deuce digs out of her "ideas" file is something that should be, at best, a human-interest story. The tale of an aging, low-level Chicago mobster living on beer, bourbon, and regret for the one mistake in his life that cost him everything. Deuce finds him in a Cicero bar late one afternoon, already drunk and resolute in his determination not to talk to her.
Afraid for his safety in the boozy world he inhabits, Deuce gives him a ride home and thus seals his brutal fate. She is left with more guilt than she can shoulder, more curiosity than she can ignore, and in more danger than she can imagine.
The mobster's final words to her shove her into a world of political and criminal intrigue and confront her with a horrific crime more than 50 years old that she will either solve or die in the trying.
