This transcript was generated with the help of AI and only got a quick once-over from a human. So if you spot a typo or something that doesn’t make sense… let’s just blame the robots. 🤖

[00:00:00.210] – Alan Petersen
Hey, everyone. Alan here. Before we get to the interview, a quick word about my latest psychological thriller, The Love Letters. It’s available now on Amazon, where it has appeared on the Hot New Releases list for domestic and psychological thrillers. The idea came from the love letters my dad wrote to my mom before they got married. There was nothing sinister in those letters, but my imagination went straight to a dark place. What if you found a stack of old love letters that revealed a side of your father you never knew? That’s where The Love Letters began. You can buy it on Amazon or read it as part of your Kindle subscription. Just go to thrillingreads.com/letters. All right, now let’s go on to episode number 246. You’re listening to Meet the Thriller Author, the podcast where I interview mystery, thriller, and suspense authors. I’m Alan Petersen, a longtime fan of the genre and an author of crime and psychological thrillers. Today, I’m welcoming back New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance. In her new novel, The Taken Ones, a young woman flies from Alaska to Seattle for her dream internship and vanishes after she lands. Private investigator J.P. Beaumont takes on the case, and the search quickly becomes a race against time.

[00:01:23.140] – Alan Petersen
During this interview, we talk about what keeps Beaumont fresh after four decades, how she makes time for her weekly blog alongside her fiction, and what keeps her excited about writing in her 80s. All right, here is my conversation with J.A. Jance.

[00:01:45.770] – Alan Petersen
Welcome back to the podcast.

[00:01:47.710] – J.A. Jance
Thank you. I’m glad to be here. And I’m happy to tell you that not only is this Beaumont number 27, it’s actually my 69th published novel.

[00:01:59.150] – Alan Petersen
Oh, wow.

[00:01:59.890] – J.A. Jance
I’ve been doing this for a long time. I, I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t start writing until after I divorced my first husband and decided it was time to give myself a chance to live the life I had always dreamed of living. So the first book I ever wrote was never published. It was a very thinly disguised fictionalized true crime, and it was 1,400 pages long. Oh, wow. Which gave me a lot of experience at writing, but it, it didn’t sell. So then my agent suggested that I try, try writing a totally fictional book. So I began trying to write the first Beaumont book. That was in 1982. And I just, I couldn’t get anything to happen. So finally, in 1983, I sent my kids to spring, well, to camp during spring break. And I got a train here in Seattle bound for Portland to spend a few days with a friend from my days in the insurance business. I got on the train and as it pulled out of the King Street Station, I thought, “What if I tried to write this book through the detective’s point of view?” So I got out a pen, I got out a notebook, and I wrote the words, “She might’ve been a cute kid once.

[00:03:24.930] – J.A. Jance
That was hard to tell now. She was dead.” And as, as soon as I wrote those words, I was on the backside of Seattle’s Magnolia Bluff. I was walking around a crime scene in J.P. Beaumont’s shoes. I was seeing what he saw, hearing what he heard, hearing what he said, and also hearing what he thought. And J.P. and I have been author and character ever since. And 69 books later. Well, there are only, I’ve written 69 books, but this is only the 27th Beaumont book. I have 3 other series. If I had tried to write all the books about him in a row, I would have given up on him long ago.

[00:04:12.660] – Alan Petersen
You know, something I wanted to ask you is I read about that, that when you first started, they wanted to use initials because they said that women couldn’t write male detectives.

[00:04:21.740] – J.A. Jance
Yes. That’s what the marketing team at Avon Books told me. Readers won’t read the— what the email said specifically was, “Readers won’t accept a police procedural written by somebody named Judy.” Well, I’m from a small mining town in the West. I was being published by a New York publisher. If they wanted to use my initials, that was fine with me. So that’s how J.A. Jance came into being. But I’m really grateful because when I sign books, it’s a lot easier to write J.A. than Judith Ann. Yeah,

[00:05:02.390] – Alan Petersen
That’s probably saved you hours in your, during your career.

[00:05:06.080] – J.A. Jance
Yes.

[00:05:07.200] – Alan Petersen
So tell us about the, the, uh, The Taken Ones, ’cause like, it’s so exciting. Uh, J.P. Beaumont continues. So can you tell us a little bit about this story?

[00:05:16.080] – J.A. Jance
I, I met outlining in Mrs. Watkins’ sixth grade in Bisbee, Arizona, in her, in her geography class. I hated outlining then. I hate outlining now. So when I write a book, I start from the beginning and write to the end, and I find out what’s going to happen right along with my readers because the story gradually unfolds as I’m writing it. This book begins with Gina Holt, a, uh, um, smart young woman from Alaska, from Anchorage, who is being driven to the airport by her grandmother and guardian to take part in a summer internship with an architectural firm in Seattle. The plane lands in Seattle. Gina texts her grandmother, “I’m on the ground.” And then she goes completely dark. I knew she had been kidnapped. I didn’t know who had kidnapped her. I didn’t know why she had been kidnapped. And so I was as much in the dark at that point as my readers are. Several years ago, I wrote a book called Nothing to Lose. And in that, Beaumont goes looking for a missing person in Alaska. In the winter. Beau is from Seattle. People in Seattle have no idea how to drive in snow.

[00:06:57.970] – J.A. Jance
And at that point, Beau’s wife, Mel, who grew up in other places besides Seattle, knew that he would be bad at driving in Alaska in the wintertime, and had him hire a driver. And he ended up being driven around by a woman named Twinkle Winkleman. And it, see what happened? I said her name and you laughed. Yeah. When I thought of her name, I laughed and I realized that somebody named Twinkle Winkleman sort of had to be almost as tough as Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.” So I started trying to think of what kind of drive— car she would drive. And I was fascinated by a car show where these two guys used to fix up these derelict old cars and sell them. And that season they had fixed up an International Harvester Travelall, which is in fact the great-granddaddy of all the hordes of SUVs we see on the road today. But I was fascinated by that because—for my mother’s birthday, my parents were originally farmers in South Dakota. And for my mother’s birthday one year, my dad gave her an International Harvester tractor. So, I mean, I knew that they made tractors and I had no idea they made cars, but I knew that a ’72 Travelall, International Harvester Travelall, would be her vehicle.

[00:08:34.720] – Alan Petersen
And I read from another interview that you, uh, when she first came to your mind, you thought it was just a passing character. Here she is now.

[00:08:43.660] – J.A. Jance
Well, yes, I thought she was a passing character. I, she was only going to be in the book for a couple of days, for a day or two, as long as Beau was in Anchorage. But she was one of those characters that just would not go away. And she was still in that book at the crashing climax. Then people said, “Oh, we love Twink. Won’t, won’t you write a novel about her?” Well, my, my vast experience with Alaska, or what has come about from two cruises to Alaska, I do not know about Alaska enough to be able to write a whole novel about her. But I did write an ebook, uh, novella called Girls’ Night Out. And so that, again, briefly brings Beau and Twink together until the beginning of this book. So Gina is missing. Beau is completely in the dark at this point because he’s busy having a retirement party for his wife, Mel. She’s retiring as the chief of police in Bellingham, Washington. Well, I’ve been writing about Beau for 40-plus years. When he started out, he was a drunk. He was divorced. He was estranged from his kids. He was living the wild and crazy bachelor life in Seattle.

[00:10:14.080] – J.A. Jance
Over the years, he’s changed. For one thing, he’s sobered up. He’s reconnected with his kids. I’ve watched his kids grow up. I’ve watched his grandkids grow up. And that party at the beginning of the book was a chance to allow me and all my readers to touch bases with his whole family. So that having that party was fun for me. As, as the book moves on, we meet—we find out that Gina is not a singular case, that there are other young women who have also been taken under the same circumstances. And, and so it becomes this cross-country thriller that starts in Anchorage, Alaska, and ends in Florida.

[00:11:09.500] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, and this book does a lot with the missing and the murdered Indigenous women. And I know that’s a real, uh, problem and thing that’s come to light in the last few years.

[00:11:19.000] – J.A. Jance
So

[00:11:19.220] – Alan Petersen
how did you,

[00:11:20.350] – J.A. Jance
uh,

[00:11:20.520] – Alan Petersen
condense this for me?

[00:11:21.890] – J.A. Jance
It’s come to light in the last few years, but it’s been an issue I was aware of since I was a teacher on the Tohono O’odham Reservation in the late ’60s and early ’70s. So it may be news to everybody else, but it certainly isn’t news to me. And yes, the fact that Gina is Indigenous is part of her background, but it’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is chilling, in my opinion. Don’t ask me.

[00:11:59.540] – Alan Petersen
And how does that work too now? Because, uh, J.P. Beaumont is 1,000 miles away. How is—how would you balance that, those two with—

[00:12:08.960] – J.A. Jance
Well, the first problem was getting Twinkle Winkleman out of Alaska because it takes days to drive from Anchorage to—and she was desperately, desperately afraid of flying. So that was, that was the first problem in the book. And then as we go through the book, we learned about the other girls and we learn about their families and how each of the family grouping has a different reaction to the disappearance of their particular victim. And we also see how the victims, some of the victims themselves, are coping to survive what has happened to them. And I think you see both, you see both sides of the plot. You see the victims, you see the perpetrators, and you see how gradually they all come together.

[00:13:12.740] – Alan Petersen
You mentioned earlier about the, uh, the party for J.P. and for his, uh, his retiring wife. It looks like those, the family’s continuing in the law enforcement business. Can you tell us about that? Was that, uh, putting the grandson in, Kyle?

[00:13:26.720] – J.A. Jance
In the previous Beaumont book, Beau’s grandson, faced with his parents getting a divorce, ended up coming to Bellingham and living with Beau and his, his wife, Mel. And Mel and, and the grandson really formed a bond. And at the end of the last book, he’s decided he wants to go into law enforcement. And so now Beau and Mel are cops. Beau’s son is a cop. Beau’s grandson and the nephew of the other cop is a cop. And at the party, his daughter’s new husband turns up and he’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, and they met at a “disband the police” rally years earlier. So having everybody at that party is sort of this bombshell moment, and it could possibly explode at, at any second. That was a fun party for me to write.

[00:14:45.230] – Alan Petersen
You know, so I’m wondering now, um, how you rotate around your characters. Uh, you know, you’re writing a Beaumont novel, Ali Reynolds, Joanna Brady. So how, when you get back into, into a character of like J.P. Beaumont, how do you get back in their head?

[00:15:00.580] – J.A. Jance
It’s really interesting. When I, when I wrote those first sentences, the, those, those sentences that I wrote on the train are actually the way the novel starts. Until Proven Guilty started in those, with those exact sentences. And when I start writing a Beaumont book, within, almost within a matter of paragraphs, I’m back in his head and I’m, I’m hearing his sort of curmudgeonly remarks and, and enjoying his sense of humor. And it’s weird because I’m writing the book. I’m the one sitting with my fingers on the keyboard, making the keys, the words appear, but it feels as though they’re coming from him. And it, and I just, I, it’s magic. I can’t explain it. I have no idea how to explain it.

[00:15:55.240] – Alan Petersen
And how do you keep everything in, in, uh, in order after 47 years and 27 novels? Do you have like a story Bible or something?

[00:16:05.600] – J.A. Jance
I keep a name file for every series. And so that, that helps me remember things, the details, like how tall people are or what kind of weapons they carry. But the people, the people are like people I know to me. Mm-hmm. There’s, there’s no confusing the characters in a Joanna Brady book with the characters in a Beaumont book, or Joanna with Ali. They’re, they’re all distinctly real people to me. And I think that’s, that’s what makes them seem real to my readers. I, my characters aren’t superhero superheroes. They don’t, you know, they don’t wear capes and they don’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. They’re people dealing with the issues ordinary people deal with every day.

[00:17:08.870] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, this book is the, well, your books usually have dark subject matters, but readers come to your books for the humor and the family warmth. How do you judge where the lighter moment lies in a story like this, or does it just come natural?

[00:17:23.910] – J.A. Jance
You remember that fuzzy-haired artist who used to be on PBS?

[00:17:28.510] – Alan Petersen
Oh, Bob Ross thing?

[00:17:30.070] – J.A. Jance
Yes.

[00:17:31.260] – Alan Petersen
Pictures, numbers?

[00:17:32.460] – J.A. Jance
Yes. My, my husband watched a lot of those and I can’t even draw a stick figure and make it believable. But what I learned secondhand from those was that what makes a painting and what makes a book and what makes a story are the contrast between light and dark. If it’s all dark, there’s a brand new series on TV that we watched two episodes and quit because it’s, it’s all dark. It’s all gunfights. It, there’s, there, the people don’t seem like they’re regular people. But putting in the light in contrast with the dark is really important. And that’s why what happens at the end of The Taken Ones is so important because that gathering at the end is truly the light.

[00:18:37.600] – Alan Petersen
And also, as long as you mention your readers, um, and you keep a weekly blog alongside a busy fiction schedule. So do you, how do you make room for that? Do you like have a writing schedule? Like, “I’m gonna write every day.”

[00:18:52.170] – J.A. Jance
I write every day. I, I’ve actually been lying in bed the last couple of nights thinking about the beginning chapter of the next Beaumont book. So there you were. I haven’t put a single word on paper, not on paper, but on my keyboard. But I know the scene that’s going to be the beginning of that book. Um, I write a weekly blog. I usually write, write that on Tuesdays. And the blog, it’s available on my website, which is my J.A. Jance author website online. The blog is over in the far right-hand corner of the page. It posts every Friday. It’s sort of a window on my world. It’s what’s going on in my life this week. If I’m writing, if I’m doing corrections. When I lost my name file for the last book I was writing, that was terrifying. And I, I had to overcome that problem before I could continue. So the blog is about what’s going on with me. So I write one of those every week. I answer all my emails. I, I do not have secretarial help, so I prefer—people sometimes send me snail mail and that requires going to the printer.

[00:20:12.200] – J.A. Jance
It requires an envelope. It requires a stamp. Oh my God. So, but I respond to every email that comes in and I usually write the blog in the morning. And if I’m working on a book, I do that in the afternoons. I also get my 10,000 steps a day. I am, let me check. I started walking in 2015, 10,000 steps a day. I have done that for 1,802 days in a row right now. Wow. And hold your horses. At this point, I have 47,410,337 steps, which amounts to 22,523 miles. I’m working on walking around the world. That’s, that’s 24,904,000 miles, but who’s counting? Not bad for an 82, not bad for an 82-year-old broad.

[00:21:19.300] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. You know, and I read, I can’t remember if this was a new blog or another interview, but you’ve talked about that, about ageism and how it works only if we allow ourselves to be devalued. So have you encountered that? Like people who want to push you back, like you should be slowing down or something?

[00:21:36.560] – J.A. Jance
Well, I have a book coming out next month. The next two books are written and in the New York pipeline, and I have two more books under contract. So I am, I will be fully employed until I’m 85.

[00:21:53.460] – Alan Petersen
Great. Oh, that’s good news for us fans. All right. So, um, so the new, the, the book comes, uh, November 10th. It’s The Taken Ones.

[00:22:04.800] – J.A. Jance
Next up in March will be Smoke and Mirrors, the next Ali Reynolds book. And next fall should be the next Joanna Brady, the one I just finished. And that’s called Before the Trail Goes Cold.

[00:22:21.310] – Alan Petersen
And you said you’re already thinking about the next J.P. Beaumont?

[00:22:24.650] – J.A. Jance
Yes, it’s Beau’s turn now.

[00:22:27.860] – Alan Petersen
All right, I want to thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really enjoyed talking with you.

[00:22:34.380] – J.A. Jance
Thank you so much.

[00:22:45.300] – Alan Petersen
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with J.A. Jance. I’ve got several interviews already recorded, so you can expect at least two more episodes before the end of November. If you enjoyed the show, I’d appreciate if you took a moment to rate or review it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It helps other thriller fans find the podcast. You’ll find the show notes, past episodes, and more about my own thrillers at thrillingreads.com, and you can check out my latest psychological thriller, The Love Letters, at thrillingreads.com/letters. All right, thanks again for listening, and I’ll catch you next time.