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[00:00:05.020] – Intro
This is Meet the Thriller author, the podcast hosted by thriller novelist, Alan Peterson. Each episode, Alan sits down with some of the most exciting voices in mystery and suspense, best-selling legends and rising stars alike, to talk writing, process, and the art of crafting a killer story. From Dean Kuntz and Walter Moseley to Freda McFadden and Lee Child, over 200 authors have joined Alan for deep, revealing conversations that every thriller fan and aspiring writer will love. You can find transcripts, show notes, and the full archive of episodes at thrillerauthors. Com. And don’t forget to check out Alan’s own heart-pounding thriller at thrillingreads. Com/books. Now, here’s the latest episode of Meet the Thriller author.

[00:00:53.520] – Alan Petersen
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Meet the Thriller author. I’m really excited today because I’m joined by a legendary name in the genre, New York Times bestselling author, J. A. Jance. She’s, of course, the creator of some of the most beloved crime fiction series out there, Joanna Brady, J. P. Beaumont, Ali Reynolds, The Walker family. It’s just amazing. Her upcoming book is The Girl from Devil’s Lake, which is the 21st Joanna Brady novel in that series. I’m really excited to talk to J. A. About all that. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:28.060] – J.A. Jance
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

[00:01:29.720] – Alan Petersen
Oh, yeah. Such a great honor. So right into to the book. Can you give us a little bit, an overview of the Girl from Devil’s Lake, what can readers expect from it?

[00:01:40.080] – J.A. Jance
It’s about a serial killer who has spent decades hiding in plain sight. And he starts out by getting away with murder at the age of 11. And having gotten away with it for once, he goes on getting away with it until he eventually crosses paths with Joanna braided. As you said, this is the 21st Joanna Book. We met Joanna and her mother, Eleanor, and her daughter, Jenny, in the first book, Desert Heat. At that point, Jenny was nine years old, and she’s there with her mother and her grandmother, and they’re waiting for Joanna’s husband to come home so they can go out to celebrate their 10th anniversary dinner. But Jenny has had a smidgen of sex ed at school, and she has counted on her fingers and figured out that there aren’t enough months between her birthday and their anniversary. She asked her mother if she was a premium, which, of course, is a whole topic Joanna braided never wanted to discuss, especially with her mother in the room. That’s when we first meet Jennifer Brandee. We meet her again and the Girl from Devil’s Lake as a college graduate who has just signed on as a deputy with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. And Joanna is on her way to speak at her daughter’s graduation.

[00:03:18.860] – Alan Petersen
That’s something I wanted to ask you, because it’s been fun to read a few of these books because it progresses in time. It’s not like stuck in the 1993, the same age or anything like that. Is that Is that something that was important for you? And I also was wondering, is it exciting to come back to Joanna and your other characters?

[00:03:37.660] – J.A. Jance
It’s something that keeps me interested. I made the decision to have with my first Detective, J. P. Beaumont, to have him age over time. I gave him my birthday so I could remember his birthday. And now, much to our surprise, we’re both 80, and I’m writing his 27th Detective Beaumont book. But people change over time. When I started out with Bo, he was a divorced homicide Detective in Seattle, estranged from his family, drank way too much. We watch him progress through the years. Until now, he is married to his third wife, happily married to her, has reconnected with his family, stopped drinking 19 books ago, I believe. So watching the people grow and change has been something that has been really helpful to me in continuing this series because that way, these people seem more like people to me.

[00:04:45.620] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s what I think makes your character so incredible because I’ve seen other of your interviews where you said it was important for you to have Joanna braided have a family and other real-life obligations that we could all identify with compared to some other books.

[00:04:59.720] – J.A. Jance
Well, Well, I was just starting to write the Joanna Brady books when I read a book, A mystery by another author, and there was a dog in that book. The dog was only in the book. When the family left home for some reason, the dog stayed home. There was nobody who took care of the dog. He was only there to die in a fire when the bad guy burned the house down. That really annoyed me. I haven’t read another one of that guy’s books since. But my position is, if you’re going to have kids and animals in books, somebody has to take care of them. When Joanna set off to marry Butch, my then editor said, Oh, don’t let her get married. If she gets married, then it’ll be boring. I’m sorry. I’ve been married to the same man for 40 years, and it still isn’t boring. Being married is lessons in diplomacy, lessons in survival. It’s all kinds of things, but it is certainly not boring. Someone once wrote and said, Well, Well, did Joanna and Butch have a platonic relationship? Well, in my opinion, what goes on in people’s bedrooms is none of my business and none of my readers’ business either. But I said, Well, they have two kids together, so I don’t think so.

[00:06:32.360] – Alan Petersen
Not too platonic. Now, in the Girls from Dever’s Lake, so this one is really interesting, too, because like you mentioned earlier, it’s a crime that spans decades and even different countries. Can you talk about that?

[00:06:47.580] – J.A. Jance
It’s a continental mystery. It’s also a study in the perseverance of the police officers involved in those long unsolved cases and how they never get over them and how the families never get over those long-solved cases. And Joanna, that little red-haired, five-foot, almost nothing person, is the spark plug who finally brings all these cases together.

[00:07:18.180] – Alan Petersen
You mentioned that this was one of the most complex mysteries of all the books in the braided series. Is that how you see this one? This is a pretty complicated case for her compared?

[00:07:28.040] – J.A. Jance
Yes, I did.

[00:07:30.220] – Alan Petersen
I was also wondering, too, now. You mentioned before, the first book was published in 1993. When you first started this new character, did you ever envision it going this long, or was that hoping, or how does that work?

[00:07:45.620] – J.A. Jance
Actually, I used to say that I could never write 26 books in the Kenzie Mel Hones series because I could never write that many books about the same character. It’s really surprising to me to be working on Beaumont number 27 right now. But the reason I’ve been able to keep on writing about these characters is I’ve been able to move from character to character and local to local and not always be writing about the same character. If I had just written Beaumont or just written Joanna, I would have lost… Interest would have flagged a long time ago. But I’m interested, and sometimes my characters cross over into other books. For instance, Jenny did some really critical police work in the most recent Walker family book, Blessing of the Lost Girls. And that was what really plugged her into law enforcement. Excuse me, I have to apologize. My dog said, Mary hears strange voices in the room, and she is protecting us from you.

[00:08:56.740] – Alan Petersen
Okay, that’s good. Better than my chihuahua, which sitting there sleeping.

[00:09:02.780] – J.A. Jance
Well, your Chihuahua has better behaved than my doxie is.

[00:09:06.480] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, she’s more… Yeah, mine doesn’t care. She’s like, Oh, whatever, you’re on your own. Yours is more protective. That’s good. I was wanting to know with your process because it’s so fascinating. I’ve read other interviews with you where you don’t outline. Is your process changed since you first started or are you still- No, I started the new Beaumont book yesterday with no outline, no parachute.

[00:09:30.000] – J.A. Jance
But what I’ve learned is if I can start a book, if I can find a place to start a book, I can write it to the end. So I start at the beginning, I write to the end, and I’m always surprised by stuff that happens along the way.

[00:09:45.100] – Alan Petersen
Do you always work on… You’ll work on a braided book, and then you’ll work on a Beaumont book?

[00:09:50.180] – J.A. Jance
Well, I’m actually juggling three separate books right now because I’m promoting The Girl from Devil’s Lake, the editorial letter for a The Smoke and Mirrors, The Next Ali Book should be back within the next week or so. And I’ve started the next Beaumont book. So I’m juggling three books, but I’m not writing more than one book at a time. Does that make sense?

[00:10:16.600] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that makes absolutely sense. Because I know I have inspiring writers also that listen to this podcast, not just read. They’re fans, but they’re also inspiring writers. What’s your writing process like? Do you write set hours? What writing software do you use?

[00:10:31.040] – J.A. Jance
At this point, I’m my husband’s caretaker. So I get up, I read the news, I make breakfast, I get my 10,000 steps. By the way, let me check where I am today. I don’t have my 10,000 steps today, but I am currently at 41,735,012 steps. That’s 19,826 miles. I’ve been walking 10,000 steps a day since 2015.

[00:11:00.700] – Alan Petersen
Oh, wow.

[00:11:01.560] – J.A. Jance
I get my steps, and then around 1: 30 or so is when I sit down to work.

[00:11:08.650] – Alan Petersen
And do you use that word to write your stories?

[00:11:11.280] – J.A. Jance
I do not do windows, either kind. No, I’m a Mac girl. I work in pages.

[00:11:19.700] – Alan Petersen
Okay. Yeah, I’m a Mac guy.

[00:11:22.160] – J.A. Jance
When I bought my first computer in 1983, my first husband, the jerk, died of chronic alcoholism at age 42 in 1983. When I started dating him, my parents said, This guy has trouble. And of course, they were right. And of course, I ignored them. But as soon as we married, my dad made sure I had a life insurance policy on my husband, which I was both the owner and the beneficiary. And so I paid those premiums, come hell or high water. And when he died, I received a $50,000 death benefit. I took 5,000 of that and bought myself an Eagle computer, dual floppy, not steam-driven, but very close, dual floppy, Eagle with 128 K of memory. I worked on a word processing program called Spellbinder. For an aspiring mystery writer, Spellbinder was the right program for me. Of course, that went away a long time ago. I’ve never in Word, but of course, I have to translate my manuscripts to Word before I send them to New York because none of them can deal with pages. I’m a mac girl.

[00:12:44.740] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, these pages makes it very easy to export it as a word doc.

[00:12:49.720] – J.A. Jance
But I want to tell you, if there are aspiring writers listening to this, I started writing in 1982 When I was a single parent, two little kids, no child support. I invested 10% of my death benefit, $5,000 in myself by buying that computer and a daisy wheel printer. Oh, my God. Printing manuscripts on a daisy wheel printer with paper jams was hell on earth. It was so nice when I could finally just send the file to New York. But the guy, David Graham, the guy who sold me my first computer, fixed it so that when I booted up and I wrote with those two little kids, the only time I had to write was from 4: 00 in the morning until 7: 00 in the morning before I got my kids up to go to school, got me dressed to go sell life insurance. But David fixed it. Every morning, when I booted up my computer at 4: 00, the words that appeared on the screen were these, A writer is someone who has written today. And today, I don’t qualify because I haven’t written a word yet.

[00:14:04.320] – Alan Petersen
Do you write every day?

[00:14:06.400] – J.A. Jance
I write every day, yes. I write a weekly blog that posts on my website every Friday morning. When I went away to college, I was only 100 miles from home in Tucson, and my hometown was Bisby. I was only 100 miles away, but that was the days of long-distance phone calls. And so every Tuesday morning, even though my mother still had four kids at home, she would sit down and write me a letter telling me what was going on back home. Those letters showed up in my mailbox at my dorm in Tucson every Friday morning. That’s why I write the blog, and that’s why it posts on Friday morning in honor of my mother. They’re really like my mother’s letters from home. They’re letters from the writer to the reader. They tell things Things that have happened to me along the way, things that have happened to me that week. They’re a window on my world. People might… Sometimes I talk about writing, sometimes I talk about this week is about a remembrance from when I was teaching on the Indian reservation in the late ’60s. So they’re soup to notes. But I write either writing on a manuscript or writing on the blog every single day.

[00:15:28.540] – Alan Petersen
I also think it’s so incredible, the story I wanted to ask you about. When you were in college in the early ’60s, you wanted to join a creative writing program, but your professor said no because you were a woman.

[00:15:39.800] – J.A. Jance
Yes. I told the professor, I’d like to enroll in your class, and he looked me up and down and he said, You’re a girl. I said, So. He said, Girls become teachers or nurses, boys become writers, and he wouldn’t let me into his class. I married a guy who was allowed in his class. He never published anything. But Here’s the deal. It’s a very bad idea to make mystery writers mad. In my first Walker book, Hour of the Hunter, the main character, Diana Ladd, is a teacher on the reservation, but she always wanted to be a writer. Her husband, who was allowed in the creative writing program that was closed to her, he’s dead at the beginning of the book. As for the craze killer, he turns out to be a former I’m a professor of creative writing from the University of Arizona. Bear down.

[00:16:37.220] – Alan Petersen
Do you ever follow up, though, what happened with a professor?

[00:16:41.020] – J.A. Jance
By the way, when I married, my husband was allowed in that creative writing program. Shortly after we married, he told me there’s only going to be one writer in our family. I didn’t start writing until after we were divorced. Both my husband and the professor were deceased before my first book was published in 1985. But every time one of my books lands on the New York Times list, I imagine them both spinning in their graves.

[00:17:14.380] – Alan Petersen
I think that’s such a sweet revenge because not only did you just publish, but you’ve become like an icon. So it’s like, you couldn’t be more wrong.

[00:17:23.540] – J.A. Jance
Well, I wish they could see the home I live in now. I wish they could see… I just went to Nashville for killer Nashville and flew there on a private jet. It’s a long way from the used car as my first husband and I used to truck around in.

[00:17:45.000] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. Making it to the top in such a tough business to make it in, too, is just amazing. It’s not because of the stories. You always said you consider yourself more of a storyteller than anything. I mean, that’s the bottom line.

[00:17:57.780] – J.A. Jance
Actually, I consider myself more of a storyteller than I do a novelist. Because you know what? The ancient sacred charge of the storyteller is to beguile the time. Yes, I’ve been on the New York Times list countless times. But what gives me the most satisfaction is a man from Florida wrote to me after his wife. His wife underwent surgery for lung cancer in a 21-inch incision down her back. And after the surgery, she developed flesh-eating fasciitis and had to spend weeks in a hyperbaric chamber. He wrote to me. He had never heard of me before. We met on a European tour, and I gave him a copy of the first book. He wrote to me and he said, I have now read every one of your wonderful books. I don’t know how I would have gotten through this time without them. The ancient sacred charge of the storyteller is to be gone all the time. And time spent in hospital waiting rooms is time most in need of beguiling.

[00:19:23.160] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Then the last question I always ask my guests, for those aspiring writers I’ve mentioned before that are listening? Any advice that somebody wants to write mysteries and thrillers?

[00:19:35.860] – J.A. Jance
Well, they say, don’t write what you know. You’re supposed to write what you know. You maybe don’t think you know anything. But spending 18 years of my life with a man who died of chronic alcoholism a year and a half after I divorced him, when it came time to write my first Detective Beaumont book, he couldn’t work all the time. His books are written in the first person. So I had him do the drinking I had lived with because I just happened to know a lot about drinking. Four books in, my readers began pointing out that Bo drank every day and he had a drink of choice, and it was interfering with his work. Could he have a problem? My first reaction was, These are books. But more readers asked me that question, and I realized that I had patterned him him. I had created Bo’s character, patterned him after a problem drinker, and my readers caught onto it before I did. But you know a lot of things that you collect on the way that you can drop into a book. My dentist in Bisby, Arizona, who went to the country club for three martini lunches and then came back and treated kids’ teeth with no Novocaine when they got out of school.

[00:21:01.200] – J.A. Jance
An adult before I found out you could go to the dentist and not come home with a hole in your tongue. So there’s a dead dentist on the first page of the fifth book. I take little pieces of my life and put them into books. My sister lived on this little ranch, and they had a cow named Shirley, a horse named Warpaint, a dog named Smoky Joe, and a pig named… It’s a Russian name. I can’t think of it right now. Anyway, the pig had a Russian name. Warpaint was really smart, and he knew that if it rained, the electric fence would go down and he could let everybody out. So my sister came home from work one day and everybody was out. Smoki helped her round up the pig and Shirley. But Warpaint was out in the pasture, and you could walk right up to him if you had nothing in your hand. But if you had a halter or a rope, he would stay just out of reach. So my sister walked up to him and snuggled up under his neck and was cuddling him. And then she reached under her shirt, slipped off her bra, wrapped it around his neck, and led him home.

[00:22:14.880] – J.A. Jance
In Joanna Brady number 5, she is in a bad position. She’s being shot at. She needs a distraction. So she slips off her bra, puts it in, some pebbles in that, uses it as a slingshot. Now, yes, there’s a connection between my sister’s bra and Joanna Brady’s bra, and the connection is me. So don’t neglect the things you know. Feel free to put them into your books because they’ll make your books believable for you, and they’ll make your books believable for your readers. Well, I hope it’s fun, and I hope people go to my blog because there’s a lot of writing advice that gets inadvertently put in those posts.

[00:22:58.240] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I’ve been reading it, doing I did a research for the interview, I started reading them, and I’m definitely going to link to it on my website and everything because you have some fantastic posts there on everything, not just writing, but just on your incredible career and life. I’ve enjoyed them. So thank you for doing that.

[00:23:14.860] – J.A. Jance
I started dreaming of being a writer when I was in second grade. I’ve been living my dream for the past more than 40 years now. To grow up and live the dream you always dreamed about is an incredible blessing.

[00:23:28.900] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, it’s amazing, too, because I did read that wrote Wizard of Oz has been an influence to you to write. They wanted you to make you a writer, right? Yeah, that’s incredible.

[00:23:36.620] – J.A. Jance
Yes, it is. His books were probably the most important books I ever read in terms of pointing me in the direction I wanted to go.

[00:23:46.340] – Alan Petersen
That’s fantastic. So everybody, the latest book, The Girl from Devil’s Lake, will be out September 30th. It’s a great read, so highly recommend it. Thank you so much for talking to us. It’s a real pleasure talking with you.

[00:23:56.820] – J.A. Jance
Thank you.

[00:24:00.000] – Intro
Thanks for listening to Meet the Thriller author, hosted by Alan Peterson. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other Thriller fans discover the show. You can find all past episodes, show notes, and author interviews at thrillerauthors. Com, including conversations with icons like Dean Kuntz, Freda McFadden, and Lee Child. And if you’re looking for your next gripping raid, check Check out Alan’s own Psychological Thrillers and Crime Fiction Novels at thrillingreads. Com/books. Until next time, stay safe, keep reading, and keep the thrills coming.