The following is an interview Lloyd Ritchey conducted with J. B. Kohl, author of THE DEPUTY’S WIDOW, a hard-boiled detective mystery published by Arctic Wolf. In this writer’s opinion, Jennifer Kohl has raised the bar for novelists in every category.

Q. I just finished reading your book, THE DEPUTY’S WIDOW. It was an engrossing mystery—a totally fun, entertaining read. Please tell us about it.
A. Thanks, Lloyd! I’m glad you enjoyed it. My goal was to write something that was fun to read and not overly introspective. The Deputy’s Widow is a murder mystery set in 1948. It’s written in the noir style…characters are tormented but not to a point of being completely hopeless. The main character is a private detective by the name of Hamilton Baker.

His wife has left him. He’s living in his office. And his brother has just been murdered. Despite all that, I think “hope” is Detective Baker’s defining characteristic. He’s trying to find something good in a corrupt environment and hope is about all he’s got. It’s barely a flicker, but it’s there.

The story is a mystery, but with the elements of noir that I love…the femme fatale, the gangsters, the angst felt by everyone living in a corrupt world.

Q.   I think the dark, tough world of noir fiction is fascinating. What aspect of the genre attracts you most as a writer?

A.  I agree with you about the world of noir being fascinating. Many noir films have unhappy endings. It’s like a train wreck. You see it happening, you know it’s going to be bad, but you can’t look away.

I think again I come back to the word “hope”…despite that fact that one knows a character may never get it together or end up happy, there is that kernel of hope that shimmers through the gloom and keeps the audience riveted.

I think that speaks to the mentality of us all…the desire for a happy ending, but the willingness to accept that it can’t always turn out the way we want it too. And just because a story isn’t a fairy tale doesn’t mean we can’t care about the characters.

Q.   I was wrapped up in the book’s characters, who seemed dimensional and real. (I can feel the earth shake when mobster "Leadfoot" Barone approaches!) Did you create bios of your characters before committing them to paper?

A.  Thank you!! I’m so glad you were captivated by the characters. Yes…each and every character has a full biography written for them, complete with parents, birth place, likes, dislikes, goals, fears, possessions…you name it. I did try to get away without doing bios for some of the characters, but they ended up being so two dimensional that I had to give them life histories.

Q.   Your scenes are vivid. I felt as though I were taken by the shoulders and thrust into the story. I could feel the characters’ pain during the fights and altercations. Did you labor over the action scenes, or did they flow naturally?

A.  Again, thank you. I wrote the action scenes with a great deal of guilt. I gave Stewie Baker a history, a life, a future…and then I let him get killed. And poor Detective Baker managed to get mutilated within the first few pages of the book, which I still feel guilty about.

Giving each character a history made their reactions more predictable during action scenes or verbal arguments. I think if there’s a lot of history between characters, even if the reader doesn’t know all of it, they can pick up on it and feel the tension during scenes. And in a weird way, the characters tend to guide that themselves the deeper I get into writing the story.

However, there were times when I knew someone was going to die, or someone was going to have to face something bad and those scenes didn’t flow as naturally because it was painful to kill someone off or to cause someone harm, be it physical or emotional. There was a lot of re-writing with those scenes because my tendency was to be too nice…and being nice is no way to commit murder!

Q.   I enjoyed the appropriate humor—much of it, in my mind, reminiscent of THE THIN MAN—that shone through even the darkest sequences. Did that humor come automatically to you, or did you think, "Hmm. This scene needs to lighten up a bit."

A.  Again, the tendency was to make everything either too serious or too funny. And life is neither one all the time nor the other. It’s a big fat wonderful mess of humor, anger, fear, sadness, joy…everything.

There are a couple of movies I watched over and over to help me get into touch with despair and humor as they co-exist. SNATCH, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, SPIDERMAN 2, THE THIN MAN, and REAR WINDOW.

REAR WINDOW in particular is a fascinating study of humor and suspense and horror. What’s more awful than a man who murders and dismembers his wife? Yet Hitchcock has all these other wonderful characters out the back of Jimmy Stewart’s apartment…and their lives are bizarrely light-hearted and comical at times.

And that’s my point. There are funny things that happen even in the worst situations. So I guess I’d have to say the humor came naturally after much study and reflection…haha.

Q.   I think THE DEPUTY’S WIDOW is tightly structured, with no wasted exposition. Did you outline the story first, or did it grow "organically?"

A.  Believe it or not, I just started writing. And I hated it. It was nothing like what it turned out to be. Foolishly, I was trying to please every potential audience on the planet. And it showed. So after a couple of chapters, I tried to decide what I wanted the story to be about. Then I tried to decide if I wanted the plot to be more important or the characters to be more important.

Characters won…so then I allowed them time to develop and grow. After I had bios, I’d sit down and put a couple of them in a room together to see what would happen. Some good scenes grew out of those confrontations. An outline (or a very fluid version of one) developed from there and the rest of the story fell into place. Numerous things changed with regard to the outline, but I found that once it was in place it made the way to the end of the book a lot easier to find!!

Q.   Would you please tell us a little about your work habits? For example: how do you balance writing and family responsibilities? Do you get up an hour early for writing?

A.  Work habits are extremely variable. I like to write in the mornings because it seems I’m at my most creative then. During the school year, I get the kids off to school and then I sit down and begin to write. That’s usually around 9:00 AM. Once I start, I write anywhere from 3-4 hours, depending on what I’m working on.

In the summer, I get up at 6:00 am and go for a walk and then get down to the business of writing as soon as possible. I can only write a couple of uninterrupted hours a day during the summer, at best. And that’s not every day. It all depends on when the kids get up. When they are awake, I want to be with them, not chained to my computer.

Overall, I try to be very flexible with my schedule so that my kids have my full presence when they need it.

Q.   I noticed from your blog that your mind seems ever active, ever searching for stories, even from everyday situations, as exemplified by your humorous slices-of-life, "Banana Man" and "Waitress." Do you force these exercises upon yourself, or does the storyteller in you start penning an event as soon as you experience it?

A.  That’s a tough one!! I love watching people. And I love when I encounter someone really interesting…someone who makes me think about life in a new way. I guess I’d have to say that the vignettes I write about these folks begin in my mind immediately upon encountering them. I may think about them for days before I actually sit down and type something out, but the thoughts are there and percolating from the very first encounter.

Q.   I know you’re working on a second Detective Baker novel, and I can’t wait to read it. Do you have a projected completion date?

A.  It’s my hope to have the second Detective Baker novel completed by November.

Q.   Thanks, Jennifer, for participating in this interview. Any final words for your fellow authors or aspiring novelists?

A.  Write every day…even if it’s only a sentence or two. Recognize that not all publishers like everything that they read, and that rejection is the norm. Every writer you read has been rejected at some point.

 

J.B. Kohl, author of THE DEPUTY'S WIDOW