“Alafair Tucker is
a strong woman, the core of family life on a farm in Oklahoma where the
back-breaking work and daily logistics of caring for her husband Shaw, their
nine children, and being neighborly requires hard muscle and a clear head.
She’s also a woman of strong opinions, and it is her opinion that her neighbor,
Harley Day, is a drunkard and a reprobate. So, when Harley’s body is discovered
frozen in a snowdrift one January day in 1912, she isn’t surprised that his
long-suffering family isn’t, if not actually celebrating, particularly broken
up.
When Alafair helps Harley’s wife
prepare the body for burial, she discovers that Harley’s demise was anything
but natural…” –Opening of the synopsis for The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, Book
One in the Alafair
Tucker mystery series.
Among my favorite subjects for
Author of the Month are my fellow historical mystery novelists. So it’s with
great excitement that I get to profile Donis Casey, author of the Alafair
Tucker and Bianca Dangereuse mystery series.
15) Donis, I have to ask you first, what was your inspiration for Alafair
Tucker, a very unlikely amateur detective as she’s a turn of the century farmer
with a husband and 10 kids. What led you to create her?
I wanted to create an unlikely but highly motivated
sleuth, and someone with a peculiar skill set. Someone most people would never
think of. Alafair's a combination of some of the traits of my mother, my
mother-in-law, my grandmothers (who were both amazingly competent and
independent), myself, and a female relative who shall remain nameless. This
series is different from anything I have ever written, because it’s about a
traditional woman. I’ve always been a feminist, and in my youth I was
especially dedicated to the cause. But when I reached a certain age, it began
to dawn on me that perhaps things aren’t as black and white as I had always
thought. In fact, by so totally rejecting the qualities that have historically
been associated with women, I was buying into the idea that there was something
inferior about them, As I grew older and wiser I really wanted to correct that
notion. What they had to put up with and how they managed in spite of it all is
incredible. They were twice as smart and twice as tough as most people have to
be today.
I wanted to set the books in the unlikely state of
Oklahoma, as well. I am a native Oklahoman, fourth generation, born and raised,
but I haven’t lived there for many years. When I first began to travel, I
learned pretty quickly that most people on this wide Earth don’t know much
about Oklahoma, and what they do know is likely to be wrong. I blame John
Steinbeck. Oklahoma was rich with opportunity in the early 20th
Century – nothing like Grapes of Wrath!
14) What do you consider Alafair Tucker’s greatest strengths and
weaknesses as a mystery detective character? What makes her tick?
Alafair
Tucker knows everybody in the county and doesn’t have a second thought about
worming information out of anybody who crosses her path. She has a way of
knowing things about people, too, almost like a sixth sense, which probably
comes from having so many children. People tell Alafair things that they
wouldn’t tell the law. Maybe it’s because she’s not very threatening, or maybe
she reminds them of their mothers. For every Alafair book, I have to figure out
a really compelling reason for her to get involved in a murder investigation.
After all, with a farm, a husband, and ten kids to deal with, it's not like
she's looking for something to do. So in every book, it's one of the children
who is affected in some way, and there is nothing Alafair would not do for her
children. Love gives her teeth and claws. It makes her dangerous. It makes her
a remarkable sleuth.
13) Let’s switch gears for a moment and glide into the next decade.
What led you to create Bianca Dangereuse?
The
Bianca Dangereuse series is a spin-off of the earlier Oklahoma-set Alafair
Tucker series. When we first met Blanche/Bianca, she was a six year old girl,
Alafair's eighth child, living with her very large family on the farm in
Oklahoma in the 1910s. We watched through ten novels as she grew up to be a
smart, beautiful, but headstrong teen, bored with life on the farm. Each of the
Alafair books moves forward one year in time, and by the time the tenth book, Forty Dead Men, was finished, we'd been
through World War I and the influenza epidemic, and were about to embark on a
new era, the 1920s. I decided it would be fun to fling Blanche into the world
and see what happened. I didn't know myself that Blanche was going to end up as
Bianca LaBelle, major silent movie star in Hollywood - until she did!
12) 1920s Hollywood, part of the setting for my latest novel, Hollywoodland, is a rich mine for a period
mystery novelist as it was both a time of great glamor as well as scandalous
murder cases. Have you ever been tempted to insert Bianca into a real life
case, such as the real-life murder of William Desmond Taylor?
The
Taylor murder occurred a few years too early to be a factor in the Bianca
Dangereuse mysteries, and the second Bianca mystery,Valentino Will Die, Bianca deals with the circumstances of her dear
friend Rudy's actual death in 1926 (which was rumored to be a murder even at
the time), so as the series moves forward, he's already gone. However, I have
thought about writing a Bianca mystery featuring real life '20s movie star
Mabel Normand, who was implicated in Taylor's death and in a bunch of other
scandals, as well. She also died early. All kinds of possibilities there.
11) When you were growing up, who were your favorite authors and had
any of them gone on to influence your work?
I
was a wildly eclectic reader when I was growing up, but I always favored
stories with a historical setting, an exotic setting, or science fiction! As a
kid I loved the Lucy Fitch Perkins Twins
series, about sets of twins growing up in different countries, such as the Chinese
Twins, The Eskimo Twins, the
Greek Twins. I read Beau Geste
(French Foreign Legion) half a dozen times when I was a teen and The Nun's Story (set in the Belgian
Congo) at least a dozen times when I was a young woman. But it was Ellis
Peters' Brother Cadfael Mysteries that
made me decide to write historical mysteries, and I purposely fashioned the
first few Alafair Tucker novels after the Cadfaels – a warmhearted,
compassionate, simple yet competent central character, a tremendous feeling of
place and time – an invitation to the reader to step into the character's world
and live there for a while. Come sit down to dinner with the family!
10) Describe your typical writing day, if such a thing exists. Do you
exclusively write in a notebook, a laptop or both? Do you set daily word goals
and, if so, what are they?
I write on a laptop with occasional thinking sessions with
pen and paper. I live in southern Arizona, so for half the year it's hot
(really hot!) in the afternoon. I check my email first thing in the morning,
and then the rest of the morning is usually reserved for any trip or outdoor
activities. I've developed a routine of sitting down to write at about 2:00 and
going until 5:30. I have no word goals. I just try to write as much as I can.
On the first draft I go go go without editing myself at all. I end up with a
mess of a manuscript, but the magic happens with drafts two through twenty (or
however many it takes).
9) I know your two series protagonists are separated by half a country
and a full decade. But have you ever been tempted to do a LaBelle/Tucker crossover?
Bianca LaBelle is a spinoff. Bianca is one of Alafair's
younger children who runs away from home with a suave stranger who promises to
put her in the movies, but has nothing but the worst intentions. Blanche/Bianca
manages to escape his clutches, but by her own wits and with a lot of help she
does end up in Hollywood. Six years later, she is the star of the silent movie
action series The Adventures of Bianca Dangereuse, and the skeleton of the man
who abducted her is found buried near the beach in Santa Monica. There is some
minor crossover in the first Bianca, and there will be more crossover in both
later Bianca and Alafairs.
8) Aside from the obvious difference of Tucker living in a small
Oklahoma town and LaBelle working as an action movie star in the rapidly
growing city of Hollywood, what are the biggest differences to how each woman
approaches a murder investigation?
Both women have plenty of useful connections that law
enforcement does not. Because of her wealth and fame, Bianca has a lot of
cache. She knows lots of powerful and famous people, and most of them have secrets
they want kept and troubles they want vanished. In the first Bianca novel, The
Wrong Girl, she meets a scruffy, Chandleresque detective called Ted
Oliver, who eventually becomes her partner, her eyes and ears in the seedy
underworld of Prohibition-era Southern California.
7) Considering that Alafair Tucker lives in a small Oklahoma town, how
do you avoid “Cabot Cove Syndrome” or clustering a series of murders within a
small locale?
As I told my editor once, if you know anything about early
20th century Oklahoma history, having too many murders is not a
problem I have to deal with. Just by reading the newspapers of the time and place, I could
find enough real murders that happened in the area to last me through an
encyclopedia-sized series. Don't confuse 1910s East Coast civilization with
life in Indian Territory Oklahoma.
Frontier justice was a real thing!
6) From reading your introduction in the first Tucker mystery, your
series actually began as a genealogy project for your family. Yet the Bianca LaBelle series can’t claim the same
inspiration. So, on an abstract level, what attraction does writing period
mystery fiction hold for you?
Actually, we met Alafair Tucker's daughter Blanche as a
very ill child in
The
Wrong Hill to Die On, an illness that caused Alafair to take the child
to visit her sister in Tempe, Arizona, considered a healing place for lung
complaints in 1916. The Blanche/Bianca character was originally based on my
real-life great aunt Blanche, who ran away from home as a teen. She didn't end
up a movie star like her fictional counterpart, though.
Fictional Blanche's aunt flirted
with running off to Hollywood and the movies but in the end stayed with her
husband and law practice. This is the groundwork for Bianca Dangereuse's
adventures. They begin when the now 16-year-old Blanche seizes her chance to
escape drop-dead dull Boynton, Oklahoma, by running away with dashing Graham
Peyton who talks of movies. He turns out to be a seducer and sex-trafficker and
Blanche bolts in Northern Arizona. Her luck turns when those who take her in
enable her to finally make it to Hollywood. Six years later Bianca Dangereuse
is a hot, hot star. And the bones of Graham Peyton are uncovered buried on a
Santa Monica beach....
5) Pantser, plotter or plantser?
Pantser, no question. I usually know who the principle
characters will be and have an idea for a murder. Sometimes I think I know who
the murderer is before I start. I'm often wrong. That's the fun of it.
4) After a dozen novels across 16 years, it’s obvious you’ve had a
successful partnership with Barbara Peters at Poisoned
Pen Press. But if you were offered a Big Five deal, would you take it?
You betcha. I loved being at
Poisoned Pen Press and having Barbara as my editor for all the Alafair Tucker
Mysteries. But in 2019, just as I was preparing to launch the first Bianca
Dangereuse novel, The Wrong Girl, PPP
was sold to a much bigger outfit called Sourcebooks. There is a lot more
potential with Sourcebooks, but not so much of the warm family feel I had with
Barbara. So if I'm going to be a smaller fish in a bigger pond anyway, why not
swim in the biggest pond that will have me?
3) What you count as among your greatest strengths and weaknesses as a
novelist?
I
think I have a unique vision. I love celebrating the unsung people who really
make the world go round. Since the pandemic, they've been calling these folks
“essential workers”, and who's more essential to every living person than
her/his mother? I also love world-building
2) Are there any plans to begin another
historical mystery series?
Yes.
A novelist is like a shark. You've got to keep moving forward or die. I've done
some preliminary work on a possible new series set in Europe in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
1) What’s next for Donis Casey?
I've just submitted the third Bianca Dangereuse Mystery, The Beasts of Hollywood, to my
publisher. Beasts features Bianca and
Dashiell Hammett, just as he's becoming famous for his Continental Op stories
but before he writes his first novel. I've yet to learn when and if it'll be
published. I've also begun work on the eleventh Alafair Tucker Mystery, which
overlaps the Wrong Girl in time but is
not quite a crossover.
If
you’re interested in Ms. Casey’s work and wish to learn more, then use the
handy links below.
Facebook
author page
Website
(Multi-author
multi-national mystery author blog
to which I contribute twice a month)
Instagram
Publisher's author page
Pinterest
Amazon author page
B&N link for Valentino
Must Die \
Bianca
Dangereuse series, all retail buy links.
Podcast, Dark and
Stormy Bookclub
Interview on The Big Thrill, magazine of International Thriller Writers
Valentino
Bianca Dangereuse Hollywood Mystery series page
https://read.sourcebooks.com/fiction/9781464213502-valentino-will-die-tp.html
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/valentino-will-die-donis-casey/1136667707
