THE WALKER FAMILY

Mysteries are enduringly popular. I’ve read them all my life, from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, right on through John D. MacDonald and Lawrence Block. Mysteries work as stories with the required beginnings, middles and ends.  Those ends usually entail the bad guy getting caught and/or punished. That is the rule. If the bad guy doesn’t get it in the end, you may be dealing with literature, and that’s another kettle of fish entirely.

In mysteries, the reader doesn’t know who the killer is until the end. In thrillers, the reader knows who the bad guy is from the beginning.  The only question is how much damage he’s going to do before he gets caught.

I think many people who become writers do so because they’re ill-suited to having regular jobs.  That’s certainly true in my case.  And so, after writing nine Detective Beaumont original paperbacks in a row, by 1989 I was beginning to feel as though I had a regular job.  When I threatened to knock off Beau in my next book, my editor was aghast.  “Don’t do that,” he said.  “Remember that first book of yours, the one that was never published?”

I remembered it well. My first manuscript had been called Hour of the Hunter. It was a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that had taken place in Arizona in 1970, and it was one in which my first husband had played a key role as a witness. The manuscript was universally turned down for good reason  For one thing, in its original form it was 1200 pages long. But even after it was trimmed down by 550 pages to a mere 650, it still didn’t make the cut. Editors said that the stuff that was real was “unbelievable” whereas the parts that were fictional were “fine.”

My agent finally suggested that I try my hand at fiction, and that’s where J.P.Beaumont stepped into the picture. Between 1985 and 1989 when I was having this conversation with my editor, I’d had an emotional encounter with some of the still-grieving family members of that series of murders in Arizona. Just meeting them one time was enough to convince me that real murders affect real people. I stopped writing true crime on the spot.

So when my editor suggested that I revisit that original manuscript, I didn’t want to bring up that awful time for that still fractured family. Not only that, the killer was still in prison in Arizona, and I didn’t want to write a book that he could point to and say to his friends in Florence, “Hey guys, this book’s about me."

I ended up selling Morrow and Avon a book called Hour of the Hunter, but the only thing it has in common with that original manuscript is the title. And, twenty years later, of all my books, it remains my favorite.