Sheila York — "Don't Slam the Door on the Way In"

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Delighted to introduce Sheila York, author of the Lauren Atwill Screenwriter Mysteries, the most recent is NO BROKEN HEARTS.

SHEILA YORK: In Hollywood, telling the truth is the most dangerous thing a woman can do.

In a way, that’s where No Broken Hearts started, with that line. I don’t know where it came from. I wish I knew where my ideas came from. I’d go there and have more of them. But one day, there it was, just as I was starting to put words on the page in some sort of sequence, and it had an urgency that inspired me to keep going, which really helps if you’re a “pantser” — somebody who jumps into writing a book with a lot of the great unknown still ahead.

My story was still rather vague. I knew it would be about a cover-up that would put Lauren’s life in danger. I had some history on my side here. Under what’s called the studio system, which reached its height in the 1940s, studios had their actors under contract, and they aggressively crafted and protected stars’ images. The stars were, after all, their investments. Hollywood made millions on glamour, class, style — weaving the fantasy of the lives the stars led.

Journalists and even the police could be induced with cash and favors (and because they too loved the fantasy) to keep misbehavior quiet. Sometimes more than misbehavior. There are rumors – some of which have been reported in Hollywood histories as fact – that this protection had sometimes extended to covering up involvement in deaths. So Lauren would find a murdered woman – but others would be ferociously determined to protect a star. But that was about as far as I’d gone.

She’d be forced to investigate, but I didn’t yet know why. Readers eagerly embrace the concept of the amateur sleuth, but it’s not enough to say, “Well, she investigates because she, you know, found the body.” No, she doesn’t.

Lauren isn’t the sort of gal who could be bought off. And it would take more than “Keep your mouth shut, if you want to work again”, although that was a threat with real weight in studio-system Hollywood. A writer who dragged a studio into scandalous headlines could kiss her career goodbye.

If she was going to investigate, I needed something that would make it absolutely impossible for her to tell what she saw.

Maybe she thinks the star could be innocent, and if she does talk, at best she would ruin his reputation and her own career; at worst, she’d send an innocent man to the gas chamber.

Maybe she’s afraid to trust the police. The Los Angeles police department was notoriously corrupt back in the 1940s. Could they be involved?

But why would she have to investigate?  

Maybe . . . ?  

What if . . . ?

Ah, I can’t tell you that twist. It would require a Spoiler Alert. But I knew I had found the answer. 

Since I can’t share the Spoiler (not that you’d want me to, but I have been a flagrant tease), I’ll share another secret.

I almost never got the chance to write No Broken Hearts because I came close to screwing up. Badly. 

At panels and other book events, occasionally someone asks, “What’s the biggest surprise your characters ever sprung on you?” Finally, today, on Jungle Red, I’m coming clean. I have my own cover-up. And I’m going to confess it.

What’s the biggest surprise? Two people came back from the dead.

When I wrote my first mystery (Star Struck Dead), I was clueless about publishing and never thought about a series. So some elements of Lauren’s history didn’t seem to matter much. Then as I was working on the next book, her history became more complicated, and by book three (Death in Her Face), I had a wonderful idea for a charming, witty fellow writer, with whom she’d once been very much in love. 

Except that my great idea for the complications in their past required a strained relationship between Lauren and her parents. Terrific! Conflict!

Except. Lauren’s parents were dead.

There is no panic an author can have like the moments spent madly flipping through that first book to the one and only place where she knows Lauren’s parents are mentioned. Are they dead? 

Does it say they’re dead?

By some miracle, it does not. At some point apparently, I’d heard a subconscious whisper from that place where my ideas come from. The whisper must have said, “Don’t kill them.” And in that final, published version, you can’t tell one way or the other.

So, if you’re in your clueless-newbie stage, think long and hard before you slam any doors in your protagonist’s past.

Lauren’s parents are alive, estranged from their daughter. And in No Broken Hearts, I finally got to meet them.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Reds and lovely readers, what's the most surprising twist you've ever read in a mystery novel? Who's your favorite star from the Golden Age of Hollywood movies? Tell us in the comments!

After a long career in radio and TV, Sheila began writing novels combining her love of history, mysteries and the movies. Set in Hollywood in the 1940s, her series features screenwriter/ reluctant heiress/amateur sleuth Lauren Atwill (and her lover, P.I. Peter Winslow) chasing killers in the Great Golden Age of Film.

Once a promising talent, screenwriter Lauren Atwill is now relegated to doctoring other writers’ work, anonymously. 

Finally she gets her shot at remaking her career, bringing a scandalous novel to the screen, a sensational tale of betrayal, corruption, and a vicious killing. But fiction turns into real life: Lauren finds a beautiful young actress brutally murdered and the legendary leading man stained with blood. Then she discovers just how far the studio and even the police will go to cover up the killing and protect a star.

If she won’t lie, her career is over. And maybe her life.