The Secret Sarah

Jungle Reds: Let's just say we're in awe of Sarah Weinman. We are trying to be cool, but it is not working. (It is working for one of us, but we're not telling which one...)

Anyway. Yesterday Sarah gave us a bit of the scoop on her new book, TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES: Stories From the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense. 

Say it with us:

Fourteen chilling tales from the pioneering women who created the domestic suspense genre…

In case you missed yesterday--where were you? --in Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives Weinman brings together fourteen hair-raising tales by women who — from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence. Lovers of crime fiction from any era will welcome this deliciously dark tribute to a largely forgotten generation of women writers.

She's the News Editor for Publishers Marketplace, where she works on Publishers Lunch, the industry’s essential daily read. She also writes the more-or-less monthly “Crimewave” column for the National Post.

A whole lot more about Sarah below...

but today, the Reds decided to explore the secret Sarah. By asking her cleverly posed questions (Hank, ever the researcher, got some of them out of the Neiman Marcus catalog. Do you believe that?) we will try to plumb the depths of the...we mean, well, here they are. 

Her answers are quite wonderful!  And at the end? You answer some of them--and we'll give away Sarah's new new book to a lucky commenter!

**You're penning an autobiography. What's the title?

The possibility of an autobiography is pretty remote at this point, but if that changes, the title would be NORMAL FEMALE, because when my mother was five months pregnant with me and got back the results of her amniocentesis -- it was the 1970s, and 36 was considered "older" for pregnant women then, no longer so much now -- and told her mother, she exclaimed, "A Normal Female!".

**Your idea of perfection?

78 degrees, sunny with a few clouds, a book in my hand, an iced coffee and a chocolate chip scone on a plate next to me. Rinse and repeat.

**What was the moment you got the inspiration for your new book?

I'm not sure there was a moment, but once I began writing the essay for the literary magazine Tin House that was the impetus for Troubled Daughters, I knew this whole idea of overlooked female suspense writers of a certain generation was one I needed to pursue for a very long time.

**What talent do you wish you had?

 Woodworking/carpentry. Would make so many things so much easier.

**What's your greatest fear?

Dying alone, my body undiscovered for weeks. I've seen the effects of that, literally, and it is horrifying. (Also: a fairly common New York City-based fear, I've learned.)

**If not your current occupation, what would you like to be?

Investigator/policy advocate for missing persons and long term unidentified individuals. But truth be told, I don't see myself leaving writing and journalism behind.

**Cat/Bird/Dog/Fish?

Dog.

**What puts you in a creative mood?

A state of relaxation. Barring that, tenacity.

**What is your most treasured possession?

First edition of Shel Silverstein's LAFCADIO: THE LION WHO SHOT BACK. Which is not actually among my possessions at the moment, it's elsewhere.

**What is something about you that no one would guess?

I cannot wink. Don't have the right eye muscles to do it. Believe me, I have tried, and practiced, but it doesn't work.

**Favorite indulgence?

Chocolate chip scones. Sigh.

**If you could rewrite your history, what one thing would you change?

Sometimes I think my entire life is about rewriting past history.

**Which artist do you most admire?

Shel Silverstein. A career like his is impossible now.

**What would you do with one extra hour in your day?

Work, sadly. Or read.

**What is the first musical/concert you attended?

I have my mother's word for this, but again, when she was pregnant with me, she knew I was going to be a musical child because I kicked very hard in the womb while she attended a Mozart recital.

**Which single piece of art do you wish you'd created?

Sticking to crime fiction: Dorothy B. Hughes' IN A LONELY PLACE.

**How would you like to be remembered?

Kind, but fair.

**Secret junk food vice?

Seeing as I've already mentioned chocolate chip scones twice in this Q&A, I guess it isn't so secret....

**If you had to pick your theme song, what would it be?

"I Can't Touch the Sun", as sung by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show.

Ed note--here's the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2PkbOG-Rn4

**What are you going to do next--right now?

After answering these questions? Updating the Domestic Suspense website, and then reading a few more pages of a forthcoming Sholem Aleichem biography.

Thank you, Sarah! Amazing.
Hank's three answers: The Juggler, Franz Marc's Deer in the Forest or Joni Mitchell's Carey, and Twizzlers.
How about yours? 
Remember, Sara's book to one lucky commenter!


More about Sarah Weinman:

Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in many print and web publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Observer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, The Daily Beast, Maclean’s, The Daily, The Guardian, The New York Post, The Atlantic.com, the New Yorker’sPage-Turner blog, Quill & Quire, Tablet, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and New Hampshire Public Radio’s “Word of Mouth”. She’s also appeared on C-SPAN’s BookTV, Minnesota Public Radio’s “Midmorning” and NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered to speak about crime fiction and the publishing industry.

Weinman’s short fiction has appeared in DUBLIN NOIR (Akashic Books), BALTIMORE NOIR (Akashic Books), DAMN NEAR DEAD (Busted Flush Press), EXPLETIVE DELETED (Bleak House Books), A HELL OF A WOMAN: An Anthology of Female Noir (Busted Flush Press), LONG ISLAND NOIR (Akashic Books) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Previously she reported on the publishing industry for DailyFinance and wrote “Dark Passages,” a monthly online mystery & suspense column for the Los Angeles Times, and “The Criminalist”, a monthly online column for the Barnes & Noble Review. Earlier in her career she was the Baltimore Sun’s crime fiction columnist and an editor for mediabistro.com’s publishing industry news blog GalleyCat.

In a parallel life, she completed her M.S. in Forensic Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of New York in February 2004 and still harbors faint hopes of actually making use of her degree someday.

From October 2003 through January 2011, Weinman created and maintained the popular blogConfessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind,  which USA Today hailed as “a respected resource for commentary on crime and mystery fiction”. The blog has been mentioned in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Ottawa Citizen, Library Journal and the India Times Business-Standard.

Why I'm Glad My First Book Is An Anthology: a guest blog by Sarah Weinman

 
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  Back in 2003, before YouTube, before Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest, young Sarah Weinman was a crime fiction lover who decided to start a "weblog," as they were then known. Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, with its book reviews, author interviews, tales of true crime and news of the publishing world became a daily must-read for writers, readers and publishing insiders. Its success boosted Sarah to national visibility: she became a columnist for the LA Times and the Baltimore Sun, an editor at the publishing industry news blog GalleyCat, and eventually led to her current job as an editor at Publishers Marketplace.

Along the way, she became the go-to historian and literary scholar for all things crime fiction, appearing in publications such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The  Guardian. Her short stories have been anthologized in several books, including Dublin Noir and Damn Near Dead, and have appeared online as well as in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

You can see why we're excited to have Sarah here at Jungle Red Writers. In fact, we think she has so much to say of interest to our readers that we've taken the unusual step of inviting her as our guest for two days running. Today, she talks about a particular kind of sleuthing: that of bringing forgotten women writers back from obscurity.

In the book world there are dreams so many writers dream they almost feel like cliché. Publishing a novel before the age of thirty. Cracking a major bestseller list. Seeing hundreds or thousands of fans at a book signing. Winning a prestigious award. Finding that signature character that will be read and remembered years after leaving the mortal coil.

Having indulged in a few of these reveries myself – and hey, some of them are still within the realm of possibility – I'm no stranger to grand writerly fantasies. But I know that when I look back on whatever further career develops, I'll be glad my first book was an anthology. Especially this anthology. Here's why:

It's not about me. Yes, my name's on the book, I wrote the introduction and selected the stories. And, aside from Dorothy Salisbury Davis, still sharp and spry at the age of 97, I'm the only living representative readers and media can contact. But what would make me utterly giddy is if Troubled Daughters,Twisted Wives spurred current readers to go out looking for what else the authors in the anthology wrote. Which leads to...

If reissues happen as a result, the anthology is already a success. In some instances, backlists are readily available. Patricia Highsmith's, thanks to W.W. Norton and Grove/Atantic, and Shirley Jackson's thanks to Penguin and FSG. Helen Nielsen's, thanks to Prologue Books. Open Road filled in the gaps for Dorothy B. Hughes that NYRB Classics and The Feminist Press hadn't, and also sell much of Charlotte Armstrong's ouevre, too. Stark House Press has been doing yeoman's work with many books by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Vera Caspary's greatest suspense novels are also under The Feminist Press's watch.

But Margaret Millar's work remains, for the most part, shamefully out of print. The same goes for Davis, Celia Fremlin, Nedra Tyre, Joyce Harrington, and Miriam Allen deFord. The greater the awareness of these excellent writers off of single stories, the better chance of more permanent fixing in the literary and crime fiction canon.

I learned some valuable skills. The key reason I began work on TroubledDaughters was to give proper due to 20^th century domestic suspense fiction, and the female writers who found their voice within this category. But I also wanted to learn about aspects of book publishing I wasn't exposed to as a reporter, critic, and occasional pundit.

People in the book business speak of permissions with grumbling impatience, and there were certainly times – luckily, not that many – when negotiating with an agency or author estate spiked my blood pressure. But those moments were easily counteracted by the satisfaction of being able to tell the child or grandchild of one of the authors that yes, their work would be discovered by a new audience. And yes, I thought the work was good and still held up well and resonated further in the 21^st century.

An anthology requires old-fashioned detective work. There were mean streets and blind alleys and wild goose chases and lots and lots and lots of waiting, the same as any detective, working for a police department or a private firm, knows. Some estates or rightsholders were so readily available it took less than an hour to track down. Others took weeks or months. And, in the case of Miriam Allen deFord, the matter of who controls her literary rights is such a mystery that even the daughter of the Bay Area-based ACLU lawyer who was deFord's executor until his death in 1998 didn't have an answer. That's a whole other story I'd like to tell someday – hopefully with a gratifying resolution.

The stories are terrific. These fourteen women, along with dozens of their contemporaries, knew how to tell a chilling suspense tale that is impossible to put down until the reader is done. I still recall my own vivid sense of horror or wonder or voiced-out-loud amazement at these stories, wondering how so many of them had all but been consigned to the dust pile. Now, I hope, they won't ever be again. 

Please join us tomorrow for our group interview with Sarah! You can find out more about Sarah Weinman at her website (currently undergoing renovation) and at Domestic Suspense. You can friend her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter as @sarahw, and check out her Tumblr. 

BREAKING NEWS: And we are DEAD ON THE LEVEL (see above)--a signed copy of Sarah's new book to one lucky commenter today..and one tomorrow! Hurray! (And hurry..it could VANISH IN AN INSTANT.)