Rhys Bowen: Today our guest on Jungle Red is a good friend and neighbor of mine from the Bay Area, Susan Shea. I have been following Susan's career with delight since I was her mentor at a Book Passage Mystery Writers conference a few years ago. I was intrigued then with her world of million dollar fund raising and so pleased that THE KING'S JAR, the new book in her series, is getting good reviews now. So take it away, Susan.
SUSAN SHEA :Sister, Can You Spare
a Dime?
Well, actually, a lot of dimes. Say a million dimes, which
is only $100,000, which is enough to get you dinner with the head of the
computer science department but not with the president of the university. If
you have ten million dimes just sitting around, I’ve got a place at the head
table with Sarah Jessica Parker and a newly-minted Nobel Prize winner, plus the
president, who intends to attach himself to Ms. Parker for the evening.
See? This is the life of a fundraiser, always asking, always
promising, always sucking up – I didn’t say that! – making nice with people who
have many more dimes than she does. These people, called millionaires and
billionaires, are different from you and me in large and small ways. They do not
shop for their own toilet paper, for one thing.
The first time I asked someone for a million dollars, I
rehearsed the excellent case I was making for the college’s project, spent time
beforehand preparing a mental script that would keep the Big Question on the
table (you never pose the question in a form that can be answered with a
straight no), and reminded myself not to order any food at the lunch meeting
that might stick to my teeth and distract me, or her. But the biggest prep was
standing in front of my bathroom mirror and saying “We would like you to
consider a gift of a million dollars.” I made sure my eyes didn't go into a
frantic blinking spasm and that I could get the words out without going, “a
mi-mi-mi-mi…”
In my previous life as a fundraiser, which, by the way, is
what my protagonist, Dani O’Rourke is, because they say you should always write
what you know, I have had the pleasure and pain of meeting a handful of
billionaires. I found them all to be fascinating, and half of them to be quite nice.
The most delightful of them is a self-made man, once a scholarship student at a
prestigious university, who developed an idea into an exceptionally robust,
international service business. When he allowed another Big B Billionaire to
buy him out, he was like a kid in a candy store. He told me gleefully he
planned to give it all away before he died, after giving his kids a million
each. “They should have the joy of making something themselves,” he told me.
He’s established too many scholarships to count, schools within universities,
libraries, you name it. And always with a big grin on his face. I adore him.
Then there’s the fellow who inherited massive wealth at an
early age. He plays at one career after another and really believes the world
revolves around his wants and opinions. (No, not the current ruler of North
Korea although minus nuclear warheads, not all that different, and about the
same age emotionally.) My hypothesis is that no one has ever – since he was a
toddler and his nannies saw dollar signs when they looked at him – told him his
behavior is not acceptable.
Jungle Red writers, a question: Do you ever wonder if
someone you know will recognize their annoying tic that you built into your
villain’s character, or see a distant echo of something that happened to her or
him in your story? While it is the absolute truth that the characters in my
books are purely fictional, bits and pieces of the people I have met pop up in
my stories, mashed into new forms and suitably disguised, I hope. The work of
fundraising, which lends itself to high comedy and deep despair on occasion, is
pretty much for real, however, in The
King’s Jar and its predecessor, Murder
in the Abstract.
SUSAN C. SHEA spent more than two decades as a
non-profit executive before beginning her best-selling mystery series featuring
a professional fundraiser for a fictional museum. Susan is on the board of the
northern California chapter of Sisters in Crime and is a past board member of Norcal’s
chapter of Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Marin County, California. www.susancshea.com
Susan will be giving away a copy of THE KING'S JAR to the best comment of the day.
