Lethal Legacy

Ro: Welcome back, Linda Fairstein, author of the best-selling Alex Cooper series. I just finished Lethal Legacy and I loved it! I’ll never be able to pass the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue without thinking of the intrigue behind those doors, and underneath the library itself. Did you already have extensive knowledge of the library before you started to write LL or was the research done specifically for the book?

Linda: Don’t you just love the NYPL? I hope your readers will come see the little video on my website (http://www.lindafairstein.com/) which features some of the library’s hidden treasures.

Ro: The video is extremely cool, and it was fun to see the hidden rooms described in the book.

Linda: All of my research was done exclusively for LETHAL LEGACY. I love libraries and I am fascinated by rare books and collectors, but I was always afraid to approach the administrators there because it’s such a, well, such a literary place, and I write more commercial fiction. But I have a great friend who is on the board of trustees, and she took me by the hand and introduced me to the fabulous David Ferriero, who is the head of the NYPL’s four research libraries, and embraced my project with open arms. I had visited the library, of course, and I had read several books about it, so I knew some of the wondrous things that were inside, but on my research tours I was given access to more incredible books, maps and manuscripts than I ever imagined. I spent several weeks doing research there, and they practically had to kick me out to get rid of me.

Ro: The details in the book were fascinating. Are the works you described in your book real and did you have a chance to see any of them?

Linda: All the books and maps described in the novel are indeed real. I have a great affinity for that world, and am fascinated by the people who are such generous patrons of our libraries and museums, and those who need to possess the rare objects for their own pleasure. I collect modern first edition crime novels and mysteries, and each time I publish a book, I treat myself to an old “rare” book, but so far I wouldn’t say that I’ve got anything to kill for. Any of your readers can see their treasures, too. The NYPL conducts two tours a day – and David is toying with the idea of the deadly Alex Cooper tour, to see some of the hidden sites to which I had access. But you can see the first Gutenberg Bible brought to America or the last letter that Keats wrote to Fanny before he died or rare political manuscripts and hundreds of sixteenth century maps of the world. It’s the most fascinating cultural institution we have in New York.

Ro: Luc Rouget, Alex’s sweetheart, is my dream date. Please tell me he’s based on a real person.

Linda: Oh, Luc! My readers either love or hate him – nothing in between. And yes, he’s based on a real guy. Before I met my husband, I had a long romance with a fabulous Frenchman named Andre who was a restaurateur and lived in a fairy-tale village in the south of France. Talk about escaping from the violence and mayhem of my day job! So he’s very real, and very kind and charming….and I think we’ll have a mystery set in the world he inhabits before too long.

Ro: How have you been able to maintain the excitement in the series after almost a dozen successful books?

Linda: Maintaining the excitement and the tension is tough to do, as all your writer-readers know. I’ve studied this genre forever by reading in it so extensively, and am always inspired by the ways that other writers I admire keep their stories fresh. Coop ages much more slowly than we do, you may have noticed. There are only three or four months between stories, so she’s not aging in real time. That helps me a lot in terms of plotting her personal evolution. And then there are endless advances in forensic techniques, and no shortage of criminal schemes. Loyal readers come back to series fiction if they like the characters and invest themselves in their stories, so that keeps me thoroughly engaged, too. There are so many series I hope will never end that it makes me focus on my own work, to keep Alex and Mike and Mercer vital enough to attract their fans.

Ro: You’re involved with a number of groups dedicated to women’s issues and child welfare. Are there any in particular that you’d like to tell our Jungle Red readers about?

Linda: Thanks for this opportunity. I’m on a number of non-profit boards, and my primary focus is on helping victims of violence – both in the courtroom and in the recovery process. SAFE HORIZON is the country’s largest victim advocacy organization – http://www.safehorizon.org/ – and it does extraordinary work, moving victims from crisis to confidence. Check the website to see the great range of programs it has – including brick-and-mortar facilities for battered women and their kids that are real homes, individual apartments in safe houses and not the horrible ‘shelters’ we used to see. We have just opened a state-of-the-art Child Advocacy Center – for victims of sexual assault – the child makes one stop – and there, at this beautifully calm center, she or he is examined by one of the best pediatricians in the city, sees a detective and district attorney, and has his or her own social worker/advocate assigned.

My board colleagues surprised me by dedicating the staff wing in my honor, for my thirty years of prosecutorial work; and when my mother died so suddenly last summer (she had been a pediatric nurse and worked for forty years with abused children), we raised funds to dedicate the pediatric medical suite in her memory. We partner often with Mariska’s beloved Joyful Heart (http://www.joyfulheartfoundation.org/) to do more alternative healing, and we have a huge gala coming up in May (buy a ticket!) at which Mariska will speak, Chris Meloni will emcee, Dick Wolf will be honored, and Sheryl Crow will perform. Then, if you want to do some forensic research for your writing, check out the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine (http://www.vifsm.org/) where all the cutting edge law enforcement technology is tested and taught. Sign up for a seminar and use it in your work!

Ro: It’s really wonderful that you’re giving so much back. It's a great example for the newbies among us.

What’s up next for you? We know Alex Cooper loves Martha’s Vineyard, any plans for a series set there?

Linda: Alex loves the Vineyard. For her, as it was for me, Martha’s Vineyard is really the beautiful, calm paradise that restores her when she is overwhelmed by everything in her professional life. It really transports her, and she feels completely safe, soothed by the water that surrounds that tranquil island. There are wonderful Vineyard series – my friend Cynthia Riggs has a great one going, and the much loved, late Phil Craig is still a Vineyard vacation must-read. I know I’ll set something there one day, but probably not an entire series. It’s a dramatic setting for a good stand-alone.
Next one is the still-untitled twelfth in the series story, which will have Coop and gang back about the same time next year. I couldn’t resist marching into all the political scandals and personal peccadilloes that have overtaken New York politics in the last year. So the historical setting is the rich background of city politics – and the only three remaining Federal period mansions in Manhattan, all of which date to 1800, and have riveting political histories. Gracie Mansion, home of the rich merchant Archibald Gracie, and given to the city for our mayoral residence – but our mayor has a fancier mansion – so imagine what goes on at Gracie, with nobody home! The other two are Hamilton Grange – the home of Alexander Hamilton; and the glorious Jumel Mansion in Harlem Heights – and the widow Jumel married Aaron Burr. Gracie, Hamilton and Burr were all involved in a murder case in 1800 – and so, the new scandals have a link to the old. That’s the next territory. I’d love to come back and talk to you about it then.
Thanks so very much for letting me drop in to chat. Best to all!
http://www.lindafairstein.com/

photo: Peter Simon

Linda will be stopping back to answer any questions on the Alex Cooper series, writing and research. And you’ll have a chance to see Linda in person at these upcoming events.

4/ 18 – Keynoting the first Connecticut mystery conference – MURDER 203 (tix and info at http://www.murder203.com/) Four Jungle Red Writers will be there too!
4/23 – Hosting Luncheon at the Plaza Hotel for God’s Love We Deliver (tix and info available at http://www.glwd.org/)
4/28 – 6-8pm – Mysterious Bookshop – Signing the new MWA anthology – THE PROSECUTION RESTS
May 1 – 12-2pm – Luncheon for the Morristown, NJ Junior League (tix and info available at http://www.mnjjl.org/)
May 14 – 12-2 – Domestic Violence Committee of Central CT– Luncheon honoring Joan Lunden
May 14 – 6-8pm – SINC event at NYC’s Muhlenberg Branch of the NYPL
August 2 – Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival in Chilmark!

Welcome Linda Fairstein!

photo: Peter Simon





Ro: This week Jungle Red is thrilled to welcome NYTimes best-selling writer Linda Fairstein, author of the Alex Cooper series, and its latest installment, Lethal Legacy for a two-part interview. Today we’ll ask Linda about her first career and the beginnings of the Alex Cooper series and tomorrow she’ll come back to tell us about Lethal Legacy.




Welcome, Linda! As a native New Yorker I knew your name well before you published your first mystery. You were an Assistant District Attorney in NYC in 1972 and head of its Sex Crimes Unit by 1976. I have to ask you about your first illustrious career - how was it for a young, beautiful blond handling high profile cases such as the Preppy Murder case? Do you think it was harder because you’re a woman?






Linda: Thanks so much for the kind words. I spent thirty years in the office of the New York County District Attorney, and when I took over the newly formed, pioneering Sex Crimes Unit in 1976 (just four years out of law school), I never dreamed work would become a passion. As your readers know, those times were very different for women in many careers. In the criminal law, most doors were closed to us – the Manhattan DA’s office had almost two hundred lawyers on staff, and only seven were women. Had I stopped to think about the challenge of doing that work at that tender age, or had I any of the wisdom I’d accumulated over the years since, I probably wouldn’t have approached the courtroom so buoyantly. But everything seemed possible to me – I’m hopelessly optimistic – and the chance to help victims triumph in cases when they had been denied access to the system for (literally) centuries was enormously uplifting.
Then, in 1986, I was introduced to my three favorite letters of the alphabet – DNA – and that scientific technique revolutionized everything we were doing – exonerating the innocent and making it impossible for the guilty to beat the system. So, yes, the very early days were quite difficult for young women trying to make careers as prosecutors or defense attorneys, but I was supported in all I did by some extraordinarily generous men – including NYC’s legendary District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, who is my professional patron saint (think my fictional Paul Battaglia) – and by scores of colleagues in the office and in the NYPD who kept me grounded and reinforced the need to never lose a sense of fairness, or sense of humor.

Ro: Were you keeping notes on Final Jeopardy, your first Alex Cooper novel during those early years on the job, or was FJ inspired by a particular case?



Linda: I wish I had been smart enough to keep notes from my first days on the job, but every time I started a daily journal, I’d be overwhelmed by work and witnesses before I got two pages into it. Fortunately, I have a good memory for cases and characters and details, and always loved storytelling. I’d wanted to be a writer throughout my adolescence, and became an English lit major at Vassar for that very reason. My second draw was public service, so I figured I could support myself with a career in the law until I got around to writing. I was asked to write a non-fiction book about our groundbreaking reforms in special victims work, and that became SEXUAL VIOLENCE, published in 1993. Once I’d disciplined myself well enough to do that book and keep the day job, I set out to start my series. Yes, FINAL JEOPARDY was inspired by a particular case – or rather, by the perp in that case. The story I tell is entirely fictitious, but the killer has a psychiatric condition I’d never heard of until I encountered it in a defendant who committed multiple crimes over a number of years…and it fascinated me. So that condition became the hook that launched Coop’s first caper.

Ro: I imagine you have hundreds of stories that would make bestselling novels. Where do you personally draw the line on “ripped from the headlines” stories?


Linda: I really didn’t start writing to tell the stories of cases I had prosecuted throughout my career. I’m hoping to do that someday in a non-fiction book. I love crime fiction and series characters, and longed to be in that world. And while I draw from motives in cases and characters I’ve met, my stories are all original, rather than retellings of cases I actually handled. For instance, LETHAL LEGACY opens with a perp using the ruse of starting a fire outside the apartment of a woman whose home he wanted to enter. He was dressed as a fireman at the time. The young woman smells fire, looks through her peephole and sees smoke – and sees a fireman who is trying to help her. Now who wouldn’t open her door under those circumstances. Pretty clever ruse to gain entry, I thought. That happened in an actual high-profile case after I left the office. I don’t tell the story of the original stalker – that didn’t interest me – but I loved ‘borrowing’ the ruse from the real case, and getting my bad guy inside for an entirely different reason. I’ve got my eight million stories from the naked city, and someday I’d love to tell me. But not in this series.




Ro: I understand that you are good friends with Mariska Hargitay of Law & Order SUV. And how do you rate the L&O SUV team for realism?




Linda: I love Mariska Hargitay! This is her tenth year as Detective Olivia Benson on Law and Order’s SVU. Dick Wolf, who has produced the whole L and O franchise has done a brilliant job. His staff is composed of dozens of ex-cops and prosecutors who craft the stories that are so often ripped from the headlines. Hey – it’s meant to be entertainment, but it has educated so many people about these issues – and in prime time, when I never thought people would be discussing sexual assault and child abuse. Mariska has had such incredible viewer reaction to her character that five years ago she created an organization to help heal survivors of sexual assault. It’s called the Joyful Heart Foundation – and as a proud board member, I can honestly say that it has done extraordinary work in this field, all because of the reach of Mariska’s fictional detective.

Ro: Linda will be back tomorrow to tell us about Lethal Legacy (which I just read and loved), the incredible work that she’s doing with the Joyful Heart Foundation, Safe Horizon http://www.safehorizon.org/ and other victim’s advocacy groups, a super tip and website for forensic research, and what’s up next for herself and Alex Cooper.

Catch Linda in person at Murder 203, CT's Mystery Festival, www.murder203.com