Two for the Price of One - Penny Koepsel and Claire Matturro

And now for something completely different. This month, Fabulous Florida Writers is pleased to welcome two guest bloggers - Penny Koepsel, a school psychologist and author from Texas, who will be interviewing Claire Hamner Matturro, former Sarasota, FL lawyer and author. Penny and Claire are the co-authors of Wayward Girls Red Adept Publishing in 2021.  Penny will be interviewing Claire about her newest book, The Smuggler’s Daughter (Red Adept Publishing July 2020).

Penny: First, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the book, The Smuggler’s Daughter.

Claire: Delighted to do so. It’s a Gulf Coast mystery which takes place in a fictional Florida city near Tampa and in the Big Bend/Panhandle of the state. Set primarily in 1992, there is a lengthy flashback to the seventies, which becomes a highly fictionalized retelling of the Sinkhole/Sandy Creek murders in the Florida panhandle in 1977—emphasis on the word “highly.”

In the story, two attorneys and a snake-bit activist are killed in a 24-hour period. Naturally this perturbs and perplexes police detective Ray Slaverson and his partner Luke Latham. They’ve been cops too long to believe in coincidences and suspect the deaths are connected but cannot find any link. Kate Garcia, who rose from a hardscrabble, shell-road childhood to become a librarian and Ray's fiancée, knows more than she should. But she can't talk without endangering those she loves in a gritty tale of hidden identities.

Penny: So, two police detectives and a complex series of crimes to solve. Would you classify this as a police procedural?

Claire: Yes, at least in part. My brother, with his long and distinguished history in law enforcement, helped me with the police investigative parts, the weapons, and the guy-talk among the detectives. There’s also a good bit of family drama in the story because the plot is character driven. I especially like the part where a rookie detective learns the ropes from veteran detective Luke while secretly courting Luke’s daughter. But primarily, it is a classic mystery with Kate doing a lot of the digging.

Penny: Your earlier books were these comedic legal thrillers with a chick lit gloss published by HarperCollins. I remember your protagonist was this wild, tofu-eating eccentric lawyer named Lilly Belle who was hilarious. What made you decide to switch into writing a serious mystery?

Claire: Well, for one thing, somewhere along the way, I stopped being funny. Maybe there’s a limit to how many tofu jokes one can make? But more than that I suppose is that I’ve been reading serious Florida mysteries since I was a kid and first discovered John D. McDonald, the grandfather of Florida mysteries. I wanted to try my hand at writing something McDonald might have tackled. While I adore and devour the Tim Dorsey/Carl Hiaasen zany Florida mysteries, I also admire and read the more serious mysteries by writers like the great James W. Hall and Edna Buchanan, and I wanted to try my hand at such a novel.

Penny: So, new genre, new publisher. Please tell us a bit about Red Adept Publishing, where the book you and I wrote—Wayward Girls—has also found a home.

Claire: Again, delighted to do so. Red Adept is a smaller fiction publishing house, which produces high-quality e-book and trade paperbacks. It has a good number of award-winning authors in its catalog. Since its first release in 2012, Red Adept has published over 100 novels, including some national bestsellers (NYT and USA Today).

Penny: Okay, let’s get back to The Smuggler’s Daughter. Why the sinkhole murders as being part of the inspiration for the book?

Claire: A bizarre fascination, I suppose, with the case. I remembered the news stories well when it happened. It was a real turning point in marijuana smuggling in Florida, which up to that point had been essentially non-violent (unlike the cocaine smuggling that came later). While I was teaching at Florida State University, I was just down the street from the Florida Archives and discovered they kept trial transcripts from the actual murder trials in the case. So, I read the transcripts.

Penny: Wait, you read the trial transcripts?

Claire: Yes, read, studied, took notes as it was fascinating. Really. Much broader information than available in the news media accounts, and as a bonus, the Archives also had some of the reports from the investigative law enforcement agencies. My first thought was to write a novel based entirely upon the case. But then I got involved in writing the comedic legal thrillers for HarperCollins and put that thought away. Not totally away, you understand, and I kept all my notes. And I kept the fascination and the story idea. When I finally caught up with myself and had the time, I sat down and wrote The Smuggler’s Daughter, but with a different focus than what I’d first imagined.

Penny: Thank you, Claire.

Claire: My pleasure and I look forward to interviewing you when our book, Wayward Girls, comes out in 2021.

Penny: It’s a date then.

John Vanek - Mystery, Medicine, and Spirituality

“Medicine was my first love, but mysteries and poetry became my drugs of choice,” says St. Petersburg writer John Vanek. Although he spent his professional career as a physician, he now spends his time living “happily as an ink-stained wretch” penning mysteries that combine medicine, religion, and spirituality.

Vanek first discovered his passion for writing while he was a student at Case Western University, but it wasn’t until he had earned his medical degree from the University of Rochester that he began to delve into the nuts and bolts of the craft. “I began honing my skills in creative writing workshops and college courses and was gratified when my early work won contests and was published widely,” he says. His writing has appeared in numerous literary journals, anthologies, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Stories of Strength, and in 2009, he published a collection of his poetry titled Heart Murmurs: Poems.

In 2018, Vanek published the first of what would become a series of mystery novels featuring an unusual protagonist. Deros, the story of a series of murders that occur after a high school reunion, introduces Father Jake Austin, a physician and Vietnam veteran who entered the seminary after the war and became a priest. “Although Father Jake Austin is a fictional character, aspects of his personality and struggles are modeled after two Catholic priests who became my close friends and confidants while I was practicing at a Catholic hospital,” Vanek explains. “When I first met them, I expected the usual stereotypes, but when their Roman collars came off, I found that they were simply human. I portray Father Jake as a spiritual man, but as realistically and human as possible.” Publisher’s Weekly described Deros as “…a mystery that’s as much a character study as a whodunit …. Readers will look forward to seeing more of Jake.”

Miracles, the sequel to Deros, follows Father Austin as his life is hurled into a vortex of three storms – a dying nun, a bleeding statue of the Virgin Mary, and an infant in a neonatal intensive care unit. Published in 2019, Miracles was easier for Vanek to write because he was more familiar with his characters’ personalities. N.Y. Times bestselling author Michael Koryta praised Miracles for “bringing the reader into worlds of mystery, medicine, and religion — and the human connections that bridge them all.”

Vanek’s latest release, Absolution, is  Book 3 in the Father Jake Austin mystery series. In the story, Father Austin is forced to decide whether to turn his back on his biological father who deserted him as a child, or turn the other cheek and save his father from a vengeful drug lord, even if it would risk his own life and the lives of his loved ones. “I didn’t struggle at all with the third book because its plot was the logical extension from the first two mysteries,” Vanek says. He is currently finishing the first draft of the fourth book in the series (as yet untitled) involving human trafficking. 

Vanek hopes readers will enjoy a protagonist who is out of the ordinary. “It seems as if child molesters, charlatans, and thugs dominate the headlines these days, while those who sacrifice personal needs for the sake of others are seldom thanked, let alone celebrated,” he says.  “Besides spinning a good yarn, I hope to honor all those who pit their will and faith against their human frailties and daily temptations, not just in the clergy or in medicine, but in all walks of life.”

For more information:

Website: www.JohnVanekAuthor.com

Facebook page: www.facebook.com/JohnVanekAuthor

Amazon Author Page: www.amazon.com/John-A.-Vanek/e/B003MNXID8

Twitter: @JohnVanekAuthor

Youtube: https://youtu.be/jgfi4iT7nnE

"Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" - How I Made Lord Byron Into A Believable Character - A Guest Post by Marty Ambrose

This month, Fabulous Florida Writers is pleased to welcome guest blogger Marty Ambrose. Her writing career spans over fifteen years. She has written nine novels,including Claire's Last Secret, a nineteenth century historical memoir/mystery that centers around the Lord Byron/Percy Bysshe Shelley literary circle. Her most recent release, A Shadowed Fate, is the sequel and the second of a planned trilogy. Ambrose was our featured writer on October 14, 2018.
 

Now that I write historical memoir/mysteries, I am often asked how I manage to include “real” figures into my books who are believable within the story.  It was daunting to take on this task, to say the least, as I wrote my latest book, A Shadowed Fate—the second work of a trilogy about the nineteenth-century Byron/Shelley circle.  Bringing in actual writers from the past requires a lot of research, a delicate balance of the real and the imagined, and a fresh perspective—especially if that person is someone as famous (and infamous) as British Romantic poet, Lord Byron. He, and the other members of the brilliant literary group, presented quite a challenge to me as an author—one that kept me up at night as I mulled over how to include enough historical details about these beloved literati while making each one come alive within my plot.

Okay, it was beyond daunting—more like impossible.

First of all, including Lord Byron as a character required massive amounts of research.  His lover, Caroline Lamb, once defined him as “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know,” and this scandalous phrase has lingered throughout the last two-hundred years.  Yet, he was a much more complex man than the rakish image she portrayed. I found that moving beyond this “celebrity cliché” meant plowing deeply into the man behind the mask.  I’ve studied Byron during much of my academic career, but making him into a character required including subtleties that, initially, seemed elusive.  One of his acquaintances, Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, captured this dilemma perfectly when she wrote:

Byron is the perfect chameleon, possessing the fabulous quality attributed

to that animal, of taking the colour of whatever touches him.

 

What to do to accomplish my task?

I read the latest biographies.  I studied his poetry.  Most of all, I devoured his letters and journals.  The latter seemed to provide the most insight.  Often written late at night when Byron was alone, he would pen his innermost thoughts.  When I was researching A Shadowed Fate, some parts of the book take place when Byron lived in Ravenna in 1821 and was part of the Carbonari revolutionary movement that sought to free Italy from Austrian rule.  Byron was hiding guns in the cellar, writing poetry about Dante, and visiting his mistress, Teresa Guiccioli—but underneath all of this frenetic activity was a restless, discontented exile.  In Byron’s Ravenna Journal, he describes a wistful longing for his years in London and dismay that, in spite of his love for Italy, he still felt like an “outsider.”  Those thoughts provided insight to “shade” Byron as a character:  he was a lonely man in spite of his messy life in Italy.

Aside from knowing the multi-dimensions of real historical figures, I found that, while I had to “frame” my characters with actual events, I had to add scenes that could be true.  That’s a tricky balance.  Back to Byron. I know the basic events of his life, but they are simply facts.  I had to create conversations and conflicts that had narrative impact.  For example, when he lived in Ravenna in 1821, he had his young daughter, Allegra, with him.  Her fate is a central part of my book’s plot—as is her relationship with Byron.  I decided a way to show that connection was by creating a scene when Byron decides to send Allegra to a convent school; I set their parting at Dante’s Tomb since it is an evocative place in Ravenna, full of poetry and depth—the perfect place for a father to express his deep regret over parting with his daughter.  There is no documentation that records he ever took her there, but it’s always possible.  Even more importantly, the setting provides a way for readers to emotionally connect with Byron’s sense of loss. 

Lastly, avoiding the “same old, same old” vignettes about someone discussed and dissected as extensively as Byron was the ultimate challenge: including the well-known escapades in a novel can feel stale to readers.  To avoid that trap, I decided to have Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, narrate my trilogy because she was the “almost famous” member of their circle, and her voice was relatively unknown.  Using Claire as a narrator gave me a chance to create a fresh image of Byron (she was his mistress and mother of Allegra) from the perspective of a woman who felt she had been wronged by him, even as she loved him passionately.  Claire gave me a chance to have the creative freedom to explore how celebrity can create highs and lows for those drawn into their orbit—not always a pleasant way to live, but always dramatic.  Also, I decided to have Claire tell her story from two stages of her life:  a young woman of seventeen (when she first met Byron) and an older, wiser lady in her seventies who has mellowed somewhat with the passing of time.  The dual narrative voices provided me with even more opportunities to give new insights into Byron not just as a character, but a legend who haunts Claire.  It was a fascinating creative process which I savored as a writer.

Of course, aside from Byron, I included the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and novelist, Mary Shelley, as characters in A Shadowed Fate as well—each of whom presented the same problem (though to a lesser extent) of finding the person behind the celebrity.  But surprising nuances were there to be found in the same way I delved into Byron:  discovering that fragment of a thought or brief moment of reflection which pointed the way in their letters and journals.  It felt like digging for treasure, except these riches held value only in the imaginative landscape of my writing.

Still, a pearl beyond price.

Would I do it all again?  Absolutely.  I found once I started including real figures in my books that I would never want to go back to all imaginary characters.   Historical people are just so compelling to research, and I want to keep hunting for new slants on the rich and famous.  And maybe, just maybe, my readers will have a new awareness of how time and notoriety can twist the truth of a person’s true nature.   Hopefully, they will be intrigued enough to keep reading.  

For more information, visit the author’s website at www.martyambrose.com.