Claire Matturro - Sarasota Sleuth

Picture the only female law partner in a prestigious Sarasota firm.  Now make her a germ-phobic vegetarian with an obsessive-compulsive personality, a dysfunctional family, and a wickedly irreverent sense of humor. Then throw her into a series of misadventures with a cast of quirky friends and relatives, and you have the makings of an unforgettable read that will have you chuckling on every page.  This is what Claire Hamner Matturro has done in her four “Lilly Cleary” novels. Think John Grisham on laughing gas.

 Matturro, a former Bradenton resident, spent nine years at Sarasota’s Dickinson Gibbons law firm, becoming its first woman partner before deciding she needed a change. “I made the change in a series of small steps, like going into a pool a little at a time,” she says.  Having wanted to write since childhood, she joined the writing faculty at Florida State University College of Law where she taught for six years.  Then she took the plunge into full-time writing.  She wrote two serious manuscripts, both unpublished, before hitting on the idea of writing a legal thriller with a lighter tone.  That led to the creation of Lilly Belle Rose Cleary, the lovably neurotic lawyer from Bugfest, Georgia. Matturro describes Lilly as “a feminine composite of the trial attorneys I knew. Most have obsessive qualities, so I exaggerated them, and I gave her a dysfunctional childhood to explain her weird personality.”  The writer admits to having certain similarities with her heroine, however. “We’re both vegetarians, we love organic foods, and we both have rural roots.”

Matturro’s debut novel, Skinny Dipping, was published in 2004 and earned praise from the Kirkus Review as “Funny, sharp, savvy…this new kid on Grisham’s block is one to watch.”  This was followed by Wildcat Wine in 2005, Bone Valley in 2006, and Sweetheart Deal in 2007.  In Bone Valley, Lilly Cleary becomes unwittingly involved with environmental activists working to expose the dangers of an abandoned phosphate plant in Manatee County. Matturro got the idea for the story while driving through the real Bone Valley near Lakeland.  Although she had read about the phosphate issue in the press, she was shocked by the devastation and later realized that many people were unaware of the problem.  “Bone Valley” struck her as a great title for a book, and nine months later, she had completed the rough draft of the novel. “This book took more research than the others,” she explains.  “The hardest part of the book was condensing and weaving the research into the storyline.” The result is an eminently readable cautionary tale with particular significance for Floridians

Matturro’s fourth Lilly Cleary novel, Sweetheart Deal, differs from the prior novels in that it is “more personal to Lilly and more poignant, very much in favor of small towns and families.” But it has enough suspense and action for even the biggest legal thriller fan. The story has Lilly returning to her hometown of Bugfest to help her reclusive mother who has been accused of shooting a man. The plot includes fire ants, an unscrupulous developer, a corrupt county commissioner, voodoo eggs, and an albino ferret with Lassie fantasies.

Although Matturro lived in southern Georgia while writing all four novels, she traveled to Eugene, Oregon in 2007 for a stint as a visiting professor of legal writing at the University of Oregon. “Eugene was cool, very cool, and had marvelous progressive programs and great health food stores and wonderful walking and biking paths,” Matturro recalls, “but home is home.” Since 2007, she has returned to her adopted native state, Florida.

Matturro’s novels are set in the Sunshine State because “you can find almost any kind of drama in Florida.”  She finds the state “enormously fascinating…it’s got everything—crime, wonderful wildlife, fascinating history and cultures.”  She enjoys the works of other Florida authors and “can’t get enough of them.”  She also loves her craft. “I love playing with words, the music of language, and the sheer fun of making up stories.”  While she admits to having trouble with spelling, she says the most difficult part of her job is “the physical act of typing.” 

In her spare time, Matturro enjoys walking, gardening, and “hanging around watching the sky change as night comes on” with husband Bill (a retired environmental attorney), and Bunni, her twenty-five year-old cat. She is also a self-described “people watcher” which provides the inspiration for many of her eccentric characters. According to Matturro, “The key thing in writing is to be a people studier. Listen to as many different kinds of people as you can.  Listen and remember.”  And she hopes readers will come away from her books with something to remember. “I want readers to be entertained, but I try to slide in some education, so I hope they will learn something too.” 

One thing is certain: no matter why you pick up one of Claire Matturro’s novels, you’re sure to be coming back for more.

For more about Claire Matturro, visit her website at http://www.clairematturro.com/

Next: Dr. William Emener - Lessons on Love and Life

Tom Corcoran - Key West Chronicler

If you’ve ever been to Key West, you know that it’s one of the more colorful Florida locales. And no one captures that local color quite like Tom Corcoran. With a photographer’s eye, Corcoran gives readers a glimpse into the off-beat heart of the city that has captivated him for almost forty years.

An Ohio native, Corcoran joined the Navy in the 60s and was sent to Key West for an eight-week training course. He fell in love with the island and its people. “It was so fascinating to an Ohio boy,” he says. “The sights, sounds and smells were just glorious.” When he finished his naval stint, Corcoran returned to Key West. He took a job tending bar at The Chart Room where, in 1971, he met a young musician who had just arrived in town. Jimmy Buffett stopped in for a drink, and Corcoran welcomed him with a beer “on the house.” This was the start of a lifelong friendship. Buffett and Corcoran shared many memorable experiences. One found its way into Corcotan’s third novel, Bone Island Mambo, which includes a scene that took place on Buffett’s boat. Corcoran even co-wrote two songs that became Buffett classics: “Fins” and “Cuban Crime of Passion.”

Inspired by the sights and scenes around him, Corcoran decided to try his hand at photography. “I read books on photography and gave myself assignments,” he explains. “For example, I’d photograph only green things for a week. That way I’d learn to see all shades of green. Now I can look at a bush and see twenty different greens.” He soon became good enough to do some freelancing. His photographs were featured on seven of Jimmy Buffett’s album covers as well as on the book jackets of writers like James W. Hall, Winston Groom, and Les Standiford. 

By 1980, Corcoran’s life began to take a different turn “I had a wife and a kid, and I needed a full-time job. My son was at that impressionable age, and Key West was filling up with impressions.” So Corcoran moved his family to Fairhope, Alabama, where he worked as an advertising and magazine photographer until his wife’s death in 1986. He suddenly found himself a single father with a rambunctious 15-year-old, so when he was offered a job as editor of Mustang Monthly, an automotive magazine, he moved back to Florida and settled in Lakeland.  According to Corcoran, “Writing about (Ford) Mustangs taught me to spot details readers respond to, and editing the technical stuff to make it more interesting really helped my writing.” 

In 1998, Corcoran made the transition from non-fiction to fiction with the publication of his first novel. The Mango Opera marked the debut of Alex Rutledge, a Key West freelance photographer who is occasionally coerced into photographing crime scenes for the city police and county sheriff. Corcoran wanted Rutledge “to be someone typical of the Key West I loved, a vehicle for its personality to come through.” He also gives readers a sampling of the colorful cast of characters that people the Keys. “Key West is an island of characters. Many are genuine characters, and those who aren’t have manufactured characters for themselves. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody has a support team. Nobody’s a star in Key West.” 

 
The Mango Opera was soon followed by five other Alex Rutledge mysteries. Corcoran credits his Key West days with providing a wealth of story material. “I spent a lot of time listening to the stories of old Conch fishermen at bars on Duval Street, and I use these in my novels." He also drew inspiration from experiences closer to home. He got the idea for his 2005 offering, Air Dance Iguana, while sitting on his dock. "I was looking out at the water, and I wondered if  anyone had written about a murder victim being hung from a boat davit.  I couldn’t find it in any other book, so I used it as my opening scene.” He keeps his readers guessing by throwing out false clues and real clues at the same time, “like a video game on paper.” The story, according to the Richmond Times Dispatch, “will take you away to Margaritaville without wasting away your time.”

The sixth Alex Rutledge mystery, Hawk Channel Chase, was released in hardcover in 2009, then in trade paperback and Kindle download in 2010. It has three or four subplots, and Sam Wheeler (Alex’s fishing guide friend) is fundamental to the story.

Corcoran is already at work on his seventh Alex Rutledge mystery, as yet untitle The story embroils Alex in two cases, one in Key West, the other in Sarasota. And two dodgy street characters created for his second and third mysteries, Dubbie Tanner and Wiley Fecko, will team up to form a private investigations company that proves invaluable to Rutledge’s efforts.

Corcoran has also ventured into the publishing arena as co-owner of The Ketch and Yawl Press, a small company that specializes in non-fiction books about the Florida Keys. In 2006, Ketch and Yawl released Jimmy Buffett: The Key West Years, Corcoran’s compilation of photos and vignettes about Buffett’s life from the 1970s throughout the past several years.  It’s a must-read for all Parrotheads and anyone who is nostalgic for the old Key West. In 2007, Corcoran released Key West in Black and White, a collection of over 160 vintage black-and-white photos. The two most recent releases are fresh editions of existing titles. Undying Love is Ben Harrison’s study of perhaps the weirdest true crime case in Keys history. And The Railroad That Died at Sea tells of Henry Flagler’s construction of train rails to Key West a century ago.

Most recently, Corcoran has returned to songwriting, collaborating on six tunes with Florida-based folk singer John Frinzi for his 2009 CD, “Shoreline.” The title song is derived from a long poem Corcoran wrote while in the Navy. The two artists continue to write new songs for Frinzi’s next release. In 2010, Corcoran assembled a 40-minute high-definition DVD with 400 recent color photographs of Key West and an instrumental sound track featuring Frinzi’s acoustic guitar and the steel pan of John Patti. It's like taking a trip to the Keys without leaving home.

The ease with which Corcoran moves between fiction and non-fiction is no small feat. But it’s easy to see why his books have been so successful. All share one fundamental quality: an abiding respect for the reader. “I never disrespect the intelligence of my readers,” Corcoran says. “I know they’re smart or they wouldn’t be reading in the first place.” 

To find out more about Tom Corcoran’s books, visit his official website at http://www.tomcorcoran.net/

Next: Claire Matturro - Sarasota Sleuth

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera - Mystery...Cuban Style

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera has always loved solving puzzles. As a child, she lost herself in the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys. As an adult, she decided to pen some mysteries of her own.  Since she thought it was important to write what she knew, this mother of three became a licensed private investigator so that she could write from experience. Twenty-two years and nine novels later, Garcia-Aguilera is a prize-winning author and the head of her own PI firm.

Bloody Waters, Garcia-Aguilera’s debut novel, is the story of a couple searching for the birth mother of their adoptive daughter, a toddler suffering from a rare disease that requires a bone marrow transplant from her biological mother. Adoption is a subject that has always interested Garcia-Aguilera. “My best friend growing up was adopted. She never felt the need to find out about her birth parents, but when she turned twenty-one she received a manila envelope containing information about them. I was there when she opened it. She found out that she was actually Canadian. I thought about how strange that would feel, to discover you weren’t who you thought you were.”  The Miami Herald praised the Bloody Waters as “Fascinating…witty…compelling.”

Bloody Waters introduced Lupe Solano, a Cuban-born Miami PI with a penchant for Chanel bags, strong Cuban coffee,  and luxury cars. “Lupe is like the traditional male private eye in that she’s a loner and will do whatever she thinks will serve her client,” Garcia-Aguilera explains, “but I wanted her to be intelligent, fashionable, and fun.” Lupe’s exploits continued in Garcia-Aguilera’s next five novels, a series she describes as “fun page-turners that entertain and educate.” In addition to the mystery at the core of each story  is a subplot that involves an element of Cuban history, culture, or politics. “I don’t think the Cuban story has been told in a forthright manner,” Garcia-Aguilera says. “I wanted to instill a little about Cuban exile history.” She has a firsthand knowledge of the Cuban experience. Born in Havana to a family with deep roots in Cuban culture, Garcia-Aguilera immigrated to the US one year after the Cuban revolution.

When her contract for the Solano series ended, Garcia-Aguilera decided to change editors, agents, and genre. She penned two stand-alone novels: One Hot Summer, a book she describes as “a cynical love story about adultery” which was later featured as a Lifetime TV movie; and Luck of the Draw, a thriller set in Las Vegas.  Lupe Solano will return in Garcia-Aguilera’s next novel, Bloody Twist. In this seventh book of the series, Lupe is hired by an attorney  to aid in the defense of the highest-paid call girl in Miami Beach - a virgin (yes, you read that right!) who has been accused of murdering of three men. Bloody Twist has been completed and is awaiting publication.

When Garcia-Aguilera isn’t writing or working on a case, she enjoys reading, going to the gym, and baking “well-liquored cakes.” She is also determined to be “the only person on South Beach with an English garden.” But most of all, she wants to continue entertaining her readers with books that will inspire them to say, “She tells a good story!”

For more about Carolina Garcia Aguilera, visit her website at http://www.carolinagarciaaguilera.com/

Next: Tom Corcoran – Key West Chronicler

James W. Hall - A Florida Literary Icon

When James W. Hall stepped off the train from Kentucky in 1965 and took his first breath of Florida air, something magical happened, and he has been working to capture that magic in his writing ever since.  Hall is the award-winning author of short stories, essays, poetry, and sixteen bestselling crime novels. His writing has a lushness and lyricism that literally sing on the page and bespeak a writer who has an abiding respect for the beauty of language. He is also a master storyteller who keeps readers mesmerized with stories that are impossible to put down. 

Hall entered Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd) planning to become a preacher.  Then he met Peter Meinke, the man who changed the course of his life. “It was Peter’s first year teaching at Florida Presbyterian,” Hall recalls. “He taught poetry, and I thought he was really cool so I took his classes.  That’s when I fell in love with literature. Peter became my role model.  He had an incredible influence on me.”

But Hall’s love affair with reading actually began long before that.  As a young boy growing up in Kentucky, Hall remembers being dropped off at the town library while his mother went shopping.  When the librarian walked by, Hall grabbed a random book from the mystery shelf to make himself look busy.  He became hooked on the story and had “the extraordinary revelation that reading a book was fun.” Hall credits that unnamed mystery novel with setting him on the road to becoming a writer. According to Hall, “I started to picture the unspeakable – that I might someday learn the craft of writing well enough to create the very things I so dearly loved to consume,”

After graduating with a BA in literature, Hall went on to earn a Masters degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and a Ph.D in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah.  He took a teaching position as Professor of Literature and Writing at Florida International University where he has worked for over thirty years.

Hall published his first novel, Under Cover of Daylight, in 1988. The story introduces Thorn, the reclusive, reluctant hero who longs for a simple life hand-crafting fishing lures at his home in the Florida Keys.  Hall based his character on a Key Largo neighbor,  but admits that he’s thrown in some of himself as well. “Like Thorn, I’m withdrawn by instinct, but called into action by the real world,” he says. “When you write, you have the joy of disappearing into the world you’re creating.   But the downside is that it’s hard to disengage, and sometimes it causes you to neglect the real world of family and friends.”  Hall tries to counteract this by setting a schedule: writing in the mornings and afternoons and keeping evenings and weekends free.

Silencer, a book Publisher’s Weekly  describes as “Hall’s superlative eleventh thriller,” pits Thorn against two deviant contract killers as he attempts to keep an environmental treasure out of the hands of greedy developers.  Thorn finds himself pulled into a complex web of kidnapping, murder and family intrigue that leads back to the 1930s and a group of powerful men with a sinister plan.  

While critics have been lavish in their praise of Silencer, Hall isn’t one to rest on his laurels.  He is already at work on another book, but he still manages to spend quality time with his wife Evelyn, his “first and best editor.” He also enjoys reading, hiking, fishing, tennis, traveling, watching movies, and walking his three Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Carrie, Stella, and Maggie.   

It’s been quite a journey from that long-ago Kentucky library, but along the way, James W. Hall has enriched the lives of countless readers all over the world.  

For more about James W. Hall, visit his official website at http://www.jameswhall.com/

Next: Carolina Garcia-Aguilera - Mystery...Cuban Style

                       

                       

Mary Anna Evans - Digging Into The Past

At first glance, Mary Anna Evans may seem like your typical left-brained math whiz. But this former environmental engineer (whose first published work was entitled A Modeling Study of the NH3-NO-O2 Reaction Under the Operating Conditions of a Fluidized Bed Combustor) has been hailed as “a new Florida voice…one who can bring to life the rich texture…of the state’s coast.” (Tampa Tribune)

Born and raised in Mississippi, Evans describes herself as “a lifelong omnivorous reader.” She excelled in school, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from Murray State University and a master’s in chemical engineering from the University of Mississippi. Although her academic concentration focused on the sciences, Evans enjoyed her writing assignments and audited writing courses. After engineering school, she moved to Gainesville where she took a position as an environmental consultant. She fell in love with the Florida climate and a lifestyle where “people move slower and interact with more warmth.” 

During her eight years on the job, she never lost the desire to write. “I wrote what life let me write—haiku when I had my children, then short stories.” She wrote her first novel while confined to bed during her third pregnancy. Even though it was never published, it set Evans on the road to becoming a full-time writer.

Shortly after her daughter’s birth, Evans decided to leave engineering and devote herself to writing.  James Michener’s The Source convinced her that she could combine her love of writing and her fascination with history by using artifacts as the framework for stories. This was the genesis for her first published novel, Artifacts. “I started with a place—an old plantation on the north Florida coast. I asked myself, ‘Who would live there? How would she pay for the upkeep? Maybe by finding and selling artifacts.’”  Enter Evans’s main character, Faye Longchamp—a multiracial archaeologist who uses her skills to solve mysteries. “Archeological procedures are similar to physics,” Evans explains, “so my engineering background helped.”  In  Artifacts, Faye digs up a human skull and begins  probing into a 40-year-old murder mystery that puts her in the path of a killer. Artifacts won the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Award and the Florida Historical Society’s Florida Literature Award. It was named an “Adult Mystery with Young Adult Appeal” by VOYA (Voice of Young America).

The success of Artifacts was followed by Relics (2005), Effigies (2007), Findings (2008), and Floodgates (2009). Strangers, published in October 2010, is set in St. Augustine. It takes Faye Longchamp deep into the history of the Sunshine State, back to the first interactions between Europeans and Native Americans. A possibly haunted house, a murdered Hollywood starlet, and the frantic search for a missing young woman make physical and emotional demands that may be too much for the pregnant Faye. Critical praise for Strangers includes this from Publishers Weekly: “Evans explores themes of protection, love and loss in her absorbing sixth Faye Longchamp mystery…Compelling…”

Evans is currently at work on a very different kind of book, Mathematical Literacy in the Middle and Secondary Grades. Co-written with Dr. Faith Wallace, its aim is to give teachers the tools they need to use all types of written material - like poetry, video games, junk mail, music, and yes, books like Evans’s – to teach math. “I was completely flabbergasted to find that my books were being used to teach math, since I don’t consciously put math in them,” Evans says. “Yet I’ve learned that who you are comes out in what you write, so my engineering and physics education sometimes shows its face.” She calls this book “the culmination of many papers, proposals and presentations Dr. Wallace and I have made.” The book is scheduled for release in June, 2011.

When Evans is not writing, she is making music. A self-described “serious amateur classical pianist,” Evans also plays the keyboard, clarinet, violin, and electric bass. She has co-written a song she describes as “a love song for my adopted state.” Land of the Flowers won second place in the “Best New Florida Song” contest. In addition to her musical and literary endeavors, Evans enjoys yoga and spending quality time with her three children and Kitty Boy, her cat.

Evans had planned to set her seventh novel, Plunder, in Key West. Then came the BP oil spill. “I was watching the progress of the slick, thinking that if it came ashore in the Keys, I would need to deal with the devastating results,” she says.  As she watched the destruction spread through the Mississippi River delta, she remembered the time she spent there and realized there was a story in the archaeological remains that were being destroyed by the oil.  “I needed to write about this disaster,” she explains, “so I moved Plunder to the area south of New Orleans that suffered so much.” Look for Plunder to hit bookstore shelves in December, 2011.

Evans’s stories and characters serve another important purpose. She hopes readers will come away from her stories with a sense of the uniqueness of each person. “Faye doesn’t fit into any racial category. She’s a vehicle to point out, without saying so, that nobody really knows who their ancestors are. I want readers to like my characters for who they are, not the categories they fit into. Then maybe they can apply that to real people.”

 An age-old idea that shouldn’t be much of a mystery at all.

For more about Mary Anna Evans, visit her website at http://www.maryannaevans.com/

Next: James W. Hall - A Florida Literary Icon

Meet Tim Dorsey

Are you looking for a book with a real Florida feel, a frenetic plot, and quirky characters that will have you laughing out loud? Then run - do not walk - to your nearest bookstore and pick up one of Tim Dorsey's novels. Dorsey, a New York Times bestselling author living in Tampa, has written 12 novels which he characterizes as "surreal satire." His books are like peanuts - you can't read just one.

Dorsey's dream of becoming a writer started when he was 15. He recalls riding the schoolbus reading Catch-22 and thinking he wanted to write books like that someday. After graduating from Auburn University, he worked for four years as a reporter for the Alabama Journal. In 1987, he took a job at the Tampa Tribune where he worked his way up from general assignments reporter to night metro editor. In 1999, Dorsey left the Tribune to devote himself to writing full time.

In addition to Kurt Vonnegut, his favorite author, Dorsey was "hugely influenced" by Florida writers like Carl Hiaasen, James W. Hall, John D. MacDonald, and Randy Wayne White. He chose to write about Florida because "it's such a detail-rich state."  His stories center around the wild escapades of Serge A. Storms, a manic, amiable serial killer (that's right) who sets out to restore balance in the universe by inventively dispatching people who richly deserve their comeuppance. (If you've ever been annoyed by someone's window-rattling car stereo ramped up to full volume, you'll love the prologue to Dorsey's ninth novel, Hurricane Punch.) Serge and his sidekick, Coleman (a substance abuser of epic proportions), traverse the Sunshine State seeking out adventure and Florida landmarks. Their antics, according to the Associated Press, "will make you laugh until your sides split." Dorsey's plots are peppered with historical anecdotes and Florida trivia, and many of the events in his books come straight from Florida headlines. According to Dorsey, "What Serge does is invention. The other stuff comes from the newspaper."

Dorsey is a writer who truly enjoys his craft. "The joy in writing is to allow the plot to go where it wants to go, " he says. He especially likes writing the scenes where Serge is "being manic." Each novel takes him about a year to complete. He spends five months doing the actual writing. Then he takes a three-month break before coming back to work on the final draft.  He feels that his greatest challenge is juggling time demands and family obligations, and he has no inclination to write non-fiction because "it's just too much work."

Dorsey's most recent book, Gator a-Go-Go, has Serge and Coleman on Spring Break in Daytona Beach. It starts out with a midget being thrown from a balcony and gets crazier from there. (Did you know that Florida was the first state to ban midget tossing?) Suffice it to say that, after reading this book, you'll never look at Spring Break in quite the same way.

Dorsey has completed the 13th installment of the Serge A. Storm saga, Electric Barracuda. It has gone to press and is scheduled to hit bookstore shelves on January 25th. Dorsey describes the story this way: "Serge, armed with his perpetually baked sidekick, Coleman, decides to blitz the state and resurrect his Internet travel-advice website—which, of course, must be the finest and the final word on trekking the Sunshine State. To up the ante, Serge concocts a theme vacation for his cyberspace audience. And that theme? You, too, can experience Florida through the eyes of a fugitive."

Dorsey is currently at work on Book #14. In it, Serge goes to Miami to become a self-employed spy. "The rest," says Dorsey, "is a (spy) secret." Dorsey describes his career as "my wildest dream come true." And judging from the success of his novels, Tim Dorsey's readers are certainly happy that he's decided to share his wild dreams with them.

For more about Tim Dorsey, visit his website at http://www.timdorsey.com/

Next: Mary Anna Evans - Digging Into the Past

Welcome to Fabulous Florida Writers

When you think of Florida, many things come to mind - beautiful beaches, abundant sunshine, palm trees, retirees, manatees, and the omnipresent orange - but you may not know that the Sunshine State is also home to a bounty of some of the best writers around. In this blog, I'll be introducing you to some of them. If you're a book lover like me, you might find a few new authors to add to your list of personal favorites. Or you might learn something new about a writer you already enjoy. So join me on a literary tour of the wonderful world of Fabulous Florida Writers. I know you'll enjoy the ride!
Warmest wishes,
Jackie

Coming soon: Meet Tim Dorsey