1) How did you become a writer?

By accident!

I wasn't one of those lucky people who know from a young age that they want to be writers and begin preparing themselves early. When I was growing up, I loved to read, but I associated writing with boring things like term papers and essay tests. People in my family tend to become teachers, librarians, engineers, and such. That was the example I was supposed to follow.

When I went to the University of Michigan, I marched straight into a science curriculum. I earned a B.S. in microbiology and a master's in public health. I worked as a chemist on an EPA research project on pollution in Lake Huron. I was a microbiologist for a company that manufactured media for growing bacteria. In 1981 my husband and I moved to New Orleans, where I became a sanitary inspector for the city (I issued citations to people who had junk cars and trash in their yards). Then I got a job as a quality engineer with Lockheed Martin at the NASA facility where the fuel tank for the Space Shuttle is built.

My favorite leisure pursuit was painting and drawing. I started doing freelance illustration and design and decided that I'd like to illustrate children's books. So I enrolled in a class to learn how to write one that I could illustrate. Much to my surprise, I found I liked writing better than illustration—and a lot better than science. And I found that I wasn't really suited to children's literature. I wanted to explore a wider range of subject matter than I could in picture books.

The answer is, a combination of heritage, love, and circumstance. My father was a big mystery fan. He loved Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, Ross McDonald, and other great, classic detective writers. And I'm a real chip off the old block. I started out reading Nancy Drew, then progressed to my father's favorites and the many other authors who fill the mystery racks at libraries.

This is where love comes in: I loved those books, and still do. The usual advice to beginning authors is "Write what you know." I would add, "Write what you love." What I love in particular about mysteries is that good always triumphs over evil; the truth will always be discovered; justice will be served. I also love the way the mystery genre lets me explore the dark side of life, and the extremes of human behavior. Murder is the ultimate crime, and it involves plenty of action, adventure, and emotion, in addition to the intellectual challenge of figuring out whodunit.

By a stroke of luck, heritage and love intersected with fortunate circumstance. This circumstance was the radical change that the mystery novel underwent during the late 20th century. The field opened up to include a diverse array of detectives, settings, and time periods. Lucky for me, there was even room for a samurai detective in 17th century Japan.

3) Why do you write about 17th c. Japan?

I realized that in order to sell a book in the crowded mystery market, I would have to write something really special. I wanted to explore a time, place, and characters that didn't appear in other books I'd read. I wanted to experience a world other than my own. I wanted to stake out some new territory so I could sell a book. I decided on a historical setting because I was more interested in classical detection than in modern detection, with its emphasis on forensic science. I'd rather write about witnesses, alibis, motives, and deduction than about fingerprinting, DNA analysis, and ballistics, which seem too much like the technical work I did for almost 20 years. By writing a historical mystery, I would be free of modern technology.

I chose Japan because I'd been interested in it since college, when I studied Asian history and art and fell in love with Akira Kurosawa's movies. Also, I wanted to do a mystery with an all Asian cast of characters. I'd like for there to be more books about Asians, and I figured that one way to make this happen was to write one myself.

When I studied Japanese history and came to 17th c. Tokyo (Edo, as it was known then), I knew I'd found my place. All the Europeans, except for a few Dutch traders, were banned from Japan, so I had my all Asian cast. Edo had a million people, including samurai, peasants, merchants, clergy, prostitutes, actors, artists, outlaws, and outcasts. Japan was a police state, filled with simmering tensions, political corruption, sex, and violence. Arts, entertainment, and religion flourished. This was an environment that had great potential for interesting crime. And 17th c. Japan was intriguingly different from America.

In 17th c. Japan, the legal system was more strict and cruel, but at the same time more free wheeling than in America. Execution and compulsory suicide were common punishments, often for trivial offenses. But there were no civil rights, no appeals, no lawyers, no getting off on a technicality—none of the things that complicate our legal system. And there was no pretense of equal justice for all. The samurai—the ruling military class—enjoyed the privilege of rank. Much of the time, they could commit crimes without any punishment whatsoever. If they were charged with a serious crime like treason, or murder of an important person, they were placed under house arrest instead of in jail with common criminals. If convicted, they were allowed to commit ritual suicide to preserve their honor, instead of having their heads cut off at a public execution the way a peasant criminal would. There was blatant sexism in the law: Married men could fool around as they pleased, but adulterous wives had their heads shaved, and their husbands were granted automatic divorces. Prostitution was legal, but confined to a special district outside town. Female thieves and other petty criminals were sentenced to work in brothels there. And a single man—the shogun—had the ultimate power of life and death over everyone.

This is great stuff for a mystery writer. One of my favorite things about 17th c. Japan is that it gives me such wonderful material for characters and plots.

4) How did you get published?

This was the hard part. First I had to learn to write.

When I was in elementary school and high school, we were taught writing at the most basic level: book reports; "What I did on my summer vacation"; how to set up a term paper. I got through college and grad school without knowing any more than this. When I set out to write my first novel, I needed to acquire some basic skills. I took writing classes, joined writer's groups, and read books on how to write and get published. While I was doing this, I was writing steadily. I wrote two "beginner" books that have never been published. Then I wrote Shinju, the first book in my samurai detective series.

My road to publication was almost as accidental as my road to becoming a writer. In 1992 I attended the New Orleans Writers Conference. Everyone who signed up and paid the registration fee got to submit an excerpt from a manuscript to be read and critiqued by one of the editors who would be speaking at the conference. My excerpt from Shinju happened to go to an executive editor at Random House. He liked it and asked to see the whole manuscript. Eventually, he bought it. That was 12 years and 10 books ago.

5) What’s your life like now that you’re a fulltime writer?

Getting paid to sit around and make things up is a dream come true! I’m a creature of habit, due to all the years I spent working jobs with regular schedules. Every weekday morning I take a 2 mile walk and plan what I’m going to write. Then I come home and write for 5 or 6 hours. I work from a synopsis, because it’s easier when I don’t have to figure out what to say and how to say it both at once. I produce about 5 pages a day, which is a miracle when you consider all the distractions associated with working at home (cats, telephone, e mail, shelves full of books). I belong to 3 different writer’s groups that meet periodically. In my spare time I study art at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art. I also like going out with my husband Marty, who’s an environmental engineer and political activist. Here’s a picture of him.