A quick glance at Ohio author Julia Keller’s bio and it’s not easy to discern her passion for writing mysteries.
Keller has a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Marshall University and Ohio State University, respectively. She’s taught at Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and Ohio University. She was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1998.
She has 25 years of experience as a newspaper reporter, working at the Ashland (Ky.) Daily Independent, Columbus Dispatch, and Chicago Tribune — where she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for a feature series on a tornado’s destruction of an Illinois town.
It’s the stories she read as a child, however, that hold her true interest as a novelist.
“It’s really just a harkening back to my childhood, where I was a great fan of mysteries and thrillers,” Keller said in a phone interview from her Columbus area home. “There was a spy series that I’d read all the time. And also comic books, I was a big comic books fan. I really like stories that are stories.
“Despite the fact I have a Ph.D. in literature, and I think a lot of people thought I would write more literary fiction or biographies of Lord Byron. But the truth is, I just love a good story. And that’s to me is what mysteries do.
“They should be literary, of course, and well written, but there’s also this element of almost a kind of fizzyness with them -- where you want to keep going, you’re just pulled forward. To me if a story doesn’t have that, particularly in this day and age where people have so many choices for what to read, it’s really hard for me to justify writing it. To me, [as a reader], that’s always been the real test.”
The author of A Killing in the Hills, Bitter River, and, most recently, Summer of the Dead credits her journalism career as the perfect training ground to be a mystery writer. She said it forces writers, especially young ones, to “get out of yourself, out of your head.” Also, writing every day as reporters do helps to develop the discipline required to be a novelist.
“I think a journalism career is absolutely the ideal way to become, or maybe simultaneously be, a fiction writer,” said Keller, who grew up in Huntington, W. Va. “I think of so many things in my book that I know about through having been a newspaper reporter. Like a lot of us [former reporters] I began doing night cops, writing obits.
“When you work for a small paper, you do everything you’re asked to do. Even working at larger papers, you find yourself in situations that you otherwise never be in. You often deal with people at very difficult and dire moments of their lives, but it gives you a perspective about human behavior that you otherwise wouldn’t get. No one can live that many lives but as a newspaper reporter you are able to do that.”
Keller, who won the Barry Award for First Best Mystery for A Killing in the Hills in last year, used that perspective to come up with the protagonist of her series, Bell Elkins, a divorced prosecutor who’s returned to her fictional hometown of Acker’s Gap in southern West Virginia. She’s fierce and strong-willed and sometimes a little hard to get along with too.
And that’s all by design.
“A lot of the female characters in detective fiction are cute and funny and smart and resourceful and all that, but I didn’t see a lot of that darkness and anger that a lot of the great male protagonists in crime fiction have … like Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch and James Lee Burke’s characters [have].
“I wanted to give a woman that same kind of privilege, to have her anger sometimes be a little out of control and I wanted her to be rich and complex. She was born out of that desire to have a strong female protagonist who also was allowed to really get angry sometimes and have that anger make an appreciable difference in the world.”
Contact Bob Cunningham at bcunningham@theblade.com or 419-724-6506 or follow him on Twitter @1012rbc.
First Published October 26, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
