Interview with Author Sheila York by Jacqueline Seewald

After a long career in TV and radio, Sheila York began writing mysteries combining her love of history, mysteries and the movies. Set in post-war Hollywood, her series features screenwriter/reluctant heiress/amateur sleuth Lauren Atwill (and lover, P.I. Peter Winslow) chasing killers in the Great Golden Age of Film. Lauren’s third adventure, Death in Her Face, was published in October. www.SheilaYork.com.

 Sheila, congrats on the great reviews this novel garnered from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly! I also love the cover art and believe it will draw readers.

Question: How would you describe your series, if you had to pick a genre?

Answer: If I had to pick a genre, I’d have to pick two. Or maybe three. I’d call my series a historical mystery with some noir sensibilities—as one might expect since it’s set in the 1940s.  But it’s not hard-boiled. I couldn’t do hard-boiled. I’m too optimistic. My series also has a strong romantic element in the relationship between my protagonist, Lauren Atwill, and the private detective she’s fallen in love with after the wreck of her disastrous marriage to a movie star. Peter Winslow, the PI, is the Mr. Right who looks about as wrong for her as a guy can be. She comes from money; he went to work for a gangster when he was just a kid. He’s tough; he’s used to giving orders. She’s used to doing things her own way. Hey, she’s a script doctor after all. An artist has to follow her instincts. It’s her job to fix other people’s messes. Even if it turns out that fixing them means finding the person who left a dead body lying around.

Question: Why the 1940s?

Answer: I love movies, from all eras, but I have a strong attachment to many of the movies of the great golden age of film, which runs roughly from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s (you can get arguments started about the exact range). I’m also a great fan of Raymond Chandler, and most women who adore Chandler’s books fall a little in love with Philip Marlowe. But I wasn’t going to write a story about a private detective in 1940s LA. At least not with him as the chief protagonist. I wanted a woman. I wanted an amateur sleuth. So I wrote a variation on the theme of the woman coming to a private detective because she’s in real trouble. I told it from the woman’s point of view. That’s how Lauren Atwill was born.

Question: Death in Her Face is your latest. How did you pick that title? 

Answer: A beautiful starlet has vanished and her gangster boyfriend lies dead in the burned out hulk of their secret love nest. The title seemed a natural fit, especially when Lauren finds another body, someone connected to the starlet’s movie. The starlet might be a killer in more than looks.

I vaguely recalled a line from a romantic poem about a doomed lady, wasting from unrequited love, and a balladeer who sees “death in her face.” Alas, I can’t find the poem. It might have been a French poem I read in college, and I’m recalling what would have been the English translation. Ah well, the title works.

Question:  What inspired this novel? How did it come about?

Answer: The inspiration was the killing of a small-time hoodlum named Johnny Stompanato in the home of the movie icon Lana Turner back in the 1950s. I read about that case when I was a child, and until that moment, I believed movie stars lived the lives of their publicity. I thought their world was perfect. How could a woman get herself entangled with a volatile, dangerous man? Why would she stay with him? Why would she refuse the studio’s demand to cut off the affair? Was it fear? Was it love? Or was it something else? The Stompanato case made a profound impression on me. And when I started to write my series, it was the fictional possibility of that ‘something else’ that intrigued me, and unfettered by reality, I found a much more complicated reason for my starlet’s affair with the gangster. My book’s plot bears no resemblance to the Stompanato case at all. But its revelation of what lies beneath the beautiful mask of Hollywood certainly inspired me. 

Question:  Could you tell us a little bit about the heroine and hero?

Answer:  My heroine, Lauren Atwill, is a Hollywood screenwriter. She compromised a promising career trying to save a marriage, and by the time it finally crashed, it had very nearly taken her career with it. She’s mostly relegated to being a script doctor these days. She has a strong instinct to fix things. She’s brave, smart, witty, fiercely loyal, and when she gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go. She’s stubborn (just ask Peter about that). If she has an idea, she runs with it. A blessing in her writing career, a bit dangerous in her personal life. Peter Winslow, with whom she investigates in frequently stormy tandem, is a private detective who’s been around the block a few times. He started out working for a gangster in the Depression as a teenager, to feed his family. And he did what he had to do to keep the job. He’s done a lot of things he’s not proud of. He knows he and Lauren are a long shot. But he can’t resist her. She’s not like any other woman he ever met. 

Question:  Tell us about the other books in your series.

Answer:  Death in Her Face is the third in the Lauren Atwill, screenwriter, series. The first novel, Star Struck Dead, won a Daphne du Maurier award and was nominated as Best First Mystery by the Romantic Times. It’s the story of a tangled web of blackmail and murder, and it’s the story of how Lauren met Peter. Lauren’s second adventure, A Good Knife’s Work, takes her to New York City and into the world of a 1940s radio mystery program, where reality is created by sound alone. It’s all about deception, even after the microphones are turned off, and Lauren must peel away layer after layer of lies to solve the killing of a friend. 

Question:  What are you working on now?

Answer:  My fourth Lauren mystery. I haven’t settled on a title yet. It’s due to the publisher at the end of the year, so I’ve had my head down and am writing like a maniac. Lauren is loaned out by Marathon Studios, where she’s spent most of her career, and she’s loaned out to what she considers a second-rate studio! She’s not one bit happy. She’s thinks the head of Marathon has done it because he’s superstitious, to test whether it’s true that, when Lauren signs on to a movie, somebody gets killed. Then somebody gets killed. Then…the body disappears.

Question:  What made you start writing?

Answer: I can hardly recall a time when I didn’t want to write, so it’s impossible to say what made me start. I think writers just can’t help themselves. But at some point when I was young, I decided that, although I dreamed of writing professionally, I wasn’t good enough to even think about a career at it. Partly this was because I was terribly, terribly shy and insecure. But I also think a contributing factor was the reaction my writing got in school. When we were given creative writing assignments, I’d write a romantic mystery, but the teachers were looking for “literary” writing. I mean, mysteries? They weren’t “serious” fiction. And I’m afraid the system didn’t give encouragement to writing that wasn’t “serious.” When I think of the overwrought prose I had to listen to in class being read aloud as examples of what we should all aspire to…  I wish I’d known then it ain’t necessarily so.

So perhaps the question is why did I start writing again?

Two things happened, several years ago: 1) My husband, David F. Nighbert, began working on his first novel, and I saw how it was done, and I began to think maybe I should give it a try; 2) I had dinner with a friend from college days, and we had a bit too much wine and started talking about the romance novel we ought to write. It was just in fun. But later, I thought, why not? I decided I would not end up at 80 full of regret that I never gave writing a chance. So I wrote the book. It took six years. And it’s sitting in a file cabinet in my attic. It’s too long and has some other challenges—all the mistakes of a first book. But I started toying with another idea, about a screenwriter in Hollywood in the golden age of film, who gets herself into some very big trouble and can’t go to the police. That book was Star Struck Dead.

Question:  What advice would you offer to those who are currently writing novels?

Answer: Finish the book. I meet an amazing number of new writers who are worried about marketing their books and they only have 100 pages finished. Finish it, leave it in a drawer for three months (no peeking) and then take it out, re-read it and rewrite it, and rewrite it, and rewrite it.

Carve out time to write. Set yourself a schedule of some sort. Don’t wait for inspiration. I think sometimes we do a disservice to new writers by talking about how our “characters just took over” while we were writing. Without that comment being explained in much more detail, it sounds as if there’s some magic out there and one morning you’ll wake up with an idea, and the book will just write itself. It won’t.

Question:  Where can readers buy your new book?

Answer: Death in Her Face was released in October, and you can buy it now, online or in stores. A terrific holiday present (it takes place around Christmas in 1946!). If you order a copy of the book to be shipped to you from Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, I’ll sign it for you! My office is not that far from the store.

Sheila, thanks for being our guest author today. Anyone who would like to comment is

welcome in this forum. Sheila will be coming by to read and respond.