Janet LaPierre

I spent the first fifteen years of my life in Des Moines, Iowa, the oldest of three daughters of a Florida-bound young couple who ran out of money in Iowa. The climate was brutal, but children don't fret much about hot and cold. More importantly, the schools were excellent, and the public library was a royal kingdom to any book-hungry child.

Most people went to church, Baptist or Lutheran in my neighborhood. My sisters and I were sent to the Baptist Sunday school because it was nearby; my parents went to no church at all, and no one bothered them about it. At the end of our street of ordinary working-class families lived a woman with her two grown daughters, one of them the mother of an illegitimate child, the other clearly a lesbian. That circumstance wasn't discussed; I didn't understand it until much later. But here's the odd thing to me now: although the three were not much involved with the rest of us, nobody bothered them, either. Then and perhaps now, the midwest was more varied than stereotypes would allow. But still very hot and very cold.

My parents were workers, but also readers, most often of popular fiction and "murder mysteries"; my mother read to her children regularly until we could do that for ourselves. My sisters and I were good students; we all read for pleasure as well as for school, but I alone became a fiction addict. Pure laziness, my frustrated mother finally proclaimed it; maybe so, but it was not after all a curable condition and persists to this day.

When I was in high school, my parents escaped the midwest for Arizona, which they saw as a refuge. A local beer commercial of the time said, "It's Lucky when you live in Arizona!" and they agreed wholeheartedly (although I don't think they cared for the beer). I finished high school there and earned a degree in English from the University of Arizona in Tucson, but never came to love the desert as they did. I didn't find my own true home until I came in my mid-twenties to northern California. The cold Pacific ocean within sight and often sound, stern granite mountains a short trip away: that's my necessary landscape.

I taught school; I married, and my husband and I raised two daughters. That was fun; mostly I read to them a lot. When they made it clear to me that they no longer needed mothering, I thought "Ooo-kay, it's time." I could not be Faulkner or Dostoevsky or Camus; but what about Margaret Millar? Charlotte Armstrong? Dell Shannon? Josephine Tey?

Couldn't be them, either. But I work hard trying, a fact my mother would be pleased to know.

Above: Janet LaPierre's new and somewhat expanded mobile research and writing office. Below: writer's companion Dulcie, who chases balls and ghosts, keeps a writer's feet and heart warm, and tries to emulate her mentor, Emmitt, now gone from us.

 

Read more about Dulcie and Emmitt in the essay Memorable Characters.

 

Published Fiction

Novels: see the Series page

Short Stories:

"The Man Who Loved His Wife" - SISTERS IN CRIME 3, Berkley Books - 1990
and also in WOMEN IN THE TREES - Beacon Press - 1996
and on audio cassette in FEMMES AND FATALITIES - Decum Press - 1992

"Take Care of Yourself" - MALICE DOMESTIC 1 - Pocket Books - 1992

"The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted" - SISTERS IN CRIME 5 - Berkley Books - 1992

"Luminarias Make It Christmas-y" - STILL UND STARR RUHT DER SEE - Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag - 1994
and also in ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE - Feb. 1996
and in THE CUTTING EDGE: THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST MYSTERY WRITERS OF THE 90's from EQMM - Carroll and Graf 1998

"Free Fall" - DAS MAGAZIN - 1995

"Patience at Griffith Gulch" - MURDER THEY WROTE - Berkley Books - 1997

"Family Gathering" - ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE - Jan. 1999

"Da Capo" - ELLERY QUEEN MYSTERY MAGAZINE - April 1999
and also in CRÈME DE LA CRIME - Carroll and Graf 2000

"Sex, Lies, and Apple Pie" - MOM, APPLE PIE AND MURDER - Berkley Publishing Group - 1999

 

A Few Favorite Links

Mendocino County
Trinity County
List of Mystery Bookstores
Mystery Readers Journal
Mystery Scene
Mystery Writers of America
Sisters in Crime

 

© Janet LaPierre.