Sunny Frazier

&

Betty Webb

This issue I'm talking with two journalists whose novels touch on real-life crimes, albeit in different ways.

Californian Sunny Frazier, www.sunnyfrazier.com , author of FOOLS RUSH IN, (Wolfmont Press, Dec. 2006) got her degree in Journalism after serving in the Navy. When the newspaper she wrote for folded, she went to work for 11 years as an office assistant with the Fresno County Sheriff's Department's undercover narcotics team.

Arizonan Betty Webb, author of DESERT CUT, (Poisoned Pen Press, Feb. 2008) came to Journalism via advertising. After dropping out of college, she worked on Madison Avenue and wrote two produced plays. She's since retired after 20 years as a reporter and book reviewer to concentrate on her novels.

Both women say that their workplace offered ideas that later influenced their books.

Sunny Frazier's real-life job and personal interest in casting horoscopes inspired the character of Christy Bristol, a narcotics office assistant who's asked by a narcotics detective, and her ex-boyfriend, to cast horoscopes to help catch the drug dealer he suspects of murdering a snitch. The book also sheds light on the real world of narcotics trafficking in rural San Joaquin Valley .

“The first case I worked with the narcotics team inspired the novel and series,” Sunny recalls. “I was actually asked to do a horoscope on a drug dealer whom we suspected had ordered several hits.”

Sunny says the detective learned the suspect was spending lots of money on astrology hotlines and asked her to fake a horoscope. The hope was that the horoscope would make him paranoid and possibly get him to reveal one of the victim's burial sites.

“I was intrigued, but refused to cast the horoscope,” she says. “I didn't want to wind up in court testifying in what might be a case of entrapment. And I didn't want to lose my job.”

The idea haunted her enough that Sunny created her character, Christy, a conflicted younger woman. “I put her through some tough tests and she had to find her strengths,” Sunny says. “I forced her to learn to survive and grow.”

Writing the novel also became a way for her to shine a light on the effects of drugs on a community. “When I started the novel, methamphetamine was showing up more and more on the streets and became a growing concern for my narcotics team,” she explains. “By the time I finished the novel, Fresno County was named the meth capitol of the world. In the context of the novel, I tried to explain to readers how this drug took root in the farmland of central California .”

Sunny is now seeking a publisher for her second novel, tentatively titled WHERE ANGELS FEAR, in which Christy and her sidekick investigate the disappearance of a wealthy man and look into the VA hospital system, a local university and a sex club. It also is partly based on a case she was involved in.

“ Life and my experiences inspire me,” she says. “The men I worked with and their dedication inspire me. I don't pretend they're perfect—some are very flawed—but the experience of working the narcotics detail was what we referred to as an ‘A ticket ride.' For those of you who remember the early days of Disneyland , you'll understand the term. I feel very blessed that I fell into a law enforcement job and mystery writing at roughly the same time. I always knew I would write a book, but I never imagined it would be in the mystery genre. After a job like narcotics secretary, it was a no-brainer.”

Favorite Quote:
“The temperature topped 105 degrees for the twelfth day in a row. The San Joaquin Valley was a pressure cooker, surrounded by mountains that pushed the heat back onto the California flatlands until tempers exploded… Whenever the thermometer skyrocketed past 100 it seemed to ignite the worst in people… Crimes of summer were crimes of passion and hate, all too often escalating to PC 187—Murder.” – From FOOLS RUSH IN, Wolfmont Press.

Journalist Betty Webb, www.bettywebb-mystery.com has interviewed the famous to the infamous, presidents, and people from all walks of life.

Once Betty decided to retire from full time reporting and book reviewing, she didn't stop interviewing. Instead, she continued to tackle the “hard” topics, beginning with spousal abuse, murder and the abuse of eminent domain in her debut Lena Jones, P.I. mystery, DESERT NOIR (Poisoned Pen Press, 2001), to the secretive world of polygamy in her second novel, DESERT WIVES, (Poisoned Pen Press, 2004).

In her fifth and latest Lena Jones mystery, Betty tackles an even more insidious topic, genital mutilation of women, in the aptly named DESERT CUT, (Poisoned Pen Press, Feb. 2008). This is her sixth published novel.

In DESSERT CUT, P.I. Lena Jones and an Oscar-winning director scouting locations for a film documentary on Arizona's Apache Wars discover the body of a young girl. Lena investigates the child's gruesome death while facing demons from her own rough childhood. The book is set against the backdrop of Geronimo's war and modern immigration, along with a modern Underground Railroad fighting to save young victims of an ancient practice that's arrived at America 's shores.

Betty admits that the hardest part of doing this book was “writing it without crying my eyes out. It IS based on a true story. I spent lots of time doing interviews with people who refused to let their names be known (for good reason). Plus, I lived in the library for a while, and also interviewed journalist friends who had done stories about the subject matter in ‘Desert Cut.' It was even more difficult to get people to talk to me about this particular subject than it was to get the polygamists to talk to me for ‘Desert Wives.'”

Inspired by “the rise of this terrible practice in America,” Betty wanted to shed light on the inherent cruelty in this tradition involving the removal and alteration of female genitalia to keep girls virginal until marriage. (See the World Health Organization facts page for more information: ( http://www.who.int/topics/female_genital_mutilation/en/ ).

Most of the women are of African descent, but the practice is seen in other cultures and countries – and now even in America . “More than 200 million women LIVING RIGHT NOW have had their genitals removed in order to ‘keep them pure,'" Betty says. “One-third of the girls do not survive this process, which has now -- thanks to our goofy-beyond-belief immigration policies -- arrived in America .”

It's this kind of hard-hitting topic that Betty believes makes her fiction, which she classifies as “noirs on steroids,” unique. “I write about the stories I covered when I was a full-time journalist, and I covered some pretty rough stuff,” she says.

Betty has written a new, more “traditional” mystery series inspired by her volunteer work at the Phoenix Zoo. In THE ANTEATER OF DEATH, coming out in November '08, a zookeeper clears a Giant Anteater as the suspect in the death of a man at a California zoo, discovering instead that one of her close friends might be the true killer.

That doesn't mean the Lena Jones story is over; far from it. Betty loves casting a light on society's ills and showing “the very real social wrongs that are continually ignored by the legal system.”

In the next Lena Jones Mystery, DESERT LOST, due out in fall 2009, she returns to the theme of DESERT WIVES, this time focusing on the “lost boys” of polygamy. “While researching ‘Desert Wives,' I discovered that there were also polygamists living in Phoenix , Mesa , and Tempe, Arizona,” she adds. “I didn't have room in the book to put that in, so this time around I have.”

Giving viewers a glimpse of another dimension of society through Lena Jones's eyes is something that Betty hopes to do for several novels to come. She admits she'd thought of finishing up the series at book 10 with Lena discovering who shot her and what happened to her parents…but then maybe not.

“ I, and my readers, love the Lena Jones character and the situations she gets herself into,” Betty says. “At first I thought that I'd wind up the series with the 10th book, but now I see that Lena 's discoveries merely lead to a bigger problem for her -- so I may not end the series there.”

Favorite Quote:
"For all our so-called concern about human rights, when the world's victims were mainly women and girls, America turned a blind eye. Churches and charitable groups, for instance, made so much fuss about the Lost Boys of the Sudan , yet never spared a thought for the Sudan 's lost girls. Weren't girls human, too?" – Lena Jones in DESERT CUT, Poisoned Pen Press.