“River of Secrets: A Wallace Hartman Mystery” Roger Johns | August 28, 2018 | Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books hardcover | 978-1-250-11012-1 | $26.99 ebook | 978-1-250-11014-5 | $13.99 Mystery/thriller
Louisiana detective risks everything to uncover the truth behind the murder of an infamous politician
Detective Wallace Hartman returns in Roger Johns’ new novel, “River of Secrets”
DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. – Louisiana is full of politicians who will say anything to suit their agenda, but when one of them winds up dead under suspicious circumstances, Detective Wallace Hartman must dig through his list of enemies to find out who wanted him gone – permenantly.
Was it the politician’s son, with whom he had a troubled relationship? Was it the social justice activist who also happens to be related to Wallace’s childhood best friend? Does the cleaning lady who discovered the body know more than she is saying?
While the detective works the case, she also has to deal with complications in her own life, including a standoffish new partner, her mother’s new suitor, and her own relationship.
Roger Johns fills his second Wallace Hartman mystery with details that will make you race to the end -- intriguing questions, disappearing suspects, an exploration of racial and political tensions, a rich Southern setting, and a strong woman who will do whatever it takes to solve this case.
About the Author
Roger Johns, a 2018 Georgia Author of Year for his debut mystery, is a former corporate lawyer and retired college professor, and the author of the Wallace Hartman Mysteries, Dark River Rising (August 2017) and River of Secrets (August 2018) from St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books. His checkered past includes, in no particular order, med school dropout, bookseller, ranch hand, drapery hanger, party photographer, hospital orderly, shoe salesman, and tuxedo rental clerk. Roger lives in Georgia, and belongs to the Atlanta Writers Club, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime. With four other crime-fiction writers, he co-authors the MurderBooks blog at www.murder-books.com. Please visit him at www.rogerjohnsbooks.com.
About the Book
Herbert Marioneaux, a Louisiana politician infamous for changing his mind on hot-button issues, has been murdered and his body posed to send a message. Baton Rouge homicide detective Wallace Hartman has to figure out who’s sending that message. DNA points to Eddie Pitkin, a social justice activist who also happens to be the half-brother of Wallace’s childhood best friend. But even with the combative history between Pitkin and Marioneaux, murder seems out of character for Pitkin whose usual MO is to confront the wealthy and powerful with their inconvenient past. As Wallace digs deeper, she unearths a possible alibi witness, along with evidence of a deeply troubled relationship that points the finger of suspicion at Marioneaux’s son. While Eddie’s supporters are convinced of his innocence, his enemies are equally certain of his guilt. Under pressure from all directions, Wallace pursues her investigation into the dark heart of the political establishment as Baton Rouge falls under the shadow of escalating violence. When it appears a police department insider may be sabotaging her efforts by leaking information about the case, and after menacing messages are left for her and her loved ones, Wallace is forced to untangle a trail of old and disturbing secrets unaided by those she most needs to trust.
An Interview with ROGER JOHNS
What inspires your writing?
In terms of stories, I’m fascinated by what-if questions and how big-picture changes play out at the street level. In my first book, Dark River Rising, something about how the South American cocaine cartels operate made me wonder: What if an unexpected change in the industry occurred in this particular way I was thinking about? What would that look like, as it took root at the bottom of the criminal food chain? Who would the new winners be and what lengths would they go to, to seize control of this change? And what would it mean for the crime fighters caught in the turmoil that came in its wake? My forthcoming book, River of Secrets, grew out of the question: What if a white man with a history as a committed segregationist claimed to have a change of heart just as he was embarking on a career in politics? Would anyone believe his evolution was genuine? Would old friends become enemies and vice-versa, and what forces would these changes call into action? When it comes to characters, I’m driven by how individuals are affected by family and social interrelationships, and how people deal with certain distinctions. For instance, there’s a difference between the things that make us happy and the things that merely make us feel good, and failing to understand that distinction can produce a lifetime of surprising outcomes. It’s the same with failing to understand the difference between who is a friend and who is merely being friendly. And then, there are certain themes like betrayal, race, religion, contemporary southern culture, and the disruption of settled expectations that maintain a strong hold on my approach to stories and characters.
Where did the idea for Wallace come from?
Wallace emerged from a long period of frustration at not being able to get past the first seventy or so pages of what eventually became Dark River Rising. The original main character was male and, for some reason, he just wasn’t the right person to carry the plot forward––something I completely missed during the early stages of trying to write that book. Over a period of a few years, I changed his age, his occupation, his approach to the case he had to solve––everything I could think of––but the story wouldn’t move past a certain point. And then one day, for no reason I can put my finger on, a question just popped into my head: Why don’t you have a woman at the wheel? It was a completely unexpected insight, but it felt correct and, instinctively, I knew it was the right approach. After I made the change, the story that had stalled so many times before just galloped out of the gate. It still wasn’t very good, but the change at least allowed me to get all the way to the end. Two important things came out of that experience: I learned that stories need to be about someone and not something, and I quit trying to force things to fit a preconceived idea about how I thought they should be. The story will be what it will be, and I had to learn to be patient and open to that and to trust it enough to invest the time and energy to follow where it led. It’s worth noting that the original male character stayed on as a major secondary character but I gave him a new name and gave his original name to my new female character.
Can you tell us about your journey to becoming a published author?
After I changed Wallace from male to female, it took almost a year to get the book finished. After that, I started trying to sell it. Twice a year, the Atlanta Writers Club hosts a really fine writers’ conference. Agents and editors will critique your work and listen to you pitch your book. Three times I went, I listened, I pitched, and I got nowhere. During that time, I joined writers’ organizations and I religiously attended two different critique groups. I learned a lot and the book went through five or six complete rewrites. Characters came and went, whole story lines came and went, and the book got a lot shorter and a lot cleaner. When I wasn’t pitching at conferences, I was cold-querying agents––dozens of them. At my fourth Atlanta Writers Conference, in May of 2015, April Osborn, an editor with Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press critiqued the first fifteen or twenty pages and liked it enough to ask for the rest of the book, so I sent it to her. A few months later, she called and said she wanted to buy it.
How did you learn to write from a female point of view?
This was the most interesting part of the writing experience for me. Even though I took great comfort from having discovered that the main character needed to be female, I was very nervous about how to get that done. It was completely beyond my experience, and I felt certain editors, and agents, and readers would have zero patience for a poor job. So, I sought help. At a meeting of the Georgia Romance Writers, I met one of the women I would eventually be in a critique group with––the second of the two groups I mentioned earlier. After several exchanges of pages between the two of us, she invited me to join her group which, except for me, was all women––all from different backgrounds, all writing different genres (romance, mystery, women’s fiction, and science fiction), and all with strong female leads. During the year between when I joined this group and when I met April Osborn, I got a very intense education on how to properly write a female character. Being a part of this group was a serious turning point for me, not only in my writing, but personally. The process of learning to write from a different point of view changed me. It brought me to a more informed understanding of how men and women relate to each other and themselves, and made me aware of just how much I still have to learn in that regard.
Why did you decide to set the series in Louisiana, and in Baton Rouge, in particular?
Oddly, I never really thought about it, so, in a sense, I didn’t actually decide. While just about every other aspect of the series was the subject of some level of conscious internal debate, the setting just sort of happened on its own. I grew up in Louisiana and lived for ten very transformative years in Baton Rouge where I went to college and, a few years after that, to law school. That influenced me in all the predictable ways, but it was my working years between and after my schooling, that exposed me, for the first time in any sustained way, to people who lived chronically desperate, chaotic lives––people for whom poverty, substance abuse, and violence (domestic and social) were commonplace features of everyday life. Some of these people appeared to have only bad opportunities while others seemed indifferent to or even disdainful of any good opportunities came their way. All the while, I was living a few miles away in a part of town where life, for the most part, was considerably easier and a good deal safer. The contrast between the environment I went home to and the one the people I worked around went home to could not have been starker or more intriguing. Given the deep inventory of important experiences I accumulated in Baton Rouge, situating the series there, in hindsight, seems inevitable. Other times and places get factored into the setting, but the Baton Rouge years are the axis years, the years that define the look and feel of the world that Wallace lives and works in.
What intrigues you about writing crime fiction?
As a child, the first books I read, outside of the Dick and Jane readers, were mysteries–– Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Alfred Hitchcock Mysteries for kids. I was mesmerized by these stories, and I read as many as I could get my hands on. So, the pump was primed, from early on, with mystery and crime fiction. It’s also the case that I’m fascinated with the extremes of thought and behavior that people are capable of––extremes which often manifest as criminality. And the effects of criminality––on the criminal and on the people and society surrounding the criminal––can be stunning. So, crime provides a lot to work with, in terms of storytelling. Within the confines of a single story, you can show people at their best and their worst, their most courageous and most cowardly, their most dangerous and their most benign, and that makes for very engaging entertainment. It’s also the case that I’m drawn to puzzles, and a mystery novel is very much a puzzle, for the reader as well as the writer. Before the reader can have the chance to solve the puzzle, the writer must build it, and building a mystery novel is quite difficult. The story absolutely must obey the rules dictated by reader expectations. Breaking these rules will anger the reader and hasten the end of the writer’s mystery-writing career. And all of the required elements must be present and work together with the precision of a clockwork. The writer can add a few extra parts, just to lead readers down the occasional false trail, but leaving out any of the required elements is strictly forbidden. And, generally, the story must be interesting. The challenge of getting all this right is very compelling.
Do you plot the books out ahead of time or work everything out as you go?
A little of both. I always know the ending from the outset, so writing the story is more or less an exercise in reverse engineering a set of events that lead up to that ending. Some of this is the result of conscious planning, and some of it is just serendipity, a process of discovery. It’s always so interesting to see what can be discovered once you’ve put yourself in a position of need––a turn of phrase, an idea for a scene that lets you come at a problem from an unanticipated direction, an insight into a character’s personality. Unfortunately, sometimes what shows up is dull and lifeless so I have to discard it. However, every once in a while, something very cool turns up and fits right in with the trajectory of the story and the characters, and I can use it.
