Detective fiction is my medium for communicating with the dead.
I don't mean that I use it in a séance. Reading and writing mysteries is my special connection with my late father, Raymond Joh. He's the reason I'm a mystery author today.
When I was a child, we spent evenings watching cop shows on TV. They taught me the plot structure of police fiction. But my father wasn't just a TV fan; he also liked to read. I inherited my love of reading from him. His favorite books were detective novels. So were mine.
At night he would sit in his bed and read Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Mickey Spillane. I would sit in mine and read Nancy Drew. My father was very frugal, and he didn't like spending money on books, although he bought me quite a large collection. Why buy books for himself, when he could get them free from the library? Except that he didn't get them. He let my mother do it. I remember her combing the shelves of the mystery section, choosing books for him. When I grew older, I helped. If I brought home titles he'd read before, he simply reread them. That's how I learned that it's OK to reread books. It's also a great way to absorb what works in a good book and what doesn't in a bad one.
When I outgrew Nancy Drew, I moved on to the books my father read, but my taste soon diverged from his. He preferred male authors of hard-boiled detective fiction. He didn't like female authors who wrote about "love stuff." I devoured books by P. D. James, Marcia Muller, and Sarah Paretsky, and I liked a good romance subplot. Our ideas about my future also diverged. My father wanted security for his little girl, in the form of an education that would lead to steady, well paid work. I was nudged away from art school toward a science degree. I nursed vague dreams of creative pursuits during a twenty-year career in science. Meanwhile, my father and I kept reading mystery novels.
Long story short, I floundered into writing mysteries. When my first novel was published, no one was more surprised than I. No one was prouder of me than my father.
He accompanied me to one of my first author events, the Nashville Book Festival. "That's my daughter!" he told everyone at my book signing. He was the biggest fan of my samurai detective series, even though it contains "love stuff" and I'm a female author.
My father died in 2002. I'm glad he lived long enough to know that my books are on the library shelves with Agatha Christie. Mystery novels help me maintain my connection to him. When I read them, and when I write my own stories, he's with me in spirit. He lives for me through the art that he gave me the background to create, through the genre we both love.
Do you re-read mysteries? Which ones?
Editor's Note: Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro series center around a Samurai Detective in the last days of Feudal Japan.
