"Oh, I had a little work done,” confesses Janet Evanovich.
“You know, gravity is not kind… I had no relationship with the person in the mirror. I didn't know who she was. I had a total face lift, and it was fabulous,” she exclaims, as though describing a great vacation. “They take your skin and they staple it to the back of your head. It's great!”
The 66-year-old author of the best-selling Stephanie Plum adventure romances – the latest, Finger Lickin' Fifteen , hit bookshelves last week – is as accessible as her work. Just as her writing barrels along from one scene to the next using straightforward language, so does Ms. Evanovich.
One minute she's on the subject of her refreshed face, the next she's discussing how she hired a personal chef, whose food has helped her drop 10 pounds since January, and after that, she's explaining the brand of the Evanovich Inc. enterprise, which she runs with the help of her two adult children, her son-in-law, and her husband of 45 years.
(In addition to family members, she employs a staff of 10.)
“I made a choice that I was not going to be a pretentious writer,” she responds without hesitation when asked how she deals with the perception that she is a mass-market, low-brow novelist. “I work real hard so the reader doesn't have to. I don't want them to have to look up words. And there are no flashbacks. This is a linear novel.”
Stephanie Plum was born out of Ms. Evanovich's frustration as a romance writer and her worries as a cash-strapped mother of two. A graduate of art school, she wrote romance novels for Bantam Loveswept, among others, under the pen name Steffie Hall for five years, starting in 1987. She was paid $2,000 for the first one – a huge sum, she thought – and by the time she had written her 12th, which was to be her last, she was earning $7,000 a book. “Some years I wrote four books. It depended on how bad I needed money,” she says, explaining that when her children were small, she would often stand in line at the supermarket “sweating and adding everything up on the bill, and half the time I had to take an item off.”
Despite her success, she was dissatisfied creatively. “I was sort of kicked out,” she says. “It was getting more and more difficult.… I wanted to go into romantic adventure, which is what I am doing now, but I couldn't sell it.”
She studied mystery writers, from Sue Grafton to Tom Clancy, and figured out a hole in the market she could fill. “I wanted to take what I liked from the romantic genre – the sexual tension and positive characters and the humour – and move that into the mystery structure. … Sue [Grafton] and others brought the female detective to the front of the stage but they were still pretty hard-boiled, and my lady was soft-boiled. She is a girly girl. She is a Jersey girl.” Stephanie is actually a composite, Ms. Evanovich says, of herself (she grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of a factory worker and a housewife) and people she knows.
“I became very deliberate. What I realized halfway through writing romance is that you start out intuitive, and you make all these choices mostly based on yourself and what you like and what talent you have, and … if you want to have any quality control over your product, you have to stop being intuitive and start being more of an analyst.”
