Janet Evanovich, best-selling author of nine crime/humor novels, is a late bloomer. At the age of 60, she is promoting her ninth book, "To the Nines," about Stephanie Plum, a bounty hunter.
Evanovich says she writes all morning, every morning, an eight-hour stint that begins at 5:30 a.m. in her New Hampshire home. "I do more thinking than writing," she said during a telephone interview from a book-tour stop in Austin, Texas. "It isn't like I sit down and the words magically appear on the paper."
Only 15 years ago, Evanovich, a stay-at-home mom, knew nothing about either writing or bounty hunters. "When I went to college, I majored in fine art, and I was a painter. Then I got married and I enjoyed making things. I liked sewing clothes and making chocolate-chip cookies. When the kids went to school, I decided painting was not where I wanted to go any more — and I had discovered I could be funny. Not necessarily at a party. But in my secret world, I could be an entertainer."
That's where writing came in. Having no writing skills and knowing no one who was a writer, Evanovich had "to learn basic English and learn how to write dialogue." But she did know about romance, so "I started writing little books for supermarkets. I got a ton of rejections. But I just kept at it. I had a very supportive family who kept saying 'You can do it!' It was 10 years before my first romance novel was published. Then I published 12 romance books in five years! But once the couple fell in love and went to bed together, I lost interest."
She yearned to write "a bigger book." The romance editors considered her their "token funny lady" and didn't think her humor would translate to crime. "But I liked to read action — the romantic adventure."
Evanovich watched TV's "Moonlighting," starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, which inspired her to write her first Stephanie Plum novel. "I didn't want to do a private investigator. I was a fan of Sue Grafton and knew I couldn't be better than she is. I didn't want my character to be a cop.
"Then one night I watched the movie 'Midnight Run,' starring Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro — and it was about bounty hunting. I knew then that was a possibility for me because it required the ability to lie and play a role, something I could learn to do quickly. I found some cachet in the term 'bounty hunting.' I loved the whole idea of it. I had never held a gun, so I learned, and then I tried to figure out what kind of gun Stephanie would use."
She also went to the Yellow Pages and found bail bondsmen, who put her in touch with some bounty hunters. "Then I talked to them and tried to learn what they did.
'I wanted to set the story in my native New Jersey, so I went back to Trenton and spent time with a couple of cops, drinking beer and eating pizza. The place is very important. New Jersey is almost a character in itself. It's a little downscale from New York, and it has a sense of humor about itself. The people in Jersey know how to have a good time. Jersey has big hair, the mob and the river to dump bodies in."
Evanovich admits there is a lot of her in Stephanie. "She tends to make the kind of decisions I would make. We both graduated from Douglas College in the New Jersey state system. I commuted and got a great education for almost nothing because I lived close to the college. But Stephanie has a lot of my daughter, Alex, in her, too. Alex is closer to her generation, so she makes sure Stephanie has the right shoes, listens to the right music and drives the right car."
Stephanie is also a woman of tenacity. "She's not the world's best bounty hunter, but she has good intuition. It's how she gets her man. At the end of the day, she usually succeeds. That's some of her appeal. She has a terrible diet, a slightly dysfunctional family — but she's a real survivor."
Traditionally, Evanovich fills her novels with "bad boys" — the kind of man who is a little dangerous. "That's because it's fun. It's also one of the most successful formulas in romance writing. There's the strong guy who doesn't take his morality from external sources. He has an air of mystery about him. Men often identify with the bad-boy image, too. Maybe they would like to be one — and women may not want to marry him, but he's fun to have a romance with."
Asked about writers who influenced her, she named Robert Parker, whose "writing is clean, precise, linear, easy to read."
But her greatest influence came from Donald Duck. "It was Uncle Scrooge in the Donald Duck comic books. They were always going on adventures, like to the Klondike in search of gold. Scrooge liked to push his money around with a bulldozer. Now I'm doing my own version of Uncle Scrooge. I read Nora Roberts and Amanda Quick — and kids books are great! But I still read Donald Duck — except that they don't have Uncle Scrooge any more, and I'm really angry about that."
Evanovich sees her heroine as "a pretty modern woman who likes to see the man kill the spider." So there is no feminism in her work, and she tires of political correctness. "I'm willing to offend anybody. Some of my humor is sexual and some is just 'I Love Lucy' — very physical comedy, bordering on slapstick."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com