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 Publishers Weekly Forecast Interview: Out of the Deep I Cry
Maine Bar Journal Interview
Forecast Interview with Julia Spencer-Fleming
From Helicopters to Holy Orders
-- by Kay Brundige, Publishers Weekly, 3/8/2004
PW: The heroine of Out of the Deep I Cry, Clare Fergusson, is an ex-army helicopter pilot turned Episcopalian priest. What was behind her creation?
Julia Spencer-Fleming: The priest part came first, but I knew I wanted to write action. I wanted to have extremely dynamic stories, and I thought by giving her a military background it would be feasible that she could confront danger, that she would have the skills necessary to disarm someone who is coming after her with a gun or, as in the case of the second book [A Fountain Filled with Blood], pilot a helicopter. Also, I think helicopters are very cool.
PW: Have you ever flown a helicopter like Clare?
JS-F: My father helped me a lot with the helicopter details, but no, I have not yet flown. I keep hoping to build up this dedicated core of helicopter pilots who read my books so that somebody will offer me a free ride at some point.
PW: You're a lawyer by profession. What made you turn to mystery writing?
JS-F: I turned to writing when I was not practicing law. At the time I was a stay-at-home mom and got involved with an Internet writers group. Though not deeply read in mysteries, I'd always enjoyed them and decided to try one myself. It seemed the ideal form for a novice because the structure is there. You have to have a murder, you have to have a solution. Having a skeleton to flesh out gave me a great deal more confidence than simply striking out on the completely wide-open boundaries of the literary novel.
PW: At the core of your series is the on-going delicate relationship between Clare and her married friend, Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne. Have your readers responded favorably?
JS-F: Oh, yes, I get more e-mail and more questions when I make appearances about their relationship than anything else. Lots of suggestions on ways to kill off his wife to clear the way. A lot of readers have thanked me for not having them jump into bed together, for portraying a couple who have this deep recognition of the soul with one another but who are committed enough to their vows to stand their ground and not simply give in to their feelings.
PW: Do you have any plans to write about the difficult issue facing the Episcopal Church today regarding the ordination of a gay bishop?
JS-F: In the book I'm working on now, Clare is going to have to face the repercussions. In the second book, she agreed to perform a commitment ceremony for two gay men. In real life the diocese of Albany to which she would belong is a conservative diocese. The bishop has come out against the issues of gay ordination. I thought it would be important for Clare to have to pay the piper because she is part of a hierarchy. She is going to have to account for her actions with a representative of the bishop. And I want to use that to illustrate the fact that it is not as simple in our church as just saying well, this congregation believes in it so we'll do it, and that congregation doesn't so we won't do it.
PW: What is it about the Episcopal Church that seems to lend itself so readily to mystery authors?
JS-F: I think in part because ours is a church tradition that honors human reason. The three pillars of the Episcopal Church are scripture, tradition and reason and that leaves an enormous amount of leeway for people to make personal moral choices within the church. So I think it gives a broader scope to characters who are faithful believers but who may be working out their belief in different ways.
--copyright Reed Business Communications, 2004
Fall 2002 Maine Bar Journal Interview 
The Maine Bar Journal recently interviewed me and two other lawyers-turned-authors. The article (a PDF file) features one of the worst photographs ever taken of me. Now no one will believe I'm the model for David Corbett's "The Devil's Redhead."
Maine Author Spotlight Interview
Julia Spencer-Fleming's first mystery, In the Bleak Midwinter, was released in March by Thomas Dunne Books, a division of St. Martin's Minotaur. The way it happened was every new writer's dream: she won a national contest, and the prize was publication.
The book is centered around an Episcopalian priest, Clare Fergusson, who has just arrived in the upstate New York village of Millers Kill to find an abandoned baby on the church's doorstep. Since it's a mystery, murders follow, and Clare and the local police chief, Russ Van Alstyne, solve the crimes together.
The setting of the book, Millers Kill, is loosely based on Hudson Falls, a small town near Glens Falls, New York, just south of the Adirondack Park, and another nearby town, Argyle, where Spencer-Fleming spent her childhood. She was born in Plattsburgh, New York.
This is the first in a series of five books she would like to publish featuring Clare and Russ. Her second, A Fountain Filled With Blood, is scheduled to be released in April 2003. Spencer-Fleming is a lawyer. She lives in Buxton with her husband, Ross Hugo-Vidal and her three children. Victoria, 9, Spencer, 8, and Virginia, who is 19-months-old.
Your manuscript won the St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic "Best First Traditional Mystery Award." What was it like receiving the phone call telling you that you had won?
I actually got a phone call, a voice mail message. Not saying I'd won, but saying, "This is Ruth Cavin, from St. Martin's Press, and I'm going to send you an e-mail." So I logged onto my computer faster than you would think humanly possible, downloaded it, and started jumping up and down with my then-eight-year-old daughter. It was very exciting.
What did you feel your chances were to win this contest?
I didn't know--I really didn't expect to win. It was one of those fantasy things. I would lie there and think, 'Maybe I'll win the contest.' What I realistically thought might happen was that an editor at St. Martin's would look at the manuscript, that I could make contacts, and get some good feedback. They got something like 240 to 250 entrants that year. I think if I had known the number I really wouldn't have expected to win.
Where did you get the idea for the book?
I started out with the characters and worked on developing them. The characters of Russ and Clare really sort of intrigued me--the idea of two different people with two different points of view, but similar backgrounds, interacting. The actual mystery has its genesis in two news stories. One was that very well-publicized case of the Texas couple who later went on to military academies who were accused of murdering a girl he had slept with. The other was an abandoned baby case in Boston.
Why did you decide to make your detective, Clare Fergusson, an Episcopal priest?
It's a milieu I know. I'm a lifelong Episcopalian. It solves the practical problem of an amateur sleuth. When you write an amateur sleuth mystery, you've got to give the person a good reason for poking around in murders. Normally, unless you're paid to by the state, you don't get involved in solving crimes. But a priest--part of their job is getting involved with people's intimate lives and problems, and helping them. I'm also very interested in touching on social and moral issues in the course of the fiction, and that opens it up to do that.
So in making it more than your typical mystery, you want to bring in real-world problems?
I do. I like the mystery genre, and I think one of the nice things about it is, it gives a huge leeway to have some very thoughtful discussions of current problems, of social issues, but at the same time, it's an exciting read. You want to keep turning the pages, you want to find out what happens. It kind of makes a message go down with a sugar pill. If I just wrote a straight book about class-conflict in upstate New York it would be as dull as dishwater. But if you put a couple of bodies in it, it suddenly becomes very exciting.
How did you pick the setting for your book? You grew up there, but you could have set a mystery in Maine.
I could have. Maybe it's just where you grow up. You have these kind of deeper evocations. That area of New York State has always seemed steeped in history. When I was a kid, we used to go tramping around on the Saratoga Revolutionary battlefields. And there's this sense, when you're close to the Adirondack Park, of this sort of looming nature that's almost about to fall in on you. It had very deep, dark overtones for me. There's probably some sort of childhood memory I've completely forgotten about getting lost while out on a family camping trip, that's channeling through me.
In your description of winter in the book, I get a sense of snow as something forbidding.
It's nice when you're sitting inside with the lights on, but it can be very intimidating when you're outside.
In fact, it can be deadly.
It can be. Every year, in the Adirondacks, there are people who die, just like on Mt. Washington [in New Hampshire]. There are people who go out unprepared for the kind of violent weather changes they're going to encounter. And you know what, I just realized this: my father was an Air Force pilot who died in a crash on an Adirondack mountain. In January of 1962, in a blizzard. It just struck me--of course, I was an infant then--having heard that story all my life, I wonder if that sort of imbued my sense of those mountains as a menacing place. He was flying a B-47 bomber out of Plattsburgh [Air Force Base] on a training mission with three other men, and they believe that they had an electrical failure in their navigation instruments and they were flying lower than they thought. They crashed into Wright's Peak.
That must have been devastating for your mother.
My mother had just finished college. She was 22-years-old with a six month old child, can you imagine? I did not make that connection before. But I suppose a lifetime of associating those mountains with this sort of mythic death has influenced my thinking about them.
Did your mother remarry?
Yes, she did. That's why I have a hyphenated last name. My birth father's last name was Spencer and when my mom remarried my dad, who adopted me, I kept both [fathers'] names.
Did your mother ever talk about the crash?
Very much. She made a book for me about it, because it was huge news in the area.
Do you plan to writer a series of books featuring Clare and Russ?
I have a vague storyline plotted out for five books. And I do mean vague. I know some of the highlights of what I'd like to have over those five books, in terms of the relationship between Russ and Clare. Which is, to me, really one of the most interesting things about the book. A mystery, in a way, is a contrivance. It's putting the plot into motion. The real inter st-- and what keeps people coming back to a series--are the characters. Because when you're reading a series of novels, if well done, the characters are growing and changing; their relationship is evolving. And that's what I'd like to see. It certainly is something you can do outside the bounds of a single novel.
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