Prostitute Diana Andrews has a business problem, and his name is John Doe.
Yes, she’s a prostitute. She works at the escort level, above the street, and she also solves crimes.
If you’re still with me, I’ll explain the why and the how.
My taste in crime fiction runs to the noir. I want to see bad guys and worse guys circling the drain and fighting it out on the way down. And it’s a funny thing about noir””there’s often a prostitute in there somewhere. The prostitution transaction requires a great deal of deception and self-deception on both sides, and what could be more noir than that?
It seems strange to call Diana an “amateur” anything, but she is an amateur detective, and that raises the usual challenge. How can I justify her involvement in solving the crime? As it turns out, it’s easy to put Diana in a situation where she has to get herself out of a jam or defend her business. She has been a murder suspect, and so have lucrative clients whose paydays would dry up if they went to prison. And in several of my stories the police believe that Diana isn’t holding up her end of the informal agreement that keeps her in business: “Don’t make us look bad, tell us when you hear something that we would like to know, and we will look the other way.”
On goes her detective hat.
Prostitutes often turn up as victims, informants, or even villains, but as far as I know, no one has done an entire series centered on a woman who sells sex for a living. Aren’t all writers in the crime genre looking for something that hasn’t been done? I seem to have stumbled on exactly that.
It all started in the summer of 2000, when I signed up on a whim for a fiction writing class at the Union County College in Cranford, NJ. One week our assignment was an action story. From somewhere came a mental picture of a man and a woman standing by a car parked on the shoulder of a deserted highway.
So far, so noir, But who were they? I decided that they were a cop and a prostitute, and just to keep things interesting, I made her the good guy. He wanted to kill her, and she needed to stop him.
I couldn’t think of a motive that would play in 1,500 words, until I made the police officer a woman also. The motive became jealousy over a man who had been paying Diana””I knew her name immediately””and ignoring the officer.
The story turned out well, but I realized that it was open-ended enough to become the beginning of something bigger. It is now the first chapter in my currently unpublished novel Do Overs. For a long time that book was the beginning of Diana’s main story arc, but beta readers suggested that something needed to come before it. They were right, and The Same Mistake Twice is the result.
Right behind “Why a prostitute?” generally comes another question”””What kind of research did you do?”
Nudge, nudge.
First, I read some books. It’s an occupational hazard for a librarian, which is what I do in my day job. I discovered that memoirs by prostitutes are a surprisingly large literature, and a huge help in getting my imagination working.
But there came a point when I needed more. I went out and found someone in Diana’s line of work to ask about it. I came to call her my Technical Consultant, because she gave me such wonderful material that I am still living off it. For example, in The Same Mistake Twice Diana earns a young housewife’s trust by drawing on plumbing skills that she learned from a client. My Technical Consultant gave me the general idea when she told me about a client who wanted to watch her wearing a skimpy outfit and working on his car. To that end he taught her some basic auto mechanics and body work.
My Technical Consultant did more than give me good stories. She made me realize that she was a person, not some exotic species from another planet. She had her dreams and aspirations. She read romance novels. She had friends, lovers, family. She was a woman like all other women, like some other women, and like no other woman, all at the same time.
And there’s the real reason for writing about a prostitute. She’s just more proof that women are an endlessly absorbing field of study””one that I don’t expect to master in one lifetime, but that’s no reason not to try.
This title is available from Coffee Time Romance, or wherever ebooks are sold.
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