Debbie Brod spends a lot of her time in the basement of her St. Charles townhouse plotting murders. Poisoning, shooting and death by crushing, she always gets her corpse.
She’s so shy and soft spoken she doesn’t seem the type to think about murder all day. Yet she’s so talented at it the local authorities probably feel relieved she commits her crimes only on paper.
Mystery writer Brod plots the perfect murder, then has her imperfect private investigator, Quint McCauley, solve the puzzle. McCauley is a 40ish bachelor who sometimes drinks too much and tends to keep to himself. He’s often in over his head with a murder case but manages to solve the crime by the end of the book despite his lack of sleuthing skills.
Though cynical and a loner, he does have a tender side and possesses a quick wit. He’s not keen about violence and is more laid back than your average PI. You could say that as a detective, McCauley isn’t as much hard-boiled as he is over easy.
In Brod’s first book, “Murder in Store” (Walker and Co., $19.95), McCauley is chief of security in a high-class Chicago department store. But by the second book, Brod has moved him an hour west of the city to a fictional town on the Fox River called Foxport.
Foxport “is really a combination of St. Charles, Geneva and Batavia,” Brod said. “Though some of the places I write about are based on real places, I give them different names. I can pretty much lay out my own map of the town. It allows me a little more freedom. I didn’t want anybody to think that St. Charles was a hotbed of murder and corruption.”
Many locals would probably agree with her love of the town and the Fox River, as expressed through McCauley: “. . . I liked Foxport. Something drew me to the river. It revitalized me, calmed me. I liked the smell, the ducks, the canoers, the fishermen. The way the moon cast its reflection on it. The way it just kept flowing, working its way around the obstacles, never faltering or flailing.”
And only a local could get away with the line, “In late March, Foxport must be to the goose population what Ft. Lauderdale is to the college crowd.”
“What I like about the area is that it’s a suburb of Chicago, but it sort of has a small-town atmosphere,” Brod said. “This is the end of the suburbs. You go past here and (it’s) country. This is where the train ends . . .
“And then I’m close enough to Chicago that, if I want to set a scene there, I can. If I want to set it out in the country, I can. When I made the decision, it was solely because I live here and could research easily. But I’m very glad I made the decision (to set it in this area.)”
Brod had always wanted to write. She even tried her hand at science fiction but was unable to find her niche. It wasn’t until she read “A Lonely Silver Rain” by the late John D. MacDonald that she realized she could write about a private investigator. (In gratitude, she named her cat Travis McGee, after MacDonald’s character.)
“Then I started reading more mysteries,” she said, “because the only private detective I had read was Mickey Spillane, and it was too violent. Not that I have any problems reading violence, I just don’t feel comfortable writing it. But then I discovered there was a whole bunch of other (mysteries) out there. And as I was reading them, I realized I didn’t have to make (my protagonist) so hard-boiled, that he could be someone sensitive, someone inept.”
Brod, 42, has had Quint McCauley in her head for years. “I had an idea for a character that had been in my head since junior high,” she said. “It was a voice.”
Brod always felt nervous about attempting a novel because she wasn’t confident she could write something that long. “And then I’d get this advice from teachers,” she said. “I’m sure it was well-intentioned, but this `write what you know’ is horse hockey, if you think about it. It really made me think, well, what do I know about? My life had not been terribly exciting up to this point.
“But I think what you have to do is write what you feel. And realize, hey, how many people who write mysteries have stumbled over dead bodies themselves? It just takes some researching, and if your character is not involved in police work, you think what you would do if you stumbled over a dead body. It’s using your imagination.”
One motivator for starting her novel was completing a thesis for graduate school in 1985 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb where she got her master’s in journalism. “I thought, if I could spend 125 pages on `The Postal Repression of the Radical Press,’ I can write a novel,” Brod said.
Another inspiration was her husband, Don Brod, a retired journalism professor from Northern Illinois University. When he saw an ad in the paper for a fiction writing workshop at Elgin Community College, he challenged his wife to attend.
“I called her bluff,” he said with a chuckle. “I said, `You keep saying you want to be a writer; look at this.’ So she went . . . she put me in a precarious position, though. I knew she could write technical material, (but) I didn’t know if she could write fiction. . . . (When she returned from her first meeting), I asked her, `How’d it go?’
” `Well, before I tell you how it went, I’d like you to read it.’
“I thought, oooh, if this is bad, what am I supposed to do? So I read that first chapter . . . and I said, `I don’t care what they said, this is good.’
“And she said, `That’s what they said.’ “
What Brod had written for the workshop became the first chapter of “Murder in Store,” her first book, which she wrote in 1987. Like countless other detective novels, the scene opens with a sexy damsel in distress sitting across the desk from a detective in his office. But Brod added her own twists to the stereotypical scene: The man is chief of security at a ritzy department store, and the woman sitting across from him is the rich wife of the store’s owner who has just been caught shoplifting a pair of white silk Christian Dior panties. McCauley, the security chief, is certain he’s going to be fired any second and desperately wishes for an escape from the awkward situation.
“The first time she read (that opening scene), I would say that most of the people there realized that she had something going,” said Rachael Tecza, who directed the fiction workshop at Elgin Community College. “The characters just sparkled. It was the scene where Diana Hauser had been caught shoplifting underwear. And people were laughing. They were intrigued by it. And that was just the encouragement she needed to take off and start writing. And she just took off after that. She’s the only person I know who has published everything she’s written.”
Brod’s writing is also unusual because she writes in the first person from a man’s point of view. (To avoid confusing readers, she publishes under D.C. Brod. D for Deborah, C for Cobban, her maiden name.)
“The voice applied better to a male character,” she explained. “It worked better for me for a couple of reasons. One, if it had been a female voice, it would’ve been too much like me. And I have more fun with the character when I can separate it from myself. Also, I think a female PI-especially some of the earlier ones-had to be really tough to survive in that kind of world. Quint gets away with lots of things because he is a man. He doesn’t have to be as tough as a woman. Because he’s not a terribly self-confident person, he doesn’t have a lot of chutzpah.
“He does have a sort of dogged determination, but he’s not a real forceful person. And if I turned that person into a woman, she probably wouldn’t be very appealing. So I was able to make the character a ilttle softer (by making him a man.)”
Brod also feels more comfortable writing in the first person. “I think the PI tone is more of a confidential one,” she said. “You know, they’re telling the story, and the reader is buying into it because there’s intimacy there. And it’s like you’re there hearing things the same time the PI does. The PI doesn’t hardly hide anything from the reader.”
To help the male point of view sound authentic, Brod borrows quotes and situations from her husband and brother.
“I certainly would tell her, `Oh, a man wouldn’t say that,’ ” said her husband, Don. “Maybe one reason I don’t say that very often is because I keep finding my lines (in her books). Quint keeps quoting me, without attribution. No footnotes. Quint is a baseball fan now and exhibits a great deal of baseball knowledge-all mine.”
And it was Don’s idea to name McCauley’s border collie Peanuts, after Harry “Peanuts” Lowrey, a popular Cub outfielder from the 1940s. (The dog’s skill in catching Frisbees causes McCauley to name him after the baseball player.)
Brod isn’t above incorporating others’ life experiences into her books either. In her first novel, McCauley returns home to discover his girlfriend is infatuated with another man and has packed his suitcase.
“The idea of him coming back and finding his suitcase packed, I got that from my brother, who’d been living with a couple of topless dancers down in New Orleans on Bourbon Street,” Brod said. “He just loves it. He’s married now and has three kids at home. This happened in the early ’70s. He came home one day, his suitcase was packed, and he realized it was time to move on. I love that story.”
Brod often bases her plots on current events. “Error in Judgment,” her second book, was inspired by a newspaper article about a judge who had committed suicide during the Greylord investigation of the Cook County Court system. Brod realized there were probably a lot of people who were relieved he wouldn’t testify, then wondered what if it hadn’t been a suicide but a murder disguised to look like one. And a plot was born.
Her third book, “Masquerade in Blue,” was based on The Fox, an environmental vigilante who has fought against pollution in the Fox Valley area for more than two decades. “In the mid-70s, the Fox River was more polluted and in pretty bad shape,” Brod said. “There were some factories on the river spewing their waste into it, and (the Fox) would just plug their lines so they’d go back into the building.”
The character in Brod’s book is called The Blue Fox and is a female. Brod didn’t want anyone to think she was writing about the real Fox. After the book was published, Brod was contacted by phone by a man who claimed to be The Fox. She sent a copy of the book to an address he gave her, but she never heard from him again.
Her fourth and most recent Quint McCauley book, “Brothers in Blood,” involves a Morgan horse, a feud between two brothers and horse sperm. “Once I’m into these stories, it always seems the relationships take over,” Brod said. “I think deep down I really am fascinated with the relationships between people, among families, because in each one of my books, it seems like that’s the way it goes: dysfunctional families, families in turmoil. My books are character driven.
“I remember reading a nice review of my second book, `Error in Judgment,’ and the reviewer mentioned my complex plotting. I said, `Well, you know how that happens. When I get my characters where I don’t know how I’m going to get them out, I really have to do some fancy plotting to move them along.’ I really don’t know what’s in store for them.”
Brod refuses to treat her characters with kid gloves. For example, in her first novel, McCauley gets jilted by his live-in lover, loses his job and loses his apartment, all within the first few chapters.
“One thing I read about writing is (that) you get your characters up a tree and then you start throwing rocks at them,” Brod said.
Perhaps the Raymond Chandler quote on the bullletin board in her office says it all: “When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.”
“Her writing is clean and crisp and very vigorous,” said Chicago mystery writer Barbara D’Amato. “Her prose is fresh, her take is humorous, yet she’s got a lot of genuine human emotions as well.”
David Hunt, owner of Town House Books in St. Charles, agrees: “They’re real fun mysteries. They’re well written, not obvious. You don’t know what’s going to be happening.
“We’ve sold hundreds of her books,” he added, estimating that 20 to 50 people turn out whenever they host a book signing for her. “She has quite a following in the Fox Valley area, because people love mysteries and also because they’re set in this area.”
Michael Seidman, Brod’s editor at Walker and Co. in New York City, turned coy when asked about the size of her printings and number of copies sold. “It’s been solid enough” is all he would say. “We’re pleased, (though) she hasn’t exploded or broken out, which I think is a shame.”
Part of the problem may be the artwork of her covers. The two-color covers with graphics that unintentionally age the books 30 to 40 years belie Brod’s style of writing and contemporary topics. If readers do judge books by their covers, a number of potential fans may be passing up Brod’s mysteries. (The paperbacks, published by Berkley/Diamond, are more attractive, as are the British hardcovers.)
When pressed, Brod admitted the covers have some shortcomings. “I’ve liked some of my book covers. Some I haven’t cared for,” she said. “I like “Brothers in Blood” but thought “Masquerade in Blue” was blah. It didn’t stand out. A fellow mystery writer wanted to nominate it for the ugliest cover of the year. Generally people have told me that they’re not pleased with the covers. That they aren’t very eye catching.”
Also, because the publisher is a small, independent company, it doesn’t have large funds for marketing. Brod takes on much of that responsibility herself, writing letters to bookstores using the voice of her protagonist, planning her own book tours and signings and getting together with other local mystery writers to give talks at area libraries.
Brod also attends conferences and speaks on panels, reasoning that doing so will help increase her exposure. She’s also president of the Midwest chapter of Mystery Writers of America.
Seidman, her editor, said of her: “Debbie is a writer who does not feel constrained to obey the rules of tradition. She’s creating fiction that happens to be within a subgenre, but she is not reinventing the wheel, which is a thing I particularly enjoy about working with her. I look at over a hundred manuscripts and proposals a week, and there’s little to differentiate them except for typeface. With Debbie, I’ve got a storyteller, someone with imagination, someone with a little finesse.”
“She has a great sense of humor, which is one of the things I like about her, the good sense of humor and sarcasm her characters use,” Hunt said.
For example, McCauley’s comment about an ex-girlfriend: “. . . I (once) dated a woman who was a lot like the obscure foreign sports car she drove-exotic exterior but not much under the hood.”
Or this description of a villain: “Mason Burke was not an attractive man. He was thin and wiry with wispy red hair and huge freckles that blended into his receding hairline. I’d once heard another lawyer say that Mason has a face like the back end of an appaloosa.”
Or even throw-away lines such as these: “When Knox opened the door he was wearing only a towel around his waist. I’ve never had the nerve to do that, so much depends on your not sneezing.”
In her most recent book, Brod does a one-paragraph commentary on ashtrays that’s worthy of Seinfeld or Steven Wright: “I lit a cigarette and dragged a Chicago Cubs ashtray across the desk top. When I was a kid, I remember making an ashtray for my folks in second or third grade. We started with a plain old glass ashtray, and then the teacher took a picture of each one of us. We mounted that photo on a piece of green felt and glued it to the bottom of the ashtray. So every time Dad snuffed a cigarette, he usually got me right on the nose. Funny the things that were okay thirty-some years ago. Dad still had the ashtray even though he’d given up the habit years ago. I think he empties his pockets into it every night. I knocked an ash off my cigarette, and it landed right in the middle of the Cubs emblem. After the last season, they deserved it.”
Brod is working on another mystery, but this time is experimenting with other characters and different points of view.
“I’ve been encouraging her to broaden her horizons, to try writing something else and take wing a little bit,” said editor Seidman. “Even though she doesn’t live under the constraints of PI fiction, she’s now bound by the constraints of her own characters in the series she’s created. I would like to see what she could do if she stepped outside of that and tried something new and different.”
Brod dislikes talking about work in progress but is willing to say that it’s a quest book with people in search of an ancient artifact. She hopes to write a fifth Quint McCauley book later.
“Debbie works hard at what she does,” Tecza said. “A lot of people think that she’s been lucky, but luck has very little to do with it. She researched the field she wanted to write in, she has faith in her own originality, and she works every day. That’s not luck, that’s talent.”
