What sets Ellen Hart and Sandra Scoppettone apart from the increasingly crowded pack of mystery writers is their sleuths.
Scoppettone’s Lauren Laurano is a quick-witted private eye who packs heat and lives in a Greenwich Village brownstone. Hart’s Jane Lawless is a Minneapolis restaurateur who solves cases in her spare time in the English country house tradition.
But those aren’t the telling details.
Like their creators, Lawless and Laurano also happen to be lesbians. Hart and Scoppettone are among the first lesbian authors to be printed for the mass market by a mainstream publishing house.
“I don’t think these books would have been published 10 years ago or 15 years ago,” says Hart. “Now I think there’s a great interest (among New York publishers) in gay and lesbian writing, and I think we’re a part of that.”
Adds Scoppettone: “When I started this series I actually didn’t know if anyone would publish it even though I’d written and published many books and they were all mainstream. But several houses wanted it. The timing was right.”
Hart believes one of the reasons their books are popular is that “they’re not ghetto books. They’re not written specifically for any audience. They’re written for a general audience, and I think anybody can appreciate them.
“They don’t push a political agenda, but I think particularly in the world we live in now where everything seems to be moving to the right, to have a (lesbian) character who is decent and normal and living a life that is within the larger world is a very political statement.”
Nevertheless, there is a sense of political correctness in the two books just out in Ballantine paperbacks that the authors were in town to promote recently. In Hart’s “A Killing Cure,” for example, Jane Lawless investigates two deaths associated with a venerable and respectable women’s club whose philanthropic foundation may be involved in funding AIDS research.
There’s also a Maya Angelou-like character, a black female poet married to a doctor who was wounded by anti-abortion activists. And Jane and her oldest and dearest friend, Cordelia Thorn, a humorous, zaftig theatrical woman, epitomize the feminist ideal of loyalty and bonding.
In Scoppettone’s “My Sweet Untraceable You,” Lauren is hired by a man called “Boston Blackie” to find out who killed his mother. There’s a gender-bending plot twist as Lauren discovers that the murdered mother may not be dead, and Lauren and others help a friend with AIDS hasten his death with an overdose of barbiturates.
What make these two sleuths different even from Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski and, most certainly, from the classic hard-boiled male detectives like Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer, is that they’re full-fledged characters. They have detailed domestic lives, lovers and networks of friends.
“Things have changed with women writing private eyes and thank God,” Scoppettone exclaims. “It’s more than broads, booze and. . .”
Hart jumps in. “Bullets, blonds and blood!”
“You knew nothing about the men,” Scoppettone continues.
Adds Hart: “You knew that they liked blonds or brunettes. You knew which drawer the gun was in and you knew what kind of whiskey they drank and that was it. It’s not enough.”
Scoppettone notes that “some of the other women who’ve written private eyes, like Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, they adhere a little bit more to (the archetype). Their characters are much more loners than our characters, although they have relationships and you know a little bit about their lives.
“In private-eye mysteries, there’s hardly anybody that has a good marriage except Lauren and Kip.”
Kip is Lauren’s longtime companion. She’s a tall, well-dressed therapist who earns more money than Lauren, a source of discord at times. Their relationship fleshes out Scoppettone’s novels, making them more entertaining and expanding the limits of the genre.
Scoppettone often populates her stories with real people. In “My Sweet Untraceable You,” for example, when Lauren comes upon actress Cybill Shepherd shooting a movie outside her brownstone, she reacts the way a heterosexual woman might at discovering, say, Mel Gibson filming curbside. She stops, stares, nearly swoons. (And feels guilty when she thinks of Kip.)
Are Lauren Laurano and Jane Lawless much like Scoppettone and Hart?
“Yes,” Scoppettone says quickly. “Lauren is based on me and Kip is based on my partner. They’re younger than we are. They’ve been together less years than we have. A lot of characters in my books are based on real people and sometimes I use their real names. Certainly a lot of Lauren’s attitudes are mine.”
Says Hart: “Well, Jane is a lot thinner than I am. I think I’m like Jane in that I’m probably somewhat of an introvert and I like to read and I’m fairly thoughtful about the world. I think I’m also like the other character in the book, Cordelia–as is my partner of 18 years. She’s very funny. I find more and more that I pattern so much of Cordelia on my partner. are also not like me at all in any major way. There are parts that are just creations.”
Hart, a Minneapolis native, was a chef for most of her life, but always wanted to write a book. By the time she was in her late 30s she thought it was time to get serious and spent one summer trying to write a mystery. It wasn’t very good, so she spent an entire winter reading the works of P.D. James and studying their structure.
“Someone gave me a book called “Murder in the Collective” and it was the first book I ever read that had a lesbian character as a main character,” Hart says. “And I thought maybe I can write a book that reflects my life and maybe it could get published and that’s what I did.” Her first book, “Hallowed Murder,” was published in 1987.
Scoppettone, a native New Yorker who has written many novels, didn’t write what she considers a mystery until 1984 when she wrote the first of several books under the pseudonym Jack Early and “declared myself as a mystery writer.”
“I became Jack Early because the voice of a first-person male private eye came into my head and I didn’t want to put a woman’s name on it. I was already established as Sandra Scoppettone and no one knew who it was. When the first book came out, I got the best reviews of my life. It made a big difference to write under a man’s name, but I didn’t do it for that reason. After three books I switched back to my own name and started what’s become the Lauren Laurano series.”
