Murder Most Female

Susan Wade

Walking Rain, Susan Wade's first novel, is dedicated to her father, "Houston Russell Wade, who gave me the word processor. Having a wonderful time, Dad. Wish you were here."

"I wrote my father a letter I guess in '88 and said `I really think I could write if I just had a word processor.' And so he gave me one on my birthday.... [It] was one of the things that was really neat about my Dad," Wade, a petite woman in pearls and a wash-and-wear haircut, remembers. "He felt like he could do anything he set his mind to. And he felt the same way about his children. And so, you know, that was his vote of confidence, `Go for it.'" With that word processor, Wade began a career that has included publication credits in such anthologies as Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears, Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, and Tarot Fantastic, and has recently found a culmination with the nomination of her novel Walking Rain for the Edgar award.

We're sitting outside at the Magnolia Cafe South. The air is just a bit chilly still for March, and rain drips grayly from the eaves of the covered patio. But Wade is buoyant, plowing through a sandwich held in both French-manicured hands. ("Promise you'll edit out the munching noises," she said before she ordered.) The 42-year-old Wade tells me that writing a novel was always one of her goals. However, fear sidetracked her.

"I started writing a novel very early. And I got some probably deservedly but extremely harsh criticism when I was about halfway through with it. And I abandoned the novel, and acquired a real novelistic fear, you know, just a conviction that I couldn't write novels." In her writing group, however, it seemed that "everybody else was writing novels, novels, novels. And one of the things I envied was that they had books with their names on them." Even though she had established herself as an excellent writer of short fantasy and horror fiction in the Eighties, Wade was intimidated by the prospect of tackling a novel. She wrote 80 pages and an outline and gave it to her agent in 1994, who sold it to Bantam Books the following fall. "And, um, I was terrified," she says, her voice sinking almost to a whisper, "I didn't think I could write a novel and here I had a contract and a deadline." She depended on her writer's group, the humorously named Trashy Paperback Writers, to provide assistance and support. "Oh, yeah, I would not have finished the book without them. Especially," and she rattles off a list of names that includes Mary Willis Walker, Fred Askew, and Dinah Chenven, and sounds as though it probably encompasses a sizable portion of the entire membership of the Austin Writers' League. "They were all just really helpful," she sighs.

Early on, when Wade received a six-page revision letter -- "that's where the editor writes you back and tells you everything that's wrong with your book and that you have to change in order for them to publish it," she says wryly -- her "writing buddies" proved instrumental in resolving a conflict that threatened to stop publication of the book entirely. Even though Amelia Caswell, the central character of Walking Rain, is a woman traumatized by the brutal loss of her family, the editor at Bantam wanted Wade to involve Caswell in a sexual affair not far into the book. Wade for her part was adamant. "I was willing to address the issues she had with the book, but I was not willing to do it the way she wanted, because I didn't think it was true to the character."

Her fellow "Trashies" helped her brainstorm ways in which Amelia's latent sensuality could be made to seem more overt without threatening the plausibility of the story. And Wade credits Mary Willis Walker and Fred Askew with shaping the penultimate scene of the novel, the scene in which the tragedy that destroyed Amelia's family is revealed. "When I was first starting the story it was Mary who brought up the issue of how there had to be a really strong justification for how long Amelia had been gone and how guilt-ridden she was." Fred Askew, she says, helped map out the "stage business" of how and where the complicated action in that scene takes place.

Receiving the Edgar nomination, Wade feels, was the seal of approval for "a book with such an identity crisis. I mean, the romance people weren't owning it, the fantasy reviewer that reviewed it said, `This isn't a fantasy.' But the mystery reviewer said, `Every now and then a book comes along that isn't exactly a mystery, but it's so engaging, nobody much cares.' And I think the Edgar nomination really puts that stamp on it, you know, the mystery community is accepting me. I'm really jazzed."

Aside from five years in New Mexico ("I still get homesick for New Mexico," she confides wistfully) and five years spent in San Antonio, Susan Wade has lived in Austin all her life. She attended elementary school at Wooldridge Elementary, "before it was swallowed up by UT." She was a passionate reader, and she says that she "can remember where I was in the library, where the book was on the shelf in the library, when I found The Illustrated Man. I mean, I can remember all the sensory stuff of that moment of finding that book, what the lighting was like, everything." In addition to Bradbury, she read Ross MacDonald, Andrew Klaven, and Alistair MacLean. However, she describes Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird as having the most influence on her writing. "[It's] one of the greatest thrillers of all time.

"I love it. I think it's a wonderful book. You know a friend of mine, his eldest brother is a lawyer, and he became a lawyer in part because when he read To Kill A Mockingbird as a young man, he thought that Atticus Finch was the hero and he wanted to be like Atticus." She pauses to sip her hibiscus tea. "And then, at 40 or so, he read the book again and realized that Atticus Finch isn't the hero, that Boo Radley is the hero." Laughing, she concludes, "He decided that he'd just as soon be like Boo, sit in the dark and cut up magazines.

"But I love that, I love that. And I think the thing about it is that, in a way, almost everyone in the book is a hero. And it's all about the richness and strength of people, and community. There are so many miraculous things, it's a really amazing book."

Growing up, Wade describes herself as a sort of "professional dilettante," dabbling in theatre, visual arts, and music but lacking the interest to settle down to one thing. "None of it had staying power. For a long time after I started writing, I kept waiting for it to go away. It took a long time before I really realized, `This is my creative outlet. This is what I want to do.' It was really exciting when that happened and I didn't have to hunt around anymore." Of her early work, she says, "The technique wasn't there, but the things that I wrote in the very beginning were things that I felt passionately about. And that's one of my basic tenets of writing, that writers should write to their own obsessions. If the writer cares passionately about a subject, that will come through in the text and readers will care too." Wade estimates that at least half of the first several stories that she wrote were eventually published.

Wade plans to continue writing short fiction in addition to novels. Burn Pattern, her novel currently in progress, was inspired by a short story, "White Rook, Black Pawn," which appeared in Twists of the Tale, "an anthology of `cat horror.'" "White Rook, Black Pawn" is about a firefighter, feral cats, and chaos theory; while researching the story, Wade found herself fascinated by the idea of "what it [would be] like for a woman to go and live in a world of men....[And] the other thing that's really fascinating for me is that a friend of mine discovered as an adult, in her thirties, that she was adopted. She had suspected, she had even asked her parents, and they had told her that she was not." Thus, her main character in Burn Pattern is a woman firefighter who must deal with the personal enigma of who her family is and the strange details of her mysterious adoption.

"And the title, Burn Pattern?" I ask.

Wade pauses. "Well," she says, "there's also a serial arsonist." She chortles. "A friend of mine is a firefighter and has given me some wonderful places for the arsonist to burn things down."

The waitress comes with the check. I've come armed with a Visa card, and a few dollars of ready cash, but Susan won't even let me pick up the tip. Well, far be it from me to fight a determined woman. Noting her expansiveness, I theorize that she seems rather satisfied with herself now. "My life," she says, signing the credit card slip and handing it to the waitress, "has become very binary. When my writing is going well, I'm happy. When my writing is not going well, then I'm discontented." She smiles broadly. "Right now my writing is going well. I'm talking not about the externals of writing, like the Edgar nomination. I could be utterly miserable in my work, working on something new and not moving ahead. But I'm about 160 pages into Burn Pattern. I just sent the proposal to my agent and she's enthusiastic about it. So, yes, I'm very happy."