Peter decker and rina la.., p.1
Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, page 1
Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus
A Mysterious Profile
Faye Kellerman
Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus
Part I: Evolution
One of the most frequently asked questions that I have fielded over my twenty-two years as a published crime fiction writer is: how much of me is my characters? More specifically, how much am I like my series female protagonist, Rina Lazarus? I’ve answered this question hundreds of times and usually I respond with the following: I am not Rina Lazarus. Rina Lazarus is a fictional entity that I’ve created. She is not based on a single representation but a composite of my experiences and my imagination. Then I add: all of my characters have Faye Kellerman in them. How it could be otherwise? They all come from my unique and sometimes subconscious process of blending fact and fiction, real and imaginary.
But the response does beg the question: how much of me is Rina Lazarus? I find it amusing and not unpredictable that people rarely ask: how much am I like my male series character, Peter Decker? More often than not, Peter takes the starring role in my novels, so if there is any character than is a manifestation of me, why wouldn’t it be Decker?
To answer the question honestly and completely, I’d like to go back to the origins of Peter and Rina. Where did they come from? Who were they before they appeared in fiction and how have they evolved?
To best respond, I need to reconsider my first published novel, The Ritual Bath, where Peter and Rina made their debuts. I’ve italicized the word “published” because at the time, I didn’t know that The Ritual Bath was going to be my first novel. I had made a few attempts at writing and was now trying to pen a story that would be interesting, entertaining and most important, would capture the eye of some far-sighted editor. But the characters didn’t come from thin air. In order to understand the biographies of Peter and Rina, I’m going to give you a little background about the author.
As a young child, I had a vivid imagination. Most kids do, but mine seemed to last a little longer and to be just a tad more florid than most children my age. I not only had imaginary friends, I had them in many different locales and diverse centuries. My friends were Greek goddesses of mythology, dames from medieval Europe, turn of the century Boston blueblood girls in boarding schools, barefoot Okies from the dustbowl and prisoners of concentration camps. Anything I heard or saw was recreated, enhanced and then acted out in private. My “friends” and I went through a slew of adventures and all before I reached school age.
School.
Nothing quite kills a fertile imagination like rote learning. No one is saying that times tables aren’t important, but how could such humdrum triviality compete with all my terrific escapades? Nonetheless, school is a necessary evil and at the age of six, I started first grade. And that’s when I discovered that although I had an elaborate imagination, I was saddled with a brain that had a hard time integrating letters with phonetics. Reading was difficult because I couldn’t sound out words. I learned how to read English using the same method I learned how to read music—by sight reading. In actuality, I learned how to read music before I learned how to read words. And like the notes on a scale, I had to memorize words in order to get my brain to properly translate what my eye saw. To do this, I resorted to a number of memorization and mnemonic tricks. I recall that I could easily identify the word “look” because the two “Ohs” that in my six year old mind resembled two wide eyes. My dyslexia stalled my reading for a while, but luckily I was compensated with a facility with numbers. I always say in my talks that I could work with x, y, and z as long as the letters weren’t strung together to make words. I did not like English. I did not like writing papers and essays. I did like creative writing but so little of that is done in school that my preference didn’t matter much. As far as learning, I took the path of least resistance and was a math major in high school and college, graduating from UCLA with a BA in theoretical mathematics in 1974.
My next incarnation was in dental medicine. I attended UCLA Dental School and graduated in 1978 fully intending to practice dentistry, but fate had other plans. Jesse Oren Kellerman was delivered about two and a half months after I graduated. I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought I’d be up on my feet a week after birth. I must have been on another planet when I thought I could easily integrate career and children with ease and aplomb. I had to learn on my own that babies were a lot of work. This was a revelation to me. For the first six months of my son’s life, I couldn’t figure why I couldn’t get anything done other than to take care of the little rascal. It helped to know people in the same situation, but as I always had been a competent person and prided myself on being organized to the point of being compulsive, I felt I should be doing better.
By the time I finally reached some kind of equilibrium, Jess was around six months old. I was finally able to brush my teeth, shower, and get dressed all before noon. I was learning how to become a functional person at the same time my son was becoming a person. He was a lot of work, but with that work was the joy of seeing a human being develop. He was a happy little guy—amusing and engaging—and we had a really good time together. As he grew older, he was very responsive and made my life easier by being an early talker. I decided to put off my illustrious career in dentistry in favor of motherhood and I kept telling myself that I’d soldier on with dentistry just as soon as Jesse was in school.
But then I got pregnant again. By the time Rachel came around, I had come to grips with the fact that I was not just postponing dentistry, I was shelving it. It was an easy decision in some ways, but a very hard one in other respects. I felt as if I was wasting years of education and I was letting my profession down. But at the time, dentistry wasn’t calling my name and honestly, no one from the ADA has ever called me up and asked, “Where the heck are you?” It seems that dentistry has gotten along just fine without me.
So I went about the business of raising a family. Now anyone who has ever spent long periods with a child knows that there’s a lot of down time—pushing a swing, taking a walk, watching your child play at the park.
The mind abhors a vacuum.
Presented with blocks of time without speaking, my brain began to spark and fill in the blanks. In my head, I listed chores that needed to be done. I planned dinner menus. I considered baby gyms and music classes. I was expected to be thinking about all those kinds of activities. What I didn’t expect was to be making up stories again.
All my imaginary friends awoke from dormancy that had been caused by twenty years of education. They began to make their big screen comebacks in my head, only this time they materialized in adult form. I began to invent newer adventures, more daring quests, more racy and passionate love stories, darker fables, and elusive murder mysteries. Once again, the chief protagonist in all my stories was some kind of Faye Kellerman facsimile, but at twenty-six, I knew better than to act out the stories aloud as I had done as a kid. They put people away for those kinds of things. I kept all my buddies inside because I felt that there was something a little off with me: making up stories when you’re a wife, and a mother and supposedly a sane person. I firmly believe that I would have left my tales deep inside my gray matter if I had been married to anyone other than Jonathan Kellerman.
Unlike me, Jonathan was a natural born writer. I think he had emerged from his mother’s womb with pen in hand. When I met Jon, I was eighteen. We married a year and a half later, both of us still wet-behind-the-ears kids and very much unformed. Jonathan not only saw me through college and dental school, but elected to go to graduate school in Los Angeles because I didn’t want to move from Los Angeles. Jonathan graduated with a PhD in clinical psychology from USC at the tender age of 24. My husband was a true renaissance man with many interests and hobbies and one of his extracurricular passions was writing. If he saw me through college, I saw him through nine novels, all of them eventually relegated to boxes in storage. His attempts taught him a lot. It taught me what it means to be a preserver and how much fun it was to write. Yes, he cared that his novels weren’t getting published, but it didn’t deter him a whit from writing. It was almost as if it were an addiction.
Then one day it suddenly dawned on me what he was doing. He was taking his imaginary friends and putting them down on paper and calling himself a writer. If he was brave enough to do that and strong enough to suffer through one rejection after another, what in the world did I have to lose by putting my imaginary friends on paper, too? And the timing was perfect. He was on the brink of breaking through into the publishing business. Had he been the monster best seller than he is today, I would have been much too intimidated to try to write.
Now another husband might have been outright discouraging. Another husband might have been discouraging in an encouraging way. Jonathan, bless him, was only encouraging. As the premier author in the family, he was helpful and straightforward, straddling the difficult line between tutor, critic and husband. The nights weren’t always easy, but the conversation was always honest.
Like a lot of neophyte writers, my first attempts were competently written but went nowhere. The stories dragged, the characters didn’t develop, the sense of place was wanting. It was really good that my initial forays into fiction never saw the light of day, but all those hours of writing bad stories weren’t all for nothing. I considered the four-to-five-year experience a protracted course in writing fiction. I had Jonathan’s input, but I st
The main thing was that I discovered my love for writing. It was cathartic, it was an outlet for my zany imagination, and it gave me something to do. I wrote notebooks full of novels, stories and plays, but deep inside, I knew I was spinning my wheels. It’s certainly okay to indulge in creative outbursts, but if I had any hopes of getting published—to have my works out there to be read and critiqued—I had to be a little bit more thoughtful about what I put down on paper.
I began to think about what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. Equally as significant, I began to wonder what I wanted to write about. That meant structure.
I needed a plot.
In the seventies and eighties to have a strong story line was somewhat an anathema, and was eschewed in modern literature. Plot was for chumps, a crutch used in genre writing. But since I wasn’t an English major in college and since I didn’t follow the vagaries of the literary world, I didn’t know that. Plot just appealed to my sensibilities as a mathematician. Well-crafted stories had beginnings, middles and ends that propelled the reader forward from the first page to the last. I considered plot to be a good thing. This sudden revelation dovetailed nicely with the kinds of books that I liked to read—mystery and suspense novels.
Jonathan had introduced me to Ross Macdonald. He had found The Zebra-Striped Hearse in a used book store near work, and we began to systematically devour many of the best “hard boiled” writers—Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, Dashell Hammett¼the list was long and impressive.
My choice was clear. I decided to write crime fiction novels and my timing couldn’t have been better. There was a growing renaissance of mystery writing in the seventies and eighties. Joseph Wambaugh and Evan Hunter writing as Ed McBain were pumping out some of the best police procedurals in the business. Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake had switched over from westerns to capers and mysteries. There were others: Arthur Lyons, Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Linda Grant, Stephen Greenleaf, and all of them were giving the murder mystery their own unique spin.
To me that was the key: to make the murder mystery genre my own, I needed to give my book a voice. I needed a narration that told the reader that this was going to be a different kind of suspense novel from a new author named Faye Kellerman. I felt that I could only put my own imprimatur on my story if I wrote from a point of expertise, i.e., if I wrote what I knew. The problem was, at thirty-two, I didn’t know all that much. I had gotten married at nineteen and had spent most of my adult life being a wife, a mother, a daughter and a student. I could probably figure out a good plot, but who would my characters be? What could I take from myself that would give my novel an exclusive punch? Who was I and what could I do to call my own?
Knowing that I wanted to write a mystery novel was a good first step, but I still had yet to figure out who would people my deliciously intricate plot. I had to start thinking about who I was so I could develop a flesh and blood protagonist.
First, I considered the fact that I was a female. That was more relevant than you might think because, in the early eighties, women PIs were coming into their own. I thought about writing from the perspective of a woman PI—I certainly admired sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky—but I had been married for a very long time. I didn’t see myself as chasing down bad guys and wielding a gun, so the idea of writing a character like that really didn’t strike a resonant chord.
Secondly, I was a wife and mother. I didn’t picture a wife and mother protagonist chasing down bad guy, either (see above paragraph).
Thirdly, I was a dentist. Now there have been lots of dentists in film and literature and I struggle to remember the name of any dentist portrayed as a hero. My recollection is that the characterization of fictional dentists usually revolves around their being sadists, louts or geeks. Although I was sure that I could imbue my dentist with sterling qualities, I just thought that the profession lacked a sexy image that might be needed to interest an editor.
I vetoed a dental protagonist.
Lastly I was a Jew.
My Judaism has always been important to me, having always loved the rites and traditions of my religion. I was raised in a Conservative home but we bordered on traditional Orthodoxy. The term used today for my kind of observance is Conservadox. We always kept a kosher home, and we were somewhat Sabbath observant. We didn’t cook, sew or clean on Saturday, not did we wash clothing or turn on a vacuum. But we did turn on lights and watch TV. My father had come from an Orthodox home and was a native Yiddish speaker. He added a little of the Old Country to our lives. I loved watching my mother light Shabbos candles. I loved going to synagogue on Friday nights and eating stale sponge cake and drinking flat soda in the social hall. I loved cleaning the house for Passover with my mother and buying boxes of matzo—bread dough that has been baked for no longer than 18 minutes to prevent it from rising. (My mother used to call it hemstitched cardboard.) I didn’t even mind fasting for Yom Kippur. I fasted earlier than was religiously required because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.
Judaism was such an integral part of my being that I had no real sense of self without it. This affiliation was only fortified when I met Jonathan who was an observant Jew. For me, the change from Conservadox to Orthodoxy was more like a small step than a giant leap. I liked praying in an Orthodox synagogue—it was what I was used to—and it didn’t bother me not to watch TV on Saturday. As I got older, the prohibition against using electricity became a boon rather than a burden.
As I thought about my Judaism and how much it had made me who I was, I began to wonder if I shouldn’t make my characters Jewish. If I wanted to write about what I know, it was a good start for my books to have Jewish contents, and what better way than to have my protagonist be an Orthodox Jewish woman. But how would that play in Peoria? Would it be too limiting for the average reader?
I thought about that for a while. Since I enjoyed reading novels that took me into another world, I figured that there had to be some readers out there who would enjoy learning about religious Jews. There had been some precedence for Jews starring in novels. For me, Chaim Potok was a tremendous source of inspiration. The Chosen had been one of the most successful novels of its day because it provided a peek of an ultra religious life.
But Potok wasn’t a crime fiction writer.
Harry Kemelman had penned a very successful mystery series centered on a crime solving Rabbi. The books were informative, but they were also as much about temple politics as they were about murder. The series was far from the crime novels that I had found so compelling.
I narrowed down my definitions. I wanted to write about a Jewish woman in a religious enclave, but somehow integrate this into the style of an LA crime novel. That meant darker, deeper suspense fiction. Would it make sense for my religious Jewish woman to run around exposing herself to danger and mayhem to solve a crime? Would it be too artificial to have her chasing clues and outsmarting the police? Might it be better if she was involved in the crime in some way, but she left the actual nuts and bolts of solving the crime to someone else?
Enter the professional.
To do the grunt work, I needed a police detective or a private eye. I chose the former because it was easier and faster to get a police detective involved in a capital crime. Private eyes have to be solicited whereas the police are the first line of attack when trying to solve a homicide. I could have included a female detective, but I chose a detective male for contrast. And as long as I had had a man and woman, well, what can I say? I’m a sucker for a romance. (Which is why Peter was divorced and Rina was a widow.) You have to remember that I had no idea that this was going to be my first novel. I was trying to throw in as much as I could to maybe attract an editor.
This is how Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus first made their public appearance. But to truly understand them, let’s look into their background.
My characters talk and I transcribe what they say. I actually hear dialogue as conversation in my head. When I don’t get the words down correctly, my characters correct me. They repeat their conversation to make sure I heard it right. It’s as if I have a tape recording of what they say and when I make a mistake, I put the tape recorder on rewind and listen again.
