Last week, the Dell mystery fiction editors were proud to be featured in short interviews over at SleuthSayers. Today, we have the pleasure and honor of welcoming a SleuthSayer to Trace Evidence. New Jersey author Thomas Pluck is the author of Bad Boy Boogie, a Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller, and the short-story collection Life During Wartime—among other titles. He was also the editor of Protectors 2: Heroes, which was nominated for an Anthony Award.
For growing up in a family that always had one leg outside the law, it took me a long time to fully embrace crime fiction. My first entry was Miss Marple, perhaps surprising for a writer often pegged as noir. I was raised by my grandmother since I was six, so I felt comfortable around a table of old ladies at tea. And as a kid, I didn’t know how crooked we were.
The house I grew up in was a marker for a gambling debt, filled every Sunday with bikers, truck drivers, disgraced cops, managers of mob-owned bars, and cocktail waitresses. I didn’t find anyone like my family in the books we read in school, but I did find them in crime fiction. My mom and I traded authors like baseball cards. Have you read this one yet? You’ve got to read this. . . .
Crime fiction is a diverse carnival, from the gritty carnies operating rickety rides to the wholesome side where bakers peddle tasty treats, where murder is more shocking but no less likely. Marks come from the farm or the inner city, all have a place here. When I browse the mystery section or flip through AHMM or EQMM to hear the sweet rasp of the pages, I may find myself in the suburbs of ancient Rome, in a gilded drawing room with a locked door, or in a rough spot in a country where I can’t speak the language but I know the music, because the human heart is the same wherever you go.
And that’s why the kid who grew up next to a Superfund site and managed to snag a degree in English Lit writes crime fiction, and is proud to be part of the carnival of crime.
Trace Evidence 