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Author Janet Evanovich came up with one of her best characters — fictional bounty hunter Stephanie Plum — because she was losing interest in writing straight romance.
“I was having a hard time getting an entire book out of just relationships,” she says. “I was in menopause, and I had more thoughts about murder than I had about sex!”
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New Jersey–born Evanovich, 81, had written nearly a dozen romance novels under the pseudonym Steffie Hall when the allure started to fade, so she decided to give crime fiction a try. She had been reading a lot of Robert B. Parker — the late creator of the fictional private detective Spenser — and liked that he was such a wordsmith who wrote very clean and easy to read books. At the time, though, some women authors were making their mark in crime fiction, including the late Sue Grafton and her best-selling Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, and Sara Paretsky, 77, with the private eye V.I. Warshawski novels. Evanovich didn’t think she could compete with them and went searching for her own niche.
“When I moved out of romance, Sue Grafton was there, but her heroine was cutting her hair with nail scissors. I mean, I’m a Jersey girl,” Evanovich says. “Oh my God, you don’t do that! Hair is important. Shoes are important. That was why I couldn’t have anybody be a cop. I couldn’t imagine them in uniform, wearing cop shoes. So I decided that the product I was going to have was going to be for a reader like me, someone who loved all of these things about romance but wanted a mystery plotline.”
She found the inspiration she was looking for in an unlikely place: Midnight Run, a 1988 action-comedy movie about bounty hunters, bail bondsmen and mob bosses, starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Suddenly the seeds for Evanovich’s literary heroine, Stephanie Plum, were planted.“ Today, there are 30 books in the Plum series, including Going Rogue, which AARP members can read for free online. I love the cachet of the bounty hunter,” Evanovich says. “I loved the fact that there was a lot of freedom to it. I didn’t have to have a large body of knowledge, like you would have to have if you were writing about cops, and it was a little different from a P.I.”
Evanovich sought to make Plum “a very ordinary person,” not much different than how she describes herself: “a normal person who got very lucky and happened to have a best-selling book series.” Like Evanovich, Plum stems from New Jersey and attended Douglass College at Rutgers University. She is the centerpiece of an extended family that includes her parents, whom she visits often, mainly to eat; Grandma Mazur, her adventuresome maternal grandmother; her Vinnie’s bail bonds work family, which includes office manager Connie, file clerk Lula (Plum’s frequent partner in crime) and Vinnie, who owns the company; and finally her two love interests, the New Jersey cop Joe Morelli and the dark, enigmatic Ranger.
“This is a book about family,” Evanovich says. “I think people just relate to all of these things.”
Evanovich began her creative life in the visual arts as a painter and sculptor. She graduated from Douglass as an art major and later married her mathematician husband, Peter. They had two children, prompting Evanovich’s decision to become a stay-at-home mom. “We didn’t have a whole lot of money,” she says. “So every now and then, the credit cards would all be run up, and I’d be down at the supermarket kiting checks because we were a little behind on payday.”
At the time, Evanovich was struggling with her painting but realized she liked telling herself stories to complement what she was doing visually — whether painting or coloring with her daughter. “That was the aha moment,” she says. “I thought, Wow, maybe I should try telling the stories instead of painting them.”
With no real writing background, she began teaching herself how to write, and since she was a fan of Regency romance novels, she started there. “It’s where I was at that time in my life. I was a young mom and a young wife. I was in love with my husband,” she says. “I loved the positiveness of romance, the positive characters. I loved the values that were espoused in it. This was before Fifty Shades, and things were a little bit more gentle.”
For nearly a decade, Evanovich honed her craft, but she was getting nowhere in the industry, pitching agents and publishers and getting rejected. “It was a really hard time,” she says. “And then when the credit card would get maxed out, I would have to go take a part-time job — telephone solicitor, sell used cars for a week, whatever I could do to make enough money to pay off the credit card — and then I’d go back to being a full-time mom and trying to write books.”
Finally, around 1980, she sold her first book, Hero at Large, for $2,000, “and it just changed my life.” Ten more romance novels followed, but over time Evanovich “just needed more” from her writing. “I kept starting to incorporate little mysteries into my romances, and my editors would always rip them out,” she says.
She took a leap of faith and penned a full-fledged mystery novel, but instead of leaving the romance behind, she decided to take it with her. “I found a hole in the marketplace,” she says. “I brought in my Jersey girl and shoved her into a Robert Parker novel.”
When she got the call that One for the Money, her first Stephanie Plum book, was going to be published, she was living in Northern Virginia. “It was something like 9 o’clock at night, and my agent called and told me that I just sold One for the Money, and that it went for $1 million,” Evanovich says.
With this sudden windfall, Evanovich paid off all her credits cards, her children’s student loans and, to really treat herself, she bought … new towels? “I couldn’t bring myself to buy anything. When you’ve lived paycheck to paycheck for so long, you just can’t spend money,” she says. “I went to the shopping center and walked around all day, and everything seemed too expensive to me. At the end of the day, I came home with new towels.”
Her new mystery writing career also became a family affair: Her husband quit teaching at the university level to become “a house husband,” her son took over her financial matters, and her daughter began to handle her publishing and marketing business. Fast-forward 30 years and this family dynamic remains the same.
“We’re a family enterprise,” Evanovich says, which allows her to spend nearly all her time writing. She is currently finishing up the next Stephanie Plum book, Now or Never: Thirty-One on the Run, which comes out in November.
“I’m sort of struggling to keep up my writing schedule right now, but that’s the good part of my life — being able to get up in the morning and go into this whole other world,” she says. “I know it’s a fake world, I know it’s make-believe, and I control it, but it still is going someplace else. I take my little dog and my coffee, and I go into my office, and I’m in the land of Plum.”
However she does it, it’s working. Evanovich has written some 70 books, including series such as Wicked and Knight & Moon. Her novels have come to be known for mystery and action, with a touch of romance, but also full of wit and humor — which the author credits to her Garden State upbringing. “I think if I grew up in Connecticut, I wouldn’t be funny,” she says. “That’s definitely my Jersey background. I just see humor in almost everything.”
Evanovich is also currently writing the Recovery Agent series, which centers on recovery agent Gabriela Rose, who is on a quest for some of the most valuable treasures in the world. “I was supposed to have my second Recovery Agent book out this summer, but I decided to get a new hip instead. I’m at the age where you need spare parts,” Evanovich says, laughing. “I just take it day by day, book by book. I don’t have any plans on quitting. I think either they’ll stop buying the books, or I’ll face-plant on my computer someday. I’ll be like Robert Parker, and that’ll be the end of me.”
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