Interview with mystery author Kent Braithwaite
We are privileged this week to have mystery author Kent Braithwaite with us, author of The Wonderland Murders, who has recently had rights sold to Japan for his book. The second book in this series has a working title of Not Quite Paradise.
SUITE: Tell me a little about your books and what genre they are.
KENT: Lorie, my debut mystery novel is The Wonderland Murders. It has been compared to Hammett/Chandler/Macdonald in certain newspaper reviews, and Elizabeth Henze of the Murder Express site calls it a "contemporary noir''. I consider the series "multicultural mysteries." I've recently finished the second novel in the Jesse Ascencio series. I am just starting on the third. Jesse is a Latino private eye who quit the FBI at Ruby Ridge and served a single term in Congress. He is a small press poet. He has working class roots, and he is married into a wealthy Anglo family. His wife's family owns Wonderland, a Southern California coastal amusement park that serves as the primary setting for The Wonderland Murders. The characters populating my works represent the full range of ethnic groups that now populate the American Southwest, where my series of novels will be set. Regarding the sub-genre of the book, readers and booksellers tell me it is gritty and hard-boiled. Personally, I see Jesse as more of a medium-boiled protagonist (in the vein of Pronzini's Nameless), but the subject matter is serious and I handle it in a serious manner. Jesse is a family man, though, with a strong sense of what many would consider traditional American values--loyalty to friends, religious faith, a sense of community, and a feeling of obligation to help out people less fortunate than he has been in life. You must know the type.
SUITE: When did you first start writing? First start publishing?(short stories, books,etc)
KENT: I first began writing as a small child. I remember writing stories and plays with groups of friends in elementary school. In high school and college, I served on editorial staffs of our literary mags. As an adult, I began seriously writing poetry and fiction in the early nineties, back when you were merely a little girl singing with your family. My first experiences as a published writer came via small press and academic journals. Slowly but surely, the magazines that were willing to publish my work became those that were better known and had larger circulations. All in all, I'd guess I have about 150 publication credits by now. One editor of a nationally prominent academic journal suggested I needed to move into book-length
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