Interview with Angela Zeman

SUITE: Tell me a little about your book and what genre it is.

ANGELA: The Witch and the Borscht Pearl is my first published book, due out Nov 1, 2001, from Pendulum Press in trade paperback for $16.95, or from the http://www.PendulumPress.com website in various e-book formats for $5.95. In it I use characters from a short story series I'd been publishing since 1993--Mrs. Risk and Rachel. Mrs. Risk, a woman in her early fifties, is an imperious, literate, and brilliant woman who many in her tiny seaside Long Island village believe is a 'witch.' Some readers have described Mrs. Risk as 'Nero Wolfe in Miss Marple's village.' Rachel is her sort of wild-child uneducated sidekick, a young girl she's taken on as a protégé. Rachel's the narrator, in first person.

It's a cozy, but I'd also classify it as a whodunit, which is what most of my Mrs. Risk stories are. I wrote the book in 1995 after having decided that after two years of short story publications, it was time to test Mrs. Risk in a book length work. I took my time choosing a subject, wanting something both interesting and fun. After all, it takes months to write a book. I was determined to have fun doing it! I knew the length of commitment because I had written other books, none of which had sold. Ed Gorman's Mystery Scene Magazine published a piece I wrote explaining the origins of the subject of the book. More about that later.

SUITE: When did you first start writing? Why do you write?

ANGELA: To my regret I waited to start writing until 1985, and with three daughters and a truly bad marriage, it had to be strictly part time. In the eyes of my family and friends it was a new 'hobby' I'd taken up.

In high school, I had been one of those top students who liked everything, did well in all my classes, and ('duh') took all the available English courses 'for fun'--a red flag neither I nor my teachers noticed. (At that time, J. D. Salinger was my hero, so some of the stories I churned out were pretty weird. I think my teachers gave me A's because they didn't know what else to do.) I served as editor-in-chief of the school paper for two years. When I graduated, my journalism teacher arranged a job offer from the local daily newspaper, which I turned down, being college bound--but not smart enough to see this as a second red flag.

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