20 novels in 20 years: The recipe behind author David Housewright's private-eye series

[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: David Housewright of Saint Paul has gotten national recognition for his tales of murder and mayhem, set in Minnesota. He has a prestigious Edgar award and three Minnesota Book awards under his belt, and he's just put out his 20th book, starring private eye Rushmore McKenzie, entitled In a Hard Wind. MPR's Euan Kerr talked with Housewright about his secret for keeping the same character interesting, book after book.

EUAN KERR: David Housewright, welcome. Thanks for coming in today.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Thanks for having me.

EUAN KERR: You have an acquaintance called Rushmore McKenzie. For people who have not met him, tell me a little more about it.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: He's a non-traditional private eye. He's an ex-cop, and he's rich, and he does favors for friends,

EUAN KERR: Good favors, not--

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Yeah. Think of him as Travis McGee with a better boat. When I created the character years ago, I wanted a guy who didn't have any baggage. He wasn't alcoholic. He wasn't a recovering drug addict. He didn't have three or four ex-wives. He didn't have any emotional issues, anything like that.

He does what he does because partly he's bored, and partly because he actually thinks he's making the world a better place. No matter what he says or sees and what he does, when his head hits the pillow at night he's thinking, OK, it was a rough day, but the world's better. And as a result, each book is different. Each book can deal with different issues and different themes that he encounters in his travels, as opposed to circling his personal issues.

EUAN KERR: I use the term about you having a relationship with him, but you've spent a lot of time writing about him. And I know from having talked to other writers about long-standing characters, that relationship can be problematic after a while. There are some people who genuinely don't like their characters anymore.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Oh, no. I don't dislike him at all, for any reason, and I think that's partly because he doesn't have problems that I don't have, that I can't solve, because I need this in the next book. But it's interesting, because I was like 4 or 5 books in with McKenzie before I understood the relationship readers have with characters and how they think of them as real people. I did a book called "Dead Boyfriends," which takes place largely in Anoka, because it was their turn.

And I remember I did a reading at the Rum River Public Library, and there was a woman. She wasn't sitting any further away from me than you are. And in the book, I make fun of the Anoka mocha, which was served at the Avant Garde Coffee House, which is a real place, in Anoka, and how McKenzie went down the street to get a cup of coffee at a place where you could also get tattoos.

So the woman looks at me and says, what does McKenzie have against the Anoka mocha? Not what do I have. Why, I thought that was funny, why this problem does he have?

And I looked at her-- I can't tell you exactly what I said-- but I looked at her, and I said, he can be such a jerk sometimes. And a woman over here jumps up and goes, yeah. The way he treated Nina in Chapter 3, what is she-- you know, what's wrong with him? And I'm like, right? And it occurred to me that, to a lot of readers, McKenzie is a real character, a real person who I just happened to know and whose stories I tell.

EUAN KERR: Did it change how you wrote about him?

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: No. No. You can't do that. Criticism and reviews and people meet on the street who tell you about what's wrong with your book, you can't-- you can't let that affect you. You have to keep writing the book you want to write, or as I tell students from time to time, you want to write the book you want to read.

EUAN KERR: The new book is called In a Hard Wind.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Yes.

EUAN KERR: And right at the beginning, you say that McKenzie breaks his own rule, because he decides he's going to help someone who isn't a friend but a friend of a friend.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: A friend of a friend of a friend.

EUAN KERR: And he's a little concerned about that meeting.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: He is, and he does it almost as a gesture. OK. I'm going to listen to you, but I'm going to say no. And then he listens, and he starts to think. And he goes, well, wait a minute, there might be something to this.

EUAN KERR: Her name is Jeannette.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Jeannette Carroll.

EUAN KERR: She's facing murder charges.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Yes, and it looks like a pretty solid case, and she is as calm as a summer breeze. She is completely unruffled, which makes Mackenzie go, there's something very wrong here. Why is this person acting unlike every single person he knows who's ever been accused of a crime?

EUAN KERR: And you then begin telling us the story of this place where she lives, and it is a very close-knit community, which also includes the victim. But clearly, this community feels under attack, and it's a fairly wealthy community, and it's really not used to that sensation. So this is where we get to the difficult part of the conversation, where we talk about the plot, but we don't give away too much. But it is based in the Twin Cities suburbs.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Yes.

EUAN KERR: When you said that it was Anoka's turn, do you go around and say, OK, now I'm going to go after them?

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: I have the books travel around a lot. About a year ago, I did an event at the public library in Red Wing. A woman who came to the event was upset, because I've killed people in Pipestone, and I've had gunfights in Wabasha and Grand Marais and Sauk Center and all these places, but never Red Wing.

So I promised her, the next book, I'd kill somebody in Red Wing for her, and I did, by the way. That's already at my publisher. I hope it comes out next May.

EUAN KERR: You're a man who keeps his words.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: But you do that, because you look around and you go, where can I take the book?

EUAN KERR: There is a delicious moment-- and I must admit, I read a lot. I rarely laugh aloud when I'm reading. I'm amused by them, but I rarely actually laugh out loud.

But you have a book group, a meeting. There's several people in this group could feasibly be suspects in this murder, and you have them discuss the situation because they like crime stories. And they all begin floating out their theories as to who may have committed this crime, and it is just such a beautiful moment. Could you just not resist, or what what?

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Well, you read Agatha Christie, you read a lot of Josephine Tay and all those guys, and they're always presenting theories. So the reader has about five or six theories to go through, and none of them are correct. But this is what you do. You try to get the reader to go down this path and that path.

And I didn't want Mackenzie to go, well, it could have been this, or it could have been this. Now that you mention it, it could have been that, and-- and let's not forget this. You know what I mean? So I thought this would be-- if you had some real people discussing a murderer in their backyard, what would they say?

And I thought, well, why don't I just throw all those theories out in that big conversation, which lasts several pages. And I'm glad you thought it was funny, because otherwise, I think a reader is going to go, really? And Mackenzie doesn't say a word. He just sits there and watches.

EUAN KERR: Another important part of the story is we see Mackenzie working through the case, and a lot of it is drudgery. We're talking, yes, he does a lot of stuff on his computer, on his phone, but he's also back with the dreaded microfiches in the library, and a lot of people would just gloss over that. Why do you?

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: This is how things work. This is how an investigation moves forward, and I wanted to show the process. I hate those shows where the clue comes to them almost like on high and come on.

EUAN KERR: The clouds part.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Somebody says something, oh, well--

EUAN KERR: Beam of light.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Yeah. No. This woman is accused of a murder. She's getting ready to stand trial. The trial is like almost nine months removed from the actual crime and the actual first investigation. So for Mackenzie to open the drawer and go, aha, is absurd. If it was easy, somebody would have done it by now.

EUAN KERR: Is it satisfying when you are able to tie up all the bits and pieces? Because there's a lot of complexity in this tale.

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT: Yeah. Mysteries are fantasies. The good guys nearly always triumph. The bad guys nearly always get what's coming to them, and the victims-- well, the readers if not the victims get closure, and that seldom happens in real life.

So one of the things I did in this book, in all the books I've written, is I wanted to give the readers closure. I doesn't necessarily be a satisfying ending. There are people who have come up to me already and said, I can't believe you did that. And I go, well, guess what, that's how things work, but you get closure. You understand why things are the way they are.

SPEAKER: That was David Housewright talking with MPR's Euan Kerr. You can hear David reading from the new novel In a Hard Wind, the 20th in the Rushmore McKenzie series, tomorrow, July 11, at the next Chapter Booksellers in Saint Paul. The reading starts at 6:00 PM. He is fantastic.