Jacqueline Carey

These are the web pages of the Jacqueline Carey who writes literary fiction. All of her novels have been chosen as New York Times Notable Books. She is also the winner of a Guggenheim fellowship. She is not the fantasy writer or the cordmaker, although she admires their names.

Rarely does a novel come along with so much ebullient wit, such ethical clarity, and so many beautiful flowers. Jacqueline Carey takes on white-collar crime, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, and the nagging question of forsythias with equal fascination and agility. IT'S A CRIME is satirical, lyrical, full of heart, and a joy to read.
 
- Cathleen Schine

If Gatsy and Nancy Drew had a baby, its take on Twenty-First Century American corruption and denial might be as trenchant as Jacqueline Carey’s but I doubt it.

- Roy Blount, Jr.

For more information, contact Sarina Evan at 212-572-8718 or sevan@randomhouse.com

Carey answers questions about her new novel:

Q: Our heroine Pat Foy is in the enviable position of doing what she loves for a living: she’s a landscape designer, and, as we might expect, IT’S A CRIME is filled with wonderful descriptions of lush, exotic flora. Is gardening a passion you share with her?

A. Yes, although I am not a true gardener. I live in a beautiful spot for plants. I have a lot of flowering trees. I have a lot of bulbs.

Originally the novel was going to contain more gardens. In the winter I often sat around and designed them, which was great fun. I picked only flowers with beautiful names. In the spring I’d try to plant at least one of each to get to know it. For instance, in the book Pat is compared to a wildflower called a mallow. I actually planted one in my yard although it is nothing but a giant weed – and I mean really giant.

Q: IT’S A CRIME explores a very different scenario than your previous novels—the white-collar world of corporate scandal. What kind of research did you do in writing this book?

A: When I started doing research, a business downturn was revealing fraud after fraud at major American companies. What was surprising was how much of this malfeasance had been hiding in plain sight. It was simply the most overt manifestation of an insanely unjust economy.

I wanted to show a well-meaning, kind woman who nonetheless finds herself in the thick of a fraudulent set-up – as, in a sense, we all are. Could she do any good? Certainly it would be hard.

I ended up going to see some of the WorldCom and Tyco trials. I wanted to get a sense of the defendants as real people. And I was surprised at how much I learned by hanging around and listening. They talked in the corridor before the doors to the courtroom opened. I rode on the elevator with them. I watched them when the jury was out of the room. It was fascinating.

I also went out to Allenwood Prison, saw the visitor’s room, and spoke to some of the people in charge. This was incredibly helpful. It’s a minimum security facility, not at all physically horrifying, so it’s easier to see how sad the situation itself is, and how hard it is on the families.


Q: You have strong political beliefs, yet you don’t argue a political position in your book. Why is that?

A: Stephen Colbert jumped on a New York Times interviewer who referred to his “political” rather than comic objective. In art a specific political objective doesn’t last. We still watch “Dr. Strangelove,” not “Failsafe” or “On the Beach.”

That said, I do hope readers draw a line from the widespread accounting fraud in the novel to the sub prime lending crisis of today. It’s an old story: A few canny and well-placed individuals make a fortune off risky behavior that will eventually destroy the financial well being of hundreds of thousands of people. They get away with it because until it’s too late all anyone can see is their own short term profit.


Q: As in your previous works, emotional ties are tested throughout the course of the novel. How much do you draw on personal experience for your characters?

A: One of the characters is very loosely based on my best friend in high school. She died as I was writing this book, so I was particularly reluctant to leave it. I kept rewriting different parts. It was as if in the alternative world of the novel, she lived on.


Q: You are a former mystery columnist for Salon.com, your character Pat is a voracious reader of mystery novels, and two other characters in the book are mystery novelists. What does this have to do with your take on modern day white collar crime?

A: I don’t want to underestimate the American fascination with crime. Writing about crime novels was an unusual way to explore it. People admire the buccaneering spirit. No one wants to identify with the hapless victims. One of my characters, Lemuel Samuel, writes free-wheeling detective novels and has lived a similar life. Another character, Virginia Howley, writes whodunits and tries to make sense of her grimmer situation through the reassuringly stricter form. Both of them feel the tug of the wild side.

Q: You mention a lot of mystery novels in your book. Are they real?

Å: The novels by Lemuel Samuel and Virginia Howley are not real, but all the others are. I avoided well-known books that readers would already have their own strong opinions about. I refer only to obscure (but good) mysteries, most of which are out of print, and all of whose authors are dead. That seemed more in keeping with the fictional world.

Q: What’s next for Jacqueline Carey?

I am currently at work on a mystery novel called Witness to the Hurricane Zeta Murders. I am writing as if I were Virginia Howley. It is set in the near future, when storms have become commonplace, and the action unfolds at a hotel in Florida during a hurricane.