AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR MARILYNN LAREW'S LEE CARRUTHERS

Lee Carruthers from Marilynn Larew’s Leee Carruthers Series sits down with us for an interview today.

What was your life like before your author started pulling your strings?

I was a recent graduate of Yale’s masters program in Islamic studies and inhabiting a cozy cubicle at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, following money laundering and terrorist funding in North Africa when my life imploded. I learned that my father (also a CIA officer) was maintaining a second family in Falls Church, Virginia. This nearly destroyed me. I adored my father. I couldn’t believe he’d betray me like that. Everybody at the Agency knew I was his daughter. I just couldn’t go to work and see them stop talking when I walked past the water cooler. Sidney Worthington (a.k.a. Marilynn Larew) rescued me and posted me to Beirut to continue my money hacking. It was there that he/she sent me on the first mission not covered in my job description. I had to acquire a whole different skill set just to stay alive.

What’s the one trait you like most about yourself?

I like my self-reliance and unflappability best. They stand me in good stead when I’m doing a “little job” for Sidney

What do you like least about yourself?

Least? My smart mouth. It’s going to get me killed one day.

What is the strangest thing your author has had you do or had happen to you?

In Hong Kong Central she had me escape from a walled village in Hong Kong’s New Territories by poking roof tiles out and hoisting myself up into the rafters. I then climbed down the side of the wall using a rope made of torn up curtains and dropped to the ground, just missing a truck in the parking lot. If I’d hit it, I would’ve broken my back. I always say it’s better to be born lucky than smart.

Do you argue with your author? If so, what do you argue about?

All the time, mostly about the crazy thing she wants me to do. In The Spider Catchers, she had me steal an SUV and escape from a terrorist camp. In Dead in Dubai, she nailed me in a wooden box and put me on a ship bound for Karachi. She knows how I hate small spaces.

What is your greatest fear?

I fear two things: small spaces and heights. She knows that, but she keeps putting me in places like that any way.

What makes you happy?

Safety. I like a nice quiet night at home, possibly reading something on my Kindle. The little jobs I do for her/Sidney are going to get me killed one day.

If you could rewrite a part of your story, what would it be? Why?

If I could rewrite anything, I’d rewrite my father’s story I adored him. I thought he was the greatest man on earth. To find that he had another family and a daughter with big blue eyes and curly blonde hair broke my heart. It also left me with serious trust issues. I have a great deal of difficulty trusting men, which has seriously messed up my love life. I also don’t much like cute little blondes.

Of the other characters in your book, which one bugs you the most? Why?

Two of the characters in my books bug me, for different reasons. In The Spider Catchers, Alicia should never have been sent into the field. She was too inexperienced and too naïve. She managed to fall in love with a human trafficker and wind up in a terrorist camp, and I had to go after her.

The second person bugs me on a really personal level. In Hong Kong Central, Secret Service Special Agent Jennifer Evans is a beautiful blonde with a perfect figure. She is the partner of Jim Sanders, a man I grew to love in Paris. She broke us up. When we all met up again in Hong Kong, she tried to keep us apart, a thing Jim said would never happen again, but she did her best. Blondes give me a pain in the first place, and her constant interference made life difficult for both of us.

Of the other characters in your book, which one would you love to trade places with? Why?

Besides me, there are only two continuing characters in the series – Mike Donovan, Sidney’s chief researcher, and Sidney Worthington himself. Mike has to stay in place. He does all the research heavy lifting for me when I’m in the field. Sidney? Yes, I’d love to trade places with Sidney for a while. I’d love to be the caller rather than callee. I’d call him in the middle of the night and tell him to pack up and leave in the morning. Then I’d send him to Aden or the Central African Republic and see how he likes dodging bullets.

Tell us a little something about your author. Where can readers find her website/blog?

Marilynn is a historian, retired from the University of Maryland System, where she taught US frontier history, the history of the Vietnamese war, Vietnamese military history, and the history of terrorism. You can see she likes vicarious violence. She knows her terrorists though. She told me while we were working on The Spider Catchers that whenever she thought of something rotten for the terrorists to do, before the week was out they actually did it. She said it made her feel really creepy. She also studied money and banking. Her dissertation was on the Cincinnati bank that started the Panic of 1819. I think her most unusual publication is about Vietnamese military history in 300 BC. She lives with her husband Karl, who is also a novelist, in a 200-year-old brick farmhouse on the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania.

Her website is www.arilynnlarew.com. There you will find introductions to all of my adventures and a short story about me and an atomic bomb, which is free if you sign up for her newsletter. You’ll also find an introduction to the adventures of a colleague of mine, Baltimore PI Anne Carter. I think you’ll like it.

What's next for you?

I’m not sure. I left the CIA without much thought of what I would do next. I just knew I was tired of the never-ending job of putting money launderers out of business only to see them back in under a month.

I have to go somewhere though. The apartment I lived in in Paris belongs to the Agency. She wants me to go to Boston. I ask you. Boston in the winter? I have a friend who has an IT business near Boston. He’s been after me to come and work with him for a long time, and she wants me to do that, but I’m not sure that information technology is what I want to do. I might have been saved by the bell. Sidney called me last night with a little job he wants me to do in Hanoi.

Hong Kong Central

Despite the fact that she quit the CIA, Lee Carruthers is in Hong Kong doing a little job for Sidney Worthington. He thinks something is wrong at Wong’s Antiques. Lee finds Henry Wong—just as he’s being kidnapped by the Chau Fong Triad. What does a Triad want with an antiquities dealer? That’s one of many questions, as Lee reunites with an old lover, is caught in the middle of burgeoning democracy demonstrations, and uncovers secrets that may once again upend her life.

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BOOK CLUB FRIDAY--GUEST AUTHOR MARILYNN LAREW

Thriller author Marilynn Larew sits down with us for an interview today. Learn more about Marilynn and her books at her website. 

When did you realize you wanted to write novels?

I wrote my first novel after I finished my PhD program. It was a hard-boiled mystery with a female protagonist. It almost sold. If it had, I would have been one of the first to write that kind of mystery.

How long did it take you to realize your dream of publication?

I stopped writing fiction after that book didn’t sell and went on to publish history non-fiction. After I retired, I returned to thoughts of writing a novel. The Spider Catchers (Lee Carruthers # 1) went though a number of incarnations before I settled on its current form. I guess maybe it took eight years.

Are you traditionally published, indie published, or a hybrid author?

I’m an indie.

Where do you write?

I have an office in my home.

Is silence golden, or do you need music to write by? What kind?

Silence is golden. I tried playing music while I write, but I found I didn’t listen to it, so I stopped bothering.

How much of your plots and characters are drawn from real life? From your life in particular?

I write about terrorism, money laundering, gun and drug smuggling, and human trafficking, so my plots are taken from the daily news. My characters are entirely fictional, but people who know me say Lee’s voice is mine.

Describe your process for naming your character?

Foreign names I take from Internet lists. I’m not sure how I name my other characters. Names just come, and I fiddle with them until they feel right. I do take care that names are not similar and that they don’t begin with the same initial to avoid confusion.

Real settings or fictional towns?

All my settings are as real as I can make them: Fez and the Algerian desert for The Spider Catchers and Dubai, naturally, for Dead in Dubai, but Istanbul and Bulgaria also play a part in that book. I do a lot of research on my settings. The Internet is a wonderful resource, and so is Google Earth. Maps, maps. I’m a map junkie. Guidebooks, too. All of them allow me to give s real sense of place to my work.

What’s the quirkiest quirk one of your characters has?

My heroine, Lee Carruthers, sleeps in the nude, and she keeps forgetting to pack nightgowns when she goes out of town.

What’s your quirkiest quirk?

I’m not sure I’m quirky. I’m just a mild-mannered retired historian whose most unusual publication is about the construction of a citadel near Hanoi, Vietnam, in 300 B.C.

If you could have written any book (one that someone else has already written,) which one would it be? Why?

War and Peace. Tolstoy flipped that plot over more times than I thought possible, although he married Natasha to the wrong man. Her brother Nickolai’s sudden understanding that they are shooting at HIM as he rides in a charge against the French is every soldier’s realization of his own mortality. I quit writing for several years after I read it. Then I decided that not being a Tolstoy was no excuse for not writing.

Everyone at some point wishes for a do-over. What’s yours?

I’d like to be as thin as my heroine and have long wavy hair. And have the ability to take down a grown man with my hands. There are a lot of men that need taking down by a mild-mannered historian.

What’s your biggest pet peeve?

Grammar in books and on TV. I know the language is evolving and all that, but some things are just wrong. A mild-mannered academic, eh?

What was the worst job you’ve ever held?

I worked in Woolworth’s 5 & 10 in Easley, South Carolina, when I was 14. It was a long Saturday standing on my feet, but I learned a lot about human nature.

Ocean or mountains?

Each in season. I love the ocean, but I have no desire to swim in it, so spring and fall after the tourist season is when I want to go to the beach. I love the mountains in the summer for their coolness and in the fall for their wonderful colors.

City girl/guy or country girl/guy?

Country girl. We live on five acres five miles from the nearest town. It’s very peaceful. Unfortunately, that is also five miles from the nearest store or pizza. Still, I can see a Mason-Dixon Line marker from upstairs.

What’s on the horizon for you?

Number three in the Lee Carruthers series, Hong Kong Central. It takes place during the Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrations of last year.

Anything else you’d like to tell us about yourself and/or your books?

You write what you know, and what I know isn’t cozy. I moved around a lot. I lived in a lot of small towns, but we didn’t stay long enough for me to develop the kind of network of friends that make for a cozy book. Other things I know – what I studied and taught – aren’t cozy either: military history and terrorism, bank panics and colonial rebellions. Apparently I have a taste for violence. And for far away places. I lived in the Philippines and on Okinawa. I’ve traveled in Europe and Asia. Studied in Hanoi. Funny, I’ve never felt alien in Asia, despite being a large round-eye, but I have felt alien in a lot of places in the U.S. when we moved, and I had to adjust to a new school and new people. My heroine, Lee Carruthers, goes alone into foreign places with a mission to carry out. She has to learn those places and their people and their dark streets fast to stay alive and carry out that mission. Not exactly my life, but not cozy, either.

Dead in Dubai (Lee Carruthers # 2)

Why is CIA officer George Branson dead in Dubai? It looks like straight detective work, finding out what George has been up to and why he’s dead, but when former CIA analyst Lee Carruthers arrives in Dubai, she walks into a deadly war between two rival Merchants of Death vying for market share. She learns that George has worked for each man under a different name. With his own, that gives George three identities. Which man is dead? Has George really been working for the Agency, or has he sold out and, if so, to whom? Who are the men following her? And why does she keep finding diamonds?

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