It has been about five years since Kathy Reichs was in demand as a forensic anthropologist — a profession she shares with the protagonist of her Temperance Brennan novels — but the author keeps up with the field, all the better to get ideas for her books.
She continues to attend annual American Academy of Forensic Sciences meetings and interacts with other forensic anthropologists regularly online.
“There’s a group of six forensic anthropology women and we zoom every Wednesday for an hour, so I get ideas that way,” Reichs said in an interview from her home in Charleston, South Carolina.
“I also get ideas through what we used to call in the ‘Bones’ writers’ room ‘ripped from the headlines,’ where I’ll see something in the newspaper or other media,” Reichs added, referencing the long-running TV drama that was based on her books.
“You know, anything is fodder for a story.”
Reichs’ latest is “Fire and Bones,” in which Temperance gets involved in an arson investigation in Washington, D.C., in a neighbourhood that was once home to bootleggers during Prohibition.
In the novel, Temperance’s daughter, Katy — who was 13 in the first novel, “Déjà Dead” — is now in her 30s and a military veteran. It’s her friendship with journalist Ivy Doyle that brings her mother to Washington to help with the recovery of victims from the arson in the Foggy Bottom neighbourhood.
Birdie, Temperance’s cat, is also still around. “That cat must be about 50 by now,” Reichs said laughing.
Back in 1997, “Déjà Dead” earned Reichs the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel, an auspicious beginning to a storied career that includes a recent lifetime achievement nod from the Strand Mystery Magazine.
That first novel took Reichs, who’s 76, two years to write because she had to carve out a couple of hours at 5 a.m. weekdays before teaching classes at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a struggle for someone who admits she is not a morning person. She also made time to write on weekends and during the summer, “any time I could grab behind a closed door.”
But Reichs also said it was getting tenure at the university — where she taught for more than 20 years, up until 1999 — that allowed her to try her hand at fiction. “Since I’d achieved the highest rank you can attain in academia, I was free to do whatever I wanted.”
“Fire and Bones” is her 23rd Temperance Brennan novel.
Two things keep the series appealing for her, Reichs said: moving location and introducing new characters.
“Brennan’s been in a lot of places including Hawaii, Montreal and Mount Everest. I will never write about someplace I haven’t visited. And I find it fun and satisfying to create somebody out of nothing.”
As for Washington, Reichs visits it frequently because it’s where her daughter and grandchildren live.
(She and her son, Brendan, co-write a YA series called “Virals,” featuring Temperance’s teenage niece, Tory, a science nerd and leader of a ragtag band of adolescents who become a crime-solving pack.)
Reichs also completed her undergraduate degree at American University in Washington and had a part-time job there giving guided bus tours, visiting the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the Smithsonian.
“When I was stuck in traffic, I had to keep talking, so I read books and books about capital trivia including geography, history and quirky little areas, so I thought it would make an interesting setting (for a book),” she said. Everything is grist for the narrative mill.
Reichs also said she reads widely but especially enjoys “a thriller or mystery set in a historical period.” Currently in her teetering pile of books are Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” and Jacqueline Winspear’s “The Comfort of Ghosts.”
As for her own writing, Reichs admits it’s very slow.
“If I write two pages in a day that’s a good day for me. Stephen King said to me, ‘The way I write is just slap the thing out and put it in a drawer, and walk away from it for six months, and then take it out and do the editing.’ But I can’t do it that way.”
Reichs said that, like Ann Patchett, she writes chapter by chapter, and she likes to edit constantly as she writes. “I’m very linear, so that’s how I approach my writing. My daughter’s a writer and if she’s in a good mood she’ll write the love scene and if she’s in a bad mood she’ll write the death scene. I can’t work that way.”
Reichs herself outlines “maybe the first eight to 10 chapters with a sentence or two of what’s going to happen in each chapter. I don’t always know what’s happening in the middle of the book. I know the beginning and I know how it’s going to end.”
Reichs said she hopes people will read “Fire and Bones” and enjoy it: “I hope people like where Brennan’s at in this one.”
With whiplash narrative drive, a cast of charismatic characters familiar and new, and the satisfying twists Reichs’ fans are accustomed to, it’s a sure bet.
Janet Somerville is the author of How Midsummer Night: A Memoir of Friendship and Loss.
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