When I first became aware of Kellye Garrett’s work, I couldn’t wait to run out and grab a copy of her breakthrough novel Like a Sister. Who wouldn’t want to read a novel with a beginning like this: “I found out my sister was back in New York from Instagram. I found out she’d died from the New York Daily News.” The novel went on to be a Book of the Month Club and an Oxygen Book Club pick, as well as being nominated for an Edgar Award and winning the Lefty Award for Best Mystery. I loved it so much that I went back and read Kellye’s first two novels in the Detective by Day series, Hollywood Homicide and Hollywood Ending. Her latest, Missing White Woman, is out April 30th, and I’m here to tell you that it’s just as fantastically readable and thought-provoking as her previous work. Kellye also serves on the national Board of Directors of Sisters in Crime and is the co-founder of Crime Writers of Color.
After chatting with Kellye at a few events, I learned that we’d both grown up reading the same mystery series borrowed from our mothers, but in this month’s Backlist, she introduces me to a great writer that I wasn’t yet familiar with: Valerie Wilson Wesley. Wesley is the author of the Tamara Hayle series of mysteries and is currently writing the Odessa Jones series, most recently featuring Shimmer of Red.
Why did you choose When Death Comes Stealing by Valerie Wilson Wesley?
I’ve loved the book since the first time I read it. It came out when I was about fifteen or sixteen years old, and it was probably the first time that I read a mystery that not only had a Black woman as the protagonist, but she was from New Jersey, like me. I recognized so many places in the book, and it was just beautiful for me to see that character.
And you’ve reread it later in life?
This is one of those books that I try to reread every couple of years. I don’t want to read them too often, because I still want to be surprised by things I forgot, but I’ve definitely read it a couple of times. I think I still have my mother’s copy from the Nineties.
What do you think of Tamara Hayle as a point of view character? (I especially loved her voice—fast, funny, and brutally honest.) Is there something in particular that appeals to you about her?
Well, she’s a Black woman in the Nineties. She’s divorced and a single mom. She was on the police force before she became a private detective, and you can only imagine what that must have been like back then. So she’s very blunt. She’s caring and loving, but she’s not warm and fuzzy, and to me that felt very realistic in terms of how someone in those circumstances would be. I don’t want to use the term tough cookie, but there’s definitely a contrast between her hard exterior and what she’s like on the inside. She’s someone who likes to keep her private life private, but because of the events of the book, her life ends up getting entwined with the case she’s working on.
I couldn’t find confirmation of this online, but it seems like this must have been one of the first detective series featuring a black female P.I. Can you talk about what was ground-breaking about this series?
I did some research on this, and I think the first crime novel with a Black female lead was written by Barbara Neely in 1992, Blanche on the Lam, but that character was an amateur detective. Then Eleanor Taylor Bland had mysteries featuring Black women, but her protagonist was a cop. So I’m pretty sure that Valerie Wesley Wilson’s Tamara Hayle was the first Black female P.I. Since then there’s been Cheryl Head and Tracy Clark, and Delia Pitts has one coming out this summer that’s also set in New Jersey.
The novel abounds in men of questionable character—most notably, Tamara’s ex-husband, DeWayne Curtis, and Basil Dupre, DeWayne’s nemesis as well as Tamara’s potential new boyfriend.
There’s an interesting moment when Tamara tells this story about when she first got married to DeWayne, in her early twenties, and Basil comes over, and at the door he picks her up and kisses her, like a real kiss. I don’t think Tamara necessarily realizes it, but it’s clear to the reader that he’s just doing it to piss off her husband. They’re just using this pretty young girl as a pawn. In the present of the book, when she’s in her thirties, she’s got a lot more agency. At this point, she’s not that young girl anymore; she’s more than an equal to these men, and she’s not there for their bullshit. Even with Basil, who she’s attracted to, she doesn’t see with rose-colored glasses. It’s great to see how much she’s grown as a person between the book’s past and its present day.
That’s a great point. Because the characters are people that Tamara has known for a long time, we get to see how those relationships have developed.
Right, whereas in a lot of P.I. novels, they’re just meeting most of the suspects for the first time.
The novel begins with the death of DeWayne’s son Terrence, which the police take to be an accidental overdose, but Tamara believes to be murder. The death of one of DeWayne’s other sons follows less than a week later, and Tamara begins to wonder that her own son with DeWayne might be next on the list of victims. How does this conceit affect Tamara and move the plot along?
I think it’s something you see more with cozies, where there’s a personal element that makes the sleuth want to be involved with the case. But Valerie handles it really well here. It could have been hokey, but it’s not. I’m not going to spoil the plot, but there’s one character who dies, and the whole time I was reading, I was thinking Please don’t do it. Don’t let them die. I was so upset when they died, because she had done such a good job creating that character and that relationship. I feel like it’s probably the right decision artistically, even though it hurts for the reader. It should hurt.
Tamara lives in New Jersey, outside Newark, and I know Wesley is from the same area. Your forthcoming novel, Missing White Woman, is also set in New Jersey. What is the importance of that setting to you?
Wilson uses a lot of real places in this book, which I love. For instance, where Tamara’s office is on Main Street in Harrison—I know exactly where that is. I know where the train station is. She really captures the essence of that neighborhood. And even places that aren’t real, like that hair salon, you can tell that the women who hang out there are based on real people. I’ve spent a lot of time in those hair salons and it’s all very real to me. Even the smell of the building—I’ve never been in that exact place, but I feel like I have.
Do you think New Jersey gets overlooked in fiction, compared to New York?
I do, and that’s one thing I love about Valerie’s work, and also Harlan Coben’s. He’s from the town next to me. Because Jersey gets messed with, people from there are very pro-Jersey. We’re used to people making fun of us.
Have you met Valerie Wilson Wesley in real life?
I have met her. I’m going to sound like a stalker, but when I got my first book deal, I found her email, and I sent her the most gushing email about how she inspired me. She had stopped writing the Tamara Hayle series, so she was out of the mystery game at that time, but she wrote me back, and it was just really sweet. We met for the first time when we were both doing events in Albany last summer. My mother is also named Valerie, and she’s the reason why I love books, especially mysteries, because she gave me free rein on her bookshelves. That was how I discovered Valerie Wilson Wesley, but also Walter Mosley, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky. And so I keep saying I want to get my Valeries together.
Do you know what Wilson is writing now?
I found out a couple of years ago that she’d decided to go back to mysteries and that she was working on a cozy series. It’s set in New Jersey, and it’s about this woman who’s a realtor and a caterer. They’re just really fun books.
Is there anything you’ve learned from this novel that you might apply to your own work?
We already talked a little about the real places in Valerie’s work, but that’s been so important to me. When I recognized the places, it added another layer; it brought me into the world of the book, and I want to do the same thing in my work. I want someone who’s reading Missing White Woman to be like, Oh, I’ve taken the PATH train from Jersey City to New York, or I’ve been to Liberty State Park. I think Valerie is the reason why I always have so many real places in my book. I want people to feel that same feeling of excitement when they recognize a place they’ve been.
But there’s also the idea of writing strong Black women who are vulnerable. I truly believe that representation matters, and I was lucky enough to be a teenager at a time when there was a lot of fiction by Black authors coming out—not just crime fiction, but also books like Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale. It made me think I could do it, because people who looked like me were doing it. And I hope there are teenagers out there right now who are reading me, who are reading Valerie Burns and Alyssa Cole and Rachel Howzell Hall and Tracy Clark and Cheryl Head, and that they realize that they can do it too.
