Text The elegant woman talking on her cellphone in front of a desolate Fort Lauderdale warehouse strip last week was there for a reason: She was getting the turn signals fixed on her vintage Jaguar. The fact that she was discussing murder, arson and such gruesome details as how long the foam remains on an overdose victim’s mouth might have been startling, had anyone heard. At 8 a.m., though, no one was listening.
That will not be the case Saturday morning at the Indian River Shores Community Center, when Elaine Viets, newspaper journalist turned mystery writer, will lead a workshop in mystery writing. To a gathering of aspiring authors organized by the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation, she will offer counsel on character development, plot line and other essentials of the genre.
In August, Viets published her 30th mystery, “Brain Storm,” the first in a new series based on a stroke survivor. Viets, who normally does a great deal of research before she writes, had first-hand experience to go on with this one: Nine years ago, she suffered six strokes that left her in a coma for a week and in rehab for four months. And that was just part of her preparation. She also took a world-renowned college-credit training course at St. Louis University’s School of Medicine, in a relatively new discipline: medicolegal death investigator, the profession of her new heroine, Angela Richman.
“They crammed a full semester into six days,” she recalls. “It was really for professionals – there was a police chief on one side and a woman who worked with tracker dogs on the other. There were so many good plots right in front of me.”
Viets, a director-at-large of Mystery Writers of America, and winner of three mystery writing awards – the Lefty, the Agatha and the Anthony – will then cross the bridge to a 3 p.m. book-signing at the Vero Beach Book Center. It is one of several she has given here over the years. “It’s always a party,” she says.
Viets was raised in St. Louis, and from 1980 until 1997 she wrote a humor column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that was eventually syndicated in 100 papers. She became a south Floridian in the mid-1990s.
It was about a decade later that Viets’ husband, Sun-Sentinel reporter Don Crinklaw, discovered he had Stage 3 cancer; he has since recovered. At the same time, they were under an IRS tax audit. Soon after, she found herself working as a clerk in a chain book store after Bantam Dell, acquired by Random House, killed off her five-book contract. “It was a stellar year,” she says wryly.
That’s when she began writing the books she calls the Dead-End Job Mysteries. The last of those stories, “The Art of Murder,” was published in May of this year. It is set in the real-world Fort Lauderdale mansion-turned-museum Bonnet House and involves the murder of an artist.
Her new, darker books in the Death Investigator series take place in Chouteau Forest, an imaginary enclave of “the one-percent and those who care for them” outside of St. Louis. There Angela Richman is investigating a violent traffic accident when the strokes suddenly hit. She is left nearly incapacitated – talking to imaginary people, something Viets herself did. In the book, while Angela in the hospital, the doctor who misdiagnosed her is murdered, and the key suspect is the surgeon who saved her life.
In real life, Viets’ venous strokes came in the form of blinding migraine headaches over the course of four days. At one point, she was so incapacitated she held up a fork to her husband and asked, “How does this work?”
She was 57, a non-smoker, non-drinker and fitness buff. The on-duty neurologist at the hospital told her she was too young and fit to have a stroke. Instead, suspecting a tumor, he scheduled a PET scan and sent her home. Two days later, another headache sent her to bed. This time, her husband couldn’t wake her up. This time, the ER doctor warned her husband she would not live through the night. She did, thanks to the efforts of a different neurologist who removed a third of her frontal lobe. When she came out of her induced coma, her entire world had changed, she says. “You are not the same person.”
While the surgery didn’t affect her speech, she had to have intensive occupational rehab. “They taught you how to walk, how to shower, how to boil water – which I wasn’t good at before the stroke,” she says. “They had an actual car frame in there. I had to practice getting in and out of the passenger seat.”
Today, she is back to driving her own car, a black 1986 Jaguar XJS. She’s had it “only” 10 years, she says; her husband had a model from the same year that he bought new and drove until last year.
“Writing a Killer Mystery: The Basics” takes place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Indian River Shores Community Center. It is one in a series of four adult writers’ workshops this season. The cost is $45. Call 772-569-6718 to register.