Author of Not the Killing Kind,
which won the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Fiction Writers of Color
You’re a published poet; what prompted you to write Not the Killing Kind, a mystery/thriller? How has your poet-voice influenced the novel?
Learning has always been a big motivator for me. After publishing two books of poetry and a chapbook (a smaller collection), I had already been through several rounds of re-learning to write poetry in new ways. Then I hit a poetry wall. I lost my motivation to write it, although I still gain a lot from reading it. The leap from poetry to novel writing felt immense and frightening, and that appealed to me. That meant I’d go through lots of learning on the way.
Why a mystery/thriller, in particular?
I wanted to explore the dark side of human nature by writing about characters who observe, experience, address or re-dress it.
Crime fiction gave me the chance to try that out.
I was also reading the crime novelists Gillian Flynn, Walter Mosely, Lucha Corpi, and Alice LaPlante while exploring what to write next, post-poetry. I loved the way they illuminate social issues, family, and women’s lives in their work, since those themes and subjects were already important to me as a poet. It was inspiring to see, in the example of their work, that I could write in a new way about things I cared about. And their prose has the aliveness I enjoyed most in poetry! In fact, Lucha Corpi is also known as a poet.
There was also an audience dimension to choosing crime fiction. With poetry, the process of connecting with readers and listeners was somewhat evangelical. To pull off successful poetry events and fruitful outreach to readers and potential readers required a crusading zeal for the power of poetry. Poets and poetry supporters model that energy, and I practiced putting it out there, too.
But then I wanted to learn: What’s it like to publish in a genre with a ready-made audience?
My poet-voice probably comes in during some of the novel’s descriptive or reflective moments, and my choice to write the novel in first person likely came from a deep familiarity with writing poetry in that POV. But there’s another layer of mystery writing that was familiar to me from having written poetry, which is the conventions of genre. Using them felt similar to writing poetry in traditional forms. In both a sonnet and a mystery, for example, readers have certain expectations of what they’ll find at specific turns in the piece. It excites my writer-brain to work out how to wind surprise and originality around guideposts readers enjoy and anticipate.
How long did it take you to write Not the Killing Kind? What was your biggest lesson in the process?
I had a teen and a pre-teen at home when I started, and they had both graduated college when it came out. Twelve years!
The biggest process lesson was that I really could make a satisfying progression of scenes out of a tangle of images, notes, ideas, and dialogue scraps. I wrote eight drafts and was relieved to see that each draft made a little more sense and tied in a few more threads.
You’ve said that you wrote Not the Killing Kind because you wanted to see a Latina in the roles of professional woman, working mother, and hero of a mystery/thriller novel. Is there something of you in Boots Marez, your main character? Or is she all herself? How did she evolve over the time you worked on the novel?
Boots and I have three life circumstances in common: we’re both Mexican-American and multiracial, we both work in education, and we’re both mamas. All the rest of her circumstances, and all of her specific situations and conflicts, are fictional. In terms of her inner workings, I would say there’s something of me in several of the book’s characters. With Boots, in particular, I share some values and some fears.
She and her son, Jaral, were the most consistent through all the drafts. But the situations I put her in evolved to become more perilous for her, and more related to each other, with each draft. She also makes more mistakes in this final version than she did in earlier drafts. When a reader leans in to say, “Noooo! Don’t do that!,” I count that as a win. That’s an engaged reader.
Not the Killing Kind deals with sensitive issues including illegal immigration, single-parent adoption and human trafficking, yet it never feels like you are preaching to your readers—those issues are simply part of the story. How did you weave them in without becoming didactic or slowing down the pace of the narrative?
YA and children’s author Matt de la Peña has a great quote about this process. He says a fictional character doesn’t need an agenda, but they do need a point of view. Immigration prompted by fear for the safety of one’s family, adopting as a single woman, and living inside systems that make things easier for human traffickers are situations either lived by or immediately in the sightline of these characters.
The story is set in rural Northern California, and place feels like a character, shaping both the narrative arc and the human characters. Did you intend place to have such a big role in the novel, or did it just evolve that way?
I’m glad you brought that up. I believe the reference to “mortar rounds” resulted from a conversation you and I had about your time working up in Humboldt County! Humboldt County is known for redwood forest tourism and outlaw pot growing. I did not want to re-hash those expected depictions of the area, so I tried to bring them in slantwise while focusing on other kinds of experiences in, or uses of, the landscape, from soul-soothing to life-threatening.
The environment was a big theme in my poetry, and I knew setting a novel in a rural area would allow me to continue weaving plants, critters, water, and weather into the writing.
After an explosive denouement, the ending is quiet and really sweet. (I don’t want to give anything away here.) Did you see the story resolving like that from the beginning, or did Boots and her son Jaral lead you there?
The characters’ problems led me there. Over the eight drafts of this novel, there were at least five different endings. I re-read the endings of several mysteries and thrillers, and reconsidered the endings of thriller films that also had an emotional arc and finally decided not to bring their mother-child relationship all the way to “settled,” but to instead close by pointing them both in a new direction.
Read a review of Not the Killing Kind (with a link to purchase) here.
Maria Kelson has two collections of poetry (as Maria Melendez) with University of Arizona Press, which were finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Colorado Book Award. Not the Killing Kind is her debut novel. It received the inaugural Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Fiction Writers of Color from Sisters in Crime. A former Santa Fe Arts Institute and Hedgebrook resident, she has given readings and workshops at campuses and literary festivals around the U.S. and served as an American Voices arts envoy in Bogotá, Colombia. Born in Arizona, raised in northern California, she has lived in one southeastern, three midwestern, and five western states. She lives in Wyoming, where she’s writing a new thriller set near Yellowstone National Park. https://mariakelson.com/
