Larry D. Sweazy has been a freelance indexer for seventeen years. For the uninitiated, an indexer is a person whose job is to find the relevant facts in a book and create the index. For this interview, Larry D. Sweazy described how his career led him to write a mystery featuring an amateur sleuth who indexes books for a living.
“One of the ways that a new indexer educates themselves in the craft is by taking a correspondence course offered by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture),” Sweazy said. “The course, along with many others, was designed to give farm wives a skill outside of farming that would generate an income in the off seasons. Indexers have curious, organized minds, are methodical, well-read, and relentless in their pursuit to divine the most important information from a text—all great attributes of a good detective.”
Hence, Marjorie Trumaine was born from that course and its purpose. Sweazy said he was also influenced by his love of mystery novels. “As a reader, I really am not drawn to books that are nothing more than soapboxes for the author. I love stories, not agendas. The wonderful thing about fiction is that it allows readers and writers to get out of their own skin and into someone else’s.”
Sweazy said that writing in a first person female voice was a major challenge for him. Although he’s written more than 800 back-of-the-book indexes for major trade publishers and university presses and has won multiple awards for his Western genre fiction, he’d never written in the first person from a woman’s point of view.
“I didn’t set out to write from a woman’s point of view,” Sweazy said. “I set out to write a character. When I first thought of writing ‘See Also Murder,’ it was a short story. Marjorie came to me straight away, nearly fully formed, demanding to be written. I considered other narratives, other characters, but Marjorie and her milieu were just too strong to be ignored. She left me no choice but to try and write her story.”
Larry D. Sweazy said that he’s very grateful to Seventh Street Books for taking a chance on this series and an unconventional character. Sweazy added that he considers the relationship between author and reader to be sacred. He said, “It is my goal to never write the same book over and over again.”
In his efforts to make sure he was writing something very different for his readers, he decided to take a major chance himself. “I really had to step outside of myself to have any chance of making Marjorie Trumaine believable. So the issue of this book, of all of my books, is to stretch myself as a writer, to go to the vulnerable, uncomfortable places, even when people warn that you shouldn’t even try. I’ve always been a little rebellious.”
More information about Larry D. Sweazy
Learn more about Larry D. Sweazy on his web site at larrydsweazy.com
