Books

Mystery writer Elaine Viets is a very funny lady. But there was nothing funny about the massive stroke she suffered in April 2007 while preparing for a 10-city book tour.

An emergency-room doctor told her husband, actor-author Don Crinklaw, that his wife would probably be dead by morning. She awoke from a four-day, drug-induced coma after brain surgery to learn later that "My husband had been planning the best way to bury me."

But the sassy, irrepressible writer is a fighter. And for a year, she says, she fought with insurance companies while relearning how to walk and go up and down stairs.

While she struggled to recuperate, fellow whodunit scribes across the country rallied to help hype their sister in crime's book, Murder With Reservations.

"Two hundred toured by proxy," Ms. Viets says by phone from her home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

"They're all working writers, but they went to signings, they sold my books, and they kept my career going."

Harry Hunsicker of Dallas, executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America, explains: "The mystery community is pretty tightknit." Besides, says the author of the Lee Henry Oswald thriller series, who helped sub for Ms. Viets at a North Dallas bookstore in May 2007, "I knew she'd do the same for me."

Now recovered, Ms. Viets is back on the circuit with a hiking stick and her newest book, Clubbed to Death, which she will read and sign Wednesday in Plano. In the comic, well-crafted novel, seventh in her popular Dead-End Job series, amateur sleuth Helen Hawthorne again has a nightmarish, low-paying job.

This time she's a complaint clerk dealing with snooty ("Do you know who I am?") members at a country club that admits rude, nouveau riche mobsters and even her sleazy ex-spouse. His disappearance after Helen socks him in the kisser marks her as a possible killer. A trio of club corpses doesn't help.

Besides a distinguished career as a print and broadcast journalist, the St. Louis native knows minimum-wage occupations. Her Dead-End Job novels are based on research doing the same kind of low-level work as her quirky, wisecracking heroine.

For Shop Till You Drop, first in the series, she worked in a dress shop until the owner was indicted and it closed. After her husband fell ill and the stock market crashed, she clerked for a year at a bookstore in Hollywood, Fla., to pay the mortgage. The result: Murder Between the Covers.

For Dying to Call You, she worked the phones as a telemarketer selling septic-tank cleaner. "I was really awful," she says.

Her stint at a posh bridal salon, where clients dropped half a mil for a wedding and a husband berated his wife, mother of the bride, for trying on a "cheap" $500 gown, inspired Just Murdered.

At a doggy boutique, she entered the world of canine haute couture. "People spent $300 on a dog birthday party," she says. "Some dogs had bigger wardrobes than I did. There was a pink sweater with rhinestones spelling out [expletive] that I liked, but I wasn't going to wrestle a Doberman for it." That title is Murder Unleashed.

To prep for Murder With Reservations, she toiled as a hotel housekeeper. "I made 38 beds and cleaned 17 toilets a day," she says. "You haven't lived until you've cleaned whipped cream and chocolate syrup out of Jacuzzi. My biggest tip was $2.35 and a jar of peach nectar somebody left in the fridge."

Such labor has given her real empathy for the invisible workers in thankless jobs. "Most were so patient and kind, so burdened with debt and trying to get out," she says. "I was stunned that they remained so cheerful in what to me was a hopeless situation."

The plucky author has a second best-selling series starring St. Louis mystery shopper Josie Marcus. (Ms. Viets' mom was a secret shopper in the '60s.) In those books, she dispenses shopping tips as well as suspense.

An insomniac, she writes between 3 and 6 a.m. on a computer, then sleeps until 11 a.m. and revises her work that afternoon. "I must be part vampire," she says.

A year after her stroke, Ms. Viets again went under the knife to repair an 18-year-old hip replacement.

"The great thing about being a writer," she says, "is that nothing you do is ever wasted. Whatever experiences you have – good or bad – you can put in a book."

Jane Sumner is a freelance writer living in Austin.

Plan your life

Writer Elaine Viets will speak at 7 p.m. today at Barnes & Noble, Preston Road at Park Boulevard in Plano.

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