Jasmine Cresswell: Killer Mind

Jasmine Cresswell (Photo courtesy Jasmine Cresswell)

It's the quiet ones you need to watch out for. Take author Jasmine Cresswell, for example. Her demure, ladylike exterior conceals the mind of a killer -- dozens of them actually, not to mention international terrorists, arms dealers, white supremacists, kidnappers and assassins. Like her late compatriot Alfred Hitchcock, she delights in the visual image of blood on snow and gleefully pits her seemingly fragile heroines against some of the darkest, most fully realized villains in modern romantic suspense. But Cresswell goes further, adding scary family dynamics and nightmarish bureaucratic scenarios that all too accurately reflect her readers' real life horrors.

Not content with seeing her fictional characters through their perils, this bestselling, multi-award winning writer also spends considerable time helping others navigate the dangers of the writing life. A past president of the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and much-sought after seminar speaker, Cresswell helped found and served as one of the first presidents of Novelists, Inc., a service organization which strives to better the status of fiction writers in all genres. Seventeen years after its founding, Novelists, Inc., remains one of the most respected professional groups in the publishing industry.

Crescent Blues: Your Unit One series (Decoy, Full Pursuit and Final Justice) moves from the romance norm of one couple/one book to something closer to a mystery series featuring a relatively stable cast of heroes. What prompted the switch?

Jasmine Cresswell: I wish that I could pretend the switch was a cleverly thought out professional move. Instead, it was much more the result of a story idea that clearly needed more than a hundred thousand words to complete. In creating Melody Beecham, the heroine of all three books, I wanted to build a character who had been neglected to the point of emotional abuse while she was growing up. Because her parents were rich and successful (but not movie star famous) it never occurs to people who meet the adult Melody that she is extremely vulnerable. The fact that she's beautiful further blinds people to the reality of her character. In addition, there are on-going mysteries to be solved. Who is Melody's father? Who killed her mother? Different answers to different puzzles are revealed in each of the three books. And, of course, I hope that in Nikolai Anwar, I've given Melody a hero who's complex and compelling enough to be worthy of her!

Crescent Blues: What are the greatest advantages of this format? The greatest challenges?

Jasmine Cresswell: The greatest advantage is definitely having enough room to develop fully-rounded characters and a really meaningful conflict between the hero and heroine -- without short-changing the suspense/mystery elements.

The greatest challenge is undoubtedly how to deliver a satisfying and complete story in each book while making sure that no ends get dropped on the way to the final denouement

Crescent Blues: Will you be following this format in your upcoming series, The Ravens?

Jasmine Cresswell: The Ravens has rather a different format actually. The premise of the series is that a successful businessman dies in a hotel room in Miami. After his death, it's discovered that he has two wives and two families: a wife who runs a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and a wife in Chicago who spends her time being socially successful. The dead man has three children: a son and daughter by the Wyoming wife, and a daughter by the Chicago wife. Each book in the trilogy has a different offspring as hero or heroine. This enables me to show the different viewpoints of two wives and three children coming to terms with the fact that they've spent the past 27 years living a lie. There are also what I hope will prove to be several very unexpected plot twists, starting with the fact that in Missing, Book One, it's discovered that Ron Raven, the bigamous dead guy, has taken out a $3 million loan that's now fallen due -- and nobody can find the money. Why did he take out the money? What's happened to it? Megan Raven, Ron's daughter and the heroine of Missing, has to find the money or her mother will be penniless and homeless. Naturally, Megan falls in love during her search. And just to pile on the agony, she falls in love with The Enemy -- someone from her father's other, bigamous family.

Crescent Blues: What prompted Mira's decision to release the Ravens series in three successive months -- and how did you make the deadlines?

Jasmine Cresswell: Well, the series is not going to be released until 2007, so I will have 18 months to write them. Six months per book. I have a really hard time keeping to a tighter schedule than that even though writing is my full-time occupation. So far, I've finished Book One, Missing. I'm just starting to work on Book Two, Suspect. (Book Three is Payback.)

Crescent Blues: The universe created for Unit One -- with its many different agents and multi-layered politics -- seems ideal for a continuing suspense series. Is there any chance that the unit or its operatives will play a role in future books?

Jasmine Cresswell: Yes, I hope so. There are a couple of characters introduced in Final Justice, the last of the current Unit One trilogy, who are ideal as spin-off characters. Maybe after the Ravens...

Crescent Blues: Was romantic suspense always where you wanted to be?

Jasmine Cresswell: Yes, I think it was. I used to read the old gothics by people like Mary Stewart and Phyllis Whitney and wish that the romance could be beefed up a little without losing any of the suspense. But back in the early Eighties, suspense elements were considered the kiss of death for any book being marketed as a romance.

Crescent Blues: What first attracted you to romantic suspense?

Jasmine Cresswell: The fact that I loved to read it.

Crescent Blues: What keeps you writing it?

Jasmine Cresswell: The fact that I love to write it!

Crescent Blues: Many of your romantic suspense novels feature heroines who appear poised but who are balanced on the thinnest edge of control, much like a Hitchcock blonde. What attracts you to this type of heroine?

Jasmine Cresswell: What an interesting question! I guess because it seems to me that in real life, we're all balanced on the thinnest edge of control most of the time. Some of my interest in this sort of a character must be a reaction to my own situation, I think. Because I'm a Brit, brought up to be polite, to speak in smooth sentences, and because I've stayed married to the same (very successful) man and we have a ton of kids and grandkids, everyone assumes that my life must be easy and I must be totally relaxed and in control.

Of course that isn't true. Nobody's life is smooth and easy viewed from the inside. Quite often, I'm sure, those of us who look most serene are actually struggling with huge problems.

Crescent Blues: What makes a great hero for a romantic suspense novel?

Jasmine Cresswell: Well, I like my heroes to appear super-competent to the world whereas their internal reality is quite otherwise. See my answer above. [Grin.] But I also confess to being old-fashioned. I want my heroes to be physically attractive, commanding and successful in their chosen careers. I admire authors who can create heroes out of unlikely material. I'm not sure I have that skill.

Crescent Blues: How do these characteristics resemble and differ from the qualities needed in the hero of a contemporary romance or a historical?

Jasmine Cresswell: I happen to be an historian by original profession. I spent years studying for my doctorate in British history, so I've read a ton of documents written by 19th century people in all walks of life.

I hold the unpopular view that people were brought up so differently in times past that they didn't feel the same things as we do in the same circumstances. If we had to watch a public execution, I'm sure we wouldn't react as people did in 16th century Europe, for example. We don't react the same way to the death of a child as people did in the past. I don't mean that parents didn't grieve, of course they did. But they grieved within a context of acceptance. If a favorite family name was Edward John, for example, parents would often give the first two of their sons the same name in the expectation that one of the boys would die. We can't even wrap our minds around that sort of mindset. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I think many of today's historical romances fail to give either their heroes or their heroines nearly enough of the flavor of the past.

Crescent Blues: What prompted you to introduce the family as an element in your covert operations stories?

Jasmine Cresswell: Our families make us the people we are. Sometimes people rise above hardship and become more than their family background would ever have predicted. Sometimes people fall between the cracks and don't quite make it even in a loving family. Whatever the precise circumstances, family is crucial to our sense of self. Neither Melody nor Nikolai would have been the people they were without their dramatic and complicated family situations.

Crescent Blues: What kind of response (if any) have you received from people "in the business"?

Jasmine Cresswell: Well, you know that one of my daughters works (not undercover!) for the CIA. Her opinion is that the stories were great fun -- and had nothing whatsoever to do with her world!

Crescent Blues: You were born in Britain and lived all over the world. Have your life and travels influenced your fiction?

Jasmine Cresswell: Definitely. Just because I've been to so many places, I feel more comfortable creating international settings. In the first book of the Raven trilogy, Missing, the hero and heroine travel briefly to Belize. With the 'Net, anyone can research Belize and use it as a setting. I've noticed, though, that writer friends who haven't traveled outside the States hesitate to move away from American settings. I understand that completely. Heaven knows, when we write fiction we're pulling so much stuff out of the air most of us want to have a really concrete image of the setting to pin all the creativity down.

Crescent Blues: What prompted your decision to settle in the United States?

Jasmine Cresswell: My husband. [Grin.] He was young and ambitious and dying to work in the States. He got a job here and we moved the day after we were married.

Crescent Blues: When did you first realize that you wanted to write?

Jasmine Cresswell: When I was in a graduate program at university in Australia and I realized that I was one of those weird students who actually liked to write papers.

Crescent Blues: What set you on the path to writing romance?

Jasmine Cresswell: At writers' conferences, one of the first things you learn is that you should write what you love to read. I'd never attended a writers' conference when I started to write, but this was the only thing I did correctly from the beginning. I liked to read romance. So that's what I wrote.

Crescent Blues: How did a British native learn to capture American idioms in her writing? What's the secret to sustaining it in a book with a distinctly regional tone, such as The Third Wife? (I thought the chapter posted on your web site was a tour de force with respect to capturing the way we talk and think.)

Jasmine Cresswell: Thank you so much for the compliment. I'm fascinated by language. I can't mimic accents orally, but I can hear them distinctly inside my head. Fortunately, for a writer, that's all you need.

Crescent Blues: How important were writers' organizations to the development of your writing career?

Jasmine Cresswell: Very important. When I started writing, I knew nobody who'd ever published a work of fiction. I knew nothing about the business. Zero. I'd published two books before I even knew there were magazines such as The Writer. Then I saw a snippet in our local paper (we were living near Chicago at the time) about a writers' help group about to start up at the local library. I went, and felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when she walks from black-and-white Kansas into Technicolor Oz. My whole life changed. Not least in the incredible friendships that have made the past twenty years so enjoyable for me.

Crescent Blues: What advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

Jasmine Cresswell: Read analytically. Nothing is more helpful to writing than to read and think about what you've read.

Crescent Blues: What advice would you give to writers facing their first appearances on radio or TV?

Jasmine Cresswell: Make sure you can sum up your book in a maximum of two sentences. If there's a question you particularly don't want to answer, make sure you know how you'll respond if it's thrown at you.

Wear simple, comfortable clothes that you feel really good in. Short skirts that show your knees don't work well unless you're Paris Hilton.

Crescent Blues: Anything you'd like to add? (Soap boxes provided free of charge.)

Jasmine Cresswell: Gosh, I think I've soap boxed enough! Thank you for such interesting questions.

Click here to learn more about Jasmine Cresswell.

Jean Marie Ward