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Maxi Mania By Kelly Lange
I am a longtime television news anchor-reporter here in Los
Angeles, or LaLa Land, as my fictional sleuth Maxi Poole calls
this place where we both live, and that we both love. To Maxi
and me, Los Angeles isn't a curse or a blessing, an ebullient
state of mind or a vacuous lifestyle choice. It's just home,
shadows and all. It'll fill you with euphoria Or break your
heart, and sometimes it'll do both on the same day.
News is the "who, what, where, when, and why" of what Is usually
a very bleak terrain. I ascended from being one of the dozen or
so ink-stained wretches in L.A.'s KABC radio newsroom to radio
reporter, then to television news reporter at KNBC in Los
Angeles, then television news anchor at that station for more
than two decades, And during it all, I was writing news. Banging
it out, as we said in the sweaty Channel Four newsroom.
Now I write fiction, and my genre is mysteries. How come? you
ask, my being a woman who has written serious news for most of
her adult life. The reason is, I love a mystery. Love the
puzzle. Truly respect the writer who can keep me guessing. And
I've read them all, from our own great L.A. noir writers like
Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross McDonald, along
with Agatha Christie and the Brits, on up to present day mystery
mavens like Sue Grafton, Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, and the
many other terrific scribes who dabble in deadly ink.
Anchoring the eleven O'clock News for so many years, getting
home from work at about two in the morning, has turned me into a
double-dyed insomniac. To get to sleep I would read for an hour
or two, or four or five, until my head hit the pillow. Until the
night I decided to be more productive with those wee hours, and
I started writing instead of reading -- writing until my head
hit not the pillow, but the keyboard. Yes, I got a few bruises
in the process, but nothing that couldn't be covered up with
television makeup to go on camera the next day.
I guess it's no big surprise that my sleuth, television
anchor-reporter Maxi Poole, is a lot like me. Except she's
younger, taller, thinner , sexier, and blonder than me.
Hey, she's my sleuth, right? She can be exactly what I want her
to be. That's the fun of writing fiction all night after writing
news all day. In the lone nighttime hours, as I sit in front of
my computer screen at three, four in the morning, while the
devil Santa Ana winds are howling through our L.A. canyons, and
the hungry herds of coyotes are howling in our hills (okay, of
Beverly), and I'm writing my Maxi Poole mysteries, get this
--far from being tied to responsible journalism, I get to just
make it up.
How liberating!
Copyright © Kelly Lange 2003
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