Conversation with Joanna Schaffhausen

by Sharon Kitchens

 A belated CONGRATULATIONS on her publishing day to author Joanna Schaffhausen, whose third installment of her Detective Annalisa Vega series came out yesterday. Of course, I picked up my copy from Michelle pronto and will be diving into it in the next couple days. I've been reading and loving Joanna's books since 2017 when her first Ellery Hathaway book came out (there are five in the series). She is a writer I admire for elevating crime fiction. Her thoughtful, character-driven stories featuring strong women who don't always bend to the rules are engaging. I love how she dives head first into the psychology of these women. When Joanna agreed to be interviewed by me for a blog post I was overjoyed. 

 

Was there something in particular that motivated you to write crime fiction? 

 

I like puzzles first and foremost. Beyond that, I’m a psychology major so I am always interested in why people do the things they do, good and bad. Crime fiction is an excellent canvas to explore many different types of people and motivations for committing crimes, as well the psychology of everyone around the crime—victims, survivors, investigators, relatives of perpetrators and relatives of victims.

 

Ellery Hathaway is this beautifully complex character. She is what happened to her and so much more. One of the reasons I love her character so much is because of how intimately you know her—how much you lean into the psychology of her as a survivor. How she responds to trauma, what drives her.  

 

I read in an interview you did somewhere along the way that you loosely based Ellery on Carol DaRonch. A survivor of a real-life psychopath. How did Ellery take shape from Carol? 

 

Our collective appetite for stories about Ted Bundy is unceasing. There are an average of five new books, TV specials, and movies per year about him even now, thirty-four years after his death. Carol was his first known living victim. She was the one to put a face to the name and this enabled law enforcement to connect Bundy to murdered or missing women across multiple states. Because she plays such a significant role in Bundy’s story, we the Bundy-obsessed public force her to relive it, over and over. Either Carol herself is hauled out for another interview or someone plays her in the TV or movie special. Bundy’s dead but he’s followed Carol like a ghost for years. She has lived her whole life in his shadow.

 

Ellery is a fictional exploration of what it’s like to have your life trajectory hijacked by a charismatic serial killer. She survived Coben when no one else did and so everyone is curious about her—but mostly they only care about her as she relates to him. He’s the star. They want her to take her place in his story. The books are about Ellery figuring out how to cope with what happened to her and to live her life on her own terms.

 

How has your study of neuroscience informed your character development? 

 

My specific background is in the biological underpinnings of memory, i.e how the brain changes when you learn something. Of course, related to this is how the brain chooses which memories to keep and which to discard and how it’s not a reliable narrator. Our memories are not photographs or documentaries; they are biased narratives influenced by emotion, outside factors like alcohol or drugs, and our own history—the memories that preceded them. What are we but a sum of our memories? They form the basis of who we are, how we navigate the world, what our hopes and dreams may be.

 

What research have you done to develop an understanding of what it is to be a police detective or FBI agent? 

 

Lots and lots of reading, including training manuals, historical FBI manuscripts, biographies of cops, current government websites dealing with particular law enforcement procedures in a certain city. I’ve also had conversations with active law enforcement personnel. 

 

I’m really looking forward to reading volume three of the Chicago police detective Annalisa Vega series, Dead and Gone.  In the first book she does what she believes a detective should do and the results are life-altering for her and people she loves. Was it ever a question she was not going to make the decision she did in the end? 

 

No. I don’t think she could have lived with herself otherwise. Of course, she has to live with the fallout from her decision, which she’s been doing in all the subsequent novels.

 

What did you set out to do with Detective Vega in Dead and Gone? 

 

What’s fun about the first Annalisa book, Gone for Good, is that for a hot minute it looks like Annalisa’s going to get everything she ever wanted and then it all slowly goes to hell. Annalisa starts the book hungering for family, both within the police force and in her home. Her series is about her letting go of the need for an ideal perfect family and working to create a real one in its place. In Dead and Gone, she has two major decisions to make: whether her ex-husband Nick can be part of that real family, and whether she still has a place in the Chicago police department after what she did in the first book.

 

If you were introducing Ellery and Annalisa at a dinner party, how would you describe them? 

 

That would be a really entertaining dinner party! Both Ellery and Annalisa have great stories to tell, if you can get them to talk to you. Ellery is more reserved. If you want to get her to open up, talk to her about dogs, especially basset hounds. She has an adorable rescue hound named Speed Bump.

            

Annalisa grew up surrounded by cops and has collected a lot of their funny stories along the way. Ask her about her dad’s time on the beat and the wildest stuff he ever saw, like the time he got called out with lights and sirens because a woman on the street kept yelling for “help.” Turned out she’d named her cat “Help.”

 

What prompted you to start writing the Annalisa Vega series—how did you know it was the right time? And are you done with Ellery Hathaway, or can us fans hold out hope there might be at least one more book featuring her down the road? 

 

Here is a little secret: I wrote the first three books in the Ellery Hathaway series before the first one was published. It was 22 months between the time Minotaur said they would publish The Vanishing Season and when it actually hit bookshelves. I could have birthed two actual children in this time. Instead, I wrote books. So, when The Vanishing Season came out, I was “ahead” on my contracts. I wrote other stuff, which included Gone for Good in 2018. Then that book didn’t come out until 2021. Because traditional publishing moves so slowly, authors often have weird gaps in their schedules with which to pursue other projects.

 

As for Ellery, never say never. I’d love to write more of her, but the series would have to really take off somehow for the publisher to ask for more of it.

 

What do you do when you’re writing a book and get stuck? 

 

This is such a timely question since it just happened to me. The short answer is that I chuck the book and start over, usually. I will struggle with it for maybe three months, but if in that time I feel like it’s not working, I just move on. I recently did this for a book for which I really love the idea but I can’t seem to make it work on paper. I’ve traded it in for a new idea that is working much better so far. But, I don’t throw away my unfinished book. One of my reject projects has been reborn in a different form for Annalisa’s fourth adventure (coming 2024).

Let’s wrap up with the basset hounds. Thank you so much for gifting us Speed Bump in the Ellery Hathaway novels. Is Winston, your real-life furry bundle of joy, a fan? How alike are they really? Also, the cuteness factor of Winston’s land shark costume is off the charts!!

 

Aw, thank you. Winston likes the books inasmuch as the store I do my launches at, Brookline Booksmith, allows dogs so he can attend. He is also excellent at making sure I know when to stop writing and feed him dinner (see attached). Speed Bump from the Ellery series predates Winston by more than a decade. I wrote the first draft of that story in 1999 and Winston was born in 2018. But they share the core basset traits: goofy charmers who are always on the lookout for food.