Escapist Fare by Gillian Roberts

Judy Greber is a peace-loving woman who loves playing with words, paints, the cat and the (perfect) grandchildren. She also has written four novels which sometimes involve death, but never sleuthing. Her alter-ego, Gillian Roberts is a figment who in theory writes mysteries.

            After fourteen books in the Amanda Pepper series, both Judy (Gillian?) and Amanda retired from the schoolroom. Amanda and her husband moved to New Orleans.  Judy and her husband stayed put in Northern California. 

            Once no longer writing the series, Judy way too loudly declared she wanted a “new challenge,” thereby setting herself up to be the living definition of ‘be careful what you ask for.‘   She’s been grappling ever since with a novel (with murder) set in seventeenth century Mexico. Those fat notebooks on the desk are filled with research, the books on the shelves (and under C3PO) are a portion of what she’s read and now--the game is to write a book in which none of that research “shows.” No info dumps, as tempting as it might be.

            Gillian sent a postcard from a beach in Figmentland that said, “Tell me when it’s time to put my name on the cover...”

Escapist Fare

by Gillian Roberts

          It should be relatively easy to write about murder,  especially when a perfect premise is given to you. Without such a ‘gift’, I’ve done it in sixteen novels and a few dozen short stories. I’ve even written a how-to-write-about-murder.

          Here’s what I know now: It is (relatively) easy--as long as it’s a mystery.

          And it’s fictional.

          The resulting puzzles or pulse-racers are called escapist fiction.  It’s suggested we read such works on a plane where anything that makes travel less onerous is a plus, or at the beach (what on earth are we escaping there?)

          “Escapist” is generally not a compliment. There’s a small sneer in the term, as if the crime isn’t on the page but within us.  Our brows are low.  Nobody gave us permission to escape.  It’s a critical form of Mean Buddhism: Be Here Now--Or Else.

          But we do escape, even when we aren’t flying or sunbathing and return to the pleasures of crime as readers and writers.

          I did or thought I did. And then real-life murder hit home, almost literally.  A gentle woman--who was active in the library, who wanted to write, who had been a career counselor, who had dreadful back problems about which she didn’t complain, whose husband, a lawyer and wildlife photographer died of Alzheimer’s a few months earlier, who had fine sons and grandchildren--was killed.

          Early one early summer morning in this quiet town she was murdered a few feet from her front door, with a point blank shot to her skull. 

          Nothing was taken from the house.  

          Nobody heard the shot.

          The local weekly just won a national prize for their coverage of the crime, but a year later, it remains unsolved. And a year later, I find myself still thinking of her on a daily basis, and looking at life differently. I was a casual friend. What is her best friend feeling? Her children and grandchildren? Her next door neighbors?  Everyone in this small town is changed in many ways. One gunshot echoes forever.  

          “You ought to write about it,” more than one person said. “You’re a mystery writer and here it is--a real life mystery in our own town.”

          True. It has every element the crime novels I most enjoy reading and writing have. It’s a classic mystery. 

          And yes, I spent a lot of time puzzling who could have, why anybody would have, done such a thing, and I have a working, if unprovable idea.  I also know that to a writer, ‘everything is material.’  I have borrowed shamelessly from news stories that gnawed at me. The books that resulted weren’t of the ‘ripped from the headlines’ type because big headlines interest me less than small, human stories. Like this one.

          But when I think about borrowing this woman’s death--even though it haunts and mystifies me and feels important in ways I can’t yet articulate--I feel as if I’d be dishonoring her because of what a writer must do in order to turn her story into mine. 

          Everything I know about her is benign, loving, wry, kindly.  She was ordinary, in the nicest of ways. That’s what gives her story such power--it makes no sense.

          But what we demand in a mystery is to go beneath smooth surfaces and find fissures, secrets, and dark places, a handful of enemies--suspects--who have cause to have wanted her gone. I couldn’t do that to that good woman, but then I’d have no plot, no story, no motives--no book.      I’ve been trying to think through this, about why I never felt this queasiness and revulsion when I’ve borrowed bits from real events and real people’s behavior and turned them into something new. We say we want believable stories, and believable characters, but we don’t, not really.  We want art. Escapist art, if you will. 

          Only since my friend was killed did I consider what, precisely, we’re escaping. I know our books can help us assuage grief and anxiety.  I’ve heard from readers who said my books got them through long sieges by or in a hospital bed, or sleepless nights, or just plain bad times, and I am so grateful that is so.

          But after a year of thinking about the unfathomable insanity that took a good life, about real crime and its aftershocks, I think that we turn to fictional mysteries to escape the terrible lack of a plot in “real” life. We’re escaping the randomness and meaningless of the evil we cannot escape in the ‘real’ world by diving into a book where loose ends are woven together, motives are clear and maybe most of all, we’re given an ending, a conclusion, a meaning--whatever that might be.

          It’s a good thing. Thanks be for the magic and the solace escapist fiction provides. Without it, life in its amoeba-like shapelessness might smother us. So while I won’t ever ‘use’ the one murder story I know, I will keep writing escapist fiction and consider “escapism” a necessary blessing and a term of praise.

A Room of One's Own by Gillian Roberts

Gillian Roberts is a figment who employs Judy Greber (the author of four mainstream novels in which people die, but nobody cares whodunit ) to ghostwrite for her. “Gillian” titles include two mysteries set in Marin County, Time and Trouble and Whatever Doesn’t Kill You, a how-to, You Can Write a Mystery, a short story collection and the fourteen books in the Anthony Award winning Amanda Pepper series.

Judy’s taught writing at College of Marin and Book Passage, and was adjunct faculty in USF’s MFA in Writing Program for a dozen years.

Currently, Judy is working on a ridiculously-difficult-to-research historical mystery. What Gillian’s been doing these past few decades remains a mystery.



A Room of One's Own
by Gillian Roberts and Judy Greber

Virginia Woolf famously said “a woman must have a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” She also said she must have money, an (inherited, she meant) income.

Nonetheless, I wrote my first book, Caught Dead in Philadelphia, without a room of my own, and my income was a (small) paycheck for teaching an overloaded roster at a private school. When I could steal an hour from my crowded life, I wrote at a small desk in a corner of the bedroom.

This worked well enough, but only when nobody else was around. Family members--well-meaning, loving though they be--have an unconscious need to take remedial action when they notice that you are totally happy without them. This is inborn--infants instinctively know how to do it. (Ask any mother what happens when she makes a phone call. If needs be, the formerly contented child will smash his own body parts if that’s what it takes to get her full attention back.)

So there I’d be, totally happy in my stolen moments with only the Selectric and the pictures in my mind, which should have set up a red flag. Because too often, a child would wander, as if in a trance, into the room and turn the typewriter off because...well, he wasn’t sure why. And one infamous sunny Saturday afternoon, when I was writing, the bedroom door opened and in came my husband and our two sons--plus a deflated basketball and a bicycle pump. The trio seated themselves cheerfully on the bed and proceeded to pump up the ball.

After I had regained the ability to speak (okay, the ability to screech) I asked, “WHY? WHY INSIDE? WHY IN HERE?” Their reactions were straight out of a cartoon. Mouths agape, eyes popping, they looked at each other, at me, at the basketball, at their surroundings, even more bewildered than I was.

We worked on that and reached a shaky peace, but naturally, when we moved again, I was thrilled to acquire a room of my own, even if it wasn’t quite a room yet. My office began life as a diminutive deck off the kitchen. The next owner turned it into her pottery workshop, but it was a peculiar half-inside, half-outside sort of place as if she couldn’t commit to clay vs. porch. The walls were brown shingles, the original exterior sliding glass separated me from the hallway, and an enormous window looked into the kitchen. It is a weirdly uncomfortable experience to do your thing in a room with three glass walls, unless you’re a guppy.


Over the years, we removed the shingles, made the kitchen dividing wall solid, put down wood floors, and created a normal interior doorway. To cap it off, and my husband built me my (enormous) dream desk. The former porch has no subflooring, so it’s the hottest place in the house in summer, the coldest in winter. And the desk apparently isn’t sufficiently enormous to avoid being cluttered 99% of the time. Doesn’t matter. It’s mine.

I’d always heard that a writer should face a blank wall in a spartan room in order to avoid distractions, but I’d rather eat glass than stare at a blank wall all day. Bad enough I stare at a blank screen and try not to think about my blank brain--adding to that emptiness would be masochistic overkill.

I therefore work in an absence of blankness. In back, glass doors face a garden bursting with life. And even if that were not so, I’ve filled the room with a medley of chatchkes and treasures. Above my desk, a poster of Georgia O’Keeffe scowls down at me. I look up at her amazing weathered face and I hear her saying, “I’m ninety and can barely see, but I’m still painting. How are you using your time, Missy?” Pinned to the poster is a tin angel that quotes James Michener with the words, “I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” On the bookshelves across the room, I can see my past work, and on my bulletin board, a book-shaped milagro. I’m therefore surrounded by all the varieties of help I can find--nagging, encouragement, a reminder that I can do it (or at least, could), and most definitely, miracles.



Near Ms. O’Keeffe, there’s a photograph I bought at a street market in Argentina. It shows a well-groomed member of the public looking down at a seated lump of a man, his beard unkempt and his pathetic possessions in a shopping cart topped by a hand lettered sign that says, in Spanish, “Poetry for Sale.” They didn’t have one that said, “Mysteries for Sale,” but I feel a kinship with that guy and am also afraid of becoming him, so he’s another prompt to get to work.

There are lots of things that amuse me. Frogs of many shapes and materials. Souvenirs from trips, gifts received and treasured. A charcoal drawing I did of my husband. The girl and boy bookends that were in my nursery, several millennia ago. A clock with no numbers. Instead, in place of the 12, it says, “read a book, ” and “read another book” at 12:15, and “read yet another book” at half past the hour and “buy more books” at a quarter of anything.


And then, there’s my waste paper basket. When I sold my first book, I spread my world-class collection of rejection slips out, chose only one per publication and glued them to an industrial-sized basket. For the twenty-nine years since then, I’ve looked at the collage: J. B. Lippincott, Young Family, The Saturday Evening Post, Atheneum, Girl Talk, McCall’s--so many others--where are you now? Maybe if you’d published me...? Probably not, but it still gives me pleasure to use it for my rejects.


One caveat: it isn’t truly a room of my own. I share it with an aged, ill-tempered tabby cat, Mehitabel, who keeps me company while I write. I am sure she does this is out of love and literary interests, not because I have a heating pad on ‘her’ chair. She’s named after the wild, sluttish tabby in the terrific Archie and Mehitabel books, which I hope you already knew. If not--highly recommended. I, of course, am Archie, the typing cockroach. I think of her as my muse. She thinks of me as her amusement. It works.

Virginia and all the writing experts would disapprove of what I’ve done with my room. They’d see a small, cluttered space with too many distractions, and they’d be right. But I see a room truly made my own. And I see stories everywhere around me--the stories of my life.

Virginia Woolf was a genius, but still a bit wrong about the necessity of a room of one’s own (let alone the income.) It is indeed lovely to have one (lovelier to have both), but the truth is, despite all the distractions around me, at those miraculous times when a brand-new story takes shape in my imagination, I barely notice the walls and shelves. Not even the wastepaper basket.