A Nun, a Tattoo, and a Mystery

A mystery novel set in Door County? Well, not quite yet, but one is in the works according to mystery writer Michael Wiley. Wiley was recently in Door County for the last stop on his book tour for his newest installment in the Joseph Kozmarski series, The Bad Kitty Lounge, and I had a chance to grab a cup of coffee with him and discuss not only his newest novel, but future novels as well.

Mindi Vanderhoof (MV): Where did the interest in detective novels come from?

Michael Wiley (MW): I grew up reading Alfred Hitchcock’s stories, and I just loved reading mysteries as a kid when everyone else was reading other kinds of books. I loved the FBI true cases and those kinds of things. I turned away from mysteries for a while, while I studied literature as an undergraduate. When I started having kids, I suddenly realized that I needed more and more pleasure again, so I started reading mysteries again. Raymond Chandler, Robert Parker, their kinds of stories just wrapped me. And I thought, “I think I can do this,” so I tried my hand at it – and it turned out well.

MV: Would you say that with an English literature background that you’re sort of pushed away from the mystery novel genre since you don’t really study them in school?

MW: Well now some people do. Now there are courses in the mystery novel, but when I went through college in the early ‘80s, it wasn’t done. We read all the big name British poets and that was about it. That’s what I teach – and I love that stuff, too – but this is what I write and this is my pleasure.

MV: Where did the inspiration for Joe Kozmarski come from? Did you pull from your real life at all to create him?

MW: Joe Kozmarski is the guy I most want to be, and the guy I most fear to be. He is a Chicago guy; he’s a polish American in his mid-forties. He’s got an ex-wife who he still loves, another woman named Lucinda whom he is also very interested in. He’s got a nephew living with him, and he’s ill prepared to take care of him. I grew up in the Chicago area, just north of Chicago and lived a lot of years downtown as well. In a lot of ways he is an everyman and resembles people we all know, but he gets himself into situations that involve murder and all kinds of violence. It is kind of fun to see how he deals with the extreme circumstances.

MV: Isn’t there something about a nun and an indiscreet tattoo?

MW: Yes. The main murder victim is a nun in Chicago, and she is known as the virginity nun. She promotes sexual abstinence among teenagers, but when she gets killed, Joe Kozmarski is the one who finds her; and, he sees, as well as everybody else, that she has a tattoo of a cat in heat. It suggests that she has a more complicated past than initially you might expect. So the book goes back and forth between the late-1960s and the present, and the long sorted history that has led to the murder is unveiled.

MV: The nun and the tattoo really caught my attention (laughs).

MW: Yeah, it is interesting because the way that this story came about is that I was in downtown Jacksonville on a hot summer day, and I saw this woman wearing a t-shirt. And she looked like she had had a pretty rough night, and the t-shirt said “Bad Kitty.” When I saw that t-shirt, I thought that had to be the greatest title for a hardboiled fiction novel that I could imagine. I looked up the title Bad Kitty online to see if anyone else had used it, and it turns out that there is a whole children’s book series called “Bad Kitty” – Bad Kitty Takes a Bath, Bad Kitty Goes to the Dentist, those sorts of things. So, no, I couldn’t use bad kitty, but then I thought lets take it up a notch and make it The Bad Kitty Lounge. You can associate the words “bad kitty” with the woman I saw pretty easily, but what happens when you juxtapose those words with somebody you wouldn’t expect to be associated with those words…like a nun?

MV: Would you say that a lot of your settings are based on places that you know?

MW: They very much are. These books are set in Chicago, go as far south as the Indiana State Dunes, go as far north as Kenosha and Racine and I’ll keep on reaching out. They are centered in Chicago. They are all using real places, places that you recognize – if you know Chicago, you’ll know the streets I’m talking about. Readers have commented on this, how deeply connected these are to the places where they are set.

MV: Do you ever get flack for not representing a place correctly, so to say?

MW: The only flack that I get is for the few occasions where I misrepresent gun use. People who know guns really well tend to be close readers of gun use, so they’ll email me and ask “Could he really have done that?” or “The better gun for that would have been a different gun.” As far as place representation goes though, no, people seem to be really, really happy with the way I represent places. I like place. Places have character.

MV: I know you mentioned to me via email that you had ties to Door County: What exactly are those ties if you don’t mind me asking?

MW: Since an early age, we spent whole summers up here. This is a place that is really near and dear to my heart. It is a place that from the first book that I wrote in this series, I’ve been thinking, “Oh, I have to get Joe Kozmarski up here.” The way I see it now, each book is set in a month. The first book is set in September, the second in October, and the third book, which comes out next year around this time, is a November book, and then I’m going to go through the calendar year. I’d love to set a winter book here in Door County with the ice and the real cold. I’d also love to have one set here in the summer as well. I figure each of these books takes Joe Kozmarski out of town for a little while, and this is a great place to go. So yeah, I grew up here. In many ways, I did more growing up here than I did in Chicago.

MV: Are you working on the third installment currently?

MW: The third is done and will be coming out sometime next year. We haven’t gotten the exact publication date yet, but that one is called A Bad Night’s Sleep.

MV: How would you describe The Bad Kitty Lounge if you had to write your own back cover blurb?

MW: Hardboiled mysteries with heart and feeling.

MV: What kind of research do you conduct when writing these novels?

MW: A lot of people say write what you know. I say the opposite. Learn what you need to know in order to write. So don’t write what you know; learn what you need to know and then write. Write the story. Figure out the story you want to tell first. I pride myself on researching things fully, so I go to the gun range and shoot the guns. I just spent a night with a few homicide detectives in Jacksonville, talking about the various approaches, the various languages, figuring out some of the ways that they think, work, and talk. I go and spend time with the people I’m interested in writing about; I go and visit and revisit the places I’m going to write about. Then I start to play. What counts most is a good story.

MV: In mystery novels, there is always that twist. How do you avoid being completely cliché when writing your twists?

MW: Twists matter deeply. That is one of the things I like about the genre. That is one of the things I like about my own approach to it. I think that twists matter. Those give us huge amounts of pleasure. My books twist. Those are real and when you’re twisting, you’re always setting things up so as to create certain expectations, but you’re leaving the evidence right in front of the readers face so that when the twist occurs the reader says “of course, of course.” The answer should be hidden in plain sight.

MV: Is Joe a good guy?

MW: He’s a great guy. I’ve had a lot of women say they want to marry him which again, I’m not always sure how I should take that. He’s a really good guy, but he’s also a really flawed guy. He makes some pretty significant mistakes.

MV: What can readers expect from The Bad Kitty Lounge?

MW: A fast ride through Chicago’s streets with lots of twists and turns.

You can pick up a copy of Wiley’s The Bad Kitty Lounge at Novel Ideas in Baileys Harbor.