Seattleite and Bestselling Author JA Jance

With more than 20 million copies of her books in print, J.A. Jance is the perennially bestselling author of the J.P. Beaumont series (set in Seattle), the Ali Reynolds series, the Joanna Brady series and more.

Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband and their two dachshunds in Seattle and Tucson, Arizona.

“Being a snowbird is complicated. Something always goes wrong at the ‘other’ house within days of our leaving it. But you can’t beat the weather,” she told Northwest Prime Time in a recent interview.

“I first arrived in Seattle in July of 1981 as a refugee from a bad marriage and a worse divorce,” said Jance. “I moved in with my sister in a condo in the Denny Regrade and supported my kids by working in the life insurance industry.”

In 1981, hoping to improve her sales career, she enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course. When she told the group a true-life story about a series of murders that had happened in Tucson, one of her classmates said, “Someone should write a book about that.”

That statement really struck home for Jance. “I had wanted to be a writer from second grade on,” she said. “As a second-grader in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway School class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. I read the first one and was hooked.” She knew, from that moment on, that she wanted to be a writer. “When I graduated from Bisbee High School in 1962, I received an academic scholarship that made me the first person in my family to attend a four year college.”

But her ambitions to become a writer were frustrated. “First because the professor who taught creative writing at the University of Arizona in those days thought girls ‘ought to be teachers or nurses’ rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program, I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that was closed to me.”

Jance graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and Secondary Education. She later received a Masters Degree in Library Science, taught high school English for two years and then became a K-12 librarian at the Indian Oasis School District for five years.

She didn’t pursue her interest in writing, even on the side, because her husband admonished her that there would be only one writer in the family, and he was it. “My husband made that statement in 1968 after I had received a favorable letter from an editor in New York who was interested in publishing a children’s story I had written. Because I was a newlywed who was interested in staying married, I put my writing ambitions on hold. Other than writing poetry in the dark of night when my husband was asleep, I did nothing more about writing fiction until eleven years later.”

When her Dale Carnegie classmate said those fateful words on a Thursday night, the thought that went through her head was, “I’m divorced. What have I got to lose? So Sunday afternoon of that week, I sat down to write. My first three books were written between 4 and 7am. At seven, I would wake my children and send them off to school. After that, I would get myself ready to go sell life insurance.”

J.A. Jance’s first book was about the series of murders in Tucson, the same story she had told to her Dale Carnegie classmates. But the book was never published. “My agent finally sat me down and told me that she thought I was a better writer of fiction than I was of non-fiction. Why, she suggested, didn’t I try my hand at a novel?”

The result of that conversation was the first Detective Beaumont book, Until Proven Guilty.

And while that first book never sold, “I’ve sold more than fifty other books,” she declared as an impressive statement of fact.

Her husband played another role in her writing career – first by thwarting it and then by helping when she was the beneficiary of a life insurance policy. “When my former husband died, I invested $5000 of the proceeds in a computer – a dual floppy Eagle and a Daisy Wheel printer. That computer had 128 K of memory, so when my word processor, a program called Spellbinder, was loaded into the computer, there was only 15K left in the work space.” She credits her first three books’ short, punchy chapters to the fact that the curser would freeze up when her computer’s memory reached its maximum.

It was while she was writing the third book, Trial by Fury, that she met and married her second husband, an electronics engineer. “He took my computer apart and added more memory with the result that the chapters were able to be a little longer and a lot more graceful.”

She met her husband at a retreat for people who had lost their spouse. “The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a poetry reading at a retreat sponsored by a group called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June of 1985, it was five years after my divorce and two years after my former husband’s death. I went to the retreat feeling as though I didn’t deserve to be there. At the retreat I met a man whose wife had died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they’d do, and we got married. We now have four new in-laws as well as six grandchildren.” Several of their children make their home in the Northwest.

“When my second husband and I first married, he supported all of us – his kids and mine. It was a long time before my income from writing was anything more than fun money. Eventually, however, the worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and took up golf and oil painting.”

Although she was born in Arizona and spends the winter there, J.A. Jance said, “Seattle will always be my creative home.” And she provided this special note to Northwest Prime Time readers: “Many of my older fans are either hardback or paperback readers, and I’m thrilled to have them, but readers who discover that the print in ink-on-paper books is suddenly too small might benefit from taking a look at electronic books because it’s possible to adjust the font size to something more comfortable.”

And a note about her fans: “A wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from fans. I learned on the reservation that the ancient, sacred the time. It gratifies me to know that by immersing themselves in my stories, people are able to set their own lives aside and live and walk in someone else’s shoes. It tells me I’m doing a good job at the best job in the world.”

Much of this article’s content is from J.A. Jance’s website: jajance.com

MORE INFORMATION

J.A. Jance’s Ali Reynolds thriller "Clawback" goes on sale March 8

J.A. Jance’s newest thriller, Clawback (on sale March 8), revisits television reporter turned amateur sleuth Ali Reynolds. Writing of what she knows, Jance was victimized by a Seattle-based Ponzi scheme, the largest in the state’s history, which unraveled in 2010. In the book, Ali must track down the mastermind behind an elaborate Ponzi scheme along with his ill-gotten gains.

Meet JA Jance in person at these book-signing events:

• Mar 16, 7pm, University Bookstore, 15311 Main Street, Mill Creek.
• Mar 17, noon, Mystery Bookshop, 117 Cherry Street, Seattle.
• Mar 17, 7pm, 3rd Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE.
• Mar 18, 7pm Sylvan Way Library 1301 Sylvan Way, Bremerton.
• Mar 19, 3pm Federal Way 320th Library, 848 South 320th Street.
• Mar 23, 7pm Puyallup Public Library, 324 South Meridian.
• Mar 24, 7:30pm Timberland Library, 313 8th Avenue SE, Olympia.
• Mar 26, 4pm Village Books, 1200 11th St, Bellingham.