Katherine
V. Forrest is the Lambda Award-winning author of eight mystery
novels featuring lesbian LAPD Detective Kate Delafield.
She is also the author of the best-selling lesbian romance
novel Curious Wine, and the science fiction novels
Daughters of a Coral Dawn and Daughters of
an Amber Noon. I recently sat down with her to talk
about her experiences as a writer and her most recent book,
Hancock Park.
AE:
You’ve been writing for a long time now, but you didn’t
start out as a writer.
KVF:
I think I’m a little unusual…like every writer
I’ve been writing all my life, but I was in the business
world. The magical event was turning 40. My partner at the
time said, “you’ve always wanted to write a
book, why don’t you take six months and write a book,”
and so like a fool I thought I could actually write a book
in six months. So three years later, Curious Wine
emerged.
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I absolutely couldn’t have done it without her and I was really
very fortunate that I had the time and the circumstance to actually
learn the craft, because it is a little bit like learning how to
be a brain surgeon. It is a very demanding profession to be in.
It really did take three years to learn how to be a writer.
AE:
Curious Wine is a classic now; what motivated you to write
it?
KVF:
It’s a very special book to me. I’m often asked if I
have a favorite book, and like all writers I say it’s kind
of like being asked to choose among your children, but I will never
write a book that I love more than that one, and to some degree
it was part of my own coming-out process.
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To explain where the book came from, a requirement is sort
of just understanding the time, because it was 1983 when
it was published, and at that point I had read all of the
lesbian literature I could find. There was just no book
out there that conveyed, for me, the passion and the beauty
of our love and how absolutely beautiful women are together.
So I wrote the book I wanted to read, and evidently a lot
of other women wanted to read it too (laughs). In the writing
of the book I found that I just more fully embraced my own
identity and celebrated it, and so that’s why it remains
to this day an incredibly beautiful experience for me, and
a book that means a lot to me….One of my favorite
things is to be at an appearance and have a young woman
come up to me and tell me it’s the first lesbian novel
she ever read, because mine was The Well of Loneliness
(laughs).
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AE:
Curious Wine is a big improvement on that.
KVF:
Yeah, it is. To this day I just feel enormously proud of the book.
I may have written better books since but none I love more.
AE:
A lot of people have credited you with founding the genre of lesbian
mystery fiction.
KVF: Well that’s really very generous of them,
but I think a number of us were inspired by Sara Paretsky, who
just kind of led the way in terms of bringing the genre above
the Miss Marple level.
I
was contacted by a straight woman who was doing some work in the
mystery field; this was some years back; and…I found out
from her that Barbara Wilson had the first amateur detective in
American fiction and I had the first lesbian police officer; mine
was the first lesbian police procedural to come out. These are
things that you’re kind of aware of after the fact, and
you think, wow did I do that?
The
other thing I know is that I never even intended to write a police
procedural, for that matter, and sometimes you’re in the
times that you’re in. Like today, I wonder—Rubyfruit
Jungle was such an incredibly important, powerful book for
my generation, and I don’t think it would be noticed all
that much today. When I wrote Amateur City, the first
in the Delafield series, I intended just to write a conventional
mystery, and I wanted to use my background in the business world
because I had seen such abuse of power in management. And so I
wanted to construct a mystery around that with a protagonist who
would be a young woman coming into a job first thing, and discovers
a body. But then I realized to my discomfort that I probably needed
to have the police on the scene if I was going to have a mystery.
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