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Scoppettone's next adult book was Such Nice People, a frightening novel about a teen boy who turns into a killer almost overnight. The story was somewhat inspired, she says, by news stories about murderers, in which “somebody on the block would say, ‘I don't understand; he's just a nice, quiet boy....'”

In fact, the original title was A Nice, Quiet Boy, but Putnam, Scoppettone's publishing company at the time, changed it, because they thought it sounded too much like a young adult title.

And that wasn't the only thing they had problems with.

“The original ending was that everybody died, except him, and he got away with [murdering them]…. Well, forget it. They wouldn't let me do it. And that was the only time in my career that [a company] has ever made me make a big change like that.”

As she told author M.E. Kerr, in the blog Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, it took a while for her to realize that Some Unknown Person, Such Nice People, and her next adult book, Innocent Bystanders, were all crime novels, and that she wanted to write more of them.

Franklin Watts published her fourth crime novel, A Creative Kind of Killer, in 1984, under the pseudonym Jack Early.

One reason she chose to take a pen name, she tells Hart, was “because my Scoppettone career had stalled. Couldn't get arrested, as they say! So I reinvented myself. … I had no idea what would happen. I don't think [the] New York publishing [world] is hostile toward women, but I do think reviewers can be. As Jack, I got the best reviews of my life and was compared to big-name male writers. I don't think that was accidental--I was still the same person and I wasn't writing any better.” For her effort, she also received a Shamus award, and an Edgar award nomination.

The 1985 mystery Playing Murder garnered her an Edgar nomination as well. It was the last book she wrote for young adults. “I had nothing more to say to YAs,” she says, in Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. “I think I'd exhausted the topics that were important to me and I wanted to move on.”

After her third (and last) Jack Early book, 1988's Donato & Daughter, she suffered from a long writer's block, but eventually began work on Everything You Have is Mine. “I wanted to write this woman private eye,” she says, “and [I thought], ‘The hell with commercial problems; I'm writing a lesbian….”

In 1991, the book was released. To her surprise, it was picked up by Little, Brown. “My feeling was, when I handed it to my agent, that if she liked it, it was going to be a very hard sell, and probably would go to a small press,” she says.

The protagonist of Everything, Lauren Laurano, was smart and funny, and lived in Greenwich Village with her opinionated psychotherapist girlfriend Kip. (Lauren was based on Scoppettone, while Kip was based on Scoppettone's long-time partner, writer Linda Crawford.)

Other Laurano books followed. The series not only offered readers engrossing mysteries, but also featured a realistic portrayal of a lesbian relationship. The last book in the Laurano series, Gonna Take a Homicidal Journey, was released in 1998.

In an interview published on her Web site, Scoppettone says, “When I ended the Laurano series with book five, I got many letters requesting a sixth. I couldn't do it. Because, for me, the pitfall was getting very tired of writing about the same people over and over. … I've always said no one should write more than four in a series and I believe that, even though I did a fifth. I don't know how Sue Grafton does it.”

In 2005, Scoppettone's This Dame for Hire was published, the first in a series featuring 1940s straight private eye Faye Quick. “I love the 40s, even though I was little [at the time],” she says. “…I love the 40s music. I love those movies—the noir period. And I had written about almost every decade, but I had never written about the 40s, which is strange since I liked it so much.” Too Darn Hot, Scoppettone's second in the series, was published this week.

Her next novel is a type, she says, she's never written before, about “a bunch of people [who are] after the same amount of money--a big amount of money.”

But right now, Scoppettone's taking the summer off from writing--for the first time in decades. Certainly, she's earned the rest.

Get Too Darn Hot at Amazon.com

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