No Mystery to Patricia Sprinkle's Success

By Jan Heidrich-Rice

"I think balancing is incredibly important," Patricia Sprinkle says. "To me, and I think any writer. One of my favorite workshops that I teach is, 'Getting Serious About Your Writing,' and that means how you discipline yourself."

Balance and discipline were recurring topics Sprinkle addressed over coffee and eggs on a late summer morning at a Waffle House near her Smyrna, Georgia, home. The prolific author of fourteen mysteries, two mainstream novels, and three nonfiction books also talked about raising teenagers, spending time with her aging parents, becoming a grandmother, and being part of a three-generation family of clerics--her father, husband, and son are all ordained ministers. Additionally, she discussed her upcoming tenure as national president of Sisters in Crime, an organization that combats discrimination against women in the mystery field, and her in-progress book tour with the Dixie Divas, four female Southern mystery writers who travel the Southeast together to sign their latest tomes, including Sprinkle's When Will the Dead Lady Sing?

When Will...? is Sprinkle's sixth book in a series about MacLaren Yarbrough, a Georgia magistrate and amateur sleuth living in the cozy Southern town of Hopemore, Georgia, "where 'crime' usually involves nothing more than late library books," but where murder occurs all the same. The character of "Mac," as Sprinkle fondly calls her, was inspired by Judge Mildred Ann Palmer, magistrate from Burke County, Georgia, whom Sprinkle met when she was invited to speak to a women's business group through the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. She had been looking for a fresh detective for a new series to follow her first, the Sheila Travis mystery series, and was intrigued to learn through Judge Palmer that Georgia magistrates require no special schooling, such as law school.

Sprinkle's interest in everything around her makes her a natural researcher. During our interview at the Waffle House, she frequently turned the table to ask questions about my writing or about the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University. She took time to ask our waitress, "Is this your first baby?" and to chat with her about childcare concerns. Whether her writing brings out, or soothes, her curiosity, she approaches book research with the same zeal, favoring face-to-face interviews over e-mail. "What you don't get with e-mail is the trigger of a story," she says. "The anecdotes that end up making something come alive don't come in because it's too much to type."

For her fifth MacLaren Yarbrough book, Who Let That Killer in the House?, Sprinkle talked with experts and laypersons to learn not only about the Georgia judicial system, but the Cobb County court-appointed special advocate (CASA) program, procedures involving juvenile offenders, psychological traumas, conflict resolution, and girls' fast-pitched softball. She also worked with a high school chemistry teacher, who researched several methods of killing oneself in a high school chemistry lab. "I hope you forget all you learned," she tells Dwight Jinright in her acknowledgments.

Despite extensive research, Sprinkle's prose is clean, easy-to-read, and reflective of the love and strength she pulls from her Southern roots. Her characters have down-home names, like Sara Meg, Myrtle, and Joe Riddley (used as one first name), and they visit diners with signs that read: COOKING AS GOOD AS MAMA USED TO DO. Her plots are tight and her resolutions satisfying. But it is perhaps her underlying themes that haunt a reader after the last page has been read. For instance, her mainstream novel The Remember Box takes us into a small Southern town at a time when Congress was fighting with Truman over budget cuts, the coal miners were on strike, and communism was a world-wide threat. "It was really the beginning of what eventually culminated in the Civil Rights Act," Sprinkle explains. "The year that people finally began to ask questions like, 'Is all of this just?' So that really was a book about a child...about how you're taught to be a racist, and how you have to be untaught."

Meaningful themes and a soft, behind-the-scenes approach to human transgressions, including murder, don't mean Sprinkle didn't struggle to come to terms with the guilt she once felt over writing about fictional killers rather than more important issues, like world hunger. She did, in fact, spend her early writing years as a staff associate of education for Presbyterian hunger programs. "I did a lot of writing," she explains, "...filmstrips, newsletters, skits, anything...articles for the newspaper and the denomination's magazine." A Vassar English major, she also loved to buy and read mystery novels during her leisure time, and she recalls that her husband Bob challenged her to try her hand at writing genre fiction as well. "To pay for the books!" she says with a laugh. "In those days, I would write the fiction and feel almost like I was skipping school. It was such fun to be writing the mysteries. The other is what I wrote to satisfy my conscience."

Sprinkle's success in the mystery field didn't lead her to turn her back on the plight of the hungry. It did, however, change her perspective on the social importance of her fiction versus her nonfiction writing. "One day...this was one turning point...I went to make a speech on hunger to an organization. They had told me how much they couldn't wait for me to come. And when I got there, this woman made an announcement, and said, 'Last month, the fire department came and talked to us about CPR. Next month, someone's coming to talk about flower arranging.' And I sat there and thought, 'These women are not concerned about hunger; they just want to fill a program.' I started looking at how many hours I was spending going out to talk to people about hunger. They probably weren't going to do a darned thing about it when I left. And I decided that I could do more for world hunger if I wrote a book and tithed the income from that book than I could do by making these speeches. I don't think I've done a hunger seminar like that since."

"What comes, comes," Sprinkle modestly says of her writing life, and when explaining the impetus for her nonfiction titles, which include Women Who Do Too Much,Children Who Do Too Little, and Women Home Alone. "The title was the killer on that last one," she says, calling it the most important book she ever wrote--albeit deadly from a sales standpoint.

Her nonfiction works came about when the Presbyterian synod invited her to come talk about stress and the Christian superwoman at their symposium for women. She was insulted. "Do I look stressed to you?" she asked them. They pointed out all she did: working for hunger relief, raising two little boys, writing a third mystery...all while her husband was starting a church which involved numerous meetings in their house. "If you're not stressed," the synod said, "come and tell us why."

Sprinkle pondered what they said. "I realized that fifteen years before," she explains, "I had been extremely stressed. Books on time management, but also Bible study, had really helped me see that you are not stressed when you're doing things you love. You're stressed not because you're doing too much, but because you're doing too much that you don't want to do. And you're stressed because you're not doing enough of the things that energize you. At that point, I loved raising kids. I loved doing hunger stuff, even though I was annoyed with it at that time. And I loved writing the mysteries."

Her Christian superwoman talk led to a book deal. But she notes, "As I was writing the book, I realized that I'm always skeptical about books where people tell you, 'Do it like I do and you will be successful.' And I got to thinking about other women who I knew who I felt had coped with enormous amounts of stuff in their lives and who managed to do it with grace and some kind of leisure and that sort of thing. And I thought, I wish I could ask them about this." And she did. "So interview is very important. I usually went in with a set of questions, and we'd talk about what had been the greatest stresses in their lives? How have you overcome those? And with raising children, you know. How did you raise your kids? Yeah, I interviewed a lot of families." The second printing of Women Who Do Too Much continues to sell well. Sprinkle, however, continues to be drawn toward the world of mystery writing.

"It's funny how things keep circling back to mysteries," she says. "I had wanted to write a book that was a how-to book, on how to collect the things and claim the things that we want to pass on to our family. Not antiques necessarily, but anything fragile. I had done three different proposals, and none of them had made it. Finally, I got an idea for a mystery series that would do this. I sent it out, and Avon talked to my agent and said what they really would like is a series on genealogy. I said, 'I don't know anything about genealogy; I can't do that.' The editor was nice enough to call and talk about it, which was wonderful. It doesn't usually happen. So it's that kind of thing that keeps confirming the call for me to write mysteries. Because things that aren't supposed to happen, happen."

Thus was born a third mystery series for Sprinkle, one Avon plans to market as "The Family Tree Mysteries." Her protagonist, Katharine Murray, "lives in Atlanta, wakes up on her 45th birthday, and realizes nobody needs her anymore. Her children are grown; her husband travels. She finds herself wandering around the kitchen, asking herself, 'What am I going to do for the rest of my life?'"

I murmur to her that I can identify, and she lights up, echoing that she thinks plenty of women will. "What I want to do in this series is to take on the question of 'How does a woman redefine herself once she's done the things she always thought she wanted to do with her life?' We're too young to stop at that point."

Book one in this series will evolve around a diary and a valuable Celtic artifact Katharine has inherited from her recently deceased family friend named Lucy. Katharine's curiosity over how spinster Lucy came to own the artifact will lead her to track the genealogy of Lucy's family. "In the course of this," Sprinkle says, "Lucy gets taken to Salzburg, Austria--I don't know if she goes, but she may. Maybe I could go to Salzburg! I didn't plan to do that."

Sprinkle's enthusiasm for her new project is infectious, which is good, because she's signed a three-book contract for it. Katharine Murray will learn, like Sprinkle did, that Salzburg is home to a major Celtic burial ground, that the Celts weren't all from Ireland and Scotland, but, in fact, all over Europe. "Katharine will also discover that Lucy had a brother who was brutally murdered in Atlanta 50 years ago," Sprinkle tells me. "Does this tie in with the diary?" She pauses reflectively. "Anyway, Katharine's experiences will lead her to form an agency to help people solve genealogy murders. So every one of them will have something to do with a family tree, but...Katharine knows no more about genealogy than I do, so as she learns, I'll learn."

I am curious if Sprinkle still writes nonfiction, and the question leads to another anecdote. A few years ago, while earning a master's degree in religious studies, she completed her thesis on "Recovering Rebeccah." Sprinkle's position is that Rebeccah is one of the most important women in the Book of Genesis--the mother of Israel--yet she's all but disappeared in modern books of biblical scholarship. She points out, "You will have books where they will talk about Sarah and Rachel, neither of whom did anything but be barren and have babies. And Rebeccah, who made a journey of 500 miles with a stranger to marry a man she did not know, who wound up talking to God and God talked back...who in 60 years of marriage managed to have a man so in love with her that after 40 years, he got caught fondling her in a field....Rebeccah is THE most important woman in Genesis. Except for Esther, she's the most important woman in the Hebrew scriptures, and yet she does not appear in scholarship for about 1600 years except negatively. You can take a whole book on Genesis this thick,"--she holds her thumb and fingers apart to demonstrate--"and there'll be 1/2 of one sentence about Rebeccah."

Sprinkle would like to turn her thesis into a book. She considered doing a scholarly book but realized that she was not going to be accepted as a scholar without a Ph.D. "So I watered it down," she says, "and I sent it to my son Barnabus, and it was fun 'cause he's such a critic. He's a good writer, but he's also a real critic of his mama, and of anybody, probably. So he took it very seriously, and he said, 'Mama, nobody's going to buy this, but I love the book.' Anyway, we talked the other day and we decided that the authority I have is as a mystery writer. So I had to change the title. It was about Rebeccah, and I talk about recovering Rebeccah and what we know about her, but nobody says it. So we changed the title to The Mystery of the Missing Matriarch. I'm approaching it as a mystery writer, saying that I come to this study as a woman in midlife who went to get her master's degree and found this mystery. And we're going to look at the mystery using detective skills."

"Will I market it?" she echoes my question. "I don't know. I'm excited. I'm going to write it, and then we'll see if somebody bites. And I think that's one of the things you have to do to bridge genres, you have to get so excited about something that you want to write a book that matters and you don't care if somebody buys it or not. You care in that you think they need to know these things, but you don't care in the sense that you're writing it for the market. You're writing it because it comes out of who you are. I think really those are some of the best books."

When asked how she finds time to serve as president of the national chapter of Sisters in Crime, she shares a time-management strategy she finds useful. "I try to evaluate from time to time what I'm doing. I do it with pictures. I will draw a circle, and I put me in it, then I make lists of all the things I'm involved in." She draws a childlike sunshine, sketching more circles at the end of several rays, labeling the outside circles with titles like, 'Writing', 'Church', and 'Promotion'. "When I look at this and I see that this one (Mac A) is so big...then I look at the rest of this and I see that I'm going to have to cut something, and what'll it be? When I look at promotion, like in June, it had 19 things, I'd look at that and say, 'That's too big. I've got to get rid of some stuff'. Sisters in Crime became a priority. I want to write, and I knew I wanted to focus on making the writing tight and making the writing financially feasible again. Okay? So, Sisters in Crime fits into that because it gets my name known. It also lets me give back to an organization that I have really loved."

When we finish breakfast, Sprinkle asks me back to her home to pick up a check to cover her local Sisters in Crime dues. She invites me into her office, a comfortable converted bedroom with a bay window overlooking a butterfly garden. "You asked me when I write," she says. "It's easier for me if I meet with you for breakfast, then come back and write...than if I stop writing in the middle for lunch. So this works better for me. I write any time. My balance tends to be that I have some days that I only write, and then I have some days when I have to do other things. I tend to write any time I am home when I'm not doing anything else. I know that sounds funny, like I only fit the writing in around the edges, and I don't."

I thank Sprinkle for fitting me in to her busy schedule. She's gracious--then again focuses on balance and discipline. "I have a book due in March. So starting October 10, I will be working every day, and you won't be seeing me having lunches and things like that because I can't do that. When I write, I tend to be obsessed with the writing. I usually get up, have quiet time, write some, then have breakfast with my husband. And I will work all day long. There are weeks where from Monday till Friday I don't leave our property. The only leaving the house I do is to go out to the mailbox. That's why I'm hunched over, because I could sit and write all day long."

Posted with the permission of Jan Heidrich-Rice and Patricia Sprinkle © 2004, 2008 Jan Heidrich-Rice