YOU might think that a heroine who rejoices in the name of Stephanie Plum, wears Doc Martens and too much hairspray and drives her uncle's ancient powder-blue Buick would never make it to the hard-boiled big-time. But you'd be wrong. Stephanie Plum is at the moment one of the most seriously cool of crime fiction's cool chicks.
A lingerie buyer turned bounty hunter, she chases bad guys, scandalises her suburban family irritates the heck out of the local cops and lavishes tender loving care on her pet hamster in roughly equal quantities. With her fatal weakness for the shoe department at Macy's and unfailing supply of acerbic observations, this Plum is quite a mouthful; and she's turning her creator, Janet Evanovich, into a publishing phenomenon and a rich woman. The three Plum hooks - One For The Money, Two For The Dough and Three To Get Deadly - are selling steadily in the US and the first is shortly to be filmed by Tristar.
I sold them, all my rights, so I've no say in it, says Evanovich happily. "They paid me a shitload of money, so I sold everything. I said, I don't care - just invite me to the party when it's all over".
The tough-talking tone is pure Plum, but if you were to judge by appearances you might take Evanovich - neat hair, wire-rimmed glasses for a small-town school-teacher. And you'd be wrong again. She may look prim and proper, but Janet Evanovich is as smart and sassy as her heroine, brimming with goodwill and good soundbites in a Dublin hotel at an ungodly hour of the morning. Not had for an art graduate of Danish stock from New Jersey, a place which emerges in her books as one where pot roast rules and funeral parlours are bobs of social activity.
"All my relatives are first-and second-generation Danes," she says. "and when I was growing up they lived together as this very tight little group extended families which extended to every Dane in the neighbourhood, you know".
"And they really did go to funeral parlours all the time. There were three in South River and Rezem's was my aunt's favourite; she used to study the obits in the paper and then go to the afternoon viewing and come home and discuss the corpse's tie or make-up or whatever. That's straight out of my childhood. I've given Stephanie all of my embarrassing moments and all of my eccentric relatives. I thought I had written a social study of a very particular part of America, of the kind of life I had as a kid - but then I got letters from people all over the country saying `hey, I know these people, I grew up with them and they live in California, or they live in Texas, or Ohio So there must be something more universal about it than I originally realised:
For fine-tuning of street-wise detail, Evanovich checks in with her 23-year-old photographer daughter. "When I'm done with a manuscript I ship it off to Alex to read and she tells me if I've made any generational mistakes. And she's brutal. For instance in the third book I had Stephanie standing in the shower thinking about, men. And she's thinking that this guy Joe Morelli has a great ass; and then she gets to thinking about Mike Richter, who's the goalie for the Rangers hockey team, and she thinks he has a pretty nice ass too. And then I wanted to have a movie star ass in there, so I used Kevin Costner. And I send off the manuscript and right away I get this hone call from Alex and she says Kevin Costner's ass is too old you can't use Kevin Costner's ass. So she gave me a list of three or four potential asses. We ended up, with Mel, Gibson's because his is pretty universal.
She makes it sound as if her books are as gloriously easy to write as they are to read, but the truth is, Janet Evanovich has worked hard at her craft. When she felt her dialogue was coming out stilted, She joined an acting class improvisation, she says, taught her to hear fluent, instant conversations in her head. When she was researching the Plum books she phoned up bounty hunters and rode around all day with cops in Trenton. And when, as a complete beginner, she decided to try her hand at writing romantic fiction, she went out and bought 100 romance novels and read the lot. She wrote one of her own, sent if to a publisher and began work on a second.
She was about half way through when the rejection slip arrived. She finished the book anyhow, but decided it was time to give up and get a proper job. I had a cardboard box like this" - she holds her hands about two feet apart "full of rejection letters and I sat on the kerb, crying, in front of my house doing a ritual burning thing. I worked as a temp for three months the worst office worker in history. Put me in panty hose and I turn nasty." There is a pause while we both study her immaculately-hosed legs. "Yeah, well. I'm all dressed up this morning - but by the end of the day, believe me, you won't want to talk to me.
I DON'T believe it. But then find it hard to believe that, ritual burning notwithstanding, Janet Evanovich eventually made a career for herself churning out supermarket romances at the rate of four a year. Romance fiction is serious stuff no time for levity amid all that pulsing and throbbing, surely?
"No, mine weren't serious," she says. "And that was one of the reasons why I eventually left romance - I just wasn't good at the sensual parts. By the time I was on my seventh book I was running out of positions.
I have all these friends who write wonderful, long, sexy passages - he put his hand there and he kissed her here and they did this and that: My hero and heroine were going at it on the kitchen table and he had his knee in the cereal bowl, which left lots of little Fruit Loop-shaped, imprints on his skin. When I realised that was my idea of really great sex, I knew it was time to move on.
It must have been quite a relief to move on to Stephanie, Plum, with her tongue in cheek attitude to matters sexual. She may sigh in the shower over the buns of supercop Joe Morelli, but she'd never admit that to his face. Is there a danger that the mutually antagonistic pair might waltz oft into the sunset together one of these days, romance fiction-style? "Not if I can help it," says Evanovich. "Though I'm under a lot of pressure in that direction from fans and even from publishers.
The good news for Plum fins is that there are likely to be quite a few more episodes before the bounty hunter hangs up her Does. Convinced that most other series novels have too few central characters. Evanovich studied the form of television sitcoms. I looked at programmes like Cheers and Barney
Miller and how they would bring somebody forward each week, and that's really what I do." Thus the first novel focuses on Stephanie's ditzy debut as an apprehension agent, with a darker undertone which deals with sexual harassment by an out-of-control boxer; the second one, about her wacky granny, borders on slapstick but has a vulnerable side too.
And the new book, says Evanovich with relish "has Lula the street person. So I could just let it all out with that one. My trash mouth just came out - in fact, I handed that book in and my editor called me up and said, `I know this is a bawdy book but did you have to use the F-word on page one? Couldn't you put it on page two?' But we kept it on page one. I figured if you're gonna be offended, be offended right away.
