Julie Smith

• Born: November 25, 1944
• Birthplace: Annapolis, Maryland

Types of Plot: Police procedural; private investigator; amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Rebecca Schwartz, 1982-; Paul McDonald, 1985-; Skip Langdon, 1990-; Talba Wallis, 2001-

Contribution

From the publication of her first mystery, Death Turns a Trick, in 1982, Julie Smith displayed her ability to create suspenseful narratives while entertaining readers with her tongue-in-cheek assessment of the contemporary social scene. In addition to satisfying the intellectual curiosity of those who enjoy a good “ whodunit,” the books featuring Rebecca Schwartz and Paul McDonald exposed the vulnerable underside of the supposedly carefree San Francisco singles lifestyle in the 1980’s.

Beginning with the publication of New Orleans Mourning (1990), the novels set in the Crescent City reflect Smith’s development as a literary artist. Like her contemporary James Lee Burke, she makes exceptionally good use of the south Louisiana setting as a means of communicating insights into human character and social relationships. An admirer of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, Smith incorporates elements of southern Gothic in her character portraits while maintaining exceptional command over her intricate and well-developed plots. Through the stories of her two female protagonists from New Orleans, one a member of high society who feels alienated from her peers, the other a young African American, Smith is able to examine issues that remain problematic for American society, specifically sexism and racism. Her finest works demonstrate that it is possible to construct a sophisticated novel of social commentary within the framework of the detective thriller.

Biography

Julie Smith was born November 25, 1944, in Annapolis, Maryland, where her father was stationed during World War II. Malberry Smith, a lawyer, and his wife Claire Tanner Smith, a school counselor, moved the family to Savannah, Georgia, after the war. Julie Smith grew up there, leaving in 1962 to attend the University of Mississippi, where she majored in journalism. After graduating in 1965, Smith moved to New Orleans and talked her way into a job as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A year later she left for San Francisco, landing a position at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she worked for more than a decade. Intent on pursuing a career as a fiction writer, she wrote dozens of stories and drafted several novels while holding down her job as a reporter. In 1979 she and two friends started Invisible Ink, an editorial consulting firm. Smith stayed with the firm for three years until her first novel, Death Turns a Trick, was published in 1982.

Buoyed by her success, Smith determined to write full time, and over the next eight years she published five novels set in San Francisco, three featuring feminist lawyer Rebecca Schwartz and two showcasing Schwartz’s friend Paul McDonald, a struggling mystery writer. In 1990, Smith chose a new location for her fiction, and for her first novel about New Orleans, New Orleans Mourning, she received the 1991 Edgar Award for best novel—the first time this award had gone to a female novelist since 1956. Although Smith published two more novels featuring Rebecca Schwartz, after 1990 the city of New Orleans became her principal métier, and novels about Detective Skip Langdon began appearing regularly. In the eighth Langdon novel, Eighty-two Desire, Smith introduced Talba Wallis, a computer whiz turned private detective, who would become the main character in a new series initiated by Louisiana Hotshot in 2001.

In the mid-1990’s Smith married business entrepreneur Lee Pryor and moved to New Orleans. Intent on assisting other authors who were struggling as she had to establish careers, she created a Web-based course in writing to help them master the basics of their craft. In an example of life following art, after relocating to New Orleans, Smith took the necessary steps to become a licensed private investigator.

Analysis

On first reading, the most notable quality in Julie Smith’s novels is the attention she gives to plotting. Her novels are well-made mysteries, in which information subtly inserted early in the work takes on importance as her detectives draw closer to discovering the perpetrator of the crimes they have set out to solve. Like any good mystery writer, Smith provides a sufficient number of red herrings and false leads to keep her detective busy and her readers guessing about the identity of the murderer. What emerges on careful reading of Smith’s novels, however, is an appreciation for her use of setting and characterization. Not only are her descriptions of places deftly drawn, but also in the New Orleans novels especially, they are integral to the larger story she wishes to tell. Smith’s major characters—Rebecca Schwartz, Skip Langdon, and Talba Wallis—are multidimensional, evolving slowly through each novel in the series in which they are featured. Through them Smith explores a network of personal and social relationships that offers readers a window on contemporary life that extends beyond the intellectual pleasures derived from solving the mystery around which each novel is organized.

Death Turns a Trick

Smith’s first detective novel, Death Turns a Trick, introduces readers to Rebecca Schwartz, a self-described Jewish feminist lawyer living in San Francisco. Schwartz is thrust into the role of detective when she discovers a woman dead in her apartment. The young woman is no stranger, however; Schwartz had met her earlier in the evening, at a house of prostitution where Schwartz was attending a risqué party. Because the principal suspect is Schwartz’s boyfriend—who is the brother of the victim—complications are manifold as she sets out to defend her lover by finding his sister’s killer.

Smith employs a chatty first-person style in presenting the story, allowing her main character to speak directly to readers. She also demonstrates exceptional ability in providing a considerable amount of background information about Schwartz, her family, and her circle of friends. Combining elements of the conventional romance novel with those of the mystery, Smith manages to interest readers not only in the hunt for the killer but also in the personal life of the protagonist. The novel offers a tongue-in-cheek critique of feminism, celebrating its strong points but lampooning its more excessive qualities, which Smith evidently considers to be barriers to healthy relationships between men and women.

Huckleberry Fiend

In Huckleberry Fiend (1987), Smith’s second novel featuring Paul McDonald, her only male sleuth, the journalist and would-be novelist is called on by a friend to help locate a valuable manuscript: the missing sections of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). McDonald follows leads that take him to the haunts of several noted collectors, including a famous romance novelist, an enterprising book dealer, and a business tycoon with unusual habits for acquiring unique art objects. Traveling from his native Oakland, California, to Mississippi and Virginia City, Nevada, to track down leads, McDonald ends up endangering not only himself, but also his lover and the friend for whom he is trying to recover the manuscript, as more than one person seems bent on keeping him from discovering what happened to the holograph of Twain’s masterpiece. The somewhat surprising denouement allows Smith’s amateur sleuth to demonstrate not only his skills at detection and deduction but also his ability to understand and appreciate the vagaries of the publishing business. Although the focus throughout is on McDonald’s efforts to locate the manuscript, Smith is able to weave into the tale some interesting literary tidbits about Twain’s career and to explore the psyche of collectors, a curious breed of individuals whose love of art and literature drives their actions in strange, often unpredictable ways.

New Orleans Mourning

The event that sets in motion the action of New Orleans Mourning is certainly out of the ordinary: Chauncey St. Amant, king of Carnival, is shot as he rides in the Krewe of Rex parade on Mardi Gras day. Because the victim is high profile and high society, the New Orleans police reach outside the detective ranks for help. Officer Skip Langdon, raised among the city’s social elite, knows the family and many others who travel in their circle. Though Langdon’s family has virtually disowned her for having become a police officer, she is still able to use friendships forged in her youth at exclusive private schools and clubs to help in the search for the killer. She discovers that St. Amant and his immediate family have kept dark secrets for two decades, and as she gets closer to the truth, she finds her own life in danger. Nevertheless, she pursues her leads doggedly, assisted by a California filmmaker in town for the Mardi Gras who takes an amorous interest in her. When she exposes the killer, however, she learns just how influential the rich and powerful are in New Orleans; a convenient lie is accepted by the authorities so that reputations can be preserved.

In this Skip Langdon mystery, Smith demonstrates that she is a master at capturing setting and making it integral to her story. New Orleans comes to life on the pages of her novel, as Langdon’s investigation leads her to explore some of the city’s storied neighborhoods and interact with a number of the unusual types who make the city unique. Additionally, Smith displays a decided advance in characterization from her previous novels. Not only is Langdon a woman trying to succeed in a profession normally populated by men but, decidedly tall and a bit overweight, she is also presented as someone having to fight against a number of social stereotypes. Similarly, members of the St. Amant family, to all appearances both financially and socially successful, are carefully delineated to illustrate the dysfunctions beneath the veneer of gentility. Smith carefully blends humor and pathos to reveal something about the cronyism, sexism, and racism that underlies the social structure of the metropolis.

Louisiana Bigshot

In Louisisana Bigshot (2002), the opening scene of Smith’s second novel featuring Talba Wallis, the self-styled poet and computer expert receives her private investigator’s license, making her a fully qualified associate in Eddie Valentino’s agency. Almost immediately she becomes involved in solving the murder of a friend and fellow poet from a small town outside Baton Rouge. Wallis’s discovery regarding her friend’s past puts her, her boss, and their families in danger from the henchmen of a powerful Louisiana politician who wants to keep the secrets of the past buried forever.

Like Smith’s other Talba Wallis novels, Louisiana Bigshot is a study of complex human relationships, revealing depths of character not often associated with detective fiction. For example, while she searches for her friend’s killer, Wallis is also working to learn the identity and whereabouts of her half sister, the child of the father who abandoned Wallis and her mother when Talba was a young girl. Smith devotes considerable space to examining Wallis’s rocky relationships with her mother and her boyfriend, who is also an estranged father. As an African American woman trying to make a living as a private investigator, Wallis struggles gallantly to overcome longstanding barriers erected on racist and sexist ideologies. The novel also hints at the nature of politics in Louisiana, where cronyism and corruption dominate the political climate and where those in power are not above breaking the law to remain in office.

Mean Woman Blues

In Mean Woman Blues (2003), the ninth of her Skip Langdon novels, Smith presents a constantly developing protagonist who has grown in stature within her profession and has matured in her personal life. The novel brings back one of Langdon’s recurring nightmares: the sociopath Errol Jacomine, who had disappeared for years but who resurfaces in a rather fantastic way as a televangelist in Dallas. Jacomine is bent on gaining revenge against the woman who destroyed his criminal network, and while Langdon is occupied searching for a ring of thieves stealing cemetery statuary, Jacomine makes his move against her. The complicated plot brings Langdon in contact with Jacomine’s younger son Isaac, who has rejected his father’s lifestyle and values and takes her to Dallas, where in a showdown with Jacomine she watches as he becomes the victim of revenge at the hands of two of his wives. More a detective thriller than a mystery, Mean Woman Blues showcases Smith’s ability to analyze her characters’ motivations and dramatize a variety of male-female relationships. The novel also explores family bonds, a common theme in Smith’s work.

Principal Series Characters:

• Rebecca Schwartz is a San Francisco lawyer and an ardent feminist, but she is also the daughter of a prominent lawyer and a woman with some decidedly conventional attitudes about romantic relationships. The conflicts Schwartz faces in trying to succeed in a patriarchal profession allow for the exploration of contemporary social issues within the framework of the mystery novel.
• Paul McDonald , Rebecca’s friend, works as a journalist and freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay area while strugglng to become a successful mystery novelist.
• Skip Langdon , daughter of a prominent New Orleans physician, has turned her back on high society to become a police detective. Partly because her height and weight keep her from fitting the stereotype of the debutante-turned-demure-matron, she feels alienated from the people in the social circles in which she was raised and more at home among the artists and oddballs of the city’s French Quarter, where she chooses to live. Not given to following rules or taking orders, she nevertheless manages to parlay her associations with the city’s elite to help solve crimes in a city plagued by racism, sexism, hedonism, cronyism, and outdated beliefs involving class structure.
• Talba Wallis is a talented computer nerd who moonlights as a poet and entertainer. She has changed her given name, Urethra, to Talba, a shortened version of her stage name, the Baroness de Pontalba. After stumbling into a career as a private investigator, she manages to combine her technological skills with her brash approach to life in a way that lets her solve cases by cutting through individual prejudices and institutional bureaucracy but that often frustrates those who care for her, including her mother, her boss, and her boyfriend.

Bibliography

Grafton, Sue, et al., eds. Writing Mysteries: A Handbook. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2002. Essays by noted mystery writers containing their insights into elements of the genre; includes a contribution by Smith outlining her ideas about the role of background, location, and setting in creating effective mysteries.

Grape, Jan, Dean James, and Ellen Nehr, eds. Deadly Women: The Woman Mystery Reader’s Indispensable Companion. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998. Essay by Smith on the importance of receiving the Edgar Award in 1991 is included in this collection of material about women’s contributions to detective fiction.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory. Diversity and Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Essays by various scholars examine the theme of race and diversity in works by American mystery writers; helps place Smith’s work in a larger social context.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains an essay on the life and works of Smith.

Pepper, Andrew. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. Discusses Smith’s use of detective fiction as a means of exploring the complex issues of race and gender.

Willett, Ralph. The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA. New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Examines Smith’s work in chapters exploring fiction set in San Francisco and New Orleans; insightful analysis of the social and racial background of New Orleans Mourning.