Nancy Pickard

• Born: September 19, 1945
• Place of Birth: Kansas City, Missouri

TYPES OF PLOT: Amateur sleuth; cozy

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Jenny Cain, 1984-1995; Eugenia Potter, 1992-2001; Marie Lightfoot, 2000-2002

Contribution

Nancy Pickard was one of the first female mystery writers to introduce feminist elements to traditional cozy mysteries in the early 1980s, depicting a female amateur sleuth with a career unlike previous female protagonists, who solved mysteries without professional commitments interfering with or benefitting their efforts. In her later works, Pickard has continued creating affluent, savvy protagonists and supporting characters who are educated and experienced in their fields, earn incomes, and contribute to their communities economically and intellectually.

Pickard’s versatile sleuths enable her to incorporate diverse elements to portray autonomous, competent women who can tackle crooks using new resources, such as computing skills, to investigate financial fraud and white-collar crimes. Pickard’s novels preceded mysteries by such authors as Linda Grant, , and , who featured corporate or entrepreneurial women sleuths.

Most critics and peers consider Pickard an exemplary mystery author; her talents have been recognized with numerous awards. In 1986, Pickard’s second novel, Say No to Murder (1985), received the initial Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original at the Bouchercon Mystery Convention. Malice Domestic Mystery Convention attendees voted for Pickard’s novel I.O.U. (1991) to receive an Agatha Award. That mystery also won a Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and was a Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee. Pickard’s mystery, The Virgin of Small Plains (2006), was nominated in 2007 for both Edgar and Agatha Best Novel Awards.

Biography

Nancy Pickard was born Nancy J. Wolfe on September 19, 1945, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Clint Wolfe and Mary Wolfe. As a child, she enjoyed reading Nancy Drew books. After graduating in 1963, she enrolled in journalism school at the University of Missouri. When she was a senior, Pickard took a creative writing class. The teacher mocked aloud a short story she had written, inhibiting Pickard from writing additional fiction. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in 1967.

Pickard reported for The Squire in Overland Park, Kansas, then wrote training programs for Western Auto at Kansas City, Missouri, through 1972 before seeking freelance writing assignments. In 1976, she married Guy Pickard and lived on a Flint Hills, Kansas, ranch. By 1981, Pickard had stopped writing freelance articles and turned to fiction. An avid reader, especially of mysteries, she relied on her reading experiences and writing guides rather than formal instruction to create mysteries. She soon sold a short story, “A Man Around the House,” to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

During the early 1980s, an editor rejected Pickard’s initial novel, saying the manuscript confused her about whether it was a mystery or romance with suspense. She considered those comments and focused on mystery, resulting in her first published novel, Generous Death (1984).

Pickard’s son, Nicholas, was born in 1983 (she and her husband later divorced). That year, Pickard read Virginia Rich’s mystery, The Cooking School Murders (1982), and wrote Rich, who responded, telling Pickard she had a fourth book in progress. After Rich died in 1985, her husband asked Pickard to complete that author’s fourth Eugenia Potter book, The Twenty-seven-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders (1992), and allowed her to continue the series.

Throughout the 1980s, Pickard wrote mystery novels prolifically. Despite her success with novels and her initial success in the short-story form, she could not sell other short stories. At a writer’s conference, a speaker emphasized that short stories must include epiphanies. Pickard began applying that revelation to her stories, publishing her work in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Scene, Armchair Detective, and numerous anthologies. She studied her peers’ books, especially Sue Grafton’s mysteries, to improve her writing techniques. Pickard edited several mystery anthologies and contributed a chapter to the serial novel Naked Came the Phoenix (2001).

In 1986, Pickard helped establish Sisters in Crime (SIC) and served on that organization’s first steering committee. From 1988 to 1989, Pickard presided as SIC president. She also was active in the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), becoming a member of that group’s national board. Pickard’s experiences on the MWA committee choosing an Edgar Allan Poe Award true-crime book winner resulted in her analyzing those books’ structure. Her contemplation served as a catalyst for her trilogy featuring true-crime author Marie Lightfoot.

In 1990, Pickard’s favorite Jenny Cain mystery, Bum Steer, set on a Kansas ranch, was published. The Kansas City, Kansas, public library presented Pickard its Edgar Wolfe Award in 1997. Pickard collaborated with psychologist Lynn Lott to write Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path: The Journey from Frustration to Fulfillment (2003), describing her struggles as a writer. Tired of series writing, Pickard wrote the highly-awarded The Virgin of Small Plains, published in 2006. In 2010, Pickard published The Scent of Rain and Lightening. Pickard has spoken at writers’ conferences. She has served on panels at Boucheron and led workshops at SIC meetings.

Analysis

Nancy Pickard depicts resourceful, independent female protagonists in her mysteries, emphasizing their intelligence, bravery, and competence. Her characters and plots represent many of the qualities found in innovative mysteries featuring female sleuths and detectives written by female authors, including Margaret Maron and Sue Grafton, in the 1980s. Pickard’s sleuths exemplified similar traits of strength, resilience, and perseverance. By creating appealing narrators, she sought to provide readers with entertainment and offer protagonists with whom they could identify.

Although the structures of Pickard’s series varied, her writing style exhibited constants, especially strong voice, effective use of setting, and intricate layers of seemingly unrelated characters and events to hide clues and enable plot twists to reveal connections. Her characterizations were strengthened with humor, often dark. Although criticisms of her writing have noted that her narratives often include too much explanation and that some of her character development is implausible or flat, many reviewers have praised Pickard’s ingenious plots and pacing.

Pickard focuses on the theme of family in most of her mysteries. Characters feel compelled to support their relatives emotionally despite deceptions and other wrongdoings inflicted on them. Family is equated with other themes, particularly power and prestige. The absence of strong family ties can harm characters who lack supporters to defend and protect them. Without an intact family structure, characters struggle against outsiders’ biases, often negative or incorrect, which shape public opinion. Varying forms of family, offered by lovers and friends, bolster characters. Family can paradoxically provide characters with safety or weaken them. The theme of disintegration, represented by people falling apart financially or emotionally, intensifies the somber tones of such Pickard novels as Marriage Is Murder (1987).

Social issues are important aspects of Pickard’s mysteries, often enhancing characterizations and strengthening plots. Pickard became aware of such concerns, particularly mental health because her grandmother died in a state mental hospital, similar to Jenny’s mother dying in a private facility. Coming of age during the 1960s, she witnessed social movements demanding improvements. Her friends participated in assisting abused spouses and impoverished people, increasing Pickard’s knowledge of how bureaucracy and politics affect services, which provided her with details to improve the authenticity of her characters’ conflicts. Altruism is present as some characters strive to help people despite their flaws, reinforcing character development within her novels and throughout her series.

Pickard’s settings help reflect her characters’ moods and establish tones to alert readers to potentially dangerous situations and people capable of inflicting pain and anguish. Her small communities in New England and the Midwest nurture and stifle characters. The seemingly pleasant ocean community of Port Frederick deceivingly contains vengeful residents. The prairie’s bleak territory intensifies the characters’ fears and sense of isolation. Fog rolls across scenes and in people’s minds to convey sinister elements and distortion. Twilight, in her novels, blinds and confuses people. Snow proves deadly and conceals crimes. Storms and fires obliterate evidence necessary to determine the truth and expose secrets.

I.O.U.

In I.O.U. (1991), commitment to duty and truth guide Jenny Cain, whom Pickard introduced in Generous Death, as she grieves after her mother Margaret Cain’s death and is confronted by physical and emotional threats. At the cemetery, someone shoves Jenny and murmurs a request for forgiveness. Unsure who spoke to her, she initiates inquiries in an attempt to comprehend what happened to her mother that facilitated her mental health issues leading to a stay in a psychiatric facility. Her mother’s emotional collapse occurred just as Jenny’s family’s business, Cain Clams, declared bankruptcy, terminating the employment on which many Port Frederick residents relied.

Jenny starts with research at the library, applying her business knowledge in her investigation. She interviews her family, including her aloof father, unaware of his impact on the community; colleagues; and friends. Jenny feels accountable to her mother and the community and feels she owes them a debt that must be repaid through her deeds. As she boldly pushes to determine the truth, Jenny risks agitating enemies and encounters perils, including becoming exhausted and almost suffocating on carbon monoxide in her car. Some people think she has tried to commit suicide, which causes Jenny to question her mental well-being and consider leaving her professional position. Themes of wealth and greed and tones of despair interplay as Jenny reassesses her assumptions regarding familial and community relations, revealing that trusted relatives and friends can be liars and foes.

Twilight

Clarity and transition are the underlying themes of Twilight (1995), the tenth Jenny Cain mystery, which resolves many issues throughout the series. As the Judy Foundation’s director, Jenny is planning a fall festival; however, she despairs as she cannot obtain the necessary insurance coverage and fears running out of time to do so. Antagonists, particularly former employer Peter Falwell, enjoy taunting Jenny, saying that the festival will be canceled.

Additionally, Jenny becomes involved in a controversy debating whether a nature trail should be closed because several people, including a young girl, have died at a highway crossing. Enduring angry fundamentalists and environmental protestors who burn her in effigy, Jenny finds comfort in the runes that her delivery woman, Cleo Talbot, interprets for her. Devastating fires and physical attacks, including a brutal assault on David Mayer, Jenny’s stepson, and the unresolved insurance dilemma intensify the suspense.

Child characters and several adults who interact with Jenny emphasize themes of innocence and vulnerability, while pride and opportunism set the tone for others’ hostile actions and deceptions for monetary and egotistical gain. Jenny’s family and friendship ties are reinforced, and enemies’ true intentions are exposed as transparency and serenity replace the confusion Jenny associates with twilight.

The Truth Hurts

The third volume of Pickard’s Marie Lightfoot series, The Truth Hurts (2002), explores Marie’s past, which the previous books, The Whole Truth (2000) and Ring of Truth (2001), foreshadowed. Confronted by a tabloid’s claim that her parents were racists, Marie is shaken. She is unsure of the truth because her parents abandoned her in 1963 when she was a baby. When she receives threatening emails from a man named Paulie Barnes, Marie fearfully submits to his requests to write a book that will feature her murder. Suspense builds as Barnes sends Marie a copy of John MacDonald’s The Executioners (1958) and mails her an airplane ticket to Birmingham, Alabama, near her hometown of Sebastion. Marie’s cousin Nathan arrives in Sebastion, lured there by Barnes, whom Marie desperately is seeking to identify. She questions residents who knew her parents in 1963, gaining self-knowledge and revising her perceptions of civil rights and family history. She discovers and embraces some truths.

The theme of truth resonates in these three books. Structurally, chapters present Marie’s published account of a true crime, often manipulating facts to protect people, in the past tense; she narrates present-tense sections, divulging her thoughts and what she perceives is true. Characters’ misperceptions and paradoxes contribute to plot twists, exposing truths.

The Virgin of Small Plains

In The Virgin of Small Plains, which takes place in 2004, Abby Reynolds slides into a ditch while driving on an icy road because she had been startled by the sight of her former boyfriend Mitch Newquist’s older mother wandering through a snowy cemetery near Small Plains, Kansas. Flashing back to 1987, when she was in high school, Abby recalls when her relationship with Mitch abruptly ended. Alternating characters’ perspectives reveal what each person experienced seventeen years before: Mitch was at Abby’s house when he watched, horrified, while Abby’s physician father and the sheriff disfigured a woman’s corpse. When Abby went to Mitch’s house the next day, he was gone, and his parents refused to tell her where he went.

An unknown girl was buried in the Small Plains cemetery where Abby saw Mitch’s mother. Credited with miracles, she has been dubbed the Virgin of Small Plains, and people flock to her grave desiring her help. Abby is determined to identify the girl and mark her grave properly. Shifting between 1987 and 2004, Pickard presents clues about past and present events. Themes of memory, betrayal, and lost innocence strengthen the plot as Abby deals with Mitch’s return. The Kansas prairie personifies this mystery’s suspense, enhancing elements of solitude and foreboding. Weather represents the characters' perils as they encounter deception and violence from people they trust. Like most of Pickard’s fiction, fear and terror boil underneath the surface of seemingly innocuous people and places.

Principal Series Characters:

• Jennifer “Jenny” Cain is the daughter of Massachusetts clam entrepreneurs James Damon Cain III and his first wife, Margaret. She earned a Master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A trust fund supplements her income as Port Frederick Civic Foundation director. In her thirties, she balances the complex dynamics presented by her younger sister, parents, friends, coworkers, enemies, husband Geof Bushfield, and his son David Mayer. Although Jenny is from the upper class, she is concerned about the welfare of people in her community. She seeks answers to family secrets that perplex and frustrate her.
• Eugenia “Genia” Potter is a widowed chef in her sixties. Originally from Iowa, she lives on a vast Arizona ranch that her husband had bought. Genia’s property also includes a house in Maine, and she often visits family in Rhode Island. She collects and tests recipes, which she shares with friends. An amateur sleuth, she investigates deaths and crimes among relatives and acquaintances or at locations where she travels.
• Marie Lightfoot is the pseudonym of a true-crime author who was born in northwestern Alabama and lives in Bahia Beach, Florida. Born to social activists Michael Folletino and Lyda Folletino, Marie was raised by her aunt and uncle with her cousin Nathan after her parents allegedly abandoned her. A journalist, she writes fact-based crime books, earning significant income and fame. Residing in a gated community near the shore, Marie prefers her solitude. However, she pursues a relationship with divorced Black American state attorney Franklin DeWeese, which often complicates her life because of their sometimes conflicting professional and personal interests.

Bibliography

Dyer, Carolyn Stewart, and Nancy Tillman Romalov, editors. Rediscovering Nancy Drew. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995.

Hall, Melissa Mia. “Small Miracles.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 253, no. 13, 27 Mar. 2006, p. 61.

“An Interview with Nancy Pickard.” BookBrowse, www.bookbrowse.com/author‗interviews/full/index.cfm/author‗number/1849/nancy-pickard. Accessed 30 July 2024.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, editor. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Marks, Jeffrey. “An Interview with Nancy Pickard.” The Armchair Detective, vol. 26, no. 2, spring 1993, pp. 84-88.

Shindler, Dorman T. “Nancy Pickard: The Third Stage of Evolution.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 249, no. 31, 5 Aug. 2002, pp. 48-49.

Whitaker, Walt. “Pickard, Biography.” Nancy Pickard, www.nancypickard.com/biography.html. Accessed 30 July 2024.