Lia Matera

• Born: 1952
• Place of Birth: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

• TYPES OF PLOT: Thriller; cozy
• PRINCIPAL SERIES: Willa Jansson, 1987-1998; Laura Di Palma, 1988-1995

Contribution

Although Lia Matera’s novels tend toward the thriller format, they are based, as well, on traditional cozy mysteries. Willa Jansson, for example, would like to focus on her career and private life but keeps getting drawn into cases with political consequences. Laura Di Palma has similar career concerns—although she is, in some respects, more willing than Willa to pursue crimes that are outside the purview of her day job. In both series, however, Matera eschews the neat endings of traditional mysteries—the return to a cozy feeling that all is right with the world after apprehending the criminals. The novels begin in a state of anxiety that can be only temporarily alleviated by the actions of the series hero and her enablers.

Matera favors the first-person narrative. Both Willa Jansson and Laura Di Palma narrate the novels as though they were speaking to a friend in confidence. Although both characters are earnest investigators, they exhibit a wry sense of humor and even a jokey manner that enhances the informal tone of the novels. However, the Di Palma series is less lighthearted. Both series, however, include serious explorations of ethical and moral issues. Matera is especially interested in the way her characters can be set up and themselves become victims. Willa’s and Laura’s legal training guides them in sorting out the innocent and the guilty and establishing how they approach the nexus between crime and politics.

Matera’s novels have an implicitly feminist focus, as they show their female protagonists in conflict with male-dominated law firms and the criminal justice system. Whatever flaws that system may contain, however, and no matter how leftist Matera’s novels may seem, she demonstrates in Havana Twist (1998) just how worse off a society can be without an independent judiciary and a legal justice system in which defendants have rights that are balanced against the impersonal forces of the corporation and government.

Biography

Lia Matera was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1952 into a family she describes as “Italian immigrant tailors.” In 1959, the family moved to Eureka in Northern California. Her first language was Italian. She told interviewer Walter Sorrells: “The ability to express oneself was the central issue in our lives. Add to that all the stories I heard around the dinner table—the sheer drama of being forced to leave one’s homeland and start fresh with nothing. Every meal became an opera. So I was focusing on language and getting tutored in storytelling before I could even ride a trike.”

Matera’s leftist politics seem to have been shaped during her years at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Although she wanted to write fiction, she also prudently enrolled in law school and in 1981, graduated from the Hastings School of Law in San Francisco. Matera was on her school’s law review journal, taught law at Stanford University, and practiced law for a private firm. Still, she resisted the ethos of a conventional law career, working only intermittently until she could sell her first novel. What interests her are lawyers’ lives and the way they practice law. She has said that she wants to portray the milieu of the law, not the minutiae of law cases.

Matera has collected her short stories in Counsel for the Defense (2000). Her stories have also appeared in anthologies, including Sisters in Crime (1989), Deadly Allies (1992), Crimes of the Heart (1995), Irreconcilable Differences (1999), and First Cases, Volume Four (2002). Her work has been translated into Italian, German, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Japanese. Matera has completed seven novels in her Willa Jansson series and five novels in her Laura Di Palma series. Matera's short story, "Snow Job," was published in the January/February 2019 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. It was nominated for an International Thriller Writers Award in 2020. She also contributed to Edgar and Shamus Go Golden in 2022.

Analysis

Lia Matera focuses on the psychology and sociology of the legal world. The mindsets of district attorneys and defense lawyers are quite different. Her lawyers are shaped by what they practice, and she enjoys contrasting the attorney employed in commercial litigation with the one committed to labor unions. Her own interest is in how practicing these different kinds of law shapes personality. Becoming a certain kind of lawyer intrigues her as she probes the strengths and weaknesses of her characters. She points out that lawyers become a lot like their clients, which explains, in part, why they are attracted to certain sorts of law. The intersections of crime, the law, and the personalities of clients, lawyers, judges, and their cohorts make Matera’s novels intriguing. In her own account of her decision to stop practicing law, she suggests that writing was the only way to obtain an overview of the legal system.

Matera’s novels tend to focus on single issues. She begins with the question, “What do I care about now?” She has canvassed issues as diverse as pornography and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

In an interview with Walter Sorrells, Matera clearly distinguished her writing from traditional thrillers: “I have a problem with the basic premise of most successful thrillers: that the system doesn’t work and justice can only be achieved through personal vengeance. . . . I hate to see popular fiction glorify yahooism and add more sparks to the American tinderbox.” Matera’s characters fumble toward understanding the crimes they are investigating, and what they learn, Matera implies, is only a part of the truth.

In both the Willa Jansson and Laura Di Palma series, the main characters continue to develop—in Willa’s case, from law school to corporate work to her involvement in cases beyond the scope of a conventional attorney, and in Laura’s case from her corporate law practice to the decision to go into business for herself. While Willa defends the poor and the indigent, Laura takes on unpopular clients and causes. The Jansson novels often present a satiric view of the law; the Di Palma novels are more acerbic about the criminal justice system. Critics have praised the interplay of Matera’s offbeat and amusing characters, her irreverent and witty style, her wry attitude toward the law, and her ingenious plots.

Where Lawyers Fear to Tread

The first novel in the Willa Jansson series, Where Lawyers Fear to Tread (1987), is set in San Francisco’s Malhousie Law School, an amusing name for an institution like the one Matera attended. Willa becomes acting editor-in-chief of her school’s law review after its editor has been murdered. When other students are murdered, Willa begins to investigate, inspired by her childhood reading of Nancy Drew. There are suspects galore, including other law review members and faculty members. Unlike Nancy Drew, however, Willa finds herself arrested and a suspect, thus setting a pattern that will be repeated in subsequent Jansson mysteries. The fierce competition for good grades and jobs and the pretentiousness of law school clearly owe something to Matera’s own experience.

A Radical Departure

In A Radical Departure (1988), Willa works as a first-year associate for a San Francisco law firm that caters to the rich and the powerful when her boss dies from hemlock poisoning. Willa’s left-leaning mother is named in the boss’s will and stands to inherit his plush home. It is all rather suspicious and too much for Willa, who is still trying to find her bearings after a rocky experience in law school. It gets worse as Willa begins to realize that she may be the next murder victim. She tries to relax by smoking marijuana, but it hardly helps because she has a reputation that the press cannot resist exploiting. Mixed in with her fitful understanding of what is happening is her ambivalence over her parents’ politics and the kind of posh world the firm represents.

Star Witness

In Star Witness (1997), Willa takes on the case of a man who claims aliens have abducted him. This is the alibi he offers when he is accused in a hit-and-run manslaughter case. He explains that his car was in a spaceship when it fell on another vehicle, killing the driver. The setting is Santa Cruz, California, and the UFO watchers are portrayed sympathetically as Willa tries to come to terms with strange phenomena such as crop circles, mysterious sightings, and assassination attempts. The plot is complex and sometimes opaque, but the evocation of a subculture is convincing. Even though she is skeptical of her client's story, Willa never loses her authority as a defense attorney.

Havana Twist

Havana Twist, set in modern-day Cuba, may be Matera’s most ambitious Willa Jansson novel. Willa’s mother traveled with a leftist group to Cuba, convinced that the country represented her political ideals. Willa is frustrated at her mother’s inability to recognize that Cuba is a police state. When the group returns without Willa’s mother, Willa begins an investigation, taking her not only to Havana but also to Mexico, where a Fidel Castro sympathizer may have information that will help Willa learn what has happened to her mother. The task is too much for Willa alone, and she accepts help from a police detective with whom she had once been romantically involved. The risk-averse Willa nevertheless finds herself in an underground Havana tunnel that the Chinese are helping the Cubans build in anticipation of an attack by the United States. Some plot twists are hard to follow, but Matera’s evocation of everyday Cuban life and the conniving necessary to survive is engrossing.

The Smart Money

In The Smart Money (1988), the debut novel for the Laura Di Palma series, Laura’s San Francisco law firm delegates her to set up a branch office in Hillside. This is Laura’s hometown, and she is bent on ruining the practice of her former husband. However, as often happens in a Matera novel, the lawyer/protagonist becomes a murder suspect. In other words, Laura has jeopardized everything—her career in a prestigious firm and the notion that she has rebuilt her life after her divorce. Laura is a sharper-edged version of Willa Jansson, and Matera is not afraid to make her main character unsympathetic. Although Laura eventually regains her equilibrium, it is at no small cost to herself since she realizes she is not quite the big-city professional she should be.

A Hard Bargain

In A Hard Bargain (1992), Laura Di Palma has failed to make partner at her upscale corporate law firm because of her involvement in high-profile criminal cases. Taking time off, Laura retreats to the woods with her lover, Hal. Soon, however, a friend draws her into an investigation of an apparent suicide that looks suspicious. The victim had a history of self-destructive behavior, abetted by a husband who would point a gun at her. As Laura involves herself more deeply in the case, she begins to confront her own demons, including Hal’s dependency on her. Caring for this traumatized Vietnam War veteran, she realizes, may just be a way of deflecting her own troubles. Unlike many legal thriller writers, Matera combines fast-paced action with a sustained examination of her main character’s psychology.

Face Value

In Face Value (1994), perhaps Matera’s most feminist novel, Laura Di Palma finds herself immersed in the world of pornography. A high-tech California guru, Big Mike, manipulates videotapes of people having sex, claiming that he can show them their inner selves. Laura, now in solo practice, begins to investigate Big Mike after he starts selling his tapes as pornography. Inevitably, his actions lead to accusations of betrayal, followed by murder. As Laura learns about the women on the tapes, she questions her identity. This is one of Matera’s darker, introspective novels set in the milieu of cults and sex clubs.

Designer Crimes

In Designer Crimes (1995), Laura Di Palma is a witness to a murder when she sees the lawyer she is about to hire shot in front of her at a desk in a financial district law office. Was the bullet intended for her? She is representing a high school classmate accused of murdering his girlfriend, who has disappeared. The case has aroused considerable publicity and controversy. The murdered lawyer belongs to a firm that seems to be undergoing some kind of mysterious shakeup with tapped telephones and secret computer files. Why are certain employees targeted? As Laura investigates, Matera elaborates on what is perhaps her most intricately plotted mystery.

Principal Series Characters:

• Willa Jansson is a San Francisco law student and then a practicing lawyer with parents who still carry on the tradition of 1960s radicalism. Clearly focused on her career, Willa nevertheless finds herself inextricably involved in the social and political issues that have been her parents’ concern.
• Laura Di Palma is a no-nonsense corporate lawyer who becomes involved in criminal defense work. Possessed with a social conscience, she often has to brook her colleagues’ disapproval when she becomes involved in crime investigations. Eventually, she forsakes corporate law for a practice of her own.

Bibliography

“About.” Lia Matera, www.liamatera.com/about.html. Accessed 30 July 2024.

“Books by Lia Matera.” Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/author/list/157381.Lia‗Matera. Accessed 30 July 2024.

Cava, Frances A. Sleuths in Skirts: A Bibliography and Analysis of Serialized Female Sleuths. London: Routledge, 2002.

Grafton, Sue, et al. Writing Mysteries: A Handbook by the Mystery Writers of America. 2d ed., Cincinnati: Writers Digest Books, 2002.

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

Murphy, Stephen M., and Steve Martini. The Word Is Law. New York: Berkeley Trade Publishing, 2002.

Walton, Priscilla, and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.