This week I interviewed mystery writer and New Orleans resident Julie Smith for an upcoming article for Inweekly and my new podcast series, And the Murders Began.
Julie is a fellow Ole Miss graduate who wrote for both the Times-Picayune and San Francisco Chronicle. In 1991, Julie won an Edgar Allan Poe Award —presented every year by the Mystery Writers of America—for New Orleans Mourning, which featured Skip Langdon, a rookie female cop who investigates the murder of the Rex, King of Carnival, that has been gunned down by a Mardi Gras parade-goer dressed as Dolly Parton.
Julie has written 11 Skip Langdon novels. The most recent The Big Crazy was released the fall of 2019, which I found had some parallels to my new novel, Blood in the Water.
In The Big Crazy, detective Skip Langdon, her friends and New Orleans deal with Hurricane Katrina. Julie admitted that it was the hardest book she had ever written, for many reasons.
“One is it took me back there, and it wasn’t a place that wanted to be,” she said, “but another was trying to remember everything, and sequence of things, and trying to put it all together.”
Julie continued, “Really, when I wrote it 15 years later, it was kind of historical so I had to depend on a lot of other books, newspaper pieces and other references to get it all straight in my head. I hope I didn’t make any errors, but then probably no one would ever know because we were all so confused in that period. Who knew what was where?”
The book has several character that readers follow in various parts of the Big Easy.
“There’s a whole thread that takes place in Charity Hospital that was a pretty difficult thing to write because I wasn’t there,” she shared. “I had to depend on lots and lots of help for that. I did have a friend who went through a similar experience to the one that one of my characters did—an ER psychiatrist who turns up after Katrina and discovers that the other doctor is not there. He’s bailed. So she has to do it all on her own.”
Her friend went through the same dilemma and was in charge of “a hundred crazies all on his own.”
“It was very interesting talking to him later because he was extremely circumspect about it,” said Julie. “He would tell me that everybody was extremely well behaved, and it was just very easy. Well, I know that isn’t what happened. But I was able to glean a lot of details from things he told me. Then there was some very good books written about it as well.”
Blood in the Water is based on the April 2014 flood and the explosion of the Central Booking and Detention facility. Even though the book is fiction, I felt an obligation to do justice to what happened. Julie agreed.
“You absolutely have to,” she said. “To me, the setting is non-fiction. It has to be right, even if you’re making up places.”
To learn more about Julie Smith and her writing, visit juliesmithauthor.com. The podcast of the entire interview will be published on ricksblog.biz and rickoutzen.com next week. The article is scheduled for late October or early November.