Mystery Author Tracy Clark Comes to Milwaukee
Chicago mystery writer Tracy Clark is the award-winning author of a series that stars Harriet Foster, a Chicago PD detective who has a brilliant mind for homicide cases but plenty of obstacles in her personal life. After crime-solving her way through the books Hide, Fall and Echo, Detective Foster is back in a new, fourth book in the series, Edge. Milwaukee Magazine asked Clark a few questions ahead of her appearance at Boswell Book Co. on Feb. 21.
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Could you tell us how the character of Detective Harriet Foster has developed and evolved over the course of these four books?
I don’t outline things ahead of time. I don’t have a plan of where characters are going. I just put Harriet – police officer, African American, female – on the sidewalk in the first book, Hide, and then I started piling things on her shoulders. She’s lost a partner, she’s lost a marriage, she’s lost a teenage son, and she is on the sidewalk in front of headquarters in her new spot, with a new team and boss waiting for her, and she’s not quite sure if she has enough in her tank. So, that’s where she starts.
She walks through the door and gets the worst possible case with the worst possible partner, and the weight becomes heavier and heavier. The arc over the four books has been her trying to dig herself out of this hole, to find a life for herself outside of the job. She’s a wonderful investigator, brilliant detective, but she goes home and she has zip in her house. She’s in a state of stasis.
My job is to meld these two pieces of her together and get her to live a whole life despite the losses and trauma, like we all must do. I try to make her as human as possible. We all deal with stuff we need to deal with, but we still have to keep moving forward. She’s a little better in (book) 4 than she was in 1. She knows she has a problem she has to deal with, but she still has to deal with it. So, that’s where we are in Edge.
How would you say your character Harriet might be similar to you, and how is she different?
She’s in no way similar to me because she’s a lot braver than I am. I’m sort of like a library cat – I need a ginger snap and a cup of tea, and give me a stack of books, and I’m happy. I love writing about that juicy stuff, but that’s not me. How she deals with emotional trauma, I recognize that; how she deals with loss and grief and a sense of responsibility for the people around her, I feel for that. But I don’t tap into her experience because I’ve never had it. In imagining what that might be, I’ve talked to a lot of cops to see how they deal with it. It’s a tough job and I’ve never done it, and I want to hear their stories, so I listen to what cops say, and, more importantly, I listen to what they don’t say. I guess we have a comparison in that we’re both female, we’re both African American – that’s where it ends. Her experience is not my experience, but I’m interested in what that experience might be.
You’ve also written the Chicago Mystery Series. Could you tell us how that might differ in tone and style?
That series features Cassandra Raines and she’s a private investigator in Chicago, and I like that series because it’s kind of funny and quirky. You know how PI novels are – these are people who are in society but a little bit outside of it. She has a different goal than Harriet because Harriet has to follow departmental rules and the law by the book. Cass is a little loose: She’s breaking into people’s offices trying to look at their files, like PIs do in fiction. I think I understand Cass a little bit more than I do Harriet. Cass is just out there helping the little guy, trying to be that force that stands between the everyman and the big corporation, but they’re both interesting characters and I find interesting things about them to pull out.
Tracy Clark will appear at Boswell Book Co. to promote Edge on Saturday, Feb. 21 at 4 p.m.
