Following my review of Blunt Instrument, I decided to see if Amy Bloom would do a brief interview, and she kindly agreed.
Peter: As a former academic, could you describe how – if – the university setting influenced your choice of writing a novel with a murder at its center? Or, to put it another way, did you witness the backstabbing, jealousy, ego trips gone wild, the intensity of passion, I guess, that would drive a person to kill a colleague?
Amy: I think my choice of the university setting was not about just one role which I played at the university. I have been a bartender of university events, and undergraduate at 2 universities, a very young faculty wife at one university, a badly treated adjunct professor at a university, and then a very nicely treated professor at both Yale and Wesleyan Universities. I certainly did see back-stabbing, jealousy, ego trips, and passion. I also saw people trying hard to make a living, to understand the complicated subject, to make their way through the complexities of life as both very young people, old people, and all the folks in the middle.
Peter: Your protagonist, Dell Chandler, still has one foot in the university door, albeit tenuous as hell. She is a marvelous character — is she a complete creation of your vast imagination or?
Amy: I think a fiction writer that tells you a character is entirely a work of their imagination is lying to you and I don’t want to lie to you. Dell is very much a creature of my imagination, but there are certain moments when anybody who knows me well would say she sounds quite a bit like me. But she also sounds like impulsive, smart, fearless, and women have I known and admired.
Peter: The humor, which permeates page after page is irresistible. I think, from my many years of reading crime novels that injecting genuine humor into a thriller or whatever is very tricky. But you sail through it. Can you talk a bit about writing … jokes? Did you sort of become Dell as you wrote it?
Amy: Because the novel is written in the first person, I very much become Dell as I write it and also because I’m very engaged with the other characters, like Harry, Alison, Liz Cutty. When I’m writing a scene in which they figure I see the scene from their eyes, I hear the dialogue as they speak it. One of the joys of Blunt Instrument is getting to be Dell so often.
Peter: Is writing a crime novel harder than a straight one?
Amy: Writing a crime novel requires some different strategies than a straight novel in regards to plot and bread crumbs. The things that do not change are the good sentence, the depth of character and the need to understand that more than one thing can be true at a time.
Peter: I naturally wondered about the choice of Dell Chandler as the name of the main protagonist – had to ask, any reference to Raymond? It’s an unusual moniker in any event.
Amy: I agree that Dell Chandler is a great name for a private investigator. The roots of the name are not with Raymond Chandler. The roots of the name are with my mother Sydelle Cohen. She was a syndicated radio and tv gossip columnist in the 1940s and before the newspaper chain would carry her column, they insisted that she change her name from Sydelle Cohn, very Jewish, to Dell Chandler. And now we have Dell.
Peter: Each chapter is the name of a well-known pop song, for example: You Send Me, Tears of a Clown, I’ve Got Dreams – but I couldn’t see a consistent thread, how did you choose the songs and why those titles?
Amy: The titles of the chapters are as much a playlist as anything else. As Dell tells us she was very shaped by her Mother’s musical taste which spanned the 50s, 60s and 70s. The Chapter titles are not directives they are at most gentle sign posts.
Peter: Is there a particular crime fiction subgenre you especially enjoy?
Amy: As a young reader I was fascinated by all of the golden age mysteries from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers, to Mignon Eberhart, to the fabulous Ngaio Marsh, and let me not forgot G.K. Chesterton. It does seem to me that you could argue that we are in another golden age of mysteries when I think of Louise Penny, Laura Lippman, Abir Mukherjee, Barbara Neely, Val McDermid, and Sulari Gentill. What I love in a mystery is most of what I love in any good novel which is intriguing characters, unexpected developments and the insight, style and prose of the author.
Peter: Do you watch mysteries and crime–related television?
Amy: I love a United Kingdom mystery. Shetland, Vera — especially the early seasons, Endeavor, Wire in the Blood, Inspector Morse, Prime Suspect!!, the extraordinary Happy Valley—and I could go on but will run out of space.
Peter: And finally, do you have a sequel planned?
Amy: And finally, I do have a sequel planned. Blunt Instrument is first in a series of three.
Peter: That’s great news – they can’t come soon enough!
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
