Joan Lowery
Nixon is a prolific author, a lover of ice cream and vegetables,
specifically artichokes, asparagus, and tomatoes, Californian and half
Texan, and the only four-time winner of the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe
best juvenile mystery award. She writes historical dramas,
heart-stopping suspense tales, page-turning adventure stories, and some
of the best mystery books readers will find in the libra.
The Edgar Allan Poe
Awards are sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America. Prior to 1989,
the sponsor grouped all nonadult mysteries into one juvenile category.
Nixon won this award in 1980 for The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), in 1981 for The Seance (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich), and in 1987 for The Other Side of Dark (Delacorte). In
1989 the juvenile award was split between children's and young adult
tides. In 1994 Nixon's The Name of the Game Was Murder (Delacorte) was
named winner of the young adult category,, making Nixon the only
fourtime winner in the combined categories.
Nixon grew up in
Los Angeles and the Laughlin Park area of Hollywood. Her mother wrote
radio scripts and also scribed Nixon's early stories. At age two, Nixon
is said to have approached her mother with a request to "Write this
down, I have a poem." Her first published work came at the age of 10,
when a poem was published on the children's page of Children's Playmate
magazine. Nixon's first professional sale came at the age of 17, when
she sold a short article to Ford Times. In college she wrote articles
for a Hollywood fan magazine as well as articles for many of the
general interest magazines such as Woman's Day.
In 1949, she
married Hershell Nixon and they moved to Texas. At her first writers'
conference, in Corpus Christi, Texas, one of the speakers was John
Ciardi, who inspired her to begin to think about writing for children.
By then the Nixons had four children. The two oldest--Kathy, then 11,
and Maureen, aged six, told her, "If you are going to write for
children, you have to write a book and it has to be a mystery,, and you
have to put us in it."
Her first novel,
Mystery of Hurricane Castle, was published in 1964. She received 12
rejection slips; the 13th publisher accepted the manuscript. When her
mother treated her to a year of housekeeper services, and the
housekeeper agreed also to watch the preschoolers, Nixon became a
full-time writer. Thirty years later, in 1994, she celebrated the
publication of her 100th book, A Dangerous Promise. Now she not only
writes books but is engaged in coauthoring interactive mysteries on
CD-ROMs with two of her daughters.
Her mysteries are
set in a variety of locations: imposing castles, remote islands, big
cities, and quaint suburbs. Nixon is a graceful writer who spins
suspenseful tales populated by well-drawn characters. She says that
"writing a suspense/mystery novel is a double challenge, because a
well-written novel involves the interweaving of two story lines. The
main character has a personal problem to solve and a mystery to solve.
The solutions to both must evolve smoothly and together." Many of her
protagonists are female--strong, confident, and capable. Her characters
control their own fates and not only deal with their personal struggles
but solve the mysteries along the way
Most of Nixon's
ideas for novels come from common sources--newspapers and stories she
hears. She often asks, "What if?." and then proceeds to answer her
question. She keeps a pocket file of ideas, to which she addresses the
what-if question. She recalls one example:
"After reading a
newspaper article about a young farmer in West Texas who was comatose
for several years I began asking questions. The article told about the
young man's mother, who cared for him and never gave up hope.
Eventually an operation for an infection resulted in his awakening from
the coma. Surprisingly, the young man recovered and soon was out on the
farm working. I was intrigued by the story and offered to take my
doctor to lunch so I could interview him."
After learning some
basic medical facts, Nixon began to wonder "what if" a 13-year-old girl
fell into a coma and awoke four years later. And what if she had been
an eye-witness to an unsolved murder? That idea developed into her book
The Other Side of Dark (Delacorte, 1986).
One evening Nixon
and her mother were driving home in a drizzling rain. When they
developed car trouble, they stopped at a stranger's house to ask to use
the telephone.
"The man who
answered the door invited us in," Nixon recalls, "and then left us
alone in the house to wait for a tow truck. I began wondering, what if
the man who answered the door was not the man who lived there? What if
there was a dead body in the house?" Those who read A Deadly Game of
Magic (Harcourt, 1983) will recognize the plot.
A real murder in
Nixon's neighborhood brought about yet another title. A postal carrier
was murdered, and eventually the murderer was found, but many things
didn't add up. Nixon speculated that there were actually two murders
that day and one of the victims was never reported missing. She began
to ask "what if" and eventually developed the theory that one of the
victims, someone who would not be reported missing, was an undocumented
household worker. The second victim, the mail carrier, most likely
witnessed the murder and was murdered to keep her quiet. Nixon wrote
the story, Whispers from the Dead (Delacorte, 1989) the way she
imagined it had happened.
Her personal
experiences, too, produce book ideas. After having a cast removed from
a broken arm, Nixon was told that swimming would be the best therapy
She and her daughter frequently visited a local hotel with a swimming
pool.
"Everyone else swam
laps, but one obnoxious guest living at the hotel swam diagonally,"
Nixon says. "I eventually used the hotel as the location for A Dark and
Deadly Pool. When I needed a murder victim I knew just who it would
be."
Another mystery, a
sequel to A Dark and Deadly Pool, came about from that same hotel
experience. Nixon and her daughter Eileen began to produce mystery
weekends in the theater. Nixon said, "I could write it but couldn't put
it on; Eileen did." The public relations woman at the hotel happened to
mention that a two-story room on the 19th floor was said to be haunted
and that the room was never rented out. The bellmen often complained
about noise from the 19th floor. It seemed to be the perfect setting. A
sequel to A Dark and Deadly Pool, The Weekend was Murder, featured a
staged murder weekend at a local hotel and a real murder which
16-year-old Liz helps to solve.
Nixon's goal is to
write an average of one mystery and one historical novel a year.
Sandwiched into this writing schedule are an occasional Western,
mysteries for younger readers, and her popular Shirley and Claude
picture book series. Ideas for these books come in various ways, just
as her mystery ideas do.
Nixon got an idea
for a series from a book packager who called to inquire if she had ever
heard of the orphan trains. She hadn't, so he sent her a magazine
article about the trains. She has now written several titles for the
Orphan Train Series. (First called the Orphan Train Quartet, the series
title had to be changed when its popularity resulted in a request for
more than the first four titles.)
The books are
optioned for a television series. A short story about one of the Orphan
Train children and her promise to find a good home for her little
sister, "Hannah's Promise," published in the November 18, 1994, issue
of Scope, earned Nixon the International Reading Association's 1995
short story award.
Nixon's Ellis
Island series features three books whose protagonists meet on a boat
crossing the Atlantic on the way to Ellis Island. One of them, a
Russian Jewish girl named Rebekah, settles with her family in New York
and works in a sweatshop. Rosie settles in Chicago with her Irish
family, whose goal is to send for others in the family. Kristen and her
family emigrate from Sweden to escape socialism and high taxes and to
find greater opportunity in America. They settle on a midwestern farm,
where they are disappointed to find their new community as traditional
as their homeland. Rebekah's story is told in Land of Hope, Rosie's in
Land of Promise, and Kristen's in Land of Dreams.
The idea for the
Shirley and Claude books came from Jim Giblin, a fellow writer and, at
the time, a children's book editor at Clarion. During a breakfast
meeting, Giblin asked, "Have you ever thought of writing a Texas tall
tale?" That question spawned the idea, and Nixon began to flesh out the
details. Nixon thought of her son-in-law, Kurt, who hated the hustle
and bustle of Houston, and created a character that she would move out
of the hustle and bustle.
"I wrote the first book and submitted it to Jim," she says. "He rejected it, and the books are now published by Viking."
Nixon's typical
writing day begins at 8 or 8:30 in the morning and continues until
shortly after noon. After an hour or so break for lunch, she returns to
her writing until 5. She works on her writing at least five and usually
six days a week, spending much of her working time in research. Her
Orphan Train and Ellis Island books, she says, required more research
than anything else she has written. Much of that research involves
travel. The actual writing generally takes Nixon three months for a
young adult book and three weeks to a month for shorter books. Once she
begins the writing process, Nixon concentrates on that particular
manuscript until it is finished.
What type of book
does she enjoy most? Young adult books, Nixon says, "because I have
more space in which to develop characters and emotions."
As she begins to get the germ of a story idea, she says, she decides on her main character.
"My main character
and my idea grow together in my mind into a plot. It may take a few
weeks. In one case it took five years. I like to open stories with
action, or suspense, or both in order to hook the reader from the
opening sentence. When I have the opening firmly in mind, I work on the
ending. I never write a word of a story until I know how I'm going to
end it."
With the beginning
and ending firmly in mind, Nixon is ready to write a proposal to send
to her editor. The proposal usually runs between 10 and 25 pages. Once
accepted, the proposal serves as a reference for Nixon, but it is a
flexible document, allowing for the addition of characters and changes
to the plot.
This year Bantam
Doubleday Dell published Nixon's young adult mystery, Murdered, My
Sweet. The seventh book in her Orphan Train Adventures series, Circle
of Love, was also published in 1997. And on tap is a proposal for a
1998 novel, Don't Tell, and a series of Orphan Train books for readers
in the seven-ll age range. That series will be titled The Orphan Train
Children. These titles will be shorter than the books in the Orphan
Train Adventures series and will have interior illustrations. This
younger age group will also be the target audience for her first two
(numbers 11 and 12) 1997 Casebuster titles for Disney Press.
Nixon's writing not
only attracts readers but writers as well. Those who write as class
assignments most often receive a copy of her newsletter; but others who
express a desire to become an author, who send their own writing and
ask for a critique, or who pour out their own life stories will get as
much encouragement, understanding, and moral support as she can give to
their situation. Some of the letters Nixon receives present interesting
perspectives. One young man wrote that he wanted to be a writer, "but
the more I write I know I don't have enough brains to be a writer so
I'm going to be a lawyer instead."
It is not only the
letter writers who have questions and comments. One interviewer asked
Nixon, "Do you satisfy your criminal tendencies by writing about crimes
rather than committing them?"
After her book The
Seance won an Edgar award, the second in a row, a woman in an elevator
said to her, "You have done so well with your children's books. When
are you going to write a real book?"
In addition to the
Edgar awards, Nixon's books have earned her many state choice awards,
the Western Writers of America Spur Award, and numerous listings on
best books lists. But she says that the best accolades come from her
readers. One Christmas, a ninthgrade girl wrote to Nixon that in the
first eight grades of school she had never read one book all the way to
the end until a friend gave her The Stalker. She loved it and proceeded
to read all the books Nixon had written. In her letter the girl said,
"Thank you for the gift of reading."
"That kind of letter," says Nixon, "is the best award any children's book author can get."
Joan Lowery Nixon
lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband Hershell (Nick) Nixon. They
enjoy traveling and playing with their grandchildren, who live nearby.
You can read more about Joan Lowery Nixon by visiting her WWW page on the Bantam Doubleday Dell site (http://www.bdd.com/forum/bddforum.cgi/trc/index/nixo).
The site has information about the author and a message from the author
herself. It also has a hot link to Nixon's e-mail at
JNixon5130@aol.com.
~~~~~~~~ By Sharron L. McElmeel
Sharron L. McElmeel
is a frequent contributor to LIBRARY TALK and THE BOOK REPORT who often
writes about authors and their books. Her most recent publications
include Literature Frameworks: Apples to Zoos (Linworth, 1997) and
Internet for Schools (Linworth, 1997), which she co-authored with Carol
Simpson.
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