Literary Birthday – 26 June – Julia Spencer-Fleming

Happy Birthday, Julia Spencer-Fleming, born on 26 June 1961.

Julia Spencer-Fleming Quotes

1. I play around a lot with form, chronology, and points of view. It’s endlessly fascinating to me the way the framework of fiction affects the plot and the reading experience. (All About Romance)
2. When a reader picks up a book with my name on it, she can expect a certain type of read – ­mystery, romance, a fast-paced plot, action, social issues. (All About Romance)
3. Before I ever started the first book, I wrote biographies of the town, Russ Van Alstyne, and Clare Fergusson. (All About Romance)
4. When I began writing the series, I was unsure how much police procedure and amateur sleuthing I could combine. Now I’m blending police procedure, romance, small-town life and I don’t know what-all ­– maybe Women’s Fiction? – into each novel, which in turn, becomes part of an overall story I’m telling over many volumes. (All About Romance)
5. I used to joke that law school taught me what NOT to write, but that’s not really fair. Despite centuries of jokes, good legal writing requires the ‘ABCs’—accuracy, brevity and clarity. Those aren’t bad habits for a novelist to pick up. Acting and theatre, interestingly, have continued to prove useful, as the same techniques I learned for creating characters on stage are the ones I use for creating characters on the page. (Book Page)
6. I love mysteries and thrillers—and cliffhangers!—and read a lot of it when, as you astutely put it, I’m not creating it. (Book Page)
7. My approach to writing since (ouch!) 2002? I’ve become a great deal more relaxed. I still plod through the middle of the book and agonise over wrapping up the ending and I’m always ping-ponging between complete conviction that I’m a hack or a genius, but I trust my process and choices much more than I did at the beginning. If I want to take a detour with a character or an event or a setting, I trust it will serve the greater story, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. (Book Page)
8. Crime fiction is a place where true storytelling still flourishes. I think we as human beings are hardwired to want stories with real characters, good language, and plot. It’s what I want to read, and it’s what I am driven to write. It’s almost a cliché to say that mysteries offer the reader the experience of bringing order out of chaos, but I think it’s true. (Maine Writers)
9. My legal training is most useful, I think, in creating the sort of chain-of-events that must take place to bring a mystery to a satisfying conclusion. Lawyers are taught to be rigorous, logical, and detail-oriented when making a case, and those are excellent traits for a crime fiction writer to have as well. (Maine Writers)
10. I start with characters, then with a dramatic situation, which usually becomes the precipitating event of the book. A baby is abandoned. A timber heiress goes missing. I feel my way through the plot, and frequently have no idea of what’s going on behind the mystery until I’m more than half-way through the book. (Maine Writers)

Julia Spencer-Fleming is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling American author of mystery fiction. She studied acting and history at Ithaca College and received her J.D. at the University of Maine School of Law. She worked as a lawyer before writing full-time. She has won the Agatha Award, Anthony Award, Macavity Award, Dilys Award, Barry Award, Nero Award, and Gumshoe Award. She has also been a finalist for the Edgar Award. Her books feature Clare Fergusson, a retired helicopter pilot turned Episcopal priest and Russ Van Alstyne, a police chief. They are set in Millers Kill, a fictional town in upstate New York. The series began with In the Bleak Midwinter. The latest book is At Midnight Comes the Cry. Follow her on Bluesky and Instagram.

Source for photograph: Media page on author’s website.

by Amanda Patterson
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