Tanen Jones's new novel is The Better Liar.From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with your characters?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I had this thought: No one ever has perfect access to the interior conflicts of a family except the people in that family, but they never see the conflict clearly, being too close to it.
The only person who could ever truly understand a family, inside out, would be a person who somehow was allowed all the access of a family member while secretly being a stranger.
From that thought grew my characters. What kind of person would do such a thing? What kind of family would need "solving" in this way?
As I wrote them, I discovered my characters were cut along classic noir archetypes, but I had changed them to suit my own sensibilities: the detective was a young queer actress; the troubled marriage was an equitable one; the crooked cop was a butch woman; the dead girl speaks.
At the end, as in all the best noirs, each character is presented with a wrenching dilemma.
All novelists use old tools, but...[read on]