11 minute read
Claire Matturro interviews Rebecca Barrett
Claire Matturro interviews Rebecca Barrett
Thank you, Rebecca Barrett, for taking the time to chat about your books, publishing, life in Fairhope, and whatever else pops up today. You and I have never actually met in person, but I’ve been a fan of your writing for years. Let’s start by chatting about your newest book, The Rat Catcher, which by the way, I enjoyed and admired greatly.
In a nutshell, The Rat Catcher is part classic mystery, part historical, and part police procedural, and wholly captivating. You have all the plot twists and turns that readers expect told in an engaging pace with a gritty underbelly. It’s set in the months after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and you capture that time frame wonderfully well with its conflicts and society-at-the-crossroads feel.
The hero is a Vietnam veteran, Hugo August, who returns home to Mobile, Alabama to become an investigator for the police department. Not only must Hugo confront the mysterious death of Ruth Camden, one of the town’s most formidable women and a wealthy matriarch of “Old Mobile” society, but he must deal with the dead woman’s entangled, privileged, and contentious family. His past as an orphan in Mobile comes tumbling back in several ways, too, especially when the woman he once loved turns up as the dead woman’s niece. While Hugo probably still loves her, he can’t let that interfere. She is involved somehow, or knows something he needs to know, yet when he pushes too hard, he triggers difficult consequences for all.
All in all, it’s just a stunning, wonderful book, and I congratulate you on it. And the cover is fabulous too!
Rebecca Barrett: Claire, you’re too kind with your comments. Such praise from a talented writer and critic such as you means the world to me.
Claire Matturro: Rebecca, you nail the time frame—the late sixties—and place—Alabama—so wonderfully well in The Rat Catcher. I especially admire and respect how effectively you weave signs of the time into the actual story line. For example, the wanna-be Black panther and the Vietnam draft dodger both play such key roles in the plot and are also emblematic of the era. Can you tell us why you set the novel in South Alabama in the 1960s?
Rebecca Barrett: In my adult life I’ve traveled to some far-flung corners of the world and have had some unique and sometimes scary adventures. I’m often asked why I don’t write about this. I think the reason is, in part, that I’m a southern girl, born and raised. By that, I mean the culture of my environment early in life formed the core of my understanding of the world around me. I believe a kind of osmosis occurs in our formative years that, with later understanding, dictates a lot of our life choices and our view of the world. To say that I was aware, to any great degree, of the political and social unrest going on around me in the late sixties and early seventies would be a stretch. That period in time in the deep south was like two separate worlds existing side by side. I knew boys who didn’t return from Vietnam. Yet for many the war barely registered as more than a snippet in the paper or a couple of minutes on the evening news. We were kids. Friday nights were meant for pep rallies and football games, The Beatles and Andy Griffin.
On the other side of the equation was the great music of the time, the marked change in the direction of fashion away from the staid and up-tight, and the rise of sexual freedom in a rebellious youth who didn’t fully understand what they were rebelling against. We were kids who wanted an undefined something. No place exemplified this dichotomy in our social consciousness quite like the deep South. And no place had a more stratified society than Mobile, Alabama. It made the perfect backdrop of the Hugo August series.
CM: You live in Fairhope, Alabama now, which as I understand has a very active arts and literary scene. When did you move to Fairhope? Where did you grow up, and where are some of the favorite places you’ve lived?
RB: For many years my husband and I had an apartment in the French Quarter in New Orleans but our primary residence was always in Mobile, Alabama. The beauty of it, he would say, was that we could work and be “serious” at home but also be within a short drive to two of the most wonderful places on the planet, the other wonderful place being the sugar white beaches of the Alabama and Florida coast.
I grew up on a farm north of Mobile until middle school. I think that’s where most of my story telling began. People in the country are great at entertaining themselves and their neighbors by turning the mundane into something interesting or funny. The ability to laugh at one’s self is a great educational tool.
I moved to Fairhope about a year and a half ago. It is, as you say, a lovely place to live. Originally founded in 1894 as what would today be called a commune, it still draws creatives who like to live in a lovely setting on the cliffs above Mobile Bay and practice their craft. My move from Mobile was prompted, in part, by the increasing sense of isolation that began during the pandemic. I’m a very social creature. I love living here in the heart of this vibrant community with two book stores within view of my veranda and a variety of eateries within an easy walk from my front door. It was a good decision.
CM: You know, I’ve been reading your books now for ages, and especially recall and admire Road’s End. Yet it occurs to me I don’t know much about your personal background, other than Southern and rural. Have you always been a writer? What led you to write novels, or have you been a writer most of your adult life? What profession or jobs might you have held before becoming an author?
RB: I suppose I’ve always been a story teller. My primary chore as a kid was to entertain my two younger brothers. The front porch swing took us on many adventures of my imagining. The bookmobile was a godsend during my childhood and I devoured everything I could get my hands on. In high school I decided I would move to Spain after graduation and live the writers’ life. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Somerset Maughan featured heavily in my reading preference during that time. But, as they say, life intervened and I never made the move to Spain.
Marriage, children, and life in general were my focus but I would occasionally put pen to paper for a short story that wouldn’t leave me in peace until it was on the page. These short pieces were gratifying to write but, as those who know me well will tell you, I tend to make a long, shaggy dog tale out of even the small things and so, heavily influenced by Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring, I thought I’d write apocalyptic fiction. In the process I discovered that what I really write about is people. Regardless of whether or not there’s a murder, an affair, a mad scientist, or Mother Nature at the core of a story, it’s always about what Faulkner called the human condition.
CM: There’s such a range of style and subjects in your books, including your contributions to the delightful Trouble series, which are cozy mysteries/romantic suspense, and Road’s End, which is a powerful, heart-warming multi-generational novel. But then you have a post-apocalyptic novel, (writing as Campbell O’Neal), plus children’s stories, and short stories of life in the South. Did I miss anything? What led you to write in such a range?
RB: For me, writing always starts with a scene. I don’t know where they come from but I’m sure Freud would have something to say about that. For The Rat Catcher the scene was of a detective arriving at a murder scene to encounter, unexpectedly, the object of his lifelong desire in the form of Bibi Prescott, a denizen from the opposite end of the social strata. Everything else flows from that complication.
My children’s stories have always been about my grandchildren. And my other fiction, regardless of the time period or literary structure, spring from the soup that makes up my life experiences. What bubbles to the surface always surprises me once it’s finished. The underlying theme only reveals itself in the writing.
Only the Trouble mysteries came from a place of plotting and structure as far as the who, what, and where were concerned. But the why is always up for grabs with me until the ninth hour. These were fun stories to write and I’m glad Carolyn Haines prevailed upon me to join this group in this adventure.
CM: Well Read Magazine has a good many authors among its steady readership and fan base, so I want to ask about your experiences in first publishing The Rat Catcher as an Amazon Vella book. How did that work out for you? What was the learning curve with Vella and how difficult was it to publish it in Vella form? And will future stories with Hugo August first be introduced in Vella?
RB: My writing has always been more about writing than about being published. Not that I didn’t want some big publishing house to swoop down and tell me how marvelous I was and here’s your check for a trillion dollars. Self-doubt is the constant companion of a writer. I soon discovered that I didn’t want to endure the wrenching process of repeated rejection. A very witty editor, who shall remain nameless, once opined “there might be a story here somewhere but not in these pages.” I burned him in effigy. I also didn’t write for a very long time after that. His comments weren’t witty, just cruel. I later won the grand total of $100 for that short story.
But, more recently, I decided that since I would always write, I should discipline myself and put more effort into the publishing aspect of things. I researched the various serialization platforms and decided to give Amazon Vella a try.
Chapters of a work in progress are published over a period of time through the Vella platform. The premise is that readers will access a chapter using an ereader and then comment or like the segment as it comes available thereby building an audience once the reader is engaged.
When I first published to the site, it was complicated for readers to find the correct link. They had to know the title because the Vella offerings weren’t easy to find. The searcher had to know to first go to Vella, which didn’t appear on the Amazon site in the list of categories, then search for your book. Changes have been made to the platform and I think this will improve discoverability.
As for publishing in this format again, I don’t think I will. The reason being that I think it’s better suited for different genres than what I write and for flash fiction. Fantasy, science fiction, and erotica seem to comprise the largest audience. That’s not to say that if I were a big-name mystery or historical writer that my readership wouldn’t find me in this format but for building readership, I think I would need a platform with huge numbers of followers which could then be directed to this niche marketing tool. I’m not savvy enough with marketing to see any real benefit from this venue.
CM: What are you working on now? And what’s in store for Hugo?
RB: She Had To Die is the next book in the Hugo August detective series. I’m about a third of the way in and I find that series writing has the advantage of making the plotting flow more smoothly. I already know the motivation, and believe me, that’s major for me. The goal is to have it finished and edited by January, 2024. With a final read by my Beta readers, the book should be in print shortly thereafter. The idea for the third book is already intruding on my thoughts so I’m very excited about what the next year holds for my writing.
CM: Thank you, again, Rebecca. All the best in your continuing adventures as an author and in life.
