Having written mysteries for over 20 years, Mississippi native Charlaine Harris has been training for her career since the moment that she could hold a pencil. After publishing two stand-alone mysteries, Sweet and Deadly and A Secret Rage, Harris decided to establish her first series, so she began the lighthearted Aurora Teagarden books, about a diminutive Georgia librarian whose life never turns out quite the way she planned, and continued the series until she grew restless. The result of that restlessness was the much edgier Shakespeare series, set in rural Arkansas, which followed heroine Lily Bard, a tough and taciturn woman whose life has been permanently reshaped by a terrible crime and its consequences.
Harris’ current, and most successful, venture is the Southern Vampire series about Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic barmaid in southern Louisiana whose life changes forever the night that a vampire shows up at the bar where she works. The sixth, and most recent, installment of the series, Definitely Dead, was just released earlier this month, and follows Sookie as she travels from Bon Temps to New Orleans to recover an inheritance left to her by her estranged cousin Hadley, which proves to be a more dangerous undertaking than Sookie ever could have expected.
“I started backwards with the Sookie character,” explains Harris, when talking exclusively to MediaBlvd Magazine about how she developed such an interesting, unusual young woman. “I don’t usually start from the beginning. I don’t have the character, and then create the book around her. I have the idea for the book, and then I create the character who will work for the book. With this, I knew I wanted to write a book about a girl who was dating a vampire because she couldn’t date anybody else, and the whole character of Sookie evolved from that. And then, she just kept growing.”
Knowing that she wanted to use an old-fashioned Southern name, Harris recalled that a very good friend of her grandmother was called Sookie. Having loved the name Stackhouse, she felt that the two names just flowed together perfectly. The next aspect of the story that evolved was Sookie’s telepathy.
“I didn’t really do a lot of research into that because I find that most people who claim they’re telepathic are not reliable people, and I wanted her to be a real telepath. If she is anything, she is honest. She’s really a lot like a Girl Scout. She’s honest, loyal, true and helpful, and telepathic. I think I probably started thinking about her when I was looking at one of my children and I thought, ‘I wish I could read his mind.’ And then, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be awful?’ And, the more I thought about it, the worse it seemed. To know what people really think about you? That would be terrible. How could you get along in the day-to-day world? So, I wanted to write about that.”
Though her early works consisted largely of poems about ghosts and teenage angst, Harris, who hopes that she possesses some of Sookie’s honesty and courage in her own life, began writing plays when she attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and graduated to books a few years later. “My parents were tremendous readers, and my brother was a tremendous reader, so we were a family that encouraged the written word, in every form, and I just grew up loving books more than anything. I always wanted to do this, as a career. Even when I was going through college, I knew that I wanted to write, but it was almost impossible for me to tell people that was what I was going to do. I guess I was afraid they would laugh, or something. But, I knew that what I was, was a writer.”
“Unfortunately, for several years after I got out of college, I had to do other stuff to support myself and my first husband. But then, when I got married a second time, my husband gave me what was really high technology then -- an electric typewriter -- for a wedding present, and told me that if I didn’t want to go back to work, I should just stay home and write the book I’d always wanted to write.”
Still holding onto that electric typewriter for sentimental reasons, Harris admits to having had a stroke of serendipitous good fortune, once she finally set her mind on a career as a writer. “I took one creative writing course, after I graduated from college, from Shannon Ravenel, who has edited Best American Short Stories for many, many years, and now has her own press, Algonquin Press, in South Carolina. She was teaching a creative writing course that year in St. Louis, and she had just quit work at Houghton Mifflin in Boston. She had recommended the work I did for the class to a former colleague of hers at Houghton Mifflin, and they took the book.”
Things did not go as smoothly for Harris, when it came time to sell Dead Until Dark, the first of her Southern Vampire stories. “For a long time, those books were very, very hard to sell. It took my agent two years to sell it, and he wasn’t even that crazy about it. But, I said, ‘I think this is really going to do it for me,’ and, eventually, he found somebody who would take the books -- John Morgan at Ace. He’s not at Ace anymore, but he took the book, and then they just did really well, from the get-go.”
Bored with being serious, Harris knew that she wanted to inject her own sense of humor into the Southern Vampire stories. “I think they’re funny, and I wrote them as funny. I wanted to write my sense of humor, for once. I had always held back, but I thought it was time to just let it rip. I wanted to do something that was really just fun, and yet, I do have an agenda. It’s in there, but if people want to get the top part of the story, that’s okay too. I just wanted to write something that had everything in it that I’ve ever wanted to do.”
Harris classifies the Sookie stories as Southern romantic vampire mysteries, although they’re often filed under science fiction or mystery in bookstores. With the popularity of vampire, supernatural and paranormal stories rising, the truly successful ones each have something special that makes them stand out from the crowd.
“I have my own voice, and I never really worried that Sookie would be like anybody else. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years. And, at the time I started writing Sookie, there weren’t so many vampire stories.”
According to Harris, who became more interested in vampire stories, herself, after reading Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, the attraction lies, in part, with the whole bad guy thing. “Everybody loves the bad guy. And, it’s erotic, when you think about the bite and the big ecstasy, and the traditions about that. You think, ‘Could something really be that good?’”
“There are enough vampire stories of every degree of humor, romance, erotica and adventure to satisfy anybody. People are interested in vampires in the same way that they’re interested in other supernatural creatures. It’s always nice to think there’s something else, something we don’t know about, something more wonderful, more scary, more adventurous, right outside our range.”
Along with the supernatural aspect of her stories, Harris’ work also has an intelligence to it that she admits is there in an effort to make an impression on her readers. “I like to have people think about things a little bit. If I leave a movie and I don’t talk about it afterwards, then it’s kind of a failure. That goes for books, too. If I read a book and then, the next day, I can’t remember the name of the protagonist, it was just a way to pass the time. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but I like it when readers let me know they’ve been thinking about some of the things that I’ve said in a book.”
And, no good Southern romantic vampire mystery would be complete without a sex scene or two. Prior to this book series, Harris had never really written an explicit sex scene, but she says that it was much easier than she expected.
“I thought, ‘Hey, I’m turning 50. If not now, when? Let’s just see if I can do it.’ And, it was really a lot of fun. You never know if what trips your switch is going to do it for anybody else. So, I’ve just really enjoyed the reactions to that.”
Planning to continue the series until she becomes tired of it, Harris says that, so far, she’s having no trouble keeping Sookie fresh. “It just seems like Sookie gets into so much trouble, and there’s always so much to learn about the supernatural world around her, that I haven’t had a problem with that. We’ll see what happens when I do start getting a little bit tired. But, her life is so exciting and things just keep happening to her. I’m just really happy with the books.”
Harris’ audience is about to expand even further, now that acclaimed writer-director Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) is turning the Southern Vampire books into a television series for HBO. With a pilot scheduled to film early next year, Harris is pleased that her work has been placed into such capable hands.
“I had other offers that were wonderful offers by wonderful people, but the minute I heard Alan Ball, I thought, ‘Here’s my quality assurance.’ He approached my agent and wrote me a letter, and waited while I was doing the thinking process on the offers that were on the table. Then, he sent me an absolutely gorgeous, huge vase of pink roses, when I decided that he would be the best person for the job.”
Although her involvement with the television version ended with choosing Ball to bring Sookie to life, she says that he has been kind enough to keep her informed, along the way. “I’ve read the pilot. I think that’s really wonderful of him, since he doesn’t have to talk to me about it at all, and I really didn’t expect that he would. I trust him completely. Of course, he’s making it his own, but he’s absolutely faithful to the spirit of the story. He liked the tremendous emotional range in the books -- the veering from tragedy to comedy to fear to happiness, and to all points in between.”
Always working on something, Harris is currently writing the next Sookie story, which is not yet titled, and will follow that with the next installment of her most recent series about Harper Connelly, a young woman who’s been struck by lightening, leaving her with the strange ability to find corpses. Grave Surprise, the follow up to the first of the series, Grave Sight, will be released on November 7 of this year.
“In Grave Surprise, Harper finds an extra body where it shouldn’t be, and it ties into a previous case of hers, which is one of her few unsuccessful cases. She realizes a lot more about herself in the next book. I started those books because I wanted to do something a little darker, and I wanted something that was a little more based in the conventional mystery form, while still clinging to my supernatural element. I got really interested in lightening strikes and people who had been struck by lightening. That really started the whole train of thought on Harper. Lightening strikes are mysterious things, and people who have been hit really aren’t ever the same again. I’m a silent member on a list for lightening strike survivors, and it’s just fascinating.”
Also on Harris’ plate are a couple of short story anthologies. The first, My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, will be released in October.
“P.N. Elron asked me to do that. I had not written many short stories, but I had written a few. Right after I agreed, I thought, ‘Do I have time to do this?’ But, I really wanted to do it because the concept seemed funny, and I wanted to get away from Sookie a bit. My novella in Night’s Edge had dealt with this fictional city called Rhodes, which is really similar to Chicago, and I wanted to set another story there, in that world, in the third person because it’s fun writing in the third person, after writing so long in the first. And, I wanted to write about a really snooty vampire. She was just such a hoot. I thought of what a really old vampire would think of modern wedding customs and put that in with a wedding that really shouldn’t even be taking place, between a vampire and a werewolf. P.N. Elron just asked me to be in a second anthology, based on C.S.I., so I’m looking forward to that.”
Following that, Harris, along with Toni L.P. Kelner, will be putting together her own anthology of vampire birthday stories, called Many Bloody Returns, with an expected release date sometime next year. And, she admits to turning another series over in her head that she would like to start, at some point, once she actually has the time to work on it.
In her professional life, there are two milestones that stand out for Harris. “I loved winning the Anthony Award (recognizing excellence in the mystery and crime writing genre). I didn’t think there was a snowballs chance in hell that I would win, and I’m still surprised I did because the story had vampires in it. I just really didn’t think a book with vampires would ever win a mystery award. And, I don’t think I ever will again.”
“The other thing that made me happiest was hitting the New York Times best seller list. That was totally unexpected. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ My publisher was so excited and sent me flowers, and the higher-ups called me. I thought, ‘Well, this really must be a big deal.’ I didn’t realize that the publishing industry was so gung-ho about it.”
With such a rich, varied career, Harris reveals that it’s a much more personal accomplishment that she is most proud of. “My three children, no doubt. I learned a lot about love from having children, I learned a lot about patience from having children, and I learned a lot about being an adult from having children. It definitely has informed my work, to a large extent.”
