Life Takes an Interesting Turn for Murder Mystery Author

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After sharing an office at LLNL with physicist and mystery writer named Camille Minichino, Parker decided to try her hand at writing mystery tales of her own. Photo by Garry McLeod.

It’s no big mystery why Lab technical writer Ann Parker started penning novels — she was practically born to do it.

While growing up in San Leandro, California, Parker and her friends (one of whom also later became a published author) would make up stories as they walked along the creek in the backyard of her family home. A “voracious reader,” Parker also had a knack for analyzing literature, but dreamed of becoming a scientist.

Interested in astronomy, Parker attended Colorado College in Colorado Springs and took classes at Chabot College before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley to earn degrees in physics and English literature. Upon graduation, Parker thought she might start her career as a technician in Silicon Valley, but a Berkeley physics professor was so impressed by Parker’s detailed lab reports that he encouraged her to explore becoming a science writer or editor at a scientific journal.

“It had never occurred to me I could combine the two subjects until then,” Parker said. “I’ll always think fondly of [that professor] because he gave me my career direction. It’s interesting the turns life takes.”

After graduation, Parker was hired by the Engineering Directorate at the (then) Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The directorate needed a writer and editor with a solid scientific background, and she fit the bill. Parker shared an office with a physicist named Camille Minichino, who also happened to write science-related mystery novels based on the periodic table, sporting titles like “The Beryllium Murder.”

“I watched Camille, she was having so much fun and I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I should try writing a book,’” Parker said. “I certainly was not one of those people who had a yen to be a published author from early on; I was busy with job, kids and family, but I thought, ‘Why not try it as an experiment?’”

Mining ideas for the ‘Silver Rush Series’

While brainstorming for her first book, Parker chatted with her uncle, who mentioned Leadville, a silver mining town in Colorado. Parker’s grandmother, the daughter of a Leadville blacksmith, had lived in the town during the “Silver Rush” of the late 1800s, working in the bindery of the town newspaper. The family ties, combined with the intriguing parallels Parker saw between that era and the dot-com boom then underway in Silicon Valley, convinced her it was the perfect backdrop for a historical tale of murder and intrigue.

“The Silver Rush was much like the California Gold Rush,” Parker said. “People went crazy — they left everything behind and headed West, thinking they would arrive, pick the nuggets off the ground and be instantly rich. Most of the booms we have out here are driven by this tantalizing promise of instant wealth. That’s one of the sparks for me; when I can see a resonance between present times and the past. People don’t change that much.”

Influenced by the Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes stories she’d read in her youth, Parker envisioned a female saloon owner-turned-sleuth as her protagonist. Inspiration also came from the author Mary Hallock Foote, who wrote about Victorian women living in the Old West and an altogether different medium she loved growing up: the TV Western.

“I can remember lying on [my best friend’s] scratchy rug and we’d watch shows like ‘Have Gun Will Travel’ and ‘Wagon Train,’ ” Parker recalled. “Even at that age I thought, ‘Where are the women? The guys are having all the fun.’ Women were just window dressing, or they were the hapless victim in the runaway wagon. It wasn’t fair that they didn’t get to have any fun; they didn’t get to have adventures or chase after the bad guys. That all sunk into the back of my brain and eventually came together (in my books). I wanted to have a woman character who could have fun. She could solve mysteries. She could be a woman in a man’s world.”

Parker added her own love of music — she played the violin and piano when young, her parents were accomplished pianists and a brother is a professional musician — and Inez Stannert was born.

Trusting the process

With Minichino as her guide, Parker enrolled in a mystery writing class, where she learned about plot structure and character development. The students formed a weekly critique group where they shared chapters and collected feedback from the other members. Parker crafted her story on-the-fly — a classic whodunit that follows Inez as she investigates the mysterious death of a silver assayer. Like a scientist, Parker looked for common “data point clusters” in the students’ comments for places she needed to edit or clarify.

The book, titled “Silver Lies,” came in at more than 600 pages, and Parker began the painful process of cutting it down to a digestible length. She hired an agent to find a publisher, which turned out to be a laborious task — multiple publishing houses told Parker her book was a Western, and Westerns didn’t sell (Parker argued it was a historical mystery that happened to be set in the Old West).

After a couple of years, Parker and the agent parted ways. Parker continued to query on her own, starting with Poisoned Pen Press, a small, independent press in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Press bought the manuscript and published the book in 2003. “Silver Lies” would earn several awards and garner acclaim from Publishers Weekly and the Chicago Tribune as one of the best mysteries of the year. But Parker didn’t have time to rest on her laurels.

“The publisher commented, ‘Well you’ve written this one, and it’s the first of a series, right? Are you working on the second one?’” Parker explained. “Camille [Minichino] was very helpful in coaching me, and one thing I learned early on is when a publisher asks you that question, you say, ‘Oh, yes, of course, I’ve already started it.’”

While she contemplated a follow up, Parker was working part-time at the Lab and raising two children. The end of the workday, after the kids were in bed, was her time to write.

“I found that my internal editor, which was busy during the day, was too tired at night to speak up and say, ‘Oh, that sentence, can you go back and do better?’ Or, ‘Where are you going with all this?’ And I would just fall into the zone,” Parker said.

With the release of “The Secret in the Wall” in February, Parker’s “Silver Rush” series now spans eight books. Parker separates the series into two “cycles” — the first five books center around Leadville, Denver and other locations in Colorado from 1879 to 1880. The second cycle, comprising the last three books, follow the protagonist Inez to San Francisco, where she has fled to start a new life managing a music store. Though it brings the character closer to Parker’s real-life home, the relocation wasn’t planned, she said.

“When I was drafting the fifth book, I didn’t realize I was writing the last book in the Leadville cycle,” Parker recalled. “However, as I was nearing the end, it hit me: ‘Oh, she’s leaving for San Francisco.’ I looked back to the very first book in the series and I realized that was the direction she’d been heading, all along. So, she surprised me.”

“The Secret in the Wall” was inspired by a real-life news article Parker read in the local newspaper. Without giving too much away, Inez has taken in a headstrong orphan girl named Antonia, and while assessing a business investment property, a skeleton falls out of an opened wall, followed by a bag of gold coins. Antonia, who assumes there are pirates afoot, investigates, and she and the derringer-armed Inez must solve the mystery. The book takes place almost entirely indoors, a reflection of the state of the world when Parker wrote it. She calls it her “pandemic-year book.”

“When I really started to dive in, that’s when the world stopped,” Parker said. “One of the things I do when researching for my books is walk the streets for the place I’m writing about, to get a sense of the atmosphere and imagine what the area was like more than a century ago. Well, I couldn’t do any of that (during the pandemic). It was just me and the computer. So, I think of [the book] as my locked room mystery, with much of the story taking place in these two conjoined houses and some scenes occurring in very claustrophobic settings. That’s kind of an indication of how I was feeling at the time.”

The book was named an Editor’s Pick by Amazon.com and the Historical Novel Society, adding to the long list of awards she’s received for the series. Of all her awards, she is most proud of the Colorado Book Award for her second novel, “Iron Ties,” since Colorado is close to her heart and the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award she won for “Mercury’s Rise,” because it came from the mystery community.

As a historical fiction writer, Parker attempts to be as accurate as possible, reading websites and archival newspapers and even conducting interviews with historians on subjects she can’t easily research online. In “Silver Lies,” Parker needed an expert on silver assaying, while another book required detailed knowledge in undertaking techniques from the Civil War and 1880s. For the latter, Parker happened to find a man who performed as an undertaker in Civil War reenactments.

Each book has its challenges, Parker said. But over the years, she’s managed to “speed up the process.” After her first novel, she began working from synopses and tightened up her editing steps.

“The beginnings and endings come easily to me. But in the middle — I call it the ‘muddle in the middle’— I often realize I’ve introduced all these new factors that aren’t in the synopsis. However, I’ve thrashed through the middle often enough to know that eventually it’ll work out, and I have great faith in the subconscious mind to unravel these problems.”

By the time she finishes a book, Parker is understandably “exhausted.”

“I’m just done,” she explained. “I feel wrung out and need to crawl off and hibernate for a while.”

She finishes up her 2022 book tour for “The Secret in the Door” concluding with a virtual panel for the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco on Nov. 18.  

Parker, who is semi-retired but still writing for the Technical Information Department’s “Science and Technology Review,” until her last official day on Oct. 28, said she had been “hanging on” until she could witness two milestones — the Lab’s first woman director and its 70th anniversary. The first happened with the promotion of Kim Budil to director in 2021, while the second occured with a lab-wide celebration in October. As she contemplates her next steps, Parker said there are still more stories to be told. With her children grown and no longer in the area, she plans to continue writing books, potentially beyond the “Silver Rush” series.

“The Lab has been a huge part of my life, so I wanted to be here to celebrate its 70th and then say goodbye,” Parker said. “After I ‘hang up my badge’ and walk out the gate for the last time, I’m planning to take time to decompress a little bit. However, I’ve been working in the world of words since I was a young, so I’m not going to give it up. It probably won’t be long before I return to spinning stories in my mind and on the page.”