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Gender-Bending, Genre-Blending
Knoxville author Julia Lieber won’t be pigeonholed by sexuality or subject matter
by Paige M. Travis
Like a lot of authors, Julia Lieber is something of an enigma. The Knoxville writer uses a pseudonym, and she insists on drawing a solid line between her status as a novelist and her career as a lawyer. She is politically engaged, fiercely concerned about the increasingly blurry division of church and state promoted by the religious right, the emergency state of our environment and the dissolution of news people into celebrities. But her most intriguing quality might just be her imagination.
Her first novel, There Came Two Angels, published in May by Alyson Publications, is a mystery in the tradition of the writers she’s admired since she started reading their books in her early 30s—Dashiell Hammett, Ruth Rendell, and their ilk. And as she wrote and published short stories and essays, searching for her niche, she found herself delving into the minds of characters who stray or stumble into the wrong side of the law.
“That, I think, is probably one of the things that motivated me to write a mystery fiction: to think about the psychology of people who get involved in crime and their motivations,” she says.
Lieber’s plot for There Came Two Angels started with a hypothetical situation the outcome of which she could only imagine: a conservative senator gets caught in bed with the mutilated corpse of a gay hustler. When this “what if?” stuck in Lieber’s mind, she was compelled to imagine how such a news story might play out in reality.
“What would that do to American culture? What would people think of that? What would the media think of that? How would people like Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh and Gary Bauer respond to a situation like that?” She speaks quickly, her mind still revved up by the incendiary notion. “It was really too rich. It was almost like I wanted it to happen. So the only way I could make it happen was to write a story about it.”
From this scenario came the detective protagonist, one with a complicating irony. Former police detective Loy Lombard is a street-smart sleuth, a no-nonsense professional who happens to be a lesbian (although she feels “dyke” suits her better). Lured away from running her private security company, Lombard is hired by the American Family Freedom Campaign, an extremely conservative group that vilifies homosexuality, to help prove their man is innocent. What would seem to be a clear conflict of personal interest doesn’t faze Lombard. A crime-solver to the core, she wants to find the truth.
“It’s never going to bother her in the least bit that she works for these people,” says Lieber. “She’s kind of mercenary, basically.”
Lieber herself is gay, although neither she nor Lombard would make a big deal about it.
“She’s very pragmatic about [her sexuality],” Lieber says of the fictional P.I. “She doesn’t let her whole identity rest in that. That’s sort of incidental to her nature. It’s something she never brought into her work.”
But it is a consideration in the current publishing world, which is responding to the increased visibility of gays in the media and popular culture. Leiber suspects her chances of getting published by Alyson, a gay/lesbian press based in Los Angeles, would have been slimmer if she were sending her manuscript now instead of in 2002, before Queer Eye for the Straight Guy captured television audiences and the issue of gay marriage was a major element of the presidential election. She’s wary of being pigeonholed as a writer of gay/lesbian fiction. There Came Two Angels, she believes, could be marketed to—and will be of interest to—a variety of readers.
“It’s a political satire, it’s a mystery, and it happens to have a gay/lesbian theme, so that’s where it gets shunted. It could easily appear on the mystery shelves of any bookstore.”
Lieber has a sense of humor about publishers’ motivations.
“They want the book to sell, and they know that gay and lesbian readers are going to be more likely to buy this, so that’s where it’s marketed. And there’s nothing wrong with that,” she says, consciously mimicking the line from Seinfeld. “At the same time, it would be nice for the book to reach a wider audience than just gay and lesbian.”
The plot is timely, political and, well, mysterious. Lieber is careful not to give too much away. Plot, after all, is the essence of the mystery; it keeps the reader turning the pages to find out what happens next. Lieber is conscious of certain critical attitudes toward genre fiction.
“I think that most literary writers cringe at the word ‘formula’ because for somebody who writes literary fiction, it’s about the language and about the human heart and human consciousness,” she reasons. “But somebody who writes genre fiction—whether it’s horror or mystery or romance—you have to have a formula in order to make it marketable, make it appealing to a public that is used to being able to read a story for its plot.”
Lieber responds to this tradition with an understanding and a twist.
“What I’ve tried to do is make the characters really interesting. It isn’t strictly genre fiction; I think I’ve done enough character development to take it a class or two higher than hard-boiled.”
Loy Lombard is a tough cookie and a fascinating individual. At first she seems unknowable, showing only a wizened, smart-alecky surface. But as the story progresses and Lombard gets further drawn into the conspiracy, her softer side is exposed.
“I think that you want the detective protagonist to be in some way a kind of sad sack,” says Lieber, whose favorite crime-solver is Ruth Rendell’s Wexford. “If you look at a lot of the detectives in mysteries, famous in the past, even if they’re not lonely, even if they have a family, or a partner or a sort of normal veneer, there’s some kind of internal loneliness to them. I don’t know why that is, but I do play off that in the Lombard character.”
And although Lombard is an orphan, she feels comfortable in her own identity, even though she’s flawed.
“I think that the one constant in Lombard that maybe brings out some of her heroism is the fact that she is so professional and she is so committed to figuring out what the truth is despite her other flaws and frailties, of which she has many. Just like we all do.”
June 10, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 24
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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