She dunnit: Dream deferred becomes novel 10 years in the making

Ever since she was a little girl, Paula LaRocque dreamed of writing mysteries.

"It was my first love," said the Arlington-based author, who will sign copies of her first novel, Chalk Line, at Recycled Books Records CDs on Saturday afternoon.

LaRocque is already an established writer of three top-selling books on word usage, including a comprehensive handbook on writing mechanics, The Book on Writing: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Well.

"The first books that caught my heart and mind were the Nancy Drew mysteries," she said. She was 7 years old at the time and already a voracious reader. Before long, she was reading her way through her mother's library, which included Agatha Christie novels and books from Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series.

"I got on to the whole idea of the puzzle - of the mystery - early," she said. "Traditional mysteries, particularly the whodunits, [aren't] bloody or gritty. They're not crime novels - they're mysteries. They capture your imagination because you want the answer. Who did this thing and why? Can you figure it out?"

When she was 8, LaRocque wrote two mysteries of her own. With a body. And a killer. They had a beginning, middle and end and were six whole pages long.

"I did it once and thought it was such fun and so exhausting that I did it again," she said.  

LaRocque laughs as she recounts her earliest forays into mystery writing.

"The first was Mark Her Off the List, John, and the second was Incident at Hidden Cave," LaRocque said. "The second one was distinguished by the fact that one word occupied one whole line in my Big Chief tablet … SCREEEEEEEEEECH!

"That was the sound of them pushing the rock away from Hidden Cave - in which, of course, was a body."

Those stories were her only attempts at fiction until she took a creative writing class in college. She won first prize in a university-wide literary contest for a poem and first and second prizes for two short stories. But that was her last venture into the art of fiction for long time.

Instead, she prepared to teach English. She earned her bachelor's degree from Western Michigan University, graduating summa cum laude, and went on to receive a master's degree. She started work on a doctorate, but was offered a teaching job in technical communications for the school's engineering department and worked as a stringer for the local newspaper.

"I had made the swing completely to nonfiction, and there I stayed," she said. "For a whole career. For decades."

She and her husband left Michigan for Texas, where she taught journalism and dramatic and creative writing courses, first at Texas A&M University, then at Southern Methodist University, and later at Texas Christian University.

"That's when I started developing my really strong opinions about what interests people and what keeps them reading, what makes them turn the page," she said.

In 1981, The Dallas Morning News offered her a unique opportunity - to work with reporters as the newspaper's first writing coach. Later, she also became an assistant managing editor.

"It was an experiment," LaRocque said, one that lasted 20 years and helped to establish her as an expert. She became known as one of America's foremost writing coaches, giving workshops throughout the country, penning a regular column for the Society of Professional Journalists' Quill magazine and providing commentary on Dallas' National Public Radio station, KERA-FM (90.1).

"So here I am nonfiction, nonfiction, nonfiction. In the back of my mind - and I do mean way at the back - I was still was that 8-year-old who wanted to be a novelist," LaRocque said.

"Sometimes we are lucky enough to have one big dream. I did have that one big dream, I just didn't pay any attention to it or give it any mind because I was busy making a living."

She retired from The News in 2001, and immediately got to work on her dream.

"Here's what happened," she said. "I got a new journal. You know how they look. They're brand new, and they're thick, and they have lots of pages. … And I was going to write a journal entry in there. Instead I wrote, 'The best way to get there from Dallas is' - and that's still the opening line of Chalk Line.

"I didn't have a clue what this book was about. I had that little opening that's in Chalk Line now with directions how to get to Huntsville prison - that's what I had that first day at the end of 2001. And then I wrote the end. I wrote the last two pages. Today they are exactly what they were that day I wrote them."

It took her 10 years to fill in the part between her opening line and final pages. LaRocque knew to how write. But she had to learn how to write fiction.

"What happens is you get an idea intellectually," she said. At first you're really daunted by it because where's this going to come from?

"With nonfiction, you uncover facts and then you try to tell those facts in a storytelling way to make it interesting. With fiction, you uncover a lie, and try to tell it like it's true! Obviously, storytelling is the important thing there, but you're not aiming for that because it is a story - you really are making it up."

She continues: "I would never have guessed they're actually opposite animals. They use the same skill, technically, writing … but that's all they have in common. No wonder it took me 10 years."

Chalk Line is a page-turner, filled with all the stuff that makes a good mystery: a dead body; the nagging question of "whodunit"; a cast of quirky but believable, three-dimensional characters; and a whole pile of clues. To LaRocque's knowledge, no one has yet guessed the murderer.

But this is not just a simple murder mystery. Woven into the story are deeper themes. It explores contradictions and questions about alienation, trust, morality, law and justice and learning to see things in shades of gray, rather than black and white. Art references are sprinkled throughout.

"I always wanted it to have a lot of deeper meaning. It does," she said. "Whether it will resonate for everybody or even most people, I don't have a clue. We're going to see.

"One of the reasons it took me 10 years was I had to figure out what I thought about it, what was satisfying to me as a response, and what was just a canned answer, what was it on the surface and what might it be below that. All of that takes time and you have to do it by yourself.

"When the story starts to unfold, one is unfolded. Now all you have to do is polish it, and then you realize, 'By God, I wrote a novel.' And as soon as you think that, who can stop you?" she said.

Chalk Line is LaRocque's first in the Ben Gallagher series. She is putting the finishing touches on the next novel, and is in the process of starting the third.

CHALK LINE: A BEN GALLAGHER MYSTERY

by Paula LaRocque

published by Marion Street Mysteries

hardcover, 304 pages

$24.95

BOOK SIGNING

When: 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday

Where: Recycled Books Records CDs, 200 N. Locust St.

Details: www.paulalarocque.com