| |
With outstretched hand, Susan Isaacs greeted me in the spacious foyer of her two-story brick house on Long Island's North Shore. "Hi, I'm Susan!" she said with a warm smile. Her eight novels are about homicide and skullduggery, deception and betrayal. Was this what a best-selling mystery writer was supposed to look like and sound like?
She led me past her elegant living room filled with dark furniture and Oriental rugs to the garden room, overlooking a sprawling lawn and swimming pool. Her black cat, Poe (named for Edgar Allen Poe), ambled beside us. With coffee and cookies in hand, we sat comfortably across from each other like two good friends having a chat.
Just another housewife? Like some of the heroines of her novels, not quite. Isaacs' books have been translated into 30 languages, including Hebrew, and her first novel, Compromising Positions, published in 1978, was made into a movie for which she wrote the screenplay. Currently, she's working on a sequel to this tale about a witty, perceptive housewife-sleuth who solves the murder of a Long Island periodontist.
I asked Isaacs how she had become a writer. She said that it wasn't something she had planned. When she left Queens College of the City University of New York in 1965, she took a job as an assistant editor at Seventeen magazine, she told me. She started writing an advice-to-the-lovelorn column and quickly moved up the ladder to senior editor.
In 1968, she married Elkan Abramowitz, a trial lawyer specializing in white-collar criminal defense work. She left Seventeen in 1970 when her son, Andrew, was born.
For the next three years, until the birth of her daughter, Elizabeth, Isaacs stayed home writing freelance articles and political speeches. She says that she's still a political junkie. (This year, she covered both the Republican and Democratic conventions and has been writing occasional political columns for the New York newspaper Newsday.)
In the mid-'70s, she began to write novels.
Compromising Positions was an instant bestseller and was followed by Close Relations (1980), Almost Paradise (1984), Shining Through (1988), Magic Hour (1991), After All These Years (1993), Lily White (1996) and Red, White and Blue (1998).
In addition to being a dedicated writer, Isaacs is an activist who works hard for the North Shore Child and Family Guidance Association, the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the National Endowment of the Arts Literature Program.
Not coincidentally, she is a member of Women's American ORT.
Where do you do your writing?
SI: I took an empty bedroom for my office. It's cheerfully decorated, with raspberry wallpaper, slightly berserk wall sconces, an old farm table I use as a desk and paintings by a couple of my artist friends. Nevertheless, once I'm writing, I lose all sense of where I am and enter my fictional universe.
Why did you choose to write mystery novels?
SI: When I started writing, I sensed I wasn't going to be another Virginia Woolf or Jackie Collins, but since I was hooked on reading mysteries, I thought I could be a Semitic Agatha Christie. Mysteries have a built-in narrative drive and that's a good form for first novelists.
|
The Mystery of Susan Isaacs
