Episode 2 is an interview with Noir author Steph Cha and her Juniper Song Mystery Series. You can listen to it here, or if you'd prefer, you can listen on i-Tunes.
In this interview, we talk about all three of Steph's novels, Follow Her Home, Beware Beware and Dead Soon Enough. She also gives a shout-out to the Los Angles Review of Books as well as two authors she loves. You can check them out on their websites: Megan Abbott and Denise Mina. And you can find Steph on her website.
In case you missed it, I am giving away a big bundle o' books by three mystery writers (Steph Cha's Dead Soon Enough, Lisa Klink's All In (signed by the author), and Krista Davis' The Diva Steals a Chocolate Kiss), plus a $10 Amazon gift card. If you'd like a chance to win the book bundle, all you have to do is sign up for my newsletter before April 30th. Everyone on the list at midnight Pacific Time, April 30th, will be automatically entered to win.
No spam, by the way, just a monthly newsletter. I won't sell, rent, lend-out, or ransom your e-mail address.
If you'd rather read the interview than listen, here's the transcript!
Enjoy!
Episode 2: Steph Cha Transcript
Welcome to Destination Mystery, a podcast for readers who love a good mystery. I'm Laura Brennan.
My guest today is Steph Cha. She is the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware and Dead Soon Enough, the third book in the Juniper Song Mystery Series. Her writing has appeared in the LA Times and she is currently the Noir Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. A graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, she lives in her native city of Los Angeles, California, and I am thrilled to have her here today.
Laura Brennan: Welcome! How are you doing?
Steph Cha: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on.
LB: Absolutely! I really love your work, it's just so rich and so full of the characters and the relationships -- it’s just so good. But let’s start by talking about Juniper Song. She’s your series protagonist, and really, what was her genesis?
SC: Well, I wanted to write an LA novel. I guess even before I started writing, I had the idea -- I’d read Raymond Chandler in college -- and I just had the idea that it would be cool if a book like Follow Her Home existed, in that I wanted to -- I really love the way that Chandler represented Los Angeles, but it did seem very much a representation from another era, where it's a very starkly white man's vision of the city. And it just did not really jibe with my experience growing up in LA. You know, I’m Korean-American and what I really wanted to represent was the kind of upbringing that I had, the kind of 1.5 generation experience. I have a lot of Korean-American friends who were born and raised in LA and we have the largest Korean population outside of Korea, in Los Angeles. But it had not been, that experience had not been represented in fiction, like anywhere, or very scantly. So I just decided that I wanted to write a Korean-American Los Angeles novel and since Chandler is the biggest Los Angeles writer, it made sense to me to have a conversation with him.
LB: Oh, that is such a great way of putting it, because I can absolutely see how all three books are a conversation with that and with his -- his vision of LA. It was so interesting, you were talking about -- well, I was reading it and I was thinking about Chandler and the whole lone hero thing. And then about 10 pages later you actually took that head on, in that your third book, and the thing that I was interested in was sort of the gendered issue of it. Song is very much a lone wolf private investigator, but at the same time it seems like she's longing for family
SC: Actually, I really liked the fact that Philip Marlowe is this ‘man without a past’ character. I found it kind of fascinating. You know, you dive into those books and you know very little about him, except his age, his height, that he is a private investigator… But I wanted to ...