Critics, readers respond well to local author’s novel

By THERESA HOGUE
Gazette-Times reporter

Former GT columnist finds success with mystery set in Eastern Oregon

Under a bright high desert sun, with the smell of pine and sagebrush and the quiet that can only be found in solitary places, Wendy Madar found peace and healing that she had never before known.

Eight years later, Madar’s experiences living in an old mining cabin near Baker City transformed into a mystery novel that is receiving literary acclaim and has already sold out its first printing.

Under the nom de plume Ashna Graves, the former Gazette-Times reporter and columnist has written several books featuring heroine Jeneva Leopold. But “Death Pans Out,” her latest book, has taken the mystery genre by storm, something that’s surprised Madar to no end.

“It seems a quiet story, and not a mainstream mystery,” she said. In the novel, reporter Jeneva Leopold has fled the dreary winter rain of “Willamette,” a fictional Western Oregon town, to seek out the solitude of her uncle’s high desert mining cabin. Depression and frustration following a double mastectomy has forced Jeneva to find new ways to cope, and her lonely life on the desert slowly makes healing possible.

During her stay at the cabin, where her uncle had disappeared a dozen years previously, Jeneva makes strong friendships with some of the quirky characters who inhabit the gorgeous landscape. And she also begins to unravel the mystery of her uncle’s disappearance.

Like Jeneva, Madar once sought out the desert sun after breast cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome changed her world. Her good friend Allen Throop, who had retired from a job as director of mined lands reclamation for Oregon, suggested a mining cabin she could rent for the summer, so she fled a rainy Corvallis summer for the heat of desert hikes. “The appeal of the setting drew me to greater exertion,” she said of her months on the desert. “My body reset itself, somehow, back to a pattern that predated the illness. Within two weeks, I felt the difference.”

She chronicled her adventures at the cabin in columns printed in the Gazette-Times, but she also kept copious notes about the people and places she found in Eastern Oregon. Eventually, the outline of “Death Pans Out” took shape. Although she experienced no murder mystery at the mine, she was inspired by the setting to create a novel.

Madar, who is currently associate director of the Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University, chose to write under a pseudonym to keep her nonfiction writing and her novels separate. She is surprised by the reaction of reviewers but is enjoying the chance to do a book tour. The first place she read her book was Baker City, and she was nervous and excited to hear the reaction of locals to the thinly disguised version of their neighborhood in her book. “I’ve come in as a stranger and taken someone else’s place and people,” Madar said. But the local reaction was positive and set the tone for her book tour.

The Kirkus Review Special Edition on Mysteries and Thrillers named “Death Pans Out” one of 12 “hot releases of 2007,” and Entertainment Weekly called the novel a “small, strong gem of a book.” Madar is also hearing positive things from readers, many of whom identify with Jeneva’s struggles to heal and to be a woman on her own in a male-dominated setting. “People seem to respond strongly to the landscape and to the character of Jeneva,” she said, “and to the overall premise of going to a place like that alone to come to grips with some problem.”

Madar said the book’s premise actually became a pitfall when she tried to pitch it to East Coast publishers. She said women editors told her that the story was unrealistic, and that a woman would never go to such a secluded place alone. With a laugh, she said they didn’t know West Coast women very well. She eventually went with an Arizona press. Jeneva will return in two more books by Madar. She’s planning on setting the second book mainly in “Willamette,” Corvallis’ alter ego, and hopes to base some of the story on real-life crimes that took place here.

Madar will read and sign copies of “Death Pans Out” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at 23rd Avenue Books in Portland and at 7 p.m. Friday at Grass Roots Books & Music, 227 S.W. Second St.