Wednesday, August 24, 2005

New Mexico author sets mysteries in small towns

Clara Garcia News--Bulletin Staff Writer; cgarcia@news--bulletin.com

Belen Pari Noskin Taichert, author of "The Belen Hitch," understood when she first started writing murder mysteries located in actual New Mexico towns that it could become controversial.

People may not like how she depicted their home town and they may have reservations that the city is the site of a fictional homicide. But according to Taichert, the stories are much more than the murder — it's a way to show the world what New Mexico has to offer.

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"I wrote the story I needed to write — I didn't compromise," Taichert said. "But while writing this book, I kept hoping people will realize that I wrote this with love."

"The Belen Hitch," Taichert's second published murder mystery, tells the tale of Sasha Solomon, a public relation's specialist hired to judge whether the Harvey House should be renovated into a train museum and bed and breakfast or a modern art gallery. Solomon's job isn't that easy after finding the world-famous artist Phillipa Petty, whose art is proposed to be hung in the historic building, murdered.

Taichert's first published book, "The Clovis Incident," was, of course, based in the eastern New Mexico city. In this book, Solomon travels to Clovis to bid for a job. While there, Solomon meets her old friend, Mae, who seems just a little bit nuttier than she once was.

Solomon is shocked to find a dead man on Mae's property. As she tries to understand what happened, Solomon continues to fight her own internal demons. She soon discovers that Clovis is a lot more than a dot on the map.

"It is always risky to write about towns that exist, especially small towns because it can really back fire," Taichert said "As people are reading about a place, they can get angry — angry that a murder happened in their town. I hope that I wrote about Belen with enough love that people understand that I'm not ragging on the town.

"But Sasha is a PR pro, and as she's driving down Main Street, she notices the boarded up stores, and she has got to notice — it's a reality. That's how a public relation's professional would look at it if they were hired to come into a town to develop tourism. First impressions are first impressions."

Taichert said she hopes people who read "The Belen Hitch" will understand by the end that Sasha actually likes Belen and she's enthusiastic about it.

There never came a time in Taichert's life when she made an obvious decision to become a writer. Like most, it's something that just comes naturally, she said.

"I've always been a writer," Taichert said. "I've always had that compulsion to put words on paper from the time that I've been able to hold a crayon."

Before Taichert began writing mystery novels, she always had this image that a writer of novels was a person who drank a lot of coffee or alcohol, smoked cigarettes and lived in a garret in Paris. There's a big difference between a working writer and the idealized writer, she said.

She always wanted to write a book, but didn't know what to write about. She said she just knew, of course, that she was going to write the great American novel. But what finally pushed her over the edge and made her write a full manuscript was being pregnant and being really irritable. In order to distract herself, she started reading mysteries.

"I had never really read mysteries up until that point because I wanted things quick, fun and fast," she said. "I'm a mystery reader who likes characters rather than trying to figure out the puzzle."

Taichert said she remembers reading a mystery by an author who has published many, many mysteries that she thought it was just horrible. After turning the last page and pondering about what she had just read, Taichert threw it down and told herself she knew she could do better.

"Someday, I will thank this author when I can figure out how to do it graciously," she said. "That's what got me writing a book. When I wrote my first manuscript, it was far worse than what this author had written."

That manuscript, entitled "For Immediate Release" was the first in the Sasha Solomon series. Taichert said while the character of Solomon was always a public relations pro, she is very different today than when the writer first created her.

"That manuscript was filled with every cliché and the plot was totally predictable. It was just lousy every way you can think about it," she said. " My second manuscript was a thriller about a serial killer. The book, "Heal Thy Self," was written in first person and third person from the serial killer's perspective.

"That's when I realized that I write books that have sub themes and unifying themes. It was very violent — graphically violent. I was still working on the back story for Sasha and it's a book that I still might try and salvage, but it would mean a tremendous amount of work."

In "The Belen Hitch", Solomon is much more normal compared to the hallucinations she suffered from in Clovis. While Solomon's illusions were somewhat endearing, somewhere between Clovis and Belen, Taichert realized that this quality in her main character had become a little, well, just too much.

According to the author, she either had to commit to having the character endure the hallucinations and really go with it, or don't. Ultimately, Taichert didn't feel it necessary having to write books that always have Solomon seeing ghosts before solving the crime.

When asked why she chose Belen as the backdrop for her latest murder mystery, Taichert pointed to a couple of reasons.

"I think Belen is a really interesting little town — I really do, I like it," she said. "I like towns with personality. All New Mexican towns have personality, but there are some that have more obvious personality than others. And after Clovis, I was yearning for a more New Mexican type of town and Belen definitely is."

Another reason Taichert chose the Hub City was that after writing a book that was four hours away from Albuquerque, she was ready to write something closer to home where she could pop down and spend some time looking around and do some research.

While Taichert had never made a point to visit Belen as a destination before — except for a field trip when she was an elementary student — she drove through amazed that this small town has three exits.

When she made her first trip to Belen from her Albuquerque home, which she describes as a reconnaissance mission of sorts, Taichert said she was fortunate not only to find one of the best places to stop, the public library, but to find a great resource in Beverly McFarland, the city's librarian.

"I told her about my book and my ideas, and instead of looking at me as if I were insane, she was really very supportive," Taichert said. "I told her of the kinds of things I was looking for and she would point me in the right direction. With her help, I got to see a little more of Belen than if I had just seen it walking on the surface."

Taichert spent about of four or five days in Belen; talking to people and just getting a feel of the town. She said every one she met, including the owner of the Hub Motel, who was gracious and opened up some of the rooms for the author, was really helpful and gave her many ideas of the characters in the book.

According to Taichert, someone with a public relations background much like her main character, she was attracted to the more interesting sites in Belen that really interest tourists.

"That's something that they can't get anywhere else," she said. "That's why I love the town."

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