The Richmond found in the Willie Black mystery novels by Howard Owen is a dicey locale, filled with mysterious schemes involving baseball diamonds, a history of government corruption, weirdness in Oregon Hill and hard-drinking, two-pack-a-day newsmen who know that their industry is dying.
No, wait – that's real life.
"Oh man, c'mon," says a laughing Owen, the author of RVA-centric books such as "The Philadelphia Quarry," "Oregon Hill" and "Parker Field," when asked how much of his fictional Richmond is based on real life. "The characters are a mix of people I've known and my own imagination. No, Mayor Levar Stoney won't be appearing in a future book, although I do like him."
An award-winning journalist who once served as sports editor and deputy managing editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Owen began writing fiction at age 40. "Journalism teaches you the language. It also teaches you that you can't afford writer's block. If you have writer's block, you lose your job." (His secret weapon is the advice and counsel of wife Karen, who makes her living as a book doctor.)
"The Devil's Triangle" author Howard Owen (photo by Jane Nardone).
"I didn't start writing mysteries until 2010. My first nine novels were all literary fiction," he says. Owen's latest, "The Devil's Triangle," published by The Permanent Press, is the sixth of his Willie Black stories, featuring a cynical police reporter as the main protagonist. Like most of his books, it is set in Richmond. Owen has previously documented everything from the city's minor league baseball history to its secret swimming holes. "Richmond is endlessly fascinating. I think that it's an interesting enough place that people in Seattle or Topeka would be intrigued by it."
And that is happening. The writer's 2012 novel, "Oregon Hill," copped the prestigious Hammett Prize, bestowed by the International Association of Crime Writers for outstanding crime fiction. Never mind that Owen, also a Theresa Pollak Prize winner, has never been a huge mystery fan. "I stumbled onto this by accident," he confides. It happened when he participated in a crime and mystery anthology called "Richmond Noir," a series of short stories by different authors. For his contribution, "The Thirteenth Floor," he used Willie Black as a character and liked his voice. "It felt as though I could use him for a book or two. Now I'm currently writing the seventh Willie Black book."
The Richmond found in these mysteries is a vivid and dangerous place, with serial killings, murderous villains, long-buried bodies and sketchy plane crashes, peopled with out-sized recurring characters such as media relations flack Peachy Love, antagonistic newspaper publisher Rita Dominick, bitter police chief Larry Doby Jones, and Black himself, a cagey figure who has his own set of problems. "After all this time, I have a cast of characters three pages long and I have to keep it straight," the writer says. "I can't have someone with blonde hair in the second novel suddenly have red hair in the sixth." He's been building a world – the alternate Richmond – "and I have to keep it the same, and keep it all in my head."
Howard Owen will appear at a book launch for "The Devil's Triangle" on July 12 at Chop Suey Books, 2913 W. Cary St. 6 p.m. Free. For more on Howard Owen, go to howardowenbooks.com.
