Janet Evanovich Blends Romance, Crime and Wit in ‘Going Rogue’

AARP (Illustrated portrait: Michael Hoeweler/Roland Scarpa; Background: Ryan Johnson) Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

Author Janet Evanovich came up with one of her best characters — fictional bounty hunter Stephanie Plum — because she was losing interest in writing straight romance.

“I was having a hard time getting an entire book out of just relationships,” she says. “I was in menopause, and I had more thoughts about murder than I had about sex!”

New Jersey–born Evanovich, 81, had written nearly a dozen romance novels under the pseudonym Steffie Hall when the allure started to fade, so she decided to give crime fiction a try. She had

been reading a lot of Robert B. Parker — the late creator of the fictional private detective Spenser — and liked that he was such a wordsmith who wrote very clean and easy to read books. At

the time, though, some women authors were making their mark in crime fiction, including the late Sue Grafton and her best-selling Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, and Sara Paretsky, 77,

with the private eye V.I. Warshawski novels. Evanovich didn’t think she could compete with them and went searching for her own niche.

“When I moved out of romance, Sue Grafton was there, but her heroine was cutting her hair with nail scissors. I mean, I’m a Jersey girl,” Evanovich says. “Oh my God, you don’t do that! Hair

is important. Shoes are important. That was why I couldn’t have anybody be a cop. I couldn’t imagine them in uniform, wearing cop shoes. So I decided that the product I was going to have was

going to be for a reader like me, someone who loved all of these things about romance but wanted a mystery plotline.”

a reader like me, someone who loved all of these things about romance but wanted a mystery plotline."

— Janet Evanovich

She found the inspiration she was looking for in an unlikely place: Midnight Run, a 1988 action-comedy movie about bounty hunters, bail bondsmen and mob bosses, starring Robert De Niro and

Charles Grodin. Suddenly the seeds for Evanovich’s literary heroine, Stephanie Plum, were planted.“ Today, there are 30 books in the Plum series, including Going Rogue, which AARP members

can read for free online. I love the cachet of the bounty hunter,” Evanovich says. “I loved the fact that there was a lot of freedom to it. I didn’t have to have a large body of knowledge,

like you would have to have if you were writing about cops, and it was a little different from a P.I.” 

Evanovich sought to make Plum “a very ordinary person,” not much different than how she describes herself: “a normal person who got very lucky and happened to have a best-selling book

series.” Like Evanovich, Plum stems from New Jersey and attended Douglass College at Rutgers University. She is the centerpiece of an extended family that includes her parents, whom she

visits often, mainly to eat; Grandma Mazur, her adventuresome maternal grandmother;  her Vinnie’s bail bonds work family, which includes office manager Connie, file clerk Lula (Plum’s

frequent partner in crime) and Vinnie, who owns the company; and finally her two love interests, the New Jersey cop Joe Morelli and the dark, enigmatic Ranger.

“This is a book about family,” Evanovich says. “I think people just relate to all of these things.”