Here at Casa Mysterioso, instead of recycled site-owner publicity, we offer interviews with other people in the arts--writers, musicians, actors, entertainers, and sometimes just plain characters. We add new ones all the time, and site visitors are invited to contribute. If we use your interview, we'll pay $35. Query by e-mail.

Interview with Jan Burke
Interview with Jeremiah Healy
Ben and Diane (An Interview with Stephen Booth)
Cold Days and Deadly Nights (An Interview with Steve Hamilton)
Mysteries (An Interview with Irene Marcuse)
The Stone Monkey (An Interview with Jeff Deaver)
The Salaryman's Wife (An Interview with Sujata Massey)
A Kiss Gone Bad (An Interview with Jeff Abbott)
Charlotte Justice (An Interview with Paula Woods)
Blood Money (An Interview with Rochelle Krich)
Letter From New Orleans: (An interview With Andy J. Forest)
The Lady From Charm City (An Interview with Laura Lippman)
Crescent City Views (An Interview with Anne Rice)

 

An Interview with Irene Marcuse

Irene Marcuse is the author of the Anita Servi mystery series. Set in New York, these books have connected with readers and critics alike. Servi is a wife and mother as well as a social worker. Marcuse weaves social issues into her mysteries. Andi Shechter recently sat down and interviewed Irene about her life and work.

AS is interviewer Andi Shechter; IM is Irene Marcuse

AS: When I saw your first book, I wondered about your last name. Anyone who knows modern political history must know about Herbert Marcuse. Did having this man as your grandfather influence you?

IM: My grandfather was a wonderful, humorous man (with a taste for mysteries - he devoured Simenon, and loved Hawaii Five-0). While I was mostly too young to have read and discussed much of his work with him, growing up in a politically leftist household certainly had an influence on me. From the civil rights movement to protesting the Vietnam war, feminism and environmentalism right on up to my current concerns with issues of poverty and social justice -- it sounds hokey , so let me tell a story from my first day in social work school. The professor asked everyone why they went into social work. My answer was "Because I wanted to change the world." The professor - a man about my own age - said, "That's great! I haven't heard that answer since the late 60s." Which dates me but I hope not my values!

AS: Your New York is so wonderful; it's alive with all sorts of cool places to go and things to do. I know you weren't raised there. What brought you to New York (and do you miss Berkeley?)

IM: I moved to New York from New Mexico, actually, when my first marriage broke up. I came to go back to school at Columbia University, where my father teaches. They offered free tuition as well as an undergraduate program for "older students from varied educational backgrounds" - a description that suited me to a T. I'd flunked out of college when I was 19, and over the years I put in time at various California junior colleges getting my grade point average back up. Going to college in my 30s was wonderful - by then I knew enough to take classes that interested me.

I do miss Berkeley - there's nowhere else that has such an eclectic, opinionated, free-spirited populace - and I miss New Mexico, the most beautiful place in the world. Having visited both places over the years, I've realized how much they've changed, and, in a sense, moved on without me. If I'd known, when I first came to New York, how long I was going to stay, I'd never have done it. So many people, so crowded all the time, so noisy, dirty, rude, rushed, crammed together, expensive . But I got my BA, became a foster parent, met my husband, got an M.S.W., got married, became an adoptive parent (which took eleven years, but that's another story). I've been in New York City almost 20 years and now I can't imagine living anywhere else. It's all here - people of all races and hues; every variety of food, entertainment, all along the spectrum of income and culture.

AS: Everyone always assumes that characters in fiction are, at least, semi-autobiographical. How much of you is in Anita?

IM: Anita has my demographics - age, hair color, height (no - I'm taller!), husband, child, occupation, address within a few blocks - but in terms of personality, I see myself as more like Anita's friend Anne, the administrative assistant. There are pieces of my personality in Rosemarie, Anita's mother, also -- she's got my flaky, retrograde hippie characteristics. Same with the other characters -- they resemble my nearest and dearest on the surface (although I've given Benno the one thing my husband doesn't have: hair). . I always think of the characters in my books by their own names, in terms of who they are as unique individuals, so that their behavior is capable of surprising me.

AS: Talk about your pre-writing life, would you? You worked in social service, didn't you? What were the good parts of that and what were the bad parts?

IM: I got my M.S.W. and my first nine-to-five job at the age of 40. By then, I really appreciated the benefits like health insurance, paid vacations and holidays, and sick leave. All my life I've found myself around old people - relatives, neighbors, the grandparents of friends - and social work with the elderly was a lot like what I'd already been doing, only I got paid for it. I still volunteer at my former employer, mostly with the flea market, which I wrote about in Consider the Alternative. There really were no bad parts to my job; I worked with and for wonderful people. I left it because my circumstances had changed so that I was able to take the time to do what I've always wanted: write novels.

In my pre-social work life, I worked as a medical technician, long-distance telephone operator, house cleaner, waitress, bartender, painter and wallpaper hanger, bead stringer, proofreader, editor . . . and along the way, wrote quite a bit of poetry.

AS: Consider the Alternative is your newest book. In it, you talk about the very difficult issues facing people as they age - quality of life, suicide, dependence. This couldn't have been easy to write about. What prompted it?

IM: Mystery writers have truly weird minds. The initial impetus for Consider the Alternative came when I heard about the plastic bag method of suicide, 'self-deliverance'. It seemed like a good way to kill someone. Seriously, it was a very difficult book for me to write. The year I was working on it seemed to be the year that my parents' contemporaries started dying. Also during that year, my good friend Brenda Taylor, to whom the book is dedicated, was dying of liver cancer.

AS: What's been the response to your books. In your second ,for example, you tackle issues of trust in a marriage. As mentioned above, in your third, you talk about the end of life. Do people respond well to the serious nature of the issues you have chosen?

IM: There are two kinds of readers . . . No, really, it's interesting to me that while reviews tend to mention the social issues in my books, ordinary readers usually respond more to the story than to the underlying themes. I like a little food for thought in my recreational reading. I often choose books based on location, and on the profession of the protagonist, because I like to learn about places and fields I'm not familiar with. Books are escape hatches for me, doorways leading out of my own limited experiences. Writing has turned out to be a way to repay the favor of all I've read by sharing the details of my neighborhood and career with other readers.

AS: Is Clea going to end up dancing with Alvin Ailey? PLEASE say yes.

You know, I hadn't thought about that! Alvin Ailey is a very serious dance program; my own daughter quit after 5th grade because at that point she'd have had to take not only two classes on Saturdays but two afternoons a week as well. Clea, though -- I could see her as a dedicated student.

 

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