There are a lot of writers I admire whom I have never met—in person, up close, face to face—and Claire Applewhite is one of those.
We first became acquainted by email a year and a half ago when she scheduled herself to a part of a gathering of Midwest mystery writers at Booked for Murder, our independent mystery bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. She didn't get here, though. Her participation in the kickoff for St. Louis's Big Read kept her in her hometown that day.
We've corresponded since, and last fall she accepted my invitation to mentor an unpublished writer through our MWA—Mystery Writers of America—Midwest chapter's mentorship program. Did a fine job of critiquing the work of the writer I assigned her.
Claire is a promoter. She's out everywhere, doing appearances and author talks and selling her books at bookstores and writers' conferences. You expect that, but she also does book events at pet expos and fashion shows.
She's equally aggressive in seeking publicity, even asked me to do a Featured Writer story on her.
So come along and meet Claire Applewhite.
Claire Applewhite, a mystery writer who gets noticed
Gaze upon the photo of Claire.
Does that look like a writer to you?
Most of us picture writers as grizzled characters—check out my own profile picture—with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, hermits who hide away, beating out their stories on Remington typewriters or old Mac II's.
Claire Applewhite—a mystery and a romance novel to her credit, a second mystery about to come out, and two more books awaiting publication—looks like a model.
A star.
"I got that photo taken in response to my readership regarding the professional photos I had been using," she says. "To quote one younger reader, 'You look like Meryl Streep in the Manchurian Candidate,' or another well-meaning friend, 'You look like a banker.' I concluded that I did not look like a writer."
So Claire asked friends in the news business—she does some writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—to suggest a good photographer she could hire to shoot a few new publicity pix.
This photo is the result of 10 hours in the studio, posing, posing, posing. She wore six different outfits that day.
Claire is no slouch as a writer. When yet unpublished, she entered four of her manuscripts in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition. In 2005, '06, and '09, her manuscripts made the first cut and became semi-finalists in their divisions. "Night and Day," the manuscript she entered in 2007, made the second cut and became a finalist in its division.
That's darn good.
Getting published came about this way. A friend asked Claire to submit a short story for an anthology that L&L Dreamspell was going to bring out . . . and her story was accepted.
She followed that by sending the Dreamspell editors her private eye manuscript, The Wrong Side of Memphis.
They took that, too, and brought the book out in 2009.
Lots of dead bodies in this story. The reviewer for Kirkus put it this way, "Dead bodies start to outnumber the tenants of a seedy apartment building in this sprightly mystery."
That seedy apartment building, the Jewel Arms? Great name, isn't it? Claire modelled it after an apartment building in which she lived when she was a college student.
The Jewel Arms, like so many of the characters in The Wrong Side of Memphis, doesn't survive. Claire blows it up before the book ends.
While The Wrong Side of Memphis is the first in a series, the next Applewhite book that Dreamspell published was Crazy for You, a stand-alone romance novel about obsessive love among the wealthy of St. Louis. It came out last April.
Anybody who can bring off a lead character named June "Bunny" Dingwerth—she's in the Crazy for You book—gets my vote as a writer who has a gift for selecting memorable names.
"I think everyone knows a 'Bunny,' don't you?" Claire says. A Bunny, yes, but it's the name Dingwerth that grabbed me.
But back to Bunny. "For this reason"—everybody knows somebody named Bunny—"a lot of physical description almost wasn't necessary."
St. Louis Hustle is Claire's second book in her P.I. series. It will be out, again from Dreamspell, in a couple months.
She is a disciplined writer. "I spend four hours a day or night writing. Five pages a day, no matter what," Claire says.
Five pages a day, five days a week, that's 25 pages . . . in three and a half months, she's got a first draft finished.
When Claire started on her odyssey as writer, she wrote in the morning—early, before the alarm clock goes off for most of us. Now she's a night owl. "I find that the writing is best between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.," she says. "The world is quiet, and the characters' voices are clear."
For more on this writer of mysteries from St. Louis and her books, go to Claire's website. Here's the link: claireapplewhite.com
© Jerry Peterson.
