Books: 'The Arizona Triangle" By Sydney Graves

 

The Arizona Triangle: A Jo Bailen Detective Novel

By Sydney Graves

Harper Paperbacks/HarperCollins Publishers; paperback, 304 pages; $18.99; available today, Tuesday, October 22nd

Sydney Graves is a pseudonym for Kate Christensen, an Arizona native and the author of eight novels, with the most recent Welcome Home, Stranger. Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has also authored two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, winner of the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir.

Christensen has always set out to write a mystery, and with the incisive new novel, The Arizona Triangle, under the pen name of Sydney Graves, she has done it in the first in a brand new series centered on Justine Bailey, better known as Jo.

Right on the cusp of turning forty, Jo works for an all-female detective agency based in Tucson, Arizona. While she is on a stakeout of a cheating spouse, Jo learns that her long-estranged best friend from childhood, Rose, is missing, and Rose's mother wants to hire Jo to find her. 

This case is so many kinds of wrong for Jo, but she has no choice but to head back to her hometown, an hour north of, and a world apart, from Tucson.

When she returns to Delphi, Jo learns that Tyler, her high school boyfriend, who is probably part of the reason that her friendship with Rose headed south, is the cop assigned to the case. It doesn't take long for Jo to come to the conclusion that Tyler is all mixed up in it, and to have any hope of learning what happened to Rose, she must finally confront the demons she thought she left behind.

THE ARIZONA TRIANGLE: Behind the Book - by Sydney Graves (Kate Christensen)

I wrote my novel The Arizona Triangle between drafts of my last novel Welcome Home, Stranger for pure fun, to distract and entertain myself during the COVID lockdown. I also wrote it to fulfill a decades-old yearning to write detective fiction. The first draft came out extremely fast, and then after two more drafts to fine-tune and polish it, I sent it to my editor in hopes that she would like it enough to acquire it.

The name Sydney Graves is an intentional literary alter-ego. I've been an avid reader of detective fiction since I was a teenager, and I love the cloak-and-dagger aspect of writing under an assumed name. It seems fitting for the genre.

Before I knew what the book was about, I knew where it would be set. I grew up in Arizona and have a lot of history there. It is a very particular place; one I knew well and deeply love. Hiking in the foothills of Mt. Lemmon north of Tucson a number of years ago, near the town of Oracle, I was struck by what an ideal setting this would be for a murder mystery. And so the book began to take shape in my head, born out of a sense of place rooted in my home state. 

My private-eye protagonist Jo Bailen emerged more gradually. Unlike Jo, I am not half-Mexican, but many of my friends growing up had Mexican heritage, and I have spent a lot of time in Mexico. And I'm intrigued by the idea of a woman who is both mixed-race and bisexual, both at home and an outsider in many worlds - the ideal identity of a private eye.

In the course of solving the mystery, I wanted Jo to grapple with her heritage, her estrangement from her white mother in the wake of her beloved Mexican father's death, and her attraction to both men and women. As I wrote, I felt her own identity and the case she's investigating dovetailing like interlocking pieces of a puzzle.

I'm not finished with Jo by a long shot. In fact, I'm about to start writing her next mystery, Saguaro City, and I hope her ongoing intertwined professional and personal lives will become a series. In writing these books, I'm paying homage to all the great detective-series writers whose work has delighted and thrilled and inspired me for decades; the likes of Sue Grafton, Tony Hillerman, Raymond Chandler, Dick Francis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Janet Evanovich, Sara Paretsky, Robert B. Parker, Sara Gran, and of course, the grande dame of them all, Agatha Christie.