April Smith is a story teller of all sorts By Pohla Smith, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
FROM THE Pittsburgh POST-GAZETTE
April Smith is a story teller of all sorts
By Pohla Smith, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
April Smith's latest Ana Grey book, "Good Morning, Killer" (Knopf, $24) is dedicated to her father, and with good reason. He sparked a career that has spanned journalism, short stories, TV production, movie scripts and three novels.
"He's a doctor, a G.P., and he always wanted to write. He published some stories and he would always tell me stories," said Smith, who visits Pittsburgh tomorrow to kick off the Summer Coffee & Crime Series at Mystery Lovers Bookstore in Oakmont.
"He'd come home, have a break and tell me stories -- mainly science fiction from the books we read. There were a lot of books in the house, lots of science fiction with surrealistic covers. I just began to imitate them, like Ray Bradbury.
"Because my father was so naive, he encouraged me to send them out. I was 7, 8, 9," Smith added. "I had an Olympic typewriter. I put them in envelopes and I sent them to New Yorker, Fantasy and Science Fiction. That's what I did growing up in the Bronx in the winter when you were confined to your imagination."
She got a lot of rejection slips back then, but that is not the case now. Both her book publisher and the TV industry keep her pretty busy.
Among her television works are the miniseries "Best Kept Secrets," and six movies, including "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" and "Black and Blue," an adaptation of the novel by Anna Quindlen.
"Good Morning, Killer" is the second novel featuring Ana Grey, an FBI special agent in Los Angeles. It concerns the kidnapping of a 15-year-old girl, as well as Grey's tangled, star-crossed affair with a police detective.
The first Grey adventure was the 1994 "North of Montana," which focuses on a case involving a Hollywood agent.
In between the two Grey books, Smith wrote "Be the One," a thriller featuring Cassidy Sanderson, the only female scout in Major League baseball.
Smith blames her television work for the long time between books, but this will not be the case anymore. She said she plans to concentrate on books for now.
"Both agents [Hollywood and fiction] want me in that milieu," she said. "To stay alive in television ... I'll probably write one script a year," she said. "But once it's a book I'm working on, it's a book."
Asked if she could match high-profile writers like John Sandford or Scott Turow (a former graduate school classmate) and turn out a book once a year, she laughed. "I don't know about once a year, but maybe a year and a half."
That's how long it took her to write "Good Morning, Killer."
ŠThe Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2003
This material is copyright by the publisher and is used here for purposes of information on the work of April Smith.