Once upon a time, I wrote for children. Old children. The creatures known in publishing as young adults—not quite teenagers but beginning to navigate the realties of a world that is not always kind. They have experienced cruelty, encountered their first villains. They know about sex—kind of, sort of. As young people, they don’t always have to power to vanquish the bad guy. But they care deeply about injustice, as any teen who shouts, “It’s not fair!” would tell you.
But at a certain point, the seemingly bottomless well of my adolescent angst ran dry. As an author of “realistic fiction,” I survived the vampire craze, but the Hunger Games of dystopia finished me off. And I wanted to write about…well, grown up stuff, without worrying that I was corrupting the minds of young folk.
In 2007, my young adult novel, Crunch Time, was nominated for an Edgar, which meant that three months after giving birth, I got to go to the awards ceremony. I wasn’t happy “just to be nominated”; I was thrilled out of my skull. A night where Dave Barry read my name aloud and I sat right behind Stephen King was more than enough to get me thinking about switching genres. I found the mystery community a little more battle-scarred than my YA compatriots, but also a little more generous. By that time, YA had gone from backwater to big money and that’s never good for comradeship.
I also fell madly in love with a character who would become my series detective. Jane Prescott is a lady’s maid with a grisly story to tell, and she would not get out of my head until I got that story down on paper. And so I switched from YA to adult historical mysteries.
There are similarities between young adult and mystery. The first and obvious one being that they are both “genre,” which can bring accusations of crass commercialism from the snobbish and poorly read. Both require the discipline of focused storytelling; you cannot hide behind pretension if you want to speak directly to the heart of a teenager or keep a smart reader guessing.
I was originally drawn to YA because when you are young, everything is high stakes. You’re going through many firsts and every choice feels laden with peril. Just walking into a lunchroom is a big drama. But nothing—not even the SATs!—is more high stakes than murder; no moment is more fraught than when one person decides to take another person’s life. In a murder mystery, every relationship is knife-edged—as it often is in YA. Can I trust you? Are you lying? Do you mean me harm or can you help me? Who is to blame…and also, what would cause someone to do something so terrible?
My detective, Jane Prescott, is a young woman pulled into unusual circumstances when she has to prove her employer didn’t murder her fiancé. She learns some ugly truths about what human beings are capable of and some startling truths about her own abilities. In that sense, her dramatic arc is similar to that of a young adult heroine. Like her YA counterparts, she doesn’t always have the power to bend the world to her will, but that doesn’t make her less determined.
Jane’s life in fiction has just started. But I hope no matter how many bodies she finds in the mansions and alleyways of Gilded Age New York, she retains the fierce curiosity, loyalty to her friends, compassion for the underdog, and the desire to hold bullies accountable that make our young adult years so turbulent and so memorable.
Mariah Fredericks’ new novel A Death of No Importance, is published by Minotaur Books.