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April 2, 2009

Books, Journals & More, a closer look: Kathryn Miller Haines

A Rosie is a Rosie is a Rosie is a …

It’s March 1943 in New York City. World War II is in high gear and spirits are in the deep dumps. Young men, except for a few on military leave, are in short supply. Rationing for staples like butter and meat is in full force and everyone not involved in the black market is feeling the pinch.

In this setting we meet aspiring actor and part-time sleuth Rosie Winter, a brash and perceptive young woman navigating in a male-dominated world, who seems to court trouble at every turn.

She and her boarding house roommate Jayne, a dancer by trade, get knee deep in a rash of accidents during rehearsals for “Goin’ South,” a play whose ironic title describes its likelihood for success: virtually nil.

But are they accidents, or is something more nefarious afoot? What’s going on during off-hours at the theatre? Who’s bankrolling “Goin’ South”? And who killed Paulette, the successful actor who previously lived in Rosie’s very room and whose picture dominates the boarding house parlor?

In Kathryn Miller Haines’s second novel starring Rosie, “The Winter of Her Discontent,” Rosie introduces us to mobsters and their muscle men; a sadistic dance instructor; the prim housemother presiding over a boarding house for single women, which houses a flock of other acting aspirants; several more successful actors who are a notch above on the economic ladder; an alcoholic director trying to make a comeback, and soldiers on leave looking for female companionship and future pen pals. In short, there are scads of tempting suspects in this atmospheric murder mystery.

Haines’s fascination with the 1940s began at an early age. Her father has always been a War World II nut, she said, and her mother, in perhaps a misguided attempt to shield her daughters from salacious contemporary films, weaned them on 1930s and ‘40s movies.

“I was very much raised on those films, and I loved the women and the clothes and the fashion and the witty repartee,” Haines said. “From a historical perspective, I was just so interested in what it was like to be a woman then, how women’s roles were changing drastically because of the war, and how we’re going to have this sort of regression following in the 1950s after the war ends. I thought, ‘Wow, what an interesting time to have a female sleuth operating. What would it have been like?’”

For background material contemporary to the era, she didn’t have to look far: As associate director since 2002 of the Center for American Music, part of the University Library System, she relied heavily on Pitt’s collection housed in Stephen Foster Memorial.

“A lot of the periodicals we have are from the late ‘30s and ‘40s: wonderful old copies of Life Magazine, Photoplay, Scene magazine, those wonderful titles from the ‘glam era’ of Hollywood,” she said. “I’m constantly thrilled if something I write works perfectly with history: when I found out how much mob money was involved with Broadway, for example.”

Outside Pitt, Haines is an award-winning playwright and since 1998 has been the do-it-all force behind the local theatre troupe, Mystery’s Most Wanted Dinner Theatre Company.

More recently she has turned to the novel. “The War Against Miss Winter,” published in 2007, was the first installment in her Rosie Winter mystery series. She bridges her theatre background with the novel genre by casting her main characters as entertainers in the milieu of the Great White Way. Discerning readers will note the conceit in the Rosie series that all the novels’ chapter titles are titles of plays written before the novels are set.

“One of the problems I found starting writing novels after writing plays for several years was that I couldn’t think in narrative. I had a hard time with description,” Haines said.

“So much of the weight of what you try to do as a playwright is shared by the director and by the actors, and so for me it’s imagining people in these roles and how they would take this on stage and how they would move. I think in those terms, almost a sense of blocking. On stage there’s nothing more boring than two talking heads. You have to imagine people doing things. So I tried to transfer that idea to the novel, but I had huge trouble. And then it got to a point where there was too much description and I had to pare that back.”

It seems she’s found the proper balance, since Haines’s third Rosie novel, “Winter in June,” is in the hopper and will be released this spring. She has contracted with HarperCollins for a fourth Rosie book in 2010.

The origin of Rosie Winter’s character can be traced to Haines’s days earning a Pitt Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing, when she submitted a novel for her MFA thesis.

“It was terrible. After not being able to sell it, I looked at it again and realized how horrible I had been at constructing a plot,” Haines said. “Writing a mystery was really about trying to teach myself about constructing a plot that fit together because mysteries are so plot-dependent. So it was a learning process. At the same time I also fell in love with the genre.”

Does she share personal characteristics with her prized female sleuth?

“Not really. She’s taller, she’s younger, more successful. She also has some shortcomings that aren’t necessarily mine, but that are true to the era in which she lives: her impatience about the war, for example,” Haines said.

“She does have some idealized qualities that I’d like to have or I wish I had in more abundance — her ability to stand up for herself, her independence, her sense of humor, her persistence,” Haines said.

The two do share a propensity for self-reflection, the author acknowledged.

“I find it interesting to step back and look at yourself. It’s something all writers do, and to a large extent all actors do it, too, because you’re constantly trying to learn from what your true reactions are at any given moment. So if I ever have to replicate it whether as a writer or actor, I can try to make it as honest and true as possible,” she said. “A lot of that comes from self-reflection, and I have a tendency to want to understand how my mind works so that when I create a character, whether by performance or by page, I’m trying to be true to that emotion.”

In a book filled with unsavory mob-based characters, egomaniacal theatre types and women of questionable repute, perhaps the biggest villain is the war itself. Rosie constantly struggles with guilt at not doing enough for the war effort. She cannot reconcile the self-centered nature of the acting profession with doing good in a war-weary world. She chides herself for not knowing which branch of the military on-leave personnel hail from or what rank they hold. She’s learned her one-time Navy boyfriend, with whom she parted on disquieting terms, is missing in action and she feels guilty for not mending fences before he shipped out.

The war brings out the worst in many of the other characters, too, with crimes ranging from the inhumane to the unconscionable. “But I don’t think it’s fair to indict history, because circumstances were what they were,” Haines said.

On the other hand, she sees a trend these days to mythologize the World War II era, with celebrating war-time anniversaries and releasing “greatest generation” books.

“I think there’s a danger in that kind of romanticizing, because when we mythologize history like that we tend to be a little harder on the present, when in fact there are lot of strong parallels,” Haines said.

“Whenever you’re writing about history you have to remind yourself that the character doesn’t know the end point. Rosie doesn’t know the war is going to end in ’45. One thing that’s been very important to me is making sure of what information the characters would be privy to or not at any given point.”

Haines said one of her trusted readers, who lived through World War II, offered some advice on that score while she was crafting novel No. 3.

“Rosie and Jayne are on the West Coast getting ready to go on a USO tour and they observe Japanese Americans being taken to an internment camp and Rosie starts railing against the injustice of this,” Haines said. “And my friend said, ‘No, nobody would say that! It never occurred to us that this was wrong at the time.’

“It’s very useful to have access to those sorts of viewpoints because we so often want to view things through the veil of political correctness and our own personal discomfort. It’s challenging because that is an integral part of the war, the racism that was inherent during that time period. It’s very hard for me to put anything in Rosie’s mouth that’s racist, because that’s not who I am as a person. But it’s also true to the times that she would have these thoughts and these beliefs.”

Similarly, the World War II era should not be indicted unduly for its male dominance, Haines said.

“We tend to think of men as the evil doers in society: They’re the ones who create the wars, they’re the ones who commit most of the crime. With this second book I was really interested in flipping the tables and looking at the evil that some women do, the fact that they’re also capable of doing tremendously terrible self-centered things. I don’t want it to seem that one gender is superior to another. But like it or not, that while men are responsible for many of the roles that women often find themselves in, at least earlier in history, there’s a certain responsibility as women for accepting those roles and not trying to break out of those roles.”

Mystery lovers will be pleased to learn that Haines sees no end in sight to the Rosie series. “There’s something so reassuring about mystery novels, because in life we don’t have all the answers, and we wish we did, but you always know that at the end of a mystery novel you’re going to have an answer,” she said.

“Writing the novels is a little bit more terrifying after you’ve been published, because even though you know it’s been sold you think: Are you going to be able to fulfill the same progress you demonstrated in that first book? Are readers going to be satisfied with it? Are you going to get the same joy out of doing it, or is it going to start feeling like work? They are work, but they’re also a lot of fun. I absolutely get a kick out of Rosie. I wouldn’t be spending all this time with her if I didn’t.”

Readers will get a kick out of Rosie too.

—Peter Hart


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