About
Theasa Tuohy, novelist, journalist and playwright
Theasa Tuohy is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and playwright with a rich background in storytelling. Her career spans work with five daily newspapers and the Associated Press, where she honed the reporting skills that now breathe life into her fiction. Tuohy’s novels, celebrated for their historical accuracy and strong female protagonists, have earned praise from Kirkus Reviews and recognition as finalists for the Oklahoma Book Award, a testament to her storytelling skills. Whether she’s diving into the harrowing world of a female correspondent in Vietnam or following the daring exploits of a female reporter and the pilots of the first female transcontinental air race of 1929, exploring the spirited clashes of women in the 1920s, Tuohy’s work consistently captures the essence of female empowerment and friendship. With the release of her latest book, Mademoiselle le Sleuth, Tuohy brings her signature style to a the second of her mystery series set in Paris.
While my first two books are historically accurate and deeply researched, my new mystery series set in Paris feels, to me like fluff. I just made things up. Of course, everything about the city is quite correct. As the writer, Harriet Welty, a long-time resident and author of books on Paris, said of the first mystery, The Woman at la Gare de l’Est, “I especially enjoyed the descriptions of various places in Paris which most tourists have never heard of or been to.”
As well as my reporter’s insistence on the accuracy of all details, the other quirk of my mysteries is that the characters are based on friends of mine who live there and I even used their real names. They have all taken this as quite a lark, but none of them, I assure you, is involved in murder.
The genesis of the first Paris mystery, which Kirkus called “A twisty, thrilling Tale of the City of Light,” was an actual event. I noticed a woman seemingly trying to cross the street in front of the Sarah Bernhardt café while Vicki, Miranda and I were whizzing up Blvd Sebastopol toward the Gare l’Est. I saw the same woman again as our taxi pulled up in front of the train station. Later, puzzling over the map wondering how a woman last seen on foot could make it to the station ahead of a speeding taxi, I saw that the street corner where I had first seen her was called Avenue Victoria. With that kind of Kismet, I began trying to write myself through a story to figure out how such a thing could happen.
Because I don’t work from an outline, I rarely know from one day to the next what’s going to happen to my people. For me that’s the fun. That’s why readers read, to find out what’s going to happen. And that’s exactly why I write, to find out what’s going to happen. I spent a long career having to stick to the facts, and while I’m still compulsive about accuracy of details of time and place and smell and color, I adore that I can now make things up. So, I do some research about a setting or event, then I let the characters out to run around in the scene that I, the reporter, is describing as it unfolds.
I grew up on crazy flying stories: My mother was an early-day pilot. Thus, the inspiration for Flying Jenny. I never was a war correspondent, but I grew up in the early years of daily female journalists, so I knew the problems of working for acceptance. I never lived full-time in Paris, but have friends who do, so with frequent visits I got something of a feel for the place. The murder stuff is way outside the boundaries of any one of us.
Something about my compulsion to make sure I’ve got all of my facts straight: I went to Vietnam after I had finished early drafts of The Five O’Clock Follies to make sure I’d captured the feel of Saigon. I picked up many of what writers call “the telling details.” Women wearing elbow-length white gloves while riding on the backs of motor scooters. The images of relatives of those in the hospital, cooking meals for them, and washing their bed linens on the hospital grounds.
For Flying Jenny, I made the long drive from Oklahoma City to Pawhuska, Okla., to double-check the one thing I couldn’t quite be sure of from my Internet research: That there was enough space behind its Courthouse to land a plane. Otherwise, I could work out all sorts of things sitting at my desk, like how much fuel a JN4 would need to fly from Atchison, Kansas, to Ponca City, Okla. With that book, set in 1929, I wanted to explore the lives of two women doing so-called men’s jobs but coming from very different backgrounds. One had to struggle, the other didn’t. Flying is an expensive hobby.
