Jacqueline Corcoran's books include the Academic Mom Mysteries series. She is also a social worker and educator, and she lives in the Washington, D.C., area.
Q: You write under the names Jacqueline Corcoran and Jacque Rosman—why did you decide to use both names?
A: I'm a licensed clinical social worker and have spent most of my career in academic social work, a profession with a strong ethical foundation.
Since my protagonist, Cara Knight, is also a social worker and academic, I wanted to create some separation between my professional identity and my being a novelist. After all, Cara routinely sets about solving crimes, which sometimes requires a little deception and rule-bending.
Q: Do you usually know how your novels will end before you start writing them, or do you make many changes along the way?
A: I routinely make many attempts at outlining, and they only get me so far. I tend to discover the story as I write and see my way forward as I go. Of course, with a mystery, that means I eventually have to backtrack and make sure I've laid a logical trail of clues leading to a solution that feels both surprising and inevitable.
Q: How important is setting to you in your books?
A: Setting is very important to me. Washington, D.C. is one of the structuring elements of the Academic Mom Mysteries. The stories move through recognizable D.C. neighborhoods and landmarks, and the crimes often intersect with the worlds of local or national politics. That gives me an endless supply of possibilities for mystery and intrigue.
Q: How does your experience as a social worker influence your fiction writing?
A: Interestingly, I wanted to be a writer before I wanted to be a social worker. But social work has definitely influenced the way I write.
Years of interviewing people have taught me how much information you can gather by listening closely, reading people, and asking questions in ways that don't immediately put them on the defensive. Cara has those same skills, and they allow her to learn things that people might never tell a more conventional investigator.
As an academic, most of my job involves writing in some form—journal articles and books. Even though it’s not fiction, I believe that practicing writing in all its forms has helped my development as an author.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm writing the fourth book in the Academic Mom Mysteries. The book is still stubbornly resisting a title, but the story takes Cara into the worlds of art, the Smithsonian, and Washington's embassies—which, as you might imagine, gives her plenty of opportunities to get into trouble.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: One of the things I enjoy most about writing the Academic Mom Mysteries is letting Cara juggle the absurdities of academic life, the demands of raising two young children, and the decidedly inconvenient habit of stumbling into murder investigations.
She's not a professional detective or someone who can simply drop everything when a mystery appears. She still has classes to teach, deadlines to meet, children to pick up, and dinner to figure out. For me, much of the fun comes from turning ordinary life into something more exciting.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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