About
the Author
Christine Andreae lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia but her
mysteries are set in Montana where she, her architect husband, and their two sons have
spent summer vacations hiking and riding in the high country.
A former journalist and adjunct professor of English, her first
mystery, Trail of Murder(St Martin's, 1992) was
nominated for Mystery Writers of America's Edgar award for "Best First Mystery."
It opened the series starring Lee Squires, a professor/poet from Washington D.C. who
moonlights in Montana as a camp cook and whose back country adventures continue in
Grizzly (SMP 1994) and
Small
Target (SMP 1996).
Christine's latest novel, the critically acclaimed
Smoke Eaters
(SMP 2000) is a stand-alone thriller set on a
Western wildfire. Her red-headed heroine, Mattie McCullough, is an Incident Commander who
combats wildfire, sexism and a psychopathic killer.
A hospice patient care volunteer for the last ten years, Christine
is also the author of When Evening Comes (SMP 2000) a
non-fiction narrative of her work with the dying. Written in the hope of bringing the
dying process out of the dark closet of fear, she is donating her royalties from the book
to Blue Ridge Hospice.
Christine is also active in the cause of preservation and is a
co-founder and president of the Scenic 340 Project. She is a member of the board of
directors of Warren Memorial Hospital and of the Glen Burnie Museum.
She received her BA from Manhattanville College and her MAT from
Yale. |
It's a coincidence,
Christine Andreae insists, laughing, that her new novel tells of murder on the scene of it
raging Missoula-area wildfire. "It's scary," she says, shaking her head over
coffee in Bernice's Bakery on Monday morning. "'I don't even want to make a joke
about that."
The timing couldn't be better, though, for Andreae (pronounced "Andree-ah") to
promote firefighting thriller in western Montana. Wildfire is the talk of the town in
Missoula and all around, and Andreae's tale puts the reader smack-dab in the middle of
one, in a way no newspaper article or TV news spot ever could.
That's because "Smoke Eaters,
published by a division of St. Martin's Press, sees through the eyes of the men and women
battling the blaze. Among those: Mattie McCulloch, the fictional first-ever female federal
incident commander, heading 1,700 troops and a multimillion-dollar budget aimed at
quenching the Justice fire outside Missoula.
Mattie is the novel's protagonist and the second female sleuth Andreae has created. Lee
Squires, heroine of her first three novels ("Trail
of Murder," "Grizzly" and "Small Target," all set in
Montana), started out as a male detective in Washington, D C.
A former newspaper and magazine writer in D.C., her former home, and Virginia, where she
now lives, Andreae, 58, began writing fiction 18 years ago.
Her first two novels, mysteries set in Washington, D.C., failed to find a publisher even
after an agent suggested she change the gender of her hero, Ted Squires.
Then, a decade or so ago, Andreae and her husband and some friends were horse-packing in
the Bob Marshall Wilderness and a horse stumbled and fell off the trail, throwing its
rider, No one was seriously hurt, and jokes ensued about members of the party
"killing each other off." Andreae found herself dwelling on notion, and
"Trail of Murder" was published in 1992. It subsequently was nominated for an
Edgar Award.
Andreae, who visits Montana with her family every year, patterned Mattie after Candace
Gregory, the high-level forester she met during the months she spent researching her book
in fire camps in Montana and California.
"A lot of Mattie's stories are Candace's stories," Andreae says. The nudist
ranch Mattie tries to evacuate - unsuccessfully - came from Gregory's experience, for
instance, but the guns they wear are the author's invention, she says.
Ditto for the scene in which Mattie is praised for having rescued two journalists caught
in a fire years earlier. In the book, Mattie's all-male peers ratchet up their respect for
her after hearing the tale; in real life, Andreae witnessed a similar change of sentiment.
After hearing Gregory tell how she'd rescued the journalists, Andreae wondered how three
people could fit inside one of the little portable shelters.
To demonstrate, Gregory opened her own shelter and she and Andreae crawled in it, to the
amusement of the male firefighters looking on. The men laughed and winked and cracked
sexual innuendoes, until they learned of the rescue Gregory was emulating. Then says
Andreae, "their faces cleared. They realized these weren't two little girls playing
in a tent."
Sexist attitudes are alive and well the fire lines, Andreae confirms, partly because of
the "macho" nature of the men drawn to the work.
"I think it goes back to the war metaphor, " she says. Yet those attitudes are
changing as new generations take to the woods, generations used to seeing women in all
kinds of roles. "Women who are my age, who went through in the '70s, were
groundbreakers on a tough path; they were not spoken to," Andreae says.
In her months in fire camps in California and Montana, though, she met all kinds of women
who assumed they could, and would, do every bit as well as the men there and men, who
assumed the same, she says.
But men still dominate the firefighting scene and women cope by masking their emotions,
Andreae says. As a result, she found Mattic McCulloch's character - tough on the outside,
tender in the middle - extremely difficult to write, she says.
However, she had no problems creating her male antagonist, a sexual pervert, arsonist and,
ultimately, murderer. Weird sexual proclivities; hatred of women; elaborate killing
schemes planned with relish: His journal entries were embarrassingly easy to write, she
says. "It must have come from my evil inner child," Andreae says.
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Christine Andreae left
the quiet solitude of her safe home in Front Royal to explore the harsh world of specially
trained, federally appointed firefighters. Exchanging the rustling of the trees
surrounding her mountaintop home for the crackling of million-dollar fires in California,
Andreae researched the life of those who fight the far-reaching fires of the west for her
latest book, "Smoke-Eaters."
In her favorably reviewed new book, a psycho- arsonist has set a
fire that rampages through Montana. A woman commands the group of thousands of
firefighters, something as-yet unheard of in real life.
The story explores sexism among the ranks, the thrill of fighting infernos, and the darker
side of human nature as the arsonist turns out to be someone very close to the camp.
Andreae's interest in the subject ignited in 1994 with a large fire
in Colorado.
"In that fire, 14 firefighters were killed, four of which were
women. It was interesting how there was no great human outcry, no big reaction of 'Oh this
is why women shouldn't do this,' but there is such a big upheaval in the military over the
same thing. The firefighters structure is based on the military, but women are just a part
of the team here," she said.
Originally, Andreae's fourth book was going to center on a cook for
the firefighters, but once she got out there and saw how massive the entire production
really was, she realized a chef would not give an accurate picture.
"These camps really are a world into themselves," she
said. "It was like going into another city or town. The fire was up in the hills.
Fighters were bused to the fire from the camp."
The camp, she said, consisted of several tents, shower trailers with
machines that recycled water and bath sheet-sized paper towels to dry off with,
communication satellites, weather stations, and kitchens with huge salad bars.
"It was really fascinating. The logistics were truly
amazing," she said.
Andreae arranged the stay through a public relations agency in Iowa.
The actual fire was in San Bernadino Mountains, not far from Palm Springs, Calif.
"The public relations unit in camp helped prepare everyone for
my arrival," she said, chuckling at the fact the firefighters camp was so large it
would even need a P. R. unit. "I wondered if anyone would talk to me at all, since
there was no incentive to get their names in print, but everyone was very welcoming and
interested in what I was doing, even if their names would never be in print."
It was during her stay in the camp that Andreae met Candace Gregory,
the woman who would become the basis for her heroine, Mattie. For almost a year, the two
remained in contact, filling in specific details of the life of a woman firefighter.
"The best part is hearing people's stories," she said.
"Candace
was telling me about the time when she was new to the team, she was told to go out and
brief some people that they were in danger of the fire. They failed to tell her she was
going to a nudist colony."
"Mattie's character was much more difficult than the antagonist
because I had to figure out how to portray the woman as warm inside, but see that she is
perceived by her colleagues as tough," she said.
Along the way, Andreae, without putting her name on the
manuscript, had several people read her story to see if she was making her characters
believable.
"One of the comments that came back was 'This is clearly an
experienced writer who knows a lot about fire, but obviously he doesn't know a lot about
women,'" she laughed. That was clue number one her characters needed some work.
The antagonist in the book came much more easily for Andreae, which
she found rather uncomfortable. "I spent a lot of time reading books on serial
killers and trying to find common denominators between arsonists and firefighters. I wrote
his parts in first person in the form of diaries he'd been keeping about his fantasies. In
the profiles of fire setters, fire and sexuality are closely connected," she said.
"It was really scary."
The fact that the character was a man is why the voice came so
easily, Andreae speculated.
"I was able to let my imagination go with this one. I wasn't so
closely connected. There wasn't that feeling of 'Will people think that's me?'" she
explained.
That same self-doubt has kept the award-winning writer from
admitting she is an actual author.
"I've never really liked to say I'm a writer," she said,
in spite of winning a Shenandoah Arts Council Award for Literature in 1996, The Blue Ridge
Hospice's Founder's Award in 1994, and a nomination for "Best First Mystery" by
Mystery Writers of America
in 1992.
"Now that I'm on my fourth book I guess I can say it."
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