I got so many queries last week about April Woo that I feel guilty. Thank you for loving April. I realize I wrote the first one in 1992, and she was with me for 15 years on a daily (and nightly) basis. I lived and breathed NYPD and April Woo. I dreamed April Woo. I ate Chinese food, and hung out in Chinatowns whoever I could find them. When I went to signings, people checked out my eyes wondering if I am half Chinese. And of course I am, but not by blood. You won't see my Chinese heritage in my face. But face and Chinese culture has always played an important part in my life. The drive for change and movement is Chinese, too. We always move forward, while honoring the past.
Many of you loved April and want her back. Now. You want her back the way I wish there were more Sherlocks, the real ones. More Peter Wimseys. More Arthur Upfields (he wrote about an aboriginal detective in Australia, called Napoleon Bonaparte, Boney), more Judge Dees, about a Chinese detective in, I don‘t know, maybe the 12th Century. There are so many mystery series about exotic characters that I loved. And, frankly, I wouldn't mind reading another April Woo novel myself. I love her, too. I loved NYPD and writing about my home town, New York City.
But some authors get wander lust and want to see a bigger world. I didn't get a dread disease or feel too depressed to work, or suffer a terrible sorrow when I disappeared for a few years. I had to go walkabout. Write about other cities and other locations and other police departments and other characters. Remember Dorothy Sayers? Arthur Conan Doyle? Dorothy Sayers was my model. She wrote eight Lord Peter Wimsey novels and then reverted to her scholar past. She returned to Oxford and translated religious texts from the Latin, or to the Latin, I don't remember which. But I was influenced by that choice.
After the first April Woo, because of Dorothy, I vowed to write no more than eight. And then I wrote a ninth. And then I wrote two stand-alones--Over His Dead Body and For Love and Money And then I wrote three screenplays, and Sleeper. And then I started Ilovequitters.com. One great thing about being a writer is that you can go as far as your imagination stretches.
I like the idea of finding a way to incorporate April in what I am doing now. And we'll see how that could work. But we can't go back to New York the way it was pre terrorism, and we can't go back to Sherlock the way Conan Doyle wrote him. Can't return to the world of Lord Peter, or Agatha Christie. Can't even return to our beloved Jane Austin. Like it or not, time spins forward. And I find the possibilities of new things thrilling.
I'll keep you posted.
