Transitory: A Micky Knight Mystery Unveiled

This September, J.M. Redmann brings us the eleventh Micky Knight mystery, Transitory. J.M. Redmann has published ten novels featuring New Orleans PI Micky Knight. Her first book was published in 1990, by one of the early hard-boiled lesbian detectives.

Tell us about Micky Knight, the protagonist of your series.

Michele Antigone Knight, known to her friends as Micky, was born in the bayou country outside of New Orleans, Louisiana.

She had a rough childhood, her mother was a teenager who hadn’t chosen to be pregnant and had little choice but to marry the man Micky considers her father, a man much older than her mother. But her mother wasn’t content to remain in the bayous married to a man she didn’t love and left when Micky was around five. When she was ten, her father was killed in a car accident and Micky was taken in by an Aunt and Uncle living in the suburbs of New Orleans. It wasn’t a happy arrangement, the wild bayou child in this prim, proper family, and when she was eighteen, Micky left.

With the help of a scholarship and some kind people, she went to college in New York City, the place that she knew her mother had moved to. But she never found her mother and after college came back to New Orleans.

She drifted around for a while, drinking too much, and not able to find a job or career that appealed to her. An out-of-the-closet lesbian, Micky slept around a lot, but never really connected with anyone.

One job she ended up in was as a security guard for a warehouse. Her boss did some private detective work on the side and asked Micky to help him out several times. As they worked well together, he requested Micky to join him when he started his agency. But he eventually wanted their relationship to be more than just professional, and Micky decided that it was time to move on.

And so the M. Knight Detective Agency was born.

What drew you to writing? Why mysteries?

Family values—my parents met as journalists on the same newspaper and they were both college educated (my mother the first in her family) so reading and books were always part of my growing up. They both wanted to be writers, too, but life never gave them the chance. I can’t remember not wanting to be a writer, I was writing short stories in third grade. As to mysteries, I’ve always liked puzzles and read them. At the heart of the mystery is the search for justice; who gets it and who deserves it.

Let’s be honest, part of was practical, it’s easier to sell a mystery both to publishers and to readers. Also, at the basis of most crime novels is death and dying, good and evil, and while it is possible to gloss over them, you can also really take a look at the kind of damage violence does, or how we deal with grief and loss, and still be true to the genre. I like to point out to all my English major snob friends that Hamlet was a genre play, it has every convention of the revenge tragedy in it, from ghosts to body counts.

For more information: jmredmann.com