By Harbor Light News Staff | on September 21, 2022

Samantha Jayne Allen (Courtesy photo)

Samantha Jayne Allen is the author of Pay Dirt Road, winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize for Best First Mystery Set in the Southwest. She has already written a second book that will bring readers back to the town of Garrett, Texas and the gritty protagonist Annie McIntyre. She is currently working on a third in the series. However each book, like her first, will be a great stand alone read.

Samantha Jayne Allen has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Common, and Electric Literature.

It was a pleasure to chat with Allen about her writing process, what she’s reading, and how moving away from a place can actually end up bringing a person even closer to it.

EMILY MEIER: I read that this book was inspired by a coming of age story you wrote while you were completing your MFA at Texas State University. How did this story first come to you? Was it through setting, the mystery, or a particular character, Annie?

SAMANTHA JAYNE ALLEN: Yes, my MFA thesis was a story about the relationship between a young woman who’s come home from college and her grandfather, set in small-town Texas—those were the two elements of the story that came to me right from the beginning, and were also the parts that I carried over into this book. While a lot changed between my thesis and Pay Dirt Road (the former wasn’t a mystery), I think I’ve always been trying to tell a story about family, and about how complicated nostalgia can be.

EM: I know a mystery writer who actually writes four drafts of every novel. The first draft is just plot. The second draft develops the characters, and then she layers in details etc with every draft after. With mystery writing, plot is of the utmost importance. How did you approach the process for this book?

SA: That’s actually pretty similar to my process. I found that what really helped me succeed with this book was just to keep going. To simply get to “The End” on a first draft. I pushed through to get the story down—to figure out the plot—doing my best to not get stalled out by trying to make it perfect just yet. Once I’d finished that first draft it all seemed more manageable. I knew I could go back and fix any character problems, rewrite any clunky passages, but I couldn’t quite conceive of the novel as a whole until I knew where the story ended.

EM: You went to school in Texas and I think I read that you grew up in Texas and have family from various parts of the state. But you now live in Atlanta. I know a few writers who’ve said that they can only really write about a place once they’ve left it. There’s something about the distance, and perhaps a little bit of homesickness or longing for that place, that allows a writer to access it in a different way. Did you find that to be true when creating this small town and writing about Texas?

SA: Yes, that has been my experience exactly. I’m compelled to write about Texas because I miss it and would like to spend time there in my imagination. I think with distance comes the kind of long-eyed view I need to properly analyze a place in writing, but with distance also comes a desire to mythologize. I guess since I’ve lived in Atlanta for almost a decade now, I’m actually beginning to have those kinds of feelings about this city, too—turning down a certain street, or the way the light looks different on the first cool day of the year feels loaded with associations I’ll feel a sudden need to parse out. So much of writing for me is sifting through memories of a place—that’s usually the spark for me.

EM: I read that there will be another book featuring Annie. When can we expect to see it on shelves? Did you know from the beginning that you’d like this to become a series?

SA: The second book in the series, Hard Rain, will be out April 18th. It’s about how natural disasters can bring out the best and the worst in a community. Annie’s hometown has been devastated by a flood, and in the aftermath she’s hired to find a man who went missing that night. When her search turns up a different victim—shot dead, not drowned—she wonders if the man she seeks is actually a killer. I wrote Pay Dirt Road so that it could stand on its own, but still hoping that it might launch a series. It’s a dream come true to be writing the third book now.

EM: What did writing the first book teach you about writing? And what about the second?

SA: My first book taught me the importance of enjoying the process and writing the kind of book I wanted to read. Also, importantly, simply that I could do it. I came away from writing it—actually finishing it!—with a sense of confidence I hadn’t known before. Of course, when I started fresh with the second book a lot of that confidence began to falter. During the writing of my second book I had my first child, and had to learn new ways to think about my routine. I learned that so much of writing is thinking about writing in whatever quiet moments I have—I don’t always have a lot of time at my desk, but when I do sit down, I now go in knowing what I want to say already, which makes the writing come faster of course, but also with more depth and clarity.

EM: Are there books or authors that you reread? What are you reading now?

SA: I love to reread while I’m drafting for inspiration, but also for comfort. I reread a lot of series books that I love, like those by Louise Penny, Robert B. Parker, or Sue Grafton to name a few. I reread my favorite poems quite often (Mary Oliver, Natasha Trethewey, and Ada Limón are some of my all-timers). I also like dipping back into Larry McMurtry’s novels when I need a good dose of Texas. I just started a new (to me) novel called The Body in Question by Jill Ciment, about a pair of jurors in a murder trial who are sequestered at an Econo Lodge in Central Florida and have an illicit affair—if that’s not a hook, I don’t know what is.

EM: What would you like readers to know?

SA: That I’m absolutely thrilled to take part in this year’s Festival. I’m looking forward to some great discussions with my fellow panelists, and I hope that they’ll join us over the weekend. Thank you for having me in beautiful Harbor Springs!

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