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Community Corner

Who's Who in Albany: Tom Roberts

Every weekday we'll feature a brief chat with someone who lives or works – or plays – in Albany.

Name: Tom Roberts (pen name, "T. A. Roberts")

Age: 63

Occupation: Wildlife biologist, mystery-writer and weekend wooden boat mariner. His most recent book is Drake's Bay.

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How long have you been writing? I've written 12 books, and six have been published. I've had four mysteries published, going back to 1973; the other two are non-fiction. When I left the Forest Service, I wrote a series of essays about being a wildlife biologist in the U.S. Forest Service. I worked in the Sierra National Forest, just north of Yosemite, along the spine of the Sierra Nevada.

Why did you leave the Forest Service? The Forest Service was getting very politicized during the Reagan years. It was frustrating to be in a conservation position in an agency that had become very commodity-driven. Most of the Forest Service employees are driven by a stewardship mission to wisely use the resources. You can log old-growth trees if you leave some of the trees for the spotted owls; you can graze cattle if you leave enough forage for deer to eat. But there was pressure to over-utilize both.

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How does your training as a wildlife biologist influence your novel-writing? I do a lot of technical writing, as a technical ecologist. When you describe the Eastshore State Park for instance, in writing a report, you have to record so many details – every bird that flies overhead, the vegetation, seasonal changes. No bird goes unidentified in my fiction!

How did you decide to write mysteries? The allure of the well-written mystery for me is being able to do three things. The first is to have the classic element of surprise and discovery, the solving of the mystery itself. The second is having motivation – fear, anger, insecurity – for the main character to solve the mystery. [In Drake's Bay] the main character has a troubled relationship with his partner; because of a past infidelity, he can't bring himself to trust anything she does. The third is a realized sense of place. In the Bay Area fog is different at different times of day. I've had some readers say to me, "When you were talking about Kensington, I knew exactly what you were talking about – the houses, the place where you eat breakfast."

In every story, you need the reader to experience time and place; that's where good writing comes in. But it's particularly hard when you haven't been to a place. For various reasons, the main character [mid-book] goes to Amsterdam, but I've never been there. I had to look at Google maps of the city; I saw every film made there in the last 10 years. Then I asked my nephew to tell me something about Amsterdam that you could only know by being there; he'd spent a year there studying abroad. He said, "On almost every corner there's a pushcart selling French fries, and they're sold with mayonnaise."

Could you say more about character-driven motivation? That's character-driven motivation, as opposed to police- or private-eye –driven. [My mysteries] tend to read like novels for the first three chapters. All of the 16 publishers who rejected [this book] said, "Oh no, you have to start with a murder or a sex scene." All that happens is the gradual unfolding of this history professor's life. He's restless and insecure. Because of his character, he has blundered onto something very exciting and ultimately very dangerous. He's driven by his character, as opposed to simply solving a crime. The character is engaged in self-discovery.

How did you react to the 16 rejections? You can go one of two ways: (1) You can try to write the way someone else can write; or (2) you can try to make it somewhat better. They make market-based rejections. Every time, you re-evaluate the manuscript, provoked by their response. A few publishers said, "I particularly like the fact that this book is unique in its composition." That's affirming.

Do you have an agent? I've had two agents, but for this kind of book – it's  too heavy for the lightweight and too light for the heavyweight. It takes just as much time to find an agent as finding a publisher.

You spoke recently at Books Inc. Will you be giving any more book talks? I'll do one at Book Passage in Corte Madera sometime in the fall. I may get one in Sacramento. If I can do three, then I can go back to obscurity.

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