American thriller writer ditched romance for crime

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Tami Hoag used to sell monogrammed toilet seats for a living.

You can imagine that she managed to flog a fair number. This is, after all, the woman who went from persuading people to buy faux-leather toilet seats, to selling romance via the novelette so beloved of the female bus rider.

Then she went on to reinvent herself as the author of seven consecutive New York Times Top Ten best suspense sellers.

The thriller writer attracts unlikely fans. A guy who comes to work in a tie but who has been sighted at parties wearing cowboy regalia, told me: "Tami Hoag is Hot."

When I tell her this she laughs - very loud and with the utmost delight.

She's got a big laugh for a petite woman. And it's an unexpectedly raucous one for an author who is dressed in a soberly cut black suit; for a woman who chooses discreet but expensive gold and diamond accessories.

You wouldn't want to get all stereotypical about such things but if you got to thinking about what a woman who sits in her study in her house in Virginia, in the heart of horse country, who pours out big dollar words about serial killer characters who incinerate their victims, might look like - you would not be likely to pick Hoag out of the line-up.

Still, anyone after a stereotype might have picked Hoag as looking right at home at a conference of successful romance writers. Which is just what she was after the publication of her first book in 1988, the second she'd submitted.

She went on to write 20 of the slender titles.

The transition from romance to suspense came, she says, out of a desire to write bigger, more complex stories - stories like those in Still Waters, Guilty as Sin, Ashes to Ashes (she says she agonises over titles) and her most recent, Dust to Dust.

If it seems an unlikely switch, Hoag is still a staunch defender of the romance novel.

"I think it's a genre people like to take pot shots at. They like to flick through the books and find a really flowery passage or a really sexy passage and, you know, snicker, snicker.

"Those individual passages are not what those books are about. They're about people in a relationship. That's not to say there aren't bad books in the genre, there are tons of bad books, but there are bad books in every genre. And, at the core of it, what romance is about is issues that are important to women: relationships, family, trying to juggle careers and responsibilities, about trying to make a relationship work."

It says quite a lot about society, Hoag reckons, that books dealing with relationships, with issues important to women, are so derided.

And sure, she says, the romance genre ties up the loose ends, makes life look rosy. That's not such a long way from how the suspense genre works.

"Justice is exacted. Every genre has its absolutes."

Which is why they sell, says Hoag. They're books about one of the oldest stories in the world: "People are always fascinated with crime, I think there's a sort of fascination with the criminal mind. I think people worry about it - what more cataclysmic event could there be among humans than one human killing another human?"

Hoag, as you would expect given her subject matter, gets some very peculiar letters. The odd inmate writes, but so do those who read her by the bed of a dying relative - or the dying themselves.

The suspense novel as a last comfort read? It seems a strange choice. What will Hoag, a self-confessed control junkie who has taken up dressage because she likes its precision and arcane rules, be reading on her deathbed?

Probably, she laughs, a book about how to cure whatever's killing her.

And then, no doubt, she'll get out of bed and write a bestseller about the experience.

But not quite yet. Her next book will be set in the show-jumping world.

It will give a glimpse, she says, of the underbelly of a subset of society. A subset which looks to be, on the surface, every bit as elegant and polite as Hoag herself.

That one, she's happy to hear, should be one hell of a hit Down Under.