Anne Wingate spent a number of years as a police officer in
Plano, Texas, before retiring (I believe to Utah, though I'm
not absolutely sure of this; she is a member of the LDS
Church, though) and taking up mystery writing. Apparently
mentored by Elizabeth Linnington, she followed Ms.
Linnington's pattern of developing three separate series of
cop novels, all set in Texas, under three different
names.
Under her own name she writes about Mark Shigata, a Nisei FBI
agent turned small-town police chief. Those of you who cut
your crime-reading teeth on the Hardy Boys might find the
name of the town for which Shigata is the top cop
particularly resonant. It's called Bayport.
As Martha Webb, she's written one stand-alone, entitled, I
think, DARLING COREY'S DEAD, about a single-mother
policewoman in Northeast Texas working a case with a US
Postal Inspector, and a two-book series, consisting of EVEN
COP'S DAUGHTERS and WHITE MALE RUNNING, about the head narc
of a small Texas town, and his ace undercover agent, a former
biker turned cop (whom all the bikers think is STILL a
biker).
Under her most-used pen name, Lee Martin, she writes about
Detective Deb Ralston of Ft. Worth PD's Major Crimes Squad. A
mother and grandmother rasing a large group of adopted kids
with her husband, Deb, during the course of the series,
converts to the Mormon faith and becomes pregnant for the
first time in her life, just as she's raised most of her
adopted brood to adulthood. I suspect that Deb Ralston is as
close as Ms. Wingate comes to a fictional
self-portrait.
For all that she apparently regards Ms. Linnington as a
guide, Ms. Wingate more than betters her in the matter of
getting the police procedure right, which is, after all, what
the police procedural is all about. I generally find her
books enjoyable, if sometimes hastily written (in one book,
her protagonist gets into a furious shootout early in the
novel, then later, at the climax, finds herself in another
tense gun battle during which she remarks that it's the first
time she's ever fired a shot in the line of duty, completely
forgetting the early occassion only a hundred pages
earlier).
Ms. Wingate has also written a how-to book for Writers Digest
entitled CRIME SCENES - A WRITER'S GUIDE TO FORENSIC
INVESTIGATION. During her own career, Ms. Wingate was a
fingerprint expert, so this is a subject about which she's
particularly well-qualified to write a how-to book.
Given the discussion on "men-writing women" and
"women-writing-men" that's developed today, it's interesting
that two of Ms. Wingate's series characters, Police Chief
Shigata and the team of narcs she created in her "Martha
Webb" persona, are men. It occurs to me that the "cross-sex"
phenomenon is particularly prevalent in the procedural. I may
have more to say about that later, if the discussion on
"cross-gender" mystery writing continues.
JIM DOHERTY
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