Interview with Robin Donovan

Robin Leemann Donovan is the president of Bozell, an Omaha-based advertising agency, and the author of the Donna Leigh Mystery series. Her first book, Is It Still Murder Even If She Was a Bitch?, won an AMA Pinnacle Award. The series follows a menopausal ad agency owner in Omaha whose colleagues keep getting murdered. Robin started her career as a high school English teacher before moving into advertising. She also writes Menologues, a humorous blog about menopause that was picked up by Vibrant Nation and Alltop.

Host: Richard Lowe | Guest: Robin Leemann Donovan

Interview Transcript

Richard: Tell me about yourself.

Robin: I was born in Jersey City, probably while bullets were still flying. I grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey — almost a suburb of Manhattan. At 12, my parents dragged me to Connecticut, which was quite a culture shock. I spent the next 20 years there before being recruited for a job in Omaha. Three very different cultures. I took my New Jersey attitude with me, and sometimes that plays well. It doesn’t always play well.

Why Murder Mysteries

Robin: I was always an avid reader. I started as a secondary English teacher and always had visions of being a cross between Cornelia Otis Skinner and James Thurber — delusions of grandeur, I guess. Growing up, my mother was always reading Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie, and as a family we were always watching murder mysteries.

I knew I wanted wry humor, but I’m not Dave Barry. I needed some kind of platform or plot. The thing I was most familiar with was murder. My mother’s favorite show was The Sopranos. People asked us, “Did you ever know people who actually talked like that?” Hell yes, we did. We don’t know that they did any of those things. But they definitely sounded like that.

That Title

Richard: How did the title come about?

Robin: I wanted to write a series and thought I needed a clever naming convention. I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound trite. I finished the whole book without a title. My business partner said, “Don’t put that pressure on yourself — just put a title on this book.” So I said, “Fine. Is It Still Murder Even If She Was a Bitch?” and we started laughing. I wrote it down as a joke.

But then I was interviewing creative director candidates from California and New York, and when they asked about my hobbies, I’d tell them the title. They all got hysterical. So I kept it. The whole series has very long titles — that became one of its trademarks.

The first two books feature murder victims the protagonist couldn’t stand. The third one, I killed a friend — and that turned out to be a bigger challenge than I expected. It’s hard to juxtapose humor against the murder of someone you liked without sounding callous or sappy. I had to find a different mechanism to move past the grief and get to the humor.

A Menopausal, Imperfect Detective

Robin: I wanted to create the opposite of the Mary Higgins Clark detective — the 20-year-old with a perfect figure who’s brilliant and meets the murderer in a dark alley without backup. My character Donna Leigh is not perfect in any shape or form. She does the best she can but makes mistakes along the way. There’s no way in hell she’s meeting someone in a dark alley without police backup.

There’s a scene where she gets a call from a guy using a disguised voice saying, “Meet me at midnight in this back alley.” She just says, “Bullshit. I’m not meeting you anywhere. What do you think, I’m stupid?” And he drops the voice and says, “I’m sorry, I thought I could help. I thought that’s how you do it.” She’s been around the block a few times.

One of my favorite characters, Clovis Cordoba Seville, was supposed to appear in just one chapter. She became my favorite because she always grabs all the attention. One of my favorite lines about her: she would rather be the murder victim than not have it all revolve around her. That level of narcissism — I’ve experienced it. You get to say great things about it.

Writing What You Know — Sort Of

Robin: I take bits and pieces of people I’ve met throughout my career and morph them together. A lawyer told me early on: you cannot invent human beings, because what you see is what you know. You can morph people together, but you can’t just invent stuff. I’m not embarrassed to say I draw from what I know.

My first publisher made suggestions like setting the book in Kansas City instead of Omaha. I said no — I know Omaha. My first editor said one character could be gay with a very small adjustment. I said, “But he’s not.” It was important that what was in my head rang true with what I know.

Chapter Notes Are Everything

Robin: Keep notes on every chapter — where you introduce characters, what names you gave them. With a 300-page book, you forget. Did I write that, or did I just think I was going to? Without notes, I would have left everything dangling.

I had no system when I started. About 10 minutes after my publisher said yes, I was celebrating, and then I thought — how am I going to keep all this straight? So I spent the next few days devising a system. A man at my first talk said, “I’m an engineer, and this is the process we use to create products.” It had never dawned on me. I was reinventing the wheel, but it’s human nature to organize a project that way.

Writing the Third Book

Robin: My first book really wrote itself — divine inspiration and you’re the hands doing it. With the third book, I pushed myself. I wrote half the book and put it aside for two years. When I went back and read it, I thought it was terrible. Then an idea popped into my head that never would have come two years earlier. I wrote the last chapter, went back and revamped the whole front, and the rest wrote beautifully.

My advice: even if it doesn’t work, you can make it work.

What She Loves Most

Robin: I really like to make people laugh. With Menologues, a woman I went to high school with in New Jersey — we hadn’t seen each other in years — saw the blog, referred someone who was struggling, and that person contacted me and said, “You saved my life.” If you can teach somebody something and make them laugh at the same time, to me that’s as powerful as it gets.

When I’m writing comedy, I’m having the best time. I enjoy writing comedy as much as sitting and watching a really good comedy. I write on Saturday and Sunday for about eight hours each day — not because I tell myself I have to, but because it’s what I look forward to all week.

Learn more about Robin Donovan at rldonovan.com.

Find Richard Lowe at TheWritingKing.com.

Video edited by Bonnie Dillabough.