In Runner, Tracy Clark’s newest crime novel, Chicago is built on networks: the safety nets that catch the vulnerable as they fall—foster home placements, a night bus full of snacks and blankets—but also the webs spun to catch those who slip through when the first nets fail.
Runner is the fourth in Clark’s series featuring Cass Raines, a black woman private eye on Chicago’s South Side. Former police, injured in the line of duty, someone who has endured a great deal of loss on the job and off, and who has survived and thrived within a found family she has collected around herself, Cass is a character with empathy, generous though she protects her own heart to a fault.
Clark’s novels combine many elements that contemporary crime fiction fans desire: a charismatic lead, an infinitely readable voice, ripping stories, a setting that luxuriates in itself and knows its own particularities (watch for the “dibs” system to make a cameo), and a social conscience, placing characters within the context we live in now to grapple with tough questions we haven’t yet answered.
In Runner, Cass Raines takes on the high-stakes case of a mother struggling with addiction. Her daughter, a girl not so different from the girl Cass once was or could have easily been, is missing in a brutal Chicago winter. It will take all of Cass’s resources—and a few she’ll beg, borrow, and bribe homeless kids with cheeseburgers for—to find the girl in time.
I asked Tracy Clark a few questions about writing about Chicago, learning from some of Chicago’s pioneering women crime writers, and what it takes to keep the flame of a novel series going book after book.
Lori Rader-Day
Catch up the people who haven’t met Cass yet…What’s her origin story?
Tracy Clark
Cass is a tough, resilient black woman marked by profound loss. She lost her mother to cancer when she was 12. A day after her mother’s funeral, her father, unable to cope with single parenthood, dropped her off at her maternal grandparents, promising to return for her. He does not. She makes a choice, at 12, to stop waiting, and she gets up, shakes it off, and gets on with it, learning early that nothing is permanent, nothing’s promised, people come in and out of your life, whether you want them to or not. It’s a lesson we all have to learn. But Cass continues to lose those near and dear. Her grandparents die while she’s still in her twenties, leaving her their apartment building. It’s her inheritance, her legacy, her connection to the family she no longer has. Cass has become a cop by that point and rises quickly to become a homicide detective with the Chicago Police Department. She is tenacious, smart, dedicated and empathetic. She serves, protects, but also cares about those she’s asked to help. She knows loss. She recognizes the scars it leaves behind. She’s the kind of cop you want when bad things happen. In book one of the series, Broken Places, we meet Cass on the worst day of her police career, a day no cop would wish on his or her worst enemy. A mistake has been made and she is forced to take a life she had wished to save. The scar on her chest, left behind by a gangbanger’s bullet, is a constant reminder of that fateful day. This is the nightmare that haunts her, it’s the baggage she carries; it’s yet another loss to deal with. Faced with such trauma, a person can go one of two ways—they can either rise or fall. Cass rises. She moves forward. Like a shark, she either keeps moving forward or dies.
Lori Rader-Day
Cass rises, but she does it as a private eye, giving up her badge after that episode. In what ways is Cass a classic Chicago PI? In what ways is she nothing like what readers might expect?
Tracy Clark
I borrowed a few things from the classic PI archetype. First, Cass is very much an outsider. She dances to the beat of her own drum, zigging where others might zag. She’s the adult version of the little kid in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” who points out the ruler’s nakedness when no one else has the courage to do it. She’s inciteful, she’s intelligent, she does not suffer fools lightly and definitely does not play well with others. She follows the leads wherever they take her, no matter how dark the alley. That’s the classic PI. Cass differs in that, as a black woman, her perspective on the world is unique, much different from Sam Spade’s might be. She’s from the neighborhood, she knows the people there are good people often caught in bad circumstances. She sees the growing disconnect between communities of color and the police who are charged with protecting them. She knows being poor is not a character flaw and that people in need are often unseen by society at large. Cass brings toughness and snarkiness to the page, like a classic PI, but she also brings understanding and compassion. She notices what others may not and can apply context to the burning issues of the day. Cass is boots-on-the-ground with a passion for making a difference, an underdog with a soft spot for underdogs, David facing off against Goliath, refusing to give a single inch.
Lori Rader-Day
The runner of the title of the new book is a girl who’s run away from her foster home. Tell us about Cass’s new case and what’s at stake at the beginning of the story.
Tracy Clark
In Runner, Cass has been hired by Leesa Evans to find her missing 15-year-old daughter, Ramona Titus, who has run away from her foster home in the middle of a brutal Chicago winter. Right off the bat, this is a case Cass will take with very few questions asked. There is a child in danger, a child lost, and Cass is the woman for the job. She wants Ramona safe, as she wants all innocents safe.
But as Cass begins her search for Ramona, following the breadcrumbs, questioning those who know her, touching base with the cops on her case, she discovers that someone she has talked to has lied to her, that Ramona’s home life wasn’t as idyllic as described, and that something sinister is going on that prompted Ramona not to run away, but flee for her life. Quick on the heels of that revelation comes this one—Cass is not the only one looking for Ramona. Now Cass must race against time, fight the unrelenting cold, and beat the nefarious forces to the missing girl, who is literally running for survival.
Lori Rader-Day
During a brutal Chicago winter, too. How do you research (or not) your settings for each book? The old factory in Runner, in particular, stood out to me as a place that felt real.
Tracy Clark
Every setting in the Chicago mystery series is a real place, though I may take a few liberties with how I describe them. In Broken Places, the church where the bodies were found is my parish church, though I changed the name to protect the innocent. LOL. The marina in book two, Borrowed Time, is sitting right there on the lakefront bold as you please. I even snapped a photo of one of the boats moored there so that I could use it in the final scene and describe it correctly. In Runner, the old factory is actually the old Schulze Baking Company on East Garfield Boulevard here on the South Side. As a kid sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car, whenever we’d pass it, I’d roll the window down to smell the bread baking. It’s empty now, the company long since shuttered, but the memory of the place remained, so when I needed an abandoned place to set a scene in Runner, I thought of Schulze. I then drove over there and circled the block checking out the layout. Again, I took a few liberties, sue me, second thought, don’t sue me. Sadly, I couldn’t get inside the building, but there were a few photographs of the building’s interior online, so I studied those, and then let my imagination do the rest.
Lori Rader-Day
This is the fourth in the series. I’m in awe of people who writer series books. What’s your philosophy or goal for the series—is it more important to keep the series fresh by changing things up or to give readers that sense of hanging out with an old friend?
Tracy Clark
Writers of series have to do both those things. We have to keep the books fresh each time, giving the readers something new to look at, think about, worry about, but we also have to give them what they expect to find when they return for the next installment—their favorite characters, familiar settings, that engaging world you’ve hopefully created for them that they want to revisit. Series are very much character driven, so writers really have to work hard to create characters with which the reader can identify. If readers don’t care about Cass and her friends, they won’t come back no matter how clever the storyline. It’s my job to make them care about each and every character, even if the response I receive for a character is one of pure hatred accompanied by a strong desire to see him or her get what’s coming to them. But they should embrace your main character. He or she is running the show, right? Luckily, I’ve gotten a few emails now from readers telling me they wished Cass was their friend. One reader wrote to tell me that he was in love with Cass. Bingo. Game over. My job’s done. That’s what you want. You want that character connection, that engagement, that identification. Cass is a winner, a flawed winner, but a winner nonetheless.
Lori Rader-Day
Which writers with long-running series are your models here?
Tracy Clark
Oh, this is a long list. Early on, way before I actually put pen to paper, I absorbed the rhythms and banter of the old Thin Man films and filed that away for when I might need it. When I began to read crime fiction almost exclusively, I read everything and everyone I could find. I read Hammett and Chandler, Himes, Mosley, Parker, I particularly liked Robert B. Parker. The precision, the cleanness of Parker’s sentences, the sound of the words, their rhythm, still to this day resonate with me. Then, of course, there were the great female crime writers that really sparked my desire to put my own spin on things—Grafton, Barnes, Muller, Paretsky, Taylor Bland, Wilson-Wesley. I even read cozy mysteries, just because I enjoyed the characters, particularly Joan Hess’s Maggody series and Nancy Pickard’s Jenny Cain series. Writers must be readers; you learn to write by reading. By reading you learn about story structure and character development. You see how other writers solve complex story elements, and then you know how to solve them in your work. For writers, reading is part enjoyment, part reward, part escape, but it is also part education.
Lori Rader-Day
You had the chance to learn from Eleanor Taylor Bland, one of pioneers, one of the first black women crime writers, and a Chicagoan, too. Tell us a bit about how you met and what you learned from her?
Tracy Clark
We met at Mystery Writers of America’s annual writers workshop called Dark & Stormy Nights. I was still in college at the time and wanted to write books so badly by that point. I, however, had no idea, none at all, how to get started, what to do, how to create characters, nothing. There weren’t a lot of black writers at the workshop any of the years I attended, just Eleanor, a few others, and little old me clutching my crappy manuscript and taking copious notes on whatever words of wisdom dropped out of the mouths of the published authors in attendance.
Eleanor sort of plucked me out. It couldn’t have been that hard, though, I was easy to spot. She read my pages. She saw something in them and wanted to see more. She passed along her phone number and email address. I grinned all the way home, and when I got there, I began to write like a mad fiend. I would email Eleanor and ask her advice on my story problems and she would email back. We talked on the phone, we met up again at the next conference. We became friends. She talked me off the ledge so many times. Writing is soooo hard. It’s easy to give up and stop. I got my first agent through Eleanor. She selected my first short story for inclusion in an anthology of African-American crime writers titled Shades of Black. Walter Mosley was in that anthology. No way my story held a candle to his, but I was in there, thanks to Eleanor. But the best part of this is that Eleanor didn’t do this just for me; she did this for a lot of writers, especially writers of color. I think if we found all of those writers Eleanor helped, we could fill Wrigley Field twice over. She was just that generous with her time, just that passionate about fostering new talent and helping it along. She was a fantastic writer. Her Marti MacAlister series was one of my favorites, but I think her enduring legacy will be the writers she opened the door for, the ones she kept on the right track.
Lori Rader-Day
Now you’re the mentor. What advice would you give any aspiring writer, perhaps a writer of color who hasn’t yet seen themselves represented in publishing?
Tracy Clark
I would tell them to not worry just yet about publishing. Their job, their one important job, is to keep their head down and write. Teach yourself how to tell that story. If you need to educate yourself on the craft of writing, invest in that education. Take whatever course or workshop you can find. Teach yourself to write. Once you’ve done that you can then veer off the beaten path and go wherever your imagination takes you, but you’ve got to know the rules, as ever-changing as they may be, before you can comfortably break them. Then I would tell them while they’re absorbing all that knowledge to read, read, read. A writer should always be reading something. Finally, I’d pass along Eleanor’s words to me, but you’ll have to imagine her no-nonsense delivery — KEEP WRITING!
I usually got the KEEP WRITING after I whined to her about how tough writing actually was, like she didn’t know that already, like the toughness was only reserved for me. As to my being a mentor, yes, I will accept that, but I accept it on Eleanor’s behalf and on behalf of all those writers since who offered me a kind word of encouragement, a bit of advice, a pat on the back, a seat at the cool kids’ table. I want to give back to someone else what they gave to me. Eleanor gave me validation and confidence and a sense of belonging in the writing community, none of which I had, then. I have some of that now, some, I still suffer from bouts of imposter syndrome. I sort of cannot believe I’m actually doing what I’m doing after so many years of fretting over manuscript pages. In fact, I was so not in the writer head space even three years ago that I almost missed my first author panel at my first Bouchercon [annual World Mystery Convention] because I was standing in line to get a book signed by Catriona McPherson. I’d forgotten all about my book and that panel. I was a fan, and Catriona was right there. No way I was missing that. I just made the panel with like two minutes to spare, but I had to literally run for it. Of course, the panel room was a floor down and halfway the length of the entire hotel. (That’s the writer gods having a laugh.) I got there, though, with my signed copy of Scot and Soda in my backpack safe as houses.
Lori Rader-Day
Catriona would have signed that later in the Bouchercon bar, just saying. What are your favorite Chicago books?
Tracy Clark
Here are my faves: Anything by Sara Paretsky, and I do mean anything. She’s such a wonderfully rich writer. As a newbie just starting out, I would read her Warshawski series and literally say to myself, “Okay, well, I’m never gonna be that good.” I like how she captures Chicago, but also how she made V.I. so distinctive, so engaging, so endearing.
Barb D’Amato’s Cat Marsala series. Cat’s a freelance journalist in Chicago and I enjoyed her scrappiness. In one book, I remember, Cat climbs up into the ceiling in City Hall, I think, trying to get away from a killer. It was hilarious, also a bit tense because the bad guy was right underneath her. I think I learned a lot about building tension here.
Hugh Holton’s Larry Cole series. Okay, what’s not to love? Gritty, realistic, hard-hitting police procedural set in my hometown! Love it. Cole is a CPD detective chasing murderers. There’s a lot of insider cop know-how in the Cole books, which you’d expect since Holton was a commander in the CPD. I remember one creepy scene from one of the books that took place inside the Museum of Science and Industry after the place had been locked up for the night and all the museum goers had gone home, except for the killer. Shivers.
All three are series, which inspired me to want to write a series of my own that was at least half as good as theirs. I don’t think I’ve gotten there yet, but my head’s down and I think I’m becoming a better writer every day. I’m no quitter, either, so I’ll keep at it. If all those rejection letters I received all those years ago didn’t turn me back, nothing can or will. I will always KEEP WRITING.
FICTION
Runner
By Tracy Clark
Kensington Publishing Corporation
Published June 29, 2021
